NOTE ON SOURCES

Because of this book’s broad scope in both time and subject matter, my research required the use of a wide variety of archival sources. Locating these documents and fitting them into my understanding of the topic was both a struggle and a joy. Here are some of the key sources and repositories I relied on.

The Rochester Public Library’s Local History and Genealogy Division has a thoroughly categorized mountain of newspaper clippings for most of the twentieth century as well as a nearly complete microfilm record of all major and minor newspapers printed in the city since its founding. It also holds original copies of many Rochester City School District documents dating to the nineteenth century. The library hosts the invaluable Phillis Wheatley Public Library Oral History Collection, containing dozens of recorded interviews with Black community leaders in the late 1970s and early 1980s. These are online at http://www.rochestervoices.org/collections/african-american-oral-histories/.

The University of Rochester’s Rare Books and Special Collections division at Rush Rhees Library (RBSCP) contains several collections that are indispensable to those researching the racial dynamics in Monroe County after 1950. The Walter Cooper Papers cover important parts of the early Civil Rights era, while the Franklin Florence Papers pick up mostly after the uprising in July 1964. The Joseph C. Wilson, Ruth Scott, Harry Gove, and Urban-Suburban Summer School Program, Brighton, NY, papers were also useful. The University of Rochester hosts the Rochester Black Freedom Struggle Oral History Project, a collection of interview recordings made by the historian Laura Warren Hill for her book Strike the Hammer. The recordings and transcripts are available online at https://rbscp.lib.rochester.edu/4489.

The Rochester Museum and Science Center (RMSC) is home to the Howard C. Coles Collection, the voluminous and wide-ranging files of the pioneering journalist, including his unpublished manuscript “Nomads from the South.” Coles created an important statistical record regarding housing conditions for Black people in Rochester throughout the twentieth century. RMSC also holds several important collections relating to the growth of the Puerto Rican community in Rochester. The largest of them is the Sue Costa Collection of Hispanic/Latino Papers, while the most useful single document for my purposes was Nydia Padilla’s 1985 master’s thesis, “Puerto Rican Contributions to the Greater Rochester Area.”

Other local libraries and repositories that I consulted include the Rochester Municipal Archives; the Rose Archives at SUNY Brockport; the Project UNIQUE Papers at Nazareth College; and the Big Springs Historical Society in Caledonia, New York. At the New York State Archives in Albany I reviewed the personal papers of Education Commissioners James E. Allen and Ewald Nyquist as well as both men’s official Commissioner’s Files. These collections yielded several interesting documents not intended for local consumption, most significantly the 1970 letter from Herman Goldberg to Nyquist discussing the possibility of a school operated jointly by Rochester and Brighton. The Jerome and Ruth Balter Papers at Swarthmore College in Philadelphia gave fascinating behind-the-scenes perspective on the local desegregation movement in the early 1960s.

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Papers at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC, were an extremely fruitful resource. They contain previously unreported information regarding race relations in the early twentieth century and the full case file of Aikens v. Board of Education, including a fragmentary copy of the Steepee study that was believed to have been lost. Elsewhere at the Library of Congress, the draft Simulmatics study in the Daniel P. Moynihan Papers gives a strikingly frank view of physical and social segregation in Rochester after 1964. I also found valuable information in the papers of the National Urban League.

This book relies as well on a great deal of secondary literature, both about Rochester and about other places in the country. The story of the nineteenth-century push for desegregation in Rochester schools is told well by Judith Polgar Ruchkin in “The Abolition of Colored Schools in Rochester, New York, 1832–1856,” New York History 51, no. 4 (July 1970), 377–93. Blake McKelvey’s The Water-Power City is a valuable overview of the first few decades of Rochester’s history, while Milton Sernett’s North Star Country describes abolitionism and nineteenth-century civil rights activities in upstate New York in general. Carleton Mabee’s Black Education in New York gives the context of other New York school districts’ struggles regarding desegregation and access to education for Black children. David Blight’s biography of Frederick Douglass is the best and most comprehensive—together, of course, with Douglass’s own memoirs.

The peerless history of the national Great Migration is Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration. Two massive government publications provide important data about Rochester’s Black community before the Civil Rights era: the Second Report of the New York State Temporary Commission on the Condition of the Colored Urban Population, from 1938; and Negroes in Five New York Cities: A Study of Problems, Achievements and Trends, a 1958 publication of the New York State Commission against Discrimination Division of Research. Blake McKelvey’s “Lights and Shadows in Local Negro History,” Rochester History 21, no. 3 (October 1959), 1–27, is a general overview of Black history in this and other periods. Joyce Woelfe Lehmann, ed., Migrant Farmworkers of Wayne County, New York: A Collection of Oral Histories from the Back Roads collects interviews with some of the many men and women who picked apples and cherries in Wayne County. There are many journalistic exposés regarding working conditions for migrant workers; one of the best is Dale Wright’s book They Harvest Despair. Laura Root’s 1951 master’s thesis, “An Analysis of Social Distance between the Two Negro Communities of Rochester, New York,” provides a fascinating insight into the social dynamics of the Third and Seventh Wards before the Great Migration began in earnest. It is available for review in person at the University of Rochester Rare Books and Special Collections division. A good national overview of housing discrimination is Richard Rothstein’s 2017 book The Color of Law. Patricia Sullivan’s book Lift Every Voice illustrates the rise of the NAACP. Richard Kluger’s Simple Justice is an excellent overview of Brown v. Board of Education, while Brown v. Board of Education: A Civil Rights Milestone and Its Troubled Legacy, by James Patterson, explores its aftermath.

As its title implies, The Remaking of a City: Rochester, New York, 1964–1984, by Gannett journalists Lou Buttino and Mark Hare, is an overview of the turbulent two decades after the 1964 uprising; it includes a chapter on education. The US Commission on Civil Rights held a hearing in Rochester in September 1966 that gathered firsthand testimony from several important figures in the school district. Benjamin Richardson’s doctoral dissertation on RCSD reorganization was the single most important secondary source for this book, combining interviews and qualitative analysis to give an uncommonly clear narrative of those complicated years. Ralph W. Barber, too, wrote a valuable dissertation in 1968, “The Effects of Open Enrollment on Anti-Negro and Anti-White Prejudices among Junior High School Students in Rochester, New York.” On the national level, Matthew Delmont’s book Why Busing Failed provides needed framing around the political implications of the word “busing.” Trial and Error, by Eleanor Wolf, is the best single analysis of the Milliken v. Bradley case.

A useful source for the early history of Urban-Suburban is Lawrence Heinrich, “A Descriptive Study of a Cooperative Urban-Suburban Pupil Transfer Program,” a 1968 dissertation; so is the program office’s own historical review, written on the occasion of its fiftieth anniversary. Kara Finnigan of the University of Rochester has analyzed the later years of the program with great insight, most notably in her 2009 presentation with Tricia Stewart, “Interdistrict Choice as a Policy Solution: Examining Rochester’s Urban-Suburban Interdistrict Transfer Program.”

Those looking for more detail on the evolution of school funding in New York should see the book Politicians, Judges, and City Schools, by Joel S. Berke, Margaret E. Goertz, and Richard J. Coley. Denise Gelberg’s book The “Business” of Reforming American Schools is a review of the first fifteen years of the accountability era and includes a chapter on Rochester. Julia Koppich’s 1992 paper “The Rocky Road to Reform in Rochester” is a comprehensive look at the 1987 teachers’ contract.

Gary Orfield has been the most prolific and influential writer on school segregation for more than forty years; one particularly valuable book is Dismantling Desegregation. Rucker Johnson makes a case for school integration with a novel data set in Children of the Dream: Why School Integration Works. Arguing the opposing case is Derrick Bell in Silent Covenants.