13 year old Lee Harvey Oswald's Probation Officer Was Mayor Wagner Aide John Carro

Steven A. Levine                                                                                                        
Coordinator for Educational Programs

As we approached the 50th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, I recalled that Lee Harvey Oswald lived in the Bronx and had a tangential connection to Mayor Robert F. Wagner through John Carro, one of Wagner’s assistants in the 1960s. 

In 1953 Carro was a probation officer for the Children’s Court. Ten years later just after Lee Harvey Oswald had been murdered by Jack Ruby, a friend of his called, “Carro, you know who that case is . . .?"  That was the case you handled. Don't you remember?"  Carro had been the probation officer for a 12 year old truant from New Orleans named Lee Harvey Oswald, then living in the Bronx on the Grand Concourse, who had missed 46 days of school in the fall 1952 semester.  He recalled in his testimony to the Warren Commission

“I went upstairs and I told the press secretary to the mayor. I told him the information that had just been relayed to me that I had been Oswald's P.O. and that I should tell the mayor about it, and the mayor had gone to Washington, so he told me, "Just sit tight and don't say anything." The story didn't break in the papers - this was on a Tuesday or Wednesday - until Saturday when someone found out, went to Judge Kelley, and then there were stories Friday, Saturday, and the Post reporter showed up to my house on a Sunday evening. I don't know how he found out where I lived or anything else, but once he got there, I called city hall again, "Look, I got this reporter over here. What do I do with him?"  They said, "So apparently the story has broken. So talk to him." . . .

Carro remembered Oswald because he was different from his other cases,

What did stand out, you know, that I really recall as a recollection of my own  . . .  that I was a Catholic probation officer and this boy was a Lutheran, which was strange to begin with, because you normally carry youth of your own background. And secondly that he did dress in a western style with the levis, and he spoke with this southwestern accent which made him different from the average boy that I had on probation.

But he concluded that the roots of Oswald’s crime could not be found in his youthful truancy or what he saw of Oswald and his family.

I wouldn't speculate on what drove Oswald to do this. I would say in my experience I have encountered many a boy who will do things like this to attract attention to themselves, that they exist, and they want somebody to care for them. It is hard to say what motivated him. I don't really know. I had no inkling of that at that stage. As a matter of fact, he said when he grew up he wanted to go into the Service, just like his brothers, who were in the Service, and he said he liked to horseback ride; he used to collect stamps. But certainly these things that he said were the normal kind of outlet, the things any normal boy of 13 years of age would do. There was nothing that would lead me to believe when I saw him at the age of 12 that there would be seeds of destruction for somebody. I couldn't in all honesty sincerely say such a thing. 

Nonetheless, in a speech he gave to the Bronx County Society for Mental Health on January 27, 1964, he regretted that Oswald’s mother had refused to comply with a court order for her son to be treated at a psychiatric clinic.  “Had he been placed, had he not been taken from our jurisdiction, his whole life may have been changed.”  No doubt he was also thinking of the life of the nation as well.

You can read more about Carro’s impressions of Oswald in his Probation Officer’s Report and an interview with him available on You Tube  Carro is one of the only people alive today who has any recollections of Oswald as a child.  An important figure in Wagner’s third term, Carro had a distinguished career as a fighter for Puerto Rican and civil rights and was the first Puerto Rican appointed to the New York State Appellate Court.

March on Washington and the War on Poverty: 50 Years Later

Mrs. Coretta Scott King, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Mayor Robert F. Wagner, 1964

Steven A. Levine
Coordinator for Educational Programs

After returning from the March on Washington this weekend, I have been reading people’s reminiscences and analyses of the March on Washington for Jobs & Freedom 50 years ago today.  One thing is clear: the goals of the March were not only to end legal apartheid in the United States, but to create as the Marchers demanded “that every person in this nation, black or white, be given training and work with dignity to defeat unemployment and automation.”  Education historian Diane Ravitch recalled in her blog that, “For that brief few hours in time, the theory was reality, and we knew that change was coming, that it was inevitable. The only question was not whether it would happen, but when.”  She then contrasted that moment to the present when “Much has changed, but not enough. Barack Obama is President, but poverty among people of color remains scandalously high and racial segregation is no longer treated as outrageous.”

Sadly our commitment as a nation and a city to tackling segregation and poverty have nearly vanished in the last 50 years.  Poverty in New York City has increased from 18.4% in 2008 to 20.1% in 2011, reflecting national trends, while President Obama and other politicians constantly reference the middle class and rarely mention the poor in their speeches.

In contrast, Mayor Robert F. Wagner’s speeches in the 1960s reflected a commitment to combating poverty unlikely to be uttered by a presidential candidate today.  Speaking at the United Neighborhood Houses on December 3, 1964, he laid out a long term commitment to New York’s anti-poverty programs,

"I would rather move slowly and build a firm foundation for action, bearing in mind the long-range and sustained nature of the effort that will be required . . . not just the semblance of action, but truly to prevail in the war against poverty, which means also to prevail in the war against discrimination and disadvantage."

Unfortunately, the war in Vietnam sidelined the War on Poverty and the Wagner’s “firm foundation” never received the necessary federal resources.  With the election of Richard Nixon in 1968, the War on Poverty ended and the 1975 fiscal crisis led to a massive austerity in New York City. 

What is unconscionable is that few of our politicians even acknowledge the widespread poverty existing in our society today and that our nation has spent the last ten years spending hundreds of billions of dollars fighting unnecessary wars leading to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people at home and abroad instead of expending these resources at home on education, health care and job creation.  Our politicians have always found it possible to open the nation’s checkbook to fight wars, but tell the poor that our nation cannot afford the necessary resources to change their circumstances.

NAACP Attorney Constance Baker Motley Confronts Racism at "Ole Miss"

Steven A. Levine
Coordinator for Educational Programs

When Constance Baker Motley began working for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund in the late 1940s, there were few women lawyers in the United States and only a handful of African-American women lawyers. Motley had the intelligence and determination to overcome both those barriers and become one of the leading civil rights attorneys in the nation. The Archives’ new video, “NAACP Attorney Constance Baker Motley Confronts Racism at Ole Miss,” shows her facing down racist protesters in Mississippi while representing James Meredith in the University of Mississippi desegregation case in the early 1960s.

In this video, her son Joel describes her strength of character and ability to see past the virulent racism and violence around her. At the same time, Motley was able to support plaintiffs like Meredith and Charlayne Hunter-Gault and Hamilton Homes at the University of Georgia through the trials they faced in breaking down the walls of segregation and racism embedded in the foundations of the United States.

Constance Baker Motley’s accomplishments have often been overshadowed in the historical memory by her mentor, Justice Thurgood Marshall. But as an attorney who won 9 out of 10 cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, we should remember her importance to the civil rights movement, especially during Women’s History Month. Moreover, with the support of Mayor Robert F. Wagner, she became the first African-American woman elected to the NY State Senate and the first woman elected Manhattan borough president. After her sojourn in New York politics, President Johnson appointed Motley to be the first African-American federal judge. She was truly a trail blazer in a pre-feminist era. (You can learn more about Motley’s appointment to the federal bench and how it became enveloped in the conflict between Senator Robert Kennedy and President Johnson in the Archives’ video “Lyndon Johnson Appoints Constance Baker Motley to be a Federal Judge.”)

I hope you will take the time to watch both videos and use them in your classrooms. (You can also learn more about Fannie Lou Hamer, another pioneering woman in the civil rights movement, in the Archives’ Mississippi Freedom Summer lesson.) If you have any questions about Constance Baker Motley, the videos, or want to bring a class to the Archives, please free to contact me in the comments or at slevine@lagcc.cuny.edu