Sebastian Milito Canarsie school busing protest photographs

Sebastian Milito (11/27/1943-4/19/2022) was born in Brooklyn, New York. He began his career in the 1960s in New York City where he studied photography in night classes at NYU, The School of Visual Arts and The New School. He apprenticed in fashion and commercial photography studios. In Milito's own words: "My passion was photographing street-life, the human condition — people doing what they need to do every day to survive and make sense of their lives." His work was published by The New York Times and Time-Life. He also worked under contract at WNET/Channel 13 as a photojournalist for the nightly news show The 51st State.

In the late 1970s Milito moved to Los Angeles where he worked as a photojournalist, producer, director, and writer of documentaries for the news programs 28 Tonight and Newsbeat with Clete Roberts for KCET. He received four Emmy nominations for writing and producing, and a Golden Mic Award for best news reporting of the year for a story about a Vietnam Veteran with PTSD. Milito began to focus his career on TV, film and theater. He wrote scripts for the crime procedural show Quincy; an Emmy-nominated movie of the week, After the Promise; and an award-winning play, An Evening with Marlene: Falling in Love Again, as well as several not-yet-produced feature films.

A series of writers' strikes in the 1980s led to Milito working in the art department for TV shows and feature films as the head of set construction. He built sets for The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile, Clear and Present Danger, Star Trek, and Mission Impossible III, among others. Throughout these career changes, Milito continued to practice photography, including building a darkroom in his house in Los Angeles.

Artist biography modified from text provided by the donor.

In response to 29 black and Puerto Rican children being bused from Brownsville to attend John Wilson Junior High School 211 in Canarsie in the fall of 1972, 1,500 white demonstrators protested at the school on October 31 and were kept at bay by 200 riot-equipped police officers. White parents in the area boycotted and protested the local public schools en masse, forcing many schools to close. The morning of the protest at Wilson JHS, City Councilman at Large Monroe Cohen had served a court order to School Chancellor Harvey B. Scribner in an attempt to block the 29 Brownsville students' admission. The students' parents paid $100 per day in order to charter their bus to Canarsie from their homes at the Tilden Houses project. The photographs in this collection document the protest.