Brook School was a grammar school located in Hillburn, New York, in the Ramapo Central School District, which served the district's black students until its racial integration in the 1940s.
Description The school was an all-black school, which parents fought to desegregate in the early 1930s and again in 1943.Ramapo Independent, Sept. 9 1943Theodore Laymon "Parents Fined At Hillburn in School Strike: Sentence Will Be Suspended if the Protest Is Ended; Negro Adults to Appeal" New York Herald Tribune, Sept. 30, 1943 "Race Segregation Charged at Hillburn; Strike of Negroes Closes Two Schools" The New York Times, Sept. 10, 1943."Hillburn's Glory and Shame", The Crisis Nov. 1943, v.50, no. 11, pp. 327, 344 Thurgood Marshall was hired by the NAACP to desegregate the school. Thurgood Marshall won a disparity case regarding integration of the schools of Hillburn, 11 years before his landmark case of Brown v. Board of Education, on behalf of the village's African-American parents. Leonard M. Alexander and Peter C. Alexander, "It Takes a Village: The Integration of the Hillburn School System. Page Publishing, 2014 ().
Black children who lived in Ramapo attended the Brook School in Hillburn, a wood structure that didn't include a gymnasium, library, or indoor bathrooms. Meanwhile, the Main School – attended by white children and now the headquarters of the Ramapo Central School District – included a gymnasium, a library, and indoor plumbing.Thomas Sugrue "Hillburn, Hattiesburg, and Hitler" p.87-102 in Kruse, Kevin Michael, and Stephen G. N. Tuck. Fog of War: The Second World War and the Civil Rights Movement. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.chapter, in Google books"Hillburn's protestors—and those they inspired throughout the North-—would accelerate a grassroots movement for quality education, one that would eventually reshape Northern and Southern PoliticsThomas J. Sugrue "God have Pity on Such a City", in his Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North Random House, 2009 chapter in G Books
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