Intermediate School 201: Race, Space, and Modern Architecture in Harlem
By Marta Gutman
Faced with intransigent bureaucracy, struggling schools, deteriorating buildings, and entrenched racial segregation, parents in Harlem demanded direct control over the core functions of public education in the 1950s and 1960s. One new building became a flashpoint in the battle for community control—Intermediate School (IS) 201, the infamous windowless school that abuts the Park Avenue railroad viaduct two blocks north of East 125th Street, straddling Central Harlem and East Harlem. White architects and politicians, including the mayor, John Lindsay, rallied to defend “Harlem’s besieged masterpiece,” but parents in Harlem disagreed.[1] The location and the architecture, which many of them opposed, stood as a constant reminder of their unmet demands, from exclusion in policy making to broken promises of integration.
Well after the Supreme Court held racial segregation unconstitutional in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision (1954), New York City lagged in desegregating schools. Fed up with the glacial pace, pent-up anger about school facilities and ingrained racial segregation exploded in the late 1950s. Mae Mallory, Viola Waddy, and seven other women formed the Harlem Nine and organized a 162-day boycott of three junior high schools in 1958. This grassroots activism, coupled with court action, forced the Board of Education (BOE) to create an open enrollment policy—four long years after Brown.[2]
Figure 1 City Wide Committee for Integrated Schools, “School Boycott! Flier,” 1964.
Credit: Queens College Civil Rights Archives.
More protests followed. Civil rights activists, led by Reverend Milton Galamison, organized a citywide boycott in 1964. A photograph of an African American boy staring through a dirty, broken window illustrated the flyer that urged participation in “Freedom Day” (figure 1). The caption reads, “I Don’t Have A Good Integrated School.” More than 460,000 pupils—half of the students enrolled in the city’s public schools—stayed home on February 3, making for the largest civil rights protest in U.S. history.[3] The generous explanation is that demands from white parents for segregated neighborhood schools and from black parents for integrated schools were irreconcilable in the face of extraordinary demographic change: 1.5 million white residents left the city between 1950 and 1965, and the number of school-age children increased with black and Puerto Rican boys and girls making up 75 percent of students by 1960.[4] Less generously, the BOE was, whether for reasons of racist ideology or inertia, comfortable operating a segregated school system.
Two years later, angry parents upped the ante in Harlem. They demanded that their community exercise direct control over IS 201, a stellar example of the BOE’s intransigence. With the school scheduled to open on April 1, 1966, the Board of Education announced that mixing blacks and Puerto Ricans in equal number would achieve racial integration. Black and Puerto Rican integration advocates wanted their children to share in the resources and political power that they knew accompanied white student enrollment.[5]
Pressured to do better by parents and community representatives at IS 201, the BOE tried to make its plan tolerable. It delayed the school opening and touted the building’s advantages in a leaflet that it distributed to thousands of families in Queens and the Bronx who would have the option of enrolling. The response was lukewarm at best. Exactly nine white children from overcrowded junior high schools in Queens registered, and anger escalated in Harlem as it became clear that voluntary transfer had replaced compulsory zoning as the BOE’s mechanism for desegregation. When the chair of the Board of Education, Lloyd Garrison, told the community that white children would come to the school once it had “proven” itself, the community answered in-kind: their children would stay out of school “until the school had proven itself” to them.[6]
To challenge segregation at IS 201 and its predicted consequences, parents turned to the time-honored tools of grassroots organizing and public protest. The Harlem Parents Committee, chaired by Isaiah Robinson, and other community groups called for a boycott, determined that the school would not open until their demands were met. When the picket line formed on the opening day, September 12, 1966, fewer than 600 students (of the 1,800 who could have been enrolled) crossed it to attend classes; 80 percent were African American, 20 percent were Puerto Rican, and none were white. “A New Air-Conditioned School Means Nothing Unless the Children Attending It Are Learning,” one leaflet read.[7] “I don’t want segregation, but if I have it I want it on my own terms,” David Spencer, a parent and community leader, told a reporter. “I feel I know what’s best for me.”[8] Mae Mallory, Stokely Carmichael, and other members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the Congress of Racial Equality, the Black Panther Party, and other community groups joined Spencer, Alice Kornegay, Helen Testamark, Suki Ports, and other parents on the picket line.[9]
The boycott, which lasted almost three weeks, succeeded. Parents forced the white principal, Stanley Lisser, to resign, and pressured the Board of Education to hire a black administrator and integrate African and African American history and culture into the curriculum. Their victory paved the way for an experiment in local self-governance in education that the Ford Foundation funded in 1967; defined formally as a “demonstration district,” at IS 201 and two other schools, this experiment was known informally as community control. And although New York’s ultimate decentralization of school governance in 1970 was far from what community-control advocates had sought in the 1950s and 1960s, the IS 201 activism helped propel that change as well.[10]
Chapter 8 of Educating Harlem directs attention to architecture—to the polarization that design caused, and the opportunities that it also afforded. IS 201, designed by Nathaniel Curtis and Arthur Q. Davis, white architects based in New Orleans, is an example of an equalization school. Southern school districts in the pre–Brown years sought to fend off desegregation by bringing segregated educational facilities for black children closer to parity with those for white children. In the 1950s an equalization school in the South was materially better than one from the Jim Crow period, but it was not exactly the same in every aspect of its design as one built for white children. These modern schools benefited African Americans in that they were black-run institutions and they employed African American teachers. However, the new schools continued to constitute black children as social subjects with inherently unequal citizenship rights.[11]
Figure 2 View of IS 201, Curtis and Davis, 1963.
Credit: Office of Civil Defense, Department of Defense, “New Buildings with Fallout Protection” (Washington, D.C., 1963), 20–23. A copy of the drawing is in the National Archives.
IS 201 served the purposes of equalization in New York City even though the BOE did not adopt a formal policy of equalization or admit that it built equalization schools deliberately. However, this school, a modern school, designed and built to higher standard than any other one in Harlem, reinforced existing patterns of racial segregation, much to the dismay of parents and civil rights activists. And the process of planning and building IS 201 exposed the political disempowerment that reinforced school segregation in New York City. In keeping with its top-down, stratified management, the Board of Education reluctantly incorporated new methods of citizen participation into its planning process but did not value this input, even though public hearings and other mechanisms for expanding local democracy had been in use in the city since the early 1950s.[12]
Harlem parents wanted to harness opportunities in the built environment to make better lives for themselves and their children, and they used urban space to make their demands known to the public. Whether they articulated a vision for the future based in integration or black autonomy, whether they embraced modern architecture or disdained it, urban places figured in their aspirations for a just society. The exceptional design of IS 201, the heated disputes about the boycott in 1966, the teachers’ strikes in 1967 and 1968, and decentralization of the Board of Education have obscured the interplay between space and society that took place at the school.
This post is adapted from chapter 8 of Educating Harlem. You can read the entire chapter here.
Marta Gutman is an architectural and urban historian who teaches at the City College of New York and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She is writing a new book on modern architecture, public schools, and public education during the Civil Rights movement. Prof. Gutman is a founding editor of Platform, www.platformspace.net.
[1] James Bailey, “Harlem’s Besieged Masterpiece,” Architectural Forum 125, no. 4 (1966): 48–51. The name of this school has changed several times. In this essay I call it, “IS 201.”
[2] Adina Back, “Exposing the ‘Whole Segregation Myth’: The Harlem Nine and New York City’s School Desegregation Battles,” in Freedom North: Black Freedom Struggles Outside the South, 1940–1980, ed. Jeanne Theoharis and Komozi Woodard (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 65–91.
[3] Clarence Taylor, Knocking at Our Own Door: Milton A. Galamison and the Struggle to Integrate New York City Schools (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997).
[4] State Education Commissioner’s Advisory Committee on Human Relations and Community Tensions, “Desegregating Public Schools in New York City” and New York City Board of Education [hereafter NYCBOE], 1964); and New York City Planning Commission, Plan for New York City 1969, vol. 1: Critical Issues (New York, 1969), cited in Prashant Banerjee et al., “Mid-Century Modern Schools: Preserving Post-War Modern Schools in New York,” Student project (New York: Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation, Historic Preservation Program, 2013), 8n5.
[5] On community control, see among others Jerold Podair, The Strike That Changed New York: Blacks, Whites, and the Ocean Hill-Brownsville Crisis (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2004); and Heather Lewis, New York City Public Schools from Brownsville to Bloomberg: Community Control and Its Legacy (New York: Teachers College Press, 2013).
[6] “I.S. 201: Symbol of the Struggle for Justice in Urban Education,” East Harlem Protestant Parish Newsletter, October 1966, 4–5, in Municipal Archives of the City of New York Board of Education of the City of New York Collection, series 385, Rose Shapiro Papers 1961–1969, subseries c, box 6, folder 18.
[7] The leaflet is reproduced in Thomas K. Minter, Intermediate School 201, Manhattan: Center of Controversy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Graduate School of Education, 1967), 3.
[8] Quoted in Jeremy Larner, “I.S. 201: Disaster in the Schools,” Dissent 45, no. 1 (1967): 27–33.
[9] “A ‘Brick Concentration Camp,’” Jet, October 13, 1966, 16–17; Thomas A. Johnson, “Black Panthers Picket a School,” New York Times, September 13, 1966, 38; and William Knapp, Commanding Officer, Bureau of Special Services, Memo to Chief Inspector, re Dispute Between the Board of Education and East Harlem Parents and Community Leaders Involving Intermediate School #201 in Harlem, September 23, 1966, B.S.S. #548-M (Supplementary #10) in Numbered Communication Files, New York Police Department Surveillance Records, 1939– 1973, MA.
[10] Podair, Strike That Changed New York.
[11] Rachel Devlin, A Girl Stands at the Door: The Generation of Young Women Who Desegregated America’s Schools (New York: Basic Books, 2018), 14–18, 58–65; James E. Ryan, Five Miles Away: One City, Two Schools, and the Story of Educational Opportunity in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 26–27; and Amy S. Weisser, “Marking Brown v. Board of Education: Memorializing Separate and Unequal Spaces,” in Sites of Memory: Perspectives on Architecture and Race, ed. Craig E. Barton (New York: Princeton Architecture Press, 2001), 97–108.
[12] Marci Reaven, “Neighborhood Activism in Planning for New York City, 1945–1975,” Journal of Urban History, first published April 28, 2017.
[13] NYCBOE, Journal of the Board of Education of the City of New York (New York: City of New York, v.d.), entries dated January 4, 1962: 67, January 25, 1962: 162, February 28, 1962: 266, March 8, 1962: 399, April 16, 1962: 586, May 8, 1962: 730, July 8, 1962: 1104, August 22, 1962: 1371, 1469, October 11, 1962: 1524–25, May 12, 1964: 732, and November 18, 1964: 1723.
[14] Diane Ravitch, The Great School Wars: A History of New York City Public Schools, 3rd ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 294–95.
[15] Babette Edwards, telephone conversation with author, June 16, 2014.