"Sorry Junior, Recess is Over": Integration, White Backlash and the Origins of Police in New York City Schools
By Rachel Lissy
On the morning of September 19, 1957, 17 year old Maurice Kessler walked into an American History class at Thomas Jefferson High School in East New York, Brooklyn and tossed a bottle of lye. The bottle exploded, splattering 18 pupils and the teacher with corrosive liquid. The attack was aimed at 16 year-old David Ozersky, whose face was described by other students as "melting off," and who was reported to be partially blinded in the attack.[1]
Kessler was arrested and eventually found his way into the courtroom of Judge Samuel Leibowitz, a tough-on-crime judge known, according to the The New York Times, for his ability to turn a trial into a "public spectacle.”[2] Leibowitz had long been critical of the city's handling of the "veritable procession of kids" in its criminal courts.[3] He argued the city’s "soft in the head" approach was based on "psychiatric mumbo jumbo" that "coddled" delinquents.[4] Leibowitz concluded Kessler’s first hearing by calling for a grand jury investigation into crime "in and about schools."[5] In their first statement the grand jury recommended that a uniformed policeman be assigned to patrol the corridors, stairways and schoolyards of every school in the city.[6]
The Superintendent of New York City schools, William Jansen, immediately dismissed the grand jury’s recommendation as “unthinkable,” and, in a reference to the recent deployment of the National Guard in Arkansas, added, “we do not want a Little Rock in New York City.”[7] The city’s professional groups and educational advocacy organizations overwhelmingly echoed this position. The Teachers Guild, the city's largest teacher organization, called the grand jury's recommendation for policemen in schools "inept and damaging."[8] The United Parents Association (UPA) issued a statement claiming "it will be a sad day when policemen must be stationed in American public schools"[9] and called the proposal a "useless approach to a sensitive and complex problem."[10] Even the city's police commissioner questioned the wisdom of the proposal claiming police in schools was "neither practical nor morally desirable."[11] The grand jury countered that what was “unthinkable” was the notion that ”school children whose presence in class is compelled by law, must continue to be subject to acts of violence by vicious students.”[12]
"Sorry, Junior, Recess is Over!" New York Herald Tribune, December 10, 1957.
This debate echoed longstanding tensions about how schools should best respond to disorder and delinquency. On one side, conservatives, politicians, and frustrated teachers called for punitive and coercive responses based on the belief that punishment (or the threat of punishment) was needed to prevent and deter unruly behavior in the classroom as well as society. They argued that “coddling" delinquents by treating them as fragile or vulnerable only exacerbated disorder by creating a permissive society lacking moral authority. On the other side, educators, academics and mental health professionals called for rehabilitative responses that viewed children as less blameworthy than adults and focused on treatment, guidance and the creation of nurturing relationships and child-centered environments. While this debate regularly surfaced throughout the 20th century, rehabilitative approaches had consistently dominated until this time. Police in schools were seen as anathema to the principles of child psychology and the notion that teachers and schools should act in loco parentis. However, within months of the Kessler incident the “unthinkable” became quite “thinkable” as the New York City Board of Education (BOE) implemented a series of policy changes that not only placed police in schools, but endorsed and encouraged unprecedented cooperation and coordination between school officials and law enforcement.
Why this shift occurred in 1958 — and not following earlier incidents in 1942, 1944, 1948, 1955 — is directly related to the other dominant issue facing the New York City schools at the time: integration.[13] First proposed in 1956, the recommendations of the city’s Commission on Integration sparked highly contentious debates that pitted supporters in the Black community and civil rights groups against opponents in middle and working class white communities and groups representing conservative politics and real estate interests. By the summer of 1957, this resistance — voiced by “taxpayer associations” — was having an impact.[14] When the city released its long awaited integration plans they did little to address the central issues of zoning and teacher assignment. Civil rights activists accused the BOE of “deliberately confusing, delaying, distorting, and sidetracking the reports of our Commission."[15]
David Ozersky, lye attack victim, 1957. Associated Press.
This was the context in the fall of 1957 when Maurice Kessler, who was Black, entered the classroom in East New York and attacked David Ozersky, who was white. Indeed, the September 20th article describing the incident, "Boy Hurls Lye in Class,"[16] appeared side-by-side on the front page of The New York Times with "Parents Picket City Hall over Delay in Integration."[17] Opponents of integration seized on the Kessler-lye-incident as an opportunity to further bolster and legitimize their position.
Judge Samuel Leibowitz’s grand jury provided a platform for this perspective to gain media attention and the imprimatur of an official investigation into crime and lawlessness in the city schools. The all-white grand jury was led by two men with vocal ties to conservative politics. Leibowitz had previously run for mayor of New York under a platform that earned him the nickname “Mr. Law and Order.”[18] He appointed A. George Golden, chairman of the Property Owners of Greater New York and member of the Real Estate Square Club, as the jury's foreman. While Golden was serving as foreman he was also running for governor of New York on the anti-integration conservative United Taxpayers Party ticket.[19]
Parents picket City Hall over delay in integration, Sept. 20, 1957. New York Times.
In calling for policemen to be placed in schools, the grand jury was bolstering one of the central arguments of anti-integrationists: that schools populated by majority Black and Puerto Rican children were “Blackboard Jungles,” too dangerous to integrate. White parents argued that the presence of Black students would lower educational standards, "contaminate"[20] their children with deviant behavior, and terrorize their purportedly peaceful insular neighborhoods.[21] They argued that integration would "involve dangerous bus transport" by bringing disorderly Black students to mostly white schools or forcing law-abiding white students to attend dangerous schools in Black communities.[22]
Leibowitz and the grand jury affirmed these perceptions by describing schools as "hotbeds of crime, violence and depravity" occupied by "wild animals,"[23] "psychopaths" and "hoodlums, rapists, thieves, extortionists, arsonists and vandals."[24] In calling for police officers to be stationed in school, the grand jury claimed that "these are not instances of childish misbehavior but acts of criminal violence in the basest degrees."[25] Depicting school incidents as caused by "hoodlums," "wild animals" and "extortionists," attached disorder to students and not settings. According to this framing crime and violence would follow Black students re-zoned to attend white schools.
The grand jury investigation placed blame squarely on the school system for its inability to contain unruly youth and protect innocent students. This was in contrast to previous incidents in which blame had been placed on a range of factors from the influence of mass media and commercialized violence to comic books, absent social welfare services, and broken homes. By contrast the grand jury focused its ire on the school district, describing district level officials as "utterly incapable,"[26] and blaming them for "this horrible, miserable mess that is now called our public school system."[27] Golden accused the President of the Board of Education of spouting "lies made to befuddle the public”[28] and "mislead[ing] the public with catchphrases.”[29] Leibowitz warned the members of the Board of Education that they were "not a law unto itself" and accused them of thinking they were "so powerful with their connections and claques."[30] The grand jury's criticism of the school system and characterization of school officials as out of touch, inept, and untrustworthy elites echoed and affirmed critiques made in opposition to integration that presented it as a social engineering experiment beyond the capacity of the BOE to execute.
That the grand jury had ulterior motives behind its investigation was clear to integration proponents even at the time. A group of ministers in Bedford-Stuyvesant accused the grand jury of using "innuendo" to "place a racial connotation on recent unfortunate events in our borough."[31] Likewise, the NAACP released a statement questioning
the manner in which the grand jury investigating the public schools of Brooklyn has exploited the natural concern of the people of this city for the welfare of their children. What purported to be an investigation of the schools has turned out to be an attack upon the city's entire educational system with thinly veiled overtones of racial prejudice.[32]
Councilman Earl Brown described race as "the 'sleeper' in Judge Leibowitz and his grand jury's tirades about the schools."[33] Brown argued that "a satellite jockey who had lived on the moon for 10 years could tell that the 'certain people' Leibowitz's grand jury foreman talks about in his press statements are Negroes."[34]
Despite these objections, the grand jury was ultimately successful. In January of 1958 following a second headline-generating incident in which a middle school principal who had been called by the grand jury to testify committed suicide, the BOE announced a series of policy changes. After months of insisting police had no place in schools, one week after this incident, the BOE reversed its policy and assigned police to patrol the hallways of 41 schools considered "difficult."[35] The BOE’s new policies did not just invite police into the school building, they also pushed students out onto the streets to be policed. On February 6, 1958 the New York City BOE dramatically altered its suspension policy by giving principals the power to suspend any pupil “charged with a violation of a law involving violence or insubordination.”[36] Prior to the policy change, a student could only be suspended by an Assistant Superintendent and only after a hearing had taken place and an alternative school placement had been arranged. By contrast, the Board's new policy allowed for what The New York Times described as the "wholesale suspension of troublesome pupils from the schools without any provision for their future care."[37]
The details of the new policy endorsed unprecedented collaboration between schools and law enforcement. In a broadcast to principals, Superintendent Jansen clarified that under the new policy, principals should immediately suspend any student who was arrested, whether inside or outside of school. Principals were likewise encouraged to suspend students awaiting trial, on probation, or returning from custodial institutions. Practically any involvement with police or court officials was grounds for suspension. [38] By the end of the school year education officials reported more than 1,300 students suspended under the new policy.[39] With only 219 suspensions reported in the first half of the 1957-1958 school year, the total suspensions in the second half of the year represented more than a 500 percent increase in student suspensions.
In March of 1960 the grand jury concluded its investigation. In a final statement, the jury celebrated that its investigation had ushered in "a new era of close cooperation between school officials and the police department."[40] This statement would prove to be remarkably accurate. Over the next 6 decades the presence of police in schools would grow larger, more elaborate, and more coordinated. Whether called “Security Guards,”[41] “Security Helpers,”[42] “Student Service Officers,”[43] or “School Safety Resource Officers,” their role had grown from 80 in 1968 to 450 in 1972 to 2,200 in 1989.[44] In 1998, Mayor Giuliani would make good on a campaign promise to shift oversight of the city’s more than 3,000 “School Safety Resource Officers” from the Board of Education to the NYPD.[45] Despite initial assurances that the force would not expand its size, this security force would continue to grow and with it the expansion of other tools of law enforcement such as metal detectors and surveillance cameras. Currently there are more than 5,000 “School Safety Agents” in the city’s schools — a force larger than the police departments of Boston, Washington D.C., Detroit, or Las Vegas.[46]
Amidst recent calls to defund police and remove them from schools, this origin story highlights how these debates are about more than pedagogy or even safety — they are about racial politics. School disorder is highly salient to debates about zoning, teacher assignment, school funding and, of course, integration. In 1958, in the debate between punitive and rehabilitative approaches, punitive prevailed. Segregationists were successful in characterizing schools as dangerous and students as criminals. In an effort to allay these fears and address attacks on their competence, the Board of Education adopted disciplinary policies that institutionalized the notion that school disorder was caused by youthful offenders not vulnerable children or neglected, over-crowded and segregated schools. Children were treated as criminals and crime calls for punishment, not compassion. In attempting to alleviate the fears undergirding white backlash to integration, the BOE only served to reinforce, rationalize and legitimize the abandonment and segregation of Black children.
Rachel Lissy, PhD is a historian, consultant, storyteller and capacity builder who works with school and district leaders to transform discipline policy and address racial inequity. This essay draws from her dissertation, “From Rehabilitation to Punishment: The Institutionalization of Suspension Policies in Post-WWII New York City Schools.”
[1] Emma Harrison, "Boy Hurls Lye in Classroom; 20 Hurt, One May Be Blinded," New York Times, September 20, 1957; "Lye Hurled by Vengeful Youth into Classroom: Target of Spite Attack Feared Blinded; Teacher and Score of Students Burned," Los Angeles Times, September 20, 1957.
[2] Murray Schumach, "Samuel S. Leibowitz, 84, Jurist and Scottsboro Case Lawyer, Dies," New York Times, January 12, 1978.
[3] National Archives and Records Administration, Longines-Wittnauer with Samuel Leibowitz, 1954, http://archive.org/details/gov.archives.arc.95912.
[4] Ibid.
[5] "Schoolboy, 17, Ruled Insane in Lye Attack," Chicago Daily Tribune, November 7, 1957.
[6] Lawrence Fellows, "Policeman for Each City School Urged By Brooklyn Grand Jury," New York Times, November 26, 1957.
[7] “Judge Says N.Y. Schools Need Police,” Washington Post, November 27, 1957.
[8] Statement by the New York Teachers' Guild (January 27, 1957. Series 1, Box 7, File 8. United Federation of Teachers Archives).
[9] United Parents Association, January 29, 1958 (Series 386.3, Box 1, File 3. New York City Department of Education Archives).
[10] Gene Currivan, “Proposal for a Policeman in Every School Is Strongly Resisted by the Board,” The New York Times, December 15, 1957.
[11] Citizens Committee for Children, To the Head of Municipal Affairs of the New York City Bar Association (February 7, 1958. Series 354, Box 19, Folder, 15. New York City Department of Education Archives).
[12] George Golden, “Grand Jury Presentment,” December 7, 1957 (Section 354 File 15. New York City Department of Education Archives).
[13] “Two Boys Kill Teacher in School after ‘Showing off’ by Smoking,’” New York Times, October 3, 1942; “Passenger on BMT Train Shot for Objection to Rowdy Acts of 8 Young Negro Hoodlums,” New York Times, June 12, 1944; “‘Emergency’ Found in Juvenile Crimes,” New York Times, May 2, 1948; “Youth Gang Invades High School; Two Pupils Beaten in Classroom,” New York Times, March 29, 1955.
[14] Groups opposed to integration emphasized their status as homeowners who paid property taxes as an investment that entitled them to access to their local “neighborhood” schools, this despite the fact that all New York City residents paid taxes in various forms. These groups, often formed in conjunction with real estate groups, used their status to threaten to leave the school system for private schools, parochial schools or the suburbs.
[15] Gerald Markowitz, and David Rosner, Children, Race, and Power: Kenneth and Mamie Clark’s Northside Center (New York: Routledge, 2000), 101.
[16] Emma Harrison, "Boy Hurls Lye in Classroom; 20 Hurt, One may be Blinded," New York Times, September 20, 1957.
[17] Edward Hausner,"Parents Picket City Hall over Delay in Integration," New York Times, September 20, 1957.
[18] “Fusion for Leibowitz for Mayor,” New York Herald Tribune, June 8, 1953.
[19] "School Joins City in Drafting Plan to Halt Violence," New York Times, February 4, 1958.
[20] Joshua B. Freeman, Working-Class New York: Life and Labor since World War II (New York: New Press, 2000), 198.
[21] Joshua B. Freeman, Working-Class New York: Life and Labor since World War II (New York: New Press, 2000).
[22] "Integration Splits Chamber in Queens," New York Times, May 23, 1957.
[23] "School Jury Told to Call Officials," The New York Times, December 5, 1957.
[24] Emanuel Perlmutter, "Head of School Beset by Crime Leaps to Death," New York Times, January 29, 1958.
[25] Ibid.
[26] Citizens Committee for Children, To the Head of Municipal Affairs of the New York City Bar Association, Citing World Telegram and Sun Article November, 7, 1957 (February 7, 1958. Series 354, Box 19, Folder, 15. New York City Department of Education Archives).
[27] "Three Statements about Violence in the City's Schools," New York Times, January 31, 1958.
[28] Emanuel Perlmutter, "Principal's Death Is Laid to Threat by a Grand Juror," The New York Times, January 30, 1958.
[29] George Golden, “Grand Jury Presentment,” December 7, 1957 (Section 354 File 15. New York City Department of Education Archives).
[30] "Leibowitz Scores School Officials: Informs Jury they may Indict," New York Times, December 7, 1957.
[31] "Schools Join City in Drafting Plan to Halt Violence,” New York Times, February 4, 1958.
[32] "Schools to Halt Ousters on April 1," New York Times, February 14, 1958.
[33] Councilman Earl Brown, "Getting off the Hook," New York Amsterdam News, February 22, 1958.
[34] Ibid.
[35]"Police to Patrol 41 Schools Here," New York Times, January 31, 1958.
[36]Edith Evans Asbury, "Schools to Expel Pupils Accused of Breaking Law," New York Times, February 7, 1958.
[37] Gene Currivan, "Education in Review: City and State Enter Upon New Program to Care for Unruly Youth in the Schools," New York Times, February 16, 1958.
[38]William Jansen, Broadcast to Principals (February 14, 1958. Series 65, File 2, Archives of the New York City Department of Education).
[39] John Theobold, “Report on Suspended Pupils,” (January 13, 1959. Series 281, Box 34, File 618. United Federation of Teachers’ Archives).
[40]“Jobs at 15 Urged for Some Pupils,” New York Times, March 22, 1960.
[41] Sidney Zion, “Plainclothes Security Guards Begin Duties at 25 Schools Here,” New York Times, April 9, 1969.
[42] Leonard, Buder, “Schools to Hire Security Helpers” New York Times, February 20, 1968.
[43] “School Safety,” New York Times, August 25, 1972.
[44] Pope, Charlotte, “”Unthinkable”: A history of policing in New York City Public Schools and the path towards police free schools,” Children’s Defense Fund New York, https://www.cdfny.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2019/10/CDF-NY-Report-History-of-Policing-in-NYC-Public-Schools.pdf.
[45] Archibold, R.C, “New Era as Police Prepare to Run School Security,” New York Times, September 16, 1998.
[46] “A Look at School Safety,” New York Civil Liberties Union, https://www.nyclu.org/en/look-school-safety.