Police Escort for Negro Children" [caption for 1962 UPI wire photograph]

[New York. 1962]. 8 x 10 glossy photograph with pasted caption to verso. Some cockling; light stains to verso.

This poignant image shows Elaine Bibuld and her three children, ages 6 to 10, ascending subway stairs, under a police escort in December 1962.

In the early 1960s, the Bibuld family relocated from the Brooklyn neighborhood of Crown Heights to Park Slope after a fire. Their children transitioned from an excellent school to one lacking in academic standards and extracurricular activities, primarily serving African American and Puerto Rican students. Elaine and Jerry Bibuld, members of Brooklyn's CORE chapter, protested this educational inequity by removing their children from the segregated school and placing them in an all-white school in Bath Beach. This act, deemed illegal, sparked a three-month-long protest, making the Bibuld case a significant focal point for desegregation efforts in the city. (Photo of the Week: An Interracial Family in 1962, accessed online)

The caption reads: "Mrs. Jerome Bibuld and Transit Authority patrolman Leo Rosen escort her three children from a subway station December 3rd, after an unsuccessful attempt to enroll them in the predominantly white Brooklyn P.S. 200. The parents requested police escorts after receiving a series of threats of bodily harm..."