Transcript of full Joyce McCray interview

BY JENNIFER BARRIOS | jennifer.barrios@newsday.com

My name is Joyce McCray, I'm 80 years old. I was born in New York City, in Harlem.

[Why did you get involved in activism?]

I became involved in the school integration situation when I moved here in 1960 because we found that there was a lack of proper education given to our children. We compared it with the education in the other two district schools and it was inadequate.

Subjects were given to fourth-grade students in Lindner [Maurice W. Downing Elementary School on Lindner Place] and Davison which weren't given to our children, and we knew that we had to really fight so everyone, when they went to the one middle school and one high school, to be able to compete with each other.

Since this was a community situation as far as the education in the school, people were being recruited to participate in a boycott, strike or sit-in. Whatever we could do to change the whole system so that our children get a quality education.

[Was there ever any fear or doubt?]

There is no fear when you know you're fighting for a just cause. You just do it from your heart, from your inside and you just go ahead and participate and as you are walking along, even though people are against you and spitting on you literally, you just keep on walking, nonviolent, smile, so that you can accomplish your goal. Which is to make sure that our children have a quality education, that was our main theme and our main goal, nothing else.

Once we were involved in the integration situation, people would call, they were participating in other demonstrations. And one of them was Long Beach housing, which was discriminatory. We were picketing a house on a certain street, and Long Beach, which was a city, the police came and they were quite disturbing because they would be rough, and they put us under arrest, my daughter and I.

We were taken to the local Long Beach jail. We were told we were going to be freed, but my daughter was released and I was, the group I was with were kept and transferred to Nassau County Jail. And we were waiting all day. It was an experience because you got a chance to see the other side of how people were treated. I talked to a lot of prisoners. I even had on a coat that was furry, and they even wanted to know did I steal it? Because they did not realize you could buy those things

Finally the NAACP came and we were released from the jail. I often say the jail was worse than what I was picketing forThe police were terrible, they were really bad. It wasn't a good experience.

[What was your proudest moment?]

My proudest moment was just even going to graduations and just seeing the youngsters with their happy faces, knowing that they were being able to go to the colleges they wanted to, being able to do the things they wanted to more freely than they did before, instead of being rejected every time they went to the guidance counselor

In my own children I see the results. If I can see it in my home, then the neighborhood and the whole community has made progress, because we have. And we're not alone. When I originally went into the integration fight, it was because I wanted the whole community to be able to receive what we were going to receive as individuals and that is quality education. And all of my children have gone to college because of the integration fight. They probably would not have been able to if this didn't occur, and if we had still stayed in the same school.

I remember we started in middle school, it wasn't called the middle school at the time, and we just went and we just said we are not going to leave. And we stayed there all night and in the morning we left. We also sat in at Lindner Place, which is one of the district schools, and that was not a good experience because they pushed us out.

And my youngest daughter was there, and she experienced a school system that she was going to attend, how the people were excluding us from a school we paid taxes for. We paid taxes for all the schools, not just one, and here you are excluding us, pushing us out. It was an experience that was well worth being there because you knew what you were going to have to deal with. We were dealing with hostile people.

They wouldn't even provide a bus for our children. I would make two or three trips to bring the children from the neighborhood back and forth. Finally now we have buses. But this is how they were trying to spite us.

It was like a foreign country, Lynbrook and Lindner Place, because there wasn't any need for us to be over there. We were just circulated in our own school at Woodfield Road, which is now a library. We realized it later on when all the people started getting together and meting to start the boycott and finding out each parent had a different complaint regarding the education their children were getting.

There was many abuses, emotional abuses as far as the children are concerned. We didn't have any communication with Lindner Place or Davison Avenue. Now they're integrated. Not anymore, not a problem anymore. They all merged into the one middle school and one high school, and that's where they could pull their so-called tricks.

So when our children from Woodfield Road would go, it was like a strategy, they were not able to compete because they were getting an inferior education and the other children were getting languages and everything. How could you compete?

When we went to Davison Avenue, they wouldn't let us inside, so we just picketed. And the police in Lynbrook, oh boy, they were terrible. And we couldn't sit in at Lindner Place either, because they pushed us out, but we sat in at Howard T. Herber \[Middle School\].