May 13, 1964, 8 PM, Teaneck High School Auditorium, Meeting of the Teaneck Board of Education;
The nine trustees of the Board and School Superintendent Harvey Scribner seated at a long table on the high school stage;
1400 Teaneck residents, most of them white and most of them angry, crammed into the auditorium.
Vice-President Theodore Ley: I move that Teaneck establish Bryant School as a Central 6th Grade, and institute busing to implement that plan.
President Bernard Confer: I second the motion.
Call the vote:
Dr. Bell -- “Yes”
Mrs. Hendricksen – “Yes
Mr. Herr – “Yes”
Mr. Jones – “Yes”
Mr. Larsen – “Yes”
Mr. Margolis – “No”
Mr. Warner – “No”
Vice President Ley – “Yes”
President Confer – “Yes”
By a vote of 7 to 2, the motion to establish Bryant School as a central 6th grade and institute busing to achieve racial equity in the Teaneck Public Schools is passed.
The 1400 residents packing the high school auditorium, most opposed to busing and led by the Neighborhood Schools Association, charged the stage in rage. The Teaneck Police, prepared for that reaction hustled the Board Trustees out a back door and accompanied each home. At home, each was embraced by family members who had been asked by Teaneck Police to stay home that evening: They feared they could not protect all trustees and family members seated in the audience from the angry mob.
The brave 7, along with School Superintendent Harvey Scribner, were called “Heroes” by Reginald Dammerell in his book Triumph in a White Suburb, and recognized similarly by Whitney Young, head of the National Urban League, in his book review in the New York Times.
Those 7 were composed of 6 Whites, 1 Black; 6 men, 1 woman, 4 Christians, and 3 Jews.
Let’s roll back 11 years to look at how the hard work and emotional effort to achieve this noteworthy vote started. On an evening in 1953, two young Jewish couples, all in their 30’s, met in a living room on Kensington Road. June and Morton (Mort) Handler, and Clarice and Theodore (Teddy) Ley were raised in modest circumstances in the New York City boroughs of Manhattan and The Bronx, grandchildren, and children of immigrants of the sewing machines and tenements of the Lower Eastside.
They were raised believing in the power of individuals to effect change, in “tikkun olam” which is Hebrew for “repair the world,” and most of all, in the education provided by the public schools to lift the daughters and sons of immigrants and first generation to the noble position where they were equipped to support a family, practice tikkun olam, and in some small way change the world for the better,
Noteworthy in 1953, the groundwork was being laid for the successful 1954 decision of Brown v. Board of Education. Brown v. Board of Education was a landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that U.S. state laws establishing racial segregation in public schools are unconstitutional, even if the segregated schools are otherwise equal in quality.
Teaneck, as well as attracting young Jewish families after the war, was also attracting young Black families, mostly from the same boroughs of New York City. Most of the Black families moved into the Northeast section of Teaneck (engineered by many Teaneck real estate brokers). The result was that the public schools of the Northeast - Bryant and Washington Irving – were becoming primarily Black.
The two young couples, the Handlers and Leys, aware of the pending Brown v. Board of Education and the de facto segregation developing in the Teaneck Public Schools – and driven by their upbringings and beliefs – decided to do something about it. In that Kensington Road living room was born The Teaneck League for Better Schools, incorporated with the help of township attorney Jacob (Jack) Schneider. The League for Better Schools stood in opposition to the well-established Teaneck Taxpayers Association. The League was formed not only to deal with racial integration but, also, to encourage the building of more schools and to increase the public school budgets to handle the post-war baby boomers (ideas vehemently opposed by the TTA).
A side note on June Handler. June achieved a doctorate in Early Childhood Education from the Bank Street School. She noticed that in the Crayola crayon boxes was a pale pinkish colored crayon called “Flesh.” June contacted the CEO of Crayola explaining that “flesh” comes in many colors and pointed out the harm being done by Crayola’s teaching children and their parents that flesh was light pink. Quite amazingly, the CEO contacted June and, subsequently, the pale pink crayon was renamed Peach. The Handler family was invited to Crayola’s headquarters where they were presented with boxes of Peach crayons as tokens of recognition and appreciation.
Also in 1953, the rapidly growing Teaneck League for Better Schools supported Teddy Ley for Board of Education Trustee. His campaign was successful – he actually came in first – and the movement for racial integration in the Teaneck elementary schools finally had a voice in the public arena.
Two junior high schools (now middle schools) were built – Benjamin Franklin started in 1954 and Thomas Jefferson in 1957. When it came to naming the two schools, there was a debate: should they be named for poets like the Teaneck Public Elementary Schools or for statesmen. (It took until 2020 for Teaneck to name a public school for a woman, Theodora Smiley Lacey, a lifelong hero of the civil rights movement). In the 50’s it was decided to name the new junior high school for statesmen Benjamin Franklin (BF) and Thomas Jefferson (TJ).
It is noteworthy that in the late 1990s/early 2000s Michelle March, former wife of legendary THS basketball coach Curtis March raised questions about a public school (Thomas Jefferson) being named for a slaveholder, and suggested it be renamed the “Sally Hemmings School” honoring the woman who was enslaved by Thomas Jefferson and bore him several children. No action was then or subsequently taken.
Now in 2024, the issue has re-emerged: How can Teaneck, New Jersey, a model of civil rights in public schools, continue to honor a slaveholder in the name of one of its public schools? Should Teaneck celebrate the 60th anniversary of public school desegregation by renaming the Thomas Jefferson Middle School?
As well, in 1956, an 8th public elementary school was constructed, named for another poet, Eugene Field. Eugene Field became the Theodora Smiley Lacey School in 2020.
While the development of the physical structure of Teaneck Public Schools was expanding, de facto segregation of the elementary schools was also growing as Teaneck continued to attract educated, successful Blacks and Whites of all religions, from New York City and other nearby urban areas like Newark, Paterson, and Jersey City. Hispanics, Muslims, and Asians were not yet (in the late ’50s and ‘60s) represented in significant numbers in Teaneck and its schools.
By 1959, things were aligned to move into the final steps of school desegregation. The Board of Education had trustees who either favored finding a way to desegregate the public elementary schools or were willing to step aside for pro-integration candidates. The trustees at that time were Frank Burr, Anthony DeGennaro, Theresa Dayharsh, Ruth Hendriksen, Everett Hines, George Larson, Theodore Ley, Orville Sather, and Dr. Harold Weinberger, seven of whom had children in the public school system and thus were working directly for the future of their children and their children’s generation. The Superintendent of Schools was Dr. Theos Anderson. The Teaneck League for Better Schools had grown and was joined by a second group of Citizens, led by Ruth Glick, supporting desegregation and increased funding to schools.
And then came 1961, the year of three momentous events in Teaneck’s progress toward desegregation:
- Dr. Harvey Scribner was hired after Dr. Anderson retired,
- Lamar Jones became the first Black elected Trustee on the Board of Education,
- Theodora and Archie Lacey, a dynamic, activist Black couple moved to Teaneck with their children.
Harvey Scribner had been the chief school administrator in Dedham, Massachusetts. While he had never overseen a school district integration/desegregation, his initial interview with BOE Trustee Ley in his Dedham office, was an enthusiastic meeting of the minds that resulted in the Board’s hiring Dr. Scribner to lead them and the township in the first voluntary desegregation of public schools in the United States.
With Lamar Jones elected to the Board and the Laceys who had been raised on civil rights activism, the movement that had been building since 1953 and led by Whites came into full bloom! The Board of Education meeting room across the hall from the THS principal’s office and the family room of the Lacey home crackled with the energy of the about-to-be-realized dream. The plan was to establish Bryant School, which was serving primarily Black students, as a central 6th grade, with 6th graders from all over town bused to Bryant, and 1st through 5th grade students from the Bryant district bused to the other Teaneck elementary schools.
There was significant opposition to the busing plan, particularly from a newly formed organization, the Neighborhood Schools Association. This group insisted that elementary children needed to be able to walk home for a hot lunch, for which the cry of “My child needs a lamb chop and baked potato for lunch” became symbolic. Despite many obstacles, the 11 years of perseverance and hard work came to fruition.
On May 13, 1964, 60 years ago, the dream became reality. Bell, Confer, Hendricksen, Herr, Jones, Larson, Ley: YES!
Dr. Scribner and the heroic seven went home to bricks thrown through their windows and death threats – but when the buses rolled up to the Teaneck elementary school doors in September 1965 (as has been reported elsewhere), Dr. Scribner called Board President Confer and, almost weeping, reported, “The buses are in; the kids are okay.”
Postscript: While hailed as a success, which it was, the burden of the initial plan for desegregation fell heavily on the Black elementary students and their parents. Here is an excerpt from a Teaneck Voices interview with Allison Davis, a township leader in Teaneck. Allison, a journalist and television news producer, was part of NBC’s start-up team for MSNBC – the cable and internet brainchild news service of NBC and Microsoft -- who wanted to figure out ways to use technology to better tell stories. She was one of the 6th graders who participated in the desegregation dream:
Allison was going into 6th grade when Bryant became a central 6th grade in 1965. She remembers the town and the national media celebrating the 6th graders who were bused from all parts of town to Bryant as “heroes”
Allison says, “We sixth graders were not the heroes. The heroes were the little kids from Bryant [grades] 1-5 who got on one of 7 buses and were driven away to parts of town where they were not allowed to live and which their families didn’t know.” The heroes included the mothers, many of whom, like her mother, didn’t drive and didn’t know where their small children were going. Allison’s younger brother was bused to Lowell School. His friend next door was bused to Longfellow.
As Allison says, “Initially, as far as my mother knew, he could have been taken to Alabama!” If the school nurse called home because her brother was sick or injured, her mother didn’t know where to go and had no way to get there even if she had known. “So,” she says, “the burden still fell on the Black Community. These were the heroes – young kids put on buses and taken to places where their parents couldn’t get to them. That “successful” experiment was the beginning of racial integration but was nothing compared to the trauma experienced by many of the young Bryant School kids bused far from their homes.
But Teaneck being Teaneck, the leadership and residents accepted and addressed these unexpected consequences of achieving desegregation by establishing both a central kindergarten and 6th grade at Bryant and Washington Irving elementary schools, and 1st through 5th grades at the other Teaneck elementary school. The result was that almost every elementary school child in Teaneck was bused, and the burden of successful civil rights change was more equitably distributed.
Nonetheless, it remains importantly noteworthy that too often the greatest burden of social change is borne by the ostensible beneficiaries of that change.
Perhaps the greatest impact of this successful experiment in social justice is that it shaped the culture of Teaneck for the next several decades. The fact that ordinary people could intelligently and, mostly, peacefully effect great social change in matters that were wreaking havoc across our nation attracted like-minded people to Teaneck. In 1964 and beyond, social activists like now-retired Senator Loretta Weinberg and her husband Irwin and their young children moved to Teaneck to become part of shaping the future. As well, it changed the image of Black communities.
Again, the words of Allison Davis from her Teaneck Voices interview:
Allison and her husband, Robert Wright, moved back to Teaneck in 1980. They chose Northeast Teaneck because they wanted to live in a stable Black neighborhood. In Silver Spring, [where she had gone to school] hers was the only Black family in the neighborhood. Allison wanted her children to know that they could move into a Black neighborhood and that it could be a great place to grow up.
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