The New York Board of Education reported today that, due to a ruling by the City Corporation Counsel — the city’s chief legal officer — it will have to permit the National Renaissance Party to hold meetings in a public school, after normal school hours. The NRP is a neo-Nazi, anti-Semitic group, headed by James E. Madole, who has been convicted of conspiracy to riot and is now out on bail pending an appeal from a two-year prison sentence.
According to Lloyd K. Garrison, president of the Board, the NRP was refused a permit to meet in a junior high school auditorium in the Yorkville section of the city last summer, on the grounds that such a meeting might “cause dissension or promote disorder. However, the Board asked the city’s legal department to rule on the action. Corporation Counsel J. Lee Rankin has now ruled that the Board had acted improperly in refusing the permit to the NRP, basing his decision on the State Education Law which allows the use of school building facilities for “social, civic, recreational and political meetings and entertainments,” without interfering with normal school functions.
Arnold Forster, general counsel of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, today challenged the Rankin ruling and the Board’s resultant decision. He stated that the National Renaissance Party is not a political group but a “gutter group.” It would be better, he stated, “that gutter groups be left in the gutter.”
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
