FEATURED RAMAPO ROOM BOOK:
It Takes a Village: The Integration of the Hillburn School System
Author: Leonard M. Alexander, Peter C. Alexander
Publication date: 2014
Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc., New York, NY
EXCERPT – page 35-38:
Between 1931 and the early 1940s, progress on integrating the Hillburn school system was slow. I was in grammar school during that time, and I remember that life went on in our village just as if nothing was going on. There were no editorials in the newspaper or protests by the citizens. The men in the village continued to work in the foundries run by Mr. Pierson and Mr. Davidson, and the separate schools continued undaunted.
Relations between the races outside of school were also frozen in time. Whites and coloreds rarely spent time together. In fact, the only time I remember being in the same place as whites was in our village park, called the Fountain, during the winter months. There was a pond in the center of the park, and many residents would go ice-skating there. Even at the Fountain, however, the races didn’t mix; we all skated on the same pond but stayed within our racial groups. A few of the white kids were friendly to my friends and me, particularly the Sovak, Wanamaker, and Long children, but we never played together.
The apparent quiet notwithstanding, the NAACP was still hard at work behind the scenes, trying to seek justice for the colored children of Hillburn. Everything came to a head, however, in 1943. As an editorial in the NAACP magazine, The Crisis, explained:
Here was literally a feudal village, tucked away a scant hour from Manhattan. It maintained the last and only “Negro” school in the state. Its white people patronized the little colony of Negroes in the best ante-bellum tradition. They were “kind” to them. They “gave” them work. They “let” them live in a hollow on the other side of the highway. Years ago, they “set up” the Negro Brook school, a two-room shack, and later added two more rooms, the whole with outside toilets.
But the Hillburn Negroes of 1943 are not the Negroes of 1913 or of 1903. They knew that the world had changed and they were tired of living in the past. So they announced they would not send their children to the dilapidated Brook school. The result, after an interval in skirmishing, was that the school was ordered closed.
There was much more to the story than parents suddenly deciding not to send their children to the colored school. In the period between 1931 and 1945, World War II erupted in Europe, and many Hillburn residents, white and colored, fought in the war to protect the freedoms upon which the United States had been founded. The war was a reminder of the important role of colored families in American history. We mattered as much as the whites.
Closer to home, Hillburn’s colored families were enjoying more economic security in the thirties and forties, in part because the war effort created more job opportunities. In fact, women of color were working at W. W. Snow’s mammoth brake-shoe plant in Mahwah, New Jersey, earning decent wages. Prior to the war, no colored people were working at the plant. People were much less worried about losing their sources of income if they spoke up about the segregated schools because they were so badly needed in the workplace.
Also, the climate for civil rights advances had changed throughout the country. New Yorkers of African descent grew more militant and pushed for greater rights, including educational rights, and “alliances with New Dealers, leftists, and religious activists—began pushing for civil rights legislation, including a 1918 state law that officially forbade racially separate schools in the state.”
By 1943, my father had stepped down as president of the Hillburn chapter of the NAACP; that role now belonged to Marion Van Dunk and a new group of village leaders. Ironically, some of the very people who called him troublemaker were now spearheading the new charge for equal rights for the Hillburn colored children. Pop was never one to stand in the spotlight, but the new push for equality surely made him proud, even if he was now watching from the sidelines.
Mrs. Van Dunk and the rest of the Hillburn NAACP board members contacted a young lawyer who had been working with the national NAACP to help integrate schools nationwide. That lawyer was Thurgood Marshall. Marshall promised the Hillburn parents that the NAACP would “back the local group to the limit to fight against segregation.”
Thurgood Marshall was an up-and-coming attorney, who spent much of the 1930s and 1940s litigating civil rights cases that collectively led to the Brown v. Board of Education decision. He successfully challenged the South’s white primaries, overturned racially restrictive covenants, and had twenty-nine victories before the United States Supreme Court. Also, during that time, he assisted the colored parents in Hillburn.
At the start of the 1943-1944 school year, Hillburn’s colored families were fired up and ready to fight for integration. With help from Attorney Marshall, the parents planned a general strike; they would keep their children out of Brook School until the school district integrated the system. The wagons were circling around the school board because it had to submit a formal response to the charge that it was maintaining a segregated school system. The board really had no acceptable response because the school boundary it drew was Route 17, which was logical and which allowed a few colored children who lived on the white side of town to attend the white school. Where it made a mistake was to gerrymander the school boundaries to cross Route 17 to include the one white family that lived on the colored side of town.
The Hillburn school desegregation effort was fairly widely known, at least within civil rights circles. The struggle in Hillburn was not the only northern town attempting to integrate its schools. In New York’s Hudson Valley, similar battles were also taking place in Goshen (in Orange County to the northwest) and in New Rochelle (in Westchester County to the east). African American newspapers also spread the word, and the Hillburn integration effort was quickly connected to the national movement to integrate the United States and communities such as Berwyn, Pennsylvania; East Orange, New Jersey; and Springfield, Ohio. Countee Cullen, a poet who rose to prominence in the Harlem Renaissance, even penned a poem about the struggles in my village. Titled, “Hillburn—The Fair,” the piece was published in The People’s Voice in New York City on October 30, 1943. It reads:
Hillburn—The Fair
God have pity
On such a city
Where parent teaches child to hate;
God looks down
On such a town
Where Prejudice the Great
Rules drunkenly
And evilly
What should be Liberty’s estate.
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