Catching up with longtime activist Velma Murphy-Hill

Velma Murphy-Hill

By Chris Lombardi

Chelsea Now first interviewed Community Board 4 member Velma Murphy-Hill for our Gay Pride issue, when she and her husband, Norman, talked about their mentor, civil rights activist Bayard Rustin. It was then that we learned about Hill’s work on behalf of justice in New York City schools, both for students in Brooklyn and among paraprofessional teachers’ aides. We caught up with her again on Tuesday to talk about schools, fighting for justice from the bottom up, and her history of integration work, starting at age 12.

This morning, you went to the doctor to explore treatment for a 45-year-old head injury that you sustained doing civil rights work. “The Chicago Defender” newspaper said that a “jeering, cat-calling mob” of 3,000 had “rained a hail of stones at the interracial group” at Rainbow Beach.

I got about 17 stitches in my head from that demonstration. I was secretary of NAACP Youth Council. We had heard there was a beach and blacks couldn’t go there. It was 1960, and there was this stirring in the country: Greensboro sit-ins, Ernie Green was integrating the school in Little Rock. We decided, there were 30–35 of us, and we were gonna go out and integrate a beach. But when we took it to the NAACP, they said, “We don’t do that sort of thing.”

But then you met Norman Hill, who was working with Bayard Rustin and A. Philip Randolph, who were encouraging “direct action” to enforce the 1954 Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education, which said that separate is not equal.

Norman came. Here was this guy from Summit, N.J., who talked like he was from New York. So, we integrated the beach, and I married Norman about two months later: My mother almost killed me. I hadn’t finished college yet!

Sounds like you gave your mother gray hairs from the start.

Well, it’s true that when I was about 12, I was in a Chicago park, telling people: “We gotta change society!” I don’t know where I got that, but I actually think it was her fault. We were really poor; she brought me to work with her, among mill and smelter workers. She brought me on picket lines a lot. Thinking of her was part of what brought me to the paraprofessionals. I could see her in their faces. But unlike my mother, these women could not find a factory job: The factories had left.

After Rainbow Beach, you married Norman Hill, came to New York with him and went to work for the Congress for Racial Equality (CORE). You were field director of CORE. What did that mean?

Bayard [Rustin] and A. Philip Randolph taught me all you needed to know: You had to be able to make a speech, be able to sing, to persuade people to be willing to go to jail. [laugh]. We had demonstrations everywhere, in places like Harlem Hospital to protest their all-white staff. Then there were the school boycotts of 1964 [with the Citywide Committee for Integrated Schools], when 500,000 kids stayed home on one day to protest segregation.

You’ve lived at Penn South for 40 years now. What was it like when you moved in?

In 1967, when we moved in, Norman and I were traveling a lot. We’d been to Israel, so we knew about the cooperative movement and kibbutzim. And Bayard was friends with Harold Ostroff, who was big in that movement. But many of the people here had not lived with blacks. You know Ernie Green, of the Little Rock Nine? He lived here, too. He was sharp—he would walk in with all these wonderful Brook Brothers suits on. And he would get in the elevator and people would get off.

There was this odd combination: a fear of blacks and also the desire to embrace.

Sometime after Bayard moved into this co-op, A. Philip Randolph, who was living alone in Harlem, was mugged. We wanted to bring him here so that he could be taken care of, and he moved to Penn South in the late ’60s. When he died in 1979, he was still in this development. Now, I think the co-op is like a little oasis in a desert, particularly now that things are getting so gentrified around here. It’s one of the last major middle-income developments in Chelsea, where you don’t have to be rich to live.

Just as you and Norman were moving here, you left CORE and accepted a scholarship to Harvard’s graduate school in education. But with that master’s degree, you ended up an organizer again.

I was tired and thought, Maybe I would want to teach. When I got back to New York in 1968, I started to visit schools and saw all these women of color. First I thought, They have already integrated the teaching staff! But those were the ones cleaning up after the teachers, reading to the kids and so forth. No one thought of them as educators.

I went to Albert Shanker [president of the United Federation of Teachers], who I had met during the school boycott. I told him: “I want to organize paraprofessionals.” He said, “Fine, but you have to become one.” I was horrified at the idea at first: You mean I have to get up in the morning? I am not a morning person. But it was amazing. All these black and Hispanic women—about 10 percent white—and there was this question, a question of how to organize them. It was a job, getting them to believe that they could lead.

So, how did you do it?

Mostly it was just going to schools every day, and talking about what we did as valuable.

We went everywhere—to churches, places people worked. Some didn’t trust the teachers union to look out for them. Some said, when they talked to me, that their husbands didn’t want them to go to college, fearing they would lose them.

You helped make college what they call a “career ladder” for paraprofessionals, a way for them to move up in the profession.

When we first brought it up, some people from the Board of Education said, “They’re not really interested in going to college.” The Board agreed to it, not expecting that many would. I’m very proud of what happened on the day of registration that winter [1970]: Out of 10,000 paras, 6,000 of these black and Hispanic women lined up for blocks around City College to register. That was one of the most important things in my life—the beginning of the real integration of the schools. True affirmative action, too. No quotas of any kind.

We also went to Detroit and Philadelphia and other places to organize. There are paraprofessionals all over the country—and in New York—who are still on the path we created.

More recently, you’ve focused more on housing issues.

I helped form an organization called Afford Chelsea, about housing. We got the Central Labor Council involved. And we got a lot in terms of pushing for working people. That West Chelsea zoning, with the 27 percent affordable units—I’m proud that a group I worked on helped make that happen. And on Board 4, I’m on the Housing, Health and Human Services Committee. Tomorrow, I’m going to Elliott-Chelsea Houses, where both the local NYCHA tenants associations can sit down with Hunter [Johanssen], from Borough President Stringer’s office. They’re concerned about crime.

Still, I have to ask: Have you been watching all the changes in New York schools? What do you think? Do you buy Chancellor Klein’s declarations that they will better fulfill the promise of Brown v. Board of Education?

To be honest, I have not been following it that closely. I do know that in the old system, they were just skimming the best students, so something had to change. I do think that at the Department of Education, they do have some people who are serious and concerned. But I think they have to involve teachers more. You have to involve teachers at the start, and they’re not really doing it in a serious way.