New York

Cisco

vs

Board

Elizabeth and Samuel Cisco lived in the city of Jamaica, New York. They refused to allow their son to go to the local public school for Black students because they believed it was inferior to local white schools. When they attempted to enroll their son in an all-white school, he was denied because he was Black. During a five-year legal battle, Samuel Cisco was arrested two times for protesting the segregation of schools. Sadly in 1897, Samuel passed away. Elizabeth continued fighting and filed a lawsuit against the school board of the borough of Queens. The courts questioned whether the school board was authorized to maintain separate schools for Black and white children within the borough. They concluded that separate schools for Black children were constitutional if they provided facilities equal to those for whites. Cisco lost the case, but she took a sympathetic judge’s advice to focus her efforts on changing the existing laws. She worked with like-minded activists to draft a bill that would desegregate most of New York’s public schools. These efforts caught the attention of the governor at the time, Theodore Roosevelt. With his support, the bill was approved by the legislature. Roosevelt signed it into law. While the bill and law did not eliminate the power for rural regions to maintain separate schools, it did prohibit segregated schools throughout all urban areas in the state of New York. This was a major victory. The New York Secretary of State honored Elizabeth Cisco as the person “to whom the most credit is due.”

Further Reading

Monograph

Page 54. Breifly summarizes the case but gives enough to understand well

Opinion

The question of this case is whether the schoolboard in the bourough of Queens in New York is allowed to have separate schools for children of color and also keep them excluded from other schools. The

considers People v. King and considers its establishment of separate schools. It was held that this did not deprive African American children from equal enjoyment of any accommodation, advantage, facility or privilege accorded to them by law, and that they in no way discriminated against colored children

Newspaper Photograph/Scan

Photograph/copy of the ORIGINAL newspaper when Samuel Cisco was arrested for not sending his children to the school for Black students, talks a lot about racial tensions gives the amazing quote from cisco "The war has been carried into Africa and we now propose to carry it in Caucasia."

Article

Page 228. Explains the case and takes important quotes from it and the King case.