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SSStttooonnnyyy BBBrrrooooookkk UUUnnniiivvveeerrrsssiiitttyyy The official electronic file of this thesis or dissertation is maintained by the University Libraries on behalf of The Graduate School at Stony Brook University. ©©© AAAllllll RRRiiiggghhhtttsss RRReeessseeerrrvvveeeddd bbbyyy AAAuuuttthhhooorrr... Black, White and Green: High School Student Civil Rights and Environmental Activism in New York City and on Long Island, 1968-1975 A Dissertation Presented by Neil Philip Buffett to The Graduate School in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in History Stony Brook University December 2011 Stony Brook University The Graduate School Neil Philip Buffett We, the dissertation committee for the above candidate for the Doctor of Philosophy Degree, hereby recommend acceptance of this dissertation. Dr. Christopher Sellers – Dissertation Advisor Associate Professor, Department of History Dr. Wilbur Miller – Chairperson of Defense Professor, Department of History Dr. Themis Chronopoulos Assistant Professor, Department of History Dr. Andrew Hurley Professor, Department of History, University of Missouri at Saint Louis This dissertation is accepted by the Graduate School Lawrence Martin Dean of the Graduate School ii Abstract of the Dissertation Black, White and Green: High School Student Civil Rights and Environmental Activism in New York City and on Long Island, 1968-1975 by Neil Philip Buffett Doctor of Philosophy in History Stony Brook University 2011 This dissertation highlights the contributions of high school student activists in both the Civil Rights and Environmental Movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Through an in-depth analysis of various New York City and Long Island community case studies, the project sheds light on the importance of place as a theoretical concept in the evolution of student-led social and political activism. The project illustrates how student involvement in both the Civil Rights and Environmental Movements did or did not manifest in two contrasting suburban and urban settings. Moreover, it highlights how place as a construct in and of itself influenced students‟ participation in both movement types in the post World War II era. Key to this analysis is an examination of not only geographic location and place specificity, but also the race, ethnicity, and socio-economic status of activist students. To contextualize these students‟ social and political activities, the project also examines the multiple influences within and outside of young activists‟ families, high schools, residential communities, as well as the local, state and national movements with which the students understood themselves to be associated. iii Table of Contents Introduction………………………………………………………………………………. 1 Chapter One: Landscapes of Social Movement.................................................................32 Chapter Two: Civil Rights and Environmental Activism in Bellport……………………64 Chapter Three: Civil Rights Activism in Suburban Malverne………………………….132 Chapter Four: Environmental Activism in Brooklyn…………………………………...191 Chapter Five: Civil Rights and Black Power Activism in Brooklyn…………………...247 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………...304 References………………………………………………………………………………313 iv Introduction In the fall of 1969, Zoilo Torres and Paulette Samuels, two students at Bellport Senior High School returned from summer vacation with plans of organizing a high school-based Civil Rights Movement in their local Long Island community. Hoping to combat longstanding racial, ethnic and socio-economic inequality, Torres and Samuels founded the Black and Puerto Rican Student Union (BPRSU) and served as its teenaged leaders. Just one year later, Ronald Rozsa, a senior from the same high school, returned after yet another summer vacation with similar plans of organizing local teens for political action. Although unlike his socially-conscious predecessors, Rozsa returned to school with plans of organizing a teen-led environmental action campaign for the preservation of fragile eco-systems within and around the Bellport Community. With the founding of Torres and Samuels‟ BPRSU, and Rozsa‟s Students for Environmental Quality (SEQ), youth in this rural Long Island community ushered in a period of teenaged political activism by bringing local life to divergent manifestations of two nationally-significant social movements. These two vastly different movements, however, attracted very different sets of teenaged activists and elicited very different responses from Bellport‟s adult population. The BPRSU was generally feared, misunderstood, and admonished by local media representatives, high school administrators and members of the surrounding white community; conversely the primarily white and middle to upper-class SEQ was routinely supported, celebrated, and congratulated for its activities. At the same time, while one was perceived as purely disruptive, unwarranted and threatening to the status quo, the other found local favor as 1 an educational and altruistic endeavor which benefited from the advice and encouragement of faculty mentors in school. These differences beg the question why? What led to such variances in student interest and public perception of these two social movements, both of which evolved upon this similarly shared suburban landscape? What was it about Bellport that led to the formation of two distinct manifestations of high school student activism in the same community high school? How did Bellport, as a place – both geographically as well as demographically – influence students‟ personal and collective decision-making processes when choosing to engage in either civil rights and/or environmental activism? At the same time, how did place influence these same choices in other types of communities, be they suburban or urban, comparable or dissimilar to Bellport? This dissertation project explores these place differences and how they influenced high school student civil rights and environmental activism in varying communities on suburban Long Island and in the New York City borough of Brooklyn. While the project certainly sheds light upon the significant contributions of high school activists in local manifestations of each of these national movements, it centers upon their differences based upon students‟ geographic and demographic place in relation to the sites and nature of their activism. The chapters which follow illustrate that despite a few similarly-shared movement trends such as non- place specific, universally-shared student goals, occurrences of high school student civil rights and environmental activism were never mirror images of one another. Students‟ lived realities in their own communities – defined by differences in race, ethnicity, class, and local topography, as well as differences intrinsic to the urban/suburban divide – shaped varying forms of high school student civil rights and environmental activism. 2 In the case of Bellport, while students in both social movements shared a similar suburban landscape, they did not share parallel suburban lifestyles, as their community was rigidly divided along racial, ethnic and socio-economic lines. Moreover, these demographic divisions also manifested geographically as Bellport was legally divided into two distinct neighborhoods: one relatively affluent and primarily white, and the other, much less prosperous and largely African American and Latino. As a geographic and demographically divided community, Bellport provided white, black, and Latino residents few shared spaces for cross-cultural and unifying social interaction. Throughout the postwar era, the local high school filled this void, as the educational facility became one of the only shared public spaces within which residents from either neighborhood, particularly the young, came together. It is within these two separate social worlds that BPRSU and SEQ members located much of their personal and collective motivation to actively engage in civil rights and environmental activism. At the same time, these diverging social realities also limited movement crossover, as student activists participated in only one movement or the other – never both. What is it about such differences, then, that led students from each of these two neighborhoods to choose one form of political activism over the other? Why was there no crossover between these two movements? Moreover, how common was it for a community to experience both high school student civil rights and environmental activism in the same school building? Finally, how significant was socioeconomic difference as a determinant factor in leading one group of students to labor for civil rights, and the other, to organize on behalf of the local environment? 3 As the analysis on Bellport will reveal, both student movements were grounded by differing sets of organizational priorities largely based upon students‟ mutually exclusive lived realities in their respective, yet conjoined, suburban neighborhoods. While the majority of BPRSU members hailed from the working-class and less affluent hamlet of North Bellport, the majority of SEQ members hailed from the more prosperous, middle to upper-class, waterfront village. For African American and Latino student activists, such stark contrasts between their neighborhood and that of their SEQ classmates grounded their civil rights activism, as they focused their efforts upon both racial and ethnic diversity in school as well as the alleviation of poverty in the greater community.

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