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COPYRIGHT 2001 Transaction Publishers, Inc.
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]
The responses and identities of different groups of Jews complicate the white landscape. While major national Jewish organizations supported this school integration effort, there was little response from Brooklyn's local Jewish communities. The Board of Education never forwarded a plan for integration to which the local communities might respond. However, the demographic shifts within the JHS 258 area and surrounding vicinity offer some insight into the areas' changing Jewish communities. By the mid-1950s, Bedford-Stuyvesant had already lost most of its Jewish population. Neighboring Crown Heights, the area that integration activists proposed be integrated with the Bedford-Stuyvesant junior high school, also saw an overall decrease in its white population. However, while the neighborhood's Italian, eastern European Jewish, German and Scandinavian residents were moving to the suburbs after World War II, the Lubavitch Hassidim, orthodox Jews from eastern Europe, were expanding their community in Crown Heights. This insular community with its own infrastructure and educational institutions would not have been affected by any public school integration proposals. [15] Finally, the active involvement of radical Jews (from Brooklyn and the city's other boroughs) in this school integration effort further complicates the meaning of Jewish involvement in the struggle for black civil rights, as these radicals did not necessarily identify primarily on the basis of ethnicity.
Second, this northern school desegregation conflict occurred as de segregation battles exploded in the South. In 1955, Autherine Lucy attempted to gain entry into the University of Alabama and the Montgomery Bus Boycott began. [16] These struggles inspired African American in New York City. But they also revealed the tension within the civil rights organizations and between these organizations and their local membership about the extent to which northern struggles deserved institutional support.
Third, this fight for an integrated junior high school occurred within the Cold War climate of the 1950s. Fear of being stigmatized as "pink" for advocating racial unity severely disabled the efforts of progressive African-American parents and their white allies, many of whom were Jews associated with a variety of unions, parent and civil rights organizations. The McCarthy attacks seriously impeded the radical New York City Teachers Union's support for the school integration struggle. Furthermore, opponents of integration used associations between JHS 258 activists and the Teachers Union to de-legitimize their efforts.
The parents and civil rights activists framed their demands for an integrated school in direct response to the New York City Board of Education's recently adopted school integration policy. The resolution, announced on 23 December 1954, seven months after the landmark Brown Supreme Court decision, stated:
the Board of Education of the City of New York is determined to accept the challenge implicit in the language and spirit of the decision of the United States Supreme Court.... We believe that an effective method for obtaining these ends is to set up a Commission of the Board of Education charged with the responsibility of determining the facts and recommending whatever further action is necessary to come closer to the ideal, viz., the racially integrated school. [17]
In conjunction with the resolution, the Board of Education unanimously approved the establishment of a Commission on Integration that was charged with offering recommendations for integrating the city's public schools.
The board's resolution was a result of months of battles that predated the Supreme Court announcement. Dr. Kenneth Clark, the prominent black psychologist, had ignited these battles with his highly publicized demand that the Board of Education be held accountable for the inferior education it offered the City's African-American schoolchildren. At the Urban League's annual dinner Clark summarized the prior twenty-year history of education for New York City's black schoolchildren and characterized the educational situation as in a "stage of educational decline." [18] He claimed that the schools black children attended were the system's most overcrowded and poorly resourced. They also had the most inexperienced teachers. In a particularly incendiary assertion, he claimed that the high school zones had been gerrymandered purposely to exclude large numbers of black students from attending the best academic high schools. In spite of such provocative allegations, Clark's charge to the Board of Education was fairly mild: he simply called on the board to conduct a study of the conditions for blacks in the city's public schools.
High level administrators within the Board of Education attacked Clark for months after he issued his call. The attacks ranged from out right rejection of Clark's characterization of the schools as segregated to attempts to discredit Clark himself. Many administrators refused to see the term "segregation" applied to a northern school system. [19] In addition, the board red-baited Clark to discredit him. For example, one assistant superintendent attempted to link Clark with the Teachers Union, which was widely known as a left-leaning union. "You perhaps know," he wrote, "that he [Clark] and Judge Delany are current favorites of the Teachers Union and that the line they follow fits right in with their program of creating community dissension and distrust of the public school system." [20]
In the end, though, growing local and national attention to the issue of school segregation made it extremely difficult for the Board of Education to ignore Clark's charges. Locally, Clark was part of a new organization, the Intergroup Committee on New York's Public Schools, which was effectively gathering public support for its concerns. Concurrent to the formation of the Intergroup Committee, Mayor Robert Wagner, who also spoke at the Urban League's Brotherhood Month Dinner, promised that a new government agency, the Commission on Intergroup Relations, would also take up the issue of school integration on behalf of his office. [21] Nationally, the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision gave prominence not only to the issue of school desegregation but to Dr. Clark himself. [22]
The Board of Education ultimately adopted the recommendation of its own public relations officer, who argued that embarking on a study would enable the Board of Education to "show good faith" with regard to the allegation of school segregation. [23] By the end of 1954, the board had endorsed a study and established a Commission on Integration, which was co-chaired by the outgoing and incoming presidents of the Board of Education.
How does all this background relate to the efforts of the Brooklyn parents who, a dozen years before Ocean Hill-Brownsville, attempted to integrate a school in their neighborhood? First, their efforts were premised on the self-declared mandate of the Board of Education's Com mission on Integration to create racially integrated schools. They took to heart the words of the Commission's co-chairs, that their school would be the "pilot project for integration," [24] and they believed they would be the first test...
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