Jean L. Konzal Oral History

Jean Leanore Konzal, née Stein, grew up in the Pomonok housing section across the street from Queens College, where she moved to in 1952 with her family. Her parents came from families who supported Communism and greatly feared retribution during the era of McCarthyism. Her father immigrated from Cherkassy, Ukraine at the age of six and worked as a factory employee adhering frames to pocketbooks. Her mother, a strong figure in Konzal's life, was a manicurist who lost her sister and brother-in-law during the purges in the Soviet Union in 1937.

As a Queens College student, Konzal volunteered with the Student Help Project, an initiative that provided free tutoring services to underserved children in South Jamaica, Queens from 1962 to 1968. During the summer of 1963, Konzal was one of sixteen Queens College students who lived with black families in Farmville, Virginia and tutored African American children who had been denied formal public education since 1959. (The county had defunded and closed its schools rather than comply with federally-ordered racial integration.)

Although representatives from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) traveled to Farmville to organize marches and sit-ins shortly after the arrival of the Queens College students, Jean and her fellow Student Help Project volunteers refrained from participating in the demonstrations at the suggestion of Reverend L. Francis Griffin. The students did not want to compromise their teaching mission and wanted to limit the risk to their host families.

Konzal continued her involvement with civil rights and education issues beyond the summer of 1963. She attended the March on Washington on August 28, 1963 with fellow Student Help Project volunteers and participated in both a Freedom Fast at Queens College and a summer workshop on human relations at Rutgers in 1964. The workshop’s instructors included two of her mentors for the Prince Edward County Project, Sid Simon and Rachel Weddington.

Aside from being a member of the Student Help Project, Konzal was the President of the Aloha House Plan, I also was Treasurer of the QC chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). She graduated from Queens College in 1964 with a B.S. in Elementary Education. She has worked as a teacher, staff developer, and consultant. She has taught seminars on the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision and coauthored two books on family-school relationships, Making Our High Schools Better (1999) and How Communities Build Stronger Schools (2002). Konzal was chair of the Department of Elementary and Early Childhood Education at The College of New Jersey when she retired, and serves as an adjunct professor for the college’s Global Master’s program. She is currently writing a memoir of her life that also includes chapters about her participation in the Student Help Project.