“The Colored People Have Dispersed”: Race, Space, and Schooling in Late 19th-Century Brooklyn

By Judith Kafka and Cici Matheny

“The doing away with the distinctively colored schools and … bringing about mixed classes,” wrote the Brooklyn Daily Eagle in September of 1899, “has done more toward the education of the race than any other individual effort.”[1] Brooklyn’s Board of Education had officially ended racial segregation in schooling in 1883, by requiring all district schools to admit any student living within their enrollment boundaries. The Eagle, Brooklyn’s largest-circulating newspaper, had opposed the decision 16 years earlier, but now declared the results a huge success.[2] No Black parent with children in the public schools, the Eagle maintained, “would tolerate for a moment the suggestion that the old order of things should be restored.” Moreover, the Eagle helpfully pointed out, in addition to aiding Black children, school desegregation benefited Brooklyn’s spatial and economic development:

One can readily see that when schools were established for a particular race, that race would settle thereabout, to be within walking distance of the school for the children. And when the race settled there they built their churches. This very natural condition followed the establishment of each of the colored schools in Brooklyn.

However, “now that the colored children are admitted to all the public schools the colored people have dispersed,” the paper continued. “They are now found in every section of the city.” The advantage of this geographic redistribution of Black families, explained the Eagle, was evident in rising property values in the neighborhoods they left behind:

It is admitted that where colored schools were maintained they worked an injury to the localities by diminishing property values, because they became known as purely colored settlements. But these conditions have been very much abated, and in some instances quite removed by the opening of the white schools to colored children, and it is admitted by men well located in realty values in Brooklyn that by distributing the colored people over the city through the influence of the public schools, better conditions prevail than were formerly known.[3]

During a period of largescale population and geographic expansion, as Brooklyn absorbed hundreds of thousands of new immigrants and surrounding villages (becoming what we know of as the borough of Brooklyn), the Eagle’s assertions about the effect of school desegregation on neighborhood property values make clear the centrality of the relationship between racism, housing, and schooling in Brooklyn’s late 19th-century spatial development – echoes of which are present in battles over control of schooling today.

The 1883 decision to desegregate Brooklyn’s schools – some 15 years before consolidation would make Brooklyn part of greater New York City, and 17 years before state law would end segregated schooling in New York’s cities and towns – had been a hard-fought victory for many of Brooklyn’s Black leaders, including Philip White, the Brooklyn School Board’s first Black member. One sticking point in the new policy was the fate of the three so-called Colored Schools in operation at the time – all of which had been founded by Black community leaders prior to the existence of a Brooklyn public school system, and all of which were staffed and led almost exclusively by Black educators.  In the end, the Board reached a compromise: students of all races would be permitted to attend their local district schools, but the Colored schools would remain open for families that preferred them.

In less than two decades, each of the formerly-known-as Colored schools was gone – either merged or restructured into a white school, or closed entirely.  According to the Eagle, the demise of Brooklyn’s designated-Black schools was the result of Black choices; it argued that once Black families had the option, they preferred integrated schools and had no need for segregated institutions.  Our analysis reaches a somewhat different conclusion.[4]  We found that “choice” on the part of Black families only partially explains the demise of Brooklyn’s designated-Black schools. When considered in the context of the city’s changing spatial arrangements, it is clear that white interests – and specifically white property interests – also played a role, as white families and developers sought, and ultimately acquired, control over formerly-Black spaces and school buildings. 

CS2/PS68

The first of Brooklyn’s Black-designated schools to disappear was Colored School Number Two (CS 2, renamed Public School 68 in 1887), located in what had once been the village of Weeksville, a Black rural settlement on the outskirts of Brooklyn that became more centrally located as Brooklyn grew around it. In earlier eras, CS 2 had been the only school in the vicinity, and was often attended by white students, despite its designation as “Colored” with (mostly) Black teachers and principals.[5] By the 1880s, however, the neighborhood also housed several district schools, as it had become more developed and increasingly popular with white middle class and new immigrant families – even more so later in the decade, once an elevated train line made travel to downtown Brooklyn and New York City (Manhattan) a reasonable commute.[6]

Many of these new residents found the existence of a designated-Black school in the neighborhood problematic. In 1890, as the Board was set to begin work on a new school building, long promised to the families of CS 2/PS 68, a group of white petitioners asked that the site be used for white students instead. A school built for the “exclusive use of colored children,” they maintained, would necessarily depreciate the value of their nearby property.[7] The petitioners’ logic, as the highly-respected Reverend Rufus Perry declared at a meeting of Black Brooklynites, would prevent designated-Black schools from being built in any neighborhood, as such schools would purportedly lower property values wherever they were located.[8]

In the end, the new building was erected, but it was never used for PS 68 exclusively. Instead the building was first shared with a “regular” district school (PS 83) and then in 1893 the two schools were combined.  In merging students and staff – including a Black administrator who supervised white teachers – the school, now reconstituted as PS 83, likely became the state’s, if not the nation’s, first truly integrated school (although Black students were in the minority).[9] 

Yet while many (Black and white) Brooklynites advocated combining 68 and 83 out of a belief in the benefits of racial integration and the symbolic and material harms of designating certain schools for Black children and educators, it is also clear that an integrated school was more palatable to (at least some) nearby white property owners than a school that was intended for the exclusive use of Black students. In addition, many white families seemed eager to access the new school building; PS 83 had enrolled only 325 students the previous fall, but by March of 1893 there were more than 1,100 enrolled – only 175 of whom had been students at PS 68.[10]

CS1/PS67

Colored School Number One (CS 1), the oldest and largest of the city’s Colored Schools, was restructured out of existence as a designated-Black school in 1898. Housed in a new and much-admired “beautiful brick structure,” CS 1 (renamed PS 67) was located in what would later be called the neighborhood of Fort Greene – an area known for its concentration of a Black middle/professional class, as well as a smaller group of fairly well to-do Black elite. [11] At the same time, however, because of its location on a hill, its general proximity to ferry services and the newly-finished Brooklyn Bridge, and its growing and generous housing stock, Fort Greene was becoming increasingly popular with middle and upper-class white families; the streets closest to Fort Greene Park were home to some of the most exclusive addresses in the Brooklyn.[12]

When CS 1 was restructured into a district school with enrollment boundaries, students who lived beyond those boundaries were required to transfer to their local schools – a move that was intended to make PS 67 a predominantly white institution. This reorganization was done not at the behest of Black Brooklynites, but despite their significant opposition. Several members of the Board of Education – including its one Black member, at this point Samuel Scottron –  argued that the school was poorly run and provided a substandard education, and that the long-revered and still popular principal, Charles Dorsey, was incompetent.[13] Critics also claimed that with its declining student enrollment and small class sizes, CS 1 was too costly for the city to maintain.[14]

But the Board’s true intention in restructuring PS 67 was made clear by the Eagle, which explained “that the restrictions of the school to colored children is primarily the reason for the lack of good results.”[15] In truth there were no restrictions against white students enrolling in PS 67, but it was viewed as a designated-Black school, with mostly Black faculty, a Black principal, and a predominantly-Black student body. Once the Board had forced Dorsey’s retirement, reconstituting PS 67 into a district school with enrollment boundaries was a way to do “away with its distinctive characteristic as a colored school.” The reorganization was to improve the school’s quality, by getting “rid of” the (Black) children from “Coney Island, Canarsie, East New York, and even as far away as Jamaica [Queens]” who reportedly attended school irregularly and therefore drove down academic standards.[16]

The plan apparently succeeded. While it is impossible to draw any conclusions about the school’s quality, PS 67 certainly lost its identity as a school for Black students almost immediately. New enrollees the following year were almost entirely from residential areas with few to no Black residents, and within two years the school was reportedly 80 percent white.[17] Board members like Scottron and others may have truly believed that this reorganization was in the best interest of Black children, but they acted against the wishes of the Black families whose children were still enrolled there, as well as in opposition to many of Brooklyn’s Black elite.[18] Meanwhile white families in the area now had a mostly-white school for their children, with white teachers and principals, in a relatively new building, with the possibility of attracting even more white families in the future.

CS3/PS69

CS 3/PS 69 was the last of Brooklyn’s designated-Black schools to close. When the school was first established, the area around it, then part of the town of Williamsburg, had been relatively undeveloped. But by the 1880s, the neighborhood, like much of Brooklyn, was becoming more densely populated, especially with new immigrants from Germany. By then CS 3 had a new schoolhouse, built in 1879, reportedly “one of the finest buildings of its kind in Brooklyn.”[19] The changing racial composition of the neighborhood helps provide some context for the school’s ultimate demise, as the area became progressively whiter over this time period and the building occupied by CS 3/PS 69 was in demand. Even before it had voted to admit Black students to regular district schools in 1883, the Brooklyn Board of Education had already reduced CS 3 to the intermediate level and ordered students in the older grammar grades to transfer to schools closer to home.[20] Proponents of CS 3, both Black and white, argued that the school offered a high quality education, and that statements to the contrary were thinly veiled attempts to secure the new building for white children (and specifically for the new German immigrants settling in the area). One Black defender of the school, a Reverend Manning, argued that “if the Board of Education would appoint a colored truant officer for the colored schools the attendance would be considerably larger.”[21]

When PS 69 was ultimately relocated to a nearby storefront in 1899, the school reportedly had only 20-50 Black students in regular attendance.[22] While Scottron had been at the forefront of the effort to restructure PS 67 and had moved for Principal Dorsey to be fired, he sought to protect both PS 69 and its longtime principal, Catherine Clow, from a similar fate. Scottron disparaged the school’s proposed new location – “I can truthfully say that no worse site could have been chosen for colored children”; even the Daily Eagle, which seemed to support the move as a step toward closing PS 69 entirely, noted that it was “yet to be developed” how the storefront could be “divided into class rooms so as to comply with the rules of the School Board regarding light and ventilation.”[23] Two years later, when PS 69 was officially closed, it had only 63 students on its rolls; because of a state law standardizing teacher and principal salaries across the now consolidated New York City, it had become the “most expensive school in the public system in Brooklyn.”[24] It is unclear, however, how much of PS 69’s attrition can be attributed to low demand on the part of Black families, how much was a response to the school’s new location and conditions, and how much was the result of concurrent changes in the racial development of Brooklyn, as Williamsburg’s relative Black population decreased during this period, while Black residence grew proportionally elsewhere.

When viewed in the context of the changing geographic and racial contours of Brooklyn, it is clear that white interests played a role in the demise of Brooklyn’s Colored Schools in the late 19th century. White families sought access to the buildings occupied by Black schools and a claim to the neighborhoods that surrounded them. While many white parents were willing to send their children to school with Black students, for the most part they did so only when the schools themselves were unmistakably in white control. The Eagle, meanwhile, celebrated the supposed geographic dispersal of Black families following formal school desegregation, focusing on reported rising property values in neighborhoods Black families vacated. Yet the benefits appeared one-sided; white homeowners in some of the city’s tonier neighborhoods resisted residential integration and Brooklyn’s Black population started to spread elsewhere in the borough – although Black families were clearly still concentrated near the (formerly known-as) Colored schools.[25]

The relationship between Brooklyn’s late 19th-century school desegregation policies, the closing of its Black-run schools, and the spatial and racial development of its neighborhoods has clear parallels today, as gentrification and the closing of mostly-Black and Latinx schools in cities across the United States have gone hand-in-hand. In both eras predominantly (but not exclusively) white politicians and administrators used technical arguments about the supposed poor educational quality and under-utilization of schools to justify the closing of institutions highly valued by those closest to them. And both then and today these seemingly rational arguments eclipsed larger questions of power, race, and inequality in the spatial and educational development of their cities.[26]   

Judith Kafka is an associate professor of educational history and policy at the Marxe School of Public and International Affairs at Baruch College, City University of New York, and at the Graduate Center. She is the author of The History of “Zero Tolerance” in American Public Schooling (2011) and is currently researching the history of enrollment zones and school choice in Brooklyn.

Cici Matheny holds a master’s of public administration from the Marxe School of Public and International Affairs at Baruch College, City University of New York, and is completing an Excelsior Service Fellowship with the State of New York.

[1] “Find Mixed Classes Best; Colored People Would Strongly Object to a Return to Separate Schools.” Brooklyn Daily Eagle [BDE] September 25, 1899, p.9. Data sources for all maps: Brooklyn Board of Education Records, New York City Municipal Archives; Colored School No. 1 Records, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library; John R. Logan, Jason Jindrich, Hyoungjin Shin, and Weiwei Zhang. 2011. "Mapping America in 1880: The Urban Transition Historical GIS Project" Historical Methods 44(1): 49-60; "New map of Kings and Queens counties : from actual Surveys," 1886, from The Lionel Pincus & Princess Firyal Map Division, The New York Public Library; NYC Open Data, 2019.

[2] Raymond Schroth, The Eagle and Brooklyn: A Community Newspaper 1841-1955, (Westport, CT, 1974).

[3] “Find Mixed Classes Best,” p. 9.

[4] For a more extensive discussion of this topic, and an explanation of our research methods, see our article, “Racial Integration, White Appropriation, and School Choice: The Demise of the Colored Schools of Late Nineteenth Century Brooklyn,” Journal of Urban History, (June 2020). doi:10.1177/0096144220933229.

[5] “A Tempest in Weeksville: Colored Folks Object to a White Teacher.” The BDE February 24, 1869, p. 2; “The Color Question in the Schools.” BDE, October 19, 1869, p.3; “Board of Education: An Interesting Meeting Yesterday.” BDE, March 3, 1869, p.2. See also, Judith Wellman Brooklyn’s Promised Land, The Free Black Community of Weeksville, NY (New York, 2014).

[6] “Over a Million Needed for New Public School Houses.” BDE, December 5, 1888, p.1.

[7] “A Boys’ School: Separate Organization Decided Upon Yesterday.” BDE, October 8, 1890, p.1.

[8] “Are Indignant: Colored Citizens Make a Vigorous Protest” BDE, October 29, 1890, p.6.

[9] Carleton Mabee, Black Education in New York State from Colonial to Modern Times (Syracuse, NY, 1979). David Ment. Racial Segregation in the Public Schools of New England and New York, 1840-1940 (Dissertation, Columbia University, New York, 1975); Wellman, Brooklyn’s Promised Land.

[10] “Angry at Mr. Simis. An Indignant Taxpayer Denounces the Mixed School System.” BDE, March 16, 1893, p. 4. “School No. 83 is All Right. Mr. Simis Says Consolidation is Far from Ruinous.” BDE, March 18, 1893, p. 10. Mr. Simis also estimated that 100 of the new enrollees were the result of new district lines.

[11] “Opened with Becoming Ceremony.” BDE, November 23, 1883, p.4; Robert Swan, “The Black Belt of Brooklyn,” in An Introduction to the Black Contribution to the Development of Brooklyn, Charlene Claye van Derzee, ed., (Brooklyn, 1977),

[12] “Flurry in Ft. Greene Place, Because a Negro Has Bought a Three Story House: Aristocratic Neighbors in a Panic.” BDE, October 1, 1894, p.1.

[13] Scottron was the third Black member of Brooklyn’s Board of Education. After White died in 1891, T. McCants Stewart was appointed to replace him. Scottron succeeded Stewart in 1894. Marsha Hurst, “Integration, Freedom of Choice, and Community Control in Nineteenth-Century Brooklyn,” Journal of Ethnic Studies 3.3 (Fall 1975): 33-55.

[14] Brooklyn Board of Education, Proceedings, (April 6, 1897).

[15] “65,000 in Night Schools.” BDE, October 15, 1898, p.2.

[16] “Will Reorganize No. 67,” BDE. December 6, 1898, p.16.

[17] “Hartwell Reinstated by Justice Hooker.” BDE, October 15, 1900, p.6.

[18] “Appeal to the Mayor: Colored Citizens Do Not Want Scottron Reappointed.” BDE, May 26, 1897, p.5.

[19] “Color Line: Causing a Stir in the Eastern District.” BDE, February 25, 1884, p.4.

[20] “The Schools: Important Meeting of the Board of Education.” BDE (March 21, 1883), p.2.

[21]“Color Line,” 4.

[22] “Plan to Oust Mrs. Clow Meets with Opposition.” BDE, September 21, 1899, p. 3; “School Board in Session.” BDE, October 4, 1899, p.9.

[23] “Plan to Oust Mrs. Clow Meets with Opposition.” BDE, September 21, 1899, p. 3.

[24] “Last Negro School to Close.” BDE, June 6, 1901, p.10; “Davis Law Plays Pranks,” p. 12.

[25] “The Color Line. Drawn on Classon Avenue over a New Resident.” BDE, July 12, 1890, p.6; “Flurry in Ft. Greene Place,” p.1.

[26] See, for example, Eve L. Ewing. Ghosts in the Schoolyard: Racism and School Closings on Chicago’s South Side. (Chicago, 2018).