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Without a Prayer

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Leslie Ribovich illuminates how both secularization and desegregation took the form of inculcating students into white Christian norms as part of their project of shaping them into citizens.

Image courtesy of interviewee. March 5, 2024

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The speaker discusses the motivations behind their book, which explores the intersections of race, religion, and public education, particularly in New York City. They identify three main strands of interest: the lack of dialogue between scholarship on race, religion, and public education; the historical connection of these topics, as evidenced by archival documents; and the desire to challenge the narrative that such issues are predominantly southern concerns by highlighting the significant racial and religious dynamics in northern education.

The author emphasizes the importance of archival research, having examined various documents and materials from over eleven repositories, including the New York City Board of Education archives. They analyze how historical events, like school desegregation efforts post-Brown v. Board of Education, intertwined with Judeo-Christian values, revealing religion's implicit presence in public education policies despite legal efforts to secularize schools.

Key court cases from the 1960s, such as Engle v. Vitale and Abington v. Schempp, addressed state-sponsored prayer and Bible reading in schools, declaring them violations of the First Amendment. The author argues that while these cases aimed to remove certain religious practices, they did not eliminate the underlying religious and racial biases ingrained in educational frameworks.

The discussion includes examples like the Open Enrollment program that framed integration efforts within a religious context and Brotherhood Week activities in schools that attempted to promote interfaith and racial camaraderie without substantial structural change. Critiques from within communities of color highlight a desire for genuine equality and control over educational practices.

The speaker hopes the work encourages readers to consider how race and religion co-create the sphere of public education and informs contemporary discussions surrounding diversity, equity, and inclusion in schools. Ultimately, the book advocates for a deeper understanding of the historical and systemic intertwining of these issues in shaping public education.

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I would say that there are sort of three strands

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that motivated the book.

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One was thinking about scholarship on race

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and religion on the one hand, and religion,

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or sorry, race and, public education on the one hand,

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and religion and public education on the other hand.

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And, while these were both sort of vibrant fields

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of study, they didn't necessarily, I found, speak

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to each other in the way that, that, that I was kind

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of interested in them doing.

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So for religion and public education,

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there was a lot about kind of court cases

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and religion being public schools, these kinds of questions.

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And then for race and public education, there's a lot about

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desegregation and the continued history of injustice,

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in, in public education

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and equity, especially for students of color.

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And I was interested in sort of the intersections

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of religion and race and public education,

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and was interested that it seemed

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that these two fields weren't necessarily speaking

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to each other at the same time that there was kind

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of a burgeoning field in religious studies studying the

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intersections of race and religion.

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So that was sort of one area that, that I was interested in.

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Um, at the same time, as I mentioned, secondly, I am,

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I've long been interested in religion and,

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and race and public education.

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And part of that was

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because when I was going through archival documents,

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I kept finding moments where I would see

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that historical actors were talking about race

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and religion at the same time,

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often even in the same breath.

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So, one example is in New York City,

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in the Board of Education was putting forward this proposal

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called Open Enrollment.

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That was a proposal to try to

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work on school desegregation in 1963.

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So this is after the Brown v Board of Education Decisions.

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Um, this was a one way transfer program of black

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and Puerto Rican students to predominantly white schools.

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And there are all sorts of kind of tests

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and things going along with it, that would allow them

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to even be able to, to transfer to these schools.

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But at this moment, the Board of Education says

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that open enrollment is an example

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of their Judeo-Christian heritage

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and the values of the Judeo-Christian heritage.

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And so that kind of moment

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that I kept finding really interested me why at this moment

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when religion is supposed

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to be removed from the schools at this exact moment,

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is it being used to, to kind of,

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explain why integration is important.

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And then the third one, I, so as you noted,

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the book focuses on New York City,

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and I was really interested in the fact

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that when we talk about religion

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and public education since the 19, since the early 1960s,

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we often think about kind of the, the,

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these rogue cases in the Bible, but of school prayer

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or Bible reading or something like that.

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So it often ends up seeming more like

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kind of a southern issue.

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Um, and similarly, race

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and public education,

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there's definitely a narrative about kind of southern,

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Southern segregation,

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that overlooks the significant segregation

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that was going on in the north.

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Even if in the north it wasn't,

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it wasn't legislated in the same way.

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So there was still very much residential segregation,

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that was due to other kinds

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of laws around housing and things.

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But anyways, I was really interested in saying, okay,

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nevertheless, we're seeing that New York City is one

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of the most segregated schools,

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school systems in the country.

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We're seeing that there are, New York City is working

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with like the National Commerce and Christians and Jews

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and other interfaith organizations.

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Um, and so it's really this vibrant place

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where conversations about religion and race

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and public education were happening in

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the 1950s and sixties.

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So I would say sort of the scholarly conversation on the one

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hand, what I was seeing in the primary sources on the other,

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and then this kind of focus on New York City to,

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to challenge our understanding about religion

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and race as being primarily southern issues,

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but really think about them more as,

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and sort of undoing that myth of northern innocence

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and rather thinking about kind of what,

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what role the North played in this as well.

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I primarily did archival research, though I also did a lot

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of, work on archival databases as well.

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So, thinking like newspaper databases, looking

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through, visual

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and material culture, so thinking about instructional films

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and things, and photographs.

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But sort of the bulk

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of my research took place going to archives.

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I visited over 11 arch archival

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repositories throughout the country.

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Um, and one of the main places

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that I looked was the New York City Board

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of Education Archives at

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that are housed at the Municipal Archives,

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in, in lower Manhattan.

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And, one of the things

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that I was really interested in in doing this archival

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research was thinking about what it means to look

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for ideas about religion in a space

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that isn't necessarily explicitly religious.

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So looking in the Board of Education archives, for example,

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historians of Education definitely have looked in those

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archives, but, scholars of religion not so much, right?

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And so what does it mean to sort of say, okay,

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religion is part of everyday lives

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and is part of kind our everyday lives is part of the way

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that people were making arguments around this.

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What does it mean to look for that in relationship also

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to race, in, in the in education archives,

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I did though look in some more kind

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of traditional religion archives.

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I went to the archdiocese for the, the archives

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for the Archdiocese of New York,

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and was looking at how they were understanding intersections

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of education and race.

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Um, and then I also went to the Sean Schaumburg Institute,

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for the study of black culture.

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And there was looking at how they were talking about issues

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around integration, and,

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and juvenile delinquency and things.

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So in all of these spaces, even if the archives are sort

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of officially more about education or religion

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or race, thinking about the intersection

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of the three in those archival spaces to start 1954,

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brown v Board of Education,

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Landmark Supreme Court case on, on racial equity.

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So this is the case that overturns Plessy v Ferguson,

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which had said that separate

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but equal facilities, that,

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that the facilities could be separate

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but equal, so there could be a white facility

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and a black facility.

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Um, and Brown B Board of Education ends up saying, no,

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this is, this is, this is inherently unequal

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to have separate facilities, based upon race.

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Um, and interestingly, I've actually argued elsewhere,

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that and shown elsewhere how that decision was inspired

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by Polly Murray, who was an activist

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and lawyer, whose law school paper it's been shown,

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has actually was actually used

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to support Brown V Board of Education.

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And one of the things that they argue is that,

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they focus on the separation part of the separate

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but equal clause instead of always having

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to prove in every case that facilities were equal.

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That had kind of been the approach, of the NAACP

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and others showing that it was equal.

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But instead, what was really

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so significant about Brown V Board of Education is

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that it cut to the heart of the structure of, of

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that law from the first place to say that that,

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that was a, a, an inherently unjust framework.

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Um, however, the following year, 1955,

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the Supreme Court ends up continuing to think

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through Brown v Board of Education

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and in a follow up case on Brown V Board

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that's also called Brown V Board of Education,

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also often called Brown two, where the court, says

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that gives a timeframe for

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how desegregation is supposed to happen.

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And they say that it should happen within schools

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and school districts with all deliberate speed.

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And that framing all

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with all deliberate speed basically ends up meaning

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that schools are left to their own devices

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to figure out much of desegregation

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and the timetable for it.

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And so, although Brown 1954 has the possibility

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to really be transformative, brown 1955 doesn't,

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sort of enact the possibility for it to, for

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that transformation to come into effect.

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Um, so that's sort of on the race and public education side.

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Then, in terms of religion

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and public education, we've got these two cases,

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1962 Engle V, Engle v Vitali,

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and 1963 Abington v Shemp.

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And these, are often,

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these are two cases about devotional exercises

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in public schools.

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So 1962, Engle VI Vital is about,

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state sponsored school prayer 1963 is about Bible reading,

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and all school prayer

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and as devotional practices in public schools.

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And in both of them, the court ends up arguing that

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and deciding that both

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of these practices violate the establishment clause

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of the first amendment of the US Constitution.

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So that clause saying that,

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Congress shall enact no law respecting an

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establishment of religion,

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These cases say in fact that state sponsored school prayer

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and then Bible reading

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and school prayer for devotional purposes,

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that these violate the establishment clause,

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these es effectively establish a religion.

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Um, so in terms of how connected these two cases are,

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or these, I guess three to four cases are,

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but the religion and the, and the race

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and public education, cases,

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they're not connected in the sense

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that there were like individual players that were kind

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of working behind the scenes on both of them.

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Um, but they are, I argue, part of an overall

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sort of framework for understanding what the purpose

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of public education was.

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And that framework was one that really, aimed

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to imbue students into white Christian norms.

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Um, and that saw white Christian norms as,

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as really the gold standard.

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So for instance,

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Eng v Vitali 1962 comes out of New York State, the,

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I keep saying state sponsored school prayer

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because the prayer at issue in Eng Vi Vitali is,

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the Regent's Prayer that was written

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by the New York State Board of Regents.

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Now, the New York State Board of Regents is the governing

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body for education in the state of New York.

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And so you have this educational

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body actually writing a prayer.

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Now, only 10% of districts

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and schools in New York State ever ended up actually

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adopting the prayer, and New York City was not among them.

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However, part of what I show is that,

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the region's prayer actually appears in the region's work on

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moral and spiritual values, education and moral

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and spiritual values curriculum.

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It's a much broader curriculum

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that's popular throughout the country.

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And this curriculum is really trying

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to instill an idea about, American heritage

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and American history where they uplift the ideas

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of the founding fathers as being moral exemplars.

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And what I want to say,

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and what I end up showing in the book is the relationship

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between that kind of moral and spiritual values ideology,

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and how you could end up getting something like,

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like Brown two, where there's,

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with all the deliberate speed, schools aren't going

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to have a lot of speed

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or aren't going to feel the urgency

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to desegregate schools if there's this sense for moral

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and spiritual values curriculum

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that we already live in an integrated American democracy,

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and our models for our, the, the white founding fathers.

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And so in that way, part of what I wanna show is that

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secularization and desegregation are two sort of narratives

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that we have about 20th century public education,

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and that they're both kind of undergirded within I sort

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of a liberal imaginary, that is informed

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by both whiteness and a kind of Protestant Christianity.

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I argue that the Supreme Court rulings of 1962

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and 1963 did not remove religion from public schools

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because religion was

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Already embedded into the framework

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of public education in such a way that, that it,

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it could not be removed.

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And so,

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and in particular, the ways

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that it was embedded into the framework

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of public education was around policies,

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and practices related to race,

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and especially related to these ideas about segregation

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and desegregation of public schools.

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So, some examples that ends up that, that I look at

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and I look at examples both before and

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after the cases of 1962

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and 1963 to show the ways that religion

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and race kind of intersected, in, in such a way

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that yes, you could remove prayer or remove Bible reading,

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but that sort of idea

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of lifting some practice out wasn't really getting to,

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to the heart of, of what it meant

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to have religion and public education.

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So, a couple examples I mentioned earlier,

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open enrollment, right?

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So we have, the school board saying that this program

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for desegregation, for integration

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of public schools is based in the Judeo-Christian heritage.

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Um, that's one example to show that the idea

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of the Judeo-Christian heritage was something

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that had already been kind of embedded in public schools.

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Um, another example I look at that I think shows both

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how students were being kind of, introduced

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to white Christian norms at the same time

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that there were many parents

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and community members who sought to, resist

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or critique those norms,

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was something called Brotherhood Week.

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So Brotherhood Week was sponsored

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by the National Conference of Christians and Jews.

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Um, and particularly, it actually ran from, well,

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first it was Brotherhood Day, but it ran from like the 1930s

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up until the 1980s, but was very popular in the fifties

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and the 1950s and 1960s.

13:45.185 --> 13:49.325
And, the Brotherhood Week really had a presence in

13:49.325 --> 13:50.685
public schools and especially in

13:50.685 --> 13:51.765
New York City public schools.

13:51.785 --> 13:56.085
And so you had things like, parent groups

13:56.935 --> 13:58.725
using the materials from the National Conference

13:58.725 --> 14:01.685
of Christians and Jews suggesting that they all bring

14:02.235 --> 14:03.885
food from their different cultures.

14:03.905 --> 14:06.645
And so you have some that we might think of as more sort

14:06.645 --> 14:07.885
of associated with, with racial

14:07.945 --> 14:10.245
or ethnic groups, like I think there was,

14:10.625 --> 14:13.245
you talked about like Ru bringing like Russian meals

14:13.585 --> 14:15.045
or, bringing meals

14:15.045 --> 14:16.645
that are more traditionally African American,

14:16.705 --> 14:19.685
and it's also often like the most stereotypical meals from,

14:19.875 --> 14:21.285
from, those cultures.

14:21.365 --> 14:22.525
But then also Jewish meals,

14:22.525 --> 14:23.965
which gets into thinking about like,

14:23.965 --> 14:27.565
and they bring Fil Fish thinking about both sort of,

14:28.085 --> 14:29.085
religion and race together.

14:29.185 --> 14:31.805
But this idea of having this moment, this meal together

14:31.805 --> 14:34.485
where, where families were able to kind

14:34.485 --> 14:36.285
of practice the value of integration,

14:36.585 --> 14:38.525
but then there was no kind

14:38.525 --> 14:40.365
of structural change within the schools.

14:40.585 --> 14:43.485
And so it really was this sort of moment suspended in time

14:43.735 --> 14:47.125
where integration could happen and yet,

14:47.425 --> 14:50.845
and yet then everyone sort of returns to the status quo of,

14:51.345 --> 14:52.605
Uh, of segregation.

14:52.825 --> 14:56.205
And so, that is one example of how just

14:56.205 --> 14:58.205
that very practice of saying this is part

14:58.205 --> 14:59.405
of the values of our schools.

14:59.785 --> 15:02.405
Um, that is the kind of thing that continued both before and

15:02.405 --> 15:03.445
after the decisions.

15:03.505 --> 15:04.685
Now after the decisions.

15:05.205 --> 15:07.085
Interestingly, there were some critique

15:07.085 --> 15:10.565
of Brotherhood Week actually, as part of kind of the,

15:11.305 --> 15:14.845
this is the time of Black Power, this is the time of

15:14.895 --> 15:16.205
where civil rights is really,

15:16.305 --> 15:18.285
the civil rights movement is really amping up.

15:18.285 --> 15:20.205
And there were a number of black parents

15:20.265 --> 15:23.725
who ended up really critiquing, critiquing many aspects

15:23.945 --> 15:28.645
of the public schools vision, for, for

15:29.425 --> 15:31.565
public education, the ways that religion

15:31.585 --> 15:33.405
and race kind of intersected in that.

15:33.585 --> 15:37.005
But one with Brotherhood Week, there was this, librarian

15:37.005 --> 15:39.805
and mother of two students in Harlem Public Schools,

15:39.825 --> 15:40.965
Amy Bushel Ji,

15:41.185 --> 15:43.645
who actually critiqued her school's Brotherhood Week,

15:43.645 --> 15:47.365
and they wrote their own, she wrote her own version of,

15:47.435 --> 15:48.525
play for Brotherhood Week

15:48.525 --> 15:50.925
and worked with the students at that school to create that.

15:50.925 --> 15:52.885
And her vision was instead of kind of having this moment

15:52.885 --> 15:54.845
of togetherness suspended in time,

15:55.225 --> 15:58.965
she had students project imagining themselves playing these,

15:59.065 --> 16:00.645
what they call luminary figures.

16:00.645 --> 16:01.925
So Constance Baker, Motley,

16:01.925 --> 16:04.445
Thurgood Marshall set in the year 1990.

16:04.545 --> 16:08.205
And so sort of thinking about that as like,

16:08.675 --> 16:11.885
temporarily thinking about kind of going, going forward

16:11.905 --> 16:15.525
and having that be the, the model of what, of

16:15.525 --> 16:17.925
what an I ideal kind of society would look like.

16:18.305 --> 16:19.925
Um, there's also critiques in the,

16:19.995 --> 16:22.965
with the Community Control Movement, the last chapter

16:22.985 --> 16:26.965
of the book looks at that, which is often sort of framed

16:26.965 --> 16:29.725
as this battle against African Americans

16:30.225 --> 16:33.085
and, African American parents and Jewish teachers.

16:33.385 --> 16:36.885
Um, but what I wanna show is that, there's some of that,

16:36.945 --> 16:40.085
but there was also very much a critique within the community

16:40.085 --> 16:42.325
control movement of the sort

16:42.405 --> 16:44.085
of white Christian norms, ideology.

16:44.085 --> 16:45.765
And the reason that black

16:45.765 --> 16:48.885
and Puerto Rican parents really wanted to be separate,

16:48.945 --> 16:50.605
and wanted to have sort of control

16:50.605 --> 16:52.605
of their own schools was precisely

16:52.675 --> 16:56.445
because the school board had failed by putting forward,

16:56.545 --> 16:58.365
the idea of integration

16:58.865 --> 16:59.925
and sort of the value

16:59.945 --> 17:02.925
of integration without the practice of it.

17:03.365 --> 17:07.245
I hope that readers take from the work, both in history

17:07.385 --> 17:08.725
and in looking at things today,

17:08.875 --> 17:12.005
that when we're talking about public education and race

17:12.025 --> 17:13.525
or public education and religion,

17:13.675 --> 17:16.085
that we end up thinking about the other one

17:16.105 --> 17:18.485
and seeing the ways that these two ideas are really kind

17:18.485 --> 17:19.765
of co constituted.

17:20.105 --> 17:23.805
Um, and I think that that will shape, our understanding

17:24.185 --> 17:26.645
of history and of these significant cases.

17:27.145 --> 17:31.125
Um, but also going forward today with the attacks on DEI,

17:31.585 --> 17:34.885
and sort of the attacks on teaching critical race theory

17:34.885 --> 17:38.245
and things that people are able to see that it's important

17:38.505 --> 17:41.685
to, to look at some of the underlying kind of frameworks

17:41.865 --> 17:45.925
and, and ideologies on both sides to kind of think through

17:46.315 --> 17:47.445
what are the best ways forward.

00:00 - I would say that there are sort of three strands that motivated the book. One was thinking about scholarship on race and religion on the one hand, and religion, or sorry, race and, public education on the one hand, and religion and public education on the other hand.

00:17 - And, while these were both sort of vibrant fields of study, they didn't necessarily, I found, speak to each other in the way that, that, that I was kind of interested in them doing. So for religion and public education, there was a lot about kind of court cases and religion being public schools, these kinds of questions. And then for race and public education, there's a lot about desegregation and the continued history of injustice, in, in public education

00:45 - and equity, especially for students of color. And I was interested in sort of the intersections of religion and race and public education, and was interested that it seemed that these two fields weren't necessarily speaking to each other at the same time that there was kind of a burgeoning field in religious studies studying the intersections of race and religion. So that was sort of one area that, that I was interested in. at the same time, as I mentioned, secondly, I am,

01:13 - I've long been interested in religion and, and race and public education. And part of that was because when I was going through archival documents, I kept finding moments where I would see that historical actors were talking about race and religion at the same time, often even in the same breath. So, one example is in New York City, in the Board of Education was putting forward this proposal

01:38 - called Open Enrollment. That was a proposal to try to work on school desegregation in 1963. So this is after the Brown v Board of Education Decisions. this was a one way transfer program of black and Puerto Rican students to predominantly white schools. And there are all sorts of kind of tests and things going along with it, that would allow them to even be able to, to transfer to these schools. But at this moment, the Board of Education says

02:04 - that open enrollment is an example of their Judeo-Christian heritage and the values of the Judeo-Christian heritage. And so that kind of moment that I kept finding really interested me why at this moment when religion is supposed to be removed from the schools at this exact moment, is it being used to, to kind of, explain why integration is important. And then the third one, I, so as you noted,

02:30 - the book focuses on New York City, and I was really interested in the fact that when we talk about religion and public education since the 19, since the early 1960s, we often think about kind of the, the, these rogue cases in the Bible, but of school prayer or Bible reading or something like that. So it often ends up seeming more like kind of a southern issue. and similarly, race

02:52 - and public education, there's definitely a narrative about kind of southern, Southern segregation, that overlooks the significant segregation that was going on in the north. Even if in the north it wasn't, it wasn't legislated in the same way. So there was still very much residential segregation, that was due to other kinds of laws around housing and things.

03:16 - But anyways, I was really interested in saying, okay, nevertheless, we're seeing that New York City is one of the most segregated schools, school systems in the country. We're seeing that there are, New York City is working with like the National Commerce and Christians and Jews and other interfaith organizations. and so it's really this vibrant place where conversations about religion and race and public education were happening in

03:38 - the 1950s and sixties. So I would say sort of the scholarly conversation on the one hand, what I was seeing in the primary sources on the other, and then this kind of focus on New York City to, to challenge our understanding about religion and race as being primarily southern issues, but really think about them more as, and sort of undoing that myth of northern innocence and rather thinking about kind of what, what role the North played in this as well.

04:02 - I primarily did archival research, though I also did a lot of, work on archival databases as well. So, thinking like newspaper databases, looking through, visual and material culture, so thinking about instructional films and things, and photographs. But sort of the bulk of my research took place going to archives. I visited over 11 arch archival repositories throughout the country.

04:27 - and one of the main places that I looked was the New York City Board of Education Archives at that are housed at the Municipal Archives, in, in lower Manhattan. And, one of the things that I was really interested in in doing this archival research was thinking about what it means to look for ideas about religion in a space that isn't necessarily explicitly religious.

04:51 - So looking in the Board of Education archives, for example, historians of Education definitely have looked in those archives, but, scholars of religion not so much, right? And so what does it mean to sort of say, okay, religion is part of everyday lives and is part of kind our everyday lives is part of the way that people were making arguments around this. What does it mean to look for that in relationship also to race, in, in the in education archives, I did though look in some more kind

05:17 - of traditional religion archives. I went to the archdiocese for the, the archives for the Archdiocese of New York, and was looking at how they were understanding intersections of education and race. and then I also went to the Sean Schaumburg Institute, for the study of black culture. And there was looking at how they were talking about issues around integration, and, and juvenile delinquency and things.

05:42 - So in all of these spaces, even if the archives are sort of officially more about education or religion or race, thinking about the intersection of the three in those archival spaces to start 1954, brown v Board of Education, Landmark Supreme Court case on, on racial equity. So this is the case that overturns Plessy v Ferguson, which had said that separate but equal facilities, that, that the facilities could be separate

06:10 - but equal, so there could be a white facility and a black facility. and Brown B Board of Education ends up saying, no, this is, this is, this is inherently unequal to have separate facilities, based upon race. and interestingly, I've actually argued elsewhere, that and shown elsewhere how that decision was inspired by Polly Murray, who was an activist and lawyer, whose law school paper it's been shown, has actually was actually used

06:43 - to support Brown V Board of Education. And one of the things that they argue is that, they focus on the separation part of the separate but equal clause instead of always having to prove in every case that facilities were equal. That had kind of been the approach, of the NAACP and others showing that it was equal. But instead, what was really so significant about Brown V Board of Education is that it cut to the heart of the structure of, of

07:07 - that law from the first place to say that that, that was a, a, an inherently unjust framework. however, the following year, 1955, the Supreme Court ends up continuing to think through Brown v Board of Education and in a follow up case on Brown V Board that's also called Brown V Board of Education, also often called Brown two, where the court, says that gives a timeframe for how desegregation is supposed to happen.

07:35 - And they say that it should happen within schools and school districts with all deliberate speed. And that framing all with all deliberate speed basically ends up meaning that schools are left to their own devices to figure out much of desegregation and the timetable for it. And so, although Brown 1954 has the possibility to really be transformative, brown 1955 doesn't, sort of enact the possibility for it to, for

08:02 - that transformation to come into effect. so that's sort of on the race and public education side. Then, in terms of religion and public education, we've got these two cases, 1962 Engle V, Engle v Vitali, and 1963 Abington v Shemp. And these, are often, these are two cases about devotional exercises in public schools. So 1962, Engle VI Vital is about,

08:29 - state sponsored school prayer 1963 is about Bible reading, and all school prayer and as devotional practices in public schools. And in both of them, the court ends up arguing that and deciding that both of these practices violate the establishment clause of the first amendment of the US Constitution. So that clause saying that, Congress shall enact no law respecting an establishment of religion,

08:55 - These cases say in fact that state sponsored school prayer and then Bible reading and school prayer for devotional purposes, that these violate the establishment clause, these es effectively establish a religion. so in terms of how connected these two cases are, or these, I guess three to four cases are, but the religion and the, and the race and public education, cases, they're not connected in the sense

09:19 - that there were like individual players that were kind of working behind the scenes on both of them. but they are, I argue, part of an overall sort of framework for understanding what the purpose of public education was. And that framework was one that really, aimed to imbue students into white Christian norms. and that saw white Christian norms as, as really the gold standard. So for instance,

09:50 - Eng v Vitali 1962 comes out of New York State, the, I keep saying state sponsored school prayer because the prayer at issue in Eng Vi Vitali is, the Regent's Prayer that was written by the New York State Board of Regents. Now, the New York State Board of Regents is the governing body for education in the state of New York. And so you have this educational body actually writing a prayer. Now, only 10% of districts

10:16 - and schools in New York State ever ended up actually adopting the prayer, and New York City was not among them. However, part of what I show is that, the region's prayer actually appears in the region's work on moral and spiritual values, education and moral and spiritual values curriculum. It's a much broader curriculum that's popular throughout the country. And this curriculum is really trying to instill an idea about, American heritage

10:43 - and American history where they uplift the ideas of the founding fathers as being moral exemplars. And what I want to say, and what I end up showing in the book is the relationship between that kind of moral and spiritual values ideology, and how you could end up getting something like, like Brown two, where there's, with all the deliberate speed, schools aren't going to have a lot of speed or aren't going to feel the urgency

11:07 - to desegregate schools if there's this sense for moral and spiritual values curriculum that we already live in an integrated American democracy, and our models for our, the, the white founding fathers. And so in that way, part of what I wanna show is that secularization and desegregation are two sort of narratives that we have about 20th century public education, and that they're both kind of undergirded within I sort of a liberal imaginary, that is informed by both whiteness and a kind of Protestant Christianity.

11:43 - I argue that the Supreme Court rulings of 1962 and 1963 did not remove religion from public schools because religion was Already embedded into the framework of public education in such a way that, that it, it could not be removed. And so, and in particular, the ways that it was embedded into the framework of public education was around policies,

12:12 - and practices related to race, and especially related to these ideas about segregation and desegregation of public schools. So, some examples that ends up that, that I look at and I look at examples both before and after the cases of 1962 and 1963 to show the ways that religion and race kind of intersected, in, in such a way that yes, you could remove prayer or remove Bible reading, but that sort of idea

12:38 - of lifting some practice out wasn't really getting to, to the heart of, of what it meant to have religion and public education. So, a couple examples I mentioned earlier, open enrollment, right? So we have, the school board saying that this program for desegregation, for integration of public schools is based in the Judeo-Christian heritage. that's one example to show that the idea of the Judeo-Christian heritage was something

13:06 - that had already been kind of embedded in public schools. another example I look at that I think shows both how students were being kind of, introduced to white Christian norms at the same time that there were many parents and community members who sought to, resist or critique those norms, was something called Brotherhood Week. So Brotherhood Week was sponsored by the National Conference of Christians and Jews.

13:33 - and particularly, it actually ran from, well, first it was Brotherhood Day, but it ran from like the 1930s up until the 1980s, but was very popular in the fifties and the 1950s and 1960s. And, the Brotherhood Week really had a presence in public schools and especially in New York City public schools. And so you had things like, parent groups using the materials from the National Conference of Christians and Jews suggesting that they all bring

14:02 - food from their different cultures. And so you have some that we might think of as more sort of associated with, with racial or ethnic groups, like I think there was, you talked about like Ru bringing like Russian meals or, bringing meals that are more traditionally African American, and it's also often like the most stereotypical meals from, from, those cultures. But then also Jewish meals,

14:22 - which gets into thinking about like, and they bring Fil Fish thinking about both sort of, religion and race together. But this idea of having this moment, this meal together where, where families were able to kind of practice the value of integration, but then there was no kind of structural change within the schools. And so it really was this sort of moment suspended in time where integration could happen and yet,

14:47 - and yet then everyone sort of returns to the status quo of, of segregation. And so, that is one example of how just that very practice of saying this is part of the values of our schools. that is the kind of thing that continued both before and after the decisions. Now after the decisions. Interestingly, there were some critique of Brotherhood Week actually, as part of kind of the,

15:11 - this is the time of Black Power, this is the time of where civil rights is really, the civil rights movement is really amping up. And there were a number of black parents who ended up really critiquing, critiquing many aspects of the public schools vision, for, for public education, the ways that religion and race kind of intersected in that. But one with Brotherhood Week, there was this, librarian and mother of two students in Harlem Public Schools,

15:39 - Amy Bushel Ji, who actually critiqued her school's Brotherhood Week, and they wrote their own, she wrote her own version of, play for Brotherhood Week and worked with the students at that school to create that. And her vision was instead of kind of having this moment of togetherness suspended in time, she had students project imagining themselves playing these, what they call luminary figures. So Constance Baker, Motley,

16:01 - Thurgood Marshall set in the year 1990. And so sort of thinking about that as like, temporarily thinking about kind of going, going forward and having that be the, the model of what, of what an I ideal kind of society would look like. there's also critiques in the, with the Community Control Movement, the last chapter of the book looks at that, which is often sort of framed as this battle against African Americans and, African American parents and Jewish teachers.

16:33 - but what I wanna show is that, there's some of that, but there was also very much a critique within the community control movement of the sort of white Christian norms, ideology. And the reason that black and Puerto Rican parents really wanted to be separate, and wanted to have sort of control of their own schools was precisely because the school board had failed by putting forward, the idea of integration

16:58 - and sort of the value of integration without the practice of it. I hope that readers take from the work, both in history and in looking at things today, that when we're talking about public education and race or public education and religion, that we end up thinking about the other one and seeing the ways that these two ideas are really kind of co constituted. and I think that that will shape, our understanding

17:24 - of history and of these significant cases. but also going forward today with the attacks on DEI, and sort of the attacks on teaching critical race theory and things that people are able to see that it's important to, to look at some of the underlying kind of frameworks and, and ideologies on both sides to kind of think through what are the best ways forward.

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