In Brooklyn Heights, Private Schools Won So Integration Lost

By Rebecca Zimmerman

After the citywide 1964 school boycott and the 1968 teacher strike, many white Brooklyn Heights families fled the public school system. As a result, they significantly expanded the power of market-based solutions to segregation by inventing the idea of a neighborhood, private school. Paradoxically, parents often claimed that private schools would be more “diverse” than public schools. These parents’ decisions are a major–and often overlooked–factor in why public school integration in Brooklyn failed.

As 1964 began, parents in Brooklyn Heights seemed to love public school. Right before the city announced its state-mandated busing plan, parents agitated for a new building for P.S. 8, the elementary school in the North Heights with 75.4% white student enrollment. “The need for the new school was becoming acute and certainly would have been so a year or two from now,” wrote the editorial board at the Brooklyn Heights Press, the neighborhood newspaper. “Brooklyn Heights is growing and its children need adequate educational opportunities.” [1] This was a distinctly public problem, they charged, similar to Heights’ parents efforts to keep the Heights exclusive. Without proper public schools, parents were anxious about the future of the Heights, especially with a proposed urban renewal plan to create public housing near Cadman Plaza.

But less than one month later, these same parents changed their minds. On February 3rd, 1964, almost half of New York City’s public school students stayed home in protest of school segregation. [2] Organized by Reverend Milton Galamison, activist Bayard Rustin, and local branches of CORE and NAACP, the boycott charged that, ten years after Brown v. Board of Education, no integrated school was available for most Black and Puerto Rican students in New York City. The city responded by enacting the Princeton Plan, by which the city would pair under-enrolled, majority Black and Puerto Rican schools with over-enrolled, majority white schools and bus students between them to achieve racial balance. P.S. 7, the 96% Black and Puerto Rican and over-enrolled school in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, would be paired with P.S. 8, the majority-white elementary school in Brooklyn Heights. Although the schools were a mere nine blocks apart, this pairing sparked significant controversy.

This 1964 article in the Brooklyn Heights Press profiled the significant number of families who decided to leave the public school system or flee Brooklyn Heights altogether in response to school pairing.

Many white, “liberal” parents responded to the plan by pulling their children from P.S. 8 and placing them in private schools, namely Poly Prep, Brooklyn Friends, Packer Collegiate, and the newly-formed St. Ann’s. These schools began to market themselves as what the city sought to create: integrated, neighborhood schooling. In fact, private schools often sold themselves as more integrated while drawing families away from public schools and consequently undermining the process of integration in those schools. This way, these parents could send their children to a school nearby, preserve the exclusivity of the Brooklyn Heights neighborhood, and make sure that only “excellent” children were at the desk next to their own.

Public and private schools’ histories have often been told separately. By including private schools in the story of the attempted integration of Brooklyn Heights, we can better understand how they came to take on so much power. Furthermore, private schools are an underexplored actor within this tumultuous moment in New York City’s schools. With the added pressures of the 1964 school boycott and 1968 teacher strike, private schools got a unique boost from parents who gave up on public schooling. Those parents charted a course that continues to this day, with Brooklyn Heights private schools growing in both campus size and enrollment numbers over the second half of the twentieth century. This story also partly explains why New York’s public schools remain among the most segregated today. [3]

1964 in Brooklyn Heights: Boycotting Segregation And Integration

The Brooklyn Heights Association voiced immediate opposition to the busing plan. The BHA had amassed substantial power in the neighborhood throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, championing school board candidates and thwarting public housing developments. New opposition groups coalesced around an ideology “for integration and against busing” and favored “pairing of schools in principle but not in practice.” [4] Many Heights parents positioned themselves as advocates for social justice by objecting solely to the “logistical” parts of the desegregation plan. By playing on the increased anxiety of parents about the future of the middle class, Brooklyn Heights depended on P.S.8 staying P.S.8. In fact, these white parent groups claimed that opposing the pairing plan was actually to support majority-Black schools. Paul Windels, the President of the BHA said “first priority should be given in allocating City funds to improving physical plants and teaching staff of all substandard schools.” [5] John Doherty, the Education Chair  of the BHA insisted that “pairing P.S.8 is a miserable failure in educational principles and a backward step as regards integration.” [6] While claiming to be solely anti-pairing and not anti-integration, Brooklyn Heights parents worked against pairing P.S.8. [7]

Many white parents staged anti-pairing boycotts and civil rights-style marches, directly co-opting Bayard Rustin’s strategies from only weeks prior. But importantly, they tried to distinguish themselves from other reactionaries and the prior violent attempts to thwart busing measures, like in Glendale, Queens. In Glendale only five years prior, Black students faced harassment and intense protests when they were transferred in a one-way program aimed to even out racial imbalance. [8] In Brooklyn Heights, the white, liberal upper-class parents claimed not to be anti-segregation and not anti-busing. [9] Instead, they were anti-pairing, yet another way to obscure their aims to derail desegregation. This was in full display on March 13, 1964, only weeks following the school boycott, as the “anti-pairing” protestors recapitulated the scene from the February 3rd school boycott. Ten thousand people, mostly white women, literally followed in the footsteps of the school boycott organizers, walking from 110 Livingston Street at the Board of Education headquarters over the bridge to City Hall. The Parents and Taxpayers Association sponsored the protest “said that they welcome negroes;” however, the New York Times called these liberal parents’ bluff, stating that “virtually no Negroes took part,” in the march. [10]

This photo by Martin Gallatin featured the anti-pairing protest at 110 Livingston Street, blocks from both PS7 and PS8.

Despite white parents’ fear of paired school plans causing rapid change, in the first year of the pairing plans, many children at P.S.8 were still in “lily white classes.” While white and Black children were in the same building, they segregated the sections. As one contrarian white parent said, “Integrated schoolhouses with segregated classrooms are perhaps a bit of a farce.” [11] Still, by October of 1965, the P.S.8 white population declined from 75% to 38%;167 of 415 white students left P.S.8. [12] That meant there were only 2.4 white children per class at P.S.7. White parents who expressed skepticism of pairing ensured its failure by removing their kids from the equation.

Privatizing Neighborhood Schools

A quintessential example of how private schools capitalized on public school busing chaos is the start of St. Ann’s School. [13] In April of 1965, only a few months into the P.S.7-8 pairing, Canon Harcourt of Saint Ann’s Church decided to begin his “long sought dream” of a school in the St. Ann’s Church basement, only a few blocks away from P.S.8. Saint Ann’s would start with the first to fourth grades, precisely those served by P.S.7-8. [14] Saint Ann’s hoped to attract families from “every walk of life and economic circumstance” since the church “reaches virtually into every neighborhood in the city involving all racial and economic groups.” [15] Harcourt called for a scholarship program which, “it is hoped, will eventually pay 50% tuition for those who qualify.” [16] Through private fundraising, St. Ann’s would be integrated. In the early days of the school, John Doherty of the Brooklyn Heights Association and his wife, Ann, held auctions to raise money for the St. Ann’s scholarship fund. They auctioned avant garde antiques and a week at a home on Fire Island, advertised in the New York Times as raising funds for “the interracial elementary school.” [17] The Dohertys, who had been critical in leading the BHA’s fight against two-way busing, pulled out of the public fight and spearheaded integration through private means instead.

St. Ann’s hired its first head, Stanley Bosworth, who held a distinctly racialized vision for the school. Bosworth said he wanted to aid the Black students the public school system had failed, as St. Ann’s would “help produce a Negro cadre capable of leading their people out of their stifling socio-economic dilemma.” [18] In addition, St. Ann’s would inculcate more progressive values than an integrated public school could: “Unless children live in the dynamic presence of such an effort [of integration], they can hardly understand its importance nor believe in the good faith of their parents.” [19] St. Ann’s would provide a place to learn the value of integration, to understand the “good faith” of community-minded parents. In fact, the school was uniquely positioned to do just that: “A revolutionary approach to quality education with genuine social involvement is both the unique possibility provided by their community school and its primary justification,” Bosworth wrote. By 1970, he claimed that St. Ann’s was exceptional in its integration efforts: “‘It is the case that we were more rapidly integrated than any other school in the country that’s still in existence today.’” [20] At its outset, it is of note that St. Ann’s welcomed a few Black students in its inaugural class. [21] Also, Bosworth claimed St. Ann’s was to be a haven for gifted children of all races–and that it was his job to reach promising Black children and lift them out of their stagnant position. A colleague said “The Gifted Child is his ‘thing,’ his cause celebre. And the black gifted child may be even more so.” [22] Bosworth said he had a knack for spotting a gifted child and that it was “the mission of my life to prove that black gifted children exist.” [23]

White parents bought what St. Ann’s was selling, and quickly. In two years, white enrollment from P.S.7-8 decreased by 40% while St. Ann’s applications quadrupled in one school year. It was an open secret that St. Ann’s siphoned students away from public schools, derailing larger integration efforts while touting its own. The assistant superintendent reported that St. Ann’s absorbed some 85 white pupils from the paired P.S.7-8. By the end of their first year, 20% of St. Ann’s student population had come from P.S.7-8 transfers. Bosworth denied skimming students away from P.S.7-8, contending that “our total enrollment is 145 and we get children from many other areas.” [24] Bosworth charged that parents had made their choice after seeing the lackluster results of pairing: “Many of the very parents who vigorously battled for pairing of P.S.8 left it,” he said. “Their complaint was not against integration; it was against inadequate education.” [25] St. Ann’s was said to “provide a superior education for those children whose parents may otherwise have left the community” as well as “for promising children whose parents lack the means to obtain an enriched academic program.” [26] School leaders maintained that they were simply a better, more individualized, more integrated, more adequate school, for white and Black children alike.

Other private schools in Brooklyn Heights seized the opportunity of the white exodus from P.S.7-8. A spokesperson from Packer Collegiate, an all-girls school that was physically connected to St. Ann’s Church on Joralemon Street, maintained that “‘there have not been a large number of direct transfers but that the complete figures were not yet available.” [27] However, the  Neighborhood School Association began tracking school transfers and found that the following year, 14 children transferred to Packer, 13 to St. Ann’s and 3 to Poly Prep, an all-boys school in South Brooklyn. By 1969, Packer’s president John Skillman announced that they would add three elementary school sections in 1970 to accommodate the significant increase in enrollment. Packer also physically expanded, ultimately buying St. Ann’s Church as St. Ann’s moved to a larger building a few blocks north. [28]

The private schools in Brooklyn Heights advertised in local papers as “alternatives” to the public schools, advertising “multi-cultural composition of the student body” as an alluring factor.

1968 in Brooklyn Heights: The Teacher Strike, Community Control and Private Schools Ascendant

The 1968 Teacher Strike marked a shift in rhetoric and shored up white private school parents’ justifications for leaving public schools. As the strike of 1968 consumed the city, Brooklyn Heights parents claimed that public schools were dangerous. The editorial board of the Brooklyn Heights Press called the UFT “pseudo-educators.” [29] One parent warned that the experiment of pairing plus the strike was just too much for her child: “Squeeze them into an antiquated school…problems multiply. Teachers can’t teach.” [30] The UFT had come out against Black activists’ call for locally-organized school district boards and self-determination of their schools, also known as community control, and launched a mass teacher strike. [31] The principal of PS 7-8 was charged with illegally opening the doors of the school, effectively breaking the strike. She told the BHP, “‘I received threats over the phone that vigilante groups were going to ride around the school throwing things at the windows; the callers also threatened to take over the school if I did not keep it open… I considered it the same as a bomb threat.’” [32] By comparing the school to a battleground between Black activists and the UFT, the principal ignited a new worry. Parents no longer lamented learning loss; instead, they feared for their child’s safety as the white principal charged that Black activists forced her to undermine the mostly white UFT strike. 

The teacher strike turned out to be a windfall for private schools. The New York Times reported in October 1968 that “thousands of parents of public school children have been calling the headmasters of the city’s private schools, wheedling, cajoling and imploring that they take their children–victims of the teachers’ strike–into classes.” [33] In 1969, the New York Times reported that 3,300 new seats had opened in private schools to meet this increased demand. [34] Between 1969 and 1971, tuition at private schools had increased by 25%. [35] While consolidating gains in class size and tuition, Brooklyn’s private schools seemed to embrace white liberal and Black parents’ demands alike, boasting of revised, diverse curricula and record numbers of Black students and teachers. St. Ann’s hired Spike Lee’s mother, Jackie Lee, who was famous for bringing students around to cultural events in the city. One of their first Black graduates, Heather Andrea Williams, recalled being welcomed back after her B.A. at Harvard College to teach an African history course at St. Ann’s. The photos and yearbooks indicate that there were a handful Black teachers following Jackie and Heather. [36] By 1980, St. Ann’s boasted that non-white students made up 20% of the school. [37]

Throughout Brooklyn, many private schools followed in the footsteps of St. Ann’s. The Head of Brooklyn Friends school said “there is room for another private school,” and touted experimental education as key to the future of Kings County. [38] In the 125th anniversary report on Packer in 1970, President John Skillman charged that “the city is not dying” and that “the vitality of Packer is enhanced by our location.” In fact, the report mentioned, the area of Brooklyn Heights was experiencing a rebirth. “The result of these families moving back to the city is reflected in the growing pressure of new applications to our school and other independent schools.” [39] These schools appropriated the idea of “community” or “neighborhood” schools with more diverse curricula. They were even “integrated.” They were safe, they were reliable.

Perversely, the community control experiment worked in Brooklyn Heights. White parents controlled the parameters of their community, and would for years to come, by bolstering private education and deserting public school desegregation efforts. Private schools drew families away from the public schools by promising a substantive, integrated education in New York City. Ever since, many New Yorkers have followed squarely in this tradition. Well-intentioned, liberal parents continue to make choices that defund and further segregate public education under the guise of championing diversity. [40] The rise of private schooling in Brooklyn Heights and beyond must be understood as a major element of the history of desegregation in New York City–especially if the city wants to address the pervasive school inequality that is only increasing today.

Rebecca Zimmerman teaches history at Packer Collegiate Institute in Brooklyn Heights where she directs the school’s archival research program at the Center for Brooklyn History. She holds a M.S.Ed. from the University of Pennsylvania and a B.A. in History from Claremont McKenna College.

[1] “Two Separate Issues,” Brooklyn Heights Press, January 9th, 1964.

[2] It remained the largest mass demonstration until it was exceeded by the Women’s March on January 21, 2017. Matthew Delmont, Why Busing Failed: Race, Media, and the National Resistance to School Desegregation (Oakland: University of California Press, 2016); Jeanne Theoharis, A More Beautiful and Terrible History: The Uses and Misuses of Civil Rights History (Boston: Beacon Press, 2018). See also: Matthew Delmont, Why Busing Failed, accessed April 10, 2024, whybusingfailed.com. Also, The Largest Civil Rights Protest You’ve Never Heard Of: Teaching the 1964 New York City Boycott,” Rethinking Schools 32, no. 4 (Winter 2019-2020),https://rethinkingschools.org/articles/the-largest-civil-rights-protest-you-ve-never-heard-of↩︎

[3] See Christopher Bonasita, The Battle Closer to Home: The Persistence of School Segregation in New York City and John Cuscera with Gary Orfield, “New York State’s Extreme School Segregation: Inequality, Inaction, and a Damaged Future” (Los Angeles: UCLA Center for Civil Rights/Proyecto Derechos Civiles, 2014), https://www.civilrightsproject.ucla.edu/research/k-12-education/integration-and-diversity/ny-norflet-report-placeholder/Kucsera-New-York-Extreme-Segregation-2014.pdf

[4] Lorna Saltzman “Letter to the Editor” Brooklyn Heights Press, March 12, 1964.

[5] “Editorial,” Brooklyn Heights Press, March 19, 1964.

[6] John H. Doherty, “One Certainty,” Brooklyn Heights Press, January 14, 1965.

[7] See Delmont, Why Busing Failed. This was common in many other cities in the US at this time.

[8] Delmont, Why Busing Failed, 39.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Fred Powledge, “More Than 10,000 March in Protest on School Pairing” The New York Times, March 13, 1964. (https://www.nytimes.com/1964/03/13/archives/more-than-10000-march-in-protest-on-school-pairing.html)

[11] Merrill Martin, “Education Has Not Suffered” Brooklyn Heights Press, July 1, 1965.

[12] Edmund Pinto, “White Exodus Exceeds Estimates as Board of Education Gives Breakdown,” Brooklyn Heights Press, October 21, 1965.

[13] Suleiman Osman, The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn (Oxford University Press, 2011). 264.

[14] Following pairing, the schools operated under a single name, P.S.7-8, and a single administration.

[15]  “St. Ann’s Church To Open Private School; Long a Dream of Canon Melville Harcourt, Original Enrollment Set at 60 in Grades 1-4,” Brooklyn Heights Press, April 15, 1965.

[16] Ibid.

[17] “Auction to Benefit St. Ann’s School,” The New York Times, March 13, 1969; “Antique Sale Will Benefit St. Ann’s School,” Brooklyn Heights Press, April 28, 1966.

[18] Stanley Bosworth, “Thoughts On A New School,” Brooklyn Heights Press, April 22, 1965.

[19] Ibid.

[20] Alternatives: The Private Schools,” clipping, approximately 1970; Box 107, Folder 5. The Packer Collegiate Collection, Center for Brooklyn History, Brooklyn, NY.

[21] For more on different northern cities’ integration struggles, see also Thomas J. Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (New York: Random House, 2008). 

[22] Ibid.

[23] Ibid.

[24] Edmund Pinto, “St. Ann’s School Defends Against Charge of Hurting Pairing,” Brooklyn Heights Press, October 28, 1965.

[25]  Ibid.

[26] “St. Ann’s Acquires Crescent Club as New School Spokesman Says” Brooklyn Heights Press, March 17, 1966.

[27]  Edmund Pinto, “St. Ann’s School Defends Against Charge of Hurtin Pairing,” Brooklyn Heights Press, October 28, 1965.

[28]  “125th Anniversary Report from the President to Alumnae, Parents, Students, Staff and Friends of the Packer Collegiate Institute,” John F. Skillman Jr. Box 507, Packer Collegiate Institute Records, Center for Brooklyn History, Brooklyn, NY.

[29] “Teachers A.W.O.L.” Brooklyn Heights Press, September 12, 1968.

[30] “Letters to Editors,” Brooklyn Heights Press, April 17, 1969.

[31] See Heather Lewis, New York City Public Schools from Brownsville to Bloomberg: Community Control and Its Legacy. 

[32] Steve Abel “P.S.8 Open Thru Window; Local Bd. Wants Draft Action,” Brooklyn Heights Press, October 24, 1968.

[33] Robert M. Smith, “Private Schools Besought For Aid: But There is No Room for Strikebound Pupils,” The New York Times, October 25, 1968.

[34] Fred M. Hechinger, “Private Schools Plan Fee and Pupil Rises,” The New York Times, July 1, 1969.

[35] M. A. Farber “Tuition at Private Schools To Increase 12% in City,” The New York Times, June 27, 1971.

[36] “St. Ann’s School: An Unofficial History,” Brooklyn Schools Collection: St. Ann’s School; Heather Andrea Williams went on to become a scholar of Africana Studies, She is the author of Self-Taught: African American Education in Slavery and Freedom (2005), and Help Me to Find My People: The African American Search for Family Lost in Slavery (2012), both published by UNC Press, as well as American Slavery: A Very Short Introduction (2014), published by Oxford University Press.

[37] Laurie Brockway, “St. Ann’s is for ‘natural elite,’” Brooklyn Paper, September 3-16, 1980. Box 109, Packer Collegiate Institute Records, Center for Brooklyn History, Brooklyn, NY.

[38] “Supplemental Report to Accompany Report of Visit to Friends School,” Box 10, Packer Collegiate Institute Records, Center for Brooklyn History, Brooklyn, NY.

[39] “125th Anniversary Report from the President to Alumnae, Parents, Students, Staff and Friends of the Packer Collegiate Institute,” John F. Skillman Jr. Box 507, Packer Collegiate Institute Records, Center for Brooklyn History, Brooklyn, NY.

[40] Serial Productions and The New York Times, Nice White Parents, podcast audio, directed by Julie Snyder, hosted by Chana Joffe-Walt, accessed July 15, 2024,https://www.nytimes.com/column/nice-white-parents.