Showing 1 - 3 of 3 Items

Date: 2024-01-01

Creator: Mei Bock

Access: Open access

A collection of poems exploring threads including the Lower East Side, immigration, stray animals, art, and Chinese-American identity.

Date: 2019-01-01

Creator: Anne Fraser Gregory

Access: Open access

The landmark Brown vs. Board of Education decision of 1954, and its subsequent implementation, offer an essential question: Are segregated schools inherently evil, and is integration the only solution to unequal education? The statistics that illustrate the effects of segregated schooling are indeed staggering. According to a 2016 Government Accountability Office study, the number of schools segregated along racial and economic lines doubled between 2000 and 2013. In New York City, the achievement gap between Black and white students has continued to grow. In 2018, the National Assessment of Achievement Progress reported that 48 percent of white fourth-graders were proficient in math, while only 16 percent of black students met the standard. With a gap of 32 percentage points—growing 5 points since 2015—Black children in New York are consistently behind their white peers in academics. Sixty years ago, New York's Black and Latino parents parents grappled with this same issue as they fought to desegregate the city’s schools. This Honors Project will discuss segregated schooling in New York City during the 1950s and 60s, and the actors who fought to disrupt the system. Throughout this work, I will attempt to illustrate the power of community in New York City, for both good and evil, for equality and bigotry. Parents—Black, white, and Puerto Rican—function as key players in this story, as they continually fought local and state Boards to access the education they believed to be rightfully theirs and their children’s. I will also assert the notion that segregation was not solely a Southern issue: the similarities between the fight for school integration in both North and South are striking, and highlight the far reaches of prejudice in the nation both then and now. Most importantly, I argue that unequal education may not be solved by integration alone, and that believing in integration as the only viable option perpetuates the incorrect notion that children of color require proximity to white students in order to be academically successful.

Date: 2022-01-01

Creator: Micah Benjamin Wilson

Access: Open access

This thesis investigates three predominantly Jewish housing cooperatives that emerged in the Bronx in the late 1920s. The Amalgamated Housing Cooperative, the United Workers Cooperative Colony (the “Coops”), and the Sholem Aleichem Houses offered garment workers utopian retreats from the drudgery of Lower East Side tenements where Jewish immigrants arrived in droves between 1890-1920. With each cooperative housing a distinct faction of the Jewish Left––from socialists to communists to Yiddish nationalists––the Bronx housing cooperatives, more than experiments in communal living, were the site of a highly contested battle over competing Jewish cultural and political worldviews across the 1930s and 1940s. Transcending the era that is typically considered the movement’s “peak” in the 1910s, this thesis demonstrates that the era of the Bronx cooperatives must be central to any study of the Jewish labor movement by revealing the ways radical Jews attempted to maintain and negotiate their various worldviews against the backdrop of the threats posed by the capitalist housing market, assimilation, and sectarian struggles. I reconsider the disproportionate attention the “success story” of the Amalgamated Cooperative has received, situating its politics as but one of many responses to the contradictions embedded in the housing cooperative model. Finally, I analyze the role of nostalgia present across resident recollections of the cooperatives and situate it in the contexts of 1970s neoliberal urban reform and suburbanization, while considering the discursive power of this emotion to obscure the persistent legacy of anti-black racism entangled in the cooperative housing movement despite its progressive reputation.