"I Was the One Percenter": Manny Diaz and the Beginnings of a Black-Puerto Rican Coalition

Abstract

On the morning of February 3, 1964, Manny Diaz woke up wondering how many Puerto Rican students would not go to school that day. Puerto Ricans were known for having the highest high school drop-out and suspension rate in New York City, but the reasons for students' absences that day were deliberate, premeditated, and voluntary. For more than two decades since urban renewal projects segregated them into increasingly poor and racialized neighborhoods, hundreds of thousands of Puerto Rican migrants had witnessed their children's schools deteriorate under the leadership of racially prejudiced white teachers and administrators. By 1964, however, their moral indignation ripened, and they were ready to publicly voice their anger. Diaz, who had been leading a juvenile delinquency program with Puerto Rican youth in the Lower East Side, and Gilberto GerenaValentin, who had been organizing Puerto Ricans in the city through labor and community organizations, decided to join hands with black educators who had been fighting racial segregation in the city for many decades.2 They allied with black civil rights leader Bayard Rustin, who aimed to dramatize black children's inferior education in the city by boycotting the entire public school system one day. Diaz and Gerena probably wondered about the political ramifications of making such an alliance with black Americans. Would black Americans treat Puerto Rican migrants any better than white Americans had? Were they friends to be trusted or enemies to be feared? To their surprise, and the surprise of many others, the boycott was very successful. Despite the stigma of engaging in civil disobedience, 464,361 students stayed out of New York City's public schools on that morning. More than three-fourths of the students from the heavily black-populated neighborhoods of Central Harlem and Washington Heights, as well as the Puerto Rican-dominant Lower East Side and East Harlem neighborhoods did not go to school.3