5. Bushwick High School, 400 Irving Avenue
“I only graduated from grammar school,” Gleason explained in People magazine. “I went to high school, but I got my cousin’s boyfriend to come to school and explain how poverty-stricken my mother was. He said it was absolutely necessary that I get out of school and go to work. By then I was hustling pool. I’d started when I was 10.”
“The last thing Mae Gleason wanted to do was pull Jackie out of high school,” The Golden Ham points out. “He spent another few weeks at a trade high school, but in all, Jackie had only about a month of high school education.” Today Bushwick High is known as the Brooklyn School for Social Justice. The school encourages students “to be active in the social, cultural, and political lives of their communities and their world.”
