"Save Our Kids, Keep AIDS Out:" anti-AIDS activism and the legacy of community control in Queens, New York.

On September 9, 1985, the first day of classes in the New York City public school system, James Albano, age 8, found himself inside a coffin instead of a classroom. As James lay in the coffin, his mother wheeled him around a picket line set up outside P.S. 63, a grade school in South Ozone Park, New York, a neighborhood in southern Queens. When asked by a local reporter what he made of his current circumstances, James replied, "'I don't know much about AIDS. I know it's a disease. I really know that I'm sort of scared of going to school.'" (1) James, his coffin, and the parents who used them both as a form of street theater, were just a few of the characters in a much larger drama organized by Queens activists to fight New York City's Board of Education policy allowing children with AIDS to attend public schools. (2) By the time this episode in local organizing was over, the participants would also include two community school boards, municipal officials, and public health practitioners, all of whom fought over where children with AIDS should be educated.

James was one of over eleven thousand New York City public school students who missed the first day of school in school. His parents kept him home to shield him from exposure to a medical condition they feared but knew little about. Hundreds of other parents and children marched outside of eight Queens schools on September 9, holding signs that read "Save Our Kids, Keep AIDS Out" and "Teacher's Aides, Yes; Student AIDS, no." The protesting families demanded that the New York City Board of Education reconsider its recent decision to admit one unnamed student with AIDS to an undisclosed public school as part of its newly instituted policy to allow most children with AIDS to attend public schools following case-by-case reviews by a panel of experts. (3)

While individual parents across New York City struggled with the decision to allow children with AIDS to attend public schools, organized protests, such as the one where James found himself, took place only in two Queens school districts, 27 and 29, districts that had no previous history of working together to fight Board of Education policies. District 27, located in the southern corner of the borough, was a majority white district with a median family income of just over $19,000, an amount significantly higher than the city median. (4) District 29, located east of 27 (as well as District 28) on the eastern edge of the borough, had long housed members of the city's black middle class, as well as poorer African Americans. With a median income of over $22,000, African Americans in this district had a slightly higher income than whites in Queens, while in the rest of the country whites' salaries far exceeded those of blacks. (5)

Perhaps for different reasons, residents in the both districts shared a similar distrust of the New York City Board of Education, located at, and often referred to by New Yorkers as, "110 Livingston St." The building housed the Chancellor of Schools, who supervised the local school districts in a system that was both centralized and decentralized. Each of the thirty-one school districts had a Community School Board (CSB), made up of nine elected officials, as well as a Superintendent appointed by the Chancellor. In each district, the CSB and the Superintendent were supposed to work together to operate individual grades schools, while the Board of Education and the Chancellor made more systemic decisions, such as setting policies for curriculum, school safety, health and attendance. Not unreasonably, board officials in Districts 27 and 29 believed that 110 Livingston St. was ill equipped to make operational decisions about local schools, while the central office considered AIDS a policy issue that mandated a system wide response.

While New York's large-scale protests only occurred in Queens, parents in several locations across the country engaged in battles with school administrators and public health authorities over where the estimated 600 children with AIDS should be educated. (6) Some communities violently sought to bar students with AIDS from public schools, while others made the decision to admit and mainstream them. Ryan White, the teenage hemophiliac with AIDS kept from attending junior high school for two years by his neighbors in Kokomo, Indiana, has come to symbolize the AIDS hysteria of the mid-1980s. Kokomo residents created picket lines around Western Middle School, and over the course of twenty-four months, they managed to keep White from school through a combination of protests, legal proceedings and scare tactics. (7) In contrast to the hostile protests in Indiana, residents of Swansea, Massachusetts, after internal community debate and discussion, knowingly enrolled a child with AIDS in a local school, and became the first community in the country to do so. (8)

When historians and theorists have examined Queens school protesters they have characterized them as more similar to the protestors in Kokomo than Swansea, and therefore as conservative at best, and homophobic and racist at worst. In his brief description of the events in Queens, historian Sander Gilman suggests that school board members invoked images that derided the family members of children with AIDS, and in effect represented these children as "infected with the unclean image of the sexually transmitted disease." (9) That the parents were centralized in Queens, the home of the fictional, yet archetypal conservative, Archie Bunker, has also shaped how writers have represented parent protestors. In opening his discussion of the events in Queens political scientist David Kirp explains that, "Here too was an occasion for local politicians energetically to oppose the admission of the unnamed youngster, even as an earlier generation of local politicians had opposed racial integration of the schools--and for much the same reasons." (10) Not surprisingly, then, no writers have commented on the cross-racial cooperation that took place in Queens in 1985. (11)

The lack of attention to white/black alliances is due, at least in part, to the centrality of racial divisiveness in the historiography on New York City in the postwar era, particularly in the literature that details the expansion of conservatism in the outer boroughs of Brooklyn and Queens. By the middle of the twentieth century racial and class-based segregation made New York neighborhoods homogeneous. Cemented by New Deal and Fair Deal public housing legislation, poor people and members of the middle-class lived in different neighborhoods, as did white middle-class and African-American middle-class New Yorkers. These segregations had political and social consequences according to historians and ethnographers of New York. In his study of Canarsie, (a Brooklyn neighborhood) Jonathan Rieder explains that "Middle America [to which he ascribes Canarsie] felt molested by formidable powers: blacks and liberals and bureaucrats." (12) Josh Freeman concurs when he argues that by the late 1960s, "many working class whites [in New York City] came to see themselves as victims, as much more so than African Americans, to whom they believed government gave special favors." (13) In his book on the legacy of the 1968 Ocean-Hill Brownsville strike that pitted black residents of Brooklyn against white teachers and their union, Jerald Podair argues that by the mid-1980s, "white New Yorkers would fuse two powerful impulses--middle class anger and community control--to establish a political and cultural hegemony in the city that exists to this day." (14) In New York City, Podair concludes, "race was more powerful than economics." (15)

Beyond the New York border, white working- and middle-class men, not unlike the fictional Archie Bunker, and their homebound wives play starring roles in the growing historiography on postwar conservatism in the United States. This literature substantiates three main arguments about the political realignments that occurred over the course of the second half of the twentieth century. Tom Sugrue argues that locally based, white activists who tried to control the movement of African Americans into their neighborhoods and schools represented the demise of liberalism in the post-New Deal era, and ultimately became some of the most vociferous and organized conservative activists of the postwar era. A wide range of scholars has also emphasized the centrality of traditional ideas about gender roles and sexuality in conservative rhetoric of the 1970s and 1980s. Activists on the right strategized attacks on the feminist and sexual liberation movements of the 1960s and 1970s, and found political power in vehemently protesting the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment, the effects of the Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion, and legal strategies that sought to fight gay and lesbian discrimination. In this context, local histories of the New Right, such as Lisa McGirr's work on Orange County, have considered how and why conservatism changed in the postwar era, backing away from its anti-communist anxiety and gaining widespread support by adopting anti-statist positions on local and domestic issues such as property rights and sex education. (16) Taken together, this historiography has shifted away from an analysis that marks the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 as a revolution, and toward an interpretation that provides a longer historical context for conservative activism in the post-1945 era. It also suggests that while concerns about gender and sexual freedom had the potential to unite conservative activists, racism divided white conservatives and potential black allies.

In this context, it is virtually impossible to imagine black and white parents joining forces to fight anything in the postwar era. AIDS changed that. As I will show, black and white parents found a common voice in organizing against the Board of Education's AIDS admission policy. Many of the Queens parents had never been activists before but, as they would later claim, were so frightened by the Board of Education's admission policy that they felt compelled to act. They rejected the advice of public health officials and municipal officials who argued that most children with AIDS posed little, if any, risk to healthy children. Instead, parents in Queens claimed that "AIDS students" should be kept out of public school because not enough was known about AIDS; therefore their own common sense should trump experts' limited scientific understanding of the disease. Thus, parents and local communities, not a dishonest city bureaucracy or out-of-touch scientific establishment, were better able to make decisions about local children.

As I will argue here, the language not used by these parents tells us a great deal as well. While one or two of the protest leaders connected AIDS and homosexuality, rarely, if ever, did individual parents redeploy that stigma usually associated with AIDS. Nor did they talk about drug use or the racial inequalities that were becoming apparent in the epidemiology of AIDS by the mid 1980s. In fact, parents, particularly the mothers, were uninterested in talking about how children were infected with AIDS in the first place. Even in their angriest protest mode, parents did not disparage the mothers of children with AIDS as the source of disease nor did they invoke racialized images of women and children with AIDS.

In this essay, I reexamine the Queens anti-AIDS protests in light of the effectiveness of this cross-racial alliance and the rise of conservatism in the 1980s. While Queens parents deployed conservative rhetoric, even using the term "conservative" to describe their demands, like other recent historians I want to complicate the label "conservative" in part because the same activists routinely elected liberal democrats to local, state and national office. (17) Throughout the essay, I argue for the value of assessing their actions in a way not over-determined by the bifurcated national politics of the period, and by doing so, resist an automatic connection between the national political ideology which sought to shrink the state and grassroots movements which combatted government intervention. As I hope to show, political history that seeks to analyze national trends or studies only the leadership of local struggles cannot provide us with the most salient details of what happened to parents at the local level. By revisiting this community-based movement of the 1980s and understanding participants' motivations as well as those of the leadership, we begin to see that this activism acquired its coherence not from ideology, but from the specific circumstances that forced these activists to confront AIDS. While many anti-AIDS and antigay activists used phrases like "family values," to differentiate themselves from people with AIDS, particularly gay men, parents in Queens, both black and white, found a shared enemy instead in the combined power of the municipal bureaucracy and a remote scientific establishment.

The history of twentieth century New York emphasizes not only the difference between racial communities, but in particular the distinctiveness of neighborhoods. And yet, the consequences of the Board of Education's AIDS policy accentuated the similarities between these Queens neighborhood clusters. The make-up of each community school board was comparable; each had Democratic leadership and politically mixed membership. Sam Granirer, a white man who ran an employment agency and had two children, had presided over CSB 27 for three years in 1985. He had been a regular board member since 1980, when he also worked on Jimmy Carter's failed re-election campaign. The president of CSB 29, Claudette Webb, an African-American woman, also with school age children, worked in a hospital, but seemed to have had few other political affiliations. (18) Each president chaired a board with active members, all of whom played a role in the anti-AIDS protests, and some of whom held differing political views from their leader. James Sullivan, a white Republican and CSB 27 Treasurer, was significantly more conservative than Granirer: previously he had come out against affirmative action and desegregation. (19) But Sullivan's views neither found voice nor encouraged action among the majority of protesters. This was the result, in part, of the influence of other board members George Russo and Josette Lowenhaupt, a lawyer and office worker, who resisted Sullivan's often reactionary rhetoric. (20) Similar relationships existed in District 29 where Dolores Grant, a white woman, served as Webb's Vice President. Grant was, in many ways, more conservative than Webb, a fact made evident by quotes she gave to the press throughout the controversy. (21) Olivia Banks, an African-American woman who worked as a social worker, joined Webb and Grant on CSB 29, and used her status as a health professional to inform community members about AIDS in ways that never called attention to sexuality or race. (22)

The voters who elected these board members were solidly committed to a Democratic Party that failed to win a single national election in the 1980s. An overwhelming majority of people in each district voted for Jimmy Carter in the 1980 Presidential election, and for Walter Mondale in 1984. In 1984, both districts had Democratic representatives in the House and Democratic City Council members. (23) While this cannot be read as a guarantee of particular residents' political leanings, these Queens districts were not typical conservative strongholds. In fact, it was in nearby neighborhoods like Canarsie, Brooklyn where a majority of Italian and Jewish voters cast votes for Ronald Reagan in the 1980 election. (24)

In light of these political similarities it seems possible that parents in these two districts might try to build alliances with each other had it not been for the legacy of racism in New York City. The threat they perceived from AIDS created an association that no other event had. In July 1985, a month before Queens parents began to agitate on behalf of their children, the residents of the Rockaways, a peninsula situated just south of mainland Queens, fought with New York City health officials over the placement of people with AIDS in the Neponsit nursing home that sat on the western end of the Rockaways. Those who lived near the facility immediately reacted to the City's proposal and took the City to court to halt the action. (25) Neponsit's location on the Rockaways was significant for people who lived in both District 27 and 29. While schools on the Rockaways were in District 27, the land geographically abutted District 29. This political and physical proximity meant that people across the peninsula and the southeastern mainland were concerned with the consequences of the city's actions. Women who lived in western Rockaway created a community group called "Mothers Against AIDS in the Home," with the intention of stopping the city's plan. Mary Dever, a former nun and mother who lived and worked on the Rockaways, started the group and went on to play an active role in the school dispute. (26) In District 29, Dolores Grant, the first Vice President of the CSB told the New York Times that, "'If they were putting patients there [Neponsit], where else would they and were children involved?'" (27) By September 5 (the same day CSB 27 would announce the boycott), the city agreed to halt its plan to place people with AIDS in Neponsit. (28) With success on this front, parents in both districts found energy to continue their anti-AIDS activism in schools.

As the summer progressed, Queens parents also seemed keenly aware of the events occurring in Kokomo, Indiana, around Ryan White. This emerging knowledge was most evident in a newly formed friendship between the president of the Kokomo school board, Daniel Carter, and Sam Granirer. David Kirp explains that the Queens parents flew Carter in to attend the first press conferences held in Queens and an initial local meeting held in a District 27 school. (29) In their meetings, the men relayed information about scientific discoveries to each other, as well as drafts of suggested changes to school policies, all of which aided in exclusion activities. (30) While the course of events differed in Kokomo and Queens, the link between the board chair and the board president provided a unique catalyst for parents in Districts 27 and 29.

In late August, in an environment where Queens parents' panic about AIDS in public spaces multiplied day by day, the two school boards called on the Chancellor of New York City's public schools to issue policy guidelines on AIDS. They did not wait for the city to respond, however. CSB 27 was the first to act. On August 22, the Board proposed and passed a resolution that would protect the "pupils and staff" from the unknown "cause and transmission" of the disease by keeping children with AIDS out of regular classes. In a 6 to 3 vote, the members chose to classify AIDS as a "communicable disease" that needed to be treated with "appropriate isolation." If a child with AIDS lived within the district lines, the CSB would provide home instruction for the student. (31) Once the board approved the resolution, Granirer sent letters documenting the decision to all the parents in District 27. (32) Within a few days, CSB 29 passed a similar resolution barring students with AIDS at a community meeting in Queens Village. (33) By the end of the week, the New York Daily News ran a front-page story about the parent protesters, accompanied by a photograph picturing dozens of concerned residents. (34)

On August 30, just one week before school opened, the federal Centers for Disease Control (CDC) finally published its long awaited recommendations concerning school-age children and AIDS. Working in conjunction with several state health and school officers, including the Division of Maternal and Child Health, the National Association for Elementary School Principals, and the National Congress of Parents and Teachers, the CDC designed the document as a template for local health and education departments developing guidelines for dealing with children with AIDS. The CDC detailed eleven recommendations and cautiously advised open enrollment for students with AIDS, arguing it would pose little risk to either children with AIDS or healthy children.

  Based on current evidence, casual person-to-person contact as would
  occur among schoolchildren appears to pose no risk. However, studies
  of the risk of transmission through contact between younger children
  and neurologically handicapped children who lack control of their body
  secretions are very limited. Based on experience with other
  communicable diseases, a theoretical potential for transmission would
  be greatest among these children. It should be emphasized that any
  theoretical transmission would most likely involve exposure of open
  skin lesions or mucous membranes to blood and possibly other body
  fluids of an infected person ... For most infected school-aged
  children, the benefits of an unrestricted setting would outweigh the
  risks of their acquiring potentially harmful infections in the setting
  and the apparent nonexistent risk of transmission of HTLV-III/LAV.
  These children should be allowed to attend school and after-school
  day-care and to be placed in a foster home in an unrestricted
  setting. (35)

School board members went over the recommendations with a fine toothcomb and marked various passages with comments. On a copy of the guidelines kept in CSB 27's records, phrases like "more time needed" and "SALIVA??" appeared in the margins, and someone wrote "NO" next to the section on the appeal process. (36) The marginalia indicated that while the guidelines encouraged school access for all students, the CDC's qualified language allowed parents to doubt the veracity of its statements about the risks posed by mainstreaming children with AIDS. Using phrases like "studies ... of ... risk ... are very limited" and "theoretical potential for transmission" fed parents' fears that scientists were more concerned with children with AIDS than with their own healthy children.

The guidelines also provided a means for local interests to override the CDC's recommendations. While the CDC proposed that the decision to admit any given student with AIDS should be made by a team that included the child's physician and parents as well as public health personnel and the people associated with the proposed care or educational setting, the parents believed that students with AIDS would be admitted to school regardless of their actual physical condition. In addition to its recommendation, the sluggishness with which the CDC spoke, when coupled with the speed with which the school boards acted, created an information vacuum that all but guaranteed that the boards' analysis would prevail for parents.

The Mayor of New York City, Ed Koch, seconded the parents' opinions about exclusion. On the day of the CDC announcement, Koch issued a press release in which he undercut the agency's position. While Koch began with the claim that seven doctors and pediatricians from the Children's Aid Society to the American Academy of Pediatrics concluded that, "AIDS is not transmitted through casual human contact," he argued that "some theoretical concern has been expressed that one cannot absolutely rule out the possible transmission of the AIDS virus by other body fluids." Koch equivocated when drawing a distinction between AIDS and AIDS-Related Condition (ARC), explaining that, "there is an undetermined number of children of school age who have been diagnosed as having ARC. This condition, unlike AIDS, is not one that must, pursuant to state regulations, be reported to the State Department of Health." (37) Two days later, Koch continued to vacillate on the issue: "'I don't believe it's healthy for the AIDS kids or for the other children,' adding that he was referring only to younger children, who sometimes cannot control their bodily functions or who spit and bite." (38) In refusing to say that AIDS could not be spread in a school venue, Koch not only ignored the CDC recommendations, but also provided parents with new justifications for their concerns.

Koch was not alone in hedging; at the federal level, President Reagan's inner circle of policy advisors leaned more toward the parental definition of children with AIDS than the CDC's representations. On September 11, 1985, President Reagan's Domestic Policy Council met to review what the federal government had done about AIDS up to that point. Over twenty-three White House staffers attended the session, including the Attorney General, Edwin Meese, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, Margaret Heckler and Gary Bauer, who at the time was an assistant to the President in the Office of Policy Development, and later became a powerful leader of the religious right as the president of an organization called American Values. After a public health debriefing by Heckler, the conversation turned to a discussion of public schools. Bauer explained that the Department of Education had not provided advice on AIDS to schools so that individual school districts could take the lead. He concluded that "the news media has often carried sweeping assurances from health officials that there is no risk to school children from AIDS patients, and that these news accounts have often not included the appropriate statements by health officials that case-by-case decisions needed to be made." (39) In October 1985, the Working Group on Health Policy (WGHP), a newly formed Presidential advisory group with representatives from numerous federal agencies, met to discuss the AIDS/school issue in more detail. Gary Bauer, who had just been made head of the WGHP, continued to voice his disagreement with the CDC guidelines and again reflected parental positions being articulated in Queens:

  [A] series of public health and social policy issues [remain] with
  regard to AIDS (and infection with AIDS virus) including:
  * The risk of children attending school with a child who has AIDS;
  * The risks of attending school for a child with AIDS. (40)

While not a single case of AIDS was "communicated through casual contact," Bauer believed that "issues" still needed to be addressed when it came to children. Bauer's stance that further study was needed cannot have been lost on the Queens parents. With some federal officials saying children with AIDS should be in school whenever possible, and other federal officials claiming that the risk of transmission remained significant, the protesters heard incongruities, and ultimately amplified the confusion to bolster support for their demands.

Both Koch's statement to the press and Bauer's comments highlighted the state of scientific knowledge about AIDS in late 1985. It had been only a year since scientists discovered that a virus caused AIDS; and it would be another year before they agreed to name that virus Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV). In 1985, many people, including municipal and federal officials, distinguished between people with AIDS and people with AIDS Related Complex (ARC): people with ARC had not yet developed the required number of symptoms to be diagnosed with AIDS. Ultimately, this meant the general public, the news media, and even government officials, used language different from scientists and health officials. When the CDC talked about a "child with AIDS," it implied that the child was extremely sick, usually exhibiting symptoms such as pneumonia or dementia. When parents from one of the Queens school districts expressed concerns about an "AIDS student," they were not necessarily talking about a child with full-blown AIDS, but probably meant a child who was infected with HIV or diagnosed with ARC.

At a moment when officials presented inconsistent information to the public, and the meaning of AIDS was in flux, parents in Queens became more and more confused and angry. Michele James, a physician's assistant and parent living in District 29, claimed that, "'As someone with a medical background, I know AIDS isn't communicable in the kinds of ways that children interact, [b]ut as a parent, I think about a child falling down and cutting himself and another child also falling down.... Your logic can be overtaken by your sense as a parent.'" (41) Camille Canino, a mother of a child in District 27 said," 'Nobody knows enough about [AIDS].'" (42)

Parental concern about proximity to people with AIDS was also fueled by a concurrent public discussion of gay bathhouses and their role in the AIDS epidemic. Throughout the fall of 1985, New York City politicians, public health officials and gay activists fought over what should happen to gay bathhouses in the age of AIDS. (43) The New York Times regularly ran stories about schools and the gay bathhouses on the same page. In the mind of Dolores Grant this juxtaposition suggested that all public spaces were equally threatening in the face of AIDS. (44) She saw the state's interest in closing the baths and wondered what was so different about schools that housed children with AIDS. The mere presence of the disease in these public spaces completely overshadowed the actual science of disease transmission that connected specific behaviors and actions to the spread of AIDS. (45)

The school board members addressed the concerns articulated by James and Canino with a rhetorical strategy that both reflected, and veered away from, contemporaneous conversations about the role of the state, science and morality in American public life in the 1980s. They embraced the idea that local control was best for community development and protection, expressing their distrust of the federal and municipal scientific establishments and the state's willingness to protect its citizens from harm. Beyond claims for community control, the parents developed arguments about their children's civil rights as well as their own scientific discourse designed to justify their fears of how AIDS could spread among children.

Before embracing language intended to build coalitions, however, CSB 27 leaders used words that had the potential to create serious schisms among white and black parents. On September 4, Granirer and Sullivan, exclaimed that they "vow[ed] to 'Stand in the Schoolhouse Door' to stop AIDS students," a phrase taken from the segregationist stance of governor George Wallace who tried to keep African Americans out of Alabama's public schools. (46) While the racist implications of this phrase are clear on its face, there is no record of parents, black or white, balking at the use of a racist historical reference. Instead it seems that all the Queens parents, including Webb who stood by the men at a community meeting the next day, agreed with the sentiment that suggested local actors were best able to decide how schools should function. In this sense, the rhetorical power of the discourse of community control of the schools trumped Granirer's and Sullivan's unfortunate racist phrasing.

The appeal of local control to fight outside regulation was evident at an open meeting hosted by Granirer and Webb in the auditorium of P.S. 63 on September 5. The audience literally overflowed onto the streets of Ozone Park: well over five hundred parents attended, with almost an equal number of mothers and fathers in attendance, and a large number of African Americans from District 29 and the eastern end of the Rockaways. (47) Granirer began the meeting by reading parts of the press release to the group, which gave him several standing ovations throughout his speech. He then led his two children, nine-year-old Pamela and eleven-year-old Louis, to the front of the auditorium. "'These are my two children,'" he noted. "'I have worked very hard to get them to this age. And I don't want some bureaucrat in a building in downtown Brooklyn telling me I have no right to protect these kids.'" (48) With a reference to the Board of Education's location in Brooklyn that all in the audience would understand, Granirer demanded local control over school admission policies. Members of the community testified to their support and resolve. They promised to keep their children out of school until the city reversed its decision. Granirer ended the meeting with a resounding call to action: "We may have had our disagreements in the past, but on this issue we are all united. One hundred teachers would not go into the classrooms. We are going to protect you and the children." (49)

Central to Granirer's unification strategy was the argument that local actors knew more about schools than did city officials. His decision to embrace the rhetoric of community control gave African-American parents a clear reason to engage in the AIDS struggle. While it had been almost twenty years since African-American parents and school officials squared off against the Board of Education and the United Federation of Teachers in a fight over who should control public schools in Ocean Hill-Brownsville, the knowledge of that historical struggle provided a model for why African American residents would be willing to reject municipal, and even federal, control of pubic schools. In his work on the Brooklyn strike, Jerald Podair explains that African-American residents of Ocean Hill-Brownsville used the rhetoric of "community control" to expel white teachers from local schools, citing the need for black control over schools in the black community. He argues that the word "community" is a "chameleon" with the potential to be used by both "liberals and conservatives." (50)

The power of community control alone, did not however, motivate African American participation in this protest; the fact that white and black parents ignored the relationship between race and AIDS made it more likely that blacks would join the boycott. While some public health officials and activists may have understood the extent of racial disparities in 1985, media outlets rarely reported on AIDS among African Americans. In the period leading up to the protest, the national and local press, including the major newspapers and the black press in Queens, ran few, if any, stories about race and AIDS. (51) While the New York Times occasionally described the experiences of African-American children with AIDS, pieces on AIDS' impact on people of color were often about foreign countries, such as Haiti or Zaire. It would not be until after 1987 when journalists filed stories on what political scientist Cathy Cohen calls the "changing face of AIDS," stories that described the experiences of African Americans, particularly women, and AIDS. (52)

As poor African Americans and Africans began to be associated with AIDS, many middle-class African Americans sought to distance themselves from the epidemic, particularly in terms of discussion of drug use. (53) Accepting a model that identity (in this case not being white gay men) shielded people from AIDS even as AIDS activists argued that behavior put individuals at risk, these parents, much like most white Americans, were able to distance themselves from AIDS. The media's lack of attention to race, when coupled with the fact that none of the parents talked about race in relation to AIDS and that middle-class blacks distinguished themselves from African Americans with AIDS, made a political alliance between whites and blacks possible, even though overt racial harmony between parents did not exist.

As the coalition of parents solidified in Queens, the City's expert review panel announced, one day before school was to begin, that one, unnamed student with AIDS would be admitted into an undisclosed city school. (54) The panel initially reviewed four potential students, but deemed only one physically and psychologically capable of attending classes. Parents in District 27 and 29 condemned the decision. The fact that the student's identity would be kept secret angered them almost as much as anything else. No one, except for the panel and the student's family, knew which school was involved.

That this unknown student with AIDS would now attend a New York City public school strengthened parental resolve and drove them to boycott. On the first day of the school year the boycott began on the most local level, initiated by a flyer from P.S. 63's Parent Teacher Association, a grade school in the heart of District 27. The leaflet urged parents to "Make Your Voice Stronger! If the Chancellor does not reverse his statement in favor of protecting our children by keeping AIDS out of our schools, KEEP YOUR CHILDREN HOME. We must show that we care for our children and that politics can not take presidence [sic] over the health and safety of our children." (55) In District 29, parents drove through local streets with bullhorns urging people to respect the boycott. (56) CSB 29 also held its own meetings to drum up support for its efforts. At a gathering only a day into the boycott, over three hundred community members overwhelmingly supported extending the boycott for another two days. (57) The agitation worked, and Queens parents kept their children home: about eleven thousand on the first day of school, five thousand from District 29 and six thousand from District 27; a total of nine thousand students missed the second day as well. (58) After the weekend, most of the students returned to classes, but their parents continued to lobby on their behalf.

As students returned to classes, handwritten letters from parents all over the city poured into district offices. These notes spoke directly to the kinds of support given to the school board by parents' groups like P.S. 97's Parent's Association. Anna Torres and Carol Reidy expressed their frustration in a letter to CSB 27 members:

  Our children are to [sic] young to protect themselves. We do not have
  to be highly educated, we only need our human instincts, to know that
  'we' the parents have to protect them ... We the Parents are the
  people of yesterday and our children are the children of tomorrow, our
  future. (59)

This letter was typical of demands to protect children. The women relied on rhetoric that used common sense and claimed to protect children. In so doing, they deployed "instinct," a form of knowledge they deemed much more reliable than scientific theory. In their support of the CSB, Torres and Reidy made claims identical to other parents: by my count of letters kept in the archive, the ratio of letters encouraging the CSB to ban admission for children with AIDS to those that disagreed with the policy was almost 50 to 1.

Other letters expressed similar concerns to those presented by Torres and Reidy but combined their support for "innocent children" with calls for the protection of civil rights. Carolyn Kaplan from Whitestone, Queens wrote:

  We feel as concerned parents that it is wrong to accept and/or support
  the Board of Education's policy as it clearly endangers the health and
  welfare of our children. To do so, shows a complete lack of
  responsibility and concern for the innocent children who look to us
  for their protection. Also, in keeping the identity of the school and
  child who has AIDS from us, is violating our civil rights. (60) [sic]

Granirer clearly agreed with this sentiment. At the open house held September 5, he argued that, "To keep an AIDS child a secret is an infringement on the civil rights." (61) Both Kaplan and Granirer's rhetoric suggested that the rights of healthy children should take precedence over the rights of children with AIDS.

Protesters in Queens relied on the idea that the civil rights of the majority of students outweighed the civil rights of people with AIDS, and in so doing turned the standard, more progressive, civil rights argument on its head. That is, while many AIDS organizations sought to protect the rights of people with AIDS from unnecessary state intrusion such as mandatory testing and tracing, in Queens, by contrast, parents saw the requirement of anonymity for children with AIDS as a violation of the rights of their healthy children. The parents appropriated and purposed the language of civil rights from AIDS activists working to maintain privacy for all people with AIDS.

The strategy of civil rights reclamation was similar to the efforts undertaken by members of the New Right who disparaged the expansion of "special rights" for historically disenfranchised people in the name of protecting the family and children. In 1977, conservative activist and former Miss America, Anita Bryant, launched a campaign against an ordinance prohibiting discrimination against homosexuals adopted by the city of Miami, Florida. Bryant feared that the anti-discrimination measure meant that homosexuals would have unfettered access to children, claiming that, "'the ordinance condones immorality, and discriminates against my children's rights to grow up in a healthy, decent community.'" (62) Bryant successfully defeated the anti-discrimination law and in so doing secured a significant victory for a growing conservative movement, using explicit homophobia as a rallying cry to bring people together to protest the expansion of civil rights for gays and lesbians.

Less than a decade later, such moral discourse was central to many Reagan administration strategies, in particular those related to AIDS. By the mid-1980s when members of the administration spoke of AIDS and schools, they increasingly talked about the need to enact morally regulated AIDS education. In the 1987 "Talking Points" on AIDS, federal officials took the position that "educational efforts should not be value neutral. The predominant causes of the spread of AIDS--sexual relations and drug abuse--need to be addressed. For young people, the best solution to prevent transmission is still abstinence; for adults, it is fidelity within marriage. And for everyone, it is saying no to drugs." (63) A memorandum written by Gary Bauer confirmed this position. "[AIDS education] should not be neutral between heterosexual and homosexual sex ... [H]eterosexual sex within marriage is what most Americans, our laws and our traditions consider the proper focus of human sexuality." (64)

While it is tempting to see the coupling of civil rights attacks and demands for local control as indicative of the influence of conservative rhetoric in Queens, the lack of connection between Queens parents and other right-wing stances on AIDS suggests a disconnect between national conservative strategy and local actions. None of the Queens protesters called for a morally driven AIDS/schools policy, or a program that differentiated between heterosexual and homosexual sexuality. In fact, board member George Russo, who became president of the CSB 27 in 1986 after Granirer stepped down, supported providing students with explicit sex and drug education. In a piece written a month after the boycott, Russo argued that, "Whether we wish to acknowledge it or not, many of our children attending high school and even attending junior high schools are beginning to engage in sexual activities and experimenting with drugs.... Educating our young on how the virus is spread sexually and through intravenous drug use can save their lives." (65) Considering the distinction between the two positions--that of the Reagan administration and that of CSB 27's president--suggests that national conservative ideology predicated on moral reasoning did not necessarily appeal to people who in other circumstances embraced ideas such as local control.

In lieu of moralistic language, Queens parents created a rationale for excluding children with AIDS that was predicated on the ideas that parents had a better understanding of child behavior than CDC officials, and were better politicians than City officials who were out of touch with local needs. When parents expressed their concerns about children with AIDS attending school they rarely, if ever, suggested that casual transmission was possible. Instead, they argued that young children were unable to control themselves and therefore were more at risk for transmission than scientists thought. In this view, children lacked control over their actions and bodily fluids; parents described the likelihood of children getting nosebleeds or vomiting in the classroom. They were also concerned that children bit each other, creating an opportunity for possible transmission. All of this meant that healthy children could come in contact with infected bodily fluids and would then be at increased risk for contracting AIDS.

By rejecting the findings of the scientific establishment in this way parents simultaneously embraced a rhetoric of common sense and deployed a language of transmission to punctuate their growing knowledge of AIDS. Unlike David Rothman and Sander Gilman who have argued that parental fears of casual contact showed up around schools and children more than in other places because parents had been trained to keep sick children out of school, I see the parental stance as more complex. (66) Parents and board members established their credibility as people who knew what was best for children, but at the same time they refused to be labeled as anti-scientific. Not only did parents think they knew more about how a nine-year old boy acted during recess than a scientist who spent all his time in a laboratory, they also understood the science of transmission well enough to reject arguments about "casual contact" and suggest how transmission might actually happen in school-age children. Ultimately, parental distrust of the scientific establishment mirrored what historian of medicine Shelia Jasanoff argues was "a profound public alienation from science and a loss of faith in its ability 'to speak truth to power'" in the 1970s and 1980s. (67)

Although for different reasons, African Americans and whites both had reasons to be suspicious of scientists working on behalf of the government. It had been just over a decade since the exposure of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, a forty year study in which the United States Public Health Service (PHS) studied the effects of untreated syphilis in four hundred African-American men, using them as test subjects long after the discovery of effective treatment for the disease. (68) When interviewed, Olivia Banks, a CSB 29 board member, suggested that doctors had a long history of violating people's basic human rights with the supposed intention of determining scientific "truth." (69) Banks believed the government was capable of and willing to manipulate disenfranchised populations in the name of scientific inquiry.

While white parents clearly believed that the state did not listen to or address their concerns about their children's health, they more likely thought of the experience of working- and middle-class whites who lost their homes in upstate New York town of Love Canal just seven years earlier. As was the case with many New Yorkers, Queens residents had probably watched in horror as the New York State Department of Health announced its plan to investigate the environmental and health hazards created by Hooker Electrochemical at the Love Canal Chemical Waste Landfill, located just outside of Buffalo, New York. By the early 1980s, the Love Canal story had been widely covered in the statewide and national media, which regularly articulated the idea that industry and the state had failed to respond to the pressing health needs of children. Activists who saw AIDS as a threat to children, whether it was real or imagined, would have been hard pressed not see some similarities with their upstate counterparts. (70)

While parents consistently rejected government actions on AIDS as insufficient, they sought remedies within the legal system, and in so doing looked to the state for information and solutions. On September 12, just one week into classes, CSB 27 and 29, led by Sam Granirer, sought to halt the admission of the unnamed child with AIDS by suing the city. The trial began in the Queens Superior courtroom of Judge Harold Hyman with Queens lawyer Robert Sullivan representing CSB 27 and 29, and Frederick (Fritz) Schwartz, New York City's Corporation Counsel, defending New York City's policy. (71) Not surprisingly, the positions presented by the plaintiffs and defendants were not dissimilar to the arguments parents made in the preceding weeks. In arguing the CSB's case, Sullivan questioned the notion that the risk of transmission was as minimal as the city claimed, but did not argue that transmission through casual contact was possible. Rather his case rested on the ideas that children posed a unique risk to other children, and that the Board's insistence on maintaining confidentiality would increase the risk of transmission. Schwartz argued the other side, explaining that the CDC guidelines took all risks into account before calling for case-by-case review. Schwartz further claimed that the psychological and educational benefits for children with AIDS, once in school, outweighed the miniscule risk they posed to children who did not have AIDS. He reasoned that only this strategy would allow them to protect the rights of all children.

With the adversaries set on their respective positions, the trial could have easily continued with each side refusing to hear what the other side said. However, during the testimony of Dr. Polly Thomas, the epidemiologist charged with heading the City's review panel and a mother as well, the seemingly mutually exclusive discourses of parent vs. scientist began to give way to an analysis that had the power to shift people's opinions. In a series of questions about possible routes of transmission in a school setting, Sullivan, the plaintiff's lawyer, articulated one of the most commonly feared modes, the biting scenario. Sullivan repeatedly pushed Thomas to admit that biting represented a potential site for infection. Each time he asked, Thomas replied that biting posed little to no risk. She argued that the scenario relied on flawed logic in two distinct ways. First, children rarely bit other children hard enough to draw blood, and second, that even if they did bite transmission would be almost impossible. After asking the question again and getting the same answer, Sullivan switched strategies.

  Sullivan: Doctor, and I don't mean to ask this, but I guess I have to
  lay a foundation--do you have any children?
  Thomas: Yes, I do.
  Sullivan: If your child was bitten by an AIDS patient and you knew
  that your child was bitten by an AIDS patient, would you want to have
  your child receive that blood test at some point in time to reveal to
  you whether or not your child had contracted AIDS as a precaution; yes
  or no?
  Thomas: I would not. (72)

Thomas's response to the questions about her own child "produced an audible response from the audience in the courtroom." Once off the stand, Thomas reportedly said, "'I know of all the things that can happen to my kids. I have all these irrational fears. I know what it's like to be a mother. But I'm also a pediatrician and epidemiologist with the Health Department.'" (73)

Thomas' testimony, as a scientist and a mother, seems to have initiated changes in parental attitudes, particularly the mothers, in the courtroom. These women, who attended the trial every day and listened to testimony, created an information grapevine via word of mouth, relaying the information from the day's proceedings to the community at large. One of these parents, Marie Devitto, attended each session of the five-week trial. She listened carefully to the testimony, and then went home to Ozone Park to describe the day's events to her neighbors and other people in P.S. 63's Parent Association. As the proceedings went on, Devitto claimed to be "enlightened" on a daily basis. When she first began attending the trial she believed that parents needed to keep children home; by the end Devitto realized it was safe to send her children back to class. (74) It seemed that where she heard the new information was as important as the information itself. Listening to the scientists, doctors, and mothers testify in the courtroom allayed her fears that they might be hiding something, and ultimately allowed her to change her mind about children with AIDS. Once the witnesses addressed their concerns in a way that made sense to parents, they began the process of reconsidering their ideas about the attendance policy.

Ultimately, the judge in the case sided with the City. On February 11, 1986, Judge Hyman denied the plaintiff's injunction, ordered the City's guidelines be carried out and called for children to be admitted without being identified. (75) CSB members not only accepted the ruling, they also felt they now had a more complete and truthful picture of how children with AIDS would safely function in a school. In this respect, their hostility to the government's position was ameliorated by their participation in a legal conversation and did not continue after the decision.

With a new body of legal and scientific information to process, in the form of the testimony from the court case as well as the legal ruling, parents and teachers in District 27 and 29 dealt more explicitly with the inevitability of a child with AIDS entering a local school. CSB 29 members worked to disseminate accurate information about AIDS to parents with children in local schools. Olivia Banks, who worked as a social worker Brooklyn Jewish Hospital, funneled information about the transmission of AIDS from her job to parents in her district. She copied left-over flyers that explained that transmission could only happen through the sharing of blood products from the hospital for distribution at the President's Council, a place where all presidents of District Parent Associations and Parent Teacher Associations met monthly. She also organized in-service training for teachers so that they could learn to use gloves to clean up any child who had a nosebleed or injury. (76)

Like the parents in District 29 who had already begun an information campaign for district teachers, parents at P.S. 63, a District 27 grade school, provided prophylactic supplies to teachers and school officials. In February, the Parent's Association arranged for a huge delivery of items to the school, including bleach, gloves, and paper towels. To document the drop-off, the parents notified local television news stations and asked them to cover their efforts on the evening news. (77) With the supplies in place, the last two parental holdouts allowed their children to return to school. The parents' protests were officially over.

While the parents began with a position that seemed fixed, the narrative of events suggests that they were, in fact, capable of changing their minds about how to protect their children. This transformation required that the state not condescend to them, and instead provide the parents with information that considered and addressed their fears in both scientific and non-scientific language. The significance of the change in attitude is clear in a document from a year after the boycott. In a September 1986 letter to George Russo, the then president of CSB 27, from Stephen Joseph, the City's new Health Commissioner, Joseph thanked the local activists for their "thoughtful comments" on "the school review process of children with HIV infection" and "welcome[d] any further thoughts...." (78)

The events that took place in Queens in the fall of 1985 provide an important opportunity to understand how politics and political ideology were mobilized around AIDS at the community level during the Reagan era. From this perspective we see a portrait of a largely uninfected community trying to protect itself in a world in which information provided by the state changed on an almost daily basis. The parents of Queens also believed that the state was capable of lying to its citizens, and refused to relinquish their authority when it came to the health of their children. Listening to the voices of parents who took part in the protest, particularly those who were not in leadership positions, suggests that while parents were concerned about the changing relationship between state and citizen during the Reagan years, they did not consider their activism as part of a national conservative political movement. When Marie Devitto recalled her feelings about the boycott and the trial she emphasized that she was more interested in "investigating and not [in] discriminating." She "just wanted the truth," so that she could prove to her children that she "would take care of them" and not entrust them to a distant bureaucracy. Josette Lowenhaupt agreed. "Yes, there were some fanatics, but it was more impressive that huge numbers of parents became involved in the process" of seeking solutions at the level of the community school board and in the courts. (79)

This shared struggle, then, raises larger questions about the need to pin a social historical perspective to the emerging political history of conservatisms in the postwar era. Unlike the experience of activists in places like Orange County, CA where residents engaged in organized political work because of their ideological commitment to conservatism, in Queens parents came to this moment of activism without a defined ideological worldview. But in a city where race defined politics, particularly in regard to education, white and black parents shared a middle-class desire to participate in decision making with political leaders. Analyzing this example of activism also suggests that a class perspective on family and the state has as much, and perhaps more, of a role in creating community alliances as does either political ideology or a shared view of how the government might deliver political justice. All of this allowed parents to imagine the effort to keep children with AIDS out of schools as a middle-class struggle shared between whites and blacks, and in the end helped them accept when the state had fulfilled its responsibilities to them as citizens.

Department of History

Chicago, IL 60607-7107

ENDNOTES

Many people have provided me with invaluable readings of this essay. I would like to thank the anonymous readers of JSH, Steve Brier, Kimberly Brodkin, John D'Emilio, Kat Hindmand, Robert Johnston, Jennifer Langdon-Teclaw, Susan Levine, Roxanne Panchasi, Claire Potter, and Roy Rosenzweig. I dedicate this article to two brilliant and kind historians who died the week it was accepted for publication: Susan Porter Benson and Peter D'Agostino.

1. The Forum, Sept. 14, 1985, p. 1.

2. I use the term AIDS here, and not HIV, because that was the historically specific term used by the participants. I also call the children in question "children with AIDS" to mirror the phrase People with AIDS (PWA). However, when another construction appears in the text, such as "AIDS students," the historical actors used it. For a good primer of the politics of terminology and AIDS see Jan Zita Grover, "AIDS: Keywords," in AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism, ed. Douglas Crimp (Cambridge, 1988).

3. New York Times, Sept. 10, 1985, p. B5.

4. School Districts are bounded by very different lines than Community Districts which coincide with representation on the City Council and the State government. For example, School District 27 covers the same area as three Community Districts combined: Community District 14 which represents the people living on Rockaway and Broad Channel, Community District 10 which represents the residents of Ozone Park and Howard Beach, and part of Community District 9 which represents Richmond Hill and Woodhaven. See the New York City Department of City Planning Website at http://nycdoitt.ci.nyc.ny.us/html/dcp/html/lucds/cdstart.html. The Department of City Planning also provides valuable date from the 1990 and 2000 census.

5. For statistics see New York Daily News, Sept. 15, 1985, p. 5. The people I interviewed also confirmed this information. Sam Granirer, interview by author, Queens, New York, November 22, 2000. For data on the 1990 census see New York Times, June 6, 1994, p. A1.

6. For the national estimate of children with AIDS see New York Times, July 1, 1985, p. A1.

7. New York Times, Feb. 22, 1986, p. A6; New York Times, July 19, 1986, p. A8; New York Times, Aug. 26, 1986, p. B3.

8. For an analysis of events in Kokomo, Swansea and Queens see David Kirp, Learning By Heart: AIDS and Schoolchildren in America's Communities (New Brunswick, 1989).

9. For descriptions of the parents in Queens see Sander Gilman, "AIDS and Syphilis: The Iconography of Disease," in AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism, ed. Douglas Crimp (Cambridge, 1988), 104.

10. Kirp, Learning, 95.

11. Beyond Kirp, only a few essays have been devoted entirely to Queens. For a description of the controversy that focuses on the effects of the court case see Dorothy Nelkin and Stephen Hilgartner, "Disputed Dimensions of Risk: A Public School Controversy over AIDS," Milbank Quarterly, 64 (1986). The article, however, does not comment on the racial composition of the protestors.

12. Jonathan Rieder, Canarsie: The Jews and Italians of Brooklyn against Liberalism (Cambridge, 1985), 3.

13. Joshua Freeman, Working-class New York: Life and Labor since World War II (New York, 2000), 234.

14. Jerald Eric Podair, The Strike That Changed New York: Blacks, Whites, and the Ocean-Hill Brownsville Crisis (2002), 184.

15. Ibid., 212.

16. For a fine synthesis on the new historiography of the 1970s and 1980s see Van Gosse's introductory essay to Van Gosse and Richard Moser, eds., The World the Sixties Made: Politics and Culture in Recent America (Philadelphia, 2003). For work on housing see George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics (Philadelphia, 1998); Thomas J. Sugrue, "Crabgrass-Roots Politics: Race, Rights, and the Reaction against Liberalism in the Urban North, 1940-1964," Journal of American History, 82 (Sept. 1995); Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton, 2002); Becky Nicolaides, My Blue Heaven: Life and Politics in the Working-Class Suburbs of Los Angeles, 1920-1965 (Chicago, 2002); Rieder, Canarsie. For work on busing see Ronald Formisano, Boston Against Busing: Race, Class, and Ethnicity in the 1960s and 1970s (Chapel Hill, 1991). For work on gender and sexuality see Rebecca Klatch, Women of the New Right (Philadelphia, 1987); Janice Irvine, Talk About Sex: The Battles over Sex Education in the United States (Berkeley, 2002); Faye D. Ginsburg, Contested Lives: The Abortion Debate in an American Community (Berkeley, 1989); Donald G. Mathews and Jane Sherron De Hart, Sex, Gender, and the Politics of ERA: A State and the Nation (New York, 1992). For a useful local study see Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (Princeton, 2001).

17. Kirp, Learning, 98. Recently, historians also have attempted to reshape the staunchly conservative image of New York City's outerboroughs, Brooklyn and Queens. See Sylvie Murray, The Progressive Housewife: Community Activism in Suburban Queens, 1945-1965 (Philadelphia, 2003). Murray suggests that left-wing, Jewish activists moved to Queens from Manhattan in the postwar era and in so doing built a progressive, anti-racist movement in a period when most historians saw the emergence of conservative activism. For a similar argument on mothers, children and civic participation in the postwar era see Robin Muncy, "Cooperative Motherhood and Democratic Civic Culture in Postwar Suburbia," Journal of Social History, 38 (Winter 2004). My analysis is also part of an emerging strand of postwar US historiography that questions the periodization of demise of liberalism and the rise of conservatism. See Gosse and Moser, eds., World the Sixties Made.

18. Kirp, Learning, 106-08. Interview with Granirer. I tried to contact Claudette Webb several times, but have been unable to interview her. When I began my research on the events surrounding the school protests, I happened upon several boxes of materials at the District 27 and CSB 27 office in Queens. Because community school boards were not obligated to hold records, no similar records exist for CSB 29. This has forced me to rely quite heavily on local media for evidence of how parents from District 29 participated.

19. While little is known about his family life, a local Queens paper reported that in a 1983 campaign letter, Sullivan wrote to fellow Republicans that "'It is imperative that the assorted Liberal and Black Militant Extremists (a slate of eight candidates for a posible nine positions) ARE DEFEATED. The advocates of permissiveness in education, forced busing of school children and quotas in hiring and employment irregardless of qualification must be stopped!... [sic] If you're truly interested in what course our neighborhoods, small businesses, property values and schools take, please join with us now.'" See New York Newsday, March 16, 1986, p. 27.

20. Josette Lowenhaupt, interview by author, Queens, New York, October 25, 2000. Lowenhaupt was a member of the CSB in 1985. For information on Russo see The Forum, Dec. 28, 1985, p. 8+.

21. Grant seemed concerned with the presence of homosexuals in local schools. See Kirp, Learning, 108; New York Newsday, Sept. 10, 1985, p. 3.

22. Olivia Banks, telephone interview by author, March 1, 2002, Brooklyn, New York.

23. For general information about New York's 6th Congressional District see "New York 6 District Profile, 100th Congress (1987-1989)." CQ Electronic Library, CQ Voting and Elections Collection, pa1988-144-6860-385250. Originally published in CQ's Politics in America 1988: The 100th Congress, edited by Alan Ehrenhalt (Washington, 1987). http://library.cqpress.com.proxy.cc.uic.edu/elections/pa1988-144-6860-385250 (acessed July 30, 2004). In the New York 6th, almost 83% of voters elected the Democratic Candidate in 1984. See "House General Elections, New York, 1982-1990 All Districts." CQ Electronic Library, CQ Voting and Elections Collection, avg1982-3NY3. Originally published in CQ Voting and Elections Collection (Web site) (Washington, 2003). http://library.cqpress.com.proxy.cc.uic.edu/elections/avg1982-3NY3 (accessed July 30, 2004).

24. Rieder, Canarsie, 5. See also McGirr, Suburban Warriors.

25. Kirp, Learning, 99-102; New York Times, July 21, 1985, p. A26.

26. Rockaway Press, Sept. 5, 1985, p. 1.

27. Grant quoted in New York Times, Sept. 16, 1985, p. B5. Kirp attributes the quote to Webb, see Kirp, Learning, 108.

28. Rockaway Press, Sept. 5, 1985, p. 1.

29. Kirp, Learning, 111; New York Times, Sept. 5, 1985, p. B5.

30. Copies of Howard County documents were mailed to CSB 27 and remained in their files. See Howard County Health Department, "Recommended Interim Implementation of Guidelines ..." Feb. 17, 1986, "AIDS File #3," Community School Board 27 Records (District 27 Offices). A full year after the controversy, one mother from Kokomo remained very concerned about AIDS. She sent a handwritten note to Granirer calling attention to articles on household transmission. See Mitzie Johnson, "Letter to Sam Granirer," June 4, 1986, "AIDS File #3," Community School Board 27 Records.

31. CSB 27, "Addendum to the CSB 27 Open Meeting Agenda," Aug. 22, 1985, "AIDS File #1" Community School Board 27 Records.

32. Samuel Granirer, "Draft Letter to Parents," Aug. 22, 1985, "AIDS File #1," Community School Board 27 Records.

33. New York Times, Sept. 16, 1985, p. B5.

34. New York Daily News, Aug. 30, 1985, p. 1.

35. "Current Trends Education and Foster Care of Children Infected with Human T-Lymphotropic Virus Type III/Lymphadenopathy-Associated Virus," MMWR, 34 (Aug. 30, 1985), 518-9.

36. Marked up version of ibid. located in "AIDS File #1," Community School Board 27 Records.

37. Edward I. Koch, et al., "Press Release," Aug. 30, 1985, pp. 1-2, "AIDS File #1," Community School Board 27 Records.

38. New York Times, Sept. 2, 1985, p. A25. For discussions of other health officials who refused to speak with certainty see Paula Treichler, How to Have Theory in an Epidemic: Cultural Chronicles of AIDS (Durham, 1999), 15.

39. DPC, "Minutes DPC," Minutes, Sept. 11, 1985, pp. 2-3, Robert Sweet Files, folder "Working Group on Health Policy AIDS [6 of 13]," Box OA 16630 (Ronald Reagan Presidential Library) [RRPL].

40. Working Group on Health Policy, "Memo for the DPC Re: What should the federal government do to deal with the problem of AIDS?," Oct. 29 and Nov. 5, 1985, p. 2, Donald Ian MacDonald Files, folder "HIV (2)," Box OA 16756 [RRPL].

41. New York Newsday, Sept. 2, 1985, p. unknown.

42. New York Newsday, Sept. 6, 1985, p. unknown.

43. For a good description of events surrounding the bathhouse see Ronald Bayer, Private Acts, Social Consequences: AIDS and the Politics of Public Health (New Brunswick, 1991).

44. Kirp, Learning, 108.

45. Cindy Patton explains that this distinction would continue to plague AIDS prevention campaigns well into the next decade. See Cindy Patton, Fatal Advice: How Safe-Sex Education Went Wrong (Durham, 1996).

46. James C. Sullivan, "Press Release," Sept. 4, 1985, "AIDS File #1," Community School Board 27 Records (District 27 Offices). For the most recent work on Governor Wallace see Dan T. Carter, The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, the Origins of the New Conservatism, and the Transformation of American Politics (Baton Rouge, 2000).

47. When I interviewed Granirer he showed me a compilation videotape of all the local news coverage of the District protests. One of the local television stations went to the first meeting and included shots of the session in the evening's coverage. Unfortunately, the tape was not archived so I cannot determine a complete citation for the image.

48. "Special Open Meeting--AIDS," Sept. 5, 1985, unmarked folder, Community School Board 27 Records; CSB 27, "Community School Board 27 Statement on the Issue AIDS in Our Schools," Sept. 5, 1985, "AIDS File #1," Community School Board 27 Records. For press coverage and the direct quote, which did not appear in the minutes see New York Times, Sept. 16, 1985, p. B1.

49. "Special Open Meeting--AIDS," 1.

50. Podair, Strike, 21.

51. I searched each of the Black local newspapers on Southern Queens for the years 1984 and 1985. I did not find any articles that talked about the school protests or the problem of children with AIDS.

52. Cathy Cohen, The Boundaries of Blackness: AIDS and the Breakdown of Black Politics (Chicago, 1999), 173-5.

53. Cohen, The Boundaries of Blackness.

54. New York Times, Sept. 8, 1985, p. A1; New York Daily News, Sept. 5, 1985, p. unknown.

55. P.T.A. P.S. 63Q, "Letter to Parents," 1985, "AIDS File #1," Community School Board 27 Records.

56. New York Daily News, Sept. 9, 1985, p. 3.

57. New York Newsday, Sept. 10, 1985, p. 3.

58. There are minor discrepancies in the attendance roles. See New York Newsday, Sept. 10, 1985, p. 21; New York Times, Sept. 11, 1985, p. B3.

59. Anna Torres and Carol Reidy, "Parents' Association P.S. 97Q, Letter of Support," Sept. 9, 1985, "AIDS File #1," Community School Board 27 Records. I was not able to locate information about individual letter writers.

60. Carolyn Kaplan, "Letter to Joan Kenny," Sept. 19, 1985, "AIDS File #2," Community School Board 27 Records.

61. "Special Open Meeting--AIDS," 1.

62. Quote reprinted in Peter N. Carroll, It Seemed Like Nothing Happened: America in the 1970s (New Brunswick, 1990), 290.

63. Tom Gibson, "White House Talking Points: National Commitment to AIDS," June 1, 1987, p. 4, Donald Ian MacDonald Files, folder "HIV (1)," Box OA 16756 (RRPL).

64. William Roper, "Memo for the DPC Re: AIDS Education," Memo, Jan. 20, 1987, p. 3, Robert Sweet Files, folder "Working Group on Health Policy AIDS [5 of 13]," Box OA 16630 (RRPL).

65. The Mirror Tribune, Oct. 25 1985, p. 11. Russo continued to make the same argument long after the battle ended. See The Forum, Dec. 28, 1985, p. 8+.

66. David J. Rothman, "Public Policy and Risk Assessment in the AIDS Epidemic," in AIDS: Public Policy Dimensions, ed. John Griggs (New York, 1987); Gilman, "Iconography."

67. Shelia Jasanoff, "Science, Politics, and the Renegotiation of Expertise at EPA," Osiris, 2nd Series, 7 (1992), 196.

68. James H. Jones, Bad Blood: The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment (New York, 1981). For an analysis that situates Tuskegee in a longer history of racism in the medical profession see Vanessa Gamble, "Under the Shadow of Tuskegee: African Americans and Health Care," American Journal of Public Health, 87 (no. 11, 1997).

69. Interview with Banks. For work on how African Americans came to understand AIDS as part of a long history of scientific racism see Cohen, Boundaries, 186-219; Evelynn Hammonds, "Missing Persons: African American Women, AIDS and the History of Disease," Radical America, 24 (no. 2, 1990).

70. Adeline G. Levine, Love Canal: Science, Politics, and People (1982), 42 and 7. See also Thomas Wellock, "Stick It in L.A.!: Community Control and Nuclear Power in California's Central Valley," Journal of American History, 84 (Dec. 1997).

71. New York Times, Sept. 13, 1985, p. B3. The leadership of CSB 29 did not take as active a role in the court proceedings. One explanation for this is that once parents felt that the municipal government was listening to their concerns they no longer needed to be confrontational.

72. "Testimony of Dr. Polly Thomas," Sept. 18, 1985, pp. 325-6, Transcript, District 27 Community School Board et al., v. Board of Education of the City of New York.

73. New York Times, Sept. 23, 1985, p. B5.

74. Interview with Devitto. For a description of similar information dissemination see Amy Swerdlow, Women Strike for Peace: Traditional Motherhood and Radical Politics in the 1960s (Chicago, 1993).

75. District 27 Community School Board et al., v. Board of Education of the City of New York et al., 502 N.Y.S.2d 325 (1986).

76. Interview with Banks.

77. Samuel Granirer, "AIDS Precautionary Supplies," March 6, 1986, "AIDS File #3," Community School Board 27 Records; New York Daily News, Feb. 27, 1986, p. unknown.

78. Stephen C. Joseph M.D., "Letter to Mr. George Russo," Sept. 16, 1986, p. 1, "AIDS File #3," Community School Board 27 Records.

79. Interview with Devitto and Lowenhaupt.

By Jennifer Brier

University of Illinois, Chicago