Students report forgotten ‘School War’ history

A project to team students from a nearby high school with Law students from Saint John’s University in Jamaica, to dramatize the death knell of segregation in New York Schools, took a step closer to reality recently.
On Monday, July 7, students and faculty from Immaculate Conception High School’s Aquinas Honor Society met with Saint John’s Law School students and faculty at a conference to discuss their project.
They want to write a script about what has been called “The Desegregation of Jamaica School War of 1895 - 1900.”
Although slavery had been abolished in New York in 1827, segregation was not.
In the village of Jamaica, a group of parents led by Samuel and Elizabeth Cisco refused to send their children to the Colored School of Jamaica - one of only three schools on Long Island still segregated, according to published reports.
They faced fines, trials and imprisonment, but through determination, they saw a bill passed in 1900 and signed by Governor Theodore Roosevelt that ended the segregation of public schools in New York State, said project organizers.
Published reports a decade afterwards indicate a widespread sentiment in the area that the law “had been put through by Col. [Colonel] Roosevelt without due publicity,” and that “there was no intimation that such a law was under discussion” until after it was signed.
The conference was joined by Sharon Banfield of the Maple Grove Cemetery; Kathy Forrestal, Director of Interpretation, Education, and Visitor Services at the King Manor House and Librarian Kenneth Kugler of the Queens Borough Public Library, to lend their support.
Professor Victoria Brown Douglas of Saint John’s University School of Law and Senior Librarian William Manz of Saint John’s University of Law participated, as did teacher Carl Ballenas from Immaculate Conception and Youth Advocacy Coordinator Paul Pagano from the law school.
The conference, held in the Law building on the college’s Jamaica campus, thanked Denise Clark, Government Grants Manager of the Queens Library for assisting with a $10,000 grant proposal for this project, which was made to cable TV’s History Channel’s “Save Our History Grant Program.”
They hope to receive a favorable decision by September.