THE STRUGGLE OF NEW YORK CITY’S BLACK CIVIL SOCIETY TO
INCLUDE ITS NARRATIVE IN THE EDUCATIONAL POLICY DOMAIN
Walter Stafford
Introduction
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, civil society has been presented as an
elixir for problems as diverse as democratization in Eastern Europe to neighborhood
development in lower income areas of the United States. As with any rediscovery, especially one
that evokes such high expectations, there is a tendency to romanticize the past and expect too
much for the future. While scholars and analysts have rushed to provide an etiology of civil
society, and a lively debate has developed surrounding its definition and its meaning, in the
United States, the discourse continues to suffer from its omission of racial and ethnic conflict—a
conflict that is endemic in all multi-racial and multi-ethnic societies.
Analysts of all political persuasions write about civil society in the United States as a
non-violent, racially neutral and relatively culturally homogenous constellation of nongovernmental associations. Such descriptions obscure and minimize the historical complicity of
Western civil societies in violent actions (Keane 1998). While impeccably civil in their mores
and behavior, some white civic groups in the United States participated in acts of violence
against blacks and other groups of color; an even greater number of white civic groups were
silent in the face of such acts. Contemporary descriptions of civil societies also tend to minimize
the country’s cultural conflicts, notably the troubled waters of just how the narratives of blacks
and other groups of color can be included in diverse policy domains or—some might suggest—
whether those narratives should be included at all.
A contrary view, argued in this chapter, is that in a country that is historically racially and
culturally divided, there is not one but multiple civil societies. These sites are largely culturally
impenetrable and distinctive in their approaches to internal participation.
To demonstrate these contentions, this chapter goes “ behind the mask”, to paraphrase
Paul Lawrence Dunbar’s poem (1895) “ We Wear the Mask (1895) - to document the struggle of
black leaders and black organizations to gain a voice in, and to democratize, the decision-making
processes shaping public school education in New York City.
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New York City is an intriguing site for the study of civil societies. It is home to one of
the country’s oldest black civil societies, dating back to the 1600s, as well as other groups—
white, Latino, Asian and Native American—whose roots go deep into the city’s history.
New York City offers a unique opportunity to study the relationship of civil society to the
state. It has one of the United States’ oldest and one of the largest local governments, and the
second oldest Board of Education, established in 1842. New York City also provides a modernday test of the relationships among civil societies, government, and capital—one of the
contemporary concerns cited in The Third Way (Giddens 1999). It is both the center of global
capital, and headquarters of some of the country’s oldest non-profit organizations and national
foundations that benefit from the wealth generated on Wall Street.
Finally, New York City has a rich intellectual and cultural legacy that is often infused
into policy debates. New York intellectuals, journalists, and scholars have made the city one of
the centers for developing the national narrative on white ethnic groups. Central to this narrative
has been the idea that white ethnic groups have retained elements of the cultures that they
brought from Europe, but resisted essentialism in order to accommodate the common good
(Podair 1994). Efforts by blacks to include their perspective of the city’s common good have
usually been dismissed or ignored. Black civil society has usually been viewed as a poor
imitation of white associational life (Handlin 1959), as a site of exotic life (Mailer 1977), or as a
disorganized constellation of pathological families (Moynihan and Glazer 1963). When blacks
have promoted alternative narratives about themselves, their society and their culture, they have
often been rebuked for retreating to essentialism.
To draw a picture of the struggles of black civil society, I conducted extensive and
intensive interviews with some of the leading participants in New York City’s black civic
organizations and in the schools. In addition, I conducted content analyses of The Amsterdam
News and The New York Times dating from1954-70. I also examined the newsletters of the
leading black teacher’s organization, the predominately white teachers union and historical
transcripts and letters.
I have specifically focused on the educational struggles that occurred in the 1960s. As the
Southern civil rights movement achieved its larger goals of voting and public accommodation
rights, the education struggles in New York City and other northern cities became the major
battlegrounds. In New York, blacks first struggled to desegregate the city’s public schools.
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After repeated rejection by white civic organizations, white parents groups, white politicians, and
a reluctant educational bureaucracy, blacks demanded community control. The demand for
community control was anathema to most white civic and political leaders. Many black national
civil rights leaders also acted with caution, notably those who had played pivotal roles in the
Southern civil rights movement. These leaders had hoped to galvanize the labor, union, and
religious coalition that supported blacks in the South for a larger battle to gain federal support to
end poverty. This resulted paradoxically, in some of the national black leadership joining forces
with white civic groups and unions against local black civic organizations. Essentially, the
question was a basic and powerfully important one: Who would determine the narrative for the
emerging civil rights struggle around education and other policy domains in the North?
Reverberations from the 1960s still shape civic discourse in the city today. Blacks
labeled as “militants” have been blamed for the failure of racial integration in the schools
(Jacoby 1998). Charges of extremism and anti-Semitism tarnished the careers of many black
professionals, careers that never fully recovered. The unresolved conflicts and misunderstandings
of the period continue to fester, creating latent and open tensions between the city’s blacks and
Jews.
By focusing on black organizational life “behind the mask” and the struggle of black
organizations to shape the educational policy domain, I hope to clarify and correct some of the
misinterpretations of black’s role in these seminal conflicts. At the same time, I intend to give
race its rightful place as a central focus in contemporary discussions of civil society. In
particular, I want to draw attention to the duality of civil societies as sites of both
democratization and coercion.
Five authors inform my analysis and critique. Gramsci (1971) was one of the first
analysts to examine the coercive role of civil society. Kean’s (1998) investigation of violence
and what he terms “uncivil” civil societies expands our understanding of organizational coercion.
Said’s (1978) formulation of the role of “positional authorities” who claim knowledge about the
“other” is an important contribution in understanding the dismissal and denigration of the black
narrative in policy domains. Chatterjee’s (1993) argument that the civil societies of “others” are
essentially imagined nations is essential to recognizing the social and cultural construction of
black organizations. Held’s (1987) position that a “dual democratization” of civil society and the
state is required for purposeful social change to occur also informs the discourse.
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I. Conceptual Framework
In the United States, four broad perspectives are currently at the heart of the debate about
civil society. Each perspective makes a sharp distinction between government and civil society.
However, they differ in their emphasis on the relationship of government to individuals and
groups, their views of the composition of civil society, their perceptions of the government’s role
with regard to the lives of citizens and institutions, and their accommodation of cultural
diversity.
The perspective favored by many conservatives and neo-conservatives portrays civil
society in the United States as a culturally homogeneous, relatively fixed constellation of
traditional voluntary organizations whose principal function is to maintain order, cohesion, and
the continuity of Western traditions. Proponents of this view argue that leaders of privileged
organizations, in partnership with government, provide the framework and values for the
socialization of citizens. By revitalizing civil society, they seek to restore traditional values.
They believe government should provide for the poor in extreme emergencies only, with
voluntary agencies providing most other services. Little or no discussion is given to the
inclusion of a wide range of groups in the decision-making process of government and civil
society.
The second perspective is provided by some liberals who argue that civil society should
be fluid and open to change. Liberals decry the conservatives’ deference to elite organizations
and groups. They view civil society as an open-ended mix of organizations from which
autonomous individuals, without regard to group membership, can choose involvement in
accordance with personal worldviews. They further argue that civil society is a marketplace of
ideas where individuals can test their basic social and philosophical assumptions and government
should aspire to be neutral regarding available options. To ensure that every citizen has an
opportunity to pursue his or her own personal goals, liberals argue that government should seek
to reduce racial and gender discrimination in institutions, adequately support education, and
maintain minimal services for the poor. This perspective largely overlooks the impact of culture
and group membership on individuals and the way that specific cultures have shaped institutions.
A third perspective, espoused by other liberals, seeks a double democratization—to
reform government decision making and to restructure civil society. They argue that for
democracy to flourish, the decision-making process in both sectors must be expanded to include
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the voices of a large number of groups, particularly groups that traditionally have been excluded.
In their view, the democratization of civil society is especially critical, since the existing wide
gulf in access to resources gives those with wealth a dominance in discussions about the
common good. Proponents of this perspective seek a balance of power within the “marketplace
of ideas,” so those groups that have been historically dominant will not continue to monopolize
the discussion. Government has the ultimate responsibility for meeting the basic needs of poor,
weak, and vulnerable citizens.
The fourth perspective, held by multiculturalists, post colonialists and some
communitarians, is an extension of the third. It too seeks to reform government decision making
and to maintain a government safety net for the poor. However, unlike the other three, this
perspective emphasizes the existence of many civil societies, representing different ethnic and
racial groups, particularly those whose cultures have been systematically devalued and who have
only recently gained some or full political and civil rights. The role culture plays in decision
making must be acknowledged and the cultures of historically ignored or devalued groups must
be recognized. These advocates seek to strengthen civil societies of marginalized groups by
pressing government for a more equitable distribution of resources. It is their belief that civil
society is a mechanism for enhancing comprehensive, sustainable development in
underdeveloped communities.
This article is guided by the fourth perspective—a perspective which I believe, offers a
great capacity for interpreting how democratization and coercion operate within and across civil
societies and policy domains. I suggest that, for blacks, there has been a three-pronged struggle
revolving around civil society issues: the struggles within black civil society; the struggles
between black organizations and larger white civic organizations, and the struggle of blacks to
democratize the state.
The evolution of black civil society can be outlined in six stages. In the first stage,
enslaved blacks created a secret “sacred” space to form cultural bonds and to develop
organizational strategies so that they could survive and maneuver in a hostile white society.
Following emancipation, in the second stage blacks created organizations, notably churches and
civil rights groups that served as the basis of communal life. The third stage saw blacks build a
variety of new organizations to address their economic exclusion and to advance their political
and civic rights. During this stage blacks created an expanded space for themselves where they
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engaged in democratic debate (Mattson 1995). The civil rights movement and the election of
blacks to political office highlighted the fourth stage. Court challenges by blacks during the
1950s secured legal status for their organizations and expanded protections for white civic
groups as well (Rice 1962). The fifth stage was highlighted by a new relationship of blacks to
government. With the advent of the Great Society and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, blacks
gained elected offices and black non-profit organizations were awarded a greater number of
grants and contracts. Blacks also increased their demands for recognition of their cultures in
policies and programs. These demands accelerated conflicts with white ethnic groups. In the
sixth, period, starting in the late 1960's, black civic and non-profit organizations focused on
community development, tapping the state and foundations for more resources, engaging in a
debate about how to relate to other groups of color to the more affluent white voluntary
organizations, and to the private sector. Systematic efforts are underway to develop a
foundational approach to black culture that can inform institutional policy.
II. Creating a Sacred Space
During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, slavery in New York was among the
most brutal in the northern colonies. Until recently, most writers have minimized that brutality
and its impact on the evolution of black civil society.
Manhattan’s first colonial rulers, the Dutch, provided formal education in relatively
integrated settings largely due to the small population of enslaved Africans. The British, who
succeeded the Dutch in 1664, were not nearly as egalitarian – perhaps not so surprising in light
of the fact that much of their wealth depended on the trade of slaves for other goods, and because
of the growing number of blacks in the colony at the time. To keep blacks "in their place," the
British administrators passed ordinances that ultimately limited to two the number of blacks that
could gather in one place, and that also limited the formation of organizations. These
ordinances, backed with severe penalties, curbed but never completely blocked enslaved
Africans from developing organizations and establishing an embryonic civil society.
Setting up a pattern of segregation that would continue for generations, the British
administrators separated black and white students and restricted blacks’ access to formal
schooling.
In 1704, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel opened the first separate school for
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enslaved Africans to teach church catechism and prepare pupils for baptism. Following the slave
revolts in 1712, which confirmed for whites that they needed to monitor blacks, officials
temporarily closed the school. The school was reopened after the colonists somehow determined
that the school was not responsible for the revolts.
Starting in 1799, free blacks in New York City, formed many types of organizations to
address their educational, social and cultural needs. Perlman (1971) notes that:
An almost completely neglected facet of black self-improvement and social
consciousness is the early organizational effort of the Negro, free of white help,
intervention, or exploitation. New York provides an excellent case study in selfimprovement through self-organization . . .. Free Negroes in New York City
experimented with various types of social combinations that ran the gamut from
local ladies’ auxiliaries to national fraternal groups . . .. The educated guess is
made that between 1800 and 1850 approximately fifty Negro organizations were
formed in New York City (emphasis added).
In 1787, the Manumission Society created the African Free Schools, the first free schools
in the state. Ironically, free schools for blacks predated white public schools by 19 years. Black
churches augmented the admittedly limited education blacks received in the African Free
Schools. Taylor (1994) notes that the Sunday schools not only provided spiritual education but
secular learning opportunities as well. The importance of churches in black civic life was
indicated by the large number of persons who attended Sunday schools who were not members
of the congregations.
With the abolition of slavery in 1827, New York became a center for education for the
black “nation”. The first black newspaper in the United States, Freedom’s Journal, founded in
New York City, in 1827 by John Russworm and Samuel Cornish, became one of the most
important voices against slavery. The paper’s articles and editorials called on blacks to create a
new community, and to pursue education. The first issues of Freedom's Journal devoted
considerable space to discussions of schooling, listing addresses and admission requirements of
African Free Schools throughout the country.
In 1834, the Public School Society of New York City, a philanthropic organization,
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acquired the African Free Schools from the Manumission Society. The action caused
considerable anger among black leaders and parents, who argued that the Public School Society
schools showed little interest in the needs of their children. Their anxiety seemed prophetic: as
attendance declined, parents complained about the “ new discipline” that their children were
being taught, and black teachers were dismissed (Bourne 1873). When financial difficulties
forced the Public School Society to fold in 1853, the African Free Schools were placed under the
control of the Board of Education of the City of New York, established in 1842.
It was not long before black civic and cultural groups were challenging the educational
establishment’s treatment of black children. In 1857, black leaders complained to a state
committee investigating the city school’s that their “caste schools” were overcrowded and lacked
needed facilities. They also argued that their schools were located in degrading sites. The blacks
concluded that it was “ a costly piece of injustice which educates the white scholar in a palace at
$10 per year and the colored pupil in a hovel at $17 or $18 per annum.” In 1866, when ten
colored schools were placed under the direct supervision of the New York City Board of
Education, the Superintendent’s report noted that they were “ wholly or in part neglected.”
(Thurston 1965). In 1884, Grover Cleveland, the governor of New York State, signed a bill
abolishing the remaining colored schools. However, it was another six years before Governor
Theodore Roosevelt repealed the law that allowed communities to establish separate schools for
blacks.
The structure of the black organizations that formed black civil society during this period
foreshadowed the ways blacks would address educational issues in the future. While the structure
and focus of many black organizations often paralleled those of whites, they differed in two
significant respects. First, because blacks were denied suffrage, they could not use the electoral
process and the threat of the ballot to advance their causes and address their needs. Second, there
was limited civic interaction between white and black organizations. The more resourceful white
civic organizations (with the exception of those formed by Quakers) almost universally excluded
blacks from their services.
Pressed by the realities of the day, black organizations were generally of two types:
benevolent societies and beneficial societies. Benevolent societies secured resources from more
affluent blacks and dispensed them to those with fewer resources. Beneficial societies engaged
the poor in mutual aid in order to maximize their limited resources. Out of these organizations
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would arise new civic groups.
III. Reformulating the Needs of Civil Society and Education
The turn of the twentieth century was particularly harsh for blacks-- a period that has
been called the “nadir of black race relations” by Rayford Logan (1954). New civic
organizations developed and the concern for schooling escalated. However, progress was slow,
as black organizations were forced to battle racism in virtually every city institution and every
policy domain.
This was particularly evident in public education. In 1894, Samuel L. Scrotton, inventor
of the curtain rod and prominent businessman, became the third black member to be appointed to
the Brooklyn Board of Education (two other blacks had served earlier in the century). Scrotton
favored training in the manual arts and in the trades as a way for blacks to advance economically.
He served on the Brooklyn Board until 1898, when the five boroughs were consolidated into the
citywide New York City Board of Education. There would not be another black member until
1917 when Dr. Eugene Roberts, a physician and a member of the Tuskegee network, a group of
business people who supported the philosophy of Booker T. Washington was appointed to the
board (Mabee 1979; Schomburg Archives). As far as we were able to determine, two decades
would pass before another black was appointed.
The number of civic organizations multiplied as thousands of blacks migrated to the city
from the South and the Caribbean. In 1911, the National Urban League was established; eight
years later the New York Urban League for Social Services Among Negroes was born, which
was an offshoot of the national organization. The organization (The New York Urban League
for Social Services Among Negroes) officially changed its name to the New York Urban League
(NUL) in 1946. Reflecting the determination of the era, the NUL adopted the motto "Not Alms
But Opportunity" as it attempted to address the needs of a burgeoning black population. Political
reform was spearheaded by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
(NAACP), which was founded in New York City in 1909. From their inception, both NUL and
the NAACP included whites, an inclusionary pattern that was not reciprocated by any of the
white ethnic civil societies.
The formation of the new civil rights and social welfare organizations came at a
propitious time for blacks in the city and the country. Their immediate impact on the education
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of black children in the city, however, was not readily apparent. In 1911, school authorities
reported on the special needs of black children in classes and outside of the school as well.
According to the teachers, their classroom difficulties were due to the unsanitary or neglected
conditions in which the students were living. The Public Education Association (PEA)
conducted an investigation to determine if there was a relationship between the living conditions
of colored children and their academic achievement (Blascoer 1915).
During this period, an active black press—including The Crusader, Emancipator, The
Voice, and Negro World, all official organs of major activist organizations—constantly
reminded their public of the discrepancy between the promise of the United States and the
community’s daily reality. For the large number of blacks who were lured to New York City for
jobs and to escape the repression of the South, the papers distilled the harsh social and economic
realities while providing hope of a better life.
Marcus Garvey arrived in New York in 1916 with his organization, the Universal Negro
Improvement Association (UNIA). It was Garvey's belief that blacks had to actively pursue their
rights and, at the same time, establish an economic base. His call was heeded, as blacks in
households across the city and across the country joined the UNIA. Out of these households
would emerge a new generation of black leaders with a more “nationalist” view of education,
including but not limited to Malcolm X.
About the same time, A. Phillip Randolph, emerged as one of the new cadre of leaders
who challenged the exclusion of blacks from unions. Randolph became an important figure in
the evolving character of black civil society, pushing for greater unionization and economic
education for black workers. He would remain an important voice in union struggles for most of
the century.
The explosion of black creativity in arts and culture accompanied the profusion of civic
and political activity in the city. Blacks helped focus national and international attention on New
York City in the 1920s with their contributions to arts, letters, and culture during the Harlem
Renaissance. A review of the books, poems, essays, journals, and plays produced by black
writers in the 1920s reads like the canon of black literature: Alain Locke, Claude McKay,
Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, and Zora Neale Hurston.
The Harlem Renaissance was an important thread in the development of the “New
Negro”. Writers and intellectuals shaped a narrative of the “otherness” of blacks that separated
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them from white ethnics; positioning “difference” as a positive feature of black life. While
exciting, the Renaissance masked the corroding effects of poverty on the black community,
manifested in joblessness, high mortality rates, poor housing, limited educational opportunities,
and inadequate medical care.
The Great Depression strained the limited capacity of black civic and social
organizations. Harlem unemployment rates rose to nearly 60 per cent and the already low
median family income declined by over 40 per cent. Nearly half of Harlem's families received
relief from either private or public organizations. Black organizations and churches provided as
many services as they could to reduce the suffering.
Though significantly weakened by the Depression years, there were major efforts among
other black organizations to serve and sustain the community. The New York Urban League
provided haircuts to men so that they could offer a more presentable appearance for jobs; women
were given sewing machines so that they could make garments. Churches, civil rights groups,
and civic organizations offered a plethora of services, and they also organized protests against
discrimination in relief services and employment. These organizations also organized
committees to augment health information provided by the New Deal’s Works Progress
Administration (WPA).
The size and corrosive impact of the depression, abetted by racial discrimination,
obviated these valiant volunteer actions. Weakened and overextended black civic organizations
could not contain the full flood of the community’s anger and frustrations. Years of suffering
and anger caused by racism in education, social services, employment, and housing exploded in
the 1935 Harlem Riot. Alain Locke a luminary of the Harlem Renaissance, noted that while it
had been full of thrill and the ferment of sudden progress, the riots brought forth a world of
“civic neglect.” (Locke 1936; Mattson 1995)
Black civic leaders had given the city and industrial leaders ample warning, but city
officials ignored them. Even after Mayor Fiorella H. LaGuardia (1934-45) accommodated black
civic leadership by appointing many of its respected leaders to a commission to review
grievances in Harlem, he refused to publish their findings. The refusal of city officials to heed
the work of knowledgeable and influential citizens about conditions in the 1930s Harlem set a
pattern for the future. Committees including black appointees were formed after racial crises,
but they largely served to appease the frustrations of the moment, with their recommendations
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shelved by the mayor or other top political officials.
Limited political and civic power plagued blacks’ efforts to change the schools. The
white neighborhood schools were now well entrenched and defacto housing segregation limited
the policy options. School segregation was inextricably a part of the city’s housing segregation,
and school districts were zoned to segregate the races. It is notable that during LaGuardia’s
administration no blacks were appointed to the Board of Education.
Educational policy was further complicated by virulent discrimination in the unions and
in vocational education programs. Vocational schools, for example, consistently refused to
admit more than a token number of black students and those who were admitted were steered
away from occupations reserved for whites to occupations thought “appropriate for blacks”. A
commission on educational opportunities for black students in 1939 noted:
A peculiar psychology exists among teachers and counselors. They know just
what lines are best suited to colored boys and girls. Youngsters have been
discouraged because the counselor thought there was not opportunity for
employment in certain occupations.
The commission recommended that every child who applied to a vocational high school
be admitted. Similar recommendations were earlier offered in E. Franklin Frazier's report on the
1935 Harlem Riots.
Students were not the only ones to suffer the effects of discrimination. Black teachers
were a rarity, due to discrimination against black applicants in oral examinations: those with
Southern accents need not apply. The pool of black teachers also remained small because of
blacks’ exclusion from the municipally funded City College system that had been established in
1847. The City University colleges served as the primary feeder for white teachers into the
public school system.
IV. New Leaders, and New Challenges for Civic Participation
During the 1940s and 1950s a talented group of black leaders converged on New York
City: Some were returning veterans from World War II, who were deeply struck by America’s
promise of universal democracy and its treatment of black soldiers and civilians. Others were
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migrants from the South, seeking new opportunities. Together, they formed a veritable Who’s
Who in the city’s black life: Roscoe Brown Jr., the first American pilot to shoot down a German
plane, would become a leading civic leader and President of Bronx Community College. Percy
Sutton, who arrived from the armed services, would become Manhattan Borough President.
Preston Wilcox, would lead the drive for community control. James Dumpson, became the first
black commissioner of Social Services. Reverend Milton A. Galamison, became one of the more
forceful leaders for integrated schools. Mary Burke Nicholos, was one of the first black women
city planners in the country. Dr. June Jackson Christmas, became the first black and the first
woman to head New York City’s Department of Mental Health. Rhody McCoy, would become
unit administrator of one of the black experimental schools, and Reverend Gardner Taylor, the
head of Concord Baptist Church, would become one of the country’s leading religious leaders.
With the assistance of the G.I bill, blacks returned to college campuses and acquired
advanced degrees; and the growing number of well-trained black social scientists, social
workers, and physicians provided much-needed services the black community. Equally
important, these indefatigable young leaders formed new organizations to combat discrimination
in education, housing and employment. Black professionals, under the leadership of Kenneth and
Mamie Clark, created the Northside Center for Child Development in 1946, the first
comprehensive agency to deal with the psychological and social needs of black children. Mamie
Clark also trained ministers in Harlem in counseling techniques.
Black political leaders also ventured outside of black civil society. In 1941, Adam
Clayton Powell Jr., a columnist for The New York Amsterdam News, The People’s Voice, and
a protest leader in the 1930s, became the first black elected to the New York City Council. He
went on to become the first black Congressman from the city (1945-66), and only the second
black in the country’s history to head a Congressional Committee. Powell reflected the
estrangement of black civil society from the established political process, winning his election to
the council as an independent, with support from the City Fusion Party, the American Labor
Party and the Democratic Party.
Two years after Powell’s election, Benjamin Davis was elected on the Communist Party
ticket to the City Council, again confirming the growing independence of black civil society.
Davis, like Powell, had been born to relative affluence, and the black fraternities and sororities
rallied initially to his support. Davis immediately began to tackle the issues of education,
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pushing for the removal of racially prejudiced textbooks from New York City public schools. He
also introduced a bill for Negro History Week, a plan developed in collaboration with the Harlem
branch of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History.
Davis’ efforts were only the tip of the iceberg. Behind the mask, blacks were engaging in
meetings and discussions about the existing political and civic order. Out of these meetings
emerged new leaders, new demands, and a greater militancy.
Education was one of the leading concerns of the emerging leadership. During World
War II, the large influx of blacks into the city boosted black enrollment in the schools. Their
numbers led to a heightened awareness of the educational barriers to quality education. The
Board of Education used gerrymandering to exclude black students from the best high schools.
Black students were confined to overcrowded schools with poor facilities, fewer materials and
fewer books.
Under the name of the “Harlem Project,” between 1944 and 1948, a group of doctors,
psychologists, and educators investigated the conditions of schools in the black community. The
report found that the children were "sullen and wretched" and that teachers resented
appointments to Harlem. At one elementary school, which the principal described as a prison,
some students were kept away from class for as long as a month and seated in an anteroom
where teachers and clerks disciplined them.
The Board of Education systematically excluded black teachers and the idea of a black
principal was still unacceptable. Adelaide Sanford, who today is one of the New York State
Regents, recalls the barriers she faced when seeking her first teaching job in the 1950s. A
capricious and subjective interview by the Board of Examiners was the most formidable
obstacle.
Blacks also were barred from the cram courses that prepared most white applicants for
these coveted positions. Dr. Sanford, who later worked for the Board of Examiners as a
volunteer, recounted: “I discovered that you had to look for key phrases. It didn't matter if what
the person wrote was correct or valid. If you didn't use those specific words that they were
looking for you didn't get credit. . . . And you could fail by the oral alone. All the interviewer
had to write was that the person had a southern accent and they would automatically fail.”
Sanford was further dismayed by the system’s treatment of black children. Recounting
her experience in one school, she noted:
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It was called an “opportunity class” . . . grades 4, 5, and 6. And these were
children who were not considered educable. They were waiting for placement in
special education-- primarily boys. And I was told by the principal, “Just keep
them in the building. We don't want them in the halls. We don't want them
knocking on teachers' doors.” That's the only thing we were asked to do. These
were the brightest, most articulate, energetic children I've had, even until I retired
in 1985. But they were unmotivated. They had no instructional materials. And
everything that came to them was alien to them and rejecting of them.
Following the 1954 Supreme Court ruling outlawing “separate but equal” schools, Dr.
Kenneth Clark argued that New York City schools, notably those in Harlem and other black
communities, were not much better than they had been in the 1800s: “The time has now come for
us to evaluate objectively the contemporary problems which the public schools in the Harlem
community face,” he wrote “As far as our public schools are concerned, we are almost back
where we were in 1834.” [emphasis added].
Apparently the New York State Board of Regents agreed, as the state became one of the
first in the country to start, voluntarily, the process of integrating its schools. The city’s Board of
Education drew directly from the background papers of the Brown decision. On December 1954,
they declared that:
Modern psychological knowledge indicates clearly that segregated,
racially homogeneous schools damage the personality of minority
children. These schools decrease their motivations and thus impair their
ability to learn. White children are also damaged. Public education in a
racially homogenous setting is socially unrealistic and blocks the
attainment of the goals of democratic education…It is now the clearly
reiterated policy and program of the Board of Education to devise and put
into operation a plan which will prevent the further development of such
schools and would integrate the existing ones as quickly as practicable.
15
The Board’s declaration, much like that of the U.S. Supreme Court, carried great
symbolic weight with little practical direction. It nevertheless provided fresh ammunition for a
civic movement that included a diverse group of leaders in black civil society. At the forefront of
the movement was Reverend Milton Galamison. In the late 1950s he joined with white activists
in Brooklyn to take over the leadership of the Brooklyn branch of the NAACP. During his tenure
head of the NAACP chapter he attempted to force the Board of Education to come up with an
integration plan and a date for implementation. He also launched a campaign to force the
resignation of the superintendent of the board, whom he accused, of not being in favor of school
integration. In1959, Reverend Galamison formed the Parent’s Workshop for Equality in New
York City Schools. Employing a citywide protest strategy that emulated the earlier protests in
Harlem and presaged those that would follow in the South, the Parent’s Workshop for Equality
in New York City Schools, led a number of boycotts of schools in hopes of forcing the board to
integrate the schools. The group also published a newsletter to keep citizens aware of its
activities (Taylor 1994; Murphy 1990).
The early protests reaped limited, though significant, dividends. In 1958, Mayor Wagner
appointed Reverend Gardner Taylor to the Board of Education. Reverend Gardner Taylor headed
Brooklyn’s Concord Baptist, one of the city’s most prominent black churches, and he was a
stalwart in the Democratic Party. His appointment ended a long drought of black representation
on the Board of Education.
At the board, Taylor found himself embroiled in debates with his white colleagues about
their support of neighborhood schools, which he says they never adequately defined. Reverend
Taylor also attempted to get the Board of Education to eliminate the Board of Examiners,
claiming that requirements were often capricious, leading to the exclusion of blacks. Like
Adelaide Sanford, he objected to the rejection of blacks by the Board of Examiners based on
their Southern accents. Reverend Taylor notes: “There was a problem about New York accents.
I remember talking with some of the examiners. They said, ‘Unacceptable English accent,
unacceptable American.’ Well I said, ‘I hear New York accents from all of you. And that is not
typical.’”
The capriciousness combined with the web of institutional racism endemic in city
agencies meant that despite the array of some of the most impressive minds ever assembled in
black civil society and symbolic support from the board to end racial segregation, few concrete
16
changes emerged. Each step proposed by the Board of Education was usually small, incremental,
and opposed by enough white civic groups to prompt delays by authorities. For example, in
1958, in an effort to reduce overcrowding in “ghetto” schools, the Board of Education permitted
transferring black students to underutilized schools in white areas. White opposition was
immediate and formidable. A year later the Children’s Court Division of the Domestic Relations
Court ruled that the Board of Education was failing predominantly black and Puerto Rican
schools (U.S. News and World Report, 1959).
The board appointed committees and conducted studies to improve conditions for black
students. They recommended: (1) transferring licensed experienced teachers to “ghetto” schools,
which were overcrowded and understaffed; (2) creating a zoning unit in the Board of Education
that would rezone local schools that would favor integration, and (3) developing a citywide
voluntary transfer program that allowed parents to send children to schools of the parent’s
choice. Faced with opposition from white civic groups, white teachers, and white supervisors,
the board resisted the recommendations of the committee and never gave the zoning unit any
power.
As the 1960s approached, the promise of democratization of the state and the larger
voluntary sector remained a distant goal for black civil society. However, during the next decade,
the frustrations of generations would surface full-blown.
The Transition from Desegregation to Demands for Community Control: Unruly Civil
Societies
I. Background: The Beginning of Unruly Civil Societies
During the 1960s, the three themes of democratization came into full fruition. First, there
were increasing public debates within black civil society about the direction of organizations.
Aided by funding from the federally funded anti-poverty programs that stressed “ maximum
feasible participation” of the poor, a large number of grass-roots organizations challenged city
government and the traditional civil-rights organizations. There was also a wide- ranging and
intense debate about community control of public schools and about “Black Power.” Second,
black civic and political leaders stepped out of the boundaries of the civil society that had been
defined by white ethnic groups, and demanded to be part of the negotiations about the public
school policy. Initially, blacks attempted to desegregate neighborhood schools. However, after
17
repeated rejection by white civic groups, and white politicians, black parents and black civic
groups demanded control of schools in their communities. Third, in an effort to democratize the
state, blacks urged legislators to reorganize the Board of Education to increase their participation
in schools. They also demanded the appointment of black principals, and teachers and the
inclusion of black history in the curriculum. These issues thrust the schools into the forefront of
public debates.
Whites, for whom black civil society was invisible or a deviant version of their own,
were largely unprepared for the challenges. Even the liberal-radical journal Dissent known for its
critical analyses of social issues, failed to capture the underlying racial tensions in its 1960 issue
focusing on New York City. For many white intellectuals, scholars, professionals, and activists,
these new challenges violated the time-honored rules of social, political, and professional
discourse. Historically, blacks had protested practices and programs, but they rarely challenged
the foundations of knowledge that had shaped the policy domains. Blacks were not only
challenging the pedagogical commitment to their children but the prevailing view of their
community by “positional authorities.” In a brutally candid summary, Irving Kristol (1970)
described how many cultural arbiters viewed blacks in the period:
From my own experience as a book publisher, I think I can say confidently that if
a Negro writer today submits a manuscript in which dope addiction, brutality and
bestiality feature prominently, he has an excellent chance of seeing it published,
and of having it respectfully reviewed as a “candid” account of the way Negroes
live now; whereas, if a Negro writer were to describe with compassion the trials
and anxieties of a middle-class Negro family, no one would be interested in the
slightest…”
It was just such an image of a deviant black community was particularized in theories of
the culture of poverty, that viewed black children as bereft of middle-class values and the
cultural skills necessary to compete in white schools.
The struggle over public education essentially became a contest of political will between
blacks and Jews, and to a lesser extent Puerto Ricans. Jews had led the reform of the Board of
Examiners under the LaGuardia administration in the 1930s, however over the years the doors of
18
The Board of Examiners were closed to outsiders. By 1960, Sayre and Kaufman described it as a
“ service reformers dream, a bureaucrat’s delight, and an official nightmare.”
Gradually Jews replaced the Irish as the majority ethnic group in the teaching corps and
in top administrative positions (Murphy 1990; Erie 1988). They unlike the Irish however were
increasingly dealing with students who were non-white. By 1963-64, over one-fourth of all the
students in the public schools were black and 17 per cent were Puerto Rican. Half of the city’s
schools were racially segregated, as white Protestants and Catholics moved to suburbs or placed
their children in private or parochial schools.
The new educational debate revolved around six questions: (1) Was racial integration a
desirable goal and how could it be achieved? (2) What strategy should the city and the board of
education adopt if racial integration was no longer the primary goal? (3) Did the organizations
and leaders of black civil society have, or could they develop, new educational strategies to meet
the needs of their constituents? (4) Would the black strategies be accepted by the old white
ethnic arrangement? (5) What were the consequences for the old civic arrangements if blacks
were incorporated into the negotiations? And, (6) What were the consequences for the civic
order if the needs of black civil society were not addressed?
There were no easy answers to these questions. The search for answers was complicated
by the lack of racially neutral physical places where civic debate could occur, and by a history of
latent distrust among the racial and ethnic groups. Without the “space”, the discourse became
increasingly uncivil, unruly, fragmented, and frequently violent. Midge Dector (Commentary
1964), a leading commentator who would later emerge as one of the country’s leading neoconservatives, noted that by the early 1960s the school problem had succeeded in destroying,
probably for years to come, whatever illusion of civic harmony New York City entertained.
Dector’s assessment was prophetic. As blacks increased their demands for access to
quality schools, negotiations among the various civic and political groups became increasingly
“unruly”. A complex array of individuals, organizations and associations became involved in the
drama. Representing teachers-predominately white teachers-was the United Federation of
Teachers (UFT). Formed in 1960 when the Teachers Guild and the High School Teachers agreed
to merge, the UFT became a major force in the debate around educational policy and discourse
in civil society. Many of the early leaders of the UFT were Socialists with a strong commitment
to trade unionism (Taft 1974).
19
Representing black teachers was the African American Teachers Association (ATA),
founded in 1964 as the Negro Teachers Association – the organization officially changed its
name to the African American Teachers Association in 1966 – it was the first black advocacy
group organized by black educators. The ATA embraced the emerging black consciousness and
embarked on a campaign to help black parents embrace the idea of community control. After an
initial cordial relationship between the leadership of the ATA and the UFT, tensions grew when
the ATA supported the protests of black parents and students for reforms, including requests to
transfer ineffective white personnel.
Significantly, the young black activists in ATA represented the first sizeable wave of
black teachers employed by the Board of Education. In 1960,blacks comprised less than 10 per
cent of the public school teachers. Unlike the South where black public school educators were an
anchor of black civil society, the New York City Board of Education had excluded blacks from
teaching through a variety of previously described mechanisms, including the “reformed” Board
of Examiners. This meant hat there was a poor linkage of teachers to civil society and its
leadership.
The newly minted black teachers sought to change the existing civic order and
educational policy. They brought new energy to the classrooms and became role models to black
students. Many of these new recruits were athletes who bonded with the younger black males.
They also lived in the communities where they taught, and participated in community-based
organizations.
There were noticeable differences between the young group of teachers and the earlier
generation of black civic leaders. Unlike the civic leaders who arrived after World War II, many
of the younger teachers had been born in New York City and had attended the city’s public
schools. Many of them had also attended either the city’s public or private colleges. Some young
educators like Leslie Campbell were reared in activist families, and attended progressive Jewish
summer camps. Charles Wilson, who later became Unit Administrator of IS 201, the
experimental school in Harlem, had helped define the new black consciousness through essays in
the Liberator magazine. Al Vann, a schoolteacher and administrator played a central role in
organizing black parents and the ATA. In interviews with each of these educators, they
described the period as one of personal and collective transformation from being “ Negro to
Black.”
20
The anchor of the black civil groups was the Parents Workshop for Equality in New York
City Schools organized by Reverend Galamison. Other groups included the Harlem Parents
Workshop, the local chapters of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), the NAACP, and
NUL.
White parents groups and other white civic groups including Parents and Taxpayers
Coordinating Council organized when schools in their communities were “threatened” by the
attempted paring of black and white elementary schools.
None of the alliances were traditional. Black ministers, who were often the leaders and
strategists of the protests, were frequently opposed by traditional black civil rights organizations.
Many Jewish groups were sympathetic to blacks in the early stages of the protest; however, as
the protest accelerated, and conflicts of interests emerged, the largely Jewish UFT and an
increasing number of Jewish groups sided with those opposing black demands for educational
reform.
Finally, and importantly The Ford Foundation played a major and controversial role in
the school debates. McGeorge Bundy, foundation president, headed one of the most important
committees, and the foundation provided assistance to the experimental school districts and to
black organizations.
II. The Last Gasps for Integration and Desegregation
After its initial symbolic gestures supporting the 1954 Supreme Court decision, the New
York City Board of Education found itself politically constrained by the programs that it could
use to integrate the schools.
In 1960, the Board of Education instituted Open Enrollment. Under this program black
parents could send their children out of racially unbalanced but not necessarily overcrowded
schools to designated predominately white schools with openings. A second strategy initiated in
1962 focused on integrating “ghetto” schools by attracting white students to schools with
predominately black and Puerto Rican populations. To showcase this effort, the Board of
Education announced the planning of Intermediate School 201 (IS 201). The sleek new
windowless building located in East Harlem, a largely Puerto Rican and black area, won a design
award. Its newly devised-but untested- curriculum had novel instructional features’ – small
classes, flexible scheduling, team teaching, music, foreign languages, and typing, beginning in
21
the fifth grade. Its handpicked staff of 55, half-white, half-Negro had all volunteered to teach in
the school. The principal was white, the three assistants principals were Negro.” (Carter 1971)
In 1963, the New York State Board of Regents issued a policy document on racial
imbalance in the schools that reiterated the state’s commitment to the 1954 Supreme Court
decision. The Regent’s statement read much like the statement issued by the city board in 1954,
except that it placed a decided emphasis on local responsibility:
…the racial imbalance existing in a school in which the enrollment is wholly or
predominately Negro interferes with the achievement of equality of educational
opportunity and must therefore be eliminated from the schools of New York
State…In keeping with the principle of local control, it is the responsibility of the
local school authorities in such communities to develop and implement the
necessary plans.
Shortly before the start of the school year, Calvin Gross, the superintendent of New York
City schools, issued a report of the board’s desegregation policies. Gross’ report attacked the
immorality of racial segregation and suggested certain administrative and instructional remedies
that could assist in the desegregation process. However, the plan lacked timetables for
addressing and meeting the goals.
Blacks viewed the plan as another stalling tactic and decided to end the impasse by
boycotting the schools. Ministers in Brooklyn indicated that they would allow their churches to
be used as classrooms if a boycott was initiated. Reverend Gardner Taylor who had been on the
Board of Education in the 1950s, indicated he would be the first one on the picket line if the
integration issue was not settled (New York Times, 3 February 1966). Faced with increasing
pressure from black organizations and their allies, Superintendent Gross issued another report
near the end of the school year. The second report, however, also failed to provide specific goals
and timetables.
By this time, most of the leading civil rights organizations and the black ministers
indicated that they were ready to continue protesting until the Board of Education offered a
specific desegregation plan (New York Times 10 December 1963). With widening support from
the black community, Reverend Galamison increased the pressure on the Board of Education. In
22
January of 1964, he was arrested by Board of Education attendance officers for conducting a
“freedom school” for children assigned to “600” schools. The “600” schools were for
undisciplined and troublesome students, today’s equivalent of special education (New York
Times 19 January 1964). While enjoying wide support among blacks, Reverend Galamison was
viewed as an “extremist” by the major white newspapers, by segments of the Democratic
machine, and by some civil rights leaders, notably Roy Wilkins of the NAACP.
After the January boycott and the arrests that ensued, the approaches to negotiations
changed. Whereas officials at the Board of Education were initially willing to meet with blacks
as a result of the demonstrations, they now by-passed black leadership and announced their
decision about desegregating the schools on television. Infuriated, black leaders announced that
they had no choice but to go ahead with a school boycott.
White civic organizations, representing neighborhood schools, viewed the black protests
as a breach of the negotiating process. The predominately white Public Education Association
(PEA) and the United Parents Association (UPA) argued against the boycott on the grounds that
blacks were undermining the Board’s efforts.
In February 1964, the first citywide demonstration organized by Reverend Galamison
drew an estimated half million students and their supporters from the schools. It was the largest
civil rights demonstrations in history, rivaling the heralded national March on Washington
organized a year earlier. Over 8,000 police were on hand to maintain order, and newspapers
gave the boycott extensive coverage. Calvin Gross, the superintendent of the schools attempted
to minimize the boycott, noting: “This is the first opportunity for every Negro and Puerto Rican
to express with social approval everything he feels under his skin about prejudice and
discrimination”.
Gross’s patronizing statement revealed the distance between the Board of Education and
black civil society. It also reflected how many whites viewed the protesters. Gross minimized the
march in an attempt to keep the unrest from spreading; he, like other white administrators and
politicians feared more protest in northern cities.
In addition to widening the gulf between blacks and the major white parent and
educational advocacy organizations, the February boycott also strained the relationship between
blacks and many white liberals who sought a more restrained civic discourse. David Livingston,
president of District 65 of the Retail Wholesale and Department Union, attempted to negotiate
23
the fraying relationship between white liberals and black civil rights organizations, warning that
it was a disaster that: “ the struggle to advance the cause of democracy should appear as trouble
between black and white”.
As the boycotts accelerated, the Board of Education became more coercive. The UFT did
not support the boycotts, a factor that would loom important for many black teachers. However a
number of individual white teachers participated in the boycotts and were subsequently
blacklisted by the Board of Education. The UFT and black civil rights organizations united in
protest against the Board’s policies (New York Times 20 February 1964).
Prospects for harmonious racial discourse were rapidly evaporating. White civic groups
opposed to racial integration of the schools organized a march that drew between 10,000 to
15,000 participants. Most of the participants in the march were white women who were
supported by white politicians in the Democratic and Republican parties (The Worker 13 March
1964).
Undeterred by the white protests, Reverend Galamison, backed by Adam Clayton Powell
Jr. and the Amsterdam News, called for another boycott to protest the Board’s delays in
finalizing a plan for desegregation (Worker 3/15/64). This time Reverend Galamison’s efforts
were opposed not only by the Democratic Party and the city’s leading newspapers, but also by
the local and National NAACP and the NUL. Nevertheless, the boycott resulted in the absence of
more than 267,000 students.
With the success of the boycott, even the critics had to admit that a new leadership had
emerged in black civil society. Alexander Allen, the head of the New York Urban League, who
did not endorse the march, acknowledged that the grassroots now would only follow leaders who
aggressively promoted change. Adam Clayton Powell Jr. indicated that the failure of the
traditional civil rights leaders to support the march marked their demise in the city. It was a
triumph of the “ little people,” declared Galamison. However, it was not just the little people.
The march drew support from Malcolm X and from black leaders who traveled from cities across
the country to lend their support. (National Guardian 24 March 1964). Emboldened by the
success of the march, Galamison called for a work stoppage on the opening day of the World’s
Fair. Thelma Hamilton, one of his co-leaders in the Parents Workshop added, “ if they don’t give
us what we want, we’ll tie up this whole damn city” (National Guardian 31 March 1964). The
boycott caused major disruptions of the fair’s activities.
24
The boycotts riled the professionals and the administrators, polarizing and dividing them
along racial lines. The Council of Supervisory Associations (CSA), a group of predominately
white school principals and superintendents issued a policy statement denouncing compulsory
busing of pupils outside of their neighborhoods and the pairing of schools (New York Post 15
April 1964). In rebuttal, The Community Teachers Association (CTA), a small organization of
black teachers urged the Board of Education to transfer any white supervisors in black
communities who opposed racial integration and replace them with “qualified Negro personnel.”
(New York Post 15 April 1964). CTA’s statement was bold considering that there were only 24
black supervisors in the public school system.
In an attempt to marginalize the more assertive black leadership and maintain a modicum
of solidarity between blacks and whites, Bayard Rustin organized a march for school integration.
The year before he had helped organize the March on Washington. However, the New York City
march was a failure. It drew only 5,000 students, only 2 per cent of that drawn by Galamison and
his followers. Moreover, a large percentage of the participants were white. Galamison refused to
attend because none of the speakers were from grassroots organizations (New York Times 20
May 1964).
Even though Rustin was able to draw white support for the pro-integration rally,
opposition on the part of white administrators and white parents was growing. When the Board
of Education announced a plan calling for the reassignment of sixth grade students from 44
elementary schools to 10 junior high schools, and the pairing of eight elementary schools, the
reaction of whites against the plan was immediate. White administrators opposed the plan
because they were not consulted. White parent groups opposed it because it was a departure from
the neighborhood schools. Led by The Parents and Taxpayers Coordinating Council and the Joint
Council for Better Education, the white parents called for a boycott to protest plans to transfer
pupils from their neighborhood schools. The two groups claimed that they represented over one
million members, and that their strongest support was in neighborhoods where schools would be
paired. The Parents and Taxpayers Coordinating Council also asked the New York City Council
to seek a referendum that would prohibit the Board of Education from making any changes in the
pupil composition of neighborhood schools. They threatened to organize their own schools if
further integration plans were pursued. (Amsterdam News 11 July 1964). Blacks were unhappy
25
because the plan did not go far enough (New York Times 5 July 1964;New York Post 12 August
1964).
The rift between whites and blacks widened. Black students bused to outlying white
communities were stoned. Within the city, minor skirmishes broke out between black and Jewish
youths, requiring the intercession of religious leaders from both communities. The Jewish
Forward chastised black leaders for allowing black youth to engage in delinquent behavior.
Increased tensions within black civil society paralleled the white-black discord.
Congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr. and Kenneth Clark wrestled over which of their
organizations should control the federal anti-poverty funds in Harlem. Because the argument was
between the community’s leading politician and its resident scholar, the disagreement drew wide
interest and debate.
And, If this internal discord was not enough, a riot broke out in July 1964 in Harlem,
after a black youth was shot and killed by an off-duty white policeman. The riots exposed the
frail lines of communications between black civil society and the city government.
Although Mayor Robert F. Wagner (1954-65) had enjoyed support among blacks, and he
appointed a significant number of influential blacks to his cabinet, there were unresolved
tensions between blacks and the police. In an attempt to try to calm the hostilities between blacks
and the police and mediate racial tensions, Mayor Wagner invited the Reverend Martin King, Jr.
to New York City. While King made it clear that he did not want to circumvent the local black
leadership, he was still criticized by blacks for not meeting with their rank and file. According to
the Amsterdam News, King came away with a bargain that the mayor should provide some
symbolic action to gain the confidence of blacks (Amsterdam News 1 August 1964). King did
not seem to understand that symbolic gestures were no longer satisfactory.
In a subsequent meeting with blacks, King broadened his rationale for intervening in the
local dispute. He noted:
…When I received Mayor Wagner’s urgent plea that I come to New York, I felt it
my Christian duty to accept because New York City is the center of the Negro
struggle for equality, the capital of Negro life, and the most liberal city in the
country. What happens here affects the whole country-from the share croppers of
Mississippi longing for freedom to the followers of Barry Goldwater hoping to
26
discredit liberalism.” (Amsterdam News 8 August 1964).
King’s claim that New York City was the center of liberalism was not reflected in the
city’s policies. Unlike Mayor LaGuardia, Mayor Wagner did not appoint a commission to study
the riots and he blamed communists and fringed groups for instigating the discord. Wager also
refused black’s request to transfer the policeman who shot and killed the youth, hedged on
whether he supported a police civilian review board, and banned all political demonstrations.
Black leaders protested to no avail (Amsterdam News 1 August 1964; Amsterdam News 8
August 1964).
Black leaders now found themselves rebuffed on a variety of policy fronts. Education and
youth development were among their highest priorities. Yet, they lacked the power to force the
city to end police brutality against their youth, or provide them with a quality education. Even
the most moderate black leaders despaired. In his 22 August column in the Amsterdam News,
Roy Wilkins, the most moderate of the black leaders noted:
White people built the white neighborhoods long ago. The white banks built them
with lily-white mortgage money. The white real estate dealers built them with a
policy of not selling to Negroes, regardless of financial or other resources. White
rank and file people built them with civic and neighborhood associations
whose first duty above all else, was to keep out black people-all black peoplegood, bad, indifferent. (emphasis added)
Reluctantly, even the most ardent integrationists had to concede that white civic groups
were not going to support black students attending their neighborhood schools without a long
and protracted struggle. In August 1964, white parents announced that they would boycott the
schools when they opened rather than submit to desegregation of their neighborhood schools. In
September, they kept thousands of their children out of classes. Utilizing the tactics of blacks,
members of the Parents and Taxpayers Coordinating Council, along with white teachers and
white students, staged a sit-in at a former all white school. The Board of Education evicted them
from the premises (Amsterdam News 10 October 1964).
27
With few other options, blacks began to focus on improvements in schools in their own
communities, demanding that white teachers and principals perform at the same level that they
performed in white schools or leave. Black parents and black activists and social scientists also
expressed increasing reservations about the premise of some white teachers and white social
scientists that their children were uneducable because of their home environment. (Amsterdam
News 17 October 1964). And building on earlier efforts by Benjamin Davis, the second black
city councilman, blacks began demanding that schools include courses on black history
(Amsterdam News 7 November 1964).
Reverend Galamison was further emboldened by the parent’s demands. In addition to
repeating his demands for timetables from the Board of Education to desegregate the schools, he
urged the board to upgrade 200 Black and Puerto Rican teachers to supervisory positions. He
also threatened to shut down 31 junior high schools and all the special education schools, known
as “600” schools after the board announced that it was only going to pair four schools.
(Amsterdam News 14 November 1964; Amsterdam News 28 November 1964). Black civic
groups and an increasing number of white groups as well, urged the board to support his
proposals.
III. 1965: The Shifting Civic Strategies
By 1965, the new strategy of blacks seemed more and more realistic as the number of
segregated schools in the city had almost doubled and school authorities forecast that the public
school population would be overwhelming black and Latino in the next decade. A new reality
about the school system’s future population faced the Board and black civil society. However,
neither the Board of Education nor the leaders of black civil society were prepared to shift their
strategies.
The Board of Education then issued another plan for desegregation of the schools that
was more in line with New York State Board of Regent’s proposal, and Superintendent Bernard
Donovan also made it clear to white parent’s groups that he supported the plan. Black civil rights
groups were elated with his actions. However Reverend Galamison’s endorsement was muted,
and in the early part of 1965 he repeated many of his earlier demands to the Board of Education.
These included upgrading the positions of black and Puerto Rican teachers to assistant principal
and principal; a reform of the construction program to conform with a citywide desegregation
28
program, and a commitment to a citywide plan and a timetable for desegregation. He also
reiterated his demand for improvement in the “600” schools and the development of an approach
to return of the special students to mainstream schools. This time the Board of Education
responded to some of the demands. They indicated that 400 black and Puerto Rican teachers
were being prepared for supervisory positions through free seminars, and that the Board was
sending recruiters to the South to find black teachers. The latter point was particuarly interesting,
since historically the Board of Education, through the Board of Examiners, had rejected blacks
with Southern accents and backgrounds. It was also a clear acknowledgement of the failure of
the city-funded colleges to produce a sufficient number of black teachers. And, as it had done in
the past, the Board of Education indicated that it still needed a few more months to come up with
timetables for desegregation.
When the Board of Education stalled this time on the exact date when it would spell out
the timetables for desegregation of the schools, comments from black leaders were more
reserved. Reverend Galamison called for a one-day boycott that he promised would carry the “
Negro revolution to the schoolyards of New York City.” Blacks set up Freedom Schools based
on those established by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in Mississippi.
Freedom diplomas were awarded to students who attended. The boycott drew the support of
Teachers for Integrated Education, and the UFT, which indicated that it would support any
teacher who participated in the boycott. Many of the city’s black ministers and Congressman
Adam Clayton Powell also supported the boycott.
Opposing the boycott were the white parent groups and the American Jewish Congress.
Some of the black ministers in Harlem also withdrew their support, arguing that while they were
committed to removing racial segregation from all segments of American life, it was unwise to
place total responsibility for an integrated school system on the Board of Education. With
support divided within the black community, the boycott only drew about 10,000 students
(National Guardian 6 March1965). Months later, Martin Luther King voiced sentiments similar
to the city’s black ministers. He argued that the problems of the New York City schools were the
most difficult in the country; but, “the Board of Education was not evil” (Amsterdam News 22
May 1965).
29
The reduced numbers of students and protesters drawn by Galamison signaled a change
in the black community’s attitude. Increasingly, blacks argued that they wanted their own
schools improved, even if they were segregated (New York Times 15 December 1965).
With the turn toward community development, blacks began to demand greater
democratization of the anti-poverty programs and the other organizations responsible for
delivering services in their communities. Blacks had leveled a number of complaints against the
city and the federal government about the way that the mayor had structured the decision-making
apparatus of the anti-poverty program. Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, who chaired the
Education Subcommittee in the House of Representatives, threatened to cut-off all support for
the anti-poverty programs unless the city fulfilled its commitment of “ maximum feasible
participation” to the poor. A.H. Raskin in an editorial in the New York Times suggested that a
new subsidized revolution was occurring:
Behind the conflict over who shall run New York City’s war on poverty
lies a political and economic struggle with revolutionary implications. What is
involved is an attempt to effect a massive shift in the power base in the nation’s
largest city, the corporate and financial capital not only of the United States but of
much of the world.
The unresolved question is whether this attempt will represent a genuine
cooperative effort by the haves and the have-nots of a city which reflects more
acutely than any other the split level character of the American economy; or
whether it will degenerate into species of subsidized class warfare, in which the
community pays the bills for organizing mass demonstrations and civil
disobedience against itself.(New York Times 31 May 1965; 13:3)
Raskin’s warning of a “subsidized revolution” certainly could not be ignored. In 1965,
the Board of Education attempted to resolve its stalemate with the black community by
reorganizing the schools in a 4-4-4 plan that would require four years each in primary,
intermediate high school and senior high school. The plan replaced the 6-3-3 plan of six years in
elementary, and three years each of junior and senior high school. The New York State Regents
had proposed this plan, popularly known as the Allen Report, in 1964.
30
Under the 4-4-4 plan the elementary schools would draw on their immediate
communities, thus maintaining their ethnic makeup. The intermediate schools would draw on
students from a wider catchment area. Maximum integration would take place in the high
schools (New York Times 12 December 1965). Since integration had largely failed in the early
grades, the assumption was that it could be accomplished by concentrating desegration efforts on
the upper eight grades where it was assumed there would be less opposition from white parents.
This time there was white and black opposition to the plan (New York Times 15 December
1965).
I. The Emergence of Community Control and Black Power
Between 1957 and 1966, the share of black and Puerto Rican students in the public
schools increased from 32 to 48 per cent, while the percentage of white students declined from
68 to 52 per cent (The Worker 25 December 1966). Unfortunately, the increases in the share of
blacks in the schools seemed to correlate with a decline in their academic skills. In 1966, the
Board of Education admitted that the degree of retardation in reading and arithmetic scores and
the rate of dropouts in black segregated schools in poor communities exceeded those of other
areas. Even with the prospects for desegregation dwindling, Reverend Galamison filed papers in
the New York State Supreme Court to stop the construction of segregated schools in Brooklyn
(Amsterdam News 8 January 1965). The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), on the other hand
turned its attention to “ghetto” schools and filed suit to reduce the number of substitute teachers
in Harlem schools (Amsterdam News 15 January 1966).
Until now, the Board of Education had failed to either provide leadership in
desegregating the schools or to make significant improvements in “ghetto” schools. The board
however did make some concessions to black parents and Reverend Galamison when in 1966,
they appointed 24 blacks, out of 200 to become assistant principals. The board also hired black
teachers from the South who had lost their jobs because of “racial integration.”
More importantly-at least from the perspective of educational policy - was the
appointment of Kenneth Clark as the first black on the New York State Board of Regents in its
182 year old history. In his new position, Clark stepped up his criticisms of the New York City
Board of Education, arguing that although there had been four superintendents guiding the
board’s policies, since the 1954 United States Supreme Court decision, the schools remained
31
segregated, unequal, and the education of black children “ criminally inferior” (Amsterdam
News 21 May 1966).
Clark’s indictment could not be taken lightly. A cautious social scientist and an
accomplished writer, Clark chose his words to have a maximum impact on the educational
establishment.
Clark’s indictment was followed by an even more volcanic declaration by Congressman
Adam Clayton Powell. In his baccalaureate address to Howard University on 29 May 1966,
Powell declared:
Human rights are God-given. Civil rights are man-made…Our life must be
purposed to implement human rights…To demand these God-given rights
is to seek black power-the power to build black institutions of splendid
achievement (Stone 1968).
A week later, another black New Yorker, Stokely Carmichael, chairman of SNCC,
incorporated Powell’s declaration in a speech to a rally of 15,000 protesting racial violence in
Jackson, Mississippi. “ Soon the crowd was chanting:” We want black power, we want black
power, ” (Hornsby 1993).
In less than two months, three black men from New York City’s black civil society had
issued indictments and declarations that would alter the city’s racial discourse. Blacks’ demand
for an inclusion of their narrative in the city’s policy domains could no longer be ignored.
For much of the latter part of 1966 and throughout 1967, the meaning and definition of
black power mesmerized the city’s newspapers, leading the Amsterdam News to proclaim that “
No issue in modern times has produced such a furor in such a short time as the slogan ‘black
power’. Arguments in support and in opposition to black power tended to mirror the group’s
positions on the schools. For the most part, whites opposed the concept as a threat to the existing
civic and political arrangements. “Black power” also drew considerable opposition from Roy
Wilkins, the head of the national NAACP, from black ministers associated with the Republican
Party, and from the more moderate black civic leadership. Wilkins joined President Lyndon B.
Johnson in denouncing the concept, arguing that “ black power will lead to black death…every
32
other ethnic group is the rival, and the rival and antagonist of black power. It has to mean going
it alone. It has to mean separatism.” (Amsterdam News 9 July 1966).
Supporting the concept were a large number of the city’s black ministers, the more
radical civil rights groups and the Amsterdam News which provided its own definition on 16
July :
Black power is all acts of self defense by black men to force white, city,
state, and federal governments to comply with civil rights laws guaranteed
by the Federal government and the constitution of the United States.”
(emphasis added)
By the end of July, Martin Luther King, Jr., who had generally opposed what he saw as
separatism in the calls for black power argued that northern ghettoes had begun to represent a
kind of colonialism (Amsterdam News 30 July 1966). King’s statement was consistent with the
growing theory held by blacks and whites that focused on internal colonialism and institutional
racism (Village Voice article; Altshuler 1970). It also reflected a transformation of King’s
intellectual framework in the immediate years before his assassination.
A month later, Congressman Powell and Stokley Carmicheal announced a conference on
black power. Held in September in Washington, D.C., the conference barred all whites.
For the black school activists, the discussions about black power simply provided a
conceptual foundation for activities in which they were already engaged, including their
continuing demands that schools introduce a curriculum on African-American history, and hire
black principals (Amsterdam News 21 May 1966).
By now, the “movement” had become the charge of black and Puerto Rican women,
many of whom had already been involved in school protests for nearly a decade. Preston Wilcox,
a Columbia University professor of social work, and one of the activists in both the integration
and community control movements, recalls:
…When women’s liberation came about, I wondered what these people were
talking about, because in the black community, women were doing everything.
They ran the churches, the schools…The only thing I needed a brother for was a
33
strong arm. If a white guy wouldn’t talk to black parents, I would tell them to go
and get a brother and have him sit there and not say a word. But make sure when
you are talking to the principal, he sees the black guy sitting there…
Black women’s access to jobs and training in the anti-poverty programs had also
increased their leadership capacity. Indeed, in the months before the opening of schools in 1966,
The New York Times published several stories lauding the success of lower-income women in
black communities in managing anti-poverty programs that enhanced the educational and
cultural development of youth. (NEW YORK TIMES cite articles)
At the opening of the school year in 1966 the women of the Harlem Parent Association,
issued an ultimatum to the Board of Education: either bus white children to IS 201, or let the
community control the schools.
By 1966, the parents had made every attempt to attract white students to the schools.
They had sent letters to the federal government, the Board of Education, and held meetings with
the mayor. By contrast, the Board of Education, which had proposed the school in 1962, waited
until the summer of 1966 to send letters to white parents. Of the 11,000 letters mailed to white
parents only 11 agreed to send their children to the school.
While acknowledging administrative failures, board officials refused to give parents
control of the schools. What they were willing to do, however, was to forge a new partnership
with the community and black civil society.
No one was sure how this new partnership would look. It was uncharted territory, and a
test for the leadership of black civil society and the Board of Education.
Forging a New Partnership Between the Board of Education and Black Civil Society
II. The Year of Negotiations
Ironically IS 201, which was supposed to be the school that would achieve racial
integration by attracting whites to the “ghetto”, became the first site for school negotiations
about more control for the black community. According to Preston Wilcox, who was a consultant
to the parents, the principle issues under negotiation were the community’s request for a black
34
principal selected by the community and the policy-determining community committee for the
school.
Board of Education officials, who were once unwilling to meet with the parents, now
eagerly sought to meet with parents, even if it meant meeting the parents in their homes. It was a
new experience for the parents, who while steeped in the protest movement, were unprepared for
extended negotiations with resourceful officials. Nevertheless, Wilcox believed that progress was
possible, in part because he assumed that Superintendent Donovan would be more responsive to
the black parents because of his Irish heritage and his association with Irish struggles. Donovan
did agree to: (1) install a black principal at IS 201, replacing the white who had requested a
transfer to minimize the racial conflicts, (2) name a black assistant principal, and (3) utilize the
negotiating committee as a planning and transition committee for the school.
The parents thought they had won. Instead of a victory however, they were about to enter
a battle equally or more difficult than the earlier struggles to desegregate the schools. The Board
of Education refused to support Donovan’s recommendations. The UFT rejected the negotiations
because they had not been involved. Many of the teachers at IS 201, both white and black, also
rejected the agreement calling for the principal to return. The major white newspapers made it
appear as if the white principal, who was Jewish, had been forced to leave because of threats
from black militants. The CSA threatened to sue to reinstate the principal. And, white citywide
organizations, including the PEA, called on the board not to yield to “racism.”
It was a curious turn of events. White civic groups that had rejected blacks attending their
schools, now protested blacks controlling schools in their own community. Black parents and
teachers who had supported the UFT from its beginning were about to become its implacable
enemy. The union claimed victory when Henry Lisser, the principal of IS 201 returned to the
school. However, parents picketed the school with Stokley Carmicheal shouting “ Freedom,
Black Power” (Amsterdam News, September 24). Several people were arrested for stopping the
principal from entering the school.
The city government now was faced with deciding how it would intervene in the disputes
between blacks and other white civic groups, notably between blacks and the UFT. Mayor
Lindsay instructed William Booth, the head of the New York City Commission on Human
Rights, and one of his major black advisors to investigate the problems. In his report Booth
blamed the UFT, noting that the union had not supported the efforts of blacks to obtain a better
35
education for their children. Booth also charged that Al Shanker, then president of the UFT,
inflated his claims of supporting the civil rights movement. A new skirmish had begun.
This skirmish exposed deep schisms within black civil society about how to deal with the
changing educational strategies and the political consequences. Increasing criticism was leveled
against the NAACP for its moderate policies in the face of increasing white opposition to black
demands. The national vice president of the NAACP resigned because Roy Wilkins refused to
cooperate with the more assertive black leaders and youth. Youths at the New York State
NAACP convention demanded that adult leaders support the parents at IS 201 to end “mental
genocide”. They also asked the adult leaders to demand that the New York City Board of
Education eliminate “racial fantasies” from its textbooks (Amsterdam News 29 October 1966).
Once more, black civil society was forced to revise its strategies. This time Kenneth
Clark and Preston Wilcox each proposed similar strategies that would frame the new thrust of
“community control”. Clark’s proposal -Operation Demonstration Project Excellence-called for
the establishment of a special operating board comprised of community and university
representatives to run IS 201 and its three adjacent elementary schools. The board would have
responsibility for setting the educational standards and would select all the staff (Amsterdam
News 8 October 1966).
Wilcox’s proposal was outlined In “The Controversy over IS 201”, an article published in
Urban Review (July 1966). In the article Wilcox argued that if one believed that a segregated
white school could be a “good” school, then one must believe that a segregated school like IS
201 can be “good” school also. Wilcox envisioned a school with a School-Community
committee composed of individuals with close ties to and knowledge of the community. The
parents of children enrolled in the school would select the committee. The committee in turn
would screen and interview candidates for principal, review reports sent to the central board of
education, oversee after-school programs, and issue progress reports.
Wilcox acknowledged that the precedent for his idea came from the efforts of an Italian
principal in East Harlem, Leonard Covello. Covello, who had a major influence on Wilcox, had
developed a community-centered educational program for Italian youth in the 1930s, so that the
drive to “Americanize” them did not undermine their culture.
Even though Wilcox's ideas had
received considerable attention at Columbia University, even before he was invited to write the
article in the Urban Review, the editor, wrote a disclaimer in obtuse academic language raising
36
doubts of whether blacks could control their schools.* Annoyed that the disclaimer was attached
to his article rather than running it in a section usually assigned to commentaries, Wilcox
remembers that it was another example that "white folks did not want us to control our own
destiny."
Clark’s and Wilcox’s proposals were supported by various organizations of black civil
society. However, they received limited support or were rejected by the Board of Education and
white civic and professional organizations. Instead of the operations unit proposed by Clark, the
Board of Education suggested a community advisory board, an idea blacks rejected. The UFT
also rejected Clark’s proposal arguing that it was illegal and violated the union contract. The
union feared that since the special board could transfer teachers out of the schools, it would lead
to punitive transfers and destroy the tenure rights of teachers.
The union’s response exacerbated tensions between blacks and the UFT. Clark’s
committee wrote a letter to Al Shanker that left few doubts about their views:
“…the UFT has now clearly stated what we have known for some time,
that you stand directly opposed to any significant steps that would alter the
destruction of ghetto school children-we, parents and community
representatives of Harlem, will hold you responsible…If a clearly
established and reasonable role for parents and community involvement in
the schools, such as that of IS 201 which the board reneged upon, cannot
be established, other steps will be taken to assure that teachers in ghetto
schools teach! We intend to use whatever means necessary to stop
teachers, white or black, from commuting into the ghetto to cripple our
children’s lives.” (Carter 1971; p.16).
Faced with another stalemate with black civil society, the Board of Education asked
McGeorge Bundy, President of the Ford Foundation, to head a committee on education in the
ghetto. Bundy, who had recently left the Johnson administration as the Special Assistant for
National Security, turned down the offer. However, he did assign a program officer to work with
the schools. It was the beginning of a new and important relationship between blacks and the
Ford Foundation. In a series of strategic decisions, the Ford Foundation funded the Metropolitan
37
Applied Research Center (MARC) headed by Kenneth Clark, Reverend Galamison, and the
NAACP. MARC, the country’s first major black think tank, would play an important role in
devising policy and program solutions to educational problems. The think tank also provided
political and civic independence for Clark. The Amsterdam News praised the foundation’s
assistance to blacks.
If some white academics were uneasy with Wilcox’s ideas, the concepts held great
appeal for the ATA. Al Vann, the president of the organization, recalls one of his earliest
encounters with Wilcox was when he spoke to a racially integrated teacher’s conference. Wilcox,
Vann notes,” was one of the people who really inspired me as a teacher…this was the first time I
had seen a black guy talk in front of a mostly all white audience and talk black…”.
Although the ATA had been formed in 1964, Leslie Campbell remembers that the
organization mainly held social events for the first year and half. The vortex of events however
politicized the teachers, persuading Campbell and Vann that they needed to sponsor forums and
develop a distinctive publication.
The decisions by Vann and Campbell were strategic. The first issue of the ATA
newsletter Forum reprinted the article by Preston Wilcox from the Urban Review. In the same
issue, Vann discussed why the ATA was created, citing the refusal of the UFT to support black
teachers during the earlier school boycotts as one reason, and the need to assist black parents as
another. Herman Ferguson, one of the highest ranking black administrators in the public school
system at the time, urged black teachers to rally in support of the black parents at IS 201. He also
argued that Lisser, the white principal at the school, had been made a martyr by the white press
(Negro Teachers Forum November 1966). The second issue provided a broader range of
expression. Black teachers raised questions about the pairing of black and white students, noting
that often when black students were sent to white schools, they were isolated in separate
classrooms. Campbell also wrote an article criticizing the class schism between black
professionals and the black “masses”. Campbell was particuarly critical of the black teachers at
IS 201, charging that they undermined the efforts of black parents (Negro Teachers Forum
December 1966).
The initial publications, Campbell recalls, drew immediate attention to the organization.
“…Within three months the Forum was being quoted in the New York Times. Of course they
38
were not quoting it for positive reasons but for its infamous characters. But still, the organization
was getting play.”
The publications also helped expand the base of the ATA membership. Campbell notes
that “overnight we had borough chapters of 60 to 75 people. We could call city-wide meetings
and have 300 people attending.”
The emerging black teacher’s organization did not seek the support of the black civil
rights organizations. Instead, they worked with black parents, creating an ancillary organization.
According to Al Vann, the teachers spent considerable time conducting parent workshops on the
weekends, “ giving whatever help was needed”, he says “ to bring them to where they felt they
needed to be.”
An ATA conference in May of 1966 drew around 500 participants, and attracted attention
in The New York Times. Soon Campbell remembers people were calling from all over the
country inquiring about the organization. Flushed with success and a burgeoning budget from
membership dues, the organization soon opened a full-time office.
Momentum is often the greatest force for unity among oppressed peoples. Even without
consistent strategy sessions, organizations in black civil society ranging from the most radical to
the more conservative were drawn together in support of some version of community control.
Then in June of 1966, blacks received an unexpected boost when a Temporary Commission on
City Financing issued a report recommending the decentralization of schools as a way of
securing more state funding for New York City schools. Facing severe budgetary constraints,
John V. Lindsay, who had been elected mayor the same year, seized the concept and took the
idea to the New York State legislature. Suspicious of the Republicans’ motives – many of who
were hostile to the city and blacks in particular - the city delegation discouraged them from
adopting their initial proposal. The legislators compromised, agreeing to provide additional funds
to New York City if it devised a decentralization plan.
Activists maintained pressure on the Board of Education. In December of 1966,
protesters supporting Reverend Galamison disrupted a meeting at the Board of Education on the
budget and proclaimed a “people’s board of education.” As chair of the board, Galamison
conducted hearings on the problems of black and Puerto Rican students gathering wide
recognition in the press. Because of his protests, the Board of Education increased the budget for
disadvantaged schools by 20 million dollars. Superintendent Donovan also issued a statement
39
mandating revisions in the system’s textbooks to more accurately reflect the role and treatment
of minority groups (Amsterdam News 24 December 1966; Amsterdam News 31 December
1966).
The idea of decentralization was another seed in a harvest of ideas - black power,
community control, de-colonization – cultivated within organizations in black civil society, ideas
that drew on and spurred political action and became the basis of the new black narrative.
111. 1967: Increasing Tensions between the UFT and Black Civil Society
In 1967, tensions between blacks and the UFT simmered as blacks’ demand for greater
involvement in their neighborhood schools spread across the city. Blacks boycotted several
schools in Harlem and Preston Wilcox established a Liberation School where Harlem parents
could send their children until they could have greater voice in the decision-making process.
Teachers were not passive. Citing a variety of problems, including assaults on them by
students and lack of adequate facilities, they also boycotted the schools and threatened to quit
their jobs (Amsterdam News 11 March 1967; Amsterdam News 18 March 1967). An
Amsterdam News editorial chided the teachers: “ This is teaching? This is responsible action by
adults?”
It is important to note that each step in the struggle between black civil society and the
Board of Education followed a pattern: (1) Blacks protested to gain access to the policy domain
(2) The Board responded with symbolic gestures, (3) Blacks protested against the lack of
substance in the Board’s offer (4) New discussions were initiated (5) The process stalled and,
(6) The Board moved with alacrity if the civic threats continued, or the political climate made it
palatable for them to seize the initiative.
Alacrity was the rule in the spring of 1967. In April of 1967, black parents closed the
Liberation School, sent their children back to public schools and began sitting in the back of
classrooms grading the performance of teachers with report cards (Amsterdam News 8 April
1967). The same month, the New York State legislature mandated Mayor Lindsay to produce a
decentralization plan by December 1st, and the New York City Board of Education issued a
policy statement designed to further facilitate decentralization in school districts. This directive
gave district superintendents more discretion in the spending of funds, and provided space for
local boards to meet. Mayor Lindsay then turned back to the Ford Foundation and McGeorge
40
Bundy, asking him to head a committee to devise the plan. This time Bundy accepted and an
advisory panel with six members, one of them black, was created and invited proposals from the
community (The black appointee, up until this time had not been involved in New York City’s
educational struggle). In May, the Board of Education approved a plan for the creation of seven
demonstration projects aimed at improving the schools and at the same time bringing parents and
the community into a meaningful participation with the schools. Several communities were
invited to submit proposals. One was IS 201, which had been the center of controversy since its
failure to attract white students; another Joan of Arc, which had been relatively uninvolved in
educational controversies. Finally, in July, the board approved three districts: IS 201, Ocean HillBrownsville, a predominately black area of Brooklyn, and Two Bridges on the Lower East Side
of Manhattan, that served a largely Puerto Rican and Chinese population. These three projects
gave blacks and Puerto Ricans their first real control over the schools since the 1800s.
The Ford Foundation granted the three projects $135,000 for planning. Ocean HillBrownsville took its $44,000 and went to work. A community steering committee interviewed
candidates and chose Rhody McCoy six months before IS 201 chose Charles Wilson. The
steering committee, comprised mostly of blacks, included Father Powis, a white Catholic priest
who worked with Reverend Galamison to create the People’s Board of Education..
The speed with which Ocean Hill-Brownsville moved surprised the UFT and most white
observers. However, it did not surprise Brooklyn’s residents. After all, this was the community
that was the headquarters of Reverend Galamison and the ATA.
Ocean Hill-Brownsville’s leaders were politically seasoned. McCoy had been in the
school system for nearly 20 years working in the “600” Schools. Reverend Herbert Oliver,
Chairman of the Board, had been a civil rights leader in Birmingham, Alabama. He had become
active in the local schools when one of his children who had been scoring above the national
average on mathematics in the segregated schools in Birmingham Alabama, flunked the subject
after one year in the city’s schools.
Reverend Oliver recalls that he was elected because:
They (the committee) wanted a black person to be the chair because the
UFT had picked Bloomfield to chair the committee. He was a principal at
PS 271 and if he were elected chair then everything would fall into place
41
for the union. The union would control the blacks on the plantation…But,
blacks had five community representatives on the board and they all voted
for McCoy.
Outflanked, the UFT initially banned their members from joining the Ocean Hill-Brownsville
Board.
At IS 201 the selection process was much slower. The parents had trouble selecting an
administrator, in part because the union was more involved in the decision-making, and in part
because of the firestorm around Herman Ferguson who was being considered for the job.
Ferguson, as mentioned earlier, was one of the leading young black educators and a
member of the ATA. However, in the summer of 1967, his role changed dramatically as he
along with 16 others, were arrested for allegedly plotting to kill Whitney Young, the head of the
National Urban League and Roy Wilkins, the head of the NAACP.
At that time, black power advocates, like most “militant” blacks, were being monitored
by the Bureau of Special Services (BOSS), a special unit in the New York City Police
Department. Ferguson belonged to the Black Brotherhood Improvement Association (BBIA), a
small group of black intellectuals and professionals. BOSS infiltrated BBIA with a black agent
who helped organize several offshoots, including a gun club chartered by the National Rifle
Association. At a meeting of the gun club, one of the members is credited with having made the
conspiratorial statement that “those guys have sold out their own people. They should be offed.”
The infiltrator reintroduced the same idea at several meetings and initiated proposals for action,
including drafting an assassination note. Although the plot was never consummated, all BBIA
members were arrested, as it was about to disband. (Donner 1990).
The charges against Ferguson were cited by the press as an example of the extremist
behavior within the community control movement, provided a ready target for opponents of the
ATA. That Ferguson was being considered for the job of unit administrator at IS 201 but was
selected as a principal in the Ocean Hill-Brownsville district confirmed the worst suspicions of
opponents of community control.
Charles Wilson, who would eventually become the unit administrator for the IS 201
demonstration project, had been working as a career development specialist in Harlem. An
official working in the anti-poverty programs discovered him when he organized an education
42
session at the National Black Power Conference in Newark, New Jersey, in July 1967. He was
interviewed several times, but he did not know whether to take the community-sponsored effort
seriously. Wilson recalls that in his interviews with the parents they did not harbor grandiose
dreams. Rather he remembers, the parents, had:
“…simple hopes-more homework, more effective classroom management,
people who respected their children and people who came to teach as
opposed to doing social work for which they were ill equipped and
untrained.”
.
The parents were impressed with Wilson. The UFT however, thought that he was an
interloper. Even though he was responsible for shaping many of the contemporary ideas about
social change, he had never taught in the public school system.
Although the two unit administrators had widely different backgrounds, they found
similar problems when they took over the schools (McCoy 1971). Students lagged behind
academically and often had serious health-related problems that interfered with their ability to
learn. One of Wilson’s first efforts was to provide vision and hearing screenings for the students.
These screenings showed that a considerable number of the students needed glasses and hearing
aids.
The creation of the three experimental districts produced a ripple effect throughout the
black community. By the spring of 1967, more and more black parents demanded better
performances from their principals, forcing a number of them to seek other assignments in the
system. (Amsterdam News 20 May 1967). In retaliation, derogatory letters were sent to black
parents and black leaders. One letter to a black parent who had been demanding the resignation
of white principals read: “ common sense tells us, that you can’t put brains where there are none.
If Negro children are behind in their reading its because they have no brains (Amsterdam News 3
June 1967).
It was clear by now that reorganization of the educational bureaucracy was going to
embroil organizations in heated racial and ethnic debates. The atmosphere was so tense that the
New York State Bar Association issued a report warning that the spirit of tolerance,
43
accommodation and cooperation had given way to the demands by extremists on both sides
(Amsterdam News 15 April 1967).
Paralleling the discussions of how the Board of Education should be reorganized to meet
the needs and demands of black communities, was a discussion of how the black teachers should
deal with the UFT. The black teachers were increasingly a thorn in the side of the UFT. Their
widely circulated newsletter, The African American Teachers Forum (The Forum) charged
that the UFT had not made a full effort to assist black children. Wilcox, a mentor to the ATA
leadership, argued that the black teachers should try to reform the UFT from within. However,
the younger blacks believed that they should remain outside the union’s sphere.
The UFT’s decision to strike at the beginning of the school year in 1967 convinced the
black teachers that their criticism of the union was correct. The union was not only seeking
higher salaries but smaller classes, an increase in the number of schools with its own
compensatory program-MES- for disadvantaged children, and the right of a teacher to remove
any “disruptive” child from their classroom. By including the MES program in its negotiations,
the UFT hoped to enlist the support of black civil society. Audaciously, the union even asked the
Ocean Hill-Brownsville Board to support their efforts.
The UFT’s hopes of obtaining black support were illusory. Major Owens, the executive
director of the Brownsville Community Council who would later be elected to the House of
Representatives, lashed out at the UFT: “ We will not be intimidated by the UFT. Let every
teacher walk out. Emergency squads will be ready to take over every school deserted by
teachers. We will set up Freedom Schools” (Amsterdam News 3 June 1997). In a telegram, Al
Vann, the head of the ATA, warned Al Shanker, the president of the UFT, that the black teachers
would counteract all efforts by UFT to close any school in the black community. “We are ready
to meet such emergencies” his telegram read (Wagner Archives, 23 May 1997 Western Union
Telegram). Shanker telegramed Vann back that he was shocked at his telegram which he
characterized as unwarranted. Shanker’s also wrote that the union was against any anti-Semitic,
anti-Negro, or anti-Puerto Rican statements. He suggested that if black teachers meant to support
threats- vocal and physical- against those who genuinely supported educational advancement,
then the blacks should say so; otherwise they should join the UFT (Wagner Archives 23 May 23
1997).
44
Shanker’s telegram reflected the transformation in language that had occurred since
blacks began making their demands for quality education. The terms, “extremists” and “antiSemitism” were rarely used in the earlier periods to describe black protesters. Now, Shanker
established a with-us or against-us litmus test: Teachers failing the test were in essence labeled
as anti-Semites and supporting physical violence.
The charges were not limited to black teachers. The union made similar charges against
black students. To support the union’s claim that they needed a clause in their contract enabling
teachers to dismiss “ disruptive” students, Shanker suggested that the “disruptive” students were
the same students who had participated in the urban rebellions. Sandra Feldman, his assistant,
made similar claims although she later reflected that the push for the disruptive child clause had
been a mistake (Carter 1971).
Shanker’s depiction of black teachers and black students as perpetrators of violence was
an attempt to isolate what he believed were the more militant elements in black civil society from
the black moderates. The black teachers were largely unfazed. Indeed, at the end of May 1967,
the ATA went further than they had before, and called on the Board of Education to: (1) devise a
program of teacher accountability, (2) develop programs to enhance black identity, including
offering Swahili as an elective, (3) place at least 200 black teachers in administrative positions,
and (4) develop a school decentralization plan that involved parents in decision-making and that
allowed them to assist teachers in the classroom (Wagner Archives, 28 May 1967 Negro
Teachers Association’s Conference).
The union now had to take the black teachers more seriously. Through a top black union
official, a meeting was arranged between the UFT, which now represented more than 50,000
teachers and was the largest professional local in the AFL-CIO, and ATA, which represented less
than 1,000 teachers. Leslie Campbell, a leader of the ATA, who attended the meeting, says that
the meeting was a watershed.
“…They had all their big guns there. All the top union people. They told
us that they were taking the meeting seriously. But they would not make
any concessions on a New York Timeshing. We wanted them to drop the
disruptive child clause. They would not do that...Everything that Shanker
came with; Vann just matched him one and offered one better. As a
45
consequence, the union went through the summer threatening to strike
unless they got the clause for the disruptive child in their contract. We
took the position that if the union strikes we are going to keep the schools
open and go to work…”
During the summer while the white teachers were on vacation, the black teachers and the
black parents organized to keep the schools open in September. Campbell recalls that the black
teachers developed an organizing packet of about 20 pages that were reprinted by the antipoverty programs. Black teachers also conducted workshops with parents from all over the city
so that they would know what to do with their children if the teachers union struck.
As black parents and teachers increased their collaboration, so did Jewish organizations
and Jewish teachers. In August, a month before the schools opened, the Anti-Defamation League
filed charges of anti-Semitism against the Brooklyn and Queens chapters of CORE and B’nai
Birth charged that black parents in Brooklyn were leading an anti-Semitic campaign against
teachers (Amsterdam News 26 August 1967). The Commentary magazine, a publication of the
American Jewish Committee and the UFT newsletter increasingly mirrored each other with
commentary articles reprinted in the union’s newsletter.
As the civic tensions mounted, all eyes were now glued on the experimental schools,
claimed Roy Wilkins in the Amsterdam News (2 September 1967). After more than a decade of
protests, black civil society could point to an increasing number of substantive changes. In
addition to creating the experimental districts, the Board of Education waived the eligibility
requirements for the new principals and unit administrators. The largely white association of
school supervisors, CSA protested the changes in the rules and charged that the Board of
Education was giving too much power to ghetto schools. In an ironic twist, the UFT joined with
the CSA in a suit against the new procedures for principals.
McCoy, nevertheless, was triumphant, claiming:
For the first time supervisors will be selected to fit the position rather than the
assignment…As a result, there will be produced the first Puerto Rican principal in
the history of the City of New York and the first Negro secondary school
principal on record.
46
McCoy also noted that it was a credit to the black community that it was able to eliminate
the stereotype that blacks could not develop good educational programs for their schools.
McCoy’s faith in the community and his own personal endurance were soon severely
tested. As the schools opened in September of 1967, the local community had just gone through
a period of riots so intense that Reverend Oliver recalls that firemen were afraid to answer alarms
in the area. “ At one point” Oliver recalls, “ the firemen would let the buildings burn down rather
than risk their own lives.” Then the UFT struck, keeping the majority of the teachers out of the
schools. The union however had not planned its strategy well. As a result, the executive
committee ended the strike and dropped its demands for a clause in its contract to extrude
disruptive children from classrooms.
The strike left black civil society apprehensive. The Amsterdam News warned that a
larger skirmish was about to ensue. The strike, it noted, was exactly timed when “ghetto” parents
had achieved their first real involvement in their schools. Support of the strike by the black
leaders A. Phillip Randolph and Bayard Rustin of A. Phillip Randolph Institute, signaled
renewed schisms within black civil society.
Both the ATA and The Amsterdam News were prophetic. ATA’s training of black
parents during the summer meant that black civil society was prepared for the strike. Volunteers
streamed into the schools in Brooklyn. Parents picketed the picketing teachers. Freedom schools
and make shift schools were established at different sites. Dr. Mamie Clark of the Northside
Center, the first black center organized to open that facility to classes. Vann of the ATA, urged
black professionals to apply for all positions in the “ghetto” schools. Using the language of the
liberation movements of the time, the ATA demanded the human privilege of self-determination
rather than relying on the “fatherly advice of outsiders.” (Amsterdam News 30 September 1967).
Despite the growing tensions between blacks and the teachers union, Rustin remained
loyal to the UFT, denying to newsmen that he was a traitor, as many blacks viewed him, and
claiming that most black parents and black leaders supported the white teachers (Amsterdam
News 16 September 1967). To engender black support for the union, Rustin had the Amsterdam
News reprint a letter to him from Shanker, in which Shanker modified his original proposal for
excluding disruptive children from the classroom. This time Shanker indicated that he wanted a
panel with a teacher selected by the UFT, a parent, and another person selected by these two
47
representatives to make decisions about disruptive children (Amsterdam News 23 September
1967).
Even with Shanker’s retreat from his original position on disruptive children, the gulf
widened between the UFT and blacks. Sensing an increased solidarity between black parents
and black administrators, white teachers increasingly requested transfers from public schools
where blacks were dominant, including the experimental schools (Amsterdam News 7October
1967).
The black press was a barometer of the new solidarity in black civic society. In a subtle
but noticeable shift, the Amsterdam News which had reserved its columns for national black
leaders to comment on race problems, began providing space for the leaders of the local
community control movement. Rhody McCoy outlined his ideas for education in the paper,
providing a detailed perspective of community control and decentralization (Amsterdam News
24 October 1967).
Then in November, proponents of community control gained their strongest endorsement
when the Mayor’s Advisory Panel on Decentralization of the New York City Schools released
the Bundy Report. With the imprimatur of the Ford Foundation, the panel’s report became the
first civic document to go beyond the symbolic calls for desegregation. Diplomatically, the
report praised the Board of Education for its historical achievements and innovations. However,
it was uncompromisingly clear that the panel did not believe that the Board of Education could
rest on its laurels. The panel indicated that the Board of Education had to alter its policies and its
organizational arrangements to meet the educational needs of black and Puerto Rican students,
who were on the verge of becoming the majority in the school system.
The Bundy Report called for a decentralized school system that comprised of 30 to 60
community school districts, each with 12,000 to 40,000 students. These districts would be
designed to enhance the sense of community and increase coordination. Many of the panel’s
ideas echoed those articulated by black civic leaders, notably those of Kenneth Clark and Preston
Wilcox. Like Clark and Wilcox, the Advisory Panel recommended that Community School
Boards have the power to establish procedures in consultation with parents, residents, and
supervisory personnel. The panel also recommended that the community boards have broad
personnel powers, including the right to hire the community superintendent, and it called for the
abolition of the Board of Examiners, a call that blacks had made for a number of decades.
48
The most important and most controversial recommendations regarded personnel
changes. The Bundy report backed the demands of black parents, for more black and Puerto
Rican teachers, noting:
“The Panel is unable to escape the conclusion that the New York school
system will be a much healthier place there has been a substantial increase
in the numbers of qualified Negro and Puerto Rican teachers.” (Panel,
p69)
The panel also recognized the need to protect white teachers, noting that the union
contract provided safeguards for white teachers:
…white teachers would be protected not only by law and contracts but
also by the predominant concern for educational quality. Under a fully
reorganized system, teachers would be in a particular school district
because they chose it and the board chose them.
Even with the safeguards, the UFT rejected the panel’s recommendations, arguing that
the number of units was unclear and questioning the assumption that teachers would gravitate to
school districts based on educational quality. The UFT was particuarly concerned about the
committee’s recommendation that communities have the right to hire, assign, and fire personnel.
(Taft 1974; UFT ). The union argued that racial segregation would be intensified and teachers
would be employed on the basis of politics and prejudice (Amsterdam News 18 November
1967). The Board of Education also rejected the panel’s report. Alfred Guardino, the president
of the Board of Education issued a separate statement noting:
…Our Board of Education is committed to the principle of local
involvement and decentralization of function in order to foster parent and
community participation and greater flexibility of school operations.
[However], On the basis of the Board’s experience, we cannot agree with
a number of the specific recommendations proposed by a majority of the
49
Panel to effectuate our common goals. Serious problems must arise in
recasting, in one quick stroke, the largest educational system in the world.
(Panel, p vlll).
Blacks praised the report, and they were buoyed by the civic and financial commitment
of the Ford Foundation to their educational needs and demands. As noted already, the foundation
had provided funding for the experimental districts. With the release of the panel’s report the
foundation also awarded $415,225 to Fordham University to help black and Puerto Rican
teachers become principals.
IV. 1968: The Teacher’s Strike
Blacks civil buoyancy was tested early in the new year. Mayor Lindsay sent the Bundy
report to the state legislature with suggested modifications. As the legislature considered which
decentralization plan it would favor, the city was wracked with fresh charges of racial violence
between white teachers and black students, and between competing communities. After
Brooklyn blacks confronted a white principal about allegedly keeping black students huddled
outside a school in eight degree weather, Superintendent Bernard Donovan asked for more than
one million dollars for police security in the schools. "They are going to employ men with guns
to patrol the corridors of our schools,” charged Sonny Carson, the executive director of Brooklyn
CORE (Amsterdam News 27 January 1968). Carson who had been on the periphery of the
educational struggles, became a central figure as racial tensions increased, citing the Brooklyn
incidents as one reason why blacks needed local control. Carson was not alone in using examples
of teacher insensitivity. Roy Wilkins made an appeal for decentralization, based on reports of a
white teacher who punished a black student by forcing him to crouch in a waste basket
(Amsterdam News 3 February 1967).
As blacks demanded the removal of white principals, the UFT countered with similar
charges. In an open letter to the citizens of New York City, reprinted in the Amsterdam News
(February 10,1968), Al Shanker charged that it was black students and blacks extremists who
were the culprits. Teachers, Shanker argued, were becoming the targets of extremist groups:
“School after school has been enveloped by a climate of fear and chaos”.
50
The Amsterdam News did not endorse Shanker’s views. However, they did issue a
similar warning: “Pure chaos seems to have taken over the schools…no one seemed to be in
control” (Amsterdam News 10 February 1968).
Black civic leadership tried to reduce the chaos. Reverend Milton Galamison who had
been in the forefront of the struggle for racial desegregation, now led delegations to the Board of
Education to demand more power for the experimental schools so that they could be stabilized
(Amsterdam News 24 February 1967).
In many ways, the situation facing black civil society was similar that of the newly
independent countries in Africa and Asia. Ideas for rearranging the state-in this case a state
agency- had emerged from a separate civic space and the old powers had agreed to the changes,
at least in theory. However, the actual transference of political and administrative power was
often a slow and chaotic process fraught with disruptions and unanticipated problems. Chaos, at
least in the short term, should have been expected and, in some ways, discounted. However, each
“mistake,” however small, was used by the press and viewed by the state legislature as yet
another example of black unpreparedness to administer local boards.
One particular incident brought the issues to a head. In February, to honor Malcolm X
who had been assassinated in 1965, members of the ATA decided to hold a memorial service at
IS 201. By then the black teachers organization had created the African Students Association
(ASA), in which they worked students to promote arts and black culture.
To plan for the memorial service, Leslie Campbell recalls that he and Herman Ferguson
met with Betty Shabazz, Malcolm’s widow to obtain her “blessing.” Aware that any service for
Malcolm X- who was still viewed by most whites as an unreconstructed black nationalist-, would
cause a furor, Campbell secured permission for the space from the Board of Education.
However, three days before the memorial service, the Superintendent of Schools banned all
students from attending the event. It was a test for Campbell and the ATA, if not many black
supporters. Preston Wilcox stated, “If services and celebrations could be held for white heroes,
why not a black hero? Moreover, if the schools were really under the control of the community,
how could service for a black leader be denied?”
Campbell and John Hatchett, a substitute teacher, wrote the parents of the students asking
them to give their permission for their children to attend the service. Campbell recalls that 31 of
his 32 students brought letters from their parents giving them permission to attend. According to
51
Campbell and the Amsterdam News, the memorial service was a success. James Baldwin spoke
and nationally known musicians performed. However, the Superintendent of Schools viewed it
as a defiant act of disobedience and suspended both teachers.
Black organizations, black parents, and the governing board of IS 201 defended the two
men. For many blacks, there was a suspicion that the suspensions had a deeper side since
Hatchett had written an article in the Forum, the publication of the ATA, accusing Jewish
teachers of being insensitive to black students (Forum,). Some black officials indicated that they
were waiting to see if the UFT, which had taken a full-page ad to defend a white teacher
suspended for slapping a black boy who had become “disruptive” would take similar actions for
the black teachers. The UFT, while not defending the teachers publicly, called for arbitration,
which led to Campbell’s reinstatement, Hachett, the substitute teacher was dismissed.
The white press characterized the memorial services as a gathering of anti-white radicals
who were using the public schools to poison the views of black youth. While supporting the
services, The Amsterdam News (March 2,1968) lamented the ammunition the event provided
groups opposed to the Mayor’s decentralization plan.
Despite the furor in the press, the ATA was undeterred. Indeed, it only made them
proceed more strategically. Campbell asked Al Vann to call Rhody McCoy, the administrator of
Ocean Hill-Brownsville, and have him call Superintendent Donovan to suggest transferring
Campbell to McCoy’s district. Donovan, who was seeking a compromise to the racially charged
events, complied with the request. Now the ATA had a base in two of the three experimental
districts.
As the civic discourse became increasingly unmanageable, the city’s corporate elite
decided to intervene. Few prestigious foundations or industry leaders had provided civic
leadership on the volatile school issues with the notable exception of the Ford Foundation. In
March, the Citizens’ Committee for the Decentralization of the Public Schools was formed.
Among the committee’s corporate luminaries were the president and chief executive of RCA, the
chairman of Time Inc., and the chairman of IBM. It also included Reverend Milton Galamison,
the leader of the anti-segregation protests, and other black civic and religious leaders. Addressing
the Amsterdam News, Robert Sarnoff, the head of RCA, indicated that the business community
supported the establishment of local school boards that allowed parents and communities to have
a direct voice in school policy. Sarnoff also said that he welcomed the chance to reduce the high
52
unemployment rates among the city’s youth. Noticeably absent from the committee were union
representatives. (Amsterdam News 30 March 1967).
The corporate imprimatur of decentralization was an acknowledgement that the city’s
image was being tarnished by the school struggles. However, even with Galamison’s presence,
the committee held limited sway over the black parents or the union.
By the spring of 1968, the parents at Ocean Hill-Brownsville were demonstrating for
more power over the experimental district. The local board informed officials at the Board of
Education that they were closing the schools for two weeks until they received total control of
the schools. Repeating the recommendations outlined in the Bundy report, they requested
authority to hire and fire teachers, control over curriculum planning, and renovation of school
buildings (Amsterdam News 6 April 1967; Amsterdam News 27 April 1967). In an ATA press
release, Al Vann claimed that the experimental boards were not being given the “tools” to
operate, which would only lead to parent protests for more power, bad publicity, and ultimately a
declaration by the Board of Education that they were a failure. Vann’s recommendation to the
districts was to seize whatever power they could, hire and fire teachers and administrators, and
revise the curriculum to meet the needs of the community (Forum 15 April 1968).
Following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. on 4 April 1968, some of the
schools imploded. In Ocean Hill-Brownsville, the white teachers were told they could leave the
premises if they wished. Many remained. However, some white teachers claimed that black
students posted signs saying that a white man killed King. The teachers also claimed that
students attacked them, and that Leslie Campbell, was responsible for instigating the trouble.
Union delegates at the schools requested Campbell’s transfer.
In May, the Ocean Hill-Brownsville Board made its most dramatic move when it decided
to transfer 19 white principals and teachers out of the district (McCoy initially tried to reassign
the teachers within the district). An internal memoranda from the personnel committee and fact
sheets of the Ocean Hill-Brownsville Board outlined the charges against the teachers and the
principals. Documents show that although the UFT had helped draft Ocean Hill-Brownsville’s
decentralization proposal they had opposed the hiring of Rhody McCoy; 18 assistant principals
left the district, and over 100 teachers transferred out, leaving them short of personnel.
53
Internal documents from the Ocean Hill-Brownsville Board also state that the white
teachers and principals were opposed to projects supported by McCoy, that they attempted to
divide the black and Puerto Rican parents, and that they refused to respect McCoy’s authority.
Since the schools were already short of teachers, the board lamented the unpleasantness
of the transfer, saying that they knew they would be condemned in many circles. However, the
board claimed that they had to write their own rules (Report to Governing Board, Spring, 1968;
Fact Sheet). In his dissertation, McCoy noted:
…When this board was when faced with vacancies in its instructional and
administrative staff, it obviously wanted to employ professionals who
would be committed to the children and accountable to the board for their
ability to implement positive educational programming. Such a “militant
position” was the logical culmination of the unrest which motivated the
initial establishment of the demonstration districts. It was blatantly clear to
members of the community that the teachers provided Ocean Hill by the
civil service list had failed: the children of the district provided living
documentation. An objective consideration of the design of the
demonstration districts indicates that an exercise of “the responsibility,
authority, and decision-making power of the people, would necessitate a
confrontation ( McCoy 1971).
Reverend Herbert Oliver the chairman of the Ocean Hill-Brownsville governing board
supports McCoy’s interpretation:
…Rhody McCoy wanted to get some teachers in the schools who were
supportive. He also wanted the teachers who were already there to be
supportive. But, there were some teachers who simply would not be
supportive. So McCoy got to the point where he felt that there should be
some action taken on those who were perceived as unsupportive of the
project. At one of the board meetings, a motion came forward to remove
54
19 teachers from the school district and transfer them to the Board of
Education; not fire them. We knew that we could not fire them.
A semantics skirmish ensued. In an ad in The New York Times, the UFT charged the
local board “fired” the teachers without due cause (New York Times 22 May 1968). The union
also claimed that the board’s actions had been brought about by vigilante activity (The United
Teacher 29 May 1968). The NY Times wrote in its headlines that the teachers were “ousted.”
Other mainstream newspapers echoed similar charges.
Groups in black civil society and some white legal groups, notably the New York Civil
Liberties Union, supported the claim by the Ocean Hill-Brownsville Board, noting that transfers
were not uncommon in the schools. An editorial in the Amsterdam News noted:
…the 19 teachers involved were not fired; they were simply asked to
move to other districts. Certainly the idea of a governing board governing
a district such as the one in the Brooklyn experimental district gives it this
authority.
Even today, Reverend Oliver remains shocked by the refusal of the union or the press to
accept blacks’ interpretation of the events. Comparing his experience as a civil rights leader in
Birmingham, Alabama, to that as board chairman in Brooklyn, Oliver noted the differences of
the northern press, particularly The New York Times, in reporting racial events in the South and
New York City:
…my experience with the media was that it kept me alive in Birmingham
because they told the truth about Bull Connor and what the racial
segregationists were doing. Here [in New York City] I felt the newspapers
would tell the truth about the teachers being transferred and not fired. I
waited and waited. Weeks passed and not a newspaper called, and when
they did, I would tell them. No we didn’t fire them, finally I realized they
are not telling the truth up here, and they haven’t to this day…
55
One newspaper editor from the New York Post said that Oliver’s request for the truth simply did
not matter (find exact article).
The unwillingness of some members of the white press and the teachers union to
accurately report the demands of the Ocean Hill-Brownsville Board only increased their
defiance. When the Board of Education ordered the teachers reinstated, McCoy relieved them of
their assignments and told them to report to his office. Some of the teachers refused to obey his
orders; he then asked for their suspension. When the teachers tried to return to their schools
again, they were denied entry by black parents, some black teachers, black students, and
community activists.
By now, police were pouring into the area, escorting some of the teachers into the Junior
High school, which had become the target of the showdown. Indeed, when it was time for the
schools to open, there was a small battalion of police in the Ocean Hill-Brownsville schools to
keep peace and "protect" the teachers.
Facing greater turbulence, McCoy closed the district’s schools. When the teachers tried
again and the Ocean Hill-Brownsville Board refused again to take them back, 350 of their
colleagues walked out. The UFT then told the 350 teachers to stay out. The superintendent of
schools told the principals in the district to ignore the local board and accept the teacher’s back
or be dismissed. McCoy refused, but indicated he would give the disputed teachers other duties.
Again some of the teachers returned, but McCoy suspended seven of them for conduct
unbecoming a teacher. This arrangement did not last long, the union struck and the 350 refused
to teach for the remaining six weeks of school. In response, McCoy terminated their contracts.
With the UFT teachers deserting the schools, the Ocean Hill-Brownsville Board reached
out to educators across the city. The response was overwhelming. Campbell and Vann recall that
many of the members of the ATA transferred from other schools to the district, even though
McCoy had earlier been cool to their participation. Black teachers also moved from other cities
to join the staff. Black teachers however, were only a small part of the new educators. Most of
the teachers were white. Some of them were whites who remained in the school; some were
retired, and others included young men avoiding the Vietnam War. Not insignificantly, many of
the teachers were Jewish.
Although most people reading about Ocean Hill-Brownsville had only a vague idea of its
geographical location, its defiance became, for blacks, a symbol of civic democracy. The mood
56
was contagious. In the Bronx, parents slept overnight in a school and forced the board to rescind
the appointment of a white principal (Amsterdam News 18 May 1968). At Boys High School in
Brooklyn, black students demanded that the principal resign and that he be replaced by a black
(Amsterdam News 25 May 1968). School boycotts by black students spread to the suburbs.
Despite the discord, the three parties - the Ocean Hill-Brownsville Board, the union, and
the Board of Education, - still sought a settlement. On 14 June, Judge Francis Rivers, a black
judge who later became president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, was
retained as a hearing officer by School Superintendent Donovan the Superintendent of Schools to
conduct a hearing into the charges against the teachers. Rivers dismissed the charges against the
teachers for lack of evidence, recommending that seven of the remaining eleven teachers-two
had dropped out-be permitted to return to their classes, and that the others would be assigned to
the central office, pending the outcome of the hearings. River’s decision created a minor furor.
In a widely circulated pamphlet, reprinted by the Amsterdam News, the New York Civil
Liberties Union disagreed with Rivers decision, noting that McCoy’s decision was consistent
with administrative procedure (New York Civil Liberties Union 9 October 1968). Black
supporters were also critical. The head of the IS 201 board, David Spencer, charged that Rivers
ignored the testimony of parents and paraprofessionals; that he failed to allow the testimony of
assistant principals who supported McCoy; that the hearing officer showed contempt for the
black and Puerto Rican children, claiming that the children were unruly and uneducable, and that
he refused to give credence to McCoy’s charge that the educators were transferred because of
their attitude (Letter from David Spencer 11 September 1968). The Ocean Hill-Brownsville
Board again refused to take the teachers back.
Each defiant stance by the Ocean Hill-Brownsville Board increased their status in black
civil society, but contributed to a widening gulf between blacks and the UFT. The Amsterdam
News (8 June 1968) criticized the union for trying to water down the decentralization bill in the
state legislature by creating a climate of fear that black militants would take over the schools.
William Booth, the Chairman of the New York City Commission on Human Relations, who
earlier had incurred the wrath of the UFT by charging that they failed black children, again
assailed the union for “pillaring” the Ocean Hill-Brownsville board (Amsterdam News 8 June
1968).
57
And if Booth’s comments were an insufficient irritant, Mayor Lindsay appointed
Reverend Galamison to the Board of Education. Galamison who by now had led over 10 major
boycotts of the schools immediately challenged the members of the board-both white and blackto move quickly to meet the demands of the black community, or risk chaos in the schools.
Galamison was well armed for his new position. He had funding from the Ford Foundation for
the School and Community Organized for Partnership in Education (SCOPE), an organization
dedicated to improving relationships between teachers and parents in the schools (this
organization was the former City-Wide Committee for School Integration). He also had the
backing of the Brooklyn CORE and of the phalanx of black ministers from small and large
churches. Although some of the ministers were upset that Galamison had joined the Board of
Education, they remained committed to blacks winning local control of the schools.
With Galamison on the central Board of Education, the members produced an interim
plan for decentralization that awarded the local boards and the three experimental districts
additional powers of hiring, firing, and transfers of educational personnel. An editorial in the
Amsterdam News (3 August 1968) claimed that this was exactly what parents had been seeking.
The editors also noted that if anyone doubted that decentralization worked or that blacks were
ready for local control, they should review the success of the anti-poverty programs, in which
community residents made the decisions (Amsterdam News 7 August 1968). The UFT charged
that the interim plan would open the school system to “bigots and racists.” (New York Times 15
August 1968)
For the union, the Ocean Hill-Brownsville Board along with a number of organizations in
black civil society had overstepped the boundaries. According to an article by Maurice
Goldbloom in Commentary magazine, reprinted in the UFT newsletter, the union spent a major
part of the summer of 1968 preparing for “future warfare.” Little effort was made to settle the
Ocean Hill-Brownsville dispute or other educational issues. (Commentary 1969; The United
Teacher 5 February 1969).
The union capitalized on a growing white civic and political disenchantment with civil
rights and black gains. In March 1968, the U.S. Riot Commission issued the Kerner Commission
Report (March 1968) warning that the country was moving toward two societies, one black, one
white-separate and unequal. Many whites were undisturbed by the findings. Indeed, a “ white
backlash” –a term coined by President Linden Johnson- had developed against federal policies
58
and programs- including the anti-poverty, and affirmative action programs that primarily assisted
blacks.
The “backlash” was quite evident in New York City. Lower-middle class white youth
organized SPONGE – the“ Society for the Prevention of Negroes Getting Everything”- to protest
increased black mobility and to keep blacks out of their neighborhoods (Lindsay 1969).
Although SPONGE was a transitory group, it was a harbinger of the hatred that would explode in
the 1980s when white youth brutally attacked blacks in the outlying boroughs of the city.
Better organized and more volatile was The Jewish Defense League (JDL) created in
1968 by Meir Kahane. JDL was militantly anti-black, and violently opposed to community
control. Its organizers were particuarly opposed to Rhody McCoy and the Ocean HillBrownsville Board. JDL’s hostility toward blacks supporting local control made it a magnet for
many disgruntled teachers and its earliest recruits were Jewish teachers who belonged to the
UFT. As a civic counterforce to blacks, the FBI opportunely used the JDL to disrupt and promote
false claims about the activities of black radicals (Friedman 1990).
In addition to SPONGE and the JDL, black community control became the bane of a
nascent intellectual movement. Widely known as the “Neo-Conservative” movement, some of its
leading progenitors were native born New Yorkers who viewed the community control
movement as a major factor in the unraveling of the old civic order of the 1940s and 1950s
(Podhoretz 1999). Neo-conservatives would be widely influential in the city and in the nation in
the following decades.
The UFT deftly integrated the fears and doubts of white civic groups about blacks and
community control into a complex political strategy that subsumed race under larger class and
ethnic concerns. Although the war against black community control was at the heart of its
strategy, the union argued that it was fighting for the working class, and protecting the old liberal
framework that allowed disparate racial and ethnic groups to work together on mutually
beneficial policies and programs. The union’s strategy included:

Sending delegations to the state legislature to lobby against the decentralization bill
supported by blacks, the corporate community and the Ford Foundation. The union
warned the state legislators that the local districts would be operated on the basis of
race.
59

Attacking McGeorge Bundy and the Ford foundation for lending its imprimatur to
decentralization. Union members picketed the foundation and it asked the House of
Representatives to investigate the tax status of The Ford Foundation because of its
support of local civic and political activities. The union was especially grated by the
foundation’s grant to Reverend Galamison. It also chided the foundation for
providing a grant to Kenneth Clark.

Attacking Mayor Lindsay, and the civic-corporate groups. It claimed, that the Mayor
and the civic elite were joining forces with blacks against organized workers, (at the
time most of the unionist were white men) (Goldbloom 1969).

Galvanizing a major segment of the city’s union leadership-The Central Labor
Council-behind it. The Central Labor Council would provide important financial and
political support to the UFT since it believed that many of its members stood to lose
jobs and contracts if blacks gained local control of the schools.

Collaborating with the principals and supervisors in opposing the efforts at
decentralization and community control; in essence dissolving the historic friction
between management and labor.

Passing out fliers in the outlying white areas where blacks had initially tried to
integrate the schools. The fliers warned of the dangers of community control and
urged whites to oppose the Mayor’s version of decentralization.

Casting a wide net of suspicion about anti-Semitism in Ocean Hill-Brownsville if not
black civil society. The union claimed that swastikas had been painted on the walls of
schools in the local district, and that Jewish teachers had found anti-Semitic fliers in
their mail-boxes. Many of these fliers came from suspicious sources.

Claiming that its strategies were really in the interest of blacks. The UFT claimed that
it stood for quality education and that it still favored racial integration of the schools.
Citing current studies by Coleman and other sociologists, the union claimed that
black students’ education was hampered by their isolation. The union also published
anonymous letters from black parents asking teachers to remain in their schools and it
declared that breaking the schools into smaller districts would lead to racial apartheid
and increased inequality.
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
Promulgating a black historical narrative that served its interests. The narrative had
five stanzas. First, it highlighted the civil rights struggle in the South, as the heroic
battle, and minimized racism in the North. Second, it highlighted the participation of
white union leaders in demonstrations and marches in the South. Third, it claimed
symbolic legitimacy by citing Martin Luther King’s support for the UFT’s activities.
Fourth, the union promoted classes on African history, and finally it promoted articles
written by Bayard Rustin, who still claimed that blacks could not achieve their goals
without the support of the union.

Attempting to discredit the ATA and its supporters. By 1968, the ATA had become
nationally prominent. It remained the only “pure” educational advocacy group among
blacks and the organization had gained legitimacy by securing federal grants to assist
youth and parents. Al Vann, the head of the ATA, also served as the sole black
reviewer on a foundation sponsored program that awarded funds to black teachers
seeking to pursue postgraduate education to become principals. To undermine the
ATA, the UFT doctored a picture of Leslie Campbell presenting a lecture on Black
Power in Ocean Hill-Brownsville, when in actuality, the picture had actually been
taken in another place. It also regularly characterized the black teachers as
uncompromising militants who were corrupting the minds of black youth and inciting
them to hate whites.

Attacking the federally funded anti-poverty programs for providing resources to the
proponents of community control. They also flagged the programs as part of the
militant conspiracy.

Using its newsletter, and other media to paint a portrait of an anarchic black civil
society so violent and in such despair, that solutions to its problems were beyond the
realm of both the city or state governments. Sandra Feldman, a ranking official in the
UFT wrote that after a glorious decade of struggles for equality, blacks had retreated
into separatism, and “society” was copping-out by giving blacks local control of the
schools (The United Teacher 6 March 1968). Not coincidentally, the union supported
police intervention in the schools, claiming their presence was needed to deal with
violence against teachers.
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Not all UFT members or the larger labor movement supported this strategy. By the
UFT’s own admission, its strategy placed enormous burdens on its black members. There were
also divisions within the Central Labor Council. Some unions allied themselves with the black
teachers, notably District Council 37, which represented municipal workers; District Council 65,
representing retail and wholesale workers; and 1199, representing hospital employees allied
themselves. In addition, some members of the UFT argued that the union’s claim that Martin
Luther King, Jr., supported their policies made King look like a racist. Finally, there was active
and vocal dissent among some Jewish teachers who supported community control and charged
that the UFT was erroneous in its charges of black anti-Semitism (Several Jewish civic and
religious leaders echoed this position).
The internal criticisms within the UFT seemed to have little effect on its strategy, and on
9 September 1968 the day when the schools reopened, it called the first of three city-wide strikes.
Black civil society was prepared. Its members were well practiced in creating alternative
schools, and the ATA and other civic groups had spent the summer preparing for the eventuality.
However, unlike the earlier skirmishes with white civic groups, the union amassed under one
umbrella the manifest (police, teachers, custodians) and symbolic (intellectuals, writers)
authorities who shared an interest in subduing black community control. It was a classic civic
war of positional authorities against an insurgency (Grasmci 1971; Fiske 1993).
Black civil society suffered from other strategic weaknesses. In the late 1950s and early
1960s it had taken its appeals for desegregation to the New York City Board of Education, and
the New York State Board of Regents. Within this arena, blacks could boycott the schools and
gain moral and symbolic victories. Now, the ultimate decision-making had moved to the state
legislature, where the UFT warned members that any vote against its agenda could spell defeat in
future elections. Similar threats by blacks rang hollow. Moreover, while some of the small cadre
of black state legislators actively supported community control-notably those who had been
involved in the conflicts - some had doubts about blacks’ ability to manage the schools. Finally,
and significantly, Adam Clayton Powell, who had provided early political and symbolic
leadership, had been denied his seat in January of 1967, based on charges of financial
malfeasance. In losing Powell, blacks lost a seasoned elected ally with national stature who
confront the UFT.
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While most members of black civil society probably could not apprehend the array of
forces that the UFT had mobilized against them, many veterans of educational wars sensed an
Armageddon. With the notable exception of Bayard Rustin and A. Phillip Randolph, whose
group now rented space from the UFT, the organizations of black civil society united in way that
they had failed to do since the massive demonstrations in the earlier part of the decade. At
various times black leaders were informed by black FBI agents of how they should conduct
themselves, and they were protected by the Guardians, an organization of black policemen.
In the first strike, the UFT demanded reinstatement of the teachers who had been
transferred and job protection for the teachers who walked out in sympathy. Al Vann said that
the strike was a prelude to the inevitable confrontation that had to come between the white
teachers’ union and blacks. (Amsterdam News 14 September 1968). After the two-day strike, the
union reached an agreement with the Board of Education for a return of the teachers, a role in
formulating the final decentralization plan, new arbitration procedures for dismissed teachers,
and full pay for the 350 teachers who had struck the schools in the previous spring. Again, the
Ocean Hill-Brownsville Board refused to cooperate, since they had not been included in
negotiations, and when the teachers tried to enter the schools, angry black parents, activists and
community residents greeted the white teachers. In solidarity, IS 201 issued statement supporting
Ocean Hill-Brownsville’s Board and the community.
On 13 September, the UFT struck again. Unable to mediate the fraying relationships
between blacks and the UFT, the New York City Board of Education asked the New York State
Commissioner of Education to intervene. Rhody McCoy had also sought state intervention,
asking the commissioner to make Ocean Hill-Brownsville a ward of the state. The
commissioner’s solution was simple. He ordered the Board of Education to suspend the
governing board and to temporarily transfer the 10 teachers. The Board of Education indicated
that it was willing to follow the commissioner’s orders. However, the union did not trust the
commissioner and continued to strike.
Confident that it now had the power to end blacks’ defiance, the UFT added other
conditions to end the strike: (1) the suspension of the governing board had to remain in place
until the 10 teachers returned; (2) the 10 teachers had to be able to return to their classroom; (3)
“neutral” observers were to be included in the schools, and (4) the Board of Education and the
Mayor were not to approve any actions taken against teachers by unofficial groups. Taken
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together, the UFT’s demands were designed to give them the right to monitor the activities of
black civic groups within the schools and to limit any administrative actions that black groups
could take against the union. Under pressure, the Board of Education told McCoy to take back
the teachers. McCoy again refused, saying that he could not cooperate with what he saw as an act
of collusion between the UFT and the Board of Education. McCoy also called on black ministers
and community groups to come to the district every day.
The Commissioner of Education and the Board of Education offered a new compromise.
The Board of Education lifted the suspension of the Ocean Hill-Brownsville Board, and it told
the district it could keep the teachers it had hired when the UFT teachers walked out. The second
strike ended when the UFT, in agreement with Mayor Lindsay, received the right to have
“observers” in the schools backed by police presence (check). The Ocean Hill-Brownsville
Board was again told to readmit the teachers.
By now, even the more moderate black organizations were critical of the UFT and the
Board of Education. The NAACP, charging that the Board of Education had entered into a
conspiracy with the union, warned blacks that this was a fight everyone had to join. Echoing the
ATA they argued that too many of the white teachers had no respect for black children, and they
should be removed. An editorial in the Amsterdam News backed the NAACP, noting:
“ what you have is a union so powerful that it has been able to use the
actions of a bunch of black militants, a few emotional parents, two
frustrated boards-local and city-, plus a climate that in these days is so ripe
for fear these actions have been magnified into a frightful situation
enveloping all of us..
When the UFT teachers returned to the schools, violence broke again out between
supporters of the board and the police. One observer reported that the area looked like a “riot
zone.” (Amsterdam News 5 October 1968). Al Vann, who was then a principal in the district,
led teachers and pupils out of the schools to ensure their safety. Nine people were arrested. The
Ocean Hill-Brownsville Board was suspended for 30 days by the Board of Education for its
failure to comply with its order to reassign the UFT teachers to classrooms. McCoy was
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suspended because he supported the board, and all of McCoy’s principals were removed because
they supported him. The Board of Education then sent in its own personnel to run the schools.
Again the UFT sensed that it had won the day. However, when the UFT teachers arrived
to teach the students in the classes, black pupils refused to attend, and protesters surrounded the
schools. The Board of Education then closed the most disruptive school –JHS 271- for two days.
Two days later however they reopened the schools and readmitted the principals loyal to McCoy.
The hope was that with McCoy and the Ocean Hill-Brownsville Board suspended, the principals
would cooperate with the UFT teachers. The UFT disagreed with the decision, demanding that
the principals remain excluded, and that JHS 271 remain closed. However, the Board of
Education which was now headed by John Doar, (one of the leading civil rights attorneys during
the Southern civil rights movement) and Milton Galamison, opened the schools. Claiming its
members had been terrorized and threatened with death at JHS 271, the UFT began its third
strike on 14 October.
During each strike, black civic groups, the ATA, and the white allies of community
control kept the schools open and attendance was normal. They also attempted to persuade
public opinion and develop new programs. Dr. Mamie Clark, the director of Northside Center for
Children, took out a full-page ad for the Union of Concerned Parents supporting decentralization.
The 100 Black Men, a recently formed group of black executives and officials, came out in
support of McCoy and decentralization (most of the men were the civic leaders from the 1940s
and 1950s). The Council against Poverty massed thousands of supporters for the Ocean HillBrownsville Board. The Rockefeller Foundation gave the Urban League a grant to start Street
Academies for high school students who attended schools where disorders had occurred. The
Episcopal Church provided $4,000 to Ocean Hill-Brownsville to aid in their public relations
efforts. Dr. Normal Vincent Peale, president of the Protestant Council of the City of New York,
asked Shanker to call off the strike, noting that the people of Ocean Hill-Brownsville must have
a chance. The New York State NAACP voiced its unequivocal support for Ocean HillBrownsville and filed a petition on behalf of the board claiming that the suspension of the Board
and the Unit Administration was a violation of due process. Reverend William Jones, head of
one of Brooklyn’s largest black churches organized a demonstration in front of the UFT’s offices
and deplored the racist connivance of the other unions with the UFT. The New York Urban
League took out a full-page ad in the leading white newspapers supporting community control
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and Ocean Hill-Brownsville. McCoy, Reverend Oliver, and other black ministers led a massive
rally to the Board of Education. John O’Neill, one of the top blacks in the UFT who was
dismissed for his criticisms of the strike, charged that Shanker was “ outdoing George Wallacethe segregationist Governor of Alabama-as the most vicious demagogue in the country.” The
Black Caucus of the UFT, which had to balance its allegiance to the union and black civil
society, found much of the debate insulting to blacks and Puerto Ricans. They noted that no
other religious or ethnic groups in the history of the country had been forced to use
demonstration projects to prove that they were capable of running their own schools.
The UFT and its supporters responded in kind. Unionized custodians cut off water and
heat in the schools, other unions refused to deliver food, and locks on the school doors were
switched at night. In addition, union supporters claimed that the schools that remained open were
doing a poor job of educating the youth.
As in prior struggles with the white parents, there were few physical locations where the
parties could engage in “rational” discussion about the issues. As the strike continued, it was
apparent that the UFT was intent on destroying or at least weakening the civic organizations that
supported the experimental schools. Blacks were also defiant, but there were various efforts by
some leaders to reach a compromise. However, compromise was complicated by the fact that the
Ocean Hill-Brownsville Board was usually excluded from the bargaining table, and the UFT
simply refused to accept its offers.
Then the courts ruled that the Ocean Hill-Brownsville Board did not have the legal right
to appoint its principals. The UFT demanded that three of the appointed principals named in the
suit be removed until a final ruling by the Court of Appeals and that four teachers, three of whom
were members of the ATA, including Vann and Campbell, be removed also. In addition, the
suspended members of the Ocean Hill-Brownsville Board were banned from entering any of the
district’s schools, unless they had children in the school.
Thus, the 1968 strike ended, with Ocean Hill-Brownsville under a trusteeship, its key
leadership barred from the schools, the union able to observe and report any activities they found
offensive, and the white teachers, who had being transferred by the Ocean Hill-Brownsville
Board, returning to their posts. McCoy was allowed to remain under the trusteeship.
Black civil society was bitter, but not yet defeated. They still had a faint hope that the
state legislature would pass a strong bill that supported decentralization of the schools. The
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Amsterdam News reminded its readers that the strike was over, but not the battle. It urged blacks
to emulate the UFT and lobby the state legislature for a decentralization bill that would benefit
blacks. The editorial noted that the UFT had sent trainloads of its supporters to lobby the state
legislature, and blacks must be willing to do the same, but on a larger scale (Amsterdam News
23 November 1968).
Blacks also continued their defiance in the schools. After one of the returning UFT
teachers allegedly injured a black boy who told him that he was the reason that one of the black
principals was no longer in the Ocean Hill-Brownsville schools, black parents blocked the
entrance to keep the teacher from returning. Al Vann and Reverend Oliver who had been barred
from the school under the agreement ending the strike also entered the school to assist the
parents. Both were arrested, but remained defiant. Oliver met with blacks students and black
supervisors to plan strategies for achieving their goals of community control. He also joined a
sit-in of board members demanding the reopening of the district’s schools. McCoy was also
arrested after defying the trustee’s orders and temporarily “reassigned out of the district.” (Under
pressure, more than one of the trustees resigned).
The conflicts were not limited to Ocean Hill-Brownsville. The local board at IS 201
suspended nine UFT teachers for insubordination, because they disobeyed an order that the
schools in the district be open on the Friday after Thanksgiving (The schools were attempting to
make up for time lost during the strike). The unit administrator, Charles Wilson, and the head of
the board, Spencer, were arrested for attempting to use one of the schools to hold a community
meeting and “sitting in.”
In December, the Board of Education released its interim decentralization plan. Teachers
returned to the schools and Rhody McCoy was reinstated as unit administrator in Ocean HillBrownsville. The black community waited with uneasy uncertainty for the state legislature’s
final decentralization bill.
IV. 1969: The Verdict From the State Legislature
If 1968 was a year of strikes and failed negotiations, 1969 was a year of civic rancor.
Two concerns were paramount in the struggle between black and white civic and political
groups: (1) Who would influence the outcome of the decentralization bill in the state legislature,
and (2) once the bill was passed who would have the moral authority to interpret the narrative of
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events and the reformulated educational domain for a largely black and Puerto Rican student
body. The latter point was of key importance. While blacks had gained moral authority by
claiming that white racism kept them from obtaining a quality education in the 1950s and early
1960s, white civic groups, notably Jews, now attempted to undermine that authority by claming
that blacks were racist and anti-Semites.
Community hearings on the interim decentralization plan often dissolved into bitter racial
divisions. Black organizations were generally in favor of the plan, while many white civic
groups opposed any bill that appeared to give blacks more power. The UFT attempted to position
itself as the “liberal” arbiter in the debate, arguing that the Board of Education's decentralization
plan accommodated white and black extremists and violated the 1954 Supreme Court decision.
The UFT’s attempt to camouflage its own role in the civic conflict, notably its role in
fostering tensions between blacks and Jews, did not influence many blacks. Nevertheless, its
ability to paint blacks as anti-Semitic was keenly felt in the black community.
The extent of the discord and the impact it had on black civil society is evident in a
review of the Amsterdam News and the UFT’s newsletters. Whereas, several years before the
Amsterdam News had been filled with articles on “black power”, it was now occupied-for
nearly the entire year- with articles refuting black anti-Semitism. Black intellectuals, writers, and
artists, were among the most adamant that being pro-black did not mean that blacks were antiJewish.
The UFT newsletters played up the issue of black anti-Semitism, carrying and promoting
numerous reports and articles. One reprint from the Anti-Defamation League, “ Anti-Semitism
in the New York City School Controversy,” attributed the rise of black anti-Semitism to the rise
of black separatist ideology. In the League’s report, virtually all black and Puerto Rican
officials, activist-parents and community organizers who had been involved in the decade-old
struggle were alleged to have uttered some remark that was anti-Semitic. Importantly, many of
the alleged remarks were reported by UFT “observers” in the schools. (United Teacher 22
January 1969). The relationship between black and Jewish teachers was so tense in many
schools that any slight or accidental bump by a black teacher was reported by or to the UFT
“observer’s” as an anti-Semitic or anti-white incident.
Tragically, black students were often the center of the controversy. For more than a
decade, black students had witnessed or participated in demonstrations and boycotts, to gain
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access to white schools, to gain control of the schools in their communities. They had also
witnessed the intense struggle between white and black teachers and the removal from their
schools of the first significant cadre of black teachers and principals, many of who served as
mentors. The students were highly politicized, if naïve. And, like most youths, they found ways
to express themselves.
Black students’ expressiveness added to the tensions between blacks and Jews. In an
introduction to Harlem on My Mind, an exhibit organized by the Metropolitan Museum, a 16
year-old girl wrote that Jews were the cause of blacks' misery in her community. That some
Jewish writers had reviewed the document did not seem to matter, as some Jewish groups
painted the museum and blacks as anti-Semites.
A second incident proved even more damaging and lasting, and the story is important
enough to outline in some detail because it involves the ATA leader, Leslie Campbell.
Julius Lester, a former member of SNCC, taped a class that Campbell, a historian,
conducted on the African slave trade. Lester subsequently broadcast the tape on his radio show,
and the listener response was so positive that he asked Campbell to broadcast another show. As
Campbell was preparing for the radio show, one of the members of the African Student
Association, a 15 year old female student, came to his office and showed him a binder of poems
she had written. Campbell said to her: “This poetry is good, especially for a 15 year old. I’m
going on radio and I may read a couple of pieces…” At the radio station, he showed the poems
to Lester, who chose a poem from the binder that was dedicated to Al Shanker, the head of the
UFT. The poem declared that Shanker cared more about Jews and the Holocaust than the needs
of black students. Upon Lester’s selection, Campbell said to him, you must be crazy to choose
this poem (Kaufman 1989). However, Campbell read it anyway.
The response was volcanic. In the heated discussion of racism and anti-Semitism,
Campbell became a “cause celebre”. Stories were carried on the front page of newspapers and
widely debated on the radio. For some analysts it was a first amendment issue, skirting limits of
first amendment rights within civil society ( ). For others, Campbell's decision was libelous.
A large number of blacks openly supported Campbell, or refused to criticize him.
Among his supporters was Al Vann who criticized Jews for attempting to use the student poem
as an excuse to destroy Campbell and the ATA. Black writers, artists, and intellectuals took out
a full-page ad in the Amsterdam News supporting Campbell and criticizing what they described
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as a widespread smearing of blacks as anti-Semitic (Amsterdam News ). Black ministers, notably
those who had been involved in the demonstrations and boycotts openly or privately informed
Campbell that they supported him.
Campbell was under intense physical and social pressure. He was vilified in the press.
The New York Post printed his home address. Perhaps not unexpectedly, someone poured a
flammable liquid on his door and set it afire. The entire area around his door was scorched but
fortunately, the fire did not spread. Hate mail and phone calls were constant.
Campbell’s safety meant little in the heightened war of words and under increasing
criticism, Mayor Lindsay asked William Booth of the Human Rights Commission, to conduct an
investigation of Campbell. Booth, who had already criticized the UFT for being insensitive to
black students, refused. Defiantly, Booth also opposed the recommendation of a special
committee on Racial and Religious Prejudice to create a special unit to handle racial tensions in
the schools, arguing that the Commission on Human Rights could handle the job. Booth’s refusal
to the investigate Campell or support the report sealed his fate. At the urging of the City’s rabbis,
Mayor Lindsay decided not to reappoint Booth to the Commission on Human Rights, appointing
him instead to a judgeship.
The Amsterdam News was appalled that Mayor Lindsay removed one of his most
trusted black advisors. During his tenure, Booth had reflected the sentiment of major segments of
the black community, acting as a key conduit between black civic leaders and to the Lindsay
administration. Not unsurprisingly, the Amsterdam News criticized the committee whose
recommendations Booth refused to endorse. The criticisms were to be expected: the special
committee had charged that black bigotry was: “ open undisguised, nearly physical in its
intensity-and far more obvious and unidentifiable than that emanating from whites." At the same
time, the report minimized white racism, which, it observed, "tended to expressed in more subtle
fashion." (1969).
Holding out an offering of civic peace, the committee expressed regret that
relationships between Jews and blacks had deteriorated so dramatically during the 1960s, and
asked the leadership in both communities to collectively repudiate the bigotry that infused the
decentralization debate.
According to the New York Times, few blacks or Jews heeded the committee's call to
repudiate “bigotry” (New York Times 8 January 1969). Reflecting what was a growing
sentiment in black civil society, an editorial in the Amsterdam News indicated that there was no
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reason for blacks to join in a collective repudiation of racism and anti-Semitism since “The fight
for community control of the schools has not been an anti-Semitic plot engineered by a group of
black militants as some would have others to believe. It is the expressed desire of parents and
communities to determine the quality of education within their areas.”
Other black civic leaders supported the position of the Amsterdam News. In his new
position as a judge, Booth continued his criticism of the UFT and what he saw as a false issue of
anti-Semitism. In an interview with The Amsterdam News (1 March 1969), Booth charged that
the UFT had inflamed the city with its charges of black anti-Semitism. He also indicated that the
union had passed out 500,000 leaflets allegedly written by blacks that espoused anti-Semitic
policies.
From a civil society perspective, the black/ Jewish conflicts were regrettable since the
communities had a stronger affinity for community control than other groups. A survey reported
by the UFT showed that city-wide nearly half of all blacks supported Ocean Hill-Brownsville, 16
per cent of the city’s Jews, but only 5 per cent of the Catholics. Two-thirds of all blacks
supported decentralization, 43 per cent of the Jews and 22 per cent of the Catholics (United
Teacher 5 February 1969).
Moreover, several Jewish groups and writers defended blacks and the ATA against antiSemitism, and supported the experimental schools. This support however, caused considerable
tensions within families and communities. Charles Issacs, a Jewish teacher and a former college
classmate of Campbell’s, wrote an article in The New York Times Magazine supporting the
Ocean Hill-Brownsville experiment and charging that the changes of black anti-Semitism were
inflated. Issac’s also recounted stories of how white teachers had adamantly denied black
teachers a role in decision making within the schools. The article was contested in the white civic
spheres and within his family. The best description of the tensions it caused, Issac’s remembers
was in his own family. It was he recalls, analogous to the deep rifts during the American Civil
War, when families were divided on their support of the North and the South. Shortly after
Issacs' article appeared the magazine published another version of the events by Martin Mayer,
which Issacs argues was a rebuttal to his.
Mayer’s article, while balanced in many regards, presented claims that undermined the
supporters of Ocean Hill-Brownsville and community control. In his view, the school conflicts in
1968 were not inevitable. The Ford Foundation, he wrote, was more to blame for the crisis than
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the participants. Unit administrator McCoy came under criticism. Mayer claimed that McCoy
had paid for the votes of the candidates in Ocean Hill-Brownsville. While he indicated that
McCoy never wanted the teachers transferred, he charged McCoy had failed to attract qualified
teachers to the district once they were transferred. Mayer also suggested that McCoy had
deceived Kenneth Clark to gain his support.
Others also came under attack. According to Mayer, Reverend Oliver harbored black
separatist beliefs and sabotaged an attempt by the union to arbitrate the school conflict. He
claimed that Father Powis, the white priest who supported Ocean Hill-Brownsville, had
threatened to “burn down Brooklyn” after the settlement was reached ending the strike.
Mayer also accused the Puerto Rican principal in Ocean Hill-Brownsville of being
unemotionally unstable, while painting the UFT teachers as commendable leaders. He argued
that Al Shanker was the leading integrationist in the union movement, and that black teachers
were more comfortable in the UFT than in any other white institution. In a final blow, Mayer
argued that black parents believed the schools were worst under community control than before.
(Mayer, New York Times).
Mayer’s article had a huge impact: Published in the same week that the New York City
Board of Education sent its decentralization plan to the state legislature, it was widely distributed
among legislators as an authoritative account of the problems of community control and
decentralization. (Mayer’s article has also been reprinted in books, including books on civil
rights).
Blacks were furious at the timing of the article and its content. However, there were few
opportunities to refute Mayer’s story in the white press. Reverend Oliver wrote four detailed
rebuttals in the Amsterdam News, which refuted Mayer’s claims. For Oliver, who had spent
part of his time in Birmingham, Alabama, developing press reports on police violence, it was
another case of trying to force the white press to “tell the truth”. Oliver noted that Mayer only
met with him once, [and little of what he reported was included in their conversation]. Oliver
also characterized Mayer’s claim that the Puerto Rican principal was unstable as entirely
dishonest. As a board member present when the decisions were made, Oliver refuted Mayer’s
charge that McCoy did not support the transfer of the teachers, and he denied that McCoy failed
to attract good teachers during the strike. Oliver was particularly incensed at Mayer’s attribution
of incendiary remarks to Father Powis, remarks which he said were never made. Oliver noted
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that Powis had already left a meeting at the mayor’s office at the time that Mayer claimed Powis
made the statements.
No one in the white press picked up Oliver's disclaimers nor did any paper run any such
rebuttals. And while Reverend Oliver’s remarks were published in the Amsterdam News before
the final vote of decentralization in the state legislature, they appeared to have little impact on
the final decision. On 30 April 1969, the decentralization bill passed the state assembly by a vote
of 125 to 23, with the only dissenting votes coming from the small cadre of black, Puerto Rican
and liberal legislators. In the state senate the vote was 48 to 9 in favor of the bill.
There was wide agreement in the legislature that the bill was technically flawed.
Proponents justified its passage by claiming that it would bring the city back together, or it
would at least end the fight between blacks and the UFT. This latter view was summarized by
the Republican Senate Majority leader, Earl Brydges who supported who supported the bill.
Brydges argued that: “ if the blacks had won a compete victory, it would have been bad. If the
teachers union had won a complete victory it would have been bad.” His statement infuriated the
black senator Basil Patterson. Patterson’s rebuttal captured the frustrations of black civic and
political leaders: “ Those of us who are black were not seeking a victory that would mean a
defeat for anybody else…we sought an education for our children-nothing more, nothing less.”
(New York Times 1 May, 1969)
The final bill restored much of the power to the central Board of Education, and enlarged
the school districts by dividing the city into 32 community school districts with jurisdiction over
elementary and junior high schools. High schools remained under central supervision. Even the
few black legislators, who supported the bill, among them, Charles Rangel admitted that any
hope for community control had been emasculated. Bitterly, Reverend Milton Galamison
commented that: “ A great historic opportunity to right a fundamental wrong has been thrown
away with the passage of this bill by the legislature and the signing of the bill by the Governor.
Our cry for help has been manipulated for the lowest political purposes (Amsterdam News 10
May 1969).”
For all intents and purposes, community control was over. The experimental schools were
incorporated into the larger districts, and the Board of Education created a new transition board
with only one black member. The UFT celebrated. Teachers received additional protections, and
the ability of community superintendents to transfer teachers was severely curtailed. Curiously,
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even though the UFT had argued that it favored racial integration, any chances of black children
attending white schools were dashed when Governor Nelson Rockefeller barred bussing as a part
of the decentralization package.
Undermining the African American Teachers Association and black organizations and
leaders who supported community control
As a final step in its effort to shape the new educational domain, the UFT and its allies
targeted the ATA and the black leaders who supported the association or community control.
In 1969, one of the first acts of the new local school board was to dismiss Al Vann, Leslie
Campbell and five other ATA members from the public school system. The Forum, the ATA’s
newsletter, cited the dismissals as the beginning of a purge of militant teachers who had worked
for community control. It went on to note that none of the ATA members had received any
notices, nor did a black teacher who had been caught having sexual relations with a student
(Forum 17 June 1969). The UFT offered to defend the black teachers. a gesture that was
weakened by a report from a UFT “observer” commenting that the dismissals were the stage for
“the final scene” with the ATA (Robbins XXXX; United Teacher 29 June 1969).
The dismissal of the ATA teachers was part of the final scene but did not bring down the
curtain. Indeed, the black teachers expanded their efforts to shape educational policy. Al Vann
and Preston Wilcox helped create Medgar Evers College, the first black institution of higher
education in the city, and the ATA captured the largest number of votes in a local school board
in Brooklyn.
The ATA was also at the forefront of the creation of new schools and programs to assist
black students. Before his dismissal, McCoy sent Campbell to Boston and Philadelphia to look at
alternative educational programs and independent schools. Campbell borrowed models of
independent black schools and chose others and created Uhuru Sasa (Swahili for Freedom Now)
in 1970. The school, open to students 14 to 17 years of age who had been suspended from the
high schools, was an immediate success.
The Forum expanded its coverage of black culture, serving as the dominant journal on
the new black civic culturalism, or what would come to be known as Afro-Centrism. ATA’s
continuing influence was evident in the discussion among black teachers of whether they should
continue to press for community control, or focus on establishing black-run private schools.
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The UFT countered the ATA’s continuing effort to create a black educational narrative
with a dual strategy. First it promoted its own version of black history. The union published a kit
of materials for distribution in the classrooms on the early writings and speeches of Reverend
Martin Luther King. (I note early, because King became increasingly “radical” in the immediate
years before his assassination, and none of his speeches from that period were included.
(Amsterdam News 4 January 1970). Next, the UFT continued to score the ATA as anti-Semitic
and racist in articles and columns by Al Shanker in The New York Times. They also chided the
federal government and white civic organizations for supporting the black teachers.
In a final effort to dismantle the ATA, the UFT filed a one million-dollar damage suit
against the ATA in February 1972, charging that the black teachers fostered discrimination
against white teachers. The UFT, which also elicited the support of other white and black civic
groups, based the suit on an incident in which white teachers were allegedly barred from a
meeting held by the black teachers.
Ironically, the UFT suit invoked the 14th Amendment (1868) which protects an
individual’s civil rights from state interference and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits
discrimination in public places. The use of these legislative milestones—both of which were
enacted to assist blacks--was further evidence of how the UFT and its allies attempted to shape
the post Southern-civil-rights strategy as one that minimized white civic and institutional racism,
or at least made “black racism” its equivalent.
The ATA charged that the suit was part of a strategy to: place an extraordinary burden on
the organization, terminate its non-profit exempt status, terminate the receipt of “public funds”
from governmental agencies and terminate funds received from foundations. The ATA called on
blacks to establish an organization that could monitor whites, as white monitored black civic
groups (ATA Convention 1972).
The ATA’s assumptions were correct. Even as the suit was filed in court, the UFT and
its allies launched lobbying efforts to stop federal funding of two programs that had been
developed by the black teachers to assist young blacks enter two- and four-year colleges. One
program was administered in conjunction with the Bedford Stuyvesant Corporation, which had
received substantial funding from the Ford Foundation. The other was jointly administered with
Bethany Baptist church, whose pastor was Reverend Jones, one of the UFT’s staunchest critics.
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Al Shanker wrote letters to the President, Congressmen, and various federal agencies
charging that the black teachers were propagating racism in publicly funded programs. Similar
letters were sent to federal officials by the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith.
Federal officials took the charges seriously. However, after a federal review, Sheldon
Marland, the U.S. Commissioner of Education, wrote a letter to Al Shanker stating that the
ATA’s project had maintained a superior record in assisting young blacks secure a postsecondary education. Marland did promise that his department would monitor the ATA programs
closely.
Despite Marland’s positive review, the ATA was informed by the U.S Department of
Education in 1973, that the programs would no longer be funded. The New York Urban
Coalition also cancelled its financial support.
The ATA was not the only target of the UFT’s wrath. By the early 1970s, the UFT felt
comfortable asking moderate black organizations to criticize the ATA and any other blacks they
deemed antithetical to their interests. Reverend William Jones, of Bethany Baptist Church was a
particular target. When the New York Urban League decided to honor Reverend Jones with its
Frederick Douglas award, the UFT wrote to the events' organizers, demanding that they cancel
the award, claiming that Jones was anti-Semitic, a supporter of the ATA, and that he had allowed
his church to be used by the ATA for a conference that harangued Jews. (It should be noted that
in 1968-69, the UFT focused its attacks almost exclusively on black men; moderate black
organizations and black women eluded its accusations.)
The ATA began a slow demise. Al Vann emphatically recalls that the cause of the
association’s ultimate collapse was not the UFT lawsuit but the barrage of charges of antiSemitism and the decision of ATA’s leaders to pursue new projects. In fact, a judge reduced the
million-dollar claim to $5,000, which was never paid to the UFT. Nonetheless, Reverend Oliver
and other black civic leaders felt the economic brunt of the UFT’s campaign. Oliver notes that
his wife lost several jobs when it was discovered that he was her spouse.
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Consequences and Lessons of New York City’s Civic Wars for Today’s Civil Societies
I. Consequences
The civic struggles that ensued from black’s efforts to penetrate and reshape New York
City’s educational policy domain- particularly the struggles of the late 1960s--still reverberate in
the consciousness of the city, if not the country. The struggle for quality education solidified
black civil society, bringing together blacks from all classes and backgrounds in a collective
effort.
The solidarity was particularly evident during the 1968 teachers’ strike. Still, blacks were
unable to penetrate the educational policy domain or significantly alter the old civic narrative.
Part of the problem was that while blacks concentrated on education, they failed to focus on the
larger, and ultimately more challenging issue: Who in the United States’ largest city, and
arguably one of its most liberal, would determine the narrative for blacks in the city, if not the
country. McCoy (1971) argues that the educational struggles, ultimately had very little to do with
education, but was an effort by the white political and civic communities to undermine the black
insurgency.
The UFT and the white civic societies “won” the struggle. However by failing to include
a locally defined black narrative in the education domain, the city condemned itself to a recurring
conflict, since blacks continued their efforts to change the policy narrative within education,
claiming that they suffered, materially and culturally, from their exclusion.
Ultimately, the black insurgency had implications for race relations and the very concept
of civic relations in the city and in the nation. Most of the issues that fuelled the black civil
insurgency of the 1960s remain unresolved and blacks continue to suffer the ill effects:
 With the demise of the African American Teachers Association, black civil society in
New York City lost its first and only black educational advocacy organization. There have been
attempts at starting new black advocacy and policy organizations that would focus education but
few have been sustained or have been successful in changing the parameters of educational
policy. One of the difficulty's facing blacks in the decades following the 1960s has been the lack
of funding. Foundation support has been the Achilles heel for blacks’ attempts to redefine and
revitalize the educational system. Foundations that provided the economic means for blacks to
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sustain their educational campaigns during the 1960s now shy away from directly funding black
groups, preferring instead to fund them through white intermediaries.
Shifts in civic issues within the educational domain have also influenced the rules for
entry into and participation in the educational policy domain. Five years after the 1969 bill on
decentralization of schools was passed, New York City suffered a major fiscal crisis. While there
were multiple causes for the crisis, many white analysts-academics and journalists blamed the
city’s spending on educational and social programs. This interpretation of the fiscal crisis had
two consequences for the educational domain: it shifted the issues from racial and cultural equity
to fiscal exigencies and it reconstituted the civic players. By the 1970s new white advocate
groups and academics had become the interpreters of the city’s educational problems. Some of
the white advocates argued for additional resources for blacks as part of the concern for
“disadvantaged youth”, but few of them were directly connected with organizations in black civil
society. Consequently today's discourse about education in the city is carried on among the
UFT, white advocates and academics--the current positional authorities--who write most of the
reports on education and structure most of the civic meetings and debates concerning educational
policy.
After the 1960s, there were few sustained attempts to increase the number of black
teachers, black principals, or black administrators in the schools. The percentage of black
teachers climbed to 13 per cent from 1981-82. By 1997, blacks accounted for 19 per cent of the
teachers. Comparison data on principals are not available. However, as of 1997, black principals
constituted only 23 per cent of these officials. And, although there have been two black
chancellors since the 1960s, neither were from New York City. In fact, blacks are the only racial
or ethnic group with a long history in the city who have never had a chancellor appointed from
their civil society. (There has never been a Chinese Chancellor from New York City, however
the Chinese were a relatively small part of the city until the 1970's). The same pattern holds true
in other policy domains, with blacks recruited from other cities to head governmental agencies).
 The agreement won by the UFT during the teacher strikes that allowed white teachers
to observe the activities of black teachers and black students in the schools has been unofficially
expanded to cover major segments of black civil society. White reporters have demanded the
“right” to attend meetings of blacks, the police have forcefully entered black churches and
mosques, and black radio stations have been monitored for the “racist” content of its programs.
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 Predictably, and most tragically, conditions for black students have not improved. Most
of the issues outlined by blacks in the 1960’s remain true today. Blacks are still assigned to the
worst physical facilities, they are expelled at a higher rate than whites, their drop-out rates
remain high, and their overall academic scoring on reading and math tests remains lower than the
national averages. The New York State Board of Regents has classified a large percentage of the
black populated schools as “ low-performing”.
Black civil society has tried to remain vigilant about monitoring the progress of students,
but their efforts were severely undermined by a number of forces, notably the introduction of
drugs into the community in the 1970s and 1980s. Drug use undermined families and
overextended the capacity of civic organizations.
 Today, as anyone who reads the papers knows, racial tensions in the city remain.
Relations between blacks and Jews have been strained since the 1960s, sometimes to the
breaking point, as evidenced by periodic riots. Such divisiveness is not limited to blacks and
Jews. During the 1980s there were more racially motivated deaths of blacks by police and white
“mobs” –for that is what they were-- than other city or state in the country. One of the
consequences of this physical violence has been that much of the political and emotional energy
of black civil society is still devoted to protesting white violence.
 There are still major conflicts about the inclusion a black narrative in school curricula.
Blacks have sought to include a narrative that goes beyond the reverence of Martin Luther King
and the civil rights movement in the South, and includes the story of their early slavery and
subsequent oppression in New York City. Building on the efforts of blacks in the 1940s and the
1960s, blacks have attempted to refine an African-centered approach--“Afrocentrism”-- for
studying and teaching black history. White positional authorities have continually opposed a
black historical and civic narrative, especially the Afrocentric framework. Echoing the criticisms
of the earlier UFT coalition, Ravitch has called Afrocentrism a form of apartheid, and claims that
it has no room at the table with other white narratives (Ravitch 1974; Gordon 1996). After
groups of color proposed and wrote “New York State Curriculum of Inclusion”, Arthur
Schlesinger wrote his response in Disuniting Of America (1991). In it, he warned that
multiculturalism which includes Afrocentrism and the new narratives of Latinos, Asians, and
Native Americanswould lead to an abandonment of the commitment to an American identity in
favor of cultural and ethnic separatism and fragmentation.
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 The participation of black parents in schools improved only marginally. A large number
of the black women who were leaders in the anti-poverty program and the school struggles of the
1960s were absorbed into the UFT as para-professionals. The jobs have been beneficial to a large
number of low-income black women. However, they often become allies or supplicants of the
UFT in the local school board elections.
II. Lessons for the Study and construction of civil societies
There are abundant lessons for scholars and activists studying civil societies and
developing organizations within civil societies. Following are six points which I believe are
worth considering:
1. In multicultural regions that have been deeply divided by race, there are multiple
civil societies, rather than one homogenous civil society. It is intellectually and conceptually
misleading to argue that the civil societies of oppressed groups, are part of the civil society that
repressed them. This is true whether the oppression was due to racial segregation, colonization or
apartheid. As I have documented in this study, blacks, a historically oppressed group in New
York City, constructed a civil society that allowed them to practice democracy and to prepare for
struggles against the larger voluntary sector and the state. From this base, black organizations
continually attempted to participate in policy domains and circulate, as the liberal imagination
posits, in different civic spheres. Each of these attempts were rejected, as were blacks efforts to
constitute a version of their lives that replicated the white ethnic communities.
2. Models of civil society that are valid for one region or country can not be
successfully superimposed on another. Civil societies can be distinguished by their historical
dominance; their racial, ethnic and cultural insularity; their relationship to the state; their
relationship to other civil societies; the degree to which they have been forced to focus on
gaining rights and resources; the relative influence of single versus multiple religious norms; the
availability of disposable resources, and the efforts spent on defining or redefining their cultural
identity. The mistake in the New York City struggle were the attempt by some whites and blacks
to mandate a structure on the local black civil society that resembled that of blacks in the South.
The civil societies were, and continue to be, entirely different. The same lesson goes for taking a
racially and homogeneous civil society model from the United States and imposing it on other
countries.
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3. Civil society, or the relationship among civil societies or organizations, is often
uncivil and violent. The behavior of organizations within and between civil societies is often
intolerant, uncivil, unruly, and violent. The New York City findings reaffirms Keane’s (1998)
argument that it is a mistake to characterize civil society as civil discourse. Civility rarely
occurred among blacks and whites before the school debates, and it disappeared once blacks
demanded self determination and access to the policy domains.
4. The state and the larger voluntary sector have to be democratized. Held’s (1987)
argument that there is a need to simultaneously democratize the state and civil society is
axiomatic to civic and political change for oppressed groups. (In my restatement, I use voluntary
sector, since I maintain that there are multiple civil societies.) Part of the need for the
democratization is that the state and the major voluntary organizations often collaborate against
weaker groups—sometimes wittingly, other times unwittingly. The larger white voluntary
organizations have also undefined black groups. The democratization must include the
recognition of the divergent narratives of civil societies access to decision of resources, and
access to funding, particularly funding that passes through the larger organizations from
corporations and dues-check offs from government.
5. Democratization of the state is essential because the state has to “referee” and set
ground rules for civil societies. Because civil societies are uncivil, the state has to establish
ground rules and referee conflict. However, unless the state, which is not neutral, is open to
multiple narratives from civil societies, its rules are inevitably compromised. In many cases, the
state is simply unprepared for its role as referee, as was New York City in the 1960s. Lacking a
clear understanding of its responsibilities it conceded enormous power to white civic groups as a
means of containing the black insurgency. The Federal Government similarly capitulated on its
support of the anti-poverty programs, which it had funded in part to level the playing field
among competing civic organizations.
6. There is a need for mediating institutions to work with competing civil societies.
Habermas (1968) has proposed the development of mediating institutions to resolve the
competing interests of competing organizations. Such an institution needs to work outside the
influence of the state, with different civil societies agreeing to the extent of its sphere of
influence. The great void in New York City during the educational wars was the lack of a
physical place where mediation could take place. Such spaces are still limited. Some analysts
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suggest that the rules for the mediating space for New York will probably have to be negotiated
in an international assembly for NGO’s at the United Nations.
7. There are multiple narratives from civil societies that need to be represented
within policy domains. In multicultural cities or countries, the narratives and cultures of
different civil societies have to be recognized as part of the democratization of the state and the
voluntary sector. The process of recognition of multiple narratives is controversial, particularly
those of historically oppressed groups. As the New York City study showed, the narrative of the
historically oppressed will not conform to the ideals of the dominant groups. The civic struggle is
also an education; as New York City blacks studied their own history and that of other white
groups, they understood that much of the white ethnic civic narrative in New York City was
based on politically expedient myth. The key for multicultural states is not to “force” a “civil”
language on historically oppressed civic groups, but to devise different avenues for civil society
recognition. Ultimately the denial of recognition of the narrative of oppressed groups only forces
them to dig deeper into their past and to constitute civic institutions that are more essentialist.
8. The Roles of positional authorities, especially those, who arbitrate the narratives, must
be studied closely and analysts must investigate other stories to reconstitute history. Among postcolonial civil societies and nations –including blacks in the United States--the question of “who
imagines history” remains controversial. Journalists, intellectuals, academics, and analysts have
been sanctioned by the state, universities, and dominant civic organizations to construct a
historical view of historically oppressed civil societies that often diverges from members of those
societies’ interpretation of themselves. This historical view is integrated into texts and the policy
domains as the guide for decisions of how historically oppressed groups should be viewed and
how they should view themselves. In the New York City case, the dominant view among white
“experts” is that the white teachers were “fired” by blacks in the experimental schools and
abused by black nationalists. That after 30 years the misinterpretation still constitutes the “truth”
is a manifestation of the power of the white New York press and the policy networks, where the
positional authorities are employed. That it took more than 30 years for the story of New York
City blacks to be told is a manifestation of the civic and cultural hegemony that continues to
exist in the city. It is also a challenge to everyone studying civil societies and oppression to
reconsider the texts and to explore more with careful thought and intensity the histories of people
behind the mask.
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