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34 Resources, Riots, and Race The Gary Plan and the Harlem 9 2 As dawn broke on October 17, 1917, thousands of Jewish children and their parents crowded the streets of the Lower East Side, Brownsville, and Flatbush. In Yiddish and English, they chanted and carried signs reading “Down with the Gary System!” They passed women and boys on street corners railing against a plan that condemned half a million Jewish children to crowded and crumbling schools that featured vocational, rather than academic, curriculum. As immigrant children and parents converged in front of schools converted to the Gary Plan, they showered the buildings with stones and bricks. For a week, Jewish children turned their aim on city policemen and school administrators. These headline-grabbing actions testified to Jews’ frustration with social and educational discrimination in the only language to which the city would listen. These riots were the culmination of three years of ignored protests by Jewish parents to reverse the infiltration of the Gary Plan into dozens of predominantly Jewish schools around the city. And now, days before an election in which Mayor John Purroy Mitchel, who implemented the Gary Plan, could be voted out of office, the Board of Education was finally paying attention to Jewish protests. Almost exactly forty years later, on September 19, 1957, hundreds of African American parents descended on City Hall. Organized by the Harlem 9, mothers chanted and carried picket signs urging the city to end segregation, improve inferior schools, and allow their children to attend integrated schools. For five years, these women rallied hundreds of other parents to challenge the board’s policy of de facto segregation of African American youth. As they had done to Jews forty years earlier, the board refused to acknowledge African American parents’ protests against crowded, crumbling schools with unqualified and racist teachers where children were subject to vocational, rather than academic, curriculum. So the Harlem 9 sued the board for $1 million, filed hundreds of charges against the board in dozens of city, state, and federal civil rights agen- RESOURCES, RIOTS, AND RACE 35 cies and courts, and boycotted the schools for an entire school year, sending their children to Freedom Schools. In the years after Brown and the height of the civil rights movement, these highly public tactics turned the eyes of the nation away from the streets of Birmingham and Selma and toward Harlem. Though years apart, these protests by Jewish and African American parents utilized similar tactics and narratives resulting in similar movement trajectories and reactions from the Board of Education. By the end of each protest, the school system had retrenched racialized identities for each group through unequal resource allocation. The Gary Plan Developed by Gary, Indiana’s Superintendent of Schools, William Wirt, the Gary Plan was loosely modeled on John Dewey’s progressive beliefs that classrooms should educate children for life. In Gary, Wirt’s plan was guided by the necessity of Americanizing the 63.4 percent of the children in the schools with immigrant parents. The plan was designed to shape children’s behavior and produce what later critics called “loyal citizens and docile workers” (Cohen & Mohl 1979: 86). In immigrant-dominated Gary schools, children were stripped of their languages and cultures and subjected to industrial and manual training classes that deemphasized academic subjects such as math, history, science, and geography. Girls learned cooking, sewing, and bookkeeping while boys learned metal work, cabinetry, woodworking, painting, printing, shoemaking, and plumbing. The schools intended these programs to prepare immigrant children for work in factories rather than upward mobility.1 Mitchel hired Wirt to introduce the plan into NYC’s schools, which were rapidly filling with immigrant children. Rather than building new schools, the Gary Plan would save the city money by utilizing all rooms in existing schools by rotating children through classrooms, auditoriums, playgrounds, and gymnasiums . Changing classrooms became routine as specialized teachers instructed children in one subject and then sent them on their way. The initial impetus for the Gary Plan in NYC came before Mitchel was elected mayor but at his behest as a member of the Board of Estimate, which controlled the funds for the Board of Education. Attuned to the progressive initiatives occurring throughout the country, and concerned with the increasing cost of educating a continuously expanding immigrant population, Mitchel directed the board’s Committee on School Inquiry to hire Harvard professor Paul H. Hanus to study the schools and recommend changes. The report recommended...

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