Ocean Hill...50 years ago - the 1968 New York City teachers strike...
Police in Ocean Hill Brownsville during the 1968 dispute.Fifty years ago in the Spring of 1968, a month after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., approximately 350 New York City public school teachers walked out of their schools in a poor working class Brooklyn neighborhood with the support of the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) leadership.
They were protesting against an attempt by the newly elected Ocean Hill-Brownsville Community School Board (OHBCSB) to remove 12 teachers and 6 administrators from district schools who were deemed to be hostile to the community control experiment. The 12 teachers and 6 administrators were instructed by the OHBCSB to report to the central office of the Board of Education for reassignment, a fairly common practice back then which the UFT had not typically opposed. Bernard Donovan, Superintendent of the Board of Education, however, rejected the Community Board’s request and ordered Rhody McCoy, the Unit Administrator and The Reverend Herbert C. Oliver, Chairman of the OHBCB Governing Board, to proffer charges against the teachers and administrators. This necessitated a formal hearing which set the stage for subsequent events.
The Ocean Hill Brownsville community and the leadership they elected during the summer of 1967 were mostly Black Americans; migrants from the white supremacist Jim Crow South to the white supremacist de facto Jim Crow North. Education and Community leaders argued that if integration was to be blocked in NYC public schools then let the Black community run the schools in the Black community. Reluctantly, and under great pressure, the New York City Board of Education allowed for the formation of three experimental control district located in Harlem, the Lower East Side, and Ocean Hill-Brownsville. (Full disclosure – I was a high school student on the Lower East side in 1968 and have taught in NYC public schools for the past 18 years.)
The teachers who walked out in 1968 were mostly first or second generation European Americans. Largely eastern European Jews with a sprinkling of Irish and Italians Catholics, they were usually the first college graduates in their families, eager to melt into the middle class, and trade in old world identities associated with the warring nationalities, races and religions of Europe for a new identity in the USA as “whites.”
The old Teachers Union, which was an early advocate for Civil Rights, had been red baited out of existence (see Reds at the Blackboard – Communism, Civil Rights and the New York City Teachers Union by Clarence Taylor). In its place emerged The United Federation of Teachers (UFT), led by former Trotskyists and socialists of varying stripes. The UFT sought to be perceived as progressive on civil rights. Though they had opted out of the 1964 school boycott to end segregation in NYC public schools, the UFT leadership participated in the 1963 March on Washington and was initially supportive of community control.
By September 1968, 25 % of NYC teachers had voted to strike if the 10 teachers were not returned to their original positions over the objections of the Community Board. The Ocean Hill Brownsville Community Board for its part held firm to its conviction that they should determine who taught in the the district’s schools. The conflict grew to engulf all NYC schools in a prolonged and tortuous, uniquely American racial passion play of three strikes lasting ten weeks in total.
Jerald Podair, a noted historian of the period, entitled his award winning book The Strike That Changed New York. Suffice it to say that the “change” neither benefited rank and file teachers, students and parents, nor for that matter the working class of the city. The UFT leadership has never acknowledged its own disastrous role in fomenting these strikes, which would have to start first with an apology.
Fast forward to the present. NYC public schools are more segregated in 2018 than they were in 1968 but the UFT is not the same as it was in 1968 when only around four or five percent of the teachers were Black or Latino and the administrators of color could be counted on one hand.
From 1968 up until 2002 the numbers of Black and Latino educators steadily increased in NYC schools. This progress was abruptly halted under the Bloomberg administration who was granted mayoral control by the NYS Legislature. Education “reform” subsequently came with a vengeance to the largest public school system in the US. Teachers, parents and students however joined together to protest school closures in the Black and Latino communities. To its credit the UFT Delegate Assembly passed a resolution in 2011 that criticized the Bloomberg/Klein about face in hiring and committed the UFT to use all available resources to promote teacher diversity. Small groups of rank and file union members have continued to raise the demand to stop and reverse the disappearing of Black and Latino educators. (For more information see https://www.teacherdiversitycommittee.nyc)
UFT President Mulgrew resisted Bloomberg’s demand to end seniority for teachers in closing schools which would have disproportionately impacted Black and Latino members. In retaliation, Bloomberg held the UFT contract hostage and teachers went four years without a contractual raise. In the summer of 2014, President Mulgrew joined the protest organized by Reverend Al Sharpton to protest the chokehold murder of Eric Garner on Staten Island. For his role Mulgrew was rounded excoriated by the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association President Patrick Lynch and the tabloid media which gave front page coverage to a group of Staten Island UFT members who were critical of Mulgrew for his participation and who sported T-shirts supporting the police.
Chastened by the hostility of the media, the prospect of division within our own ranks, the election of Trump and the pending SCOTUS ruling in the Janus case, the leadership of the UFT today appears to be wary of taking a stand on racial matters. A recent proposal to join in a week of actions in support of Black Lives Matter was rejected by the Delegate Assembly at the behest of the leadership who said the union faced grave challenges and could not support anything that might be “divisive.” One would hope that the reaffirmation of fundamental values of solidarity would be seen by the leadership as the proper response to the challenges we face but apparently we have not learned the lesson from the 1968 “strike that changed New York.”
One of the most encouraging things about the teacher led red state revolt is that down in West Virginia, Kentucky, Oklahoma, the teachers are one with the school communities they serve. They have dropped the mic and gone off the reservation. They are acting in concert with their community to defend their schools, pensions, standards of living, working and learning conditions. They are not “acting white” as their red state handlers expected. Dare I say they are defending their class? As Karl Marx might say “well burrowed, old mole.” There is a valuable lesson to be learned from comparing the NYC teachers strike of 1968 with the red state teachers revolt of 2018. I think the lesson is that if we are to have a republic “of the people, by the people and for the people,” we will have to constitute ourselves as a people by first throwing off that stifling incubus of the “white” identity (Theodore W. Allen, The Invention of the White Race Vol II), that pitted NYC teachers in opposition to their school communities in 1968 and leaves the common people today without a political party of our own.
