After hearing too many "vague promises" from the New York City Board of Education to integrate the schools, civil rights activists in 1964 called for swift action: desegregate the city's schools and improve the inferior conditions of many that enrolled black and Latino students.
To force the issue, they staged a one-day school boycott on Feb. 3, when approximately 460,000 students refused to go to school.
Even adjusting for the typical absentee rate at the time, the school boycott was the largest civil rights protest in U.S. history. It didn't happen in the South; it happened in New York City, where the mostly white elected officials and Board of Education members said they believed in integrated education.
Yet, little came of the boycott, and the activists' demands resonate still.
A 2014 UCLA study found that New York City has some of the most segregated schools in the country, with high concentrations of black and Latino students isolated in their neighborhood schools. Researchers from The New School have more recently shed light on how schools can remain segregated, even as neighborhoods diversify.
Changing demographics have forced families and education officials to confront antiquated zoning practices that assign students based on their home address. Small-bore changes have come on an as-needed basis, as in the case of a Brooklyn school rezoning. City leaders have not committed to reviewing or changing school zone lines or admission rules on a citywide level. Instead, they argue, school-based pilot programs and the current mayor's affordable housing plans will help integrate many schools in the massive system.
These present-day issues are stark reminders that New York never adequately addressed segregation, said Matt Delmont, author of the forthcoming book "Why Busing Failed."
"We want to celebrate civil rights as something that was resolved and battles that were won in the 1960s," said Delmont, an associate professor of history at Arizona State University.
In the South, very distinct battles were won, he said. But northern cities largely stagnated.
"We never resolved the problems that were going on in the 1950s and 1960s in the North, and we're still dealing with those repercussions today."
The 1964 Boycott
The boycott came during a time of inspired protest, six months after the March on Washington.
Bayard Rustin, who organized the March on Washington, helped direct the New York City boycott. But its lead planner was Milton Galamison, a civil rights activist and pastor of Siloam Presbyterian Church in Bedford-Stuyvesant, who had been pushing for years for more integrated schools in New York.