Close to Cool: How White-Led Institutions Formed New Identities During New York's Community Control Movement

• In Event: Envisioning Educational Change: Bilingual Education, Activism, and Community Control in the Civil Rights Era

Abstract

The Ford Foundation and the Institute of Community Studies (ICS) of Queens College, both white-led institutions, aligned themselves to movement for community control of schools in New York City in the late 1960s. Instead of taking cues from the groups they worked with, Ford and ICS made decisions that allowed them to build “expertise” that defined their own institutional identities and purposes. This process of institutional identity formation was built from their association with the most “radical,” topical issues of the day and their perceptions of Blackness, despite the multicultural makeup of the neighborhoods and schools involved.

Author

• Brett Gardiner Murphy, Graduate Center, City University of New York