By Paul W. Zuber | Empire Report | January 21, 2021

When most of us think about the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, we tend to think of places like Selma and Montgomery in Alabama, and Little Rock, Arkansas. Most of us do not realize that the State of New York had its own long-standing struggles with the integration of African-Americans and other people of color. In the 1960’s, the City of New Rochelle in Westchester County became the epicenter of the struggle to integrate public schools in the North. As epitomized on the front-page cover of the nationally distributed Life Magazine, New Rochelle was described as the “Little Rock of the North.”

On January 24, 1961, Judge Irving R. Kaufman of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York rendered his decision in Taylor v. Board of Education of City School District of New Rochelle. Judge Kaufman ruled that the New Rochelle Board of Education had deliberately created and maintained the Lincoln School as a racially segregated school. This decision, which was the first school desegregation case won in a northern federal court post Brown v. Board of Education, would be the foundation and catalyst for school desegregation cases throughout the North.