“The Police State in Franklin K. Lane”: Desegregation,Student Resistance,and the Carceral Turn at a New York City High School

On Thursday morning, February 6, 1969, a 17-year-old Black junior named Edward Perry was walking the hallways of Franklin K. Lane High School when a teacher chased after him and asked to see his program card. ¹ These encounters were hardly unusual. Lane, an overcrowded, majority Black and Puerto Rican school situated along a mostly white stretch of Jamaica Avenue straddling the Brooklyn-Queens border, had in recent years developed a “climate of discrimination against minority group students,” according to reports. And among the most exasperating daily indignities Black and Puerto Rican students faced were the constant program card checks, in which teachers and other school officials demanded to inspect the children’s schedules to ensure that they were not wandering the halls or cafeteria without permission. Although program card violations were only minor breaches of school regulations, they could lead to serious punishment, including suspension. ²

Edward was a capable student with a B average and spotless personal record. ³ So perhaps that morning he was afraid of possible discipline—or maybe he simply wanted to avoid confrontation—when he declined to show his program card to the teacher, Seymour Bochner, who was white. “This teacher came running after me and asked me for my program card,” Edward later testified. “I just stood there. He asked for my program card again and I didn’t say anything. The teacher kept stepping in front of me and asking for my program card. So I just ran past him.” Bochner, however, contended that Edward had “jostled” him and filed a complaint. As a result, the boy was not just reprimanded or punished but taken from school in handcuffs and arrested on a charge of “harassment.” With just $1 of lunch money in his pocket, Edward could not afford the $25 bail, which left him incarcerated in Rikers Island Penitentiary. Neither the school, nor the arresting officers, nor the court notified his mother, Jessie Perry, who filed a missing person report when her son failed to return home. Perry even borrowed a friend’s car to search for the boy herself. The warden at Rikers later said that a slip of paper in Edward’s handwriting had been turned in with two telephone numbers and a note reading, “Tell someone I am here and to bail me out because no one knows I am here.” That too was ignored. The boy was only returned home after his sister tracked down his location and the family posted bail. By then, Edward had spent five days in jail. “Nobody contacted me,” Perry, a hotel cleaning woman, said. “Not the school, the police or anybody.” ⁴

Such was life at Franklin K. Lane. Perhaps no other school in the country saw more tension, violence, repression, and resistance during the fevered years of the late 1960s. What took place there represented a kind of denouement in New York City’s battles over race, class, policing, discipline, desegregation, community control, and student rights that by then had been building for decades.

While the rise of school policing and student discipline is a development of national importance, education is always a local story. This article offers a novel contribution by homing in on the transformation at one particular high school. Such a granular focus allows for a more intimate, textured portrait of municipal evolution that—while taking into account federal legislation and national trends—foregrounds the importance of the local city and school officials as well as the students, teachers, parents, and everyday people who shaped this history on a human level. It also reveals the consequences of carceral expansion for individual students, whose stories are highlighted here in detail. ⁵

In centering the happenings at Franklin K. Lane High School, this essay demonstrates how the logics and politics of school policing and student discipline were forged not only from the top down, by government officials at the highest levels, but also from the bottom up, in the complex interplay between the parents, student organizers, teachers, and administrators at the school. While Lane was, of course, deeply informed by the national and local context of desegregation, youth protest, and the rise of police power, the changes that took hold there came in response, above all, to the hyper-specific personalities, practices, hostilities, and alliances that dictated life at the school.

This essay also demonstrates how city officials leveraged individual school conflicts into broader carceral expansions that affected not only particular institutions but the entire public education system. Indeed, during this era, politicians often treated Lane not as a school so much as a menacing—and easily exploitable—symbol of crime, dysfunction, and racial conflagration that played on the public’s worst fears. Lane, however, was something else—an exemplar of how desegregation and under-investment led to brutal racism and a crisis of policing and discipline. This essay therefore shows how the education system’s carceral turn exacerbated the very inequalities, injustices, and grim conditions that precipitated the initial predicaments, locking Lane and other schools into a vicious cycle of crises begetting further crises. In this way, city officials did not respond to crises so much as manufacture them.

Although school policing and disciplinary crackdowns were often promoted as necessary measures for ensuring student safety, carceral expansions at Lane and other New York City schools typically corresponded not to any demonstrable rise in crime but rather to incidents of racial unrest and challenges to the prevailing social order within the school system. Indeed, the mere presence of Black students in a majority-white school was often deemed a criminal threat. Throughout the 1960s, with Brown v. Board of Education’s promise of desegregated schooling waning in the face of continued white resistance and bureaucratic obstinance, many Black parents, students, and local leaders came to see the school system as inexorably hostile to their children and began championing instead a community-controlled model of education that challenged state authority and legitimacy. Integral to this movement were urgent calls to rethink the role of law enforcement in schools as well as the draconian suspension policies that were channeling ever more Black students into the legal system. ⁶

The largely parent-led campaign for community-controlled schools ultimately gave way to even more revolutionary movements led by high school students themselves. These were children inflamed not only by the radical politics of the era but also by the experience of bearing witness to the battles for educational authority in New York City that seemed to pit teachers and administrators against any student who dared challenge the status quo. At Lane in particular, many Black students were bused in from central Brooklyn, where the local movements for Black Power and community control were strongest. Student campaigns could be highly local and specific, often concerned with changes in individual school policies and personnel, but they also promoted a radical reimagining of schools, policing, and even society at large. Above all, they called not for reform but for the wholesale abolition of student suspensions and school police. During these conflicts, many young people came to see school police as a violent and repressive body that only served to enforce racial hierarchy and quash dissent. While even ordinary students found themselves detained by school police, student organizers were targeted above all. “We knew there was no way students would ever get justice from the school police,” recalled Willie Baptiste, a former student organizer at Lane. “We didn’t want it reformed, we wanted to get rid of it entirely.” ⁷

While this wave of protest secured students some important protections and liberties, it was also met with a powerful punitive backlash. Student activists at Lane and other high schools were very often treated by public officials not as legitimate political advocates but as youthful—even criminal—agitators. And as students fought for the end of school policing and over-disciplining, they found themselves policed and disciplined more severely than ever. This was particularly true for Black student organizers, many of whom were harassed, arrested, and even brutalized by police for their work. “The method sought and the response usually given to youngsters who oppose authority . . . is ‘throw the bum [here, child] out,’” Dr. Bernard Mackler, a professor of education, wrote in 1970. ⁸

Indeed, during the latter half of the twentieth century, carcerality became a principal operational and ideological paradigm through which administrators and city officials ran Lane and other schools. Vast swaths of students—the majority, in fact—were deemed criminally suspect. Incidents of misbehavior were treated as major offenses and adjudicated in a highly legalistic manner. School buildings became correctional-style fortresses policed by security agents and plainclothes officers, enhanced by ever more expensive and intrusive forms of surveillance and security hardware. Under this model, discipline and law enforcement became the solutions to a widening array of student problems—social, economic, behavioral, emotional, interpersonal, health-related, or otherwise—no matter how complex and regardless of individual and structural circumstances. Much like the scholar Angela Davis wrote of prisons, schools would increasingly “disappear human beings in order to convey the illusion of solving social problems.” ⁹

In offering these arguments through its chronicle of Franklin K. Lane, this essay builds upon and contributes to several historiographical fields. First is the small but growing body of scholarship on the history of the “school-prison nexus.” ¹⁰ While scholars have increasingly emphasized the role of racial conflict and the criminalization of student protest, this essay nuances that point by demonstrating that the pushback was responding not only to Black student organizing, but to the implicit challenge to the status quo represented by desegregation and the arrival of Black students in predominantly white schools. ¹¹ This essay also intervenes in the historiography of high school student activism. Most previous scholarship has focused on curricular and representational demands, whereas this essay emphasizes that high school students were on the vanguard of challenging school policing and student discipline, leading a radical movement for full abolition. ¹² Finally, this essay contributes to the scholarship on race, resistance, and policing in New York City. ¹³ Of course, no one place is ever wholly representative, but New York City, which has been particularly understudied in the realm of school policing and student discipline, is notable in that it was a seemingly progressive northern city that helped forge a disturbing model for the country. Due in part to the city’s singular density and segregation, New York’s battles over police and school were among the most pointed and influential in the nation. As New York Senator Jacob Javits said during a series of desegregation rallies in his home state, “When people demonstrate in New York, they are not demonstrating for New York Senators alone. It is fair to say that they are demonstrating for the Nation and the world.” ¹⁴

Although wholly fascinating and historically consequential, scholars have largely overlooked the story of Lane’s role in the carceral turn in New York City schools. The most comprehensive account of what took place there is the book Race War in High School: The Ten-Year Destruction of Franklin K. Lane High School in Brooklyn, a highly polemical and strikingly blinkered memoir by Harold Saltzman, the school’s teachers’ union chapter chairman, who was instrumental in shaping events during this period. Among the only academic explorations of Lane’s history comes from a section of Neil Philip Buffett’s dissertation. That work, which largely focuses on high school student civil rights and environmental activism, argues that students at Lane formed “a much more radicalized, militant, and, at times, violent civil rights and social justice campaign than those” developed elsewhere in New York. ¹⁵ Original archival research paired with firsthand accounts from student interviews bring to life this overlooked chapter of New York history and reveal how one of the biggest high schools in the city became “like a prison for young people,” as one former student put it. “It certainly didn’t feel like high school.” ¹⁶

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When Franklin K. Lane High School was built in 1936, it was one of the largest high schools in the world—a five-story, red-brick edifice adorned with white columns and a cupola. It occupied the former site of the Brooklyn Truant School, which is the subject of Judith Kafka’s article in this special section. The surrounding neighborhood of one- and two-family homes was populated mostly by middle-class Germanic families, and the school once reflected those demographics. As far back as 1954, the school, originally planned for 4,000 students, enrolled only 2,400 overwhelmingly white children from the surrounding area, and boasted high academic performance and a well-liked staff. Then came desegregation, and the ensuing project of school rezoning, which cut off some whiter areas, such as Glendale, and extended Lane’s catchment deeper into overwhelmingly low-income Black neighborhoods in Brooklyn, including Bedford-Stuyvesant and Ocean Hill-Brownsville. By 1958, Lane was 24.1 percent Black and Puerto Rican, a figure that increased to 50.2 percent in 1966 then 66 percent in 1969 as enrollment surpassed 5,000. ¹⁷

But it wasn’t just Lane that was changing. In the years following the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, New York City was consumed by a series of heated conflicts over desegregated schooling, student discipline, and municipal authority. Many white parents, administrators, and teachers—while professing to support desegregation in the abstract—vociferously fought any plans for its actual implementation, often pathologizing Black students as “difficult” and even criminal. The issue came to a head in 1967 over the so-called “disruptive child clause.” Championed in 1967 by the United Federation of Teachers (UFT), the city’s then-relatively new, overwhelmingly white, integration-skeptical teachers’ union, the proviso would grant teachers the right to remove any students they regarded as troublesome for infractions as minor—and discretionary—as “defiance of authority.” Although many Black educators sympathized with the UFT’s desire for professional development, higher wages, and greater classroom resources, the Negro Teachers Association (NTA) excoriated the plan as racist and dangerously punitive. Nearly every NTA member withdrew from the UFT as a result. ¹⁸ Tensions only heightened the following year, when the UFT clashed with the new community-controlled school board in the predominantly Black Ocean Hill–Brownsville section of central Brooklyn, prompting a citywide teachers’ strike. ¹⁹ The infamous and well-documented affair seemed to pit Black students and community leaders against the city’s white teachers. Student organizers began regarding both the Board of Education (BOE) and UFT as adversarial forces, often staging protests at their offices. The Black students in central Brooklyn who watched this battle unfold from the frontlines were acutely radicalized by the experience, and it just so happened that, in the aftermath, many ended up being bussed to Franklin K. Lane.

These political convulsions and demographic transformations aroused strong tensions—and brazen racism—within Lane and the neighborhood. White community groups such as the Cypress Hill-Woodhaven Improvement Association formed, with the encouragement of some UFT chapter members, for the express purpose of opposing school desegregation and the perceived disorder at Lane and other local schools. ²⁰ “VICTIMS OF JUNGLE SAVAGERY AWAKE! ARE YOU NEXT?” reads a flier posted around the neighborhood in January 1969. “In 1967 Lane High School Was only 40% jungle. Now due to LIBERAL TREACHERY your school is 65% JUNGLE CONTROLLED.” A minstrel-style sketch as egregious as any propaganda distributed in the Antebellum South accompanied the text: five Black Lane students, drawn more simian than man, setting fire to a petrified, besuited white man they prepared to eat. One carries a sign that declares “AFRICAN CULTURE FOR LANE HIGH”; another bears a placard reading “EAT WHITEY.” Across the bottom of the page runs the question, “WILL CANNIBALISM BE PRACTICED IN THE SCHOOL CAFETERIA?” ²¹ The origins of the flier remain uncertain, but its language was mimicked in another distributed just a week later by the National Youth Alliance, a radical right wing political group with ties to the American Nazi Party that gained some popularity in the late 1960s. This second leaflet, publicizing a rally headlined by the notorious Newark City Councilman Anthony Imperiale, decried the “reign of terror against the civilized student” and encouraged supporters to “smash jungle savagery.” The image attached shows a lynched man hanging from a tree. ²²

Such displays of overt racism came not only from fringe radical groups but also from students, teachers, and powerful administrators within Lane. “Black and Puerto Rican students have been flagrantly discriminated against by the police, by certain teachers and by certain school administrators,” reads a previously confidential 1969 report about Lane, conducted by the Metropolitan Applied Research Center (MARC). “They have been harassed in the school and on the streets, subject to suspensions, arrests and injuries.” According to the report, racist epithets were graffitied often in the bathrooms and on classroom doors; teachers regularly used the n-word and several played active roles in local white extremist groups; some students were spotted carrying Nazi flags and literature, and a Confederate banner even flew one day atop of the school flagpole. ²³ Gangs of white boys often beat up their Black classmates on the grounds of protecting the white girls. “The colored’s always pushing the white girls around, so 15 of us white guys took on 16 of them Friday to show we’re not punk,” one young man told a Times reporter. ²⁴

In this environment, Black and Puerto Rican students were relegated to lower-level classes, disciplined harshly, and ultimately treated as threats. ²⁵ The school’s principal, Morton Selub, openly stated his desire to decrease the school’s Black and Puerto Rican population, saying “proportions should be closer to 50%”—a figure often cited by the UFT and white parents as a dangerous demographic “tipping point.” ²⁶ One article in the New York Times described a 50/50 racial split as “the perfect ethnic mix, it is sometimes said, for an explosion.” ²⁷ The school’s teachers’ union chapter also explicitly called for 1,100 Black students to be transferred out of Lane, blaming them for a “rash of extortion, vandalism, larceny and numerous acts against other students.” ²⁸ Black students understood well what this meant. “It is quite clear that they don’t want us here,” Romana Kerr, a sophomore, told the New York Amsterdam News, the most prominent Black newspaper in the city. ²⁹ Any display of racial pride, from carrying Pan-African flags to wearing dashikis, seemed to inspire a reflexive panic by teachers and administrators, who, despite the changing student body, remained almost entirely white. “In the eyes of many teachers,” read an article in the Times, such students “surrender the status of children for that of ‘hard-core militants.’” ³⁰

Indeed, student organizers observed an unmistakable pattern of hostility and intimidation by their teachers, who made a point of singling them out for uniform violations and other infractions that, though minor, often ended in suspensions. “The discipline was always for talking back or being unruly—totally subjective things so they could really nab whoever they wanted whenever they wanted,” Ira Schwartz, a student organizer at Lane, recalled. ³¹ Some students reported that they were even made to swear that they would not be “politically active” or urged to “repent” as a condition of their reinstatement. ³²

What’s more, in January 1969, Lane’s UFT chapter chairman lobbied the teachers to threaten a strike if the city did not station a fleet of police inside the building. As was the case in a number of cities, police had been a fixture inside many New York schools for more than a decade. Many were stationed on school grounds through regular deployments and called in to handle disturbances. But the Lane teachers and administrators wanted substantially more officers. And they weren’t shy about expressing the reason. ³³ “We feel we’re a target school for a black take-over,” said the school’s UFT chapter chairman, Harold Saltzman, justifying the request. ³⁴ Saltzman even claimed white children were the true victims of racial discrimination and violence at the school. “These whites,” he wrote, in his memoir of his time at Lane, “had been on the receiving end of a wave of terror that matched anything thrown by Southern whites at black people in the post-1954 era.” ³⁵ Ultimately, Saltzman rallied his constituents, who voted 179-30 to threaten the strike.

Soon after, despite even police department ambivalence, the city assigned more than seven uniformed officers to roam both in and outside the school. “It’s like a precinct,” multiple students told the Amsterdam News. Another remarked, upon exiting the building, “It’s like leaving a prison.” ³⁶ At a meeting with a BOE official, one Lane student testified that the school police were not just menacing but frequently violent and unpredictable. “The cops actually beat students up for no reason,” he said. ³⁷

Some students said teachers seemed emboldened by the presence of police. “As soon as they get the cops behind them, they show how racist they are,” one Lane student regarded by teachers as “militant” told the New York Times. ³⁸ Ira Schwartz, the former student organizer, recalled that during this period, he was arrested by one police officer assigned to the school when he tried to remove a bumper sticker supporting the presidential campaign of the segregationist George Wallace from a teacher’s car parked on nearby Elderts Lane. After resisting arrest, Ira was sent to the Manhattan Detention Complex, where he was forced to spend the night in a cell with an adult man who threatened to kill him. ³⁹

Even with the police in place—or perhaps, partly because of them—tensions at Lane intensified. On January 20, 1969, an episode unfolded that seemed to confirm the worst fears of many of the school’s teachers, administrators, and parents. Just before 9 o’clock that morning, a stone crashed through the classroom window of a young chemistry teacher named Frank Siracusa. When he set out to investigate, Siracusa said, three Black students jumped him in the basement vestibule, punching and kicking his abdomen. He yelled for help, but no officers came to his aid. Then, before the boys fled, one drew a water pistol, squirted Siracusa’s jacket with a liquid the teacher believed to be lighter fluid and set the lapels aflame. Siracusa removed the jacket before incurring any burns, but even with the fire quenched, the story proved incendiary. It was the same day as President Richard Nixon’s inauguration, but the affair still made the front page of the Times. Mayor John Lindsay called it an “incredibly outrageous incident.” Schools superintendent Bernard E. Donovan blamed overcrowding and “unfortunately getting out of ethnic balance.” ⁴⁰ In his book, Saltzman describes the incident as momentous: “A brand new chapter had been written into the annals of racial strife in the public schools.” ⁴¹

As appalling as Siracusa’s assault may have been, many students understood it as an aggressive counterattack against one of the central belligerents on Lane’s faculty. “This sort of thing was unusual, but it wasn’t unprecedented,” recalled Ira Schwartz. “Teachers could be very violent and racist, and a lot of students felt like they had to fight back.” What the press didn’t report at the time was that Siracusa had a reputation for bigotry. Siracusa publicly supported George Wallace during the 1968 presidential election and was “party to general anti-Negro sentiment in the neighborhood and in the school,” according to recollections from the time. “I think that if the black people don’t get into line, then we’ll either have to annihilate them or neutralize them,” he once reportedly told a journalist. One student claimed Siracusa habitually stalked the hallways and cafeteria, looking for students to “bust” on petty indiscretions, yelling at them and escorting them to the principal. Others claimed he “was widely known as a racist” and had been overheard using the n-word. “He has a long history of harassing students,” the student said. “Students don’t just indiscriminately pick out teachers and beat on them. They do have reasons.” And though it was unclear who wrote it, just below the windowpane that students had shattered in Siracusa’s classroom was a message painted in bright red: “Nigger Out,” along with three swastikas. ⁴²

Still, the structural and institutional persecution endured by students meant little in the heated aftermath of the Siracusa affair. To outraged teachers, administrators, and community members, the burning was an unprompted attack on an irreproachable educator by a pack of sadistic boys, seeming to confirm every lingering fear over Black students and school crime. Even stalwart “liberal” publications like the Times used the incident as evidence to rail against the city for “permitting nonwhite enrollment to turn into the overwhelming majority” at Lane. ⁴³ UFT representative Saltzman seized on the moment to press once again for the banishing of hundreds of Black students, as he reasoned that overcrowding and “racial imbalance” were to blame for the violence at Lane. This time, the city conceded: on January 22, Mayor Lindsay approved a plan to expel or involuntarily transfer approximately 700 students from Lane. Saltzman later explained—without evidence—that many of the students were “truants who were over the age of seventeen,” while others were “drop-ins” who would come to school for a few days and then miss weeks of class. Nearly all of those ejected were Black and Puerto Rican. None of them received warnings, hearings, or due process. ⁴⁴

“The implication would seem to be that the Negro and Puerto Rican in high school in New York is itself synonymous with being disruptive” said Dr. Kenneth B. Clark, who joined with the New York Civil Liberties Union to file a federal lawsuit that charged Lane principal Selub with acting in “flagrant and knowing” violation of the students’ constitutional rights. Allowing the students to be pushed out “because of their race or predicament of powerlessness,” Dr. Clark said, would “establish a precedent by which students in racially integrated schools can be removed on grounds that they are disruptive, hostile, impertinent, arrogant or truants and, in effect, be reassigned to essentially racially segregated facilities.” If such an action continued “with impunity,” he warned, it would “make a mockery of the 1954 Brown decision.”

In building their suit, Clark and the NYCLU relied on several federal court precedents established through late 1950s civil rights cases from the South that defended procedural due process of law for schoolchildren. “Under the guise of traditional New York liberalism, we are now confronted with a most flagrant insidious form of racial distinction in the right of human beings to public education,” said Clark. Months later, the BOE admitted to a federal court that it had erred in forcing the students from Lane, but by then most of the pushed-out children had already given up on education and moved on to other endeavors. Only 100 were re-admitted, while the rest were referred to truancy authorities. And the state of life at Lane remained as tense and antagonistic as ever. Clark publicly offered this advice to the Mayor:

If he is really seriously concerned with reducing disruptions in our high schools, then he must be just as seriously concerned with calling to account the members of the Board of Education and their professional staff who perpetrated this type of horror on human beings. Because unless he deals with that, all of his police will not be able to deal with the disruptions in our schools. ⁴⁵

In the wake of the Siracusa incident, in addition to the student dismissals, came the introduction of even more school police. Lindsay requested that Police Commissioner Howard Leary “keep Franklin Lane under 24-hour surveillance.” ⁴⁶ When Lane reopened later that week, the Times reported, “scores of policemen were stationed in the corridors, boys rest rooms, stairways, basement, gymnasium and on the streets outside the school.” Some students felt so alienated they hardly found it worthwhile or even prudent to attend classes. “No use going to that school. That’s a prison. Cops, cops all over the place, just waitin’ to bust you,” an 18-year-old Lane student from Bedford-Stuyvesant told the Times. As at so many other schools, the omnipresence of police at Lane completely shaped—and undeniably damaged—the psyche of the students, who lived in a perpetual state of fear and absorbed the lesson that they were somehow criminally suspect. “You can make believe the police are not here, sort of, but it’s not the same really,” said one senior boy. “I think it all makes most of the kids nervous. It’s like being told you’re being bad, but not telling you how.” ⁴⁷ Black student representatives put forth a proposal to replace the police with a multiracial coalition of student monitors to patrol the school and handle student grievances. “We believe the students are quite capable of policing themselves,” said Arthur Thomas, a former student and Black Panther representative, who met with principal Selub. The proposal was flatly rejected. ⁴⁸

Flooded with more police than ever, Lane and many schools across the city became powder kegs of violence, upheaval, and racial tension. There were numerous reports of street fighting, arson, vandalism, and, above all, police brutality. Predominantly black and Puerto Rican schools, where police presence was heaviest, saw a particular “escalation of punishment,” according to Miriam Wasserman, a former teacher. “As suspensions throughout the system soared, an arrest took the place of suspension,” she writes in a book recollecting that time. “Police rather than parent or dean or principal had been added as the ultimate in the conventional sequence of authorities.” ⁴⁹

Forced to confront this grim reality in their places of learning, students at Lane and elsewhere began to push explicitly—and determinedly—for the abolition of school police and an end to all suspensions and expulsions. To them, this was hardly radical, but rather a bare minimum necessity to achieve any sense of liberty in their schools. “Police weren’t there for student safety—they were there to discipline Black and brown kids and to quell student unrest,” said Jose Velázquez, a former student organizer at Louis Brandeis High School in Manhattan who estimates he was suspended six or seven times without due process. “We knew firsthand there couldn’t be justice with cops in the schools.” ⁵⁰ As part of a larger citywide campaign students called their “Spring Offensive,” organizers at Lane marshaled a movement of their own, drawing up a list of demands on March 10 that included more classes that recognized “the Black man’s true role,” “Black teachers and aides proportional to the student body,” and the “immediate removal of any/all personnel who are not employed by the New York City Board of Education.” By this last point, they meant the elimination of all school police and security personnel. ⁵¹ That spring, the Black and Puerto Rican Citywide High School Committee issued a set of demands as well. It began, “1) No more automatic suspension of high school students 2) No More police and police aides inside New York City high schools.” While the various factions of the high school student movement did not always reach consensus, nearly everyone aligned on these two points. ⁵²

If their demands were not met by March 24, Lane students said, they would stage a protest at school called “Black Monday,” in which students would wear black and “let it be known that Franklin K. Lane is dead,” according to fliers. (The quip played on the fact that Lane’s campus abutted a cemetery.) ⁵³ UFT chair Saltzman accused the students of engaging in “psychological warfare.” Behind the scenes, he privately wrote to Selub, Lane’s principal, to discredit the Black student activists as “militants” and to lobby for even more police to quash potential protest. “Have the police authorities on the precinct and city levels been notified?” he asked. “Have [the students] been made aware that they will be held strictly accountable and subject to the penalties of the law . . .?” ⁵⁴

When March 24 arrived, 100 policemen stood guard in and around Lane, with barricades stretching the length of a football field, from Jamaica Avenue all the way to the student entrance on Dexter Court. ⁵⁵ “We got off the bus to school and all I could see was police every five feet with helmets and riot gear, nightsticks and guns,” recalled Willie Baptiste, the former Lane student. “Their reaction wasn’t to take the demands seriously but to arm themselves against us.” ⁵⁶ Most of the school’s 4,300 students ended up staying home, and the day passed without incident. Still, as Saltzman wrote, “it was a day that engendered a fear in the white community that would linger for some time.” ⁵⁷

It didn’t take long for that fear to be realized. Classes resumed at Lane the following fall with a brief period of placidity. Despite all its threats and antagonistic posturing, the Lane administration yielded to the student protestors somewhat on the matter of Black studies and expanded course offerings on Black history and culture. But Black student activists found themselves embattled yet again after replacing the American Flag in Room 248, where several sections of Black History took place, with a red, black, and green Black Liberation flag. To so many Black students at Lane, room 248 was their sanctuary in an otherwise unforgiving school—a place to learn and celebrate their often-maligned culture and achievements. Pictures of Black Power revolutionaries, including Malcolm X, H. Rap Brown, and Huey Newton, adorned the walls. So, one morning in late October, when Principal Selub came to demand that the American flag be restored to its original place, the students refused. Uncowed, Selub walked to the social studies office next door and began calling the students’ parents to inform them their children would be punished. In total, nine Black and Puerto Rican students were suspended and approximately 30 others were “excluded” and told not to return to school. To the students, this was only further evidence of Lane’s antagonism and they spilled into the corridors gathering companions along the way until they were 200 strong chanting, “Power to the people!” ⁵⁸

Unresolved, the flag issue persisted. That Friday, October 24, Selub barged into Room 248, once again ordered students to remove the flag and vacate the premises, then suspended several who refused. Two Black students, fourteen and fifteen years old, were even arrested on riot charges after a group of students marched through the school bearing the Liberation flag, and some tables and chairs were overturned in the school cafeteria. (A smaller group of white students trooping through Lane the same day with a Confederate flag, chanting “white power,” were not disciplined at all.) Police conceded that no one had been injured and the worst damage done was “one small pane of glass” broken. But to Mayor Lindsay, the greater crime was the challenge to the school’s order. “Any disruptive action will be dealt with very firmly,” he declared. Going forward, he instructed, police were to “provide full assistance and . . . deal promptly and firmly with any individual seeking to disrupt the educational process.” Instead, how police dealt with students at Lane one week later was not just prompt and firm but downright brutal, leaving more than a dozen children in jail, several of them beaten bloody in the process. ⁵⁹

The day that students and community members came to refer to as a “Police Riot at Franklin K. Lane High School” began, incongruously enough, with a celebration. It was October 31, 1969, which that year was Lane’s annual “Baby Day,” when senior class students came to school wearing diapers, sucking lollipops and pacifiers, and sporting other infantile paraphernalia. Black students generally did not participate in the festivities, and many were even less inclined this year, with the return that day of the student activists suspended during the Liberation flag affair. Undercutting the jovial atmosphere even more was the presence of nearly twenty-two police officers stationed in the school, along with numerous administrators scouring the hallways for “disruptive behavior.” ⁶⁰

According to accounts provided in MARC’s previously confidential report on Lane, community documents, newspapers, and by witnesses in later interviews, things first turned violent that morning when a female dean apprehended an unidentified Black male student near the cafeteria for allegedly failing to display his program card. She pulled him into the hall along with two other administrators and a policeman, who began to slap and poke the boy. When nearby pupils tried to recruit help, other officers blocked their exit, prompting a confrontation that quickly devolved into chaos. People began to jeer and scream. One white student sprayed an officer with a water gun, while another seized an officer’s arms from behind. Neither was punished. Moments later, though, when a sixteen-year-old Black junior named Beverly Dixon, a member of the Afro-American Student Association described as “a quiet student with rheumatic heart condition,” got up to bus her tray, she accidentally became entangled with a burly police sergeant. “Then the cops came and started beating on this girl,” recalled Wayne Powell, a seventeen-year-old senior, at a news conference days later. “We’re going to make an example out of you,” the sergeant, later identified as James Mansfield, of the 75th Precinct, allegedly said before striking the girl and shoving her into the hall, toward the stairway. There, Beverly and other witnesses said, the sergeant was joined by more officers in pummeling the girl with their fists and nightsticks until blood began oozing from her head and mouth. Beverly was nonetheless handcuffed, refused permission to call her parents, and hauled off to the local precinct, where she was charged with resisting arrest, second-degree assault and harassment of a police officer, and inciting a riot. Her bail was set at $500. She was never allowed back at Lane. ⁶¹

Word of Beverly’s beating and arrest circulated though Lane and the uproar grew. “Someone grabbed me in the hall and said one of the sisters got beat up by the police,” recalled Willie Baptiste. He ran to the scene and caught a glimpse of young Beverly, restrained and whimpering. “At that point, all I saw was red,” he said. “One of ours had gotten beaten up for nothing so we were gonna cause a little chaos and let them know that wouldn’t stand.” Soon, students were flipping over tables in the cafeteria, tossing food, fighting, running through the halls yelling “police brutality!” Mortified by yet another disturbance on his watch, Principal Selub ordered the school closed, but not before calling for a battalion of reinforcements. As students poured outside, they were greeted by hundreds of police arriving by the truckload, outfitted in riot gear. There was also a group of local white parents protesting the disruption, some of whom brandished American and Confederate flags, baseball bats, and bottles. Teachers told MARC investigators that they heard shouts of “they should all be slaves!” and “send them back to Africa!” ⁶²

Most students headed for the subways and buses on Jamaica Avenue, but some never made it. “As the students moved out, the police moved in, shoving, kicking, prodding, and attempting to provoke a fight,” read a student flier reporting on the episode. With transit police denying them entry to the subway and neighborhood police shooing them away from Lane, students found themselves trapped on all sides by law enforcement. Many witnesses maintained that police allowed whites to get away on the subway or by foot unscathed while they continued to harass Black and Puerto Rican children. Several white students even ran home and retrieved rifles that they then proceeded to fire at their Black classmates. At least nine students were arrested amid the commotion that day, and many others injured—all of them Black and Puerto Rican. One boy was seen spitting out a tooth after being clobbered in the mouth by a policeman’s nightstick. A girl named Carmen Owens was taken to Kings County Hospital with swelling and bruises after a cop hit her in the leg. And Ronald Greene suffered severe lacerations on his leg after police wrestled him through the glass window of a nearby supermarket. The seventeen-year-old boy was arrested and left bleeding and untreated for an hour before being hospitalized. Four police officers reportedly sustained minor injuries as well. ⁶³

Perhaps no one—neither student nor officer—was abused quite as gravely as Willie Baptiste. Born in Mobile, Alabama, Willie moved as a child with his family to Brooklyn during the second wave of the Great Migration. He soon became politicized by the stark disinvestment in his schools and neighborhood, and eventually found mentorship under Jitu Weusi and other leaders of the Black Power movement. As a leading student organizer at Lane, Willie often found himself at odds with school administrators and local police from the infamous 75th precinct. So, when the situation at Lane began to deteriorate that October day, he knew he would likely be targeted. As soon as Selub closed the school, Willie made a dash for it. He slid past the procession of exiting students, scampered away from the hordes of protesting parents, and sprinted through the first tranche of police officers, toward the staircase to the elevated train tracks, when he began to flag. ⁶⁴

As a young boy, Willie had suffered from polio and still tired easily. Now his legs were buckling beneath him. It was then, as he hurried up the steps, that he felt the crack against his skull. “A nightstick to the back of my head, over and over,” he recalled. “Just this agonizing white hot pain.” As Willie reached to grab the weapon, another officer threw him face-first down the stairs, cracking open his head and splattering blood onto the pavement. As he tried to crawl away, Willie was handcuffed, forced into a squad car, and jailed overnight on $500 bail. “That was a whole new type of fear and pain for me,” he said. “It’s a trauma that’s with me forever.” Although he denied all charges against him, Willie was ultimately given five years of parole for resisting arrest, assault, and disorderly conduct. He was also suspended from school indefinitely. ⁶⁵

In addition to the individual trauma and injury, the upheaval at Lane provoked strong communal responses and political consequences. That same day, The East New York Alliance for Better Education, a Black- and Puerto Rican-led group that advocated community control, distributed fliers around the neighborhood that exclaimed, “THIS HAS GOT TO STOP!” and gave information on injuries suffered by Black students along with badge numbers of the offending officers. The Black Parents Emergency Committee issued a statement rebuking “police brute force” and student suppression in schools. Representatives from numerous local advocacy groups gathered to send telegrams to Mayor Lindsay condemning his “arrogant disregard for black and Puerto Rican parents, students, and community concerning Franklin K. Lane.” Their message was mournful and rousing:

You call for more police in the school. You ignore parents, but you are meeting with administrators and teachers. You appeal to the UFT bigot vote. What about the students? Who will protect them from the police and the UFT? We demand that you take positive steps to eliminate the police state in Franklin K. Lane, and punish the atrocities committed by the police and the UFT. ⁶⁶

Meanwhile, Democratic Assemblyman Frederick Schmidt, of Woodhaven, rallied a large group of white parents to petition Lindsay for the “prompt prosecution” of “disruptive students and outside agitators”; reduced overcrowding; greater manpower inside the school for the local police precinct, and the “removal of disruptive students and truants from Franklin K. Lane High school.” The stakes were unambiguous. “We regard Franklin Lane as Mayor Lindsay’s Vietnam,” said James Baumann, co-chairman of Lane’s UFT chapter. “If something is not changed here, we will all go down.” ⁶⁷

The appeal was particularly resonant given the political moment. The Lane saga unfolded mere days before the 1969 New York City mayoral election, and Lindsay, the incumbent running on the Liberal Party line, worried he was losing a once-commanding lead. Posing an increasingly zealous challenge from the right was the Democratic Party nominee Mario Procaccino, the city’s comptroller, whose campaign seized on the disorder at Lane and continuing citywide controversies surrounding school crime and desegregation. Days earlier, Procaccino charged that school crime was at an all-time high, and he laid blame for the situation on Lindsay’s support of decentralization and busing for desegregation. “I’ve come to the conclusion that we’re seeing the beginning of a crime wave in our schools,” he said, citing previous unrest at Lane and other schools. As part of a 13-page position paper, Procaccino pledged, if elected, to put a cop in every New York City public school. ⁶⁸ So after the “Baby Day” violence at Lane, the comptroller once again went on the attack. “Any time a bunch of kids disrupt a schoolhouse or a cafeteria, they have to be dealt with firmly,” he told a reporter. ⁶⁹ Procaccino was joined in his admonishment by State Senator John Marchi, the conservative Republican mayoral candidate from Staten Island, who proclaimed the central issue in the campaign to be “the war in the streets and in the schools.” He described the Lane disturbances as “a battle in this war.” “When elected,” he said, “I will deal with the agitators and rabble-rousers with a firm hand. Permissiveness in the schools will be a thing of the past.” ⁷⁰

Under mounting political pressure, on the very afternoon of the Lane ordeal, Lindsay discreetly convened top city and school officials at Gracie Mansion for a strategy session. But, as it became clear to some participants, the goal of the meeting was not helping the students at Lane or alleviating its poor conditions so much as figuring out how to minimize any political repercussions before Election Day. “I was astounded by their seeming indifference and nonchalance,” wrote UFT’s Saltzman, who attended the gathering. “[Lindsay’s] opening remarks left no doubt that this was an assemblage of the family, called together to insulate the mayor and protect him from a possible political setback resulting from the Lane riot.” ⁷¹

The group’s proposed solution would have both immediate and enduring implications. That coming Monday, before Election Day, Lane would receive a small army of law enforcement—around 100 police officers in total. (“All John Lindsay had to do was keep enough police at the school for a single day, November 3, and he would be returned to office for a second term,” wrote Saltzman.) Beyond that, Lindsay and the BOE agreed to the outlines of the UFT’s plan to boost funding and capacity for the city’s security guard program, setting in motion a process that would add 100 more school guards by March 1, 1970. So even though they ostensibly opposed the notion of permanently stationing police in all schools, the BOE, UFT, and Lindsay were building up an infrastructure of unarmed security guards while still allowing for—and even encouraging—the continued deployment of armed uniformed officers in schools on an ad hoc basis. “No acts of disruption or violence will be tolerated,” said Lindsay, at a news conference. “All the police necessary to insure everyone’s safety will be on hand at the school.” He was re-elected a few days later by a comfortable margin. ⁷²

While it is impossible to ever fully know a politician’s “true” motivations, the threat of middle-class white families—and their capital—abandoning the city proved effective leverage. As the scholar Themis Chronopoulos writes of New York, “The orderly city seeks to control young blacks and Latinos not because they commit crimes but because powerholders think that affluent groups are more likely to invest or live in a city that regulates the activities of minority groups.” ⁷³

But despite the political theatrics—or because of them—conditions at Lane only continued to deteriorate. “Lane is just like a prison,” Wayne Powell, a seventeen-year-old senior, told the Times. “The teachers start something, then they call in the cops to do their dirty work.” ⁷⁴ Sizeable deployments of both police and security guards became regular fixtures of life at the school. According to school records, Lane typically kept a compliment of at least eight police officers with a ten-person force in reserve, as well as twelve security guards and a special attendance task force (though some were later eliminated in 1970 city budget cuts). ⁷⁵ And still, according to even Saltzman, racial tension and violence remained at “crisis proportions” at Lane. “The presence of dozens of police in the building does not prevent the most inhumane kind of brutality,” he wrote to the BOE. ⁷⁶

Worst of all was the continuing harm inflicted by the police officers themselves. “Times have changed and things are worse,” read a statement to the press from a number of Black and Puerto Rican community advocacy groups. “The so-called police protection in schools has in fact become police brute force. Teachers in a number of schools are using the police to suppress and mame [sic] the educational accomplishments of the Black and Puerto Rican students.” The advocacy groups reiterated their demands for “complete community control” and that schools be run by administrators rather than the police. ⁷⁷

Unheeded by their political representatives and subjugated by their school “security” apparatus, students were left to cope with the fallout—often with horrifying consequences. Days after the mayoral election, two Black sophomores at Lane, Eddie Williams and Nathaniel Marshall, were removed from study hall and arrested by school police after one grabbed a piece of paper from the other. They were handcuffed, dragged to the precinct, and charged with disorderly conduct. Nathaniel spent the night in Rikers Island Penitentiary. ⁷⁸

The stories of Nathaniel Marshall and Eddie Williams—like those of Edward Perry, Beverly Dixon, Willie Baptiste, and so many other students at Lane—are scarcely reflected in the official state record. Few of their names receive even passing mention in the city’s voluminous municipal archives. Instead, their accounts were only recovered though original oral histories and the papers of grassroots community groups. Of course, relying on such sources is nothing new. But to fully understand the rise of school policing and student discipline, scholars will have to continue seeking out such records with urgency. This history cannot just be told from the top down, through governmental policy and state sources alone. Lane is one of countless schools that underwent a transformation all its own. And, as this essay suggests, scholars must continue to reckon with the ways in which schools like Lane have historically acted not only as institutions of education and welfare, but as carceral institutions as well.