Geographies and Infrastructures of School Segregation: a Historical Case Study of Rochester, NY

Geographies and Infrastructures of School Segregation: A Historical Case Study of Rochester, NY

Symon A. James-Wilson

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts Graduate Department of Geography and Planning University of Toronto

Geographies and Infrastructures of School Segregation: A Historical Case Study of Rochester, NY

Symon A. James-Wilson

Master of Arts

Department of Geography and Planning University of Toronto

2020

Abstract

School segregation in the United States is at a crisis point. The educational landscape in

Rochester, NY has become increasingly segregated along the lines of race, class, and geography in recent decades. This thesis investigates the geographies and infrastructures that laid the foundation for Rochester’s school segregation crisis. In particular, it asks how settler colonialism and racial capitalism have sculpted urban and suburban communities’ socio- spatial histories. This research aims to support academics, policymakers, and activists who are committed to developing more historically informed school desegregation policies, and to actualizing “equal educational opportunities for all.”

TABLE OF CONTENTS

i. LIST OF COMMONLY USED ABBREVIATIONS………………………………….v ii. LIST OF MAPS AND TABLES……………………...... v 1. PREFACE…………………………………...... 1 1.1. The Front Seat…………………………...... 1 1.2. A Curious Cartographer……………………………………………………….…….2 1.3. Im/mobility is Alert and Alive……………...... 4 1.4. Space Matters………………………………………………………………….…….7 2. INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………………………8 3. METHODS……………………………………………………………………………..12 3.1. Research Objectives………………………………………………………………..12 3.2. Rationale for an Archival Approach……………...... 13 3.3. Conceptual Implications of the Archival Approach……………………………..…14 3.4. Research Design……………………………………………………………………17 3.5. Data Collection……………………………………………………………………..18 3.6. Data Analysis……………………………………………………………………….19 4. LITERATURE REVIEW…………………………………………………………..…22 4.1. The Geographies of Education Subfield……………………………………………22 4.2. Existing Geographic Research on School Segregation…………………………….25 4.3. Current Gaps in the Geographies of School Segregation Literature……………….28 5. THE MAKING OF ROCHESTER’S SEGREGATED LANDSCAPE…………….31 5.1. Geographies and Infrastructures of Settler Colonialism: Remembered and Forgotten……………………………………………………………………………32 5.2. Racial Capitalism and the Racialization of Poverty………………………………..40 5.3. Racial Capitalism, Redlining, and Housing Discrimination……………………….47 5.4. The Birth and Rebirth of School Segregation……………………………………...56 6. SPATIAL COLLAGE AND SCHOOL DESEGREGATION………………………70 6.1. Introduction to Spatial Collage……………………………………………………..70 6.2. The Six Components of Spatial Collage…………………………………………...72 6.3. Spatial Collage and the School Segregation Crisis in Rochester, NY……………..75 6.4. Spatial Collage and Project UNIQUE……………………………………………...77 7. RESEARCH IMPLICATIONS……………………………………………………….95 7.1. Project UNIQUE as Evidence of Best Practice in School Desegregation Policy……………………………………………………………………………… 95 7.2. Additional Lessons from the School Segregation Crisis in Rochester, NY……….96

iii

8. CONCLUSION………………………………………………………………………98 9. REFERENCES……………………………………………………………………….101 10. APPENDICES……………………………………………………………………...... 113 10.1. Appendix One: Detailed Record of Archival Data Sources……………………..113 10.2. Appendix Two: Maps……………………………………………………………115 10.3. Appendix Three: Images…………………………………………………………126 10.4. Appendix Four: Project UNIQUE Mission Statement…………………………..127

LIST OF COMMONLY USED ABBREVIATIONS

D&C Democrat & Chronicle GRA Greater Rochester Area HOLC Home Owners’ Loan Corporation I-490, I-390, I-590 These are abbreviations for various interstate highways in Rochester, NY NYS New York State Project UNIQUE Project United Now for Integrated Quality Urban-Suburban Education RCSD Rochester City School District RMAPI Rochester-Monroe Anti-Poverty Initiative Urban-Suburban Urban-Suburban Interdistrict Transfer Program or USITP

LIST OF MAPS AND TABLES

Map One Monroe County (https://www.mapsofworld.com/usa/states/new- york/new-york-maps/monroe-county-map.jpg)

Map Two Upstate Western, NY (http://www.visitrochester.com/about- roc/transportation/maps/)

Map Three U.S. Rust Belt (https://futureofutica.wordpress.com/tag/rust-belt/)

Map Four Ward Map of (https://fineartamerica.com/featured/vintage-map-of- Rochester, NY rochester-ny-1901-cartographyassociates.html) Map Five Map of the Third Ward, (https://fineartamerica.com/featured/vintage-map-of- Rochester, NY rochester-ny-1901-cartographyassociates.html) Map Six Map of the Seventh (https://fineartamerica.com/featured/vintage-map-of- Ward, Rochester, NY rochester-ny-1901-cartographyassociates.html) Map Seven HOLC Appraisal of (Nelson et al, 2016) Rochester, NY Map Eight HOLC Appraisal of (Nelson et al., 2016) Rochester, NY— Zones D1, D2, D5, D6, and C24 Map Nine Map of the Sixteenth (https://fineartamerica.com/featured/vintage-map-of- Ward, Rochester, NY rochester-ny-1901-cartographyassociates.html) Map Ten Map of the Fifth, (https://fineartamerica.com/featured/vintage-map-of- Seventh, and Eighth rochester-ny-1901-cartographyassociates.html) Wards, Rochester, NY Map Eleven Map of the Second and (https://fineartamerica.com/featured/vintage-map-of- Ninth Wards, rochester-ny-1901-cartographyassociates.html) Rochester, NY

Map Twelve Map of the I-490 (https://www.interstate-guide.com/i-390-ny/) expressway Table One Children Living Below (ACT Rochester, n.d.; U.S. Census Bureau’s American the Federal Poverty Community Survey, 2018) Line in Rochester, NY by Race/Ethnicity, 2014-2018 Table Two Public School (Kuscera & Orfield, 2014; US Department of Education, Enrollment by Race in National Center for Education Statistics, Common Core of Data, Public Elementary/Secondary School Universe Urban and Suburban Survey Data) School in the Greater Rochester Area, 1989- 2010 Table Three Student Exposure Rates (Kuscera & Orfield, 2014; US Department of Education, to Low-Income Student National Center for Education Statistics, Common Core of Data, Public Elementary/Secondary School Universe in Public Schools in the Survey Data) Greater Rochester Area, 1999-2000 and 2010-2011 Table Five Spatial Collage (James-Wilson, 2020)

Table Six The Central Objectives (Young & Staff, 1969) of Project UNIQUE’s Ten Sub-Initiatives

PREFACE

The Front Seat

Imagine that you are sitting next to me in the front row of a school bus. The seat is slightly sticky, yet oddly comfortable. Pineapple hand sanitizer, lavender hand cream, and diesel fumes lightly perfume the air that passes through the center aisle. The early morning sun shining through the window is both blinding and cheerful. It is the fall of 2006 in

Rochester, NY. I am thirteen years old, and today is my first day of middle school.

A wave of rambunctious laughter flows from the back of the bus. Grumbling, hungry stomachs can be heard in the middle rows. The front most section, where you are seated, feels quiet and unassuming at first. You being to notice a faint, yet pronounced, sound of fluttering wings. They are butterflies attempting to escape the caverns of my racing heart, one at a time.

Slowly, your gaze returns to me. You watch as I quickly paint my face with two thick coats of enthusiasm. My reluctant smile makes an honest attempt at concealing the prevailing wind of nervousness that has overtaken me; but it is largely unconvincing. Both you and my parents sense that I am slightly afraid of the current tide of change.

As the bus drives away, I wave goodbye to my mother and father. They stand proudly on the front porch with soft grins that linger. As the porch fades from my view, and

I accept that I am alone now. I remind myself that middle school will to be different from elementary school in more ways than one. Moving from a co-ed primary school to an all- girls secondary school, and shifting from the public city school to a private suburban school promised a new set of challenges and possibilities. The doubt in my ear whispers, “Am I prepared for this?

A Curious Cartographer

Eager to regain my bearings, I scan the length of bus in search of something familiar.

As I do this, I begin to draw a mental map of the space. I identify a noticeable rift between the back, the middle, and the front of the bus. I quickly understand the three-fold partitioning of the space to be both physical and symbolic in nature. I understand the bus to be a microcosm of the community that I have grown up in.

I discern that the three-way division of the bus mirrors the social divisiveness of race, class, cultural identity, and geographic location in the Greater Rochester Area more broadly. I determine that these four spatial organizing principles, among others, operate within a binary of ‘similar versus different.’ I witness how they ultimately combine to create an unspoken seating arrangement on the bus. I reflect on the ways in which I have been socialized to recognize these segregationist logics, whether it has been in school, at home, or in other communal and educational spaces. I pause to consider how these spatial organizing principles have influenced my ways of knowing and being in the world. I stop to acknowledge the magnitude of the social contract that we have all signed with our silence. I whisper to you, “This unspoken, yet agreed upon, seating arrangement is confining us and restricting our movements. But what else is it doing?”

At the back of this school bus sits a group of young women who have been friends since kindergarten. They all went to the same urban Catholic elementary school, grew up in the same neighborhood, and attended the same church. These young women share a clear set of social, cultural, and spatial relations that knits them together. They nourish one another other with laughter and a strong sense of belonging. Almost all of these young women are

Black, and many of them have gained admission to our all-girls Catholic secondary school through its needs-based scholarship programs for students from underrepresented groups.

In the middle of the bus, there is another cluster of young women, but they are not as well acquainted. They attended urban Catholic elementary schools or urban public schools, but not the same ones. They grew up in separate, yet adjacent neighbourhoods and had never formally crossed paths. They were acquainted with each other’s geographies, but were more confident in their own. The collective grumbling of their hungry stomachs, however, wove them together in a different way. Growing up in a city where one in two children live below the poverty line, the necessity of subsided, and free-of-charge, school breakfast and lunch programs were well known by many of them. Ethno-racially, this middle section of the bus was comprised of a mixture of Black, non-White Hispanic, Asian, White, and multi-racial students. They came from primarily working class and lower middle class backgrounds.

At the front of this school bus sits the last of the three bunches. The “last” is important here because chronologically these students are picked up on the final few stops of the bus route each morning. This final assemblage of young women is mainly comprised of those who live in the city’s peripheries. Their homes are located in neighbourhoods that share the greatest proximity with Rochester’s surrounding suburban towns. By extension, these young women live the closest to our suburban secondary school. Out of all the passengers, the students at the front spend the least amount of time on the bus each day.

They are the last to be picked up each morning, and they are first to be dropped off every afternoon. By contrast, the students at the middle and back spend the greatest amount of time on the bus. By in large, they live in inner-city neighbourhoods that are further away from the suburbs. A notable afterlife of Rochester’s centuries-old racist and classist housing

practices [including the racial redlining of the city by the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation

(HOLC) in 1939], is that those who live in the city’s outlying neighbourhoods are less likely to be of Black or non-White Hispanic ancestry, and are more likely to come from higher income households. Similarly, those situated at the front of this school bus are largely from middle to high-income families, and they are mostly White, Asian, and multi-racial.

Im/Mobility is Alert and Alive

As I finish taking in all of my surroundings, I conclude that if one thing is for certain it is that this school bus is alive. It is an infrastructure bursting with cultural, relational, temporal, and affective contours. It is conveying bodies, and changing minds.

I determine that this bus is more than a six-wheeled vessel. That it is transporting its passengers much farther than, “from point a to point b.” I resolve that it is far more than a moving container held together by exterior social and spatial organizing principles. I observe how the school bus produces its own sights, its own sounds, its own scents, and its own feelings. I have witnessed how this transportation infrastructure gives birth to its own socio- spatial logics of inclusion and exclusion, and of mobility and immobility, and of segregation and integration.

This school bus is compressing time-space in a way that is largely uneven, and yet dually unifying. For example, the racialized, lower-income students who live in the inner city spend more time on the bus each day than their classmates who live on the urban periphery do. These students at the back and the middle of the bus are effective made

“hyper-mobile” by this bussing; they have to spend more of their time, and cross over a larger geographical space, to obtain access to the same opportunities that those who have

greater socio-economic privilege and residential choice can access over a much shorter span of time and space.

In this way, the geography of mobility on this bus is rather paradoxical. Many of these inner city students are becoming “hyper-mobile” in a physical sense as a means of accessing mobility in a more philosophical sense. Many of the students at the back of the bus have chosen to attend our private, college-preparatory suburban school as a means of gaining greater access to upward social and economic mobility. Social and economic forms of mobility include: a) being invited into an expansive social network that can open previously closed doors to higher educational and career opportunities, b) an increase in human and knowledge capital through rigorous curriculum and instruction, c) greater choice when selecting potential colleges and universities, d) the breaking of inter-generational cycles of poverty, and d) the ability to earn a larger salary over the course of a career that an individual finds meaningful, among others.

By contrast, many inner city public schools in Rochester create conditions of social and economic immobility. When considering metrics like test scores, high school graduation rates, and attendance at post-secondary institutions, many inner city schools struggle to provide their students with the kinds of educational opportunities that promote upward social and economic mobility. For urban students who are not given the chance to attend out-of-district, suburban schools, Rochester’s educational geographies are more likely to be socially, spatially, and economically confining than they are to be mobilizing.

The paradoxical relationship between mobility and immobility is both opposing and connective. Importantly, the metaphyics of im/mobility holds within it as much momentous power to create conditions of connection, as it has tremendous power to create conditions of

segregation. The transformative potential of infrastructure, then, is signaled by the school bus in several ways.

At the end of the day, all of the young women who ride this school bus will attend the same school for grades seven through twelve. They will eat lunch in the same cafeteria, attend classes together, join in the same extracurricular clubs, play on the same sports teams, commune in prayer on the morning announcements, and graduate on the same stage. Each young woman’s experience of this school will be influenced by the ways in which she is socio-spatially ‘similar and different’ to her various peers, and by the ways in which she is impacted by geographies, socio-spatial processes, and infrastructures. Nonetheless, the

‘similar versus different’ binary will not wholly define her participation in the school’s educational spaces.

Together, these students will forge new connections, new circulations of ideas and affect, new forms of knowledge production, and a new set of relations. Together, they will be both confined and mobilized by forces that seek to segregate them, and they will devise more radically emancipatory forms of mobility. Ultimately, the antecedent dualism between mobility and confinement will challenge them to better recognize the liminal spaces that exist ‘in-between’ these opposing poles. Here, new mobility paradoxes will emerge and thrive.

Together, these young women will begin to draw their mental maps, like the one I drew of my middle school school bus, to an ‘elsewhere.’ Together, they will devise novel ways of knowing and being in the world they are making, and they will strategize new ways of actualizing their individual and collective futures. Together, they will create the

reparative and inclusive infrastructures necessary for organizing and sustaining the new world they have built.

Returning to my three-way partitioned map of the bus once more, invites me to my original question: “This unspoken, yet agreed upon, seating arrangement is confining us and restricting our movements. But what else is it doing?”

I lean over to whisper into your ear once more: “This bus is transporting us, and this bus transforming us.”

Space Matters

School segregation matters because space and place matter. Space and place matter because they fundamentally change us (Christensen, 2014; Soja, 2014). As the following research project explores, geographies and infrastructures of school segregation are emotionally saturated, materially and symbolically negotiated, and socio-spatially transmuted across time-space. Community and personal histories of school segregation have much to contribute by way of exposing the historic geographies and infrastructures that foreground the ongoing crisis of school segregation. This thesis is centrally aimed at supporting education researchers, policymakers and activists who are committed to redressing the school segregation in Rochester, NY, in the United States of America, and in the world at large.

INTRODUCTION

On July 24, 1964, an ordinary Friday night street dance on Joseph Avenue in downtown Rochester, NY quickly became out of hand. After two police officers attempted to arrest a young Black man named Randy Manigault on a charge of public intoxication, the surrounding group of partygoers erupted (Homer, 1965). As 200 youth clashed with an onslaught of policemen and K-9, it was increasingly clear that the discontented residents of

Rochester’s predominately Black Seventh Ward neighbourhood had reached their collective boiling point (Homer, 1965). After years of experiencing hiring discrimination, poor housing conditions, police brutality, and racially segregated schools, the community’s rallying cries for social and economic justice could no longer be ignored (Monroe County

Human Relations Commission, 1965).

The aftermath of the three-day 1964 riots would position Rochester as a city of firsts.

Not only was Rochester the first city in a Northern state where the National Guard was called in to settle a civil rights dispute, but in 1965 it also became the first to launch a voluntary school desegregation program (Browne & Eison, 2006; Finnigan & Stewart,

2009). Rochester’s Urban-Suburban Interdistrict Transfer Program (USITP or Urban-

Suburban) is the oldest policy initiative of its kind in the United States. Established through

New York State Education Law Section 3602 (36), Urban-Suburban was created to

“voluntarily reduce racial isolation and segregation of academic opportunities in elementary and secondary schools in order to enhance and enrich racial and ethnic awareness among students, teachers, and parents” through inter-district busing (Finnigan & Stewart, 2009, p.

8; Murphy, 2015 Mar. 19). Beginning with only twenty-four participants in September 1965,

Urban-Suburban has grown to involve almost 900 students and sixteen school districts in the

Greater Rochester Area annually (Smith, 2019).

Despite the early success of voluntary school desegregation initiatives like Urban-

Suburban, Rochester’s educational landscape has become increasingly segregated in recent decades. In the absence of major institutional restructuring, the Greater Rochester Area is now home to some of the most “intensely segregated” schools (defined as schools where the student population is 90-100% non-White1) in the entire country (Kuscera & Orfield, 2014).

Between 1989 and 2010, the percentage of intensely segregated schools in the Greater

Rochester Area increased by over 500% (Kuscera & Orfield, 2014). Looking to data from the 2010-2011 academic year, the share of Black students in Rochester’s urban schools was

8.5 times higher than their share in suburban schools, and the share of Latino students in urban schools was over four times higher than their share in suburban schools (Kuscera &

Orfield, 2014). During this same time frame, the proportion of low-income students enrolled in intensely segregated schools was over two times the overall proportion of low-income students enrollment in the entire metropolitan area (Kuscera & Orfield, 2014).

Decades of legal, de facto segregation have created a stark division between

Rochester’s urban and suburban public education systems along the lines of race, class, and geography. Although sixty-six years have passed since the U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown v.

Board of Education decision ruled that America’s public schools must guarantee “equal educational opportunities for all,” the crisis of school segregation has yet to be remedied in the Greater Rochester Area. Given decades of research which has shown that racially and

1 U.S.-based education researchers often use the term “non-White” to describe people who are not racialized as White. This includes people who are racialized as Black, Asian, Latino, American Indian, Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian, Pacific Islander, biracial, or multiracial. See U.S. Census Bureau for more on common racial and ethnic categories in the U.S. context at https://www.census.gov/topics/population/race/about.html.

socioeconomically diverse schools have a significant advantage over racially and socioeconomically segregated ones when it comes to student engagement, student learning, and student preparedness for higher education and the work force (Logan, Minca & Adar,

2012; Mordechay & Ayscue, 2019), this case study asks two central questions:

1. What does a focus on geography and infrastructure illuminate about the crisis of, and responses to, school segregation?

2. What do social histories of communities negatively impacted by school segregation help to explain about this modern day crisis?

This thesis addresses these two questions through an archival research approach.

First, this thesis investigates the historical geographies and infrastructures that laid the foundation for Rochester’s school segregation crisis. Second, this thesis engages with critical scholarship from geography and infrastructure studies to develop a new way of conceptualizing school segregation in its modern day context. The resulting framework I propose— spatial collage—invites trans-disciplinary education researchers to visualize how the politics of race and space shape social institutions like public schools. ‘Spatial collage’ provides a means of understanding the ways in which geographies, infrastructures, and socio-spatial processes foreground the crisis of, and responses to, school segregation in the

Greater Rochester Area. In particular, the spatial collage theory presents educators and educational researchers with a way of considering the geographic and infrastructural implications of the school segregation crisis, and it provides geographers and infrastructure studies scholars with the opportunity to think about school segregation from the standpoint of teaching and learning. At this juncture, both academics and practitioners can gain deeper insight into why some school desegregation initiatives were more or less successful than

others, and in turn, more historically informed education policy decisions can be made in the future.

I begin this thesis with an explanation of research design and methodology. Next, I review relevant literature from the geography of education sub-disciplinary field on school segregation. Third, I provide additional historical background on the geographies, infrastructures, and institutions that underpin Rochester’s segregated schooling landscape, and detail how existing critical theory from geography and infrastructure studies might contribute to trans-disciplinary school segregation research. Finally, I present the spatial collage framework and discuss Rochester’s groundbreaking school desegregation initiatives— including the Urban-Suburban Interdistrict Transfer Program and Project

UNIQUE (“United Now for Quality Integrated Urban-Suburban Education”)— in relation to spatial collage.

Rochester’s school segregation crisis is neither inevitable, nor irreversible. I have developed the spatial collage framework to encourage contemporary school desegregation advocates to more thoroughly consider what historic geographies, infrastructures, and social spatial processes bring to bear on the future success of their proposed programs, organizational policies, and policy remedies. Inspired by local historical archival research and critical theory from geography and infrastructure studies, while spatial collage does not offer a remedy to the school segregation problem, it does offer a new way of thinking about the crisis and its potential solutions. This research aims to support academics, policymakers, and activists who are committed to actualizing “equal educational opportunities for all.”

METHODS

Research Objectives

This thesis project was undertaken in response to the growing need for tangible solutions to the school segregation crisis in Rochester, NY most specifically, and through the United States more broadly. A variety of education stakeholder groups (e.g. parent groups, teachers organizations, administrators, lobbyists, activists etc.) rely on research when building social movements and advocating for evidence-based policy decisions. Local historical archives are a critical, though arguably underutilized, resource for these efforts.

Archival research that is informed by geography and infrastructure studies can become a great asset to education policy decision makers who are interested in re-installing school desegregation initiatives that achieved considerable success historically. Critical theory from geography and infrastructure studies can help strengthen the work of school desegregation researchers and community organizers who are committed to reimagining the foundational geographies and infrastructures that underlie the school segregation crisis.

In an effort to put forth findings and recommendations that would be relevant to geographers and non-geographers alike, I wrote this thesis with a trans-disciplinary audience in mind. Accordingly, the conceptual and methodological insights that are presented in this body of work are not only useful to geographers and infrastructure scholars who interested in researching school segregation, but also to scholars, practitioners, policymakers, and activists who have not been formally trained in geography or infrastructure studies.

In summary, the main objectives of this case study were: 1) uncover the histories of school segregation in Rochester, NY through an archival research approach, 2) investigate what a focus on geography and infrastructure studies illuminates about the crisis of, and

responses to, school segregation, and 3) identify what existing critical theory from geography and infrastructure studies can contribute to new ways of conceptualizing school segregation.

Rationale for an Archival Approach

While Rochester, NY has had considerable policy influence within the national school desegregation movement, a comprehensive history of school segregation in the city has yet to be written. Relatively few detailed secondary sources on school segregation in

Rochester exist in the form of local history books, scholarly books, or academic articles.

Much of what has been published lacks specificity, context, and cohesion. As I came to discover in the preliminary stages of this research process, while I could thread small fragments of the complete school segregation story together by reading manuscripts, it would be impossible to reconstruct a more complete historical picture of school segregation in Rochester with secondary source material alone. This challenge became a major catalyst for selecting the archival approach.

Having spent my childhood and adolescence in Rochester, NY, I was already familiar with the Monroe County library system and the publically accessible Rare Books,

Special Collections, and Preservation (RBSCP) Department at the University of Rochester.

After making phone calls to both institutions, I learned that each department had special collections on school segregation. Over the course of the data collection phase, I gathered information from the wide variety of primary source materials that were available at both institutions. The enormity of relevant materials and ease of access further verified that the archival method was an appropriate and time-efficient choice for this project.

Although I had originally considered selecting an interview or focus group approach to researching school segregation in Rochester, when I began my primary data collection process in May 2018 I confirmed that the archival method was in fact more appropriate for this specific project. In particular, the vast scope and historical richness of both the RVF

Schools Archive (housed at the Local History & Genealogy Department at the Central

Library of Rochester & Monroe County) and the Urban-Suburban Summer School Program,

Brighton, NY Papers (housed at RBSCP) exceeded my expectations of the value of the information that could be gathered through the archival method. I quickly came to appreciate the abundance of background information, depth of context, and nuance that primary source materials could provide in addition to presenting basic facts. I deduced that it would have been much harder to gather as much specific background information and overarching historical context from in-person interviews or focus groups with education stakeholders who have lived experience of segregated schooling in Rochester. In summary, the archival approach helped me to uncover a comprehensive historical account of school segregation in Rochester that I initially sought after. Through my deep engagement with archived primary source materials— ranging from newspaper clippings, policy reports, and legal briefings to maps, photos, and personal correspondence— I was also able to identify key information that was missing from the secondary sources I had previously consulted.

Conceptual Implications of the Archival Approach

In addition to the practical work of data collection, the archival method also came to bear unexpected fruits in the conceptual realm of this thesis project. While I initially understood the archive to be merely a ‘source’ of information, in time I came to appreciate how it could be an object of inquiry in its own right (Mbembe, 2002). In the early stages of

data collection, I began to notice that each archive I consulted had a distinct organizational strategy. This observation led me to delve into further questions surrounding the uniquely situated knowledge production process that had informed each archival assemblage

(Withers, 2002). As I considered how the various ethical, political, and epistemic commitments of each archivist, librarian, and host institution influence the ways in which local history is remembered, and forgotten, I began to experience the archive “as subject”

(rather than simply “as source”) (Ashmore, Craggs & Neate, 2012, p. 82).

Shifting my attention from “archive-as-source” to “archive-as-subject,” I noticed that archivists, librarians and their respective institutions were making a powerful, albeit subtle, statement about their interpretation of the school segregation crisis by choosing to include primary source materials that were related to, but not directly focused on, the issue of segregated schooling within their special collections on school segregation. For example, the

RVF Schools Archive includes three folders on Rochester’s public bus system and Urban-

Suburban Summer School Program, Brighton, NY Papers includes a report and letters of personal correspondence that touch on the topic of race relations in Rochester more broadly.

At first glance, these materials seem ancillary and somewhat unrelated to the specific issue of school segregation. However, upon further reflection, the deliberate choice on the part of the archivist to include sources that speak to other geographies and infrastructures of segregation (e.g. the public bus system and racial discrimination in the housing market) reflects an ethical, political, and epistemic commitment to resist traditional analytical silos and embrace a multiplicity of knowledge (Stoler, 2009). Implicating housing, employment, and transportation segregation in the public education crisis— by way of including primary sources which speak to these issues in a school segregation archive— suggests that

archivists and librarians at the Central Library of Rochester and Monroe County, and the

RBSCP Department at the University of Rochester, were both personally and professionally invested in representing multiple ways of knowing the school segregation crisis, whether it be through the lens of schooling, housing, employment, or transportation. This inclusivity acknowledges that the multi-dimensional and multi-sector impact of the school segregation crisis extends far beyond the provisioning of public education. Quite evidently, school segregation negatively impacts lives throughout a community, as its effects ripple into related geographies, infrastructures, and institutions.

The multi-thematic way in which local archivists and librarians had gone about organizing these archives on school segregation left a significant impression on my own research process. In particular, my careful examination of their epistemic choices led me to more rigorously consider how local histories of the 1960s/70s U.S. civil rights movement both mirror, and juxtapose, national histories. As historian Jacquelyn Dowd Hall (2005) explains in an article titled The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the

Past, the coast-to-coast mass media was notorious for selectively depicting the 1960s/70s civil rights movement’s “…charismatic personalities (who were usually men) and telegenic confrontations…,” while simultaneously obscuring interregional connections, longer range political and social organizing histories, and ‘ordinary’ spaces of protest (e.g. office break rooms, kitchen tables, and individual classrooms) (p. 1236). Quite contrastingly, I found that local historical narratives of the 1960s/70s civil rights movement actually paid quite close attention to thematic intersections and ‘the ordinary,’ and subsequently, I found that many historic policies and programs that were aimed at promoting civil rights in Rochester tended to be characteristically multiplistic in nature. The spatial collage framework, which will be

presented in the discussion section of this thesis, was partly inspired by local archivist and librarians’ more multi-thematic way of conceptualizing segregation, civil rights, and institutional change; an approach that was notably ‘against the grain’ at the time.

Research Design

In recent years, there has been a noticeable methodological and scalar shift in research on school segregation. While many of the studies that were conducted in the 1960s,

70s, and 80s focused on the issue of school segregation at the national or regional level (e.g.

U.S. South v. North v. West), place-based case studies that zoom in on individual cities or states gradually became more popular as time went on. This methodological and scalar shift towards more local case studies was partly in response to the changing needs of lawyers, policymakers, and civil rights organizations that advocate on behalf of the school desegregation movement (Orfield, 2010). As the United States entered into the new millennium, the fight for equal educational opportunity became more and more robust at the grassroots level. In turn, many education think tanks— like the Civil Rights Project at the

University of California, Los Angeles— put additional effort into strengthening racial justice efforts at the community scale, forging stronger knowledge networks between urban and suburban school districts, state education departments, and civil society groups in the process.

The case study method of conducting an empirical or conceptual investigation involves the selection of a chosen phenomenon, a careful examination of multiple sources of evidence, and the presentation of major findings (Hancock & Algozzine, 2006). Historical case studies are meant to reflect a deep level of engagement with different types of information and to provide rich description of how a chosen phenomenon has changed over

time (Willis, 2007). Within the historical geography subfield this approach to analyzing space-time is commonly referenced as “the vertical theme” (Newcomb, 1969).

As a qualitative method, the case study design readily lends itself to hypothesis generation and the intensive, holistic analysis of a chosen phenomenon. Insights that can be garnered from case studies can be used to directly influence policy, practice, and future research (Merriam, 1998). All of these characteristics made the case study approach an appropriate research design choice for this project.

My personal lived experience as a resident of Rochester, NY also informed my decision to design a case study of school segregation in this particular city. As a child, I attended a predominately non-White, low to middle-income elementary school in the

Rochester City School District, and as an adolescent I attended a predominately White, middle to high-income secondary school that was located in the nearby suburb of Brighton,

NY. Having seen two sides of racially and socioeconomically segregated schooling, I have had a longstanding interest in learning more about how the Greater Rochester Area’s fragmented educational landscape originally came to be and furthermore, how it could be made more equitable going forward. This Master of Arts in Human Geography degree program presented a timely opportunity to formally investigate these questions.

Data Collection

I conducted the majority of my primary data collection at the Local History and

Genealogy Division of the Central Library of Rochester and Monroe County. I also spent a considerable amount of time at the University of Rochester’s Rare Books, Special

Collections, and Preservation (RBSCP) Department. Additionally, I was able to access rare legal and policy documents from Justin Murphy, the current education writer at Rochester’s

Democrat & Chronicle newspaper. Mr. Murphy is currently in the process of drafting a manuscript on the history of school segregation in Rochester and generously offered to share digital copies of archived historical material that he came across as part of his own data collection process. A detailed record of these materials is provided in Appendix One.

All of the archival material I accessed was publicly available. Most of it was only available for use in-person, with some notable exceptions (e.g. the Democrat & Chronicle

Digital Archive and some of the Historic Monographs on Race Relations in Rochester, NY).

With the assistance of staff in the Local History & Genealogy Department at the Central

Library of Rochester and Monroe County, I was able to scan and photocopy key newspaper clippings from RVF Schools Archive. Since The Voice and Tenth Ward Courier and Vicinity

Post newspapers had been preserved as microfiche, I was able to save .jpeg and .pdf files of these clippings for later use. Additionally, I was able to obtain digital reproductions of several documents in the Urban-Suburban Summer School Program, Brighton, NY Papers archive at University of Rochester’s RBSCP Department for a reasonable fee. These .pdf files allowed me to review these primary source materials remotely.

For less than ten dollars a month, I was also able to purchase a digital subscription to the Democrat & Chronicle’s complete repository of digitized papers. This digital subscription allowed me to access some of the primary source material that I had first accessed in the RVF Schools Archive at the Local History & Genealogy Division of the

Central Library of Rochester and Monroe County remotely at a later date.

Data Analysis

In this study, I used document analysis to review and evaluate a variety of primary source materials including: background papers, program proposals, policy reports,

organizational reports, municipal briefings, maps and charts, newspaper clippings, photographs, and magazine articles. Document analysis is a systematic procedure for reviewing and evaluating documents in order to uncover meaning, increase understanding, and develop empirical or conceptual knowledge (Bowen, 2009). The method involves appraising and synthesizing data contained in documents so that the resulting data can be organized into major themes, categories, and case examples (Bowen, 2009).

Given that the materials I gathered were already thematically organized around a single topic, my first substantive task was to re-order the assorted fragments of Rochester’s school segregation history into an accurate chronology of events. After organizing the data chronologically, I was able to construct a rough timeline of major events in local school segregation history. From here, I was able to systematically analyze the ways in which the various policy interventions, community-based initiatives, major public events, and political decision making processes that were captured in the data fit together. At this point, the data analysis was no longer about establishing an order, but about uncovering connections. This encouraged me to take somewhat of a storytelling approach to painting a fuller historical picture. Returning to the notion of “archive-as-subject,” I took some inspiration from the ways in which the archivists chose to include primary source material on other geographies and infrastructures of segregation (e.g. public busing and racial discrimination in the housing market) in the school segregation special collections. Their multi-thematic approach to archival knowledge production informed my choice to adopt a multi-thematic approach to storytelling and data analysis. Consequently, my data analysis took information about organizing in the Black and Latino communities, regional transportation infrastructures, and

the politics of neighbourhood organizing into account when telling the story of school segregation.

LITERATURE REVIEW

The existing literature on school segregation in Rochester, NY is considerably limited. Within the related disciplines of geography and infrastructure studies, relatively little scholarly attention has been paid to the issue of school segregation. On the one hand, the absence of a cohesive school segregation canon is quite discouraging. On the other, material from local historical archives, when combined with critical social scientific theory, has much to offer interested researchers. This literature review engages recent scholarship on school segregation from the geographies of education disciplinary subfield in order to situate this case study of Rochester, NY within the context of current debates.

The Geographies of Education Subfield

Since the post-structuralist and cultural turns of the 1970s and 1980s, the study of education and schooling has undoubtedly become much more robust and inter-disciplinary in nature (Taylor, 2009). Over the years, this paradigm shift has not only supported greater cross-pollination amongst pedagogues, economists, political theorists, sociologists, anthropologists, lawyers, historians, and psychologists interested in schools and schooling, but it has also made the academic contributions to a highly applied field more meaningful and relevant for multiple stakeholder groups in the field of education. In the broad sub-field of urban education— where issues of infrastructure, transportation, metropolitan planning, health care, housing, employment, immigration, among others, are directly implicated in the planning and provisioning of schools and schooling— manifold scholarship has become the gold standard (Colman, 1978; Meyer, 2000; Rury, 2005).

While geographies of education is still largely situated in the margins of disciplinary thought, in the past twenty years there has been an upsurge in the number of scholarly

articles published in geography journals on education (Thiem, 2009). Both Anglophone and non-Anglophone geographers have become increasingly interested in the ways in which formal and informal spaces of education shape broader societal processes, and visa versa

(Brock, 2013; Holloway & Jöns, 2012). Most of the published literature in the geographies of education canon has come from scholars based in the United Kingdom (accounting for

53% of the 350 articles that have been published in the subfield), the United States (13.7%), and Canada (9.1%) (Hunter, 2019). Topics that have been explored include, but are not limited to: spatiality and education policy, gentrification and inner city schools, historical geographies of education, educational mobilities, the globalization of education, the socio- spatiality of educational restructuring, emotional geographies of education, and the role of identity in the reproduction of educational spaces (Pini, Gulson, Kraftl & Dufty-Jones,

2017).

Scholars in the geographies of education subfield have thoughtfully challenged the larger discipline of geography’s historically narrow view of schools and schooling as

‘spaces, full stop’ (Pini et al., 2017; Thiem, 2009). Emergent scholarship from the canon has asked how education “‘makes space,’ or otherwise contributes to geographical processes,” and in turn, has explored how educational systems, institutions, and practices reinforce and/or challenge established accounts of socio-spatial transformation (Collins & Coleman,

2008). Increasingly, critical geographers of education have focused their attention on centering schools and schooling in novel geographic theory generation (Nguyen, Cohen &

Huff, 2017). This has importantly countered the traditional ‘add schools and stir’ approach to studying educational spaces as mere test sites for existing geographic theories (McCreary,

Basu and Godlewska, 2013; Nguyen, Cohen & Huff, 2017).

To provide an example, Brogan’s (2013) article on the neoliberalization of Chicago’s public school system demonstrates how conceptual insights from educational spaces can inform novel theory generation in the economic geography subfield. In his article, Brogan details the ways in which urban public schools have been re-imagined as new sites of capital accumulation in neoliberal era. He illustrates how a closer examination of market-based education policy and urban decisions reveals insights that might inform theories of capitalism from the economic geography subfield; a section of the discipline that is constantly looking to better understand the ways in which new sites of capital accumulation take, and make, place. Huff (2013), has also used educational spaces to theory-build at the intersection of urban and economic geography. Her case study of neoliberal austerity of school reform in New Orleans, LA takes issue with the U.S. charter school movement in an effort to illustrate how geographic analyses of charter schools can illuminate new findings surrounding the ways in which public education restructuring processes act as major drivers for urban gentrification processes and greater regional socio-spatial segregation (Huff,

2013).

In summary, scholars of the geographies of education subfield have played a major role in bringing key disciplinary concepts— including scale, the epistemic distinction between space and place, the politics of mobility and immobility, and time-space— to the forefront of mainstream education research (Pini et al., 2017). This work has importantly countered non-geographers’ largely metaphoric use of spatial language in the study of schools and schooling, and has facilitated greater cross-disciplinary pollination (Taylor,

2009). These combined efforts have pushed the geographies of education subfield to more thoroughly “address the dynamics of power, resistance, and political possibility that are

enacted through public education-related social movements” in both their academic and applied work (Nguyen, Cohen & Huff, 2017; p. 2).

Existing Geographic Research on School Segregation

Most of the existing school segregation literature in the geographies of education subfield has featured case studies from the United Kingdom and the United States. Johnson,

Burgess, Wilson & Harris’ (2006) study of school and residential ethnic segregation in

England found that the degree of ethnic segregation in the public school system amongst

South Asian (Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi), Black Caribbean and Black African students was substantially greater than the degree of ethnic segregation between residential neighbourhoods. The authors’ data analysis revealed, for example, that while two-thirds of

Bangladeshi students attended Bangladeshi majority schools, only a quarter of these students resided in Bangladeshi majority neighbourhoods. They also found that White students who lived outside of the city of London had very low exposure to non-White students in residential communities, and even lower exposure in school settings.

A separate study conducted on the ethnic segregation of English public schools and neighbourhoods by Burgess, Wilson & Lupton (2005) also found children to be more segregated in their schools than in their neighbourhoods, and that the rates of segregation among South Asian students were consistently higher when compared to Black and White students. Other topics that have been explored in the UK include: the correlation between school segregation and academic performance (see Johnston, Wilson & Burgess, 2007), and the implications of neighbourhood school attendance models— namely that the use of enrollment catchment areas bolsters higher degrees of school segregation in residential areas

that were historically segregated even before the introduction of market-based reforms to education (see Taylor & Gorard, 2001).

Turning to the United States, in an article titled “I Think It’s Just Natural”: The

Spatiality of Racial Segregation at a US High School, Thomas (2005) details a rationale for employing Judith Butler’s performativity theory in her investigation of the ways in which female students participate in the spatiality of racial difference and the spatial practice of segregated seating arrangements at a public secondary school in Charleston, SC. Similarly,

Veninga (2009) employed performativity theory in her exploration of how students who participated in busing in 1970s and 1980s negotiated their embodiment of racialized subjectivities in desegregated school environments. The paper derives its findings from a larger study that Veninga conducted in Seattle, WA between January 2002 and January

2003, wherein which she interviewed fifty individuals who were bussed between the years of 1978 and 1989 as part of the city’s school desegregation plan. “The Seattle Plan,” which all of the interviewees participated in, sought to establish racial balance in the public education system through a combination of mandatory busing assignments and magnet programs between its first launched in 1977 and its ultimate abandonment by the city school district in 1996.

Notably, geographers concerned with the segregated nature of American public education systems have shown particular interest in the ways in which economic geographies become implicated in the reproduction of the school segregation crisis. Looking to the U.S. South, Huff (2013) scrutinizes the role of the national charter school movement in the re-segregation of educational and residential landscapes in New Orleans, LA. Brogan

(2013) explores the link between market-driven housing policies and market-driven

educational policies that mutually reinforce longstanding segregated spatial patterning in the central city and outlying areas. Aggarwal (2015) sketches out how the initial emergence of choice-based education polices during the Reagan administrative, which would continue throughout both Bush and Clinton presidencies, can be traced back to economist Milton

Friedman’s “third alternative” to forced segregation or forced desegregation (p. 162).

Friedman’s theory, which set into motion a new theory of ‘choice in education policy’ based on the “co-constitutive relationship between freedom and capitalism,” steadily gained traction and has been weaponized against the national school desegregation movement for the last thirty years (Aggarwal, 2015, p. 162).

American geographers have also considered the role of social movements and community organizing in longstanding struggles over school segregation. In Development

Drowned and Reborn: The Blues and Bourbon Restorations in Post-Katrina New Orleans,

Clyde Woods uses a historical geography approach to trace the rise of Black student movements in Louisiana during the elementary, secondary, and tertiary school desegregation campaigns of 1960s and 1970s (Woods, 2017). Woods writes in a chapter focused on the

Second Reconstruction in the U.S. South (1965-1977) that, “The freedom movement and its

Blues agenda were transforming educational institutions from engines of social resignation and assimilation to a maternity ward for new movements and leaders” (p. 195).

Geographers have also investigated school segregation beyond the United States and the United Kingdom. Through the conceptual lens of nationalism, Kaplan (1992) has examined the politics of school segregation along racial, cultural, and linguistic divides in

Montreal, Canada. Using governmentality as an epistemological framework, Ledwith &

Reilly (2013) have interrogated the defensive localism that has emerged in Irish educational

policy. In their paper, Ledwith & Reilly argue that defensive localism has attempted to neutralize segregated geographies of schooling in the Irish city of Galway as an unavoidable consequence of nationalist “tradition” (p. 325). Among their listed recommendations, both authors advocate for substantive change to the education policy structures through which school enrolment is organized so that migrant students of international origin can be more thoroughly integrated with their peers who are of Irish heritage within local school systems.

Looking to South Africa, human geographer Mark Hunter (2010, 2016, 2019) has investigated school segregation and desegregation within the context of racial apartheid. In one study, Hunter (2010) demonstrates the importance of segregated schooling geographies to class formation and multiple forms of mobility (e.g. social, economic, and physical). In another, Hunter (2016) takes a historical geography approach to examine how and why school segregation has played such a central role in the ongoing reproduction of the uneven geographies of race and class that persist throughout the country. In particular, Hunter documents how education systems have become deeply implicated in three significant post- apartheid tensions, which include: “…the deracialization of privilege, the continued dividedness of Whiteness, and efforts to redistribute resources to the poor” (Hunter, 2016, p.

319). Finally in a third article, Hunter (2019) uses critical race theorist David Goldberg’s analysis of “racial neoliberalism” to tease out the many epistemic nuances that characterize the shift from school segregation as a “project of modernism” to a “project of marketization”

(p. 1).

Current Gaps in the Geographies of School Segregation Literature

With notable exceptions, including Hunter (2010, 2016, and 2019) and Woods

(2017), most of the published literature on geographies of school segregation has not been

historical in nature. It is relatively uncommon to find studies on school segregation in the geographies of education canon that utilize primary historical geographic methods like archival research. Additionally, the majority of scholarly articles on school segregation have drawn on contemporary data sets and present-day crises (e.g. the rise of neoliberal austerity politics and the acceleration of market-based educational restructuring processes), and not on historical case studies and ongoing crises (e.g. settler colonialism and racial capitalism).

Partly thanks to the “datafication” of education research, GIS-mapping and statistical modeling have become some of the most commonly used research methods in the sub-field

(Gulson & Sellar, 2019). Interviews and secondary research methods have also been considerably more popular than the archival approach.

The overwhelming focus on the present has arguably meant that geographers have not paid sufficient attention to the historical geographies and infrastructures that helped lay the foundation for the contemporary school segregation crisis. This case study of school segregation in Rochester, NY is aimed at contributing to this gap in the literature. The project mobilizes primary source materials from local history collections on school segregation in tandem with the archival research method from the historical geography subfield, to map out the longstanding geographic and infrastructural genealogies that underpin segregated schooling. Additionally, it brings critical theory on the politics of race and space from infrastructure studies, black studies, and black geographies into a more robust conversation with the geographies of education subfield. This approach was undertaken in a deliberate effort to investigate the relatively under-explored conceptual junctures that exist at the intersection of these three fields.

There are numerous questions of power, justice, and ethics at stake where the historical geographies and infrastructures that underpin school segregation are concerned. If education researchers were to better understand the ways in which geographies and infrastructures both coordinate, and fragment, diverse sets of economic, cultural, affective, and material relations, then they might gain greater insight into the socio-spatial conditions and processes that continue to reproduce the school segregation crisis; particularly racial capitalism and settler colonialism (Cowen, Paradis, Story & Mitchell, 2020). In the case of older industrial cities like Rochester, NY, lessons from the past can help inform more effective education policies and metropolitan planning decisions in the present and future.

THE MAKING OF ROCHESTER’S SEGREGATED LANDSCAPE

Rochester, NY is a mid-sized U.S. city that is located on the southern shore of Lake

Ontario in Upstate Western New York (see Map One; Note that all maps are in Appendix

One). Rochester is the metropolitan center of Monroe County and the third largest city in

New York State (see Map Two). The most recent population estimate for the City of

Rochester was approximately 206,284 persons (US Census, 2018). The most recent population estimate for Monroe County, which includes the City of Rochester and its surrounding suburban and rural towns, was approximately 741,770 persons (US Census,

2019).

Settler colonialism and racial capitalism have been particularly instrumental to the making of Rochester’s segregated landscape. These socio-spatial processes have played out through multiple forms of physical and institutional violence, ranging from genocide and police brutality to redlining and urban renewal. Together, they have shaped complex entanglements of race, space, and power in both the central city and surrounding suburbs.

A focus on geography and infrastructure illuminates that the crisis of, and responses to, school segregation in Rochester extends far beyond the classroom. Critical theory from geography and infrastructure studies canons inspires a reading of school segregation that takes into account related issues like racialized poverty, segregated housing, hiring discrimination, and regionally fragmented transportation systems. In this background section on the making of Rochester’s segregated landscape, I put a variety of historical materials from local archives in conversation with geographers and infrastructure studies scholars concerned with the sub/urban politics of race, space, and power in order to better understand why the school segregation crisis persists to this day.

Geographies and Infrastructures of Settler Colonialism: Remembered and Forgotten

In the early stages of my archival research process, I was struck by a set of images I found in a local history book titled Rochester Through Time (Grenier & Morry, 2015). On each page of Rochester Through Time authors Grenier & Morry juxtapose a historic photograph of a Rochester landmark, institution, or social geography with a corresponding, present-day photograph of the same scene (shot from an identical camera angle). In turn, each compilation reveals how the city has changed visually and structurally over time.

Under the sub-heading “Transportation Transformation,” Grenier & Morry contrast a historic photograph of the Rochester Subway (1927-1956) with a present-day photograph of the I-490 expressway (1961-present) (p. 19). When viewed together, it is evident that the current highway is routed along the former path of the Rochester Subway (see Appendix

Three). An accompanying caption affirms that the I-490 was in fact constructed atop the former rail bed following the rise in auto-mobility in the late 1950s and early 1960s. It also mentions that the Erie Canal operated through this same corridor prior to the Rochester

Subway.

Critical infrastructure studies scholars have done rich theorizing surrounding the

‘layering of infrastructure’ phenomenon that I observed in this book. As Larkin (2013) explains, infrastructures are both “…things and also the relation between things” (p. 329).

Their physical materiality and relational operations have a tendency to become ‘layered’ as they continually reenact particular circulations of people, ideas, and supplies across space- time. Cowen (2014), Khalili (2020), and Karuka (2019) have written extensively about this phenomenon in relation to maritime shipping routes and continental railroads. Taken together, they have thoroughly documented the ways in which current commercial supply

chains often operate as strategic reenactments, or not-so-subtle re-imaginations, of former imperial and military supply chains. As Cowen (2019) explains, historic infrastructures like the nineteenth century railroads laid important groundwork for the transformation of urban space in the twenty and twenty-first centuries; effectively reconfiguring “…economic geographies, circuits of finance, social worlds, rhythms and temporalities, patterns of property ownership, and morphology” (p. 12).

Literature from black studies and black geographies has also documented the

‘layering of infrastructure’ phenomenon; paying particularly close attention to the ways in which socially, politically, and economically constructed ideas surrounding race, class, and gender are produced and reproduced through infrastructures. Hartman (2007) explains how constellations of race, class, and gender in the United States must be contextualized within longer American histories of chattel slavery, anti-Black racism, and Jim Crow. Coining the term “the afterlife of slavery,” Hartman explains how the permutation and perpetuation of anti-Black geographies and infrastructures has resulted in, “skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment…” for

Black people living in the United States (p. 6).

Similarly, other black studies and black geographies scholars have observed the afterlives of slavery in other infrastructures of social reproduction and social control.

Cramer’s (2015) case study of the 2014 water crisis in Detroit, MI importantly critiques the ways in which the ongoing racialization of debt in greater Detroit metropolitan area has recurrently subsidized critical social reproductive infrastructures like municipal water and sewage services for high-income, White suburbanites at the expense of low-income, non-

White urbanites. Gilmore’s (2007) Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition

in Globalizing California meticulously teases out the entanglements that exist between: a) plantation economics, b) local, regional, and global formations of racial capitalism, and c) the infrastructural mega-project that is the American prison industrial complex. Browne

(2012) has traced how many modern racializing surveillance practices and security infrastructures in the United States (e.g. the collection of race-specific data on the U.S.

Census and the deployment of biometrics technology) have reenacted the same anti-Black racializing surveillance logics that were initially developed during the transatlantic slave trade (e.g. lantern laws and the production of the Book of Negroes slave registry in New

York City in 1783).

Returning to the case of the canal/subway/highway in Rochester, NY, while this particular parcel of land has experienced considerable physical changes (first filled with water, then with rail track, and later with asphalt), it, too, has maintained considerable relational sameness across space-time (as all three of these infrastructures were transportation systems that enabled dis/connection between places and things). As I would come to uncover through additional fact finding, these infrastructural reenactments and reconfigurations not only helped establish the foundation upon which socio-spatial segregation would be built in Rochester, but perhaps more profoundly these infrastructural arrangements would continue to reproduce, and in some cases and places even intensify, metropolitan fragmentation.

Looking back on the two photographs, I re-read their accompanying caption once more. Now that I was in position to place my visual observation in communion with the critical theory I had read from geography and infrastructure studies on the politics of race and space, new insights and questions began to emerge. Curiously, while the Grenier &

Morry’s narrative of the canal/subway/highway thoroughly accounts for this particular land parcel’s post-colonial history, it makes no mention of the land tract’s Indigenous history.

Upon visiting the physical site where these two particular photographs were taken, a spot which happens to be right around the corner from the house I grew up in, I re-discovered that the prominent New York Historical Landmark placard—which sits at the highway’s edge to educate passersby about the Erie Canal— also fails to mention how the land was used prior to European settlement. As I lingered in front of the commemoration for a while longer, I began to meditate on the particular socio-spatial politics of remembrance, or in this case the socio-spatial politics of forgetting, that are continually rebirthed through in this particular space. This short reflective exercise encouraged me to return back to critical theory from geography and infrastructure studies, but this time to engage with literature on the politics of public memory.

In their article titled Toward Responsible Geographies of Memory: Complexities of

Place and the Ethics of Remembering, geographers Till & Kuusisto-Arponen (2015) argue that present-day landscapes are never byproducts of stable, ‘set in stone’ historical narratives

(p. 291). Instead, historical narratives are shaped by the messy and ever-contested interplay that exists between power, privilege, identity, and knowledge production (Till & Kuusisto-

Arponen, 2015). They are readily influenced by what Zerubavel (1996) describes as the

“unmistakable social rules of remembrance that tell us what we should remember and what we can or must forget,” and also by conscious and implicit biases like racism, classism, and xenophobia (p. 286). Historical narratives and their attendant monuments project a conception of the world onto the land that is “…not merely of the actually existing world,

but of a world that was or is possible” (Goonewardena, 2019, p. 186). They are neither innocent nor without consequence.

As I returned to the archives with these key conceptual insights in mind, I fervently searched for several primary and secondary sources that included information on

Rochester’s Indigenous history. While skimming through the Central Library of Monroe

County’s Historic Monograph Collection, I came to learn that members of the six

Haudenosaunee nations (the Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida, Mohawk, and Tuscarora) had historically used the same canal/subway/highway tract as seasonal fishing and hunting grounds (Peck, 1884). I read in William Peck’s 1884 monograph that the Seneca nation had successfully managed an extensive Haudenosaunee trading and portage route operated along this section of Čunehstí•yu• (the Genesee River Valley) for millennium (Peck, 1884). As I located additional materials, I learned that even post-contact with European invaders, the

Haudenosaunee were able to maintain their authority in Čunehstí•yu• for some time.

Following the Haudenosaunee Confederacy’s triumph over other Anishinaabe nations and

French colonists in the Beaver Wars (1609-1701), the six nations were in control of all the land in Upstate New York, and of an expanded territory that stretched well into the Ohio

Valley (Nies, 1996). However, by the late 1770s, Haudenosaunee land title came under increased threat (Josephy, 1994).

The Haudenosaunee’s economic and political power in the Great Lakes region had not gone unnoticed by the newly erected United States government (established in 1776)

(Josephy, 1994). In the summer of 1779, General George Washington commanded an aggressive military strike in Upstate Western New York against the Onondaga, Cayuga, and

Seneca nations and British Loyalists that was known as the Sullivan Campaign (Nies, 1996).

On June 18, Washington deployed 6,200 soldiers of the Continental Army with the following orders: “The immediate objects are the total destruction and devastation of their

(Haudenosaunee) settlements and the capture of as many prisoners of every sex and age possible. It is essential to ruin their crops in the ground and prevent their planting” (Camillus

Erie Canal Park, n.d.).

Carrying out this scorched earth military strategy, the Continental Army burned down fifty Haundenosaunee villages, and destroyed approximately one million bushels of corn, fifty thousand bushels of other vegetables, and ten thousand fruit trees (Camillus Erie

Canal Park, n.d.). The soldiers also committed clear acts of genocide against the Ononodaga,

Cayuga, and Seneca of Čunehstí•yu• in a violent attempt to depopulate Haundenosaunee

Indigenous communities throughout the region (Nies, 1996). As a result of the Campaign, nearly five thousand Haudenosaunee were forced to flee to Fort Niagara in Youngstown,

NY, or into Canada, under the protection of the British (Camillus Erie Canal Park, n.d.).

Many of those who were dispossessed and displaced died from hunger, disease, and exposure to extreme cold temperatures.

In 1817, Erie Canal construction commenced on land where Haudenosaunee land rights had been terminated (Shillings, 2003). Quickly, the canal became a critical infrastructure of settler colonialism in New York State. As earth was dug and cleared to create a basin for the canal, a template for Rochester’s segregated geographies and infrastructures was also etched into the landscape.

The Erie Canal, which ran 363 miles from Albany, NY along the Hudson River to

Buffalo, NY at Lake Erie, exemplified the ways in which settler colonialism persists through the reoccurring elimination of Indigenous peoples and their civilizations by way of

genocide, judicial control, and/or land theft (Estes, 2013; Smith, 2012). In service of the ultimate goal of settler colonialism—a supreme, unchallenged settler state governed by non-

Indigenous people in perpetuity— the Erie Canal mobilized the racial capitalist logic of

“primitive accumulation by dispossession” to accelerate the economic development and political authority of early industrial centers, like New York City and Rochester, for the benefit of White settlers (Melamed, 2015; Tuck & Yang, 2012). As Melamed (2015) clarifies, primitive accumulation by Indigenous dispossession is a form of racialized capital accumulation predicated on an unequal differentiation of humanness that is legitimized through socially constructed racial categories and White supremacy. Since settler colonialism and racial capitalism are ongoing socio-spatial, economic, and political processes and not one-time “events,” they have continued to play out in a variety of struggles over land and life (Wolfe, 2006).

With all of this in mind, I returned to the juxtaposed images of the Rochester subway and the I-490 expressway one final time. I began to more thoroughly consider how these very same settler colonial and racial capitalist logics had helped establish Rochester as an early center for wheat, corn, and saw milling— and one of America’s first “boomtowns”

(McKelvey, 1984). I became more critical of the way in which most local historians’ accounts of Rochester’s transportation history proudly celebrated settler colonial infrastructures (e.g. the canal, the subway, and the highway), while simultaneously concealing settler colonial processes (e.g. Indigenous dispossession and genocide). Moving between the framing of “archive-as-source” and the framing of “archive-as–subject,” I determined that local historical knowledge producers’ active choice to remember settler transportation geographies and infrastructures, and to forget the Indigenous dispossession

that made them possible in the first place, was hardly innocent or without consequence.

Irrefutably, the Erie Canal, followed by the Rochester Subway, and later President

Eisenhower’s interstate highway system, were all fundamentally infrastructures of settler colonialism and racial capitalism. They were designed, implemented, and operated as means of further the United States’ settler colonial and racial capitalist empire. These critical transportation infrastructures not only helped segregate Rochester’s urban and suburban geographies of housing, labour, transit along the lines of race and class, but they also played foundational roles in the metropolitan segregation of public schools.

While settler colonial history and analyses of racial capitalism have largely been left out of traditional school segregation research, a geographic and infrastructural reading of the school segregation crisis encourages new ways of remembering important local history that cannot, and should not, be forgotten. The ‘layering’ process by which infrastructures and geographies of settler colonialism and racial capitalism have made Rochester’s segregated landscape— from the Haudenosaunee trade route, to the Erie Canal, to the Rochester

Subway, and finally to the I-490 expressway—has been integral to the ongoing reproduction of the greater metropolitan area’s school segregation crisis. As scholar of nineteenth century

Haudenosaunee history Alyssa Mt. Pleasant (2016) argues in her article titled On

Familiarity, Settler Colonialism and Shifting Narratives, it is imperative that communities meaningfully acknowledge, and thoughtfully unpack, the ways in which their “cherished mythologies” of structural violence continue to play out through various geographic and infrastructural ‘afterlives’ (p. 371). The following sub-sections detail how settler colonialism and racial capitalism, and their attendant infrastructures and geographies, have shaped

complex entanglements of race, space, and power in both the central city and surrounding suburbs.

Racial Capitalism and the Racialization of Poverty

An analysis of Rochester’s segregated landscape would be incomplete without thorough inquiry into the role racial capitalism has played in the making of the city and suburbs. The term racial capitalism can be traced back to its originator Cedric J. Robinson, the author of Black Marxism: The Making of a Black Radical Tradition (Thomas, 2013). In

Black Marxism, Robinson develops racial capitalism as a conceptual framework in a marked effort to correct the racism and developmentalism that was embedded in Marx and Engels’ theorization of capitalism: “The development, organization, and expansion of capitalist society pursued essentially racial directions, so too did social ideology. As a material force…racialism would inevitably permeate the social structures emergent from capitalism. I have used the term ‘racial capitalism’ to refer…to the subsequent structure as historical agency” (Melamad, 2015; Robinson, 1983/2000, p. 2).

Importantly, the term racial capitalism recognizes that “capitalism is racial capitalism” (Melamad, 2015, p. 77). Capital only exists through accumulation, and capital can only accumulate by “producing and moving through relations of severe inequality among human groups— capitalists with the means of production/workers without the means of subsistence, creditors/debtors, and conquerors of land made property/ the dispossessed and removed” (Melamed, 2015, p. 77). This kind of accumulation — which is predicated on theft, disposability, and the unequal differentiation of humanness via the social construction of race — cements the inequitable relations that capitalism requires to generate profit by way of extraction (Melamed, 2015). Racial capitalist logics have featured centrally in

various projects of White supremacist capitalist development, ranging from colonialism and slavery to genocide (Smith, 2012). Notable afterlives and reenactments of racial capitalism include: the exploitation of racialized migrant workers (Lebaron, 2015), the racialization of the prison industrial complex (Gilmore, 2007; Gilmore, 2009), segregated and racialized property regimes (Taylor, 2012), and environmental racism (Pulido, 2016), among others.

In the case of Rochester, NY, as previously discussed, “primitive accumulation by

Indigenous dispossession” was the earliest form of racialized capital accumulation that was mobilized by White European settlers in Čunehstí•yu•. Unfortunately, the genocide of

Haudenosaunee people— and the legal, illegal and extralegal stripping of their land rights— proved only to be the beginning of racial capitalism’s obvious and more clandestine operations in the Greater Rochester Area. The economic exploitation of Black

Rochesterians, and later Black and Latino Rochesterians, in the city’s racially segmented labour market would operate to the benefit of the city’s White, land-owning industrialists, and to the detriment of those not racialized as White.

Largely thanks to the Erie Canal infrastructure, by the early 1900s Rochester had established itself as a nationally renowned nucleus for clothing and shoe manufacturing, brewing and food processing, photo and imagery technology, and the production of optical instruments (Kling, 2008). Notable companies to emerge from its diverse commercial landscape included George Eastman’s Kodak Company, Bausch and Lomb, Western Union

Telegraph Company, Xerox Corporation, Taylor Instruments, Gleason Works, and Paychex

(Rochester Sesquicentennial Inc., 1984). From the late nineteenth century through to the final post-World War II boom in the mid twentieth century, the city experienced

considerable economic prosperity and population growth as in-migration from Europe and the Southern United States increased (High, 2003).

When Rochester, NY was first incorporated as a city in 1834, the urban non-White population was 2.7% of the total (Goldberg, 1963). The earliest large migration of Black

Americans to the Greater Rochester Area came shortly after the U.S. Civil War. Newly freed

Black men and women from Culpeper, VA migrated to the Mumford-Caledonia area in rural

Monroe County to work as farm labourers (DuBois, 1994). Over time, many of these families acquired their own farms or relocated to the central city spurring continued migration from what is locally known as the “Culpeper Connection” (DuBois, 1994, p. 43).

A second major wave of Black migration to Rochester commenced in 1931, as the

Fish Brothers of nearby Sodus, NY in Wayne County began recruiting Black workers for agricultural jobs in their packing house (DuBois, 1994). Eventually the lack of employment opportunities in Sodus forced many migrants and their families to look for work in

Rochester. By 1930, there were approximately 3,000 Black residents in the city of Rochester

(Passer, 1956).

In the inter-war period (1916-1940), there was relatively little migration of Black

Americans from the U.S. South to Rochester compared to other industrial cities like

Chicago, Detroit, and Pittsburg (DuBois, 1994). Unlike these other cities, Rochester had fewer heavy industries that demanded large numbers of unskilled labourers and most Black

Americans who migrated from southern agricultural communities lacked the formal education required for the city’s high tech industries. Instead, racialized and gendered stratification of Rochester’s labour market relegated Black city residents to domestic and custodial work (DuBois, 1994). Black women were mostly restricted to domestic work (e.g.

child care, cooking, cleaning, and other social reproductive tasks) (see Glenn, 1992 for a complete definition of domestic work). Black men, on the other hand, were offered extremely low-paying custodial jobs (e.g. elevator operators, porters, janitors, and chauffeurs). The racialized and gendered service sector jobs that Black residents were relegated to were exceptionally under-valued, under-paid, and precarious in nature.

The Second Great Migration (1940-1970) of Black Americans from the U.S. South and other Eastern and Midwestern industrial cities brought the greatest influx of Black migrants to Rochester (DuBois, 1994; McKelvey, 1964). The city’s low unemployment rate, large industries, and community pride following the post-War economic boom made it an appealing destination for those fleeing economic stagnation in Southern agriculture and Jim

Crow (Wadhwani, 1997). After the Federal government created the Fair Employment

Practice Committee in 1943 and the New York State Commission Against Discrimination in

1945, there was a notable increase in highly educated Black newcomers to Rochester, who arrived to fill specialized posts in the cities’ institutions and factories (McKelvey, 1959).

Between 1950 and 1960, the city’s Black population tripled from 7,845 to 23,586 (Buttino &

Hare, 1984). By 1970, the Black population had doubled again to 49,647. In 1980,

Rochester’s Black population reached 62,332.

While Rochester’s economic prosperity was extremely lucrative for White residents employed in the city’s high-tech industries (e.g. Kodak, Bausch & Lomb, and Xerox) in the

1950s and 60s, under-employment and chronic joblessness in the Black community reached a critical point (Wadhwani, 1997). In the early 1960s, the citywide unemployment rate was a meager 1.8%, and more than 10,000 jobs were unfilled (Buttino & Hare, 1984). However, the unemployment rate amongst Black Rochesterians ranged around 14% during this same

period. At least four thousand Black city residents were unemployed, and several thousands more were intermittently searching for work (Buttino & Hare, 1984).

On the one hand, many Black newcomers who migrated to the city from agricultural communities in the South lacked the formal education and degree qualifications required for many of the industrial jobs that remained unfilled. On the other, Black Rochesterians argued that local companies and labour unions were racially discriminatory in their hiring and recruitment practices (McKelvey, 1964). Furthermore, members of the Black community insisted that there were insufficient job training opportunities that would allow them to upgrade their skills. In a deeply segmented local economy, the income disparity between

White and non-White workers in Rochester grew to $2,061: the highest of any city in New

York State at the time (Wadhwani, 1997).

Latino newcomers to Rochester similarly experienced great difficulty obtaining employment. Between 1952 and 1980, the Latino population in Rochester grew from about

2,000 to 16,000— an eight-fold increase (Buttino & Hare, 1984). Many Latino

Rochesterians, the majority of whom were Puerto Rican, lacked the formal education and job skills that Rochester’s high-tech, professional industries looked for when recruiting potential employees (Buttino & Hare, 1984). Language barriers and racial discrimination

(particularly towards darker-skinned, Afro-Latinos) also created obstacles to securing work.

A research study published in 1972 found that 8.8% of Latino men and 21% of Latino women in Rochester were unemployed (Buttino & Hare, 1984). Among those who were employed, 59.1% of Latino men held blue-collar jobs. The average weekly salary of Latino men surveyed was $115, and those paid hourly had a median wage of $2.80 per hour. Latino women, on the other hand, faced even greater wage disparities. The average weekly salary

of Latino women surveyed was $83, and those paid hourly had a median wage of $2.11 per hour.

The majority of Latino Rochesterians worked in the low-wage service industry or in low paying manufacturing operative jobs. In a labour market study of Monroe, Wayne,

Livingston and Orleans counties that was prepared by the National Planning Data

Corporation’s Industrial Management Council in the early 1970s, of the 10,232 engineers and technical workers who were employed in the area just thirteen were Puerto Rican

(Thompson, 1974, Apr. 2). The report also found that none of the managers or administrators in local retail trade or manufacturing industries were of Puerto Rican descent

(Thompson, 1974, Apr. 2).

These trends would continue well into the 1980s, as older industrial cities throughout the Great Lakes region began to experience significant economic downturn (High, 2003).

Beginning with technological advancements in automation and the steady transfer of manufacturing to the American Southeast and Southwest “Sun Belt” in the 1970s, the commercial productivity of older industrial cities fell into a steady decline (Bernard & Rice,

1983). These downward spiral further accelerated in the 1980s and 90s with the offshoring of industrial manufacturing to countries in the global South, the expansion of free trade agreements like NAFTA and the WTO, and the rise of the service economy in what were now considered “post-industrial” countries (Brenner, 2002). These economic and social transformations earned the region a new nickname— the “Rust Belt” (High, 2003) (See Map

Three).

Deindustrialization, population loss from city centers, and urban disinvestment followed (Brenner, 2002). From New England, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Central New

York to Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, and Missouri, cities throughout America’s former industrial heartland were adversely impacted by difficult economic transitions (Hobor, 2012). Alarming trends in child poverty, unemployment, infrastructure failures, and environmental injustice— like the lead-contaminated water crisis in Flint, MI— have become the defining characteristics of many older industrial cities

(Sadler & Highsmith, 2016). Pervasive racial and socio-economic inequity can be found across the Rust Belt today (Mallach, 2015).

Rochester’s contemporary geographies still bear the claw marks of deindustrialization, population loss, and targeted urban divestment. Racial capitalist processes have continually produced deep-rooted inequities, particularly in the areas of housing, economic opportunity, and public education. Today, the greater metropolitan area remains highly socio-spatially segregated along the lines of race, class, and geography.

U.S. Census data from the 2014 to 2018 period indicated that the city of Rochester’s overall poverty rate is ranked the third highest among the nation’s seventy-five largest metropolitan areas (at 32.6%) (ACT Rochester & RMAPI, 2019). Between 2013 and 2017 alone, Rochester’s child poverty rate rose from 50.5% to 51.9%, and the city’s rate of extreme poverty increased from 16.3% to 16.8% (ACT Rochester & RMAPI, 2018).

Furthermore, the percentage of Black and Latino children living in poverty within Rochester and the surrounding county is substantially higher than the state and national averages.

TABLE ONE: Children Living Below the Federal Poverty Line in Rochester, NY by Race/Ethnicity, 2014-2018 (ACT Rochester, n.d.; U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, 2018)

City of Rochester Monroe County New York State United States Asian 32% 13% 18% 11% Black or 56% 50% 30% 35% African American Latino or 55% 42% 31% 28% Hispanic White 43% 12% 15% 16%

The nature of child poverty in Rochester is both highly racialized and geographically uneven. Child poverty the Greater Rochester Area’s (GRA) is highly concentrated in the city itself. Eighty-one percent of Black children in the GRA who are living in poverty, and 66% of Latino children in the GRA who are living in poverty reside in the city of Rochester

(ACT 2018). By contrast, White children who are living in poverty are more geographically dispersed, with just 24% living in the city (ACT 2018).

Racial Capitalism, Redlining, and Housing Discrimination

The historic redlining of Rochester’s Third and Seventh Wards in 1939 by real estate appraisers under the auspices of the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) played a particularly strategic role in setting the foundation for the planned abandonment and targeted disinvestment that would unfold in the inner city during the 1960s and 1970s (Dewar &

Weber, 2012; Nelson et al., 2016) (see Map Six). In fact, city administrators and private lenders would frequently cite the HOLC’s appraisals in their own local segregationist planning efforts as a justification for the so-called “self-fulfilling prophecy” of urban decline.

The HOLC’s “Residential Security Map” of Rochester’s Seventh Ward broke the neighbourhood up into two zones (D1 and D2). Both were given a security grade of four, classified as “hazardous,” and shaded in red (Nelson et al., 2016) (see Map Seven).

An excerpt from the area appraiser’s “Description and Characteristics of Area D1” reads as follows (HOLC, 1939):

“This is almost the poorest section of the city with all the customary characteristics of an old central area though not to be classed as slum. The houses are not set back and either adjacent or built close together giving an air of congestion. Their appearance is quite dilapidated and quite unsightly. Joseph, Hudson, and Clinton Avenues as well as North Street are business. There are also scattered manufacturing plants throughout. There are complete city facilities and ample schools, churches, and stores. Transportation is good and location is convenient. Indicated future is further downward. Appeal is solely for those who can afford no better.”

Similarly, the HOLC divided the Third Ward into three zones: D5, D6, and C24.

Both zones D5 and D6 were given a security grade of four and classified as “hazardous.”

They were also shaded in red (See Map Eight). Zone C24 narrowly evaded redlining, and was given a grade of three and classified as “definitely declining.”

An excerpt from the appraiser’s “Description and Characteristics of Area D5” reads as follows (HOLC, 1939):

“Years ago this was a section of beautiful old homes. Some still remain— massive structures and still handsome but with no value except for conversion purposes. Negroes have comes into the area and today it is the poorest section of the entire city. The most that can be said for it is that it is convenient. The terrain is generally flat and the streets are shaded. There are all city facilities and plenty of schools, stores, and churches. Transportation is good. Dwellings are detached with small front lawns. Lots are of medium size. Pride of ownership is lacking. There are very few small

apartments and flats. Many properties have only nominal values for min. Cost shelter. There are several factories in the area of which the largest are Folmer- Graflex, Kee Lox, and Lawyers Cooperative Publishing Co.”

The HOLC appraisers recorded that no mortgage funds would be made in available in zones with security grades of four (Thompson, 2017; Nelson et al., 2016). This meant that

Seventh Ward and Third Ward residents’ access to home financing was severely limited.

By the early 1950s, Rochester’s Third and Seventh wards were firmly established as the epicenters of the Rochester’s Black community (Buttino & Hare, 1984) (see Map Four).

On the west side of the city, the Third Ward was home to many Black Rochesterians who worked as domestic workers in the nearby predominately White, affluent community of

Corn Hill, and as custodial staff in hotels, restaurants, banks, and other businesses downtown (DuBois, 1994) (see Map Five). The main thoroughfare, Clarissa St, gradually became a central business and social artery for Rochester’s Black community. Black-owned grocery stores, jazz clubs, a hotel, barbershops, dressmakers, contractors, doctors, dentists, insurance agencies, funeral services, publishing companies, a real estate firm, an architecture firm, the Memorial AME Zion Church (the oldest Black church in Rochester), and many more services were located on Clarissa St (Coles, 1940) (see Image One). The local chapter of the National Negro Congress, the Colored YWCA, and the Rochester Civic League could also be found on Clarissa St. (Coles, 1940).

In the city’s northeastern section, the Seventh Ward had gradually shifted from a

German Jewish enclave in the 1840s, to a predominately Irish neighbourhood at the turn of the twentieth century, to an Italian and Jewish enclave in the 1920s and 1930s, and finally to a predominately Black and Hispanic community by the 1950s (DuBois 1994) (see Map Six).

The Seventh Ward was also known as the Baden-Ormond area, with Baden St., Ormond St., and Joseph Avenue serving as its main thoroughfares. While the Third Ward was home to

Rochester’s older— historically and chronologically— Black community, the Seventh Ward was home to a younger Black population who arrived in Rochester during the Second Great

Migration (Buttino & Hare, 1984).

By the late 1950s, 80% of Black Rochesterians lived in the Third and Seventh Wards

(Buttino & Hare, 1984). Although these neighbourhoods were socially and culturally robust, there were widespread infrastructural failures. A 1958 report by the New York State

Commission Against Discrimination found that 28% of units in these neighborhoods had no running water and 20% had no private bathroom (Grier & Grier, 1958). The authors of the report found that 35% of the homes were “deteriorated and dilapidated.” Monthly rents were also 30% higher in the Seventh and Third Wards than in the predominately White neighborhoods, which excluded the city’s Black residents (Grier & Grier, 1958). In 1960, the average monthly rent for a White Rochesterian was $68, while the average monthly rent for a Black Rochesterian was $94 (Wadhwani, 1997).

Much of the housing that was available to Black newcomers were cramped kitchenette apartments (Browne & Eison, 2006). The kitchenette apartment was a design concept developed by predominately White landlords in Northern industrial cities as a way of capitalizing on the racially segregated housing market (Shabazz, 2015). Beginning in the

Great Depression and continuing well into the post World War II era, modestly sized single- family homes in the Third and Seventh Wards were subdivided into multiple multi- unit dwellings (Browne & Eison, 2006; McKelvey, 1959). This model created significant overcrowding and inadequate access to basic necessities, which gave rise to a whole range

of health and safety concerns (Johnson, 1932). Often, entire families would live in a space that would ordinarily serve a single person. In Rochester’s predominately Black neighbourhoods, limited access to shared bathrooms, hazardous gas stoves, sanitation issues, absentee property managers, and negligent landlords became commonplace (Browne &

Eison, 2006).

In Twelve Million Black Voices: A Folk History of the Negro in the United States of

America (1947), Richard Wright describes the conditions of kitchenette apartments in

Northern US cities:

“Sometimes five or six of us live in a one-room kitchenette, a place where simple folk such as we should never be held captive. A war sets up in our emotions: one part of our feelings tells us that it is good to be in the city, that we have a chance at life here, that we need but turn a corner to become a stranger, that we no longer need to bow and dodge at the sight of the Lords of the Land. Another part of our feelings tells us that, in terms of worry and strain, the cost of living in the kitchenettes is too high, that the city heaps too much responsibility upon us and gives us too little security in return. The kitchenette is the author of the glad tidings that new suckers are in town, ready to be cheated, plundered, and put in their places” (p. 104).

A report by the State of New York’s Commission Against Discrimination titled

Negroes in Five New York Cities: A Study of the Problems, Achievements, and Trends found that Rochester had “the most rigid barriers [of any Upstate city] against housing…to

Negroes” (Grier & Grier, 1958; Wadhwani, 1997, p. 61). A separate study of fifty-seven middle-class Black families in Monroe County who lived in White majority neighbourhoods uncovered similar findings (Passer, 1956). Those surveyed expressed that the typical search for a home ranged from two to three years, and that selection was highly limited. Black families who wished to purchase homes in predominately White neighbourhoods could

sometimes find relatively run-down homes on main thoroughfares or radial streets in particular parts of the city, but buying a house in the suburbs was nearly impossible (Passer,

1956). This study also found that, “Educated Negroes with sufficient income believe they have a right to live in a white neighborhood and are willing to do so even if their neighbors are hostile. Most white neighbors of Negro families are more hostile to them than the

Negroes themselves realize” (Passer, 1956). Following this study, Rochester’s local chapter of the NAACP helped prepare a list of homeowners who were willing to sell their homes to

Black people (McKelvey, 1964).

Rochester was one of the last cities in New York State to build affordable public housing. In 1952, the city finished construction on its first housing project: the Hanover

Houses. The six-story Hanover Houses were located at the intersections of Upper Falls Blvd and Joseph Ave in the Seventh Ward, near the Baden St. Settlement House: an urban hub for newcomers that historically played a significant role in supporting multicultural community life amongst Rochester’s Black American and White immigrant communities (Buttino &

Hare, 1984; DuBois, 1994). Interestingly, the original proposed site for the housing project was a spacious tract of land on the city’s outskirts that sat adjacent to a neighbourhood that was home to a considerably large community of European immigrants (McKelvey, 1964).

However, the residents of this adjoining community protested the relocation of “slum- dwellers” and “N******” to their neighbourhood (McKelvey, 1964, p. 7).

With additional lobbying from the City’s Department of Neighborhood Services of the Council of Social Agencies and community grassroots organizing, proposals for expansion of low-rent subsidized housing in Rochester were commissioned (Democrat &

Chronicle, 1952 Jan. 23). Housing advocates faced considerable obstacles on account of the

HOLC’s 1939 appraisal of the area. HOLC’s redlining of the Seventh Ward influenced urban planners decision-making process surrounding zoning and land use planning. In an article titled “Planning Commission Moves for Rezoning Kelly-Ormond Area” which appeared in Rochester’s local Democrat & Chronicle (D&C) newspaper on February 6, 1952 discusses the implications of these historic decisions. At the time when the article was written, Elmer B. Milliman, president of the Central Trust Company, led the Mayor Dicker’s

Citizens Planning Committee. In the following quotation the Citizens Planning Committee is referred to as “Millman’s committee”:

“Millman’s committee is exploring the possibilities of financing home construction in the area by private capital after the examples set by the civic-minded local and banking interests in constructing several medium-rent projects immediately following World War II. Members of the Milliman committee point out, however, that no private capital would be interested under present conditions as present zoning lines are drawn on the basis of “blighted area” conditions. The Milliman committee proposed that the rezoning be drawn so that industrial and residential areas would be sharply defined with a view to propose future developments.”

In 1959, the Chatham Garden— a 250-apartment housing development— was erected as part of the Baden-Ormond urban renewal program (Democrat & Chronicle, 1958

May 21). While executive director of the Rochester Rehabilitation Commission, John A.

Dale, promised that, “…Chatham Gardens would be managed better than any other project in the city,” Rochester’s Black community was not of a similar view (Democrat &

Chronicle, 1958 May 21). Many Black residents of the Baden-Ormond area did not want to live in either the Hanover Houses or Chatham Gardens (Deutsch, 1958). Among the approximately 797 families who were facing displacement and forced relocation as part of a seven million dollar “slum clearance program” in the Seventh Ward, there was “…very little

interest in either public housing (Hanover Houses) or in Chatham apartments” (Deutsch,

1958).

In the winter and spring of 1958, the Office of the City Relocation interviewed 474 of the 797 affected families who lived in the 60-acre that was marked for demolition

(Deutsch, 1958). The interview findings showed that most families who were residing in the portions of the Baden-Ormond that were targeted for urban renewal wanted to rent homes in the northeast section of the city (in the Sixteenth Ward and towards Clifford Avenue), and fewer (around 11%) wished to move to the city’s west side (Deutsch, 1958). One hundred of the 474 families interviewed hoped to buy a home in the neighbourhood they would relocate to if they were able to obtain long-term, low-interest mortgage financing. In response to the community members’ stated preference, the Director of Relocation, Russell M. Traunstein, stated, “that point of view does not necessarily indicate the kind of housing they will be able to get or will be willing to accept when relocation actually takes place” (Deutsch, 1958).

Ultimately, the Baden-Ormond urban renewal program would displace 850 families, and only build enough new housing for 256 families. The construction of I-490 expressway in the 1950s/60s/70s would also result in the razing of dozens of Black-owned businesses along Clarissa Street and the demolition of nearly 1,400 housing units in the Third Ward neighbourhood.

Director Traunstein’s dismissiveness was a stance mirrored by many other city planners and officials of the urban renewal era. In his report on Rochester’s 1964 uprising in the Third and Seventh Wards, City Manager P.W. Homer spoke optimistically about the pending “…Third Ward urban renewal plans, aimed at improving and conserving existing structures and, hopefully, eliminating ghetto conditions” (Homer, 1965, p. 7). He went on to

say, “it is unrealistic, however, to expect the City of Rochester or its government, or both, to provide all of the housing needed or desired by low-income families,” and he put out a call for greater support from the private sector and surrounding suburban communities in the urban charge for affordable housing (Homer, 1965). Homer insisted that the alternative to greater regional collaboration was, “a City of low-income families and suburbs of middle- and upper- income persons” (Homer, 1965, p. 7-8). City Historian Blake McKelvey’s (1964) report titled The Rochester Riots: A Crisis in Civil Rights, Juvenile Delinquency, or

“Cityatrics”? shared a similarly apathetic tone on the housing crisis in Rochester’s inner city. In his concluding remarks he states, “All American cities have slum areas where the triple maladies of segregation, urban decay, and juvenile delinquency pose a serious threat.

These are the basic characteristics of a stage in urban growth that calls for the development of a new approach…” (McKelvey, 1964, p. 37). To echo James Baldwin’s astute comment in a 1963 interview with Kenneth Clark, in Rochester, “urban renewal meant Negro removal.”

Latino newcomers to Rochester were also targeted of dispossession and exploitation.

Latino Rochestarians predominately settled in the Davis and Finney street area, and in the

Lewis and Ontario Street section of the inner city (Sixteenth Ward) (Buttino & Hare, 1984)

(see Map Nine). Others clustered in the streets around North Clinton, which encompass parts of the Fifth, Seventh and Eighth Wards (Buttino & Hare, 1984) (see Map Ten). A sizeable, predominately Latino residential community also formed on the west side of the city

(Second and Ninth Wards) in the Brown Square neighbourhood and the Lyell-Saratoga area, which was once a majority Italian neighbourhood (Buttino & Hare, 1984) (see Map Eleven).

In partial response to their consistent exclusion from subsidized housing projects, one of Rochester’s leading Latino community groups— the Ibero-American Action

League— began organizing for the construction of an affordable housing development that could serve the city’s growing population of Puerto Rican residents. In an article published in the Democrat & Chronicle titled “Rochester Puerto Ricans are Working Toward ‘New

Era,’” assistant director of the Hispanic Businessmen’s Association, Pedro Maneiro, explained why economic empowerment and quality housing were critically needed in the

Latino community: “Blacks get the crumbs, but Puerto Ricans get what’s left of the crumbs…How many Puerto Ricans and Blacks are in top jobs making money like everyone else?” (Thompson, 1974, Apr. 2).

In the early 1970s, the Ibero-American Action League and the New York State

Urban Development Corporation began to plan what is believed to be the first Puerto Rican- sponsored housing project of its kind in the United States (Buttino & Hare, 1984). Located off North Clinton Avenue, the 153-unit complex named Los Flamboyanes was comprised of a mixture of high-rise and town house structures, and a central plaza. The five million dollar project commenced in 1972 and construction was completed in 1974 (Buttino & Hare,

1984). By 1974, Rochester’s Puerto Rican communities were home to approximately fifty grocery stories, six restaurants, one warehouse, one boutique, and Los Flamboyanes

(Thompson, 1974, Apr. 2). However, demand for affordable housing still exceeded supply.

The Birth and Rebirth of School Segregation

Public education in Rochester was initially conceived as a segregated system. In

1841, a legislative act created the Rochester Board of Education and authorized the creation of one or two separate schools for Black children residing in the city (McKelvey, 1959). The

Board, headed by Levi A. Ward, chose a site in the northwest quarter of the Third Ward where several Black families lived at the time (McKelvey, 1959).

This arrangement, however, was highly unsatisfactory to students and their parents.

Black children who lived on the east side of the city had to travel by foot to attend this west side school. After a meeting at the downtown Court House in December 1849, the Board created a committee to recommend action on the issue. Local advocates from the abolitionist movement demanded that Black children be granted admission to the regular District schools (McKelvey, 1959). Frederick Douglass, a notable leader in the national abolition movement and Rochester resident, joined Everard Peck and William Bloss in forcing the

Board to designate School No. 13 on the east side of the city as an integrated school. At the

National Negro Convention, which met in Rochester in July 1853, Douglass served as the chairman of the resolutions committee that drafted a striking “Declaration of Sentiments.”

As free American citizens they declared that, “the doors of the school house, the workshop, the church, the college, shall be thrown open as freely for our children as to the children of other members of the community,” and that, “the White and Black may stand on an equal footing before the laws of the land” (McKelvey, 1959, p. 8).

In 1857, legislation that mandated statewide integration was passed in Albany, and the all Black school was formally closed (Grenier & Morry, 2015). However, since the

Rochester City School District was organized around a neighbourhood attendance model— where student enrollment is restricted based on residential address—intense housing segregation along the lines of race and class bolstered school segregation along these same lines (Goldberg, 1963; Passer, 1956). Consequently, the vast majority of RCSD schools

were either overwhelmingly White or overwhelmingly non-White from the 1850s well into the mid-twentieth century.

In 1954, the United States Supreme Court ruled that de jure (mandated by law) racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional in the landmark Brown v. Board of

Education of Topeka, Kansas case; overturning the “separate but equal” ruling of Plessy v.

Ferguson (1896) (Guinier, 2004). The passage of The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the

Elementary and Secondary Act (ESEA) of 1965 by US Congress built further momentum for state and local governments to pursue more vigorous campaigns to desegregate schools

(George & Darling-Hammond, 2019). Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, hundreds of school districts around the country were placed under court-ordered desegregation plans, and strict compliance with federal civil rights laws was required to receive much needed ESEA funding for desegregation policies and initiatives (George & Darling-Hammond, 2019;

Reardon, Grewal, Kalogrides & Greenberg, 2012).

In school districts where desegregation orders were not handed down by federal or state courts, superintendents and boards of education were left to develop their own school desegregation plans on a voluntary basis (Finnigan et al., 2015). This was the case in many older industrial cities of the Northeast and Midwest, including Rochester, NY. In these districts, voluntary plans most often involved experimental policy initiatives or the creation of new state laws, both of which were supported by state and federal funding including the

Title I and Title III grant programs (Finnigan et al., 2015).

The appointment of two Commissioners of Education— James Allen and Ewald

Nyquist— to New York State Board of Regents and the New York State Department of

Education kick started the state’s twenty-year long school desegregation campaign (Kuscera

& Orfield, 2014). In New York State, school desegregation moved to the forefront of education policy after the NYS Board of Regents formally condemned school segregation in

January of 1961 (League of Women Voters of Monroe County, 1967). The announcement stated:

“Modern psychological knowledge indicates that schools enrolling students largely of homogenous ethnic origin may damage the personality of minority group children. Such schools decrease their motivation and thus impair the ability to learn. Public education in such a setting is socially unrealistic, blocks the attainment of the goals of democratic education and is wasteful of manpower and talent, whether this situation occurs by law or by fact.”

This declaration was the first to call for an end to segregation in New York’s public schools, even if the segregation in question was classified as “unintended” or de facto by local authorities. The policy marked the beginning of a sweeping chain of actions and reactions by school boards under appreciable pressure to desegregate.

The NYS Board of Regent’s policy announcement, coupled with a civil action lawsuit filed by twenty-two children in ten families against the Rochester Board of

Education and the Office of Superintendent Robert L. Springer in May of 1962, catalyzed the Rochester City School District to begin addressing school segregation more systematically (Buttino & Hare, 1984). New York State Education Commissioner Dr. James

E. S Jr.’s request to all chief local school administrators and board of education presidents titled “Racial Imbalance in Schools” in June 1963 further reinforced that complacency and inaction surrounding school desegregation would thereafter be understood as non- compliance (Goldberg, 1963). By September 1st of that year, all chief local school

administrators and board presidents were required to submit the following documentation to

Commissioner Allen:

1. A statement on the existing racial imbalance. 2. A statement of Board policy with respect to the maintenance of racial imbalance in schools. 3. A report of progress made towards eliminating it. 4. A plan for further action, including estimates of the additional cost, if any, and of the time required to carry out this plan. Commissioner Allen’s “Racial Imbalance in Schools” inquiry defined a racially imbalanced school as one with 50% or more Black student enrollment. This quantification of “racial imbalance” was one of the first instances where a metric for measuring racial segregation was formally established for New York public schools. The figure provided districts with a precise target point in a way that was unprecedented (Buttino & Hare, 1984).

From 1961 through the mid-1980s, Rochester’s City School District and Board of

Education would create several desegregation policies and initiatives both within and between school districts in Monroe County. These included open enrollment policies and intra-district bussing, grade reorganization plans, in-school and out-of-school educational enrichment programs, magnet and alternative schools, and a pioneering inter-district transfer program (Buttino & Hare, 1984).

Rochester’s Urban-Suburban program helped position the city as an early leader in school desegregation policy innovation. School Management periodical’s Desegregation: 10

Blueprints for Action (1966) article praised the City School District’s Urban-Suburban partnership with the West Irondequoit Central School District (School Management, 1996).

The U.S. Office of Education’s (1969) Planning for Educational Change Volume IV: How

Five Cities Desegregated manual similarly celebrated Rochester for its inspiring local leadership and robust community engagement in the city’s Project UNIQUE (“United Now

for Integrated Quality Urban-Suburban Education”) desegregation initiatives (also see

Young & Staff, 1969). Additionally, USITP became an important model for the eight interdistrict policy initiatives that would follow in its footsteps (Finnigan & Holme, 2015). Two of the subsequent inter-district transfer programs were established through the voluntary creation of new state laws, as was the case in Rochester. These included the Metropolitan

Council for Educational Opportunity (METCO) program in Boston, MA and the Nebraska

(Omaha Metro) Learning Community. Six of the remaining programs were established through federal or state court-mandated desegregation orders. These included the Project

Concern (later renamed Project Choice) in Hartford, CT, Chapter 220 program in

Milwaukee, WI, the Indianapolis-Suburban Township Plan in Indianapolis, IN, West Metro

Education Program and Choice is Yours (CIY) in Minneapolis, MN, the Tinsley Transfer

Program in East Palo Alto, CA, and the St. Louis Voluntary Inter-District Choice Plan in St.

Louis, MO (Finnigan et al., 2015; Wells et. al, 2009).

Despite Rochester’s early success, following the 1971-1972 academic year— which was the height of racial balance in the City School District— segregation was back on the rise by the early 1980s when the city schools were more segregated than they had been prior to the district’s initial launch of its desegregation initiatives in the mid-1960s (Buttino &

Hare, 1984). The re-segregation trend was partly attributed to the Board of Education’s vote to abandon mandatory busing for school desegregation in favor of open enrollment that was passed in the 1972 academic year (Buttino & Hare, 1984). Using the Federal guideline that defined a segregated school as one where, “the percentage of racial minority students is ten percent greater than the percentage of racial minority students in the district as a whole,” one high school and nine elementary schools in the City School District were segregated in 1963

(Buttino & Hare, 1984, p. 234). Using these same criteria, one high school, one junior high school, and thirteen elementary schools in the City School District were segregated in the

1982-1983 academic year.

Nationally, desegregation remained at its high point until roughly 1988 (Orfield,

Bachmeier, James & Eitle, 1997). During the Reagan administration (1981-1989), the NYS

Department of Education and Board of Regents shifted their focus away from desegregation efforts and instead focused on policies and initiatives like school choice, charter schools, and accountability systems (Kuscera & Orfield, 2014). Educational reform in the post-civil rights era at both the federal and state policy levels became increasing centered around market-oriented frameworks including: raising standards, implementing the Common Core test, intensely testing students using standardized assessments, and creating harsh sanctions for teachers and administrations, among others (Kuscera & Orfield, 2014). Most of these reforms were enacted without strong civil rights standards or strategies for promoting school desegregation, and in many cases actively undermined desegregation efforts (Kuscera &

Orfield, 2014). U.S. Supreme Court rulings in the Board of Education of Oklahoma v.

Dowell (1991), Freeman v. Pitts (1992), and Missouri v. Jenkins (1995) cases functioned to further accelerate urban and suburban districts’ targeted abandonment of desegregation plans; cementing major legal precedents for state-sanctioned school resegregation in the process (Orfield & Yun, 1999).

During the Clinton Administration (1993-2001), the U.S. saw the largest increases in school segregation in the last half century (Orfield & Yun, 1999). In Rochester, suburbanization and White flight in the 1960s and 1970s contributed to a steady loss of tax revenue in the city; prompting District budget cuts and school closures in the 1980s and

1990s (Buttino & Hare, 1984). Many of the greater Rochester area’s (GRA) school desegregation policies and programs— which often required additional funds to cover the cost of student transportation, school infrastructure improvements, and additional teaching staff and administrative personnel hiring— could not survive with municipal financing alone. Market-based reform measures at the state and national level shifted local priority areas and added new pressures the GRA’s public schools (Orfield & Yun, 1999). The proliferation of school choice policies and the emergence of the charter school movement would create further seismic changes in local geographies of education (Shanker, 1988).

Simultaneously, Black and Hispanic migration to Rochester— from the rural

Southern U.S. and large Northern metropolitan areas like New York City, as well as from

Latin America and the Caribbean— increased dramatically (Buttino & Hare, 1984). The combination of these two demographic shifts precipitated the enormous drop in the White students’ overall share of the City School District’s student population (Buttino & Hare,

1984). As White student enrollment in the inner and peripheral city schools fell, non-White student enrollment rose substantially.

By way of illustration, in the 1962-1963 academic year the City School District’s student population was 23% non-White and 77% White at the elementary level, and 10% non-White and 90% White at the secondary level (Goldberg, 1963). Just two decades later, in the 1982-1983 academic year, the District’s student population was 62% non-White and

38% White (Buttino & Hare, 1984). Thirty-seven years later, in the 2019-2020 academic year, the City School District’s student population was 90% non-White and 10% White

(Buttino & Hare, 1984).

From the late 1980s onwards, a growing number of Black and Latino families, primarily middle-class, have left urban areas in pursuit of better housing and educational opportunities in Rochester’s surrounding suburbs (Kuscera & Orfield, 2014). In fewer cases, some upper-middle class and affluent White families have moved back to historically high- income or newly gentrifying parts of the city (Kuscera & Orfield, 2014). Concurrently, families who are long time residents of predominately White and affluent suburban communities have launched various municipal planning strategies, such as high property taxes, as a means of safeguarding their socio-economic exclusivity and racial homogeneity

(Kuscera & Orfield, 2014; Monroe County Office of Management and Budget, 2020).

From 1989 to 2010, the Rochester City School District (RCSD) experienced a dramatic decline in White student enrollment; the greatest decrease of Upstate New York’s

Big Four (which includes Albany, Syracuse, and Buffalo in addition to Rochester) (Kuscera

& Orfield, 2014). All other racial groups saw an increase in proportional enrollment across the GRA, with the share of Black and Latino student enrollment figures increasing most significantly in suburban, rather than urban, schools (Kuscera & Orfield, 2014).

TABLE TWO: Public School Enrollment by Race in Urban and Suburban Public Schools in the Greater Rochester Area, 1989-2010 (Kuscera & Orfield, 2014; US Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, Common Core of Data, Public Elementary/Secondary School Universe Survey Data)

Urban Schools Suburban Schools Dates White Black Latino Asian White Black Latino Asian

1989- 34.4% 49.1% 13.7% 2.4% 92.5% 3.6% 1.1% 2.6%

1990

1999- 24.3% 55.8% 17.3% 2.2% 90.7% 4.1% 2.0% 3.0%

2000

2010- 15.0% 59.7% 21.4% 3.0% 82.8% 7.0% 4.7% 4.2%

2011

During this same period, Black and Latino students experienced the greatest concentration of growth in intensely segregated schools (90-100% non-White enrollment).

In the 2010-2011 academic year, 48% of Black students and 39% of Latino students attended intensely segregated school (up 13% and 16%, respectively, from the 1999-2000 figures) (Kuscera & Orfield, 2014). Concurrently, the share of Black and Latino students in the GRA’s multiracial schools decreased between 1989 and 2010. Kuscera and Orfield

(2014) also found that whereas White students in the GRA are typically underexposed to

Black and Latino students (e.g. the typical White student in the GRA attended a school where fewer than 10% of students are Black), Latino student exposure to Black students was significantly higher than the White student exposure to Black students. This finding is reflective of a long-standing trend in Black and Latino students being segregated together in predominately non-White schools.

Furthermore, Black and Latino students in the GRA were also more likely to attend public schools with disproportionally high distribution of low-income students (Kuscera &

Orfield, 2014).

TABLE THREE: Student Exposure Rates to Low-Income Student in Public Schools in the Greater Rochester Area, 1999-2000 and 2010-2011 (Kuscera & Orfield, 2014; US Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, Common Core of Data, Public Elementary/Secondary School Universe Survey Data)

Dates Low-Income White Student Black Student Latino Student Students Share Exposure to Exposure to Exposure to of Total Student Low-Income Low-Income Low-Income Enrollment Students Students Students 1999-2000 28.3% 19.5% 66.3% *

2010-2011 38.8% 28.1% 70.0% 63.3%

In the Rochester City School District (RCSD), the achievement gap between economically disadvantaged (ED) and non-economically disadvantaged students (non-ED) has remained significant across cohorts (RCSD Office of Accountability, 2018). An economically disadvantaged student is defined by the RCSD as one who is eligible for free or reduced priced meals under the National School Lunch and Child Nutrition Program

(RCSD, 2018).

For example, there was a 15% gap in the high school graduation rate between ED

(48%) and non-ED (63%) students in the 2015 cohort (RCSD, 2018). In the 2016 cohort, the gap increased to 18%, with 50% of all ED students and 68% of all non-ED student in the

District graduating high school in four years. Non-ED students were also more likely to earn an Advanced Regents NYS high school diploma or standard Regents NYS high school diploma, than ED students (RCSD, 2018). At the elementary and middle school levels, discrepancies in ED and non-EDs performance on Grades 3-8 ELA and Mathematics tests

similarly indicative of an achievement gap between these two segments of the student population (RCSD, 2018).

In August 2018, the New York State Education Department (NYSED) appointed

Dr. Jaime R. Aquino to review the RCSD’s current operations and to provide support in improving the District’s organizational structure (Aquino, 2018). Looking to 2017 data, the

Rochester City School District had the highest percentage of schools identified as “Priority”

(54%) of any district in New York State, and had the second lowest 4-year, 5-year, and 6- year graduation rates of any district in New York State with thirty-plus students in a cohort

(Aquino, 2018). In 2018, the RCSD’s four-year graduation rate was only 59%, and proficiency rates for Grades 3-8 in ELA and Math were 11.4% and 10.7%, respectively

(Aquino, 2018).

In the introductory section of Dr. Aquino’s report, the following quote from the

District’s Path Forward: 10-year Education and Facilities Master Plan was included to illustrate the persistence of educational inequity in Rochester:

“Of all topics, racial equity was a reoccurring theme. Overall, community members shared there often seems to be a disconnect with teachers and staff regarding racial equity. Community members nearly unanimously shared that they feel unwelcome and there seems to be prevalent racial bias within our school community. To achieve racial parity, the community would like to employ more teachers of color, either homegrown, nationally, or pulling from the recent crisis in Puerto Rico. Residents also spoke about the importance of offering incentives for recruitment, while students felt that racial inequity led to poorer outcomes for students” (Aquino, 2018, p. 14).

While Rochester’s voluntary school desegregation program, the Urban-Suburban

Interdistrict Transfer Program (Urban-Suburban), remains active today, it only effects about

1% of all racial minority students who reside in the city (Kuscera & Orfield, 2014). There is also considerably more demand amongst student applicants than there are spots available, with just ten percent of applicants gaining a seat at a suburban school (Finnigan & Holme,

2015). Additionally, the program no longer operates bi-directionally. The two-way component of the Urban-Suburban program ended in 1984 following budget cuts and the lack of interest amongst suburban parents to accept transfers to any but three city schools

(Finnigan & Stewart, 2009). Today, only city students are transferred to suburban schools.

Although there have been some minor successes in the struggle for school desegregation in the new millennium, decades of legal, de facto segregation continue to shape Rochester’s urban and suburban schools. In an article published in the Democrat &

Chronicle by education staff writer Justin Murphy on the current school segregation crisis in

Rochester in June 2018, Murphy included a quote from Justice Thurgood Marshall’s dissent in the landmark 1974 Milliken v. Bradley U.S. Supreme Court case which reversed the

Michigan lower courts plans to desegregation schools in metropolitan Detroit, and in turn severely limited the possibility of lasting urban-suburban desegregation initiatives that crossed school district boundaries (Orfield, Backmeier, James & Eitle, 1997):

“In the short run, it may seem to be the easier course to allow our great metropolitan areas to be divided up each into two cities— one White, the other Black— but it is a course, I predict, our people will ultimately regret” (Murphy, 2018).

In the case of Rochester, NY, Justice Marshall’s prophecy has tragically come into full fruition. Today, the Rochester City School District’s student population is 58% Black,

28% Latino, 10% White, and 4% Asian, Pacific Islander or Native Hawaiian (Groeger,

Waldman & Eads, 2018). By contrast, the nearby Webster Central School District— a

suburb of Rochester that is a short twenty-minute drive away from the central city— is 85%

White, 5% Latino, 4% Asian, Pacific Islander or Native Hawaiian, 3% Black, and 2% two or more races (Groeger, Waldman & Eads, 2018). In Rochester, 85% of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, whereas in Webster, just 15% of students qualify for free or reduced-priced lunch. The Greater Rochester Area’s central city and surrounding suburbs, and their respective public education systems, have been divided into two cities— one is predominately White and high income, and the other is predominately non-White and low income.

SPATIAL COLLAGE AND SCHOOL DESEGREGATION

Introduction to Spatial Collage

In the June 1978 edition of The Urban Review, an academic journal on urban public education, several prominent school segregation researchers including Orfield (1978), Epps

(1978), Taylor (1978), and Colman (1978) drew important connections between the segregated nature of schooling, housing, employment, and transportation in U.S. metropolitan areas. This particular issue of The Urban Review was significant at the time it was published because it worked to expand the imaginations of the journal’s target audience

(urban teachers, school administrators, and academic scholars) beyond a narrow view of busing as a “technical fix” for school segregation, and towards a more robust conceptualization of the crisis and its potential, multi-thematic remedies. Notably, like

Hunter (2010, 2016, and 2019) and Woods (2017), these school segregation researchers rigorously examined the legal, socio-political, and economic histories that underpin persistent structural inequities in public education systems including exclusionary zoning and insufficiently funded public housing projects. Foregrounding and contextualizing the school segregation struggle in this way, these authors broke down taken-for-granted temporal and thematic silos (e.g. a rigid distinction between history/the contemporary and between school/housing/employment/transportation segregation) to re-emphasize that complete, authentic school desegregation demands much more than a logistical re- assignment of White and non-White students. What powerfully emerged from Orfield

(1978), Epps (1978), Taylor (1978), and Colman (1978)’s respective papers in this special issue, is the resounding assertion that there is much more at stake, both temporally and thematically, when it comes to the de/segregation of schools than what initially meet the

eye. While the national public discourse and mass media in the 1960s/1970s focused much of their news coverage on the U.S. South, busing, and White anxieties about integration, these scholars—and their larger bodies of academic work— served as an important reminder that a wider set of demands (e.g. the desegregation of housing, transportation, employment opportunities, adult education etc.) and a broader range of proposed solutions to the school segregation crisis (e.g. the metropolitan reorganization of school districts, interdistrict transfer programs, early childhood education initiatives, the creation of alternative and magnet schools, greater civic and industry participation in the provisioning of public education etc.) have long been a part of the desegregation movement.

My reading of June 1978 edition of The Urban Review, in conjunction with my literature review of critical infrastructure studies and the geographies of education canon as it relates to school segregation, greatly influenced the genesis of my conceptual understanding of Rochester’s uniquely situated school segregation crisis. In this section, I offer a theory that I call spatial collage. I undertook this project of theory generation as a way of building on existing trans-disciplinary thought on the crisis of school segregation, and in an deliberate effort to foster greater cross-pollination between mainstream education research and critical geography and infrastructure studies.

Spatial collage is theory that recognizes the interaction of economic, political, and socio-cultural geographies through infrastructure as a powerful and transformative force of world making. Like Berlant’s (2016) reading of infrastructure as “the life world of structure,” spatial collage posits the organization and coordination of geographies through infrastructure to be the result of life sustaining, life ending, or otherwise life altering disruptions (which Berlant references as “glitches”) (p. 393). In particular, the spatial

collage framework functions as a means of visualizing the ways in which geographic assemblages that are meant to support societal welfare instead become sites of disenfranchisement through the intervention of socio-spatial processes like settler colonialism and racial capitalism. When infrastructures are then brought in to ‘glue’ these fragmented geographies and societal institutions back together, new compositions of life worlds and structures now have the potential to redress and repair that which was once broken. The theory itself has a range of applications, but for the purpose of this thesis, I will examine its specific relevance to research on geographies of education, and the school segregation crisis in Rochester, NY.

The Six Components of Spatial Collage

The spatial collage framework uses metaphoric language to help the reader visualize the interplay of geographies, socio-spatial processes, and infrastructures in the social world.

The six components of spatial collage are presented individually in correspondence with elements of collage in the visual arts, however no singular component of the spatial collage framework is wholly independent. All six elements of spatial collage are to be understood in relation to each other. For example, geographies (“the paper”) are ultimately compromised of both socio-spatial processes (“the scissors”) and infrastructures (“the glue”), and all three elements should be conceptualized holistically. The six main components to the spatial collage theory are as follows:

1. The paper. “The paper” refers to the various economic, political, and socio-

cultural geographies that shape societies and their composite institutions. These

include geographies of labour, education, health care, governance, and

interpersonal relations (e.g. communal, familial, or religious).

2. The scissors. “The scissors” are socio-spatial processes that ‘cut’ these

geographies into fragments. Socio-spatial processes include settler colonialism,

racial capitalism, social reproduction, and uneven urban development, among

others. They ‘cut’ geographies and institutions through their obvious, and more

clandestine, operations. As complex organizing logics, socio-spatial processes

often transpire in-between dichotomies of exclusion/inclusion,

oppression/liberation, and exploitation/cooperation.

3. The surface. “The surface” is the space wherein which these geographies,

fragmented by socio-spatial processes, take and make place.

4. The initial arrangement. “The scissors” cut “the paper” into fragments, and the

sections of these various fragments are then carefully arranged on “the surface.”

“The initial arrangement” refers to the ways in which geographies of labour,

education, health care, governance, and interpersonal relations (“the paper”) are

‘cut’ into fragments by socio-spatial processes like settler colonialism, racial

capitalism, social reproduction, and uneven urban development (“the scissors”),

and rearranged in space (“the surface”).

5. The glue. Infrastructures —ranging from housing, policing, schools, and

emergency services to power grids, water supply networks, railroads, highways,

buses, and information and communication technologies (ICTs)— ‘glue’ “the

initial arrangement” onto “the surface.” Infrastructures connect, organize,

transport, and circulate geographies of labour, education, health care,

governance, and interpersonal relations (“the paper”) that have been ‘cut’ by

socio-spatial processes (e.g. settler colonialism, racial capitalism, social

reproduction, and uneven urban development), by ‘gluing’ their rearranged

fragments in to place (“the surface”). Infrastructures adhere fragmented, and

rearranged, geographies together. In turn, these infrastructures play a critical role

in world making.

6. The composition. After “the paper” has been cut, arranged, and glued to “the

surface,” it has been fully composed and it is ready for presentation. Any given

piece of spatial collage will be differently interpreted, experienced, and felt by

human actors depending on their intersectional relationships to its contents.

Though a spatial collage is comprised of fragmented pieces, it is experienced

holistically as a unified composition. This sense of wholeness reflects the ways in

which human actors experience their world as a complex totality, rather than a

simple sum of parts. Furthermore, the composition stage of a spatial collage is

ongoing and mutating. No piece of spatial collage is ever static or truly complete.

Human actors can revise their interpretations and experiences of geographies,

socio-spatial processes, and infrastructures, effectively prompting them to

continually take and make new meaning out of their spatial collages. This final

component of the spatial collage framework serves as an important reminder that

human actors’ experiences of space-time are constantly in flux, and likewise their

spatial collages are regularly subject to transformation and change.

TABLE FIVE: Spatial Collage (James-Wilson, 2020)

Component Explanation Examples

The paper Economic, political, and Geographies of labour, socio-cultural geographies education, health care, governance, and interpersonal relations (e.g. communal, familial, or religious)

The scissors Socio-spatial processes Settler colonialism, racial capitalism, social reproduction, and uneven urban development The surface Spaces where geographies * take, and make, place The initial arrangement Fragmented economic, * political, and socio-cultural geographies The glue Infrastructures Housing, policing, schools, emergency services, power grids, water supply networks, railroads, highways, buses, information and communications technologies The composition The resulting piece of spatial * collage

Spatial Collage and the School Segregation Crisis in Rochester, NY

When applied to this case study of school segregation in Rochester, NY, the theory of spatial collage assists with visualizing the specific ways in which institutional geographies are fragmented by segregationist socio-spatial processes, and later re-assembled via infrastructures. Within this framing, “the paper” represents a geography of education where an equality of opportunity is guaranteed to all students in the Greater Rochester Area.

However, this “paper,” has come into contact with “scissors,” and experienced

fragmentation. “The scissors” represent socio-spatial processes— such as institutional racism, racial capitalism, settler colonialism, and uneven urban development— that have interjected Rochester’s history, and effectively ‘cut’ geographies of education in the inner city and surrounding suburbs into an ever-expansive series of broken pieces. This ‘cutting’ process has ensured that the resulting public education system operates to advantage very few (namely White suburbanites), at the great expense of many (namely non-White city residents). “On the surface,” public schools are starkly divided along the lines of race, class, and geography. Within this “initial arrangement,” there are schools where the majority of students achieve success, and schools where the majority of students are left to fall between the cracks of the widening academic achievement gap.

Next, infrastructure (represented by “the glue”) comes into play as the adhesive that re/connects life worlds together. Returning to the long history of school de/segregation in

Rochester, it is evident that infrastructure has worked to both reinforce, and to repair, the brokenness of the public education system. On the one hand, infrastructures, like the I-490 expressway, have been built and sustained as means of further segregating the greater metropolitan area, for example: increased suburbanization, White flight, and targeted urban disinvestment. On the other, infrastructures, like the Urban-Suburban Interdistrict School

Transfer Program have been implemented to challenge previously impassable socio-spatial divides, and to remove the systemic barriers that racialized inner city students face when it comes to accessing the right to an equality of educational opportunity that they have been constitutionally promised. The resulting composition is differently interpreted, experienced, and felt differently by individual educational stakeholders depending on their intersectional relationships to the educational geographies, and their attendant infrastructures, in question.

These stakeholders will continually revise their interpretations and experiences of segregated schooling as they take, and make, place.

Taken together, this theory helps to illuminate the fact that Rochester’s geographies of education are characteristically malleable, messy, and that infrastructures, and their respective operations, are not static. Infrastructures, including those that were initially conceived through segregationist planning paradigms (e.g. the interstate highway) can be powerfully re-imagined to support more equitable, inclusive, and just geographies of teaching and learning (e.g. the Urban-Suburban school bus). The application of the spatial collage theory to this case draws critical attention to the ingenious ways in which

Rochesterians have used infrastructure as a means of refusing and re-imagining the unacceptable status quo. This is significant in that it suggests that infrastructure as

“lifeworlds of structure” have a central role to play in institutional reform and societal transformation (Berlant, 2016, p. 393). In the Rochester case, a pioneering initiative known as Project UNIQUE (“United Now for Integrated Quality Urban-Suburban Education”) is perhaps the most prolific local example of best practice in school desegregation policy where a spatial collage view of systemic change was taken up in institutional and infrastructural re-imaginations. The following sub-sections will explore spatial collage and

Project UNIQUE in greater depth.

Spatial Collage and Project UNIQUE

Introduction to Project UNIQUE

Rising from the ashes of Black community uprisings in July 1964, Rochester City

School District Superintendent of Schools Herman R. Goldberg invited administrators from local colleges and universities to an educational planning conference in the 1964-1965

academic year (Young & Staff, 1969). At this gathering, Dr. Dean Corrigan of the School of

Education at the University of Rochester, and Dr. Norman Kurland of the New York State

Department of Education’s Center of Innovation, were recruited to assist superintendent

Goldberg and his staff with designing programs that would seek solutions for systemic inequities in Rochester’s inner-city schools. In July 1966, a Community Resources

Workshop was established to bring representatives from the urban and suburban private and parochial schools together in small and large group discussions. As a result of this workshop, a planning committee was created for a new education initiative called Project

UNIQUE, and Dr. Elliot Shapiro was appointed director (later to be replaced by William C.

Young) (Young & Staff, 1969). Throughout the fall of 1966, Dr. Shapiro and his staff accepted numerous invitations to speak at public forums throughout the greater metropolitan area, and educational stakeholders’ opinions on school reform were collected both formally and informally. Additionally, Dr. Shapiro and his staff engaged parent-teacher groups, school faculty, religious organizations, and civic, industrial, and civil rights groups to assess community knowledge, interest, and feelings surrounding desegregation. In January 1967, a completed proposal for Project UNIQUE was submitted to U.S. Office of Education for review, and a notice of approval was received in May of that same year (Young & Staff,

1969). The U.S. Office of Education’s Title III grant made Project UNIQUE possible. The

Title III federal grant program began as a provision of the Elementary and Secondary

Education Act of 1965 (ESEA), a landmark piece of education legislation that was launched as a cornerstone of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s “War on Poverty” campaign, in a concerted effort to provide financing for experimentation and innovation in public schools after the Brown v. Board decision (Berman & McLaughlin, 1976).

Project UNIQUE formally began in the fall of 1967 with the central aim of bringing certified professional educators together with leaders from business, industry, higher education, parent-teacher groups, social and cultural agencies, civil rights groups, and labour organizations in pursuit of both targeted institutional reform (school desegregation), and broader societal transformation (community-wide desegregation) (see Appendix Four for

Project UNIQUE’s mission statement). Through its ten sub-initiatives, Project UNIQUE sought to demonstrate the tremendous value of bringing a diverse array community resources together in support of the public education system (Young & Staff, 1969).

Through the development of a decidedly multi-stakeholder, multi-sector, and multi-scalar approach to combatting the school segregation crisis in the process, Project UNIQUE operated at full capacity between 1967 and 1969, and continued with a more limited scope well into the 1970s and 1980s. While the World of Inquiry School, the Urban-Suburban

Interdistrict Transfer Program, and the Project UNIQUE Learning Lab for Arts-in-Education are the only initiatives that still remain in full or partially operation today, the original

Project UNIQUE consisted of the following ten programs:

1. Center for Cooperative Action in Urban Education 2. Community Resource Council 3. Sibley Downtown Satellite School 4. World of Inquiry School 5. Urban-Suburban Transfer Program 6. Urban Education Major Program at the University of Rochester 7. Teacher Internship Program at the State University of New York (SUNY) Colleges at Brockport and Geneseo 8. School-Parent Advisor to the Neighborhood (SPAN) 9. Community Teacher Program 10. The Right of an Individual to Secure an Education (RISE)

The Center for Cooperative Action in Urban Education

The Center for Cooperative Action in Urban Education was established to assemble a cadre of business and industrial leaders, engaged parents, professional educators, inner city residents, urban and suburban community groups, philanthropic foundations, and Rochester

City School District staff who could bridge the gap between theory and practice, and devise solutions to systemic problems and inefficiencies in the public education system (Young &

Staff, 1969). This created a consortium of local talent that worked together to gather and redistribute community resources toward the more equitable provisioning of urban/suburban schooling. Contributors built positive working relationships around a shared ethos of mutual trust and respectful knowledge exchange.

The Center operated as a semi-autonomous unit for the full duration of the federal grant period. Under this particular organizational model, it was formally a part of the

Rochester City School District, but permitted to chart an independent course. Through the combination of Title III funds and corporate donations, the Centre was able to make a consorted effort to establish more productive collaborations between Rochester’s private and public sectors in the realm of public education. The Center demonstrated how physical and social infrastructures can unite to co-create meaningful institutional change.

Community Resource Council

The Community Resource Council was similarly founded to mobilize representatives from local businesses and industry in the planning and implementation of Project UNIQUE

(Young & Staff, 1969). The Council created a reservoir of skilled volunteers who offered time, advice, and monetary resources in a collective pursuit to resolve persistent educational

inequities in Monroe County. Additionally, the Council was instrumental in the creation of the Sibley Downtown Satellite School.

Sibley Downtown Satellite School

The Sibley Downtown Satellite School was created to exhibit what high quality, integrated education might look like in a modern, technologically advanced classroom

(Young & Staff, 1969). Located on the fourth floor of Sibley, Lindsay & Curr Co. department store in downtown Rochester, the demonstration classroom was equipped with flexible furniture, advanced technological aides (e.g. computer terminals and electronic calculators), and close circuit television. It also had a one-way glass window that allowed the general public, up to thirty visitors at a time, with the opportunity to observe teaching and learning sessions taking place at the Sibley School.

A main objective of the school was to innovate new pedagogical techniques for utilizing technological aides to teaching and learning. In service of this goal, the classroom was made available to all schools in the city and suburbs, including private, parochial, and

Protestant denominational schools, for one- or two- day field visits. During these field visits, a teacher and their entire class would be welcomed to the classroom by one of the School’s twenty-seven volunteer adjunct faculty members. The faculty member who was in charge of that day’s learning session would teach a lesson that was thematically related to their particular career or skill set (e.g. medicine, law, tool and die making, art, music, acting, banking, science, photography, etc.), and show the visiting students and teacher how to use the technologies on display at the School.

Additionally, the Sibley School hosted an after-school and all-day Saturday remedial reading improvement program for approximately eighty children from both the public and

parochial school systems. Grade twelve students from three city high schools could also enroll in a special course in retail merchandising that was taught by staff from Sibley’s department store in the demonstration classroom on Tuesday afternoons.

The Sibley School garnered considerable attention and acclaim for its unique approach. It hosted visiting pedagogues from a variety of U.S and international cities

(including Buffalo, Albany, Syracuse, Chicago, New Orleans, Fairbanks, Toronto, Montreal, and London, UK), and it was featured twice on the National Broadcast Corporation’s (NBC) nightly television programming. It demonstrated how economic geographies (e.g. commercial retail) and educational geographies (e.g. a laboratory school) could co-produce new, multi-purpose spaces.

World of Inquiry School

The World of Inquiry School was founded to address systemic barriers to high quality, integrated education at the elementary level, kindergarten to grade 6 (Young &

Staff, 1969). Having acknowledged the County-wide barriers to educational opportunity that existed along the lines of race, class, and geography, World of Inquiry made the deliberate choice to abandon the traditional neighbourhood school attendance model in favour of a fully open enrollment plan. Students who were recruited and admitted to World of Inquiry came from a diversity of racial backgrounds, socio-economic backgrounds, and geographic areas (including the inner city, outer city, and suburbs). For example, in the 1968-1969 academic year, the total student population at World of Inquiry was 57% White, 36% Black,

4% Puerto Rican, and 3% multi-racial, and families’ annual incomes ranged anywhere between $3,000 and $40,000. The school also vowed to achieve gender parity in its

enrolment figures. In the same 1968-1969 academic year, there was an even ratio of male to female students aged three to eleven.

Through the combined efforts of teachers, students, parents, community volunteers, and industry partners, World of Inquiry worked to improve racial attitudes across multiple education stakeholder groups. In particular, school administrators and staff sought to increase White and working class parents’ involvement in classroom specific, and wider school community, affairs. To do so, they thoughtfully organized the parent-school advisory committee in a way that was multi-culturally relevant, inclusive, and welcoming of diverging opinions and lived experiences.

From the perspective of teaching and learning, World of Inquiry’s creative and experimental approach to praxis garnered considerable praise for the school. Quickly establishing itself as an exemplary model of best practice in integrated education, the school’s inquiry-based, discovery approach to instruction became a source of inspiration for other schools in Monroe County. The school operated under a unique administrative structure that prioritized a smaller-than-average pupil-teacher ratio (20:1), an unorthodox utilization of teaching support staff and an adjunct faculty comprised of talented community volunteers, and multi-aged groupings of students (known as “family units”).

The World of Inquiry teaching staff’s pedagogical orientation toward more child- centered philosophies of education similarly set the school apart from the average public school. The child-centered approach to teaching and learning not only enhanced student autonomy at the school, but it also yielded more authentic assessments of student learning.

For example, formal grades were not assigned to student work. Instead, students could self- select how their personal academic, social, and psychological achievement would be

monitored and evaluated. Cross-curricular interest centers in arts, technology, health, social studies, and science were available to students across age levels, enabling them to self-guide their learning experiences of various curriculum areas.

Although there have been changes to World of Inquiry School over the years, it is one of the few initiatives begun during the Project UNIQUE funding period that still remains operational today. World of Inquiry has expanded to a K-12 school, and continues to offer expeditionary and project-based learning opportunities to its students. Presently, all students enrolled at World of Inquiry must be residents of the city of Rochester. The school no longer enrolls suburban students and, as partial consequence, it has become less racially, socioeconomically, and geographically diverse over the years.

Urban-Suburban Transfer Program

The Urban-Suburban Transfer Program was similarly put into action in a concerted effort to reduce racial isolation in Monroe County’s urban and suburban schools, and to improve the racial attitudes amongst White and non-White students, teachers, and administrative staff (Young & Staff, 1969). Recognizing that regional polarizations were separating White students from non-White students, students from high-income families from students from low-income families, and city residents from suburban residents, the program planned and facilitated the voluntary transfer of White suburban students to inner and outer city schools, and non-White urban students to suburban schools. The transfer experience was marketed to potential students as an invaluable opportunity for intercultural exchange, through which students would become better prepared for life in an increasingly racially diverse and ethno-culturally pluralistic society.

Inspired by the early success of the Urban Suburban Summer School Program, a joint initiative of city School #19’s Parent-Teacher Association and suburban Brighton

School #1’s Parent-Teacher Association, the Urban-Suburban Transfer Program was formally established in March 1965; a year before the launch of Project UNIQUE. In the fall of 1965, the first twenty-five program participants were transferred from School #19 in the

Rochester City School District to the West Irondequoit Central School District. By the fall of 1968, the City School District, eight suburban districts (West Irondequoit, Penfield,

Brighton, Brockport, Pittsford, Greece, Webster, Wheatland-Chili), one private sectarian school (The Harley School in Brighton), and two private parochial schools (St. Jerome

School in East Rochester, St. Thomas the Apostle in West Irondequoit) were involved in

Urban-Suburban (Urban-Suburban Interdistrict Transfer Program, 2015). Nearly 3,000 students were participating in voluntary transfers by the 1969-1970 academic year.

In addition to public school districts, Urban-Suburban program staff and administrators also worked with youth and student-run organizations, including the bi-racial, urban/suburban Student Union for Racial Equality (SURE) and Student Union for Integrated

Education (SUIE) groups and the Circle K Project at the State University of New York

College at Geneseo, which aimed to increase the number of non-White teacher candidates enrolled at SUNY Geneseo. Urban-Suburban’s leadership also engaged parent groups like

All Parents Together (ATP) and Quality Education Now (QEN) in collaborative efforts to reduce racial isolation and improve racial attitudes in participating schools.

Urban-Suburban was illustrative of the ways ‘busing as an infrastructure of desegregation’ can be read both materially (as “logistical fix”) and symbolically (as a complex “socio-spatial phenomenon”) (see Orfield, 1978a and 1978b for more on the

history of busing in the United States). Interestingly, Urban-Suburban revealed a peculiar socio-spatial paradox of using ‘the problem’ to devise ‘the solution.’ In this case, the very geographies and infrastructures that initially created the segregated employment, housing, and schooling landscape in Rochester (e.g. interstate highway and automobile-centric metropolitan planning in the 1950s/60s), were later reimagined as viable solutions to the segregation problem (e.g. urban-suburban busing for desegregation via the interstate highway in the 1960s/70s).

Urban Education Major Program at the University of Rochester

The Urban Education Major Program at the University of Rochester was designed to involve Master’s degree students in the examination and analysis of key issues in urban education through field study, course work, and the writing of a thesis (Young & Staff,

1969). The program provided opportunities for experienced classroom teachers, particularly those who were White and middle-class, to critically examine their personal philosophy of education and their individual teaching practice through a more critical lens, so that they could develop new sensitivities and strategies for working effectively with students from a different socio-economic, cultural, and geographic background than their own. Centrally, the

Urban Education Major aimed to prepare its graduates for successful careers in urban schools, where they would be empowered to act as knowledgeable resource people and agents of change in school-wide professional development initiatives.

Teacher Internship Program at the State University of New York (SUNY) Colleges at Brockport and Geneseo

The Teacher Internship Program at The State University of New York Colleges at

Brockport and Geneseo focused on preparing pre-service classroom teachers for careers in urban public schools (Young & Staff, 1969). The program required teacher candidates to

spend a substantial amount of time in the inner city community where they completed their practice teaching; mandating a yearlong practicum experience instead of the more typical six to eight week-long practicum experience offered at other colleges. In addition to their practice teaching, teacher candidates were also expected to spend considerable time in inner city social service agencies, and visiting their students’ home. This was mandated so teacher candidates could gain greater familiarity with the broader community context that their work was situated in. This lengthy, and more comprehensive, training process was centrally aimed at helping teacher candidates to develop the self-confidence, and culturally relevant and responsive pedagogical knowledge, necessary for an effectual career as an urban educator.

The Teacher Internship Program also aspired to serve as a model for other university and college teacher training programs that wished to redesign their courses modules, mandate a community fieldwork component, and more strategically recruit non-White teacher candidates. Notably, the Teacher Internship Program produced hundreds of graduates who went on to assist with improving the overall quality of instruction in the urban schools that hired them post-graduation.

School-Parent Advisor to the Neighborhood (SPAN)

The School-Parent Advisor to the Neighborhood (SPAN) initiative was created to bridge the gap between home and school in Rochester’s inner city neighbourhoods (Young

& Staff, 1969). Project UNIQUE administrators recruited and hired fourteen SPAN advisors, each of whom were knowledgeable and engaged residents of the inner city neighbourhood wherein which their assigned school was located. Each SPAN advisor was tasked with inciting greater dialogue and mutual trust between the school they were assigned to and the residents and agencies in the surrounding neighbourhood. They worked diligently

to improve strained relations between teachers and parents in inner city schools, and to increase parental involvement in their child’s education. SPAN advisors also liaised important information between teachers, parents, guidance counselors, social workers, school psychologists, school administrators, school support personnel, and neighbourhood social service providers, and took on leadership roles where conflict meditation and problem solving were concerned. In addition to the advisory portion of the program, the SPAN initiative also sponsored small, parent-hosted house meetings where concerned parents could gather to inspire group action and novel solutions for pressing neighbourhood problems.

The early success of SPAN inspired the design and implementation of similar local, state, and federally funded programs in other U.S. cities. Additionally, SPAN advisors contributed their knowledge of best practice in school-community relations to several formal research studies that were conducted by academics and education policymakers interested in remedying low levels of parental involvement in urban schools. SPAN illustrated the importance of multi-scalar approaches to systemic community-based change; emphasizing that successful educational initiatives demand effective coordination between geographies and infrastructures of home, neighbourhood, and school.

Community Teacher Program

The Community Teacher Program was implemented to address an unmet need for additional early childhood educational programs in Rochester’s inner city (Young & Staff,

1969). Project UNIQUE administrators recruited and assigned community teachers to sixteen inner city neighbourhood school areas. In their locally embedded role, community teachers provided advice and resources to parents who were interested in better supporting

their child’s developmental progress (e.g. creating healthy eating habits, positive sibling relationship dynamics, and effective conflict resolution skills).

Community teachers made frequent home visits to the families assigned to them. During home sessions, a community teacher would involve the preschool child, mother and/or father, and any other parental aides (e.g. grandmothers and grandfather) in a variety of in- home learning experiences. The battery of activities that the teacher would model and facilitate for the child and their caregivers was centrally aimed at fostering positive socio- emotional growth and self-confidence in the child. Through music, arts, physical education, language instruction, field trips, and special projects, participating children were able to improve their verbal, cognitive, and perceptual abilities. Consequently, they were much better prepared for their elementary school careers. Additionally, caregivers emerged from the program more knowledgeable of their child’s unique learning trajectory, including their specific areas of strength and areas for improvement.

The Right of an Individual to Secure an Education (RISE)

The Right of an Individual to Secure an Education (RISE) program was initiated to provide adult Rochesterians with learning opportunities that were historically inaccessible to non-White and low-income inner city residents (Young & Staff, 1969). RISE offered tuition-free college preparatory courses, or intro college level courses, to paraprofessionals who required additional academic training. Offered out of the Center for Cooperative Action in Urban Education, courses were specifically designed to equip adult learners with the necessary skills for attaining job advancement; preparing those who successfully completed their assignments for higher level, higher paying jobs down the road.

A variety of tutoring programs were also launched at the Center for Cooperative

Action as part of the RISE initiative. One such program offered tutoring to students interested in obtaining high school qualifications through the High School Equivalency

Examination. An array of other counseling services, including academic, career, and supportive counseling, were also facilitated through RISE. RISE illustrated the important roles mobility and accessibility play in geographies and infrastructures of education.

TABLE SIX: Project UNIQUE’s Ten Sub-Initiatives (Young and Staff, 1969)

Initiative Central Objectives

Center for 1. To devise solutions to systemic problems and inefficiencies in the Cooperative Action local public education system in Urban Education 2. To develop close relationships between inner city and suburban

education stakeholders 3. To establish more productive collaborations between the private and public funding sectors Community 1. To involve representatives from local businesses and industry in the Resource Council implementation of Project UNIQUE 2. To create a reservoir of skilled volunteers who could contribute

advice, assistance, and monetary resources World of Inquiry 1. To remove geographic, economic, and racial barriers to high quality, School integrated schooling 2. To draw students from a diversity of socioeconomic groups, racial backgrounds, and geographic areas (inner city, outer city, and suburbs) 3. To improve racial attitudes amongst students, parents, and staff 4. To increase the involvement of non-White and working class parents in school operations 5. To innovate pedagogical practices through an inquiry-based, discovery approach to teaching and learning

Sibley Downtown 1. To acquaint teachers and students, from both urban and suburban Satellite School schools, with technological aides to teaching and leaning 2. To innovate new pedagogical techniques 3. To provide the general public (up to thirty visitors at a time) with the opportunity to observe teaching and learning sessions in a demonstration classroom through one-way glass 4. To host a remedial reading improvement program and a special course in retail merchandising Urban-Suburban 1. To voluntarily transfer White suburban students to inner and outer Transfer Program city schools, and Black urban students to suburban schools 2. To reduce racial isolation within the Rochester City School District, and within the surrounding suburban public and private school systems in Monroe County 3. To improve racial attitudes amongst White and non-White students in both sending and receiving schools; to better prepare students for life in an increasingly racially diverse and ethno-culturally pluralistic society 4. To work with youth and student-run groups and parent groups in collaborative efforts to reduce racial isolation and improve racial attitudes in schools Urban Education 1. To involve Master’s degree students in the examination and analysis Major at the of key issues in urban education through field study, course work, and University of the writing of a thesis Rochester 2. To prepare successful graduates of the program for careers in urban schools Teacher Internship 1. To prepare pre-service classroom teachers for impactful careers in Program at the inner city schools State University of 2. To help pre-service classroom teachers develop the self-confidence New York (SUNY) Colleges at and culturally relevant and responsive pedagogical knowledge Brockport and necessary for an effectual career as a formally certified urban Geneseo education School-Parent 1. To improve strained relations between teachers and parents in inner Advisor to the city schools, and to increase parental involvement in their child’s Neighborhood education (SPAN) 2. To incite greater dialogue and mutual trust between staff at inner city schools, local residents, and neighbourhood social service agencies 3. To sponsor small, parent-hosted house meetings where concerned parents could gather to inspire group action

Community 1. To address an unmet need for additional early childhood educational Teacher Program programs in Rochester’s inner city 2. To foster positive socio-emotional growth and self-confidence in preschool children 3. To involve mother/father, parent aides (e.g. grandmothers), and children in in-home learning experiences; so as to increase each caretaker’s knowledge of how their particular child learns best The Right of an 1. To provide adult, inner city residents with the kinds of educational Individual to learning opportunities that have historically been denied to them Secure an 2. To offer paraprofessionals academic training Education (RISE) 3. To launch a tutoring program for those who are interested in obtaining high school qualifications through the High School Equivalency Examination 4. To coordinate an array of counseling services for adult learners

Project UNIQUE through the Lens of Spatial Collage

The administrators and thought leaders behind Project UNIQUE conceptualized school segregation through a philosophical and pragmatic framework that bears a strong likeness to the spatial collage theory. The Project’s originators understood that if they were to be victorious in their collective attempt to remedy Rochester’s segregated geographies of education, they would need to: a) identify the socio-spatial processes (“scissors”) that were at play in the ongoing reproduction of Rochester’s segregated educational geographies, and b) creatively re-imagine how new and existing infrastructures (e.g. the interstate highway, busing, local industries, community organizations etc.) could be used to “glue” the fragmented landscape back together more equitably and inclusively.

Through this deliberate order of operations, Project UNIQUE set itself up for success in a way that previous efforts at school and community-wide desegregation had not. The

Rochesterians behind Project UNIQUE agreed that systemic barriers to educational opportunity could not be redressed in a vacuum. They understood that “…massive poverty,

recent migration, unresponsive government…” also needed to be redressed if any substantial traction was to be gain in the fight for school and community-wide desegregation. This decidedly multi-stakeholder, multi-sector, and multi-scalar approach to dismantling the segregationist assemblage of public education in Rochester’s central city and surrounding suburbs was able to accomplish major institutional reforms that were entirely new to

Rochester. These reforms included greater education policy coordination between urban/suburban districts, unprecedented private sector engagement in the provisioning of public schooling, and the creation of new administrative organizational structures for facilitating early childhood, childhood, adolescent, and adult educational programs (Young

& Staff, 1969, p. 16).

Project UNIQUE’s ten sub-initiatives not only demonstrated a thorough understanding of how segregation works, but they also took direct action against segregation, through their creative re-imaginations of social, physical, and institutional infrastructures. Project UNIQUE dared to imagine how a greater emphasis on connectivity

(“the glue”) could profoundly transmute Rochester’s damaged, segregated life world into a more livable and equitable commons for all Monroe County residents regardless of race, class, or geography. While Project UNIQUE experienced several barriers to fully actualizing its inspired vision, including a relatively short federal funding period (1967-1969) and the aggressive local/regional/national resurgence of socio-political and economic conservatism

(e.g. the rise of austerity politics during the Nixon and Ford presidencies, the upsurge in

White communities’ resistance to desegregation initiatives during the suburbanization period, and Black and Latino communities’ growing frustration with being consistently denied meaningful choice and voice in the design and implementation of equity and

affirmative action initiatives during the urban renewal era, etc.), the novel epistemic and pedagogical approach Project UNIQUE’s leadership took to repairing segregated geographies of education has continued to reverberate in subsequent desegregation initiatives in the Greater Rochester Area. For example, many of the city’s contemporary non-profit organizations, like Reconnect Rochester, have taken a decidedly critical geography and infrastructure studies-informed approach to redressing Rochester’s segregated landscapes. In a 2018 report titled Transportation and Poverty in Monroe

County: How Land Use, Job Locations and Commuting Options Affect Access to Jobs,

Reconnect Rochester identified longstanding linkages that exist between: a) the greater

Rochester metropolitan area’s inadequate public transportation infrastructure, b) the socio- spatial fragmentation of economic opportunity, c) and the geographic concentration of racialized, urban poverty (Rosenberg, 2018). Taking up transportation as a vital intersectional equity issue, much of Reconnect Rochester’s programming has aspired to take a deliberately anti-racist and anti-poverty approach to land use planning and transportation redesign.

RESEARCH IMPLICATIONS

Project UNIQUE as Evidence of Best Practice in School Desegregation Policy

Project UNIQUE aspired to create a society where the entire notion of segregation would be absurd; an equitable society that would not be organized through the socio-spatial logic of implicit bias, but rather through the ethos of mutual care, respect, and equality of opportunity. Project UNIQUE initiatives reimagined and reassembled the broken fragments of Rochester’s education system, and attempted to put this system back together using a variety of infrastructures; including physical infrastructures, transportation infrastructures, and social infrastructures. In many ways, Project UNIQUE sparked a powerful, albeit incomplete, re-organization of Rochester’s segregated educational landscape. Unlike other school segregation efforts that were launched by the City School District, Project UNIQUE understood that school desegregation was about more than White and non-White children being in the same classrooms. It went beyond busing and understood the necessity of multi- infrastructural, multi-system approaches to school desegregation.

Critically, Project UNIQUE exemplified what can be accomplished within the field of education when robust socio-spatial theories of change are brought to life through innovative community programs and institutional policies. It not only contributed to desegregation efforts in urban/suburban elementary and secondary schools, but also worked towards the desegregation of neighbourhoods, workplaces, civil society groups, and socio- cultural institutions. For contemporary school desegregation advocates who are committed to combatting the present-day crisis, Project UNIQUE serves as an important reminder that creative re-imaginations of connective geographies and infrastructures can not only combat school segregation, but also neighbourhood, workplace, and community institution-based

segregation. Drawing from its evidence of best practice, Project UNIQUE suggests that the following three areas should be prioritized in school desegregation efforts:

1. Civic mobilization across urban, suburban, and semi-rural scales 2. Coordination between partners from primary/secondary/tertiary educational institutions, urban/suburban governments, civil society groups, and local businesses/industry 3. Robust participation amongst students, teachers, administrators, families, and dedicated volunteers from the community at large

Additional Lessons from the School Segregation Crisis in Rochester, NY

This case study of school segregation in Rochester, NY has been aimed at assisting education stakeholders, researchers, and decision makers by way of identifying historical cases of best practice in school desegregation policy, such as Project UNIQUE, and illustrating how existing and novel theoretical frameworks from geography and infrastructure studies can contribute to trans-disciplinary research on school segregation.

Through the lens of spatial collage, this case study of school segregation in

Rochester, NY is able to push beyond the traditional reading of this crisis and look towards more thematically comprehensive, and historically rich, interpretations of “the problem” and its many solutions. Spatial collage insists that greater engagement with the geographical and material, infrastructural underpinnings of the school segregation crisis is essential to the development of more relevant and responsive remedies. As evidence of best practice from

Project UNIQUE powerfully suggests, the complete realization of school desegregation in the city and suburbs of Rochester most specifically, and throughout the United States more broadly, will involve much more than a simple re-shuffling of White and non-White bodies into integrated classrooms. Spatial collage draws attention to the ways in which school desegregation is structurally linked to related crises of segregation, including housing segregation and employment segregation. It serves to remind a trans-disciplinary audience

that school segregation is fundamentally rooted in the longer American histories of land theft, private property, genocide, slavery, police brutality, mass incarceration, and the exploitation of migrant labour. Likewise, struggles over the complete desegregation of schools and communities in Rochester, and the United States, are bound with struggles for

Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination, struggles for Black lives and Black liberation, struggles for migrant rights, struggles for meaningful political representation, struggles for economic equality, and struggles for gender equity, among others.

School segregation is a complicated and multi-layered phenomenon. It is important to understand its history if we seek to influence its present and future manifestations. The spatial collage framework invites educators, educational researchers, geographers, and infrastructure studies scholars alike to both conceptualize, and practically address, the ways in which questions of implicit bias, racial capitalism, settler colonialism, racial justice,

Indigenous land repatriation, and economic opportunity are constantly being re-articulated through the ongoing crisis of school segregation. While the spatial collage framework does not solve the problem of school segregation, it does offer a trans-disciplinary perspective on this multi-faceted phenomenon. In particular, the spatial collage theory presents educators and educational researchers with a way of considering the geographic and infrastructural implications of the school segregation crisis, and it provides geographers and infrastructure studies scholars with the opportunity to think about school segregation from the standpoint of teaching and learning. Ideally, spatial collage will serve as a useful tool for both theorists and practitioners who are interested in identifying and deconstructing these linkages.

CONCLUSION

On July 19, 2020, several hundred people blocked a portion of Chestnut Street in downtown Rochester, NY before continuing towards the I-490 expressway in a rally against police abuse and misconduct (Orr, 2020). Assembling on the east lanes of Fredrick Douglass

Susan B. Anthony Bridge, the demonstrators marched under the banner “Save Rochester-

Black Lives Matter” for approximately fifteen minutes, before State Police troopers descended on the scene. As reported in the local Democrat & Chronicle newspaper, one young Black man addressed the crowd with the bold statement, “If they’re going to be comfortable in their suburbs, this will make them watch this” (Orr, 2020). Moments later, a young Black woman added, “We should not have to do this, to convince people that our lives matter” (Orr, 2020).

Fifty-six years after the July 1964 riots, this demonstration marked the first time that a demonstration in Rochester successfully shut down an interstate. Notably, the protestors chosen tactic was both materially and symbolically significant. They not only interrupted a major circulatory artery of the Greater Rochester Area, but they also intentionally (or unintentionally) drew attention to the longstanding histories of dispossession, segregation, and White supremacy that are embedded in this particular piece of transportation infrastructure (e.g. the construction of the Erie Canal in the 1820s and the razing of Clarissa

Street in the 1960s). As many Black organizers and intellectuals are calling for a Third

Reconstruction in the United States (see Codrington, 2020), the Black Lives Matter

Rochester’s civic action on July 19 suggests that the disruption and re-imagination of critical geographies and infrastructures of segregation will foreground contemporary organizing for civil rights and societal transformation in the United States. This growing movement has

tremendous potential to support the development of more reparative and sustainable life world structures in cities and suburbs around the globe (Silvey, James-Wilson, Arviv, 2019).

As school segregation continues to intensify along the lines of race, class, and geography in the U.S., research on the historical causes and contemporary consequences of educational inequity is more critical than ever. This thesis has aimed to demonstrate how historic archives on school segregation can be used to generate novel geographical and infrastructural theory. In particular, it has drawn attention to the way in which spatial collage can be used to re-conceptualize past and present crises of school segregation for a trans- disciplinary audience.

Geographies of school segregation are complex. Even when utterly broken and fragmented, public education systems are constantly being re-organized through multiple, interlocking geographies, socio-spatial processes, and connective infrastructures. The struggle for school desegregation is not only a struggle for racially and socio-economically integrated classrooms, but also a struggle for decent housing, affordable health care, inclusive neighbourhoods, and social welfare.

Authentic school desegregation policies and initiatives involve, and make demands of, a broad range of scales and stakeholders. As history has shown, to guarantee equal educational opportunities and improved learning outcomes to all students is to involve teachers, children and their families, government officials, industry professionals, social service providers, community organizers, and other education stakeholder groups in collaborative planning efforts. Together, through more multi-pronged approaches to local problem solving, the racial and socioeconomic desegregation of urban and suburban schools could be fully realized in this century.

As new phoenixes are set to emerge from the ashes of current uprisings— against uneven urban development, debt, racialized poverty, precarious work, police brutality, and educational inequity, among others— I optimistically look on, and wonder:

How will this moment in time be archived?

What new possibilities might be created for the complete desegregation of schools in the U.S., and globally, at this time of radical openings?

Why should we wait any longer to build the more equitable life world that has always been possible?

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APPENDICES

Appendix One: Detailed Record of Archival Data Sources

Source Brief Description RVF Schools Archive • A collection on school segregation and school reorganization in the city Rochester, NY specifically and Local History and Genealogy in Monroe County more broadly. Department at the Central Library of Rochester and • Contains mostly local newspaper clippings from the Monroe County Democrat & Chronicle and Times Union papers. • Some photographs, maps, charts, tables, graphs, policy documents, local government materials, and research reports are also included. • The materials in the collection date as far back as 1959, and as most recently as 2010. However, the majority of the contents are from the 1960s and 1970s. Urban-Suburban Summer • This collection consists of personal correspondence, School Program, Brighton, newspaper clippings, photographs, and miscellaneous NY Papers papers related to an urban-suburban summer school

University of Rochester Rare program that was hosted in Brighton, NY for three Books, Special Collections, summers with students from School #19 in the city of and Preservation (RBSCP) Rochester and students from the Brighton Central School Department District • The collection also includes reports on race relations in Rochester, the Urban-Suburban Interdistrict School Transfer Program between the West Irondequoit Central School District and the Rochester City School District. School Segregation Reports • Racial Imbalance in the Rochester Public Schools: Report from the Rochester City to the Commissioner of Education (1963) authored by School District RCSD Superintendent of Schools Herman R. Goldberg

Retrieved from Justin Murphy • Grade Reorganization and Desegregation of The of the Democrat & Chronicle Rochester Public Schools: A Report to the Board of Education (1969) authored by RCSD Superintendent of Schools Herman R. Goldberg School Segregation Report from the New York State Bar Racial Imbalance in the Public Schools: The Current Status Association of Federal and New York Law (1964) authored by the Committee on Civil Rights at the New York State Bar Retrieved from Justin Murphy Association of the Democrat & Chronicle

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School Reorganization Plan for Equal Educational A Proposed Model for a County Federation of School Opportunity in Monroe Districts (1971) authored by the Monroe County Educational County by the Monroe Planning Committee, sponsored by the Monroe County County Educational Planning School Boards Association Committee

Central Library of Rochester and Monroe County

1962 Civil Action Against the Rochester Board of A copy of the NAACP backed lawsuit brought in the U.S. Education and District District Court by twenty-two children in ten families against Superintendent Robert L. the Rochester Board of Education and District Superintendent Springer Robert L. Springer in May of 1962. This was the first biracial school segregation suit in the United States (involving four Retrieved from Justin Murphy White families and six Black families). In this summons, the of the Democrat & Chronicle plaintiffs charge the District with denying students of their constitutional rights to due process under and equal protection under the law by “operating and providing racially segregated public schools” (p. 2).

Democrat & Chronicle Digital Archive A full digital catalogue of the Democrat & Chronicle (1871- 2020). Newspapers.com

Tenth Ward Courier and Vicinity Post A local neighbourhood newspaper which regularly published articles related to education and schooling in the Tenth Ward Local History and Genealogy of Rochester, NY Department at the Central Library of Rochester and Monroe County

The Voice A local neighbourhood newspaper which regularly published Local History and Genealogy articles related to issues specific to the Black community in Department at the Central Rochester, NY Library of Rochester and Monroe County

Historic Monographs on • The Rochester Riots: A Crisis in Civil Rights, Jevenile Race Relations in Rochester, Delinquency, or “Cityatrics”? (1964) authored by City NY Historian Blake McKelvey

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Local History and Genealogy • Riots of July, 1964 (1965) authored by Rochester, NY Department at the Central City Manager P.W. Homer Library of Rochester and Areas Where Rioting Occurred: Rochester, New York July Monroe County • 1964 (1965) authored by the Monroe County Human Relations Commission

Appendix Two: Maps

Map One: Monroe County Source: (https://www.mapsofworld.com/usa/states/new-york/new-york-maps/monroe-county-map.jpg)

Map Two: Upstate Western, NY Source: (http://www.visitrochester.com/ about-roc/transportation/maps/)

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Map Three: U.S. Rust Belt Source: (https://futureofutica.wordpress.com/tag/rust-belt/)

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Map Four: Ward Map of Rochester, NY Source: (https://fineartamerica.com/featured/vintage-map-of-rochester-ny-1901-cartographyassociates.html)

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Map Five: Map of the Third Ward, Rochester, NY Source: (https://fineartamerica.com/featured/vintage-map-of-rochester-ny-1901-cartographyassociates.html)

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Map Six: Map of the Seventh Ward, Rochester, NY Source: (https://fineartamerica.com/featured/vintage-map-of-rochester-ny-1901-cartographyassociates.html)

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Map Seven: HOLC 1939 Appraisal of Rochester, NY Source: (Nelson et al, 2016)

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Map Eight: HOLC 1939 Appraisal of Rochester, NY— Zones D1, D2, D5, D6, and C24 Source: (Nelson et al, 2016)

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Map Nine: Map of the Sixteenth Ward, Rochester, NY Source: (https://fineartamerica.com/featured/vintage-map-of-rochester-ny-1901-cartographyassociates.html)

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Map Ten: Map of the Fifth, Seventh and Eighth Wards, Rochester, NY Source: (https://fineartamerica.com/featured/vintage-map-of-rochester-ny-1901-cartographyassociates.html)

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Map Eleven: Map of the Second and Ninth Wards, Rochester, NY Source: (https://fineartamerica.com/featured/vintage-map-of-rochester-ny-1901-cartographyassociates.html)

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Map Twelve: Map of the I-490 Expressway Source: https://www.interstate-guide.com/i-390-ny/

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Appendix Three: Images

“Transportation Transformation” Source: Grenier & Morry (2015, p. 19)

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Appendix Four: Project UNIQUE Mission Statement Source: Project UNIQUE Staff (1968). Project UNIQUE newsletter. Rochester, NY: City School District.

We believe that we are approaching a threshold of change in American society generally and in American education in particular. We believe that there are members in all echelons of our society who are demanding now, and will continue to demand, greater assimilation and integration of people of all racial, economic, ethnic, and educational backgrounds. We believe that this demand for integration and assimilation stems from a desire to guarantee equal educational opportunity and a fuller appreciation of the social spectrum of all America’s children.

We believe that society owes to each child an unrestricted opportunity to develop his talents to the maximum; we believe that our staff, both teaching and supportive, has the responsibility to employ all its capacity to develop the skill of the children. To this end we believe that each child must be permitted to progress at a rate as comfortable for him as the limits of staff, materials and teaching aids will permit. We hope to constantly expand those limits. We also hold that freedom of the individual child to inquire into areas and questions which interest him fundamental and should not be infringed upon, regardless of planned curricula. We are convinced that learning founded on interest is the most permanent and the most productive. Our staff will be ready to encourage and assist the inquisitive pupil and to provide ample opportunity for diversified investigations. We believe that children of various ages should be permitted extensive interaction, in order to assist each other and to learn from each other.

We believe that open discussion of racial, economic, ethnic, and educational similarities and differences is healthy and should be encouraged; we expect it to reveal that

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in the past the differences have been too strongly drawn and the similarities too often overlooked.

We believe that the task of the school must be extended to serve our disadvantaged pre-kindergarten children and their families, and assist dropouts and high school graduates with remedial and post-secondary training.

We believe that better communication is needed between the school and the community; that someone must be available who will interpret the functions and objectives of the school and make the schools more sensitive to the needs, and more responsive to the desires, of the community.

We believe that our community has resources which can make valuable contributions to the education of all children. In many instances the ability of children has not been developed. We wish to encourage greater interaction between the realms of business, industry, government, social services, and that of education; among their practitioners, students, and teachers; in order to lessen the gap between the world of learning and the world of work.

We believe that technology has a tremendous contribution to make to education. And we believe that if this contribution is made with sufficient care by all concerned, it will prove invaluable in permitting the increased interaction of teacher and student as individuals. We consider this interaction central to the evolution of a more humanistic society.

We believe that the attitude of the teacher is a vital component in the learning process and that his hopes and expectations for the learner directly affect pupil achievement. To this end we support pre-service and in-service training of teachers that emphasize attitudinal change. We believe that we have a responsibility for increasing public

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understanding and support for quality education; that our Downtown Satellite School with its daily demonstrations for the public, contributes to greater understanding of the need for education and that it will result in greater public support for education.

We believe that our responsibility in Project UNIQUE is to show that children from different educational, cultural, racial, and ethnic backgrounds can learn effectively together. Among the pre-requisites for achieving this goal are:

1. A different administrative structure 2. A decrease in class size 3. Utilization of teaching and supportive staff in a manner that is different from that which is usually found in many schools

Our major responsibility then is to show what changes in schools are needed in order to make quality integrated education a reality.

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