Ocean Hill-Brownsville at 40

New York City public schools opened peaceably again this year, making it all the more remarkable to recall the chaos that rocked the system 40 years ago.  On what was to be the opening day, September 9, 1968, the vast majority of city schools were shut down as more than 50,000 New York City public school teachers went out on strike.  The day marked the beginning of the first of three walkouts that kept 1.1 million students out of school for a total of 36 days through mid-November, constituting what was at the time the longest and largest series of teacher strikes in American history.  The strikes persisted for so long because they were not about teacher salaries and benefits, issues of dollars and cents which can be easily compromised.  Rather, they were about different visions of racial justice and the meaning of liberalism.   

The controversy began in May 1968 when the community control board in the Brooklyn’s black ghetto of Ocean Hill-Brownsville fired several white teachers.  No legitimate charges were brought against the teachers by the local superintendent, Rhody McCoy, who made clear that he ultimately wanted an all-black teaching force in the district.  Albert Shanker, the 39-year-old president of the United Federation of Teachers, was stunned by the firings.  A champion of civil rights, who had marched with Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma, Shanker firmly believed that hiring and firing should be colorblind.

On the other side were black parents and activists who were deeply distressed with the state of education in the ghetto.  They believed that too many white teachers had given up on black children and called for the hiring of  black teachers whom they believed would be more sensitive to the needs of minority students.  Their cause received support from upper crust whites, including Mayor John V. Lindsay and McGeorge Bundy, the president of the Ford Foundation, who called for racial preferences in the hiring of teachers.  Once the principle of hiring by race was accepted, it was a small step to the community control board’s decision to fire by race.

As I recount in my biography of Shanker, Tough Liberal, tensions flared between the mostly Jewish teaching force and the mostly black community control advocates, particularly after a black teacher in Ocean Hill-Brownsville appeared on a radio show and read a poem written by a 15-year-old student dedicated to Shanker. The poem began: "Hey, Jew boy, with that yarmulke on your head/You pale-faced Jew boy — I wish you were dead."  During the strikes, militants continually threatened violence, on one occasion telling a group of teachers, “you’re going out of here in pine boxes.”

Many working class whites saw Shanker as a hero for standing up to this nonsense.  Many upper middle class whites, seeing the strikes in strictly racial terms, recoiled at Shanker’s hard-line approach. Woody Allen portrayed Shanker as a madman a few years later in his science fiction comedy, “Sleeper.”  In the film, Allen’s character wakes up 200 years in the future to discover that civilization was destroyed when “a man by the name of Albert Shanker got hold of a nuclear weapon.”

Four decades later, the strikes still matter because the injuries – to the black-Jewish alliance; to the coalition between civil rights groups and organized labor; and to relations between urban parents and teachers – lie just beneath the surface.  Democrats continue to struggle to gain the support of white working class voters, who are alienated by identity politics and question liberal support for affirmative action.  Blacks and Jews often come together but remain wary partners, bracing against new outbreaks of tension.  And the divide between minority parents and teacher unions remains troublesome.  While Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton forces made peace at the Democratic National Convention in Denver, urban mayors like Cory Booker of Newark and Adrian Fenty of Washington DC and activist Al Sharpton attacked teacher unions as obstacles to good education. 

Today, we would do well to remember the approach taken by Shanker, who in real life proved to be the opposite of Allen’s madman.  Shanker called for affirmative action programs that did not divide by race but rather united by class, organizing New York City’s mostly poor and black and Hispanic teacher aides, and negotiating them a career ladder, enabling many to become full-fledged teachers.  He backed a program of peer review to get rid of bad teachers who did not believe students could learn.  He sought to avoid the usual finger pointing – in which teachers blame low achievement on bad parenting and parents blame bad teaching – instead simultaneously backing programs to support teachers to do a better job and to support parents in providing enriching home environments.  There were no real winners in the ugly strife surrounding the 1968 teacher strikes, but before we can fully move forward, the conflict’s enduring wounds need fresh tending.