Thurgood Marshall's Rockland civil rights battle recalled in Hillburn

HILLBURN - Nine-year-old Travis Jackson knew that his elementary school and the one on the other side of the village were different.

The other school in Hillburn had a library, playground and indoor plumbing. His school had none of those things.

Until a young lawyer named Thurgood Marshall came to town.

The future Supreme Court justice was then head of the NAACP legal team and his 1943 contribution toward desegregating the two Rockland County elementary schools set the stage for the landmark Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka ruling more than a decade later that ordered the ended of school segregation.

Even so, the story of Marshall's involvement in the bitter struggle to integrate two small elementary schools in Rockland is not as widely known.

That could soon change: The Hillburn school will be added to the National Register of Historic Places. A ceremony will be held May 15 at the school, which now houses the Ramapo Central school district's administration building.

"It will be a community-wide celebration," said Wylene Wood, co-chair of the Rockland African-American Historical Society who is coordinating the ceremony.

It took the work of many people to win the historic designation for the building, she said, adding that state Assemblywoman Ellen Jaffee, D-Suffern, was key to the effort.

“It was a great effort by a great man,” Pearl River lawyer James Riley said of Marshall’s work in Hillburn. “It was the start of something that was much needed and wonderful.”

Riley has suggested naming the state Thruway/Interstate 87-287 interchange, which extends into Hillburn, in Marshall's honor.

Tale of 2 schools

And in another effort to shine light on the struggle for school desegregation, a local filmmaker is preparing to start a documentary about Marshall and the fight to integrate Hillburn.

"Not very many people know this story," said Joe Allen, who is directing "Two Schools in Hillburn." "It needs to be known."

Allen plans to start filming in mid-April. His work will include interviews with people like Jackson who were part of the desegregation battle. And he will search local archives for information about the issue as well as Marshall's involvement.

Allen, who has done documentaries on the 11 Israeli athletes killed at the 1972 Munich Olympics and the honor flights for World War II veterans, is raising funds to support the project.

What happened in Hillburn is an important part of both New York and U.S. history, said Jackson, who went on to earn a doctorate and spent many years teaching social studies at Suffern Middle School and was a principal in a New Jersey district.

Two long-gone factories in western Ramapo attracted African-American workers who settled in the area. Jackson's father, a World War I veteran who was exposed to mustard gas that left a lasting effect on his health, was one of them. And Hillburn has always been home to a large number of residents who trace their ancestry to the Ramapough Indian tribe.

In those days, both American Indians and African-Americans were considered "colored," Jackson recalled. He and the other "colored" students attended the Brook School, while white students went to the Main School.

The Brook School and Brook Presbyterian Church were named for a stream that meandered down the Ramapo Mountains and ran parallel to Route 17, passing the school and church before emptying into the Ramapo River, Jackson said.

By the early 1940s, the small wooden school had four rooms with two grades in each room. The kindergarten class met in the church annex.

The Main School and Hillburn Presbyterian Church were on the other side of town, where most of Hllburn’s white families lived.

The two elementary schools were separate, but they certainly weren't equal, Jackson recalled.

Once a week, he and other students walked across the village to use the library at the Main School, a concrete building with eight rooms. They marveled at the playground and indoor plumbing, which their school lacked.

The beginning of the 1943 school year saw the opening of a new, centralized  junior-senior high school in Suffern. Hillburn students in grades 7 and 8 were transferred to the new school, freeing up enough space in the Main School for all of the village's youngsters. The state Education Department ruled that all students would attend that school.

Jackson supplemented his memory of the events with accounts from minutes of school board meetings and other archival accounts in an essay he wrote for the Rockland Historical Society, "Mr. Marshall Comes to Hillburn."

His research shows that even though there was enough room at the Main School, the school board, whose members included the powerful heads of the factories where many residents worked, balked at the idea of integrating the school.

The black community, teamed with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, coordinated a strike against the Brook School.

The community brought in Marshall to lead the charge.

That fight came at a cost.

Black families who refused to send their children to the Brook School were summoned to Rockland County Court, where they were charged with truancy and fined $10. The judge offered to suspended the fine — if the children returned to school, records show.

The parents refused.

"People were very courageous," Jackson said. "The black families and the black community pushed for equal educational rights for their children. They stood up for their rights."

Raising her voice vs. segregation

The fight over segregation in Hillburn led to intense debate throughout Rockland County and beyond in the 1940s.

A group of artists and leading citizens of the day, including actress Helen Hayes, made their feelings known. This is what Hayes told the Rockland Leader newspaper after the ruling:

“I look forward with hope and prayer to developments in Hillburn. It seems to me that, with all the children now in Hillburn Main School, the people of Hillburn have the opportunity for a wonderful and exciting experiment in democracy which might very well serve as a guide and a beacon to the whole country. I am sure that the white people in Hillburn will have faith in democracy and in the race to meet the situation with tolerance and understanding. Their audience today is as wide as the world.”

Twitter: @JaneLernerNY