Joyful Resilience: Celebrating Untold Stories of Civil Rights History in New York City

By Judy DeRosier, Jas Leiser, and Errol C. Saunders

The New York City Civil Rights History Project (NYCCRHP) aims to document the crucial and often neglected histories of Black, Brown, and Disability Rights activists who worked tirelessly to promote conversations and policy changes that are diverse and in line with the city’s population. The NYCCRHP is an educational resource that is accessible and inclusive, addressing the often disregarded intersection of disability rights and racial justice. The project presents primary sources from local newspapers, photographs, and books from the 1890s to the present day. It offers lessons that educators and students can use to understand local civil rights activism. By presenting these narratives, the NYCCRHP offers an invaluable resource for understanding the multifaceted nature of civil rights activism and expands beyond the commonly recognized figures and events to include a broader range of activists and movements. This diversity reflects the true breadth of the struggle for rights and equality in New York City.

The NYCCRHP hopes to play an essential role in educating current and future generations about the rich history of activism that continues to shape the fight for equality and justice. It emphasizes the importance of recognizing and learning from the contributions of activists from diverse backgrounds and with various abilities, highlighting the collective effort required to achieve social change. One section of the project is titled “Joyful Struggle,” which includes artifacts and stories highlighting joy as a counter-narrative to the notion that marginalized communities only know oppression and have little to celebrate.

As a team of doctoral students at Teachers College, Columbia University, the authors of this piece set out to decide why it was important to choose resources that showcase joy. As three curriculum developers/researchers from marginalized communities, we highlight sources that allow us to demonstrate counter-narratives we did not have access to in school. [1] In doing so, we want to help students exercise agency and offer them a glimpse of the historical legacy of joy as a path to resistance against injustice. We chose to write this piece using a dialogic method to emphasize how our identities, the source material, and our interpretation of the sources were in conversation during the creative process of curriculum making. [2]

Judy

As a Black Caribbean immigrant woman, I am proud of my cultural heritage. My identity is not solely based on my appearance or accent, but rather a fluid and evolving concept I share with my fellow members of the Black diaspora. Stuart Hall’s essay on “Cultural Identity and Diaspora” has informed my understanding of the complexities of cultural identity. [3] I have come to appreciate that my cultural background is not static but an active part my identity. I value my relationships with my African diaspora friends and family, and I am grateful for the diversity of perspectives they bring to my life.

After immigrating and reconnecting with family, I found myself surrounded by Black American classmates and quickly learned about the cultural differences that set us apart from White Americans. Although my experiences with my Black American friends were positive, I still felt like something was missing or not quite right whenever I was taught Black history. I rarely learned about the histories of Black Americans and even less so about Black Caribbeans.

As a social studies teacher, I tried to incorporate underrepresented histories in my lessons. Still, it was challenging to do so consistently because of time constraints, feeling the pressure to complete the curriculum to prepare students for the Regents Exams, and a lack of access to primary sources that would help diversify the lessons. However, joining the NYCCRHP team helped me provide a space to challenge a historical narrative that only saw marginalized identities as oppressed, and it was crucial to me that our team spotlight joy as both an individual and a communal experience that exhibits the innovative nature of communities.

One artifact from the "Joyful Struggle" topic, titled "Girls Jumping Double Dutch," is a 1976 New York Amsterdam News photograph of Black and Brown girls playing double Dutch at Lincoln Center. This artifact is significant because it portrays a positive image of carefree Black girls and the innocence of childhood play. The image shows four girls smiling while jumping rope, wearing light t-shirts with their team names written on the front, dark shorts, knee-high socks, and 1980s Converse sneakers. Using playtime to build community and friendships. Jumping double Dutch can symbolize teamwork, friendly competition, and community. This photograph helps to articulate joy as resistance, which Cynthia Dillard calls the secret of joy. [4] Scholars such as Crystal Webster have written about the historical exploitation of northern Black children, which further created systemic barriers to their independence and growth, not allowing them to experience childhood like their white counterparts. [5] Therefore, the primary source's importance, which shows Black and Brown girls defying this barrier, is that it uses joy as a counternarrative to help dispel harmful tropes that villainize Black girls.

Finally, this artifact allows us to share our voices and experiences. I hope educators will consider adding the NYCCRHP to their teaching toolkit to help students explore the complexity of the civil rights movement in New York City. The project can foster a sense of community and shared history by highlighting local activists and movements. Engaging with the project can encourage students to take an active role in their communities and continue the legacy of activism.

Jas

My understanding of disability identity begins with my story of myself as a young, white, Disabled student growing up in classrooms in suburban California. As a kid, I didn’t know anybody else with cerebral palsy and the social context around disability was different in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s. Disability identity wasn’t talked about openly. What I understood about my disability was through the lens of physical therapy and what was reflected back to me in a deficit model, as a student, through my own Individualized Education Plan meetings, which were included as part of routine special education. I didn’t know, yet, the incredible sense of community and kinship that would come for me from meeting other Disabled students for the first time that first year in college through a school club. Or how much of a positive shift in me it would cause seeing other visibly Disabled adults, leading independent lives, and thriving at careers that they loved. Or that I would eventually become a special education teacher myself.

When I was invited to join the NYCCRHP, I asked myself: How could I design a set of lessons about disability history that would help students build their own sense of agency through joyful counternarratives about disability history?

I thought of the film Crip Camp, which tells the story of Camp Jened. The summer camp, located in the Catskills, started in 1953 and served as one of the first summer camps for Disabled youth, from all over the country and Canada. Some came from Canada. Many of the counselors were also Disabled, and celebrated disability rights activist Judy Heumann was one of them. For many, it was the first time they had been in community with other Disabled young people. [7] So, I got to work. Through research and through the transitive qualities of crip culture, I connected with Camp Jened campers and counselors. Everyone was incredibly kind. I eagerly listened to their stories as we met on Zoom. Fittingly, they call themselves the “Camp Jened Family” and it really does feel that way. [8]

One of the photos in the NYCCRHP archive is of a baseball game at Camp Jened taken between 1968 and 1972. All accommodations the community members needed were readily made so that everyone could play a game with their friends in the sun. [9] When I saw the photograph for the first time, I saw not only the baseball game but I also saw my own community of Disabled peers and the joy that we also feel in being together with each other. Somehow, for me, being in a community just makes everything else feel more optimistically “possible.” Specifically, how we, as young and Disabled people, find joy within the struggle and how the young, Disabled campers and Disabled counselors at Camp Jened did too.

I hope these NYCCRHP materials help students also see how revolutionary a sense of community can be for them, at their schools, too. For the Disabled campers and counselors of Camp Jened, and for me, the community found amongst other Disabled youth ignited a sense of possibility. When students use the NYCCRHP materials we hope that they can look towards the past for how they can exercise their agency too.

Errol

I am a Black man, a gay man, an oldest child, an only brother, an uncle extraordinaire, a teacher since my childhood on welfare. Ivy League educated twice over, I revel in the ratchet almost as much as the bougie —as Whitman said, “Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself. I am large. I contain multitudes.” [10] I have embraced my provocative existence by promising to be my full self everywhere. I do so, especially in my classroom, so that others might not have to imagine whether folks like me exist. Indeed, I routinely interrogated my work on the NYCCRHP through this lens: Since curriculum making is political by its very nature, how can our curriculum serve as both a mirror for students to see themselves and as a window into socialities that they have not yet encountered? [11]

I remember learning about the modern creation of childhood in AP European History. We examined old paintings, noting how the droll White children changed from curiously out-of-place little adults to dainty set-pieces in need of care and attention, transforming into being valued as full people in the European mind. Fast forward to June 15, 2020 when a former student messaged me. Now a young woman, she said something like “Mr. Saunders… I mean Errol. Did you see the Supreme Court case? They ruled in favor of trans people having rights. Come with me to Stonewall to celebrate!” I agreed. We met up at Riverbank State Park, took selfies for folks we both knew from long ago, and giddily rode our bikes 150 blocks to be with other queers in solidarity. Peak pandemic, rainbow-masked and helmeted, we still laughed and reminisced about the shenanigans of yesteryear. But mostly, we appreciated the joy of human fellowship in troubled times.

Working on the NYCCRHP, I noticed that so many of the materials missed this dynamic. Sources that highlighted the joy that people experience when collectively working towards emancipation were conspicuously absent. When I encountered the first issue of The Brownies Book, I had my ah-hah moment. Mesmerized, the smile of the Black girl dressed in white, tippy-toed and arms outstretched, taking up as much space as she could, spread to my face. DuBois’s inscription gave me shivers of excitement:

“A Monthly Magazine for the Children of the Sun DESIGNED FOR ALL CHILDREN, BUT ESPECIALLY FOR OURS. It aims to be a thing of Joy and Beauty, dealing in Happiness. Laughter and Emulation, and designed especially for Kiddies from Six to Sixteen. It will seek to teach Universal Love and Brotherhood for all little folk – black and brown and yellow and white. Of course, pictures, stories, letters from little ones, games and oh--everything!” [12]

My affective response let me know that this was the right source for us to explore. A child of the sun myself, “but especially for ours” rang over and over in my head. [13]

Cognitively, The Brownies Book presents an incredible opportunity for teachers and young scholars. Edited by the inimitable W.E.B. Du Bois, the magazine presents an opportunity for teachers to explore Progressive educational thought through a uniquely Black lens. It presents opportunities for teachers and students to explore the work of Du Bois and educational civil rights outside of the Du Bois/Washington debate and come to understand DuBois’s ideas beyond and after his talented tenth ideology. And, it does so by “creating” a Black childhood, a project to reinforce our full personhood in a world that denied it while also letting us revel in the beautiful moments.

Conclusion

Our collective aim in sharing these narratives, stories, and artifacts of everyday activists who fought for policy and socioeconomic improvements in education for Black, Brown, and Disabled people is the deeply held belief that our humanity is not clouded by our marginalized identity or the oppressed experiences we live through. The artifacts will generate questions and more dialogue that help students channel their emotional connection(s) with the theme “Joyful Struggle.” And finally, we believe that people can change communities for the better and we hope that students feel encouraged to get involved and connect with the material when they see themselves represented.

Judy DeRosier is a PhD student in the social studies education program whose research centers Afro-Caribbean youth experiences with citizenship and belonging. She has over fifteen years of teaching experience as a special education and social studies high school teacher. Jas Leiser is a PhD student in the social studies education program and former special education/social studies teacher. Jas researches ways to support Disabled students and LGBTQ+ students. A veteran history teacher, Errol C. Saunders, II, is an EdD student in Curriculum and Teaching. He studies the hidden curriculum of belonging in public schools of choice.

[1] Milner, H. Richard. “Race, Culture, and Researcher Positionality: Working through Dangers Seen, Unseen, and Unforeseen.” Educational Researcher 36, no. 7 (2007): 388–400. https://doi.org/10.3102/0013189x07309471.

[2] Norris, Joe, and Richard D. Sawyer. “Toward a Dialogic Methodology.” Duo ethnography: Dialogic Methods for Social, Health, and Educational Research, 2016, 9–39. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315430058-6.

[3] Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora” Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media 6 (1989): 222-237.

[4] Dillard, Cynthia. “To Experience Joy: Musings on Endarkened Feminisms, Friendship, and Scholarship,” International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 32, no. 2 (February 7, 2019): 112-17, https://doi.org/10/1080/09518398.2018.1533149.

[5] Crystal Webster, “Beyond the Boundaries of Childhood: African American Children in the Antebellum North” University of North Carolina Press (2021).

[6] *Crip Camp*, directed by James Lebrecht and Nicole Newnham (2020: James Lebrecht, Nicole Newnham, and Sara Bolder), netflix.com.

[7] *Crip Camp*; “The News Published By Ruth Kirzon Group for Handicapped Children, Inc.” and Florence Vogel, “Excellent Results Reported By Camp Committee,” Collection of Honora Rubenstein.

[8] Jackie and Jeff Rubenstein, interviewed by Jasmine Leiser, April 19, 2023, via Zoom.

[9] *Crip Camp*; Jackie and Jeff Rubenstein, interviewed by Jasmine Leiser, April 19, 2023, via Zoom.

[10] Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself.” Modern American Poetry, 2019. http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/s_z/whitman/song.htm.

[11] Michael W. Apple, Ideology and Curriculum, third edition. (New York: RoutledgeFalmer, 2004).; Emily Style, “Curriculum as Window and Mirror,” Social Science Record (Fall 1988): 6–12.

[12] “The Brownies’ Book, January 1920, in New York City Civil Rights History Project, Accessed: 02/07/24, https://nyccivilrightshistory.org/gallery/brownies1.

[13] Sam Sellar, “The Responsible Uncertainty of Pedagogy.” Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 30, no. 3 (2009): 347–60. https://doi.org/10.1080/01596300903037077.