Sixty years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed segregation in the nation’s public schools. Brown vs. the Board of Education of Topeka overturned laws dating from the Reconstruction era that consigned black students to schools that were inadequately funded in dilapidated buildings with outdated textbooks and overall inferior resources, compared to whites-only schools.

Fulfilling the promise of Brown was the spark for the civil rights movement that flourished in the 1960s, bringing together labor, students, activists and clergy. The UFT and its predecessor organization, the Teachers Guild, were deeply involved in that movement.

In 1954, the Teachers Guild was the only local of the American Federation of Teachers to file an amicus curiae or friend-of-the-court brief on behalf of ending public school segregation. Two years later, the guild forced the AFT to expel Southern locals that refused to integrate in accordance with the Brown decision. Thurgood Marshall, who litigated the Brown case and later became the first black U.S. Supreme Court justice, received the UFT’s highest honor, the John Dewey Award, in 1957.

“We were ver

y proud that we were with him and the NAACP on that case,” said George Altomare, one of the founders of the union, a former member of the UFT executive board and today the director of the UFT professional committees.

In the summer of 1963, after the state of Virginia shut down its public schools rather than integrate, the UFT sponsored Freedom Schools for black children in eight churches. Thirty UFT members volunteered for the assignment under the direction of Richard Parrish, then the UFT assistant treasurer.

Leo Casey, a former UFT vice president and now the executive director of the AFT’s Albert Shanker Institute, said New York City was struggling with its own segregation issues, too, as more white families moved to the suburbs and the migration of Southern black families in search of work continued into the late 1960s.

“There was a lack of political will in New York City to desegregate,” Casey said.

Segregation is still a thorny issue in New York City schools today, according to a March 2014 report of the Civil Rights Project at UCLA, which is examining segregation in the eastern states. Researchers John Kucsera and Gary Orfield found that New York State’s schools are more segregated today than schools in the Deep South — a trend that intensified in New York City, they said, with the Bloomberg administration’s effort to close struggling large public schools and open a mix of smaller schools and charter schools in their place.

Orfield criticizes New York City charter schools for not adhering to “basic civil rights standards” such as community outreach, free transportation and open admissions. Almost three-quarters of the city’s charter schools have less than 1 percent white enrollment. “We learned in the South a half-century ago that choice plans without civil rights standards increase stratification of schools and leave almost all the children of color still segregated,” Orfield writes.