Blacks, Jews and the Struggle to Integrate Brooklyn's Junior High School 258: A Cold War Story.

IF YOU MENTION BROOKLYN, schools, blacks and Jews in one breath, the image that surfaces in the minds of many is the 1968 struggle for community control in the Ocean Hill-Brownsville school district. [1] Like many highly publicized events, the Ocean Hill-Brownsville struggle has generally been presented by the media and some of the key players as having come out of nowhere, an explosion without a history. But the Ocean Hill-Brownsville struggle had its roots in an earlier and less well-publicized history of struggles for equal education for African American schoolchildren. In the 1950s, many black parents redirected their energies from documenting discrimination to organizing for integration. In so doing, they exposed a segregated northern school system. [2] Paradoxically, their campaign revealed both the possibility that existed during this period to create a truly integrated system, and the deep ultimately intractable--resistance to that goal.

Charting these earlier struggles reveals a much bigger picture: the foundation of the current crisis in urban education lies in this concurrence of changing demographics and a transforming urban ecology, an emerging civil rights movement and the shaping of white ethnic identities and politics in the postwar era. The overall impact of McCarthyism on the battles for racial equality framed this period as did the anti-Communist purges of the labor movement and radical unions like the New York City Teachers Union. These earlier struggles also offer a map of the various intersections between African Americans and Jewish Americans that is helpful for evaluating the potent symbolism of Ocean Hill-Brownsville in the recounting of black-Jewish history.

The Ocean Hill-Brownsville conflict has come to symbolize, in popular and scholarly debate, the end of the supposed "grand alliance" between African Americans and Jewish Americans that emerged out of the civil rights movement. [3] For many Jews the conflict sparks memories of anti-Semitism directed specifically at the United Federation of Teachers, the predominantly Jewish teachers union. For many African Americans, the conflict was about a racist and discriminatory school system in which the United Federation of Teachers was only one of the players, and the ethnic identity of the city's teachers hardly the central issue. The mention of this incident in certain circles still provokes fierce emotions. [4] However, just as historians are challenging the assumptions about a "grand alliance," so too must we question the symbolism of Ocean Hill-Brownsville as pivotal in the changing relations between these groups. [5] Contemporary responses to the Ocean Hill-Brownsville conflict may reveal less about the event itself and more about current anxieties surrounding black-Jewish relations. For the responses as well as the partisan reports that the event generated offer a polarized view of the relationship between African Americans and Jewish Americans that be lies the complexity and heterogeneity of the communities and simplifies a far more complicated history of school integration battles.

This essay focuses specifically on the first battle to integrate a New York City public school on the heels of the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision. The various players in this effort illustrate the differences within African-American and Jewish communities. And this integration struggle offers a foundation for understanding the tensions emerging between some of these communities of blacks and Jews.

It was in 1955 that black parents and civil rights activists and their white (and largely Jewish) allies began their effort to integrate a new junior high school--JHS 258--in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn's largest black neighborhood. With the services declining as the black population increased, Bed-Stuy was becoming emblematic of many urban centers in the postwar period where federal and local policies were creating the structural foundation of its racial identity and economic decline. [6] The 1949 Federal Housing Act spurred the growth of suburbs and pro vided loans and affordable mortgages almost exclusively to white home buyers moving into segregated suburbs. [7] Similarly, the "urban renewal" projects spearheaded by urban developers like New York City's Robert Moses under Title I of the Housing Act resulted in "Negro removal." [8] By the mid-1950s, Moses had directed the demolition of hundreds of apartment buildings in the name of slum clearance that resulted in the construction of middle-income housing and the displacement of at least 320,000 people. Those displaced were the city's poor. As Robert Caro, Robert Moses' biographer notes, a remarkably high percentage of the displaced were African American and Puerto Rican. Many fled to communities in Brooklyn like Brownsville, Bedford-Stuyvesant and neigh boring Crown Heights. [9]

This disinvestment of blackness, the flip side of what George Lipsitz has characterized as the "possessive investment in whiteness," [10] was not necessarily a new experience for Bed-Stuy's black parents. For years the community had complained about overcrowding and racial segregation in many of the district's public schools. For example, the 1938 report of the New York State Commission on the Condition of the Urban Colored Population charged the Board of Education with diluting the academic program at Girls High School, located in the middle of Bedford Stuyvesant, as the school's black population increased. And in the mid-1940s the School Council of Bed-Stuy and Williamsburg, a community group of parents and teachers, argued that children in those communities received inadequate education due to teacher shortages and the resulting reduced hours of instruction. [11] By the mid-1950s, out raged Bed-Stuy parents who had for years sought to draw attention to the deterioration of their schools, were emboldened by the 1954 Supreme Court decision outlawing school segregation and the emerging civil rights movement in the South.

The JHS 258 story is that of a lost opportunity. It was no accident that this test case for integration was happening in Brooklyn in the mid-1950s when the borough's shifting ethnic boundaries could actually allow for school integration. During this decade, there was a window of opportunity to create an integrated school system that the demographic changes of the 1960s ultimately foreclosed. [12] The importance of this failed at tempt is threefold: First, it offers insights into responses of white communities to civil rights challenges in the North. The Board of Education's resistance to implementing integration reflected both bureaucratic imperatives and a race-based ideology. At the simplest level, school ad ministrators needed to protect their turf and defend their actions and policies. The institution's operating racial ideology is more difficult to untangle, as there was no consensus among the board's lay leaders and the superintendent of schools and his staff. For example, the schools superintendent masked his objection to integration proposals in his advocacy of the "neighborhood school" policy. At the same time, the board's lay leadership was far more likely to embrace the liberal racial ideology being advanced in the postwar period that sought to understand the black family in terms of behavioral pathology. [13] The board's opposition, however, was also directly related to growing evidence of white flight and fears of white parents' protests. [14]