Brook School (Hillburn, New York)

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Brook School
Location
Information
TypePublic, segregated
School districtRamapo Central School District
Last updated: 29 December 2017

Brook School was a grammar school located in Hillburn, New York, in the Ramapo Central School District. . The school was an all-black school, which parents fought to desegregate in the early 1930s and again in 1943.,.[1][2][3][4] Thurgood Marshall was hired by the NAACP to desegregate the school. Thurgood Marshall won a disparity case regarding integration of the schools of Hillburn, 11 years before his landmark case of Brown v. Board of Education, on behalf of the village's African-American parents. Leonard M. Alexander and Peter C. Alexander, "It Takes a Village: The Integration of the Hillburn School System. Page Publishing, 2014 (ISBN 978-1-63417-331-5).

Black children who lived in Ramapo attended the Brook School in Hillburn, a wood structure that didn't include a gymnasium, library or indoor bathrooms. Meanwhile, the Main School, attended by white children and now the headquarters of the Ramapo Central School District, included a gymnasium, a library and indoor plumbing.[5][6]

References[edit]

  1. ^ Ramapo Independent, Sept. 9 1943
  2. ^ New York Herald Tribune, Sept. 30, 1943
  3. ^ "Jim Crow enrolls for new term in Hillburn schools" New York Times, Sept. 10, 1943.
  4. ^ The Crisis Nov. 1943, v.50, no. 11, pp. 327-255 [1]
  5. ^ Thomas Sugrue "Hillburn, Hattiesburg, and Hitler" p.87-102 in Kruse, Kevin Michael, and Stephen G. N. Tuck. Fog of War: The Second World War and the Civil Rights Movement. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.chapter, in Google books"Hillburn's protestors—and those they inspired throughout the North-—would accelerate a grassroots movement for quality education, one that would eventually reshape Northern and Southern Politics
  6. ^ Thomas J. Sugrue "God have Pity on Such a City", in his Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North Random House, 2009 ISBN 978-0-8129-7038-8 chapter in G Books