Brook School was a grammar school located in Hillburn, New York, in the Ramapo Central School District, which served the district's black students until its racial integration in the 1940s.
Description
The school was an all-black school, which parents fought to desegregate in the early 1930s and again in 1943. Thurgood Marshall was hired by the NAACP to desegregate the school. Thurgood Marshall won a disparity case regarding integration of the schools of Hillburn, 11 years before his landmark case of Brown v. Board of Education, on behalf of the village's African-American parents. Leonard M. Alexander and Peter C. Alexander, "It Takes a Village: The Integration of the Hillburn School System. Page Publishing, 2014 (ISBN 978-1-63417-331-5).
Black children who lived in Ramapo attended the Brook School in Hillburn, a wood structure that didn't include a gymnasium, library, or indoor bathrooms. Meanwhile, the Main School – attended by white children and now the headquarters of the Ramapo Central School District – included a gymnasium, a library, and indoor plumbing.