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University Daily Kansan Tuesday, Feb. 4, 1964
Boycott Fails To Stop N.Y. Board's Plan
NEW YORK—(UPI)—The Board of Education was pledged today to carry out its school integration plan despite yesterday's boycott that kept one-third of the city's school children out of the classroom and brought threats of more demonstrations to come.
James B. Donovan, board president, and School Superintendent Calvin E. Gross said they would "pursue faithfully" the previously announced plan that integrationists have rejected as "inadequate." The Rev. Martin Galamison, a boycott organizer, said integration leaders would meet shortly to discuss repeats of yesterday's demonstration, possibly Feb. 18 and Feb. 25.
Stanley Lowell, chairman of the City Commission on Human Rights, invited Donovan and Galamison to meet with him Thursday to renew compromise discussions which were broken off last Friday. Galamison and his co-organizer, Bayard Rustin, have sharply criticized Donovan's "refusal to change his position" and Rustin called yesterday for Donovan's dismissal.
One integration leader said the classroom boycott weapon would be employed in every other major city to fight de facto segregation of schools.
In a joint statement Donovan and Gross said they regretted the boycott and felt school children "might better have learned the meaning of human dignity and human rights in their classrooms than in the streets." Yesterday Donovan called the boycott a "fizzle."
The boycott of classes, which was up to 98 per cent effective in predominantly Negro and Puerto Rican districts, was combined with large-scale picketing and mass demonstrations at the board of education, city hall and the governor's office in a protest organizers hailed as being twice as big as last summer's march on Washington. The demonstrations were orderly and there was no violence.
"This is the greatest demonstration in the history of this country," the Rev. Milton Galamison told a crowd of 5,000 which filled a six-lane street in front of the board of education's headquarters in Brooklyn. "Twice as many people took part in this demonstration as marched on Washington."
The school board said 464.362 students were absent from classes yesterday in the nation's largest school system, which has nearly 50 per cent Negro and Puerto Ricans in its student census. Daily absenteeism normally runs 10 per cent, so about 360,000 absences could be attributed to the boycott.
The school board announced last week a plan to desegregate more than 30 schools during the next three years but organizers of yesterday's protest said the board's plan was neither broad nor fast enough. They said other boycotts would be scheduled, possibly for protracted periods, if the school authorities don't move from their present stand.
The boycott was staged to dramatize demands for quick integration of the schools. The system has 168 schools with 90 per cent or more Negro and Puerto Rican students and another 100 where the Negroes and Puerto Ricans number 50 per cent or more.
"The board of education, the superintendent of schools and the entire staff of the New York City public schools have pledged to do everything humanely possible to promote equal education and a better ethnic distribution," Donovan said.
James B. Donovan, president of the school board, said again yesterday that the board would not be moved by pressure tactics and that the three-year plan would be carried out.
"We have published a plan. It is a good plan and we shall pursue it faithfully."
James Farmer, national director of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), said demonstrations similar to the boycott here are planned for every other major city in the country. He said Chicago and Boston head the list.
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