"School Colors": The Struggle for Equality in New York City's Schools Runs Deep
New York City's public schools have been grappling with issues of race and class for as long as they've existed.
The new eight-part podcast "School Colors" — produced by Brooklyn Deep's Mark Winston Griffith and Max Freedman — traces that history in Community School District 16 in central Brooklyn. Today, schools there are seriously under-enrolled. But decades ago, they were so overcrowded that black students had to go to school in shifts.
In the first episode, former student Monifa Edwards talks about being bused from central Brooklyn to a largely white neighborhood in the southern part of the borough as a little girl. She recalled being on the bus with her other black classmates one afternoon and waiting for the driver, when a crowd of angry white mothers surrounded the vehicle and shouted racial slurs. She said one woman yelled so loudly she could see her tonsils.
"They surrounded the bus, and then the bus was being shaken back and forth to the point when we truly felt he bus could be tipped over," Edwards says in the podcast.
Griffith said that deep-seated racism has continued to shape District 16's present-day struggles — and black families' fight for self-determination.
"This is a school district and a school and people who are fighting for their survival and so much of it can be traced to how people were treated when we tried to integrate and the violence that they received," Griffith said.
Listen to their conversation with "All Things Considered" host Jami Floyd.
