Racial Warfare at NYC Schools

Oct. 23, 1964 - Racial tension at John Jay High School erupted into street warfare today as hundreds of Negro and white students fought outside the Brooklyn school.

In Harlem, in another after-school incident, a group of 200 Negro youths from two schools rioted briefly in the IRT subway station at 125th Street and Lexington Avenue, swinging bottles, bats, and fists as subway passengers fled to the street.

Both incidents occurred at 3:30 P.M. Nineteen students were arrested, 13 in Brooklyn.

In the Brooklyn fight, policemen from three precincts were sent to the school, in the Park Slope section, where crowds of fist-swinging, yelling teenagers in small gangs ranged along Seventh Avenue from Third to Ninth Street.

Two white students were taken to Methodist Hospital for treatment of head cuts. Two adults were beaten by gangs of Negroes in the IND subway station at Ninth Street and Seventh Avenue.

Later, police said, a group of Negro students from the school beat and robbed a grocery clerk waiting for a subway on the platform of the 59th Street station of the BMT in the Bay Ridge section.

After order was restored outside the school, many of the students fled into the subways, terrorizing subway riders and shouting.

A group of Negro youths pushed and pummeled 10 girl students from St. Saviour’s Parochial School who had been waiting on the platform of the Ninth Street station of the BMT. After the group fled, the police found a hunting knife on the platform.

Outside the school, the police found a variety of weapons — a pellet gun, car radio aerials, stickball bats, and broken bottles.

The police of the 72nd Precinct said there had been several recent incidents involving white and Negro students at the school and that the police had been called to the school to break up smaller fights between white and Negro students in the playground.

Several students said today that many white pupils resented the fact that Negro enrollment had been rising rapidly. They said this had created friction between Whites and Negroes at the 3,400‐student school.

The outbreak on the Harlem subway platform involved students from Manhattan Vocational Technical and Benjamin Franklin High Schools.

The Transit Authority police learned of an impending rumble earlier in the day from an anonymous caller. They had stationed extra men in subway stations north and south of the 125th Street stop. A dozen uniformed transit policemen were waiting on the platform at 125th Street.

One hundred students from Manhattan Vocational, which is on 96th Street, had taken the subway from 96th Street to 125th Street, where they got off the train and headed for the exits.

At the same time, 100 students from Benjamin Franklin, which is on 116th Street, poured down the stairways into the subway, where they clashed with the Manhattan Vocational group.

The transit policemen moved in rapidly and arrested the youths believed to be the ringleaders, but not before several students had been beaten to the ground. The fighting continued for about 10 minutes, when city policemen arrived and the students either left the station or boarded trains.

People who were standing on the northbound platform, where the fighting took place, fled as the screaming youths pummeled one another with sticks, bats, car aerials, and their fists.

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