Supporting SNCC
 — Neal Hurwitz

New York City's Stuyvesant High School — founded in 1904 — was (and still is) a nationally-recognized math and science magnet school with a rigorous and highly-competitive admissions test. Located in Manhattan's Lower East Side, it provided a superior education to a largely nonwhite and immigrant population. is a nationally-recognized math and science high school with a highly-competitive admissions test. Located on E. 15th St. until 1992, it is now on the North tip of Battery Park City. Stuyvesant has provided a superior education to a largely immigrant population and has 4 Nobelists — 2nd in the nation. Neal Hurwitz, Executive Director with The Campaign for Stuyvesant, published Stuyvesant High School: The First 100 Years, 1904-2004.

Among other 'Notables', Bob Moses is a 1952 graduate and played on the champion Stuyvesant basketball team!)

My dad was friends with DuBois, Robeson, et al via the National Guardian and labor activities (Dist 65 and 1199 in NY NY; later Teamsters as well) and we did rallies and meetings 1950-1962 when I went to Stuyvesant HS from PS 9 — the Brotherhood School — in Brooklyn, NY.

Bob Moses is also a Stuyvesant HS grad (1952; he played basketball; led COFO; Freedom Summer Mississippi 1964; later The Algebra Project...), and I was newspaper writer/editor for The Spectator at Stuyvesant, covering among other events, The Freedom Riders. Albert Shanker (1946) and Roy Innis (also '52 with Moses, also called Robert Parrish at COFO...) are also Stuyvesant, as was Thelonious Monk, Class of '35 (left school before graduating to do his music...) and Alvin Poussaint, MD, another '52 grad!

Frederick Douglass and WEB DuBois have always been "heroes" for me and my families. We were also friends with several black vets of the Spanish Civil War and supporters of World Fellowship, led by Willard Uphaus.

In 1964, I was a counselor at Pioneer Youth Camp, run by Goddard-Riverside Community Center, and my friend's doctor did the autopsies on Goodman, Chaney and Schwerner... David Spain, MD. It was a horror and outrageous... of course.

The NY distributors would not let Ramparts magazine out with Louis Lomax's article on the June murders, so when I returned to Columbia College in Fall, 1964, we raised some $ and bought all the magazines direct and then sold them on the street in NY, NY to help fund the start of Friends of SNCC at Columbia, adopting at that time the Selma, AL Project.

We arranged for Columbia and Barnard press coverage and held the first meeting addressed by Dr. Spain and Marion Barry, a SNCC worker at the time. We also met with NY-area supporters such as Bob Gottlieb at Random House. We sent $ to the Selma Project before anyone knew about that place in our area... and Friends was active for about two years. (Ted Gold, Stuyvesant '64, and Columbia College SDS later, who was killed in the Greenwich Village explosion, was one of my able assistants; lovely fellow then; father a doctor...)

In Spring of '65 I hitched down to NC and Tenn, aiming to join up in Mississippi or Alabama but was called back to run SEER at Project Double Discovery at Columbia, now the oldest Upward Bound program in the US.

Andy Goodman was a neighbor and it is never to be forgotten how he tried to help and died...

(In '68, we helped bring Charles Hamilton from Roosevelt in Chicago to Columbia as the second tenured black faculty at the University; I was on the faculty '68-69 and '76-77, political science/international affairs.)

Neal H. Hurwitz
Executive Director
The Campaign for Stuyvesant/Alumni(ae) & Friends Endowment Fund, Inc.
212-222-9112


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