The 1968 New York City teachers' strike was a months-long confrontation between the new community-controlled school board in the largely black Ocean Hill–Brownsville neighborhoods of Brooklyn and New York City's United Federation of Teachers. It began with a one-day walkout in the Ocean Hill–Brownsville school district in May 1968, and escalated to a citywide strike in September of that year, shutting down the public schools for a total of 36 days and increasing racial tensions between Black and Jewish Americans.
Thousands of New York City teachers went on strike when the school board of the neighborhood, which is now two separate neighborhoods, fired nineteen teachers and administrators without notice. The newly created school district, in a heavily black neighborhood, was an experiment in community control over schools, and those dismissed were almost all Jewish.
The United Federation of Teachers (UFT), led by Albert Shanker, demanded the teachers' reinstatement and accused the community-controlled school board of antisemitism. At the start of the school year in September 1968, the UFT held a strike that shut down New York City's public schools for nearly two months, leaving a million students without schools to attend.
The strike pitted the community against the union, highlighting a conflict between the locals' right to self-determination and teachers' universal rights as workers. Although the school district itself was quite small, the outcome of its experiment had great significance because of its potential to alter the entire educational system—in New York City and elsewhere. As one historian wrote in 1972: "If these seemingly simple acts had not been such a serious threat to the system, it would be unlikely that they would produce such a strong and immediate response."
Background
Brownsville From the 1880s through the 1960s, Brownsville was predominantly Jewish and politically radical. The Jewish population consistently elected socialist and American Labor Party candidates to the state assembly and was a strong supporter of unionized labor and collective bargaining.
Black people made up 6 percent of Brownsville's population in 1940; this share doubled over the next decade. Most of these new residents were poor and occupied the neighborhood's most undesirable housing. Although the neighborhood was racially segregated, there was more public mixing and solidarity among black and Jewish residents than could be found in most other neighborhoods.
Around 1960, the neighborhood underwent a rapid demographic shift. Citing increased crime and their desire for social mobility, Jews left Brownsville en masse, to be replaced by more blacks and some Latinos. By 1970, Brownsville was 77 percent black and 19 percent Puerto Rican. Furthermore, Brownsville was frequently ignored by black civil rights organizations such as the NAACP and Urban League, whose Brooklyn chapters were based in nearby Bedford-Stuyvesant and were overall less concerned with the issues of the lower-income blacks who had moved into Brownsville. These changes corresponded to overall increases in segregation and inequality in New York City, as well as to the replacement of blue-collar with white-collar jobs.
The newly black Brownsville neighborhood had few community institutions or economic opportunities. It lacked a middle class, and its residents did not own the businesses they relied upon.
Schools Whites on the neighborhood's periphery lobbied the school board against the building of a new school that would draw a racially diverse population. They were opposed by blacks, Latinos, and pro-integration whites, but nevertheless succeeded in functionally limiting the new school's racial makeup.
In the years before the strike, Brownsville's schools had become extremely overcrowded, and students were attending in shifts. Junior High School 271, which became the nexus of the strike, was constructed in 1963 to accommodate Brownsville's expanding population of youth. The school's performance was low from the outset, with most students testing below grade level in reading and math, and few advancing to the city's network of elite high schools.: "Reading and math scores were among the lowest in the city, with 73 percent of its pupils below grade level in reading and 85 percent in math. In a typical graduating class, only 2 percent went to the city's specialized high schools, which required applicants to pass written entrance examinations and served as feeders to major universities and the city colleges."
New York City's school system was controlled by the Central Board of Education, a large centralized bureaucracy.: "The culture of centralization may have been more entrenched in New York's public education system more than anywhere else in the city. By the early 1960s, the system had become a classic example of top-heavy bureaucracy." Activists in the 1960s alleged that the Central School Board was uninterested in pursuing mandatory integration; their frustration led them away from desegregation and into the struggle for community control..
Teachers union Brownsville's teachers were members of the United Federation of Teachers (UFT), a new union local. UFT was affiliated with the AFL-CIO, which included many workers in the region.The UFT won the right to represent NYC teachers for the purpose of collective bargaining in 1961:
The UFT held a philosophy of limited pluralism, according to which different cultures could maintain some individuality under the umbrella of an open and democratic society. The union also championed individualist values and meritocracy. Some called its policies 'race-blind' because it preferred to frame issues in terms of class. The UFT contained a high proportion of Jews.
Membership in the American Federation of Teachers, the national union of which the UFT is a part, had increased dramatically during the 1960s, as had the rate of teachers' strikes.
Black leaders Bayard Rustin and Reverend Milton Galamison coordinated a citywide boycott of public schools in 1964 to protest de facto segregation. Prior to the boycott, the organizers asked the UFT Executive Board to join the boycott or ask teachers to join the picket lines. The union, however, declined, promising only to protect from reprisals any teachers who participated. On February 3, 1964, more than 400,000 New Yorkers participated in a one-day boycott, and newspapers were astounded both by the number of black and Puerto Rican parents and children who boycotted and by the complete absence of violence or disorder from the protests. It was, a newspaper account accurately reported, "the largest civil rights demonstration" in American history, and Rustin argued that "the movement to integrate the schools will create far-reaching benefits" for teachers as well as students. However, when protesters announced plans to follow up the February 3 boycott with a second one on March 16, the UFT declined to defend boycotting teachers from reprisals. Later, at the time of the 1968 school crisis, Brooklyn CORE leader Oliver Leeds and African-American Teachers Association President Al Vann would cite the UFT's refusal to support the 1964 integration campaign as proof that an alliance between the teachers' union and the black community was impossible.Daniel Perlstein "The dead end of despair: Bayard Rustin, the 1968 New York school crisis, and the struggle for racial justice"
Black schools and teachers
The UFT's program for poor black schools was called "More Effective Schools". Under this program class sizes would shrink and teachers would double or triple up for individual classes. Although the UFT expected this program to be popular, it was challenged by the African-American Teachers Association (ATA; originally the Negro Teachers Association), a group whose founders in 1964 were also part of the UFT. The ATA felt that New York City's teachers and schools perpetuated a system of entrenched racism, and in 1966 it began campaigning actively for community control. The UFT opposed both involuntary assignment and extra incentives for experienced teachers to come to poor schools.
In 1967, the ATA opposed the UFT directly over the "disruptive child clause", a contract provision that allowed teachers to have children removed from classrooms and placed in special schools. The ATA argued that this provision exemplified and accelerated the system's overall racism. In the fall of 1967, the UFT held a two-week strike, seeking approval for the disruptive child clause; most of the ATA's members withdrew from the union. In February 1968, some ATA teachers helped to produce a tribute to Malcolm X that presented African music and dance and glorified Black power; the UFT successfully asked that these teachers be disciplined.
Community control In the New York City school system, regulated by a civil service examination, only 8 percent of teachers and 3 percent of administrators were black. Following Brown v. Board of Education, 4,000 students in Ocean Hill–Brownsville were bused to white schools, where they complained of mistreatment. Faith in the controllers of the school system sank lower and lower.
Bolstered by the civil rights movement, but frustrated by resistance to desegregation, African Americans began to demand authority over the schools in which their children were educated. The ATA called for community-controlled schools, educating with a "Black value system" that emphasized "unity" and "collective work and responsibility" (as opposed to the "middle class" value of "individualism"). Leftist white allies, including teachers from the recently eclipsed Teachers Union, supported these demands.
Mayor John Lindsay and wealthy business leaders supported community control as a pathway to social stability. When in 1967 the Bundy Report, a creation of the Ford Foundation, recommended trying decentralization, the city decided to experiment in three areas, over the objections of some members of the white middle classes, who disliked the ideological tendencies that black-controlled schools might embrace.
The New York City Board of Education established the Ocean Hill–Brownsville area of Brooklyn as one of three decentralized school districts created by the city. In July 1967, the Ford Foundation issued Ocean Hill–Brownsville a $44,000 grant. The new district operated under a separate, community-elected governing board with the power to hire administrators. If successful, the experiment might lead to citywide decentralization. While the local black population viewed it as empowerment against what it saw as an intransigent white bureaucracy, the teachers' union and other unions saw it as union busting—a reduction in the collective bargaining power of the union, which would now have to deal with 33 separate, local bodies, rather than a central administration.
Rhody McCoy, the new superintendent of the board, had begun working as a substitute teacher in 1949. He worked in the city's public school system as a teacher and then principal of a special education school. He told the New York Times he was gentle but ambitious, and eager to change schools for neglected children. Some described him as a militant follower of Malcolm X, and the UFT opposed the board's decision to appoint him in July 1967. McCoy often frequented a mosque Malcolm X preached at and visited the preacher's home. McCoy was reported to be influenced by Harold Cruise’s book The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual and to believe Jews had too much influence in the civil rights movement. He nominated Herman Ferguson as the principal of JHS 271. Ferguson had penned an article in The Guardian in which he wrote his ideal school would have lessons on "instructions in gun weaponry, gun handling, and gun safety" as survival skills in a hostile society. The nomination was withdrawn.
Curriculum and school environment