A community with civil rights ties

In honor of Dr. Martin Luther King Day Jan. 17, residents of Malverne, West Hempstead and Lakeview reflected on the close history the local communities share with the civil rights movement’s desegregation efforts of the 1960s as well as past visits by King himself.

In a statement detailing the history of the segregation in the Lakeview-West Hempstead area, the West Hempstead Historical Society emphasized “how deeply the history of this national holiday (MLK Day) is entrenched in our own community.”

The area known today as Lakeview was originally settled by farmers and African-American homeowners along today’s Woodfield Road, according to the historical society. When reconstruction of the Southern State Parkway in 1946 ran through two local farms, land for home development – as well as the social structure for change and integration – was broken up.

As a result, Woodfield Road School in Lakeview, with an 80 percent African-American student body, and Woodfield Road itself, in terms of home ownership, became a major battleground in the fight against segregation.

During King’s 1965 tour of Nassau County, he visited the Lakeview-West Hempstead community twice. His first stop was on May 11, 1965, at the Woodfield Road School, which was at the epicenter of the racial integration in schools debate.
Nearby, racial tensions at the time were high in the Malverne School District – which has since become a model of diversity.

“This place was a virtual war zone in the late 1960s and early ’70s, where you had people standing in picket lines ready to kill each other over issues of integration,” Malverne Superintendent James Hunderfund said in a previous Herald story. “There was a sense of separatism, and that was prevalent in other places, but it was rampant here. You had some people that were fighting to keep it that way, and then some people were fighting to make it different. Thank God that the difference-makers won.”

Woodfield Road School was 75 percent Black and 25 percent white, while the district’s other elementary schools, Lindner Place in Malverne and Davison Avenue in Lynbrook, were 14 percent Black and 86 percent white, according to Newsday reports from the time.

In the summer of 1963, African-American families in Malverne launched a campaign to integrate the village’s schools. They lobbied James E. Allen Jr., then the state education commissioner, to desegregate the district.

In 1966, Allen did just that, and Malverne was the first district in New York to receive a desegregation order. The state mandated that Malverne implement the Princeton Plan, in which students would not attend their local elementary school, but rather a series of elementary schools — kindergarten through third grade at Lindner Place or Davison Avenue, and fourth and fifth grade at Woodfield Road.

Through the Malverne Taxpayers and Parents Association, white parents sued to overturn the order, which the State Supreme Court did in 1964, but the State Court of Appeals upheld the original ruling. In 1965, the case reached the U.S. Supreme Court, which sided with desegregating the Malverne district.

“There’s some people that’ll never change, so [racism] has to be a thing that will pass over time. But now that we have many multiracial families, we have people who really have grown up in a modern world and see the world as a complete blend,” Hunderfund said.

As the civil rights movement intensified during the 1960s, reformers saw Malverne as a possible public stage for desegregation, said Alan Singer, director of social studies education programs at Hofstra University, in a previous Herald story. In May 1962, more than 100 demonstrators picketed to push for desegregation in Malverne. Many such demonstrations — and subsequent arrests — drew national attention to the village.

At that time, many white parents removed their children from local schools and enrolled them in private schools. Today, a quarter of the district’s students still attend private schools, according to Newsday.

Woodfield Road School, in a predominately Black neighborhood, closed in 1967, but local parents would not approve busing for those students to the other two elementary schools in white neighborhoods, leaving many children to walk up to two miles to school, according to The New York Times. The issue was not resolved until 1978, when the state mandated that the children be bused.

With the past behind it, the Malverne School District has long been exploring how to become more inclusive. “We embraced this philosophy of multiculturalism, and these kids became our family,” Hunderfund said. Then, referring to the school’s colors, he added, “The phrase is, we bleed blue and orange, and the truth is, that’s the unifying factor.”