CHAPTER 4

Six Rugged Years, All Uphill

In late May 1963, Rochester City School District Superintendent Robert Springer flew to Dallas for his brother-in-law’s funeral. While staying at his sister’s home, the fifty-one-year-old suffered a heart attack in his sleep and was rushed to the Baylor University Hospital. He died on June 19, a gallstone apparently having blocked his bile ducts and caused an infection. Herman Goldberg, the district’s special education director, was appointed as interim superintendent after the school board’s first choice turned down the assignment.1

The day before Springer’s death, State Education Commissioner James Allen, had issued a directive that would come to define Herman Goldberg’s legacy in Rochester. Specifically addressing Malverne, a small, segregated Long Island school district, Allen said that the district needed to redraw the attendance boundaries to create some approximate racial balance among its three schools. More generally, he wrote in an open letter to New York school leaders:

The position of the department . . . is that the racial imbalance existing in a school in which the enrollment is wholly or predominantly Negro interferes with the achievement of equality of educational opportunity and therefore must be eliminated from the schools of New York State. If this is to be accomplished, there must be corrective action in each community where such imbalance exists. . . .

It is recognized that in some communities residential patterns and other factors may present serious obstacles to the attainment of racially balanced schools. This does not, however, relieve the school authorities of their responsibility for doing everything in their power, consistent with the principles of sound education, to achieve an equitable balance.2

The legal victory in New Rochelle had encouraged potential litigants elsewhere in the state; Malverne’s directive opened the floodgates for the next stage of the segregation struggle. In Rochester, the person standing shoulder-deep in those waters was Goldberg, a strapping forty-seven-year-old special education expert whose personal background suited him for the role. He was born in Brooklyn in 1915, part of a growing Jewish community in a mostly Catholic neighborhood. His mother was a teacher and his father owned a hardware store where tolerance across ethnic and religious lines was a requirement. “In the hardware store everyone needs nails and screws, hammers, lawnmowers—it doesn’t matter what religion you are,” he said. Goldberg attended Brooklyn College and played catcher on the baseball team. From there he was chosen for the US baseball team that put on an exhibition during the 1936 Berlin Olympics, making him one of the few Jewish athletes from the United States to venture into Nazi Germany for the games. He recalled seeing Adolph Hitler nearly every day during the Olympics, sitting just a few feet from him in the stands at swimming and wrestling matches.3

Goldberg reacted cautiously to Allen’s desegregation directive. “We’ll study the commissioner’s statement very carefully; there will be no precipitous action,” he said. Indeed, he spent the majority of his eight-year tenure as superintendent defending his deliberate pace of action from attacks on both sides. Nearly every desegregation action Goldberg proposed drew angry opposition, and sometimes court challenges, from aggrieved white parents; at the same time, the Rev. Franklin Florence, president of FIGHT, wrote him off as “timid and weak,” offering “pablum instead of beef—public relations instead of programs—gimmicks instead of products.”4

The six-year stretch from 1963, when Goldberg took office and Allen gave his first directive, until 1969, when a Goldberg-appointed committee proposed a vigorous reorganization just days before the decade turned over, was a time of great heat and no light in Rochester’s schools. Despite a series of optimistic policy pronouncements, the overall picture of racial segregation did not improve—on the contrary, it worsened dramatically, with the number of elementary schools with more than 90 percent Black students doubling from three in 1962–63 to six in 1967–68.5

That happened largely because Goldberg and the district spent an enormous amount of energy and political capital pushing the concept of voluntary open enrollment even as they acknowledged, both publicly and privately, that purely voluntary changes could not turn the rising tide of segregation. This poorly designed, poorly executed push for progress not only failed in its stated objective but also poisoned the well for later, more ambitious efforts. Allies from across the pro-integration spectrum defected out of frustration and disgust. Some of them later emerged as Black separatist leaders, who could say quite accurately that the district had no track record of success in achieving quality integrated education. The uprising of July 1964 was a keystone event, proving the stakes for the community while also increasing the urgency with which many white Rochesterians either fled the city or dug in to fight.

The bedeviling thing is that Rochester, in some ways, had the most advantageous climate for successful integration of any northern city. As late as 1968–69, nearly half of its Black students were attending majority-white schools, more than three times the average among comparable cities.6 Roch ester had in Goldberg a leader committed to the cause. Desegregation had a broad base of support, comprising teachers, administrators, and organized labor as well as secular and religious organizations in both the Black and white communities. NAACP-backed litigation provided a potential vehicle for change and federal desegregation funding was available.

But, as a worn-out Goldberg said in January 1970, less than a year before leaving the district for a post in the US Department of Education: “It has been a period of six rugged years, all uphill.”7 His hopeful plans had been watered down or were insufficient from the start. The early pro-integration consensus on the school board and in the community had frayed, with school board president Louis Cerulli leading an increasingly emboldened opposition and Black groups reassessing their loyalties. As the tumultuous decade came to a close, the prospect of serious change in Rochester’s schools was as dim as ever.

Allen’s 1963 desegregation directive for the first time set a state threshold for racial imbalance: a school with more than 50 percent Black students. In Rochester seven schools in the Third and Seventh Wards met that standard, as would two others soon to open.8 The district’s official response to Allen later in the summer of 1963 contained the basic elements of the desegregation course it would chart over the next several years. In fact, some were already underway. The district had earlier decided to build junior high schools, replacing the K–7 and 8–12 configuration with a new set of middle schools that would alleviate overcrowding in elementary school buildings. The new buildings would have larger and more strategically drawn enrollment zones allowing for greater racial balance. In another proposal, known nationally as the Princeton Plan, two neighboring elementary schools, one mostly white and one mostly Black, would be combined into one enrollment zone. The two buildings would then split the collected students by grade level rather than geography, creating two perfectly desegregated schools in the place of two segregated ones. The most prominent new idea was “open enrollment,” where students would be allowed to attend schools outside their neighborhoods, if space permitted and their parents agreed.9

Allen called Rochester’s plan one of the best in the state, yet even at that early point, signs of trouble were visible. The school board, in accepting the plan, seemed to question its premise. “It has been observed that some pupils have not taken advantage of educational opportunities presently available to them,” the board wrote. “Children without security, without a backlog of self-esteem . . . could conceivably be set further behind in their school and life experiences by the pressures of being integration pioneers.” Goldberg collected feedback from his own administrative team and found several anonymous critics. “We must not overdo or we will cause an exodus from the community,” one wrote.10

The first major organized opposition to desegregation efforts appeared in November after the board announced it would consider using the Princeton Plan with nine pairs of racially imbalanced schools, touching about 45 percent of the city’s elementary school enrollment. More than a thousand mostly white parents swelled an informational forum on the idea, complaining of the increased distance their children would have to travel to school. Within two months opponents had gathered more than five thousand signatures on a petition asking for the idea to be put to a referendum. The plan was supported, meanwhile, by the NAACP, the Monroe County Human Relations Committee, and several faith groups. “I think it is plain personal dislike of Negroes,” one proponent said. “This stuff about your children having to walk farther is just a smokescreen.”11

The district bowed to the pressure and withdrew its Princeton Plan proposal in favor of two other initiatives. First, the school board announced it would send all fifth- and sixth-graders from 95 percent nonwhite School 3 to the all-white School 30 about two miles away. The goal, Goldberg said, was not integration but rather reducing overcrowding; School 3 was well over capacity, whereas School 30 was anticipated to have seven empty classrooms. School 30 parents nonetheless objected forcefully. “Don’t ask us to do anything you wouldn’t do yourselves,” one parent told the board. The second initiative was a limited start to open enrollment, which many Princeton Plan opponents had said they would prefer. Goldberg sent a letter to families in six majority-Black schools, putting the offer in blunt terms: “There are many Negro children and only a few white children in your child’s school. . . . We would like to know if you want your child to have a chance to attend a school where there are more white children.” He and the district were expecting affirmative responses from about 2 percent of eligible children, based on precedent elsewhere in the country. Instead they received applications to transfer from 1,721 students, or 35 percent of those eligible, swamping available space in the receiving, mostly white schools.12

The transfer plan at schools 3 and 30 began in January 1964. It got off to a rough start when three quarters of the white fifth- and sixth-graders at School 30 were kept at home the first day the 118 Black children arrived on buses from School 3. Boycotts continued for the first week or so, even while the students who did attend reported a positive experience. “Aw, mister, that stuff about trouble is a lot of baloney,” a twelve-year-old told a reporter. “I made five new friends today.” The mostly Black children at School 3 regretted leaving their friends but mostly expressed optimism. “I would like to go to School 30 because I would like to ride the school bus every morning,” one wrote. “I would be losing some of my best friends, but this is not very bad because I will be meeting new friends.” On the other hand, because the Black children were a distinct minority, the burden of assimilation, both social and academic, fell on their shoulders. “You felt like you was living up to their expectations,” one student later said. “You first had to be like them. So therefore, it took something away from who you were.”13

Open enrollment, meanwhile, began in early February. About 640 were signed up to participate just days before the transfers began, but more than 100 reconsidered after what district officials described as a “campaign of terror” by white community members in Black neighborhoods over the preceding weekend. “My understanding is that individuals in cars drove through certain neighborhoods of our city and through whatever techniques they devised, indicated to children and parents and others in the area that it would be advisable for the children not to go on the buses,” Goldberg said. Alice Young, the highest-ranking Black administrator in the district, agreed: “Many Negro parents were intimidated. . . . They feared something might happen to their children.” Coming just a few months after the fatal bombing of a Black church in Birmingham, Alabama, the message was unmistakable.14

Opponents of both the School 3 to School 30 transfer and open enrollment also began more formal counterattacks in New York Supreme Court. A group of School 30 parents filed a lawsuit seeking an injunction against the transfer of School 3 children. The district was lying, they said, in claiming the action had nothing to do with desegregation. The parent leader Christopher Strippoli brought to court three aggrieved School 30 students who said they had become depressed “because they were unable to readily adjust to . . . being regrouped in the middle of the school year with children who were not their neighborhood playmates and with whom they had little in common.” A parent association at mostly white School 40 issued a separate lawsuit over the presence of eleven Black children who previously had attended School 4. Goldberg’s “whims and fancies,” they argued, would destroy the neighborhood school concept all together.15

Local judges sided forcefully with the parents in both cases. State Supreme Court Justice William Easton saw in the School 3 transfer a threat to “the ethnic institutions within which Americans have organized their urban life.” Both decisions, however, were overturned; the New York Court of Appeals decided unanimously that the opposing parents had not succeeded in establishing any constitutional violation. “If the complaint of these petitioners is that their children must now attend an integrated school, we call attention to Brown v. Board of Education,” the court wrote in the Strippoli case.16

The complainants may have lost in the courtroom, but the anxious white parents they represented continued to vote with their feet. A census count showed there were now nine schools with more than 50 percent minority students, including for the first time a secondary school, Madison High School. At the same time thirty-seven elementary schools had fewer than 15 percent nonwhite students, a proportion the Citizens’ Committee on School Integration called “grossly at variance with the overall composition of the school system,” which then stood at 26 percent nonwhite students in the elementary schools and 11 percent in the high schools.17

The major Christian, Jewish, and ecumenical faith organizations in Rochester all came out early in support of the district’s desegregation efforts, including submitting a friend-of-the-court brief in the open enrollment lawsuit. In February, though, just as the various transfer programs seemed to be progressing as planned, the Jewish Ledger threw cold water on optimism among proponents:

We confess we cannot participate in the bubbling enthusiasm and joy expressed by many groups and individuals with the success of the open enrollment plan for Rochester’s public schools. Frankly, our emotions were sorrow and shame as we viewed these bewildered tots, identification tags dangling from their tiny necks, who rise early to shuttle across town to neighborhoods denied their parents. . . .

We were always led to believe that Rochester was a highly cultural city, enjoying excellent race relations—unless, of course, you wanted to buy a home, join a club or belong to a union. Let us not now be falsely lulled into believing we have opened our hearts by opening a few doors.18

In February 1964, the essay may have seemed unduly pessimistic. Five months later it proved prescient.

On the evening of July 24, 1964, a community organization called the Northeast Mothers Improvement Association held a dance on Joseph Avenue in the Seventh Ward. A twenty-year-old man got drunk and an organizer called the Rochester Police Department at about 11:25 p.m. to make a complaint. The police responded, as they often did in Black neighborhoods, with dogs. The tactic had long been controversial, reminiscent of more overt brutality in the South but also indicative of fraught community-police relations in Rochester. Police dogs were used in several instances of police misconduct in the early 1960s that served as an important galvanizing theme for nascent Black political organizing in the city. “In my entire upbringing the dogs were the number one subject that . . . most of the people thought about, talked about, wanted something to be done about, because that was a bad situation,” a Seventh Ward resident, Trent Jackson, Jr., later said.19

Housing supply and conditions remained a dire problem, as did the city of Rochester’s indifferent municipal services. Juan Padilla, an early Puerto Rican migrant, recalled that it was particularly unpleasant to walk down Joseph Avenue on a windy day in the early 1960s: “[The] streets were dirty, and when the winds would gust, it looked like a tornado with the swirling of papers and garbage.” A 1967 confidential consultant report to Kodak on the city’s Black neighborhoods noted they had been physically segregated “strategically” and showed “an alarming lack of municipal services,” compounding the housing crisis: “The streets are littered and filthy, and the garbage stands open and uncollected. Rats are said to roam the streets at night. Traffic safety devices are lacking, there are fewer fire hydrants (though the buildings are the most flammable in the city), many of the sewer entrances are clogged, and trees have been allowed to grow and obscure street lights.”20

This all served as kindling on that hot night in July 1964. As best as anyone could piece it together in the aftermath, the partygoers on Joseph Avenue became enraged by a fast-spreading rumor that a police dog had bitten a pregnant woman. That allegation was never verified, but within minutes a crowd had assembled, and the night filled with the sounds of breaking glass and blaring sirens. The violence spread on the second night from the Seventh Ward to the other Black neighborhood, the Third Ward. A white man was killed when he was hit in the head with a pipe, knocked into the street, and run over by a car. Three more people died when a helicopter crashed into a house on Clarissa Street. Only on the third night, after the National Guard had been called in, did calm return.

Nearly 900 people were arrested, 86 percent of them Black and Puerto Rican. Of the 720 Black people arrested, 92 percent had been born out of state, mostly in the South, a remarkable illustration of the growth of the local Black population. Black leaders threw their hands up, pointing out that they had been trying to call attention to the community’s frustration and economic isolation for decades. To give one example, the State Commission against Discrimination described Rochester as “sitting on a pressure cooker whose relief valve has long been choked”—and that was in 1957. “The response to many warning reports, protests and discussions failed to activate an arrogant and complacent power structure,” Walter Cooper wrote. “Their response to all legitimate complaints was to maintain the illusory policy of condescending paternalism.” Franklin Florence, who was out of town the weekend of the violence, noted that the streets had filled with not only teenagers but also children, adults, and senior citizens. “There were grandmothers, fathers, mothers, aunties, young people,” he said. “They didn’t look at this as a riot. They looked at it as a rebellion.”21

Predictably, the city government saw things differently. In a meeting with NAACP leaders the following Monday, Mayor Frank Lamb “referred constantly to, ‘you people’ and implied that all Negroes would have to suffer because of the acts of violence over the weekend,” according to the Black leaders in attendance. In his official postmortem, City Manager Porter Homer characterized the violence as “an irrational orgy of lawlessness and disorder” perpetuated by “toughs and thugs,” contained only through the admirable work of law enforcement. The community’s efforts to help its Black residents had been unparalleled in the nation, he wrote—and, to the extent they had not resulted in significant improvements, the blame lay in large part with Black community leaders who had failed to communicate the good news to the masses. “Nothing the City government could have accomplished in the past few years would have so dramatically changed conditions for the Negro in the riot areas that his frustration and anger would have been eliminated,” Homer concluded.22

As pivotal as those three July days were for Rochester, they were overshadowed on the national scale by a broader pattern of riots and uprisings in cities across the country, some much deadlier and more destructive. Locally and nationally, frustration and anger were channeled into a more confrontational, more impatient brand of Black leadership that eventually came to be known as Black Power. Followers of Stokely Carmichael, Malcolm X, and other Black Power leaders snorted at the essentially optimistic activism of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Thurgood Marshall. Facing what one historian called “the space between new rights and unclaimed freedoms,” these more militant leaders demanded rather than pleaded, recoiled rather than reconciled.23

In Rochester, Black Power crystallized after July 1964 when a citywide group of Protestant clergy brought to town Saul Alinsky, the Jewish Chicago-based organizer and agitator. He described Rochester as “probably the most extreme example of benevolent paternalism in this country” and agreed to take on the city as a project—but only if invited by some representative group of the Black community. In 1965 that group, FIGHT, was formed, with the thirty-one-year-old Rev. Franklin Florence, pastor of the Reynolds Street Church of Christ, as president. “We have been guinea pigs in a prolonged experiment with paternalism—and we will stand it no more,” Florence said at the inaugural FIGHT convention.24

FIGHT’s primary concern was jobs, particularly for Black unskilled workers, and Florence sought them at the same place as everyone else in town—Kodak. The company was seen, not unreasonably, as the face of Rochester paternalism and the inevitable pressure point for social change. “Kodak’s benevolent-father image is very strong in Rochester and has been fostered so assiduously and for such a long time that to some extent both the community and the company have become its captives,” one researcher wrote. “Problems of minorities, militancy, and reallocation of power [do] not fit into Kodak’s existing personnel makeup and decision-making process.” Constance Mitchell, the first Black elected official in Monroe County, said it was “a [laughing] matter among the minority community that if you put your application in at Kodak, Bausch and Lomb or Xerox, any of the corporations, they’d put your application in File 13, which was the wastebasket.”25 A Kodak consultant, in a confidential 1967 report, observed that the company was, in the minds of Black residents, “the primary agent for thwarting the possibilities for human and social development in the ghetto . . . whose existence depends largely on Kodak’s implicit or explicit approval.” The consultant concluded: “The situation cannot become worse. The prime responsibility for reducing tension in Rochester must rest with Eastman Kodak.”26

For two years Florence negotiated, threatened, and protested, jostling the venerable community institution in a way to which it was decidedly unaccustomed. “It’s just like with Kennedy and Khrushchev,” he said. “You can’t have peace until you get the .45 on the table.” After a labor war that garnered national headlines, FIGHT and Kodak eventually agreed to a somewhat anticlimactic pact that provided for training hundreds of Black employees. Although focusing most of its attention on jobs, FIGHT also took some early stands on education—namely, in strong support of integration along with other assistance for Black students. Florence in 1966 testified at a hearing of the US Commission on Civil Rights in Rochester, demanding integrated education. “To be black means, in America and in Rochester, inferior,” he said. “So then it is impossible to get a quality education in an all-black school under the present system.” The following year, FIGHT’s education committee released a position paper on education, calling for integrated schools along with more Black teachers and administrators, Afro-centric curriculum, and more reading instruction.27

As FIGHT ascended, the NAACP and other more moderate groups faded. Florence derided nonmilitant Black activists—the same “Young Turks” who had so rattled earlier white and Black leaders just a few years earlier—as “Oreos and Uncle Toms.” An anonymous flier circulated in the Third Ward with a cartoon of one such “Tom” carrying a suitcase labeled “Whitey’s Bag of Tricks” in one hand and a satchel of cash in the other, hustling into a building marked “riot-proof.” A national Committee on Racial Equality executive, on a visit to Rochester shortly after the riots, concluded: “We have in Rochester no real recognized leadership by the Negro community. . . . There has been nothing concrete done in terms of getting to the community, and I doubt whether or not [Black leaders] are really interested.” A common wisecrack regarding nonmilitant Black activists was that PhD stood for “poor helpless dummy,” longtime community activist Gloria Winston Al-Sarag recalled. “The intellectuals were told to go somewhere and sit down.”28

More important than the NAACP’s losses in the public eye was the fact that Aikens, the federal desegregation lawsuit it sponsored in 1962, was floundering. Indeed, the legal attack in that case had been disjointed from the beginning. Reuben Davis, the lead local attorney, had requested to be released from the case just two weeks before it was initially filed in May 1962, citing an unspecified concern “from a personal point of view.” He ultimately remained part of the team. Then, in November 1962, the local NAACP learned it would be largely responsible for financing the lawsuit, an expense that it had not anticipated, and that Davis did not believe it could meet without significant outside assistance.29

Happily for the litigants, a group shortly formed to provide that assistance. The Citizens’ Committee on School Integration, led by Aikens plaintiff Jerome Balter, intended to create and organize momentum for desegregation, whether court-ordered or otherwise, and to raise money for the cause. As the months and years went by, however, with Aikens no closer to resolution and the local NAACP experiencing a change in leadership, Balter grew frustrated. “As you know, there has been no action on this case for almost the entire period,” he wrote in May 1964 to the national NAACP. “The local branch . . . has been conspicuous by its lack of activity on the question of school integration.”30 In the spring of 1965, the local chapter announced that it was dropping the case in favor of filing a petition for the state education department to intercede. Court rulings elsewhere in the state had led the NAACP legal team to believe such executive intercession was “obligatory” for court-ordered desegregation and would “offer the most expeditious route to the end which is involved.” In the midst of the public debate over open enrollment and other strategies, the dismissal of Aikens caused hardly a ripple. Behind the scenes and among those who had volunteered as plaintiffs, though, the NAACP’s apparently peremptory decision was disheartening. Balter reported it had been dropped “against the advice of the litigants.” An NAACP effort to file a new lawsuit the following year was derailed “because of the bad handling of the original suit,” a local representative conceded in an internal memo. “Many of the original litigants do not want to go along with us and refuse unless we give them a guarantee we will see this one through all the way.”31

How would Rochester’s schools have turned out differently if Aikens had led to a prompt judicial desegregation order? In other cases—New Rochelle, for example—judges ordered the merging of enrollment areas and the closure of schools, among other things. A progressive decision in Rochester might have implemented in full the Princeton Plan, creating pairs of racially balanced elementary schools across the city with only slightly increased transportation. Such a step would have capitalized on the comparatively broad consensus around desegregation—broad, compared to what it would become by 1970 after years of inaction. The Rochester lawsuit, with its inter-racial plaintiff group and its frank stance on the question of de facto segregation, had the potential to generate a landmark ruling. On the other hand, it is hard to imagine that a federal judge would have chosen Rochester to set an example. As paltry as the district’s progress toward desegregation was, it nonetheless outpaced that of many other northern districts at the time. And though racial segregation in Rochester was worsening, it was still unremarkable compared with what could be found in other upstate New York cities. In 1962–63 there were four elementary schools in the city with more than 80 percent minority students; in Buffalo, by comparison, there were fifteen such schools.32 Given those mitigating factors and the courts’ continuing reluctance to impose on northern districts while more overt opposition to desegregation was ongoing in the South, it seems unlikely Aikens would have resulted in a major edict.

One area where the NAACP and FIGHT agreed was the pressing need for more Black teachers. In 1963 there were just 96 Black teachers among a districtwide corps of 2,200, and many schools had none at all. Goldberg reported that the district was urgently seeking Black teachers but had been thwarted, in part, by housing discrimination, as newly arriving Black educators could not find a place to live. An ongoing commitment to recruitment, along with the continuing magnetism of the Great Migration, led to a significant increase in the number of nonwhite teachers in Rochester during the Civil Rights era, from 4 percent in 1963 to 20 percent in 1980. A parallel program brought a lesser number of Black teachers to suburban schools, where they often felt even more alien than they did in Rochester. “When I first arrived, the kids crowded around me to see if I was real,” one teacher said of her experience at Greece Arcadia High School, just west of Rochester, in 1970. “I could tell they wanted to touch me.” Nydia Padilla, a Latina, remembered arriving around the same time as a student teacher at an elementary school in the town of Webster and having children crowd around to touch her hair, excited to have “a real Indian in the school.” One boy asked whether she was carrying a knife to stab people, like his parents said Puerto Ricans often did.33

The recruitment efforts were coordinated as part of a federally funded program known as Project UNIQUE (United Now for Integrated Quality Urban-Suburban Education). Its director was William Young, and two of the first teachers he succeeded in bringing to Rochester were his younger sisters. The Young family grew up on a farm in Daingerfield, Texas. Their parents had received hardly any education but saw five of their children become teachers—even if Lillie, the younger of the two sisters, wasn’t originally interested in the profession. “They came home one summer and were telling me all about [teaching in Rochester] and asked if I wanted to try it,” she said. “And I said, ‘No, not really.’ I already had four or five brothers and sisters who were teachers and I didn’t want to do that.” But when another recruit dropped out at the last moment and the federal funding for her brother’s program came into jeopardy, she changed her mind and packed her bags.34

Lillie Young and other newly arriving Black teachers were to find in Rochester a delicate situation, as some of their white colleagues and supervisors were skeptical of their preparedness. “They were very strict on us,” she said. “It was always: ‘What are you doing? That can’t work.’” Another Black recruit, Andrew Ray, would go on to become a well-regarded principal in the district after first arriving at Madison High School from Mississippi in 1969. In his first year he overheard a white teacher saying that the new Black teachers surely hadn’t been properly trained in the South. He responded: “I’m here at the same level as you are, and you had a 300-year head start on me.”35

The Black southern transplants, of course, had all attended strictly segregated schools, and therefore brought a different perspective on how to run a classroom from that of their northern counterparts. “We knew, when a teacher walked into a classroom in our schools: order,” Ray said. “You automatically snapped to attention. . . . It was a famous saying among African-American parents in the South: ‘Don’t make me have to come to that school for you.’”36 For many, that was part of a larger difference in expectations that allowed Black teachers to connect with their Black students in a way not every white teacher could. One former student, Bettina Love, remembered the lightning strike of entering third grade at School 19 and meeting her first Black teacher, a transplant from New Orleans: “I had never seen a woman, regardless of race, so powerful, so commanding, and so stern. . . . Mrs. Johnson did not just love her students, she fundamentally believed that we mattered. She made us believe that our lives were entangled with hers and that caring for us meant caring for herself. . . . I distinctly remember walking into class, looking up at Mrs. Johnson, and realizing my class-clown days were over. I was relieved. I was ready to get my voice back.”37

Mrs. Johnson also made sure to connect with parents, Love wrote, learning about her charges as children and not just students—and instilling a healthy dose of fear in them as well. Another early Black teacher, Musette Castle, moved from Memphis, Tennessee, to Rochester in 1971 and stayed for a long career in RCSD, where she made a priority of connecting with—and respecting—her students’ parents. “I make the assumption that a parent cares and wants their child to do well,” she said. “Instead of [teachers] who just let him act simple and sleep and never contact the parent and let them know there’s a problem—what kind of nuttiness is that?”38

At the same time that scores of minority teachers were arriving in Rochester classrooms, the district was also—for the first time but certainly not the last—looking to make its curriculum more inclusive. District reading lists and lesson plans had progressed little since the days of the Little Black Sambo controversy. The first dedicated districtwide effort culminated with the publication in 1964 of “The Negro in American Life,” a middle-school curriculum supplement meant to serve as a corrective for the “unrealistic and incomplete interpretation of our cultural heritage” that students had previously encountered. “No young person preparing to take part in his country’s future can be considered educated without an understanding of the civil rights issue, its origins, and its by-products of fear, ignorance and prejudice,” the introduction stated. Still, said Hannah Storrs, a Black teacher and the president of the local chapter of CORE (Congress of Racial Equality), in 1967: “Boys and girls in the inner-city and in other schools really believe that when we talk about our ancestors from Africa that they still swing around in trees.” FIGHT called for teaching Swahili as well as for making “the contributions of Afro-American citizens to America’s growth . . . an INTEGRAL part of the social studies and history curriculum.”39

FIGURE 4.1. Percent nonwhite teachers, Rochester City School District, 1960 to 2020.

Source: Compiled RCSD documents and news reports.

The introduction of Black teachers and culturally responsive curriculum, coinciding at the local and national levels with the rise of the Black Power movement, left many Black Rochester students with a sense of empowerment just as they were being placed on the front lines of a communitywide battle over desegregated schools. Black student unions (BSUs) sprang up at most city high schools; Charlotte residents looked on with trepidation as teenagers with Afros and dashikis got off the bus on Lake Avenue, James Baldwin paperbacks tucked in their back pockets. One of them was Idonia Owens, president of the Charlotte High School BSU and later a longtime RCSD administrator. “In high school, I was fully immersed in being Blacker than Black,” she said. “I joined the local Black Panther group, I was active in the FIGHT organization, I read everything all the time by every Black author I could get my hands on.”40

Another Black Charlotte student, Jonathan Perkins, recalled: “When we, the Black students, began to have meetings and our attire changed—Black and white dashiki, Black and white applejack hat, power fist—that sort of visible ornamentation allowed me to think of the necessity of expressing myself as not just a student, but an African-American student. I recognized there’s a need for our voice to be heard, and even if I cannot articulate what I’m feeling, even just putting on this clothing is helpful to me.”41

Nellie King recalled a trip to New York City in the early 1960s with the Junior NAACP and seeing modes of Black cultural expression she hadn’t thought possible at West High School. That and protests over instances of police brutality served as gateways to greater pride in being Black. “That’s how we learned about wearing our hair natural and other kinds of things we didn’t have here,” she said. “[Before], you didn’t step out the door without your hair being very pressed. . . . Just to find that freedom to be who you are was a great experience to me.” As another Black Charlotte student leader, James Beard, remarked: “My thought was, I have a right to be in this school if I want to be in this school.”42

Participation in the open enrollment program grew from about 450 students in 1964–65 to about 700 in 1965–66. Others took advantage of another new avenue, called the Triad Plan, where students in some parts of the city could choose among three schools near their homes rather than just the one to which they traditionally would be assigned. All told, more than 1,200 students were participating in race-based transfer programs by the fall of 1966.43 Even as participation in open enrollment grew, though, the basic problem of racial isolation in the schools was getting worse. In 1962–63, before the district had done anything to promote integration, there had been eight elementary schools with more than 50 percent Black students. Three years later, after intensive political and social activity, there were nine such schools, including five where the Black enrollment was greater than 95 percent.44

FIGURE 4.2. Kindergarteners at School 50 get to know one another after being placed in the same school through open enrollment in 1965. Photo courtesy of the Democrat and Chronicle.

It was assumed that, to the extent open enrollment resulted in desegregated schools, students would become more open-minded when it came to race. Yet though many children did experience such a transformation, it was far from universal. One extensive survey found that the introduction of a handful of Black transfer students had hardened, rather than eliminated, students’ racial animus. For the white students, the researcher, Ralph Barber, attributed this largely to the influence of white Charlotte teachers, whose “open hostilities, . . . lack of tact and stereotyped, vituperative humor must certainly be communicated to students.” Black students’ antipathy, he wrote, was unsurprising when considering their rude welcome and distinct minority status: “Negro students at [Charlotte] have felt threatened, physically and emotionally, by the white community, generally, and by the white students specifically. White students at [Charlotte] have felt threatened by the appearance of Negroes in terms of social-class consciousness. This is also true of some white teachers. . . . The fear voiced most frequently by parents is that Negroes will cause [Charlotte] to lower its standards and thereby become a ‘lower-class’ school.” Barber nonetheless concluded: “Synoptically viewed, desegregation at [Charlotte] has undergone all the labor pains of a difficult birth. It probably could not have been accomplished otherwise were it born now or ten years from now. Of greatest importance is its continuation.”45

Academic results were more encouraging. Children who left segregated Black elementary schools for modestly desegregated ones saw appreciable increases in test scores, attendance, IQ test scores, sense of self-worth, and citizenship compared to those who stayed behind. Their report card marks were initially lower, but they mostly made up the difference within two years. Whatever mixed social and academic gains open enrollment produced, though, were limited to the small subset of students who had been prescreened by district officials looking for those most likely to succeed. “For every one child parachuted out of the ghetto, 12 stay behind in all-Black schools,” Franklin Florence said. “A few benefit; the many are forgotten.” Goldberg himself conceded in 1966: “I do not believe that open enrollment as it is now constituted can reduce racial imbalance in [all] schools.”46

Nor could it improve overall academic achievement by minority students in the district, as gains among open enrollment participants were offset by poor marks at the most segregated schools. The district at that time did not systematically report academic data by race—it had not tracked student race at all until James Allen requested a racial census in 1961—but the available evidence showed that Black achievement overall lagged badly. Of the four schools in the district with remedial early elementary classes in 1965–66, three had at least 90 percent nonwhite students. The four schools with advanced programs, on the other hand, were all at majority-white schools. The Monroe County Human Relations Commission formally complained in July 1966 of “academic imbalance,” and several Black parents wrote to tell Allen that their children in the city’s segregated schools were “being slowly killed mentally.”47

Those who sought a faster pace of desegregation were represented on the school board in the mid-1960s by Robert Bickal and Faust Rossi, who regularly joined forces on the losing side of 3–2 votes. In 1966 they managed to achieve a compromise, getting the full school board to request from Goldberg a fresh desegregation plan for the elementary schools. The urgency of the task was underscored when the 1966–67 school year began and about 150 white students at John Marshall High School protested the arrival of 110 Black students transferring in from Madison High School under open enrollment. Some held signs reading “Negroes go home” and “Keep Marshall clean.”48

The proposal that Goldberg presented in February 1967 contained four different plans, from which he hoped the board would choose one.49 Two of them captured the attention of the community and are worth discussing in detail. One plan called for the construction of seven “educational parks” that would replace nearly all the existing elementary school buildings with state-of-the-art campuses serving several thousand students each. They would be located mostly in public parks—Genesee Valley, Highland, Seneca, Cobbs Hill, and Maplewood would all get a campus—and offer amenities not available in smaller schools, such as science and language laboratories, auditoriums, and resource centers for teachers. This plan was discarded because of its fantastic cost but inspired a Greece school board member to put forth a similar concept for students of several school districts. His proposal will be discussed in chapter six.

The most practical of Goldberg’s four plans was what he called the “Rochester plan”—in essence, a large-scale version of the Princeton Plan. It would split the primary years into grades K–3 and grades 4–6 buildings with greater demographic balance. The city would be divided into ten units, each comprising from three to six existing elementary schools, some of them clustered geographically and others not. Each unit would have a nonwhite enrollment from 28 to 37 percent, and the boundaries would be flexible to account for changes in neighborhood makeup.

Liberal and Black groups, including the Citizens’ Committee on School Integration, the Rochester Teachers Association (RTA), CORE, and the NAACP, came out unanimously in support of the Rochester plan. FIGHT did as well, in its own way, demanding strict equity in the number of white and Black children required to ride buses and calling Louis Cerulli a bigot who “is going to have us gumming our way through the baby food Goldberg is feeding us.”50 Parent groups from majority-white schools, as well as those purporting to represent “taxpayers,” submitted thousands of signatures opposing all of Goldberg’s plans, saying they would cause “almost insurmountable financial problems” and destroy neighborhood schools.51

It was during the deliberations over Goldberg’s 1967 proposal that Cerulli emerged as the unquestioned leader of the antibusing movement in the city, a position he would not relinquish until his death five years later. A West High School graduate and respected medical doctor in the city’s Maplewood neighborhood, Cerulli won his first election to the school board in 1959 with a bland platform of fiscal restraint and putting children first. As late as 1964, an opponent of the Princeton Plan called for Cerulli to resign for inadequately defending the concept of neighborhood schools. “We don’t need a man like him on the school board,” the father taunted.52

Cerulli attended college in Louisiana and Alabama and often pointed to the strict racial segregation in place there as distinct from the developing imbalance in Rochester. Still, he never hid his reluctance about busing—or his skepticism about the value of racial integration in general. “The value to the education of an individual in an integrated or segregated school has never been proven satisfactorily to me,” he wrote in 1966. “The education of an individual to me has always been the result of the individual’s capabilities and effort together with motivation.”53

It was largely in his last two years in office, starting in 1967, that Cerulli became not just an opponent of but an agitator against desegregation. At a meeting at all-white School 52, he encouraged hundreds of parents to “flood” legislators with letters against Goldberg’s plans. He laid the blame for increasing segregation on Black southerners moving to Rochester: “I don’t know why they’re leaving [the South] . . . and get[ting] on the relief rolls right away.” And, when asked whether busing could be of any conceivable value, he answered: “If you want to enhance the education of the underprivileged children, take them out to the zoo on the buses. We got the buses. We can use them on Sunday.”54

FIGURE 4.3. Louis Cerulli, seen here in 1971, served on the Rochester school board from 1960 to 1969 and led the white opposition to desegregation. Photo courtesy of the Democrat and Chronicle.

Fellow board member Glenn Wiltsey was, like Cerulli, a strong opponent of progressive desegregation, and, as previously mentioned, Bickal and Rossi were strong proponents. This left the fifth board member, Frances Cooke, as the swing vote to find some way forward from Goldberg’s four-part proposal. The board in March 1967 listened for six hours as more than one hundred speakers addressed them before the meeting formally began. It was after midnight when they acted. The board voted down all four of Goldberg’s plans. None of them could have worked, Cerulli explained, “since they were built on assumptions of population trends and housing patterns not currently predictable.” Instead, Cooke joined Cerulli and Wiltsey in approving a separate document called the 15-Point Plan that Goldberg, sensing defeat, had quietly provided to the board several days earlier.55

Of the fifteen points, eight were promises to continue programs already underway or vague pledges of support and cooperation. Two had to do with compensatory education in majority-Black elementary schools, including limiting class sizes and hiring additional reading teachers. Two others encouraged further study of regionalization, including a “voluntary cooperative federation of school districts in the region” and a state report on financial and legal barriers. Cerulli touted these last two points in particular as forceful steps toward desegregation, though integration proponents booed lustily as he spoke. The most substantive part of the plan concerned the development of a magnet program for gifted students at majority-Black School 2, together with a “reverse open enrollment” process whereby white students from the city’s periphery could attend either that school or School 6, another brand-new building in a Black neighborhood.56

For liberals, the 15-Point Plan was an outrage. “There’s not a damn thing in it,” Bickal roared. Jerome Balter noted sarcastically the apparent “overwhelming consensus in favor of quality integrated schools . . . as long as nothing is done about it.” Florence called it “a sellout to education on a straight racist line” and attacked Goldberg for sacrificing Black children “on the altar of political expediency.”57 For Cerulli and busing foes, though, the 15-Point Plan was the best possible outcome. It avoided compulsory busing and also did not exert any particular pressure toward a metropolitan solution extending beyond city limits. Instead it took another step in reframing the debate as about improving segregated schools rather than desegregating them.

For Goldberg, the 15-Point Plan was a capitulation. Despite his avowed opposition to racial segregation, the superintendent had for the second time buckled to the demands of recalcitrant white families in crafting a purported desegregation plan. The 15-Point Plan added little to the existing open enrollment framework that he admitted was inadequate. “[Goldberg] was very good at shooting down plans that were clearly going to be unpopular,” Rossi said. “He was not a stupid guy by any means; he was very smart and politically astute.” That political calculation was proven correct by the school board election of 1967, where voters showed a distinct lack of support for strong integration measures. Cerulli was re-elected and was joined by Michael Roche, a twenty-nine-year-old teacher who ran against busing just as vigorously, becoming the first Republican on the school board in six years. “People are getting away from extreme liberalism,” Cerulli said. “People feel sick and tired of busing—moving kids around. They want the preservation of neighborhood schools.”58

The 1967–68 school year began, then, with the district in essentially the same posture it had maintained since 1963. Even as racial isolation increased in a growing number of schools, RCSD continued to leave the execution of its desegregation plans in the hands of parents. For the first time, though, it now was offering an option to white families as well. The reverse open enrollment initiative, including the gifted program at School 2, represented Rochester’s first experiment with magnet schools, a concept that would gain a great deal of currency in the generation to come. The idea was to use the gifted program (or MAP, for Major Achievement Program), as well as the incentive of a brand-new facility, to lure white families into a neighborhood they otherwise would avoid. The problem with such initiatives—which create incentives to increase white enrollment at a mostly Black school—is that some artificial cap must be placed on Black neighborhood enrollment to ensure enough space for the targeted students. When the district sent canvassers out into the School 2 neighborhood seeking hundreds of Black families to volunteer to send their children somewhere other than the newly built, richly appointed school in their own backyard, it blundered into a hornet’s nest.

Table 2 Timeline of Rochester Desegregation Efforts, 1962 to 1972

“We strongly protest the use of ‘integration’ to pressure inner city students to accept busing away from a superior school program, in order to allow white children the obvious advantages available here,” the School 2 Parent Association wrote to Goldberg. “We are confident that no child can benefit more from a superior education than our children.” The situation provided fodder for antibusing advocates as well, including Roche, who called it “absurd . . . to [deny] children an excellent education in the convenience of their own neighborhood.” The district responded that Black children transferring out of the neighborhood would receive supplemental programs at their new outer-city schools as well, including an after-school program. The 220 Black students who agreed to transfer to other schools faced one further indignity once school began, as the district failed to line up sufficient busing to get them to their new buildings.59

Numerically speaking, reverse open enrollment was a modest success in its first year. One hundred and eighty white students attended School 2, including about forty bound for the gifted program. They brought the school’s white enrollment to 20 percent, up from 2 percent the year before, and both the district and the white parents touted the transfer program as a success. Year-end testing by the district showed positive effects for the Black students who were placed into desegregated classrooms at School 2. Notably, the desegregated classrooms at School 2 had a greater positive effect than greatly reduced class sizes at School 3, which remained deeply segregated. The district created a waiting list for the 1968–69 school year and announced a similar transfer program for School 6.60

Yet of the forty-eight students in the supposedly desegregated MAP program, forty-one were white. One of the other seven was Dana Miller, who had been in fifth grade at overwhelmingly Black School 4 when he was asked whether he would be interested in applying for the MAP program at School 2, within walking distance of his house. He agreed but was surprised on the first day of school to find that he and a friend were the only Black faces in a twenty-four-student class.61 “We were a little surprised,” he said. “We thought, ‘integrated,’ so [it would be] half-and-half maybe.” Even more than race, he said, the difference was class based. Most of his classmates’ parents were lawyers or doctors, whereas his father struggled working two jobs to pay the mortgage on the home he had purchased, through a white straw buyer, on Jefferson Terrace.62

With new desegregation activities strictly curtailed under the 15-Point Plan, the problem worsened across the district, and pro-integration community groups as well as teachers and administrators began to increase pressure on the district to act. Two men emerged as leaders: Reecy Davis, the fiery organizer of the newly formed United Federation of Inner-City Parents, and Laplois Ashford, the Urban League executive director who, in December 1967, became the city’s first Black school board member when he was appointed to replace the departing Rossi. In August 1969 the federation disrupted several board meetings and announced that it would organize a boycott of the first two weeks of school in order to force a plan for integration. At the same time, Franklin Florence asked US Attorney General John Mitchell to withhold further federal desegregation funds from the district and launch an investigation, while the district’s principals handed out fliers on downtown street corners and took out a full-page newspaper ad calling for immediate countywide desegregation. “Your children won’t thank you for leaving them with the problem of separate societies,” the advertisement read.63

Faced with louder calls for action, the school board in August 1969 resorted to a familiar tactic; it asked Herman Goldberg to study the problem. It requested yet another desegregation proposal from the superintendent, the third of his tenure. Specifically, it asked him to say what the district would do if the board were to order immediate desegregation and gave him four months to do so. Ashford blasted his colleagues for their inaction and called for immediate, compulsory busing of both white and nonwhite students. “What we need is not another study but a commitment,” he said. “We can no longer sidestep our obligations. It would take an idiot not to understand the issue.” Goldberg’s due date was Dec. 31, the final day of the 1960s. When the school year began, more than a thousand students stayed home as part of the United Federation of Inner-City Parents boycott.64

In the meantime, the November 1969 elections triggered a major upheaval of the school board. The conservative Michael Roche left after winning election to City Council, part of a Republican sweep up and down the ballot. Laplois Ashford and Louis Cerulli, uncomfortable ballot mates on the Democratic ticket, were unsuccessful in their own runs for City Council, and both shortly announced their plans to depart from the school board.65 All the school board candidates in November campaigned against the use of compulsory busing, leaving Goldberg in the unenviable position of rushing to finish a report for a new board that didn’t seem interested in hearing it. Indeed, Roche and Cerulli attempted to take decisive action before leaving office. With a third vote from Dorothy Phillips, on December 18 they passed a resolution banning the use of school buses for the purpose of racial balancing. It would have permanently spiked any feasible desegregation plan—and fulfilled all the victorious board candidates’ campaign promises. Crucially, though, Phillips inserted an amendment conditioning the resolution on the ratification of the incoming board in January. The new board never took it up, so the resolution never took effect.66

FIGURE 4.4. From left: Superintendent Herman Goldberg, Richard Harrison, and Reecy Davis of the United Federation of Inner-City Parents. Photo ca. 1967 courtesy of the Democrat and Chronicle.

The board’s lame-duck stunt had the important effect of shaking some Black community leaders’ last glimmer of confidence that the district was acting in good faith. Several members of Goldberg’s advisory committee quit on the spot. “I’m finished with the council,” Reecy Davis said. “I don’t want any more to do with integration. White people won’t permit integration.” The Urban League of Rochester added in a statement: “We maintain our concern that the Board and this community are unwilling to totally integrate the schools and until such time, that the community is willing to approve some solution which will inevitably require the busing of white as well as black youth, the Urban League demands a strategy for real change and improvements in our inner-city schools.” Goldberg’s advisory council considered filing a lawsuit with the federal government, alleging that the board action constituted an affirmative step backward on desegregation.67

Undaunted by the antibusing resolution, Goldberg formally unveiled his third and most ambitious desegregation plan on December 29. It was, in essence, a variation on the controversial Princeton Plan of 1964. The elementary schools would be grouped into eleven “enlarged home zones” designed to include a racially balanced student body, and each building would become either a K–3 or 4–6 school. The secondary schools would likewise be split, with some current high schools—Charlotte, Douglass, Monroe, and West—converting to junior high schools and the remainder—East, Franklin, Jefferson, Madison, and Marshall—serving grades 10–12 (Edison Tech and World of Inquiry were not included). Some primary schools would still have more than 50 percent nonwhite students, but in buildings for grades 4–12 the proportions would be from 18 to 43 percent.68 Goldberg estimated that 16,700 students, representing 36 percent of the student body, would take a bus to school under the new system, up from about 7,700 in 1969–70. The majority of them would be secondary students, versus just 9 percent of students in grades K–3. The plan would also provide for hot cafeteria lunches in every building; previously most students had walked home for lunch, so the service was unnecessary.69

Apart from the effects on transportation and racial imbalance, Goldberg’s reorganization, as it came to be called, achieved some goals that the district had been pursuing for years. Chief among them was moving schools closer to “open classrooms.” In this pedagogical design, similar to the Montessori model, students did not necessarily advance one grade level each year but rather could learn at their own pace within a cohort of peers about their age. At the secondary level, there was a wide consensus on the wisdom of splitting the seventh and eighth grades apart from older students. A recent study on increased fighting and misbehavior in city high schools had shown that younger students did a disproportionate share of troublemaking and urged shunting them into their own schools. Goldberg also called on suburban districts to join in long-range regional planning, including the cooperative use of federal Title I antipoverty funding. “Shall we have schools, and a nation, in turmoil?” he asked in conclusion. “Or shall we have schools free from racial and ethnic fears, where all children can learn well, each developing his special strengths and each participating in the building of a new and undoubtedly the best chapter in America’s history?”70

Three days later, the calendar year turned over and a new school board was seated. Gordon DeHond was a conservative who immediately rejected Goldberg’s proposal and sought final ratification of the antibusing amendment. The incumbent board president, Dorothy Phillips, and the newly elected Thomas Frey had also pledged to oppose compulsory busing while campaigning, though not as vociferously. David Branch, a liberal Democrat, was appointed to replace Cerulli, and Emilio Serrano, a moderate Republican whom Frey had defeated by only three votes in the November election, was appointed to replace Roche.71 With the exception of DeHond, the board members kept their own counsel as they embarked on a series of informational meetings across the district. The stated purpose was to explain Goldberg’s reorganization to parents at different schools and answer their questions. As it happened, the meetings served to incubate the increasingly riotous opposition to what one parent called “Goldberg’s folly.” Many meetings in elementary schools drew more than five hundred attendees, and those in secondary schools topped a thousand in the audience.72

Assistant Superintendent George Rentsch, a major figure in the district’s desegregation efforts, gave a detailed account of one meeting in Charlotte that he said showed the pattern of dozens of others. “They wanted to question, to intimidate, and to threaten those of us who were making presentations,” he said. Many of the troublemakers, Rentsch alleged, were “part of a ‘flying squad’ of persons who would go from meeting to meeting . . . in an attempt to disrupt the meeting as thoroughly and effectively as possible.” As he left, two parents “threatened me with the fact that I would be ‘gotten’ if anything happened to their daughter.” He continued:

The pattern became predictable. Polite listening to some initial presentations; vociferous attacks on the premises on which the plan was based; and finally threats, cat calls, jeers, and other attempts to break up the meeting. At the end of these meetings, I would find that I was completely exhausted. My palms would be sweaty, my heart would be pounding. . . . Literally an irrational force, born of fear, was making them do something they did not necessarily wish to do.73

Major organizations supported and organized parents on both sides of the issue. More than two-thirds of Rochester teachers backed the plan, according to a February poll. Reecy Davis’s United Federation of Inner-City Parents remained involved, though to a lesser degree than in 1969. FIGHT and the Ibero-American Action League, the latter representing the growing Puerto Rican population, gave tentative support while also demanding compensatory programs at the schools that would remain majority non-white. Those three groups joined together under the moniker Coalition of Concern and walked a fine line, backing an integration plan of the traditional liberal model while also staking out a position on community control of schools in mostly Black neighborhoods. The president of Xerox, Joseph Wilson, was among the business leaders to support the plan, calling it “a bold plan [that] should be tried.” The countywide Teen-Agers’ League for Responsible Citizenship called for its implementation, particularly the elements regarding metropolitan solutions. “We are the coming generation,” a member wrote. “We do not want the problems inherent in a two-class society.”74

In the opposing camp, the Rochester Neighborhood School Associations Council (RNSAC) emerged almost overnight as a major citywide force. Its president, forty-three-year-old Eastridge High School math teacher James Sims, Jr., made a name for himself by organizing about a thousand children and parents to march to the district office and City Hall in opposition to the Goldberg plan. Wilbur Gerst, the first Black RTA president, called Sims “Rochester’s George Wallace.” Louis Cerulli, less than a month after leaving office, told a crowd of supporters that city schools were full of drugs and “dirty people with long hair,” and encouraged them to stand united in opposition to the Goldberg plan.75

Most observers believed the school board would pass a middle-ground measure, instituting greater busing but not to the extent that Goldberg proposed. Instead on February 25 it delivered the superintendent a shocking loss, defeating the plan 3–2 and instead approving the construction of two new junior high schools in the city. Frey and Branch, the two yes votes, accused the others of having bowed to explicit pressure from Republican leaders. Republicans conceded to having held a series of closed-door meeting with party bosses but insisted they were “exploratory and fact-finding in nature.”76

FIGURE 4.5. Parents demonstrating in favor of Herman Goldberg’s reorganization plan in early 1970. Photo by Jim Laragy, courtesy of the Democrat and Chronicle.

FIGURE 4.6. Parents protesting against Herman Goldberg’s reorganization plan in early 1970. Photo by Jim Laragy, courtesy of the Democrat and Chronicle.

The result, as a reporter summarized, “was like 1967 all over again. Now, as then, a sweeping desegregation proposal gave way to a much-diluted compromise.” The Black groups in the Coalition of Concern organized a boycott of the federally funded World of Inquiry school, which they saw as a symbol of the community’s half-hearted efforts. “Rochester can’t afford to be smug in thinking that quality integrated education comes with one school with 130 kids,” said Bernard Gifford, the president of FIGHT (World of Inquiry is discussed in chapter 6). The RTA went further, urging all teachers to attend an all-day emergency meeting at East High School on the Monday following the school board’s vote, and Goldberg responded by canceling all classes for the day. On Tuesday and Wednesday as well, many schools were closed as about twenty thousand students stayed home from school, several thousand of them picketing and marching. Mostly lost in the hubbub was the filing of another federal lawsuit alleging the school district’s failure to desegregate and requesting immediate intervention. It was filed as Colquhoun v. Board of Education, after the lead plaintiff, a parent named Lillian Colquhoun.77

Faced with such an uproar, Phillips, the board president and swing vote, wavered. On March 5, just eight days after defeating Goldberg’s plan in its entirety, the board changed course slightly and approved a watered-down version to take effect in a small subset of schools. The resolution also created “community school advisory councils,” a concession to the Coalition of Concern groups.78 “Something was salvaged, I see,” State Education Commissioner Ewald Nyquist wrote privately to Goldberg after the vote. “You have done heroic work. I wish the board would have matched your wisdom in full.” Locally, though, the compromise satisfied no one. “The [Goldberg] plan itself was a compromise,” Nancy Peck, the chairwoman of Goldberg’s advisory committee, complained: “You cannot continue to dilute compromises endlessly.” James Sims and RNSAC, meanwhile, were furious to see their victory overturned, even if only partially so. Sims called for yet another school boycott the following Monday. It was the third such disruption in five weeks, with about fifteen thousand students staying home. “I bet if I painted my face black you’d listen to me,” Sims shouted at a meeting. Another prominent busing opponent, Mary Nicolosi, charged the dais and school board member David Branch, yelling, “I’ll get you, Branch,” before being restrained.79

Another student boycott was planned for the opening of school in September. This time, in a twist, it was jointly endorsed by RNSAC’s Sims and the former FIGHT president Franklin Florence, who otherwise were diametrically opposed. In this case, as Sims put it: “Neither of us is being listened to by the board. We’re at different ends of the street, trying to be heard.”80 At the same time he was attempting to organize the first-day disruption, Sims was also running for a spot on the school board, which was having an off-year election to obtain elected representation for the seats to which Branch and Serrano had been appointed. Sims’s seemingly strong electoral base toppled in September when Nicolosi and other RNSAC officers resigned, complaining that Sims had been ineffectual in stopping attacks on neighborhood schools. That archconservative splinter group shortly reconstituted as the United Schools Association, with Louis Cerulli serving as president.81

On the other side of the November ballot was Wyoma Best, a twenty-seven-year-old Urban League organizer seeking to become the first Black woman elected to the board. She ran a moderate campaign, attempting to straddle the line between the portion of the Black community supporting community control and that supporting integration. Perhaps for that reason, she emerged as the second-highest vote-getter in the November election. In a surprise, she was topped only by Branch, her fellow liberal Democrat, who had been considered an underdog to Serrano. One year after the communitywide Republican sweep, Best and Branch, with Frey, had wrested back control of the school board. Branch immediately announced that the new Democratic majority would reconsider the Goldberg Plan decision.82

Democratic party leaders viewed the victory with little enthusiasm. As a reporter wrote: “As far as the Monroe County Democratic and Republican positions stand on the school desegregation issue, there is virtually no difference. Both parties are based in conservatism.” With a pro-desegregation majority in place at the end of 1970, both parties renewed the call for non-partisan school board elections. For party leaders “based in conservatism,” nonpartisan elections would have the virtue of removing their party labels from a school reorganization certain to infuriate much of the electorate. The state legislature in April 1971 passed legislation removing partisan labels and expanding the board from five members to seven, meaning that Best, Branch, and DeHond would need to run for new terms in November 1971, along with candidates running for the two newly created seats.83

Knowing its reign might be short, the new Democratic majority wasted no time. At the February 4, 1971, board meeting, Best, Branch, and Frey did something that never had happened before in Rochester—they introduced and passed a resolution implementing a districtwide reorganization, including compulsory busing of white students. It was essentially half of the Goldberg plan, involving secondary but not elementary students. Dorothy Phillips, the Republican board president, joined them in a 4–1 vote. As the outcome became clear, hundreds of white students at the five-hour-long board meeting rushed to the front of the auditorium, chanting, “Hell, no, we won’t go,” forcing police to escort the board members out of the room.84

There were some notable absences from Rochester liberals’ subsequent celebration. Goldberg in late November 1970 had announced that he was leaving the district for a high-level post in the US Department of Health, Education, and Welfare’s Office of Education. “I have heard the past eight years described as boiling and boisterous,” he said in his farewell message. “I think of them rather as years that mattered; years with a message; mission years.” He was replaced, first on an interim basis and then permanently, by John Franco, a Rochester native and the director of the district’s compensatory programs for mostly minority students under the name Project Beacon.85

Also missing from the cheering were Reecy Davis, Bernard Gifford, and other key members of the Black and Puerto Rican constituency that had spent years pushing for just such a desegregation plan. The day before the board voted to enact part of the Goldberg plan, the Coalition of Concern groups announced that they no longer supported it, but instead wanted the district to further empower the community school councils that the board had created the previous year. The councils represented a turn away from the goal of desegregation and instead provided a means for the Black community to influence and support mostly Black schools. “This game of musical chairs that the board plays each year of chasing kids from one school to another has got to end,” Gifford said. “We’re not looking to build a separate black world for our children. All we’re saying is that we’re sick and tired of black children being used as pawns.” Wyoma Best, who had helped conceive of the community school councils while working for the Urban League, became the primary lightning rod for Black critics in particular.86

Pushback to the secondary reorganization took a now familiar form. Hundreds of students stayed home from school and organized marches to district headquarters in the biting cold. Student leaders were suspended for organizing the boycott—but, as one of them noted: “They can’t suspend 10,000 kids.” The protests intensified in March after the Democrats on the school board approved Goldberg’s elementary reorganization as well, to be phased in over several years. Increasingly the white anti-reorganization children and parents adopted the rhetoric of the civil rights protests of the previous decade. One white mother wrote about teenagers protesting against desegregation: “Daily they march. They shout, sing and freeze while doors slam in their faces. . . . Others in this nation probably laugh at their hair, beards, clothes, music and protests. I do not, for behind it all is a driving spirit that should be an inspiration to those who sit cozy and nonchalant at home while the political machine grinds them into dust and makes fools out of them daily.”87 More than two thousand people paid fifty cents admission each to an antibusing rally at the Rochester Community War Memorial arena in April, where Cerulli was the featured speaker. “I don’t like to tell children to be violent . . . but I do believe in being militant,” he said to a standing ovation. That same day, someone spray-painted “n—— eats shit and blows” in three-foot high letters on the front of Charlotte High School.88

Branch, Best, and Frey resisted the public outcry but were potentially vulnerable on another front. The reorganization depended on a $450,000 bond for building renovations. Because the district remained fiscally dependent on the city, the Republican-controlled city council had to give final approval on the borrowing request—and Michael Roche, the former school board member, quickly announced his determination not to do so. Only a last-minute defection from maverick Republican Robert Wood saved the bond issue. Although the council lacked line-item veto power of the schools budget, it also trimmed the overall school district budget request by $867,393, the exact amount projected for additional transportation under the reorganization. The Republican council members justified their action by citing a recent advisory report that had criticized the district for overspending and underperforming. The situation was further complicated by a similar political dynamic in Albany, where the legislature cut all desegregation funding from the state budget. Undaunted, the school board made cuts elsewhere in its spending plan to keep the reorganization intact.89

Until the beginning of the 1960s, Rochester’s white leaders had mostly succeeded in ignoring the increasing segregation in the city’s neighborhoods and schools. Again and again during the following decade, RCSD put forth proposals—some modest, some momentous—to reduce racial imbalance. They were occasioned by legal action, the threat of legal action, and the combined voices of the thousands of parents who spoke their mind at school board meetings and in the voting booth. Still, the problem grew worse. The thousands of Black children arriving in Rochester from Florida and South Carolina were funneled with uncanny precision into schools that were already filled to bursting with children who looked like them. In some cases, instances of desegregation yielded hopeful experiences of understanding across cultural and racial boundaries. In more cases, though, lines of demarcation were sharpened, not blurred, and ignorance and distrust allowed to fester.

Rochester figured prominently in a 1969 publication from the US Department of Health, Education, and Welfare with a title that surely set off alarm bells among those familiar with the fight for integration in Monroe County: “How Five School Systems Desegregated.” The pamphlet listed Rochester as a community that “attest[ed] to the fact that desegregation can be accomplished, and that it can be accompanied by an increase in the quality of education available to all children, whatever their racial, cultural or economic backgrounds.” It described with admiration the RCSD open enrollment and reverse open enrollment processes along with the various programs under the aegis of Project UNIQUE. “Rochester still has a long way to go before racial imbalance is totally corrected in its city schools,” the researchers conceded. “[But the initial] effect on the whole metropolitan area is pronounced and growing.”90

By then President Richard Nixon had made clear his opposition to ambitious desegregation programs, and federal education officials may have been eager to declare victory and move on. The political needle had moved right in Albany as well, but Education Commissioner James Allen’s successor, Ewald Nyquist, maintained his policy in favor of dismantling segregated school systems. “‘Busing’ and ‘neighborhood school’ are emotional slogans, and I deplore the president’s [position],” Nyquist told a conference of educators. A report he subsequently commissioned on Rochester and other cities belied the rosy picture in the federal pamphlet: “At present, it appears that our beginning [desegregation] efforts have been outrun by continued growth in the seriousness of the problem.” The difference between the federal and state perspectives, issued just a few months apart, served to illustrate the yawning divide between a promising beginning and actual progress on the intractable problem.91

A Rochester reporter summarized the situation at the turn of the decade: “The old guard white liberals are frustrated, the city school officials are on the defensive, and the blacks are angry.”92 None of those groups, nor the white parents in determined opposition to integration, were soon to be placated. Goldberg’s final, late-arriving proposal proved to be the foundation for a furious year of confrontation.