Editing Bayard Rustin (section)

===New York City school boycott===
{{further|New York City school boycott}}
At the beginning of 1964, [[Reverend Milton Galamison]] and other Harlem community leaders invited Rustin to coordinate a citywide boycott of public schools to protest their [[de facto segregation]]. Prior to the boycott, the organizers asked the [[United Federation of Teachers]] Executive Board to join the boycott or ask teachers to join the picket lines. The union declined, promising only to protect from reprisals any teachers who participated. More than 400,000 New Yorkers participated in a one-day February 3, 1964, boycott. Historian [[Daniel Perlstein]] notes that "newspapers were astounded both by the numbers of black and Puerto Rican parents and children who boycotted and by the complete absence of violence or disorder from the protesters."<ref name="perlstein" /> It was, Rustin stated, and newspapers reported, "the largest civil rights demonstration" in American history. Rustin said that "the movement to integrate the schools will create far-reaching benefits" for teachers as well as students.<ref name="perlstein">Perlstein, Daniel, [http://www.nyc.gov/html/cchr/justice/downloads/pdf/the_end_of_despair.pdf "The dead end of despair: Bayard Rustin, the 1968 New York school crisis, and the struggle for racial justice"], New York City government. {{webarchive |url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160304203513/http://www.nyc.gov/html/cchr/justice/downloads/pdf/the_end_of_despair.pdf |date=March 4, 2016 }}.</ref>

The protest demanded complete integration of the city's schools (which would require some whites to attend schools in black neighborhoods), and it challenged the coalition between African Americans and white liberals. An ensuing white backlash affected relations among the black leaders. Writing to black labor leaders, Rustin denounced Galamison for seeking to conduct another boycott in the spring and soon abandoned the coalition.<ref name="perlstein" />

Rustin organized a May March 18 which called for "maximum possible" integration. Perlstein recounts: "This goal was to be achieved through such modest programs as the construction of larger schools and the replacement of junior high schools with middle schools. The UFT and other white moderates endorsed the May rally, yet only four thousand protesters showed up, and the Board of Education was no more responsive to the conciliatory May demonstration than to the earlier, more confrontational boycott."<ref name="perlstein" />

When Rustin was invited to speak at the [[University of Virginia#Integration, coeducation, and student dissent|University of Virginia in 1964]], school administrators tried to ban him, out of fear that he would organize a school boycott there.