On Feb. 27, Richard Carranza resigned as New York City Schools chancellor after repeatedly clashing with Mayor Bill de Blasio over how best to diversify what has become the most segregated large school district in America.
There are more than 1.1 million students in New York City’s public schools and nearly 75% of Black and Hispanic students attend a school with less than 10% of students who are white.
It’s somewhat remarkable that school desegregation remains an issue 67 years after the Supreme Court handed down the landmark ruling Brown v. Board of Education, which said that racial segregation in schools was unconstitutional.
A hint at why this remains an issue today nearly seven decades later is how the career ended of one of New York’s earliest champions of integration, Rockford High School football star Ewald Nyquist.
Nyquist’s father was a poor immigrant who moved from Sweden to Rockford in 1913. The rest of his family followed shortly after and Ewald was born in 1914. He was named after a Swedish jurist and Nyquist joked later in life that he “was the youngest of several children and I guess they ran out of names at that time.”
Although he was mostly identified in newspapers by his proper name, he was known to his friends as Joe. Joe became a starting back on the powerful 1930 Rockford Rabs football team, which outscored its opponents 276-24. Several of his teammates went on to storied college careers — Bart Cummings and Jack Beynon (Illinois), Willard Earngey (Duke) and Dick Smith (Minnesota).
Nyquist went to the University of Chicago to study psychology and play for College Football Hall of Fame coach Clark Shaughnessy, creator of the modern T-formation offense. There, his role was as the main blocking back for Jay Berwanger, who went on to be the first winner of the Downtown Athletic Club Trophy in 1935. The award would be renamed the Heisman Trophy in 1936.
Nyquist remained at Chicago as a graduate assistant coach until World War II. He served in the U.S. Navy where he developed testing programs for enlisted men and officer candidates. When the war ended he took a job in the admissions department of Columbia University. In 1951, he joined the New York state education office. He rose through the ranks to become deputy commissioner to James E. Allen Jr., who was actively trying to desegregate schools in the state, which meant busing students to achieve some sort of racial balance at schools.
In 1969, President Richard Nixon appointed Allen as U.S. Commissioner of Education. After several months, the New York education board of regents named Nyquist his successor. Nyquist, now the overseer of 5 million students in public and private schools, indicated he would continue to champion the state’s integration efforts at his first news conference.
“I believe, as the regents do, we must provide equal opportunity to everyone in the state, regardless of race, creed or color,” he said.
Over the next several years, Nyquist pushed for pre-kindergarten programs, special aid to urban districts and to improve health and nutrition in inner city schools. He also ordered school districts such as Buffalo, Utica, Newburgh and Yonkers to develop desegregation plans and, when the districts failed to do so, he developed and implemented his own.
In the 1970s, busing to achieve integrated schools was a national debate. Nyquist saw it in simpler terms.
“Busing was not the fundamental issue,” Nyquist said in a 1976 story. “The basic problem is that we have to learn to live with one another.”
His stance generated death threats and created political enemies, and over the years, more-conservative members were appointed to the board of regents. In 1976, in an 8-7 vote, he was fired. He left office in 1977 and joined Pace University as vice president of academic development. He was unrepentant.
“I was proud of the fact that I was no lollipop, right down to the end,” he said in a 1977 story. “They wanted me to resign, but I made them fire me. I had done nothing wrong.”
Nyquist died in 1987 of a heart attack.
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