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The Strike That Changed New York: Blacks, Whites and the Ocean Hill-Brownsville Crisis
On 9th May 1968, junior high school teacher Fred Nauman received a letter that would change the history of New York City. It informed him that he had been fired from his job. Eighteen other educators in the Ocean Hill-Brownsville area of Brooklyn received similar letters that day. The dismissed educators were white. The local school board that fired them was predominantly African-American. The crisis that the firings provoked became the most racially divisive moment in the city in more than a century, sparking three teachers' strikes and increasingly angry confrontations between black and white New Yorkers at bargaining tables, on picket lines, and in the streets. This study revisits the Ocean Hill-Brownsville crisis - a watershed in modern New York City race relations. Jerald Podair connects the conflict with the sociocultural history of the city and explores its legacy. The work presents a sobering tale of racial misunderstanding and fear, a New York story with national implications.
288 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 2002
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
August 14, 2020
A very fair account of the series of teacher strikes in 1968, known as the Ocean Hill-Brownsville incident. Although I've never heard of this event until reading this book, it is an extremely important piece of the puzzle in understanding race relations in NYC. Starting from what led up to the strikes-post industrialization of NYC, economic policies shaping culture, and blatant racism- the book also dives into how it has continued to affect NYC until the Bloomberg administration (and probably up until today). As a strong supporter of labor unions and the UFT, it was difficult to read how they were the bad guys at times, and did not fight for school integration more. It is a shame to think how these racial divides have over taken any emphasis on class solidarity in NYC to achieve real material gains.
July 26, 2017
A friend recommended this book as a must-read for understanding race relations in New York City, and while it’s certainly an important book on the subject, its style is academic, and its prognosis is bleak. It was worth reading, but it was tough to get through, and not the slightest bit of fun. If you take it on, sandwich it between fun and/or positive reads.
The central event the book covered was the teachers’ strike of 1968. It began in the Ocean Hill/Brownsville section of Brooklyn when some African American educators and parents teamed up to take control of their local school board and dismiss the predominantly white Jewish teachers in the district in favor of African American teachers. The parents claimed that the fired teachers were racists, which may have been true in some individual cases, and they also argued that the test-centered approach to education was discriminatory to African American kids, who were raised in a community-centered culture, not an individualized meritocratic society. The tests, said one African American educator, emphasized rote memorization and conformity and taught nothing about the real world. As a white Jew who used to perform well on those tests, I agree 100%. But the educational complaints got lost in the shuffle when the white teachers were fired. The entire teachers’ union went on strike to support them, which ended up turning the entire city against Ocean Hill/Brownsville. In the settlement, the neighborhood was granted a “community control experiment” over their schools, but in the end, their educational outcomes were no better than the white teachers’ had been.
The book argues that this was “the strike that changed New York” specifically because of its reorientation of the Jews in relation to the blacks. Until then, the Jews had been the biggest supporters of the civil rights movement. Their ties to the African American community were stronger than their ties to their fellow whites, whether they were upper class Protestants or working class Catholics. The fired teachers considered themselves liberals who were working to benefit the African Americans they were educating, so they were horrified when the African American parents yelled anti-Semitic slurs at them, attacking them as symbols rather than recognizing them as individuals. Realizing their “help” was unwanted, they ended up allying with the working class white Catholics, which only deepened the racial divide into what we live with today.
The best parts of this book were the two concluding chapters because that’s where the author was most concise. All the politicking around the strike in the earlier chapters seemed jumpy and at times repetitive. But the book definitely shows both sides of the “two Americas” we live in. Because I live in a town in the midst of its own educational battle that divides along racial and religious lines, I found it particularly relevant, though not at all encouraging. Hatred can be an effective organizing tool – look how well it’s working for Donald Trump – so is there any hope for sympathy and mutual understanding? I know I hope to try, and that’s why I’ve moved onto a new book, Altars in the Street. As always, I’ll keep you posted.
The central event the book covered was the teachers’ strike of 1968. It began in the Ocean Hill/Brownsville section of Brooklyn when some African American educators and parents teamed up to take control of their local school board and dismiss the predominantly white Jewish teachers in the district in favor of African American teachers. The parents claimed that the fired teachers were racists, which may have been true in some individual cases, and they also argued that the test-centered approach to education was discriminatory to African American kids, who were raised in a community-centered culture, not an individualized meritocratic society. The tests, said one African American educator, emphasized rote memorization and conformity and taught nothing about the real world. As a white Jew who used to perform well on those tests, I agree 100%. But the educational complaints got lost in the shuffle when the white teachers were fired. The entire teachers’ union went on strike to support them, which ended up turning the entire city against Ocean Hill/Brownsville. In the settlement, the neighborhood was granted a “community control experiment” over their schools, but in the end, their educational outcomes were no better than the white teachers’ had been.
The book argues that this was “the strike that changed New York” specifically because of its reorientation of the Jews in relation to the blacks. Until then, the Jews had been the biggest supporters of the civil rights movement. Their ties to the African American community were stronger than their ties to their fellow whites, whether they were upper class Protestants or working class Catholics. The fired teachers considered themselves liberals who were working to benefit the African Americans they were educating, so they were horrified when the African American parents yelled anti-Semitic slurs at them, attacking them as symbols rather than recognizing them as individuals. Realizing their “help” was unwanted, they ended up allying with the working class white Catholics, which only deepened the racial divide into what we live with today.
The best parts of this book were the two concluding chapters because that’s where the author was most concise. All the politicking around the strike in the earlier chapters seemed jumpy and at times repetitive. But the book definitely shows both sides of the “two Americas” we live in. Because I live in a town in the midst of its own educational battle that divides along racial and religious lines, I found it particularly relevant, though not at all encouraging. Hatred can be an effective organizing tool – look how well it’s working for Donald Trump – so is there any hope for sympathy and mutual understanding? I know I hope to try, and that’s why I’ve moved onto a new book, Altars in the Street. As always, I’ll keep you posted.
May 23, 2013
Jerald Podair contends in The Strike that Changed New York: Blacks, Whites and the Ocean Hill-Brownsville Crisis that the events 1967-8 decisively realigned the ethnic allegiances that had underpinned liberal New York and set a new conservative course. By 1967 the Ocean Hill-Brownsville neighborhood schools were failing badly. The demographics of the area had shifted rapidly since the late 1950s when black New Yorkers from the adjoining neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant, under pressure from the continuous migration from the South, had begun to move in and the former white residents had begun to move out. As the population of the district became poorer and less educated, achievement had dropped. In response the centralized school bureaucracy agreed to allow the creation of a locally elected school board to try and turn the school around. The majority white teachers union had resisted the extension of local control but had been ultimately unable to prevent it.
In the ensuing confrontation between the teacher’s union and the school board over the board’s desire to terminate or transfer more than a score of white teachers, Podair finds a metaphor for the decline of the liberal state. The elected school board framed its critique of the city education bureaucracy and the teachers union in Black Power terms: they did not trust that white teachers, the predominantly white union or the municipal authorities and wanted more black teachers and a curriculum that built racial pride. The members of the teachers union, in contrast, viewed themselves as essentially embroiled in a dispute to protect the rights of labor and the system as professional, meritocratic and committed to liberal ideals. “The UFT . . . feared community control for more than just self-interested reasons.” Podair tells us, “Union leaders, many of whom were active in the southern phase of the civil rights movement, were troubled by the ways in which arguments for community control in black neighborhoods seemed to echo those of southern “states rights” proponents,” not to mention the anti-black Parents and Taxpayers organizations within the city who sought to increase racial segregation within education.”
Podair posits that the controversy was essentially cultural and ideological in nature, and that the mutual contradictions of the worldviews were so strong that they might have erupted anywhere. The Ocean Hill-Brownsville schools were the flashpoint in the growing tension between Black Power and civil rights liberalism, important as a moment of destruction for the African American/Jewish ethnic alliance which had underwritten more than three decades of liberal municipal government (many of the members of the teacher’s union were Jewish, some of the publications and arguments supporting the school board were anti-Semitic). The confrontation, which drew out over three separate strikes, also had a “symbolic quality, as a destroyer of illusions. Until Ocean Hill-Brownsville, many New Yorkers, especially whites, believed in New York as an exercise in cosmopolitan humanism, a pluralistic city broadly integrated along racial, ethnic, and religious lines.” As conservative ethnic groups took up the cry for local control of schools New York’s pretension to a color blind municipal government suffered, and elements of racial antagonism suffused every municipal tax and service issue.
In the ensuing confrontation between the teacher’s union and the school board over the board’s desire to terminate or transfer more than a score of white teachers, Podair finds a metaphor for the decline of the liberal state. The elected school board framed its critique of the city education bureaucracy and the teachers union in Black Power terms: they did not trust that white teachers, the predominantly white union or the municipal authorities and wanted more black teachers and a curriculum that built racial pride. The members of the teachers union, in contrast, viewed themselves as essentially embroiled in a dispute to protect the rights of labor and the system as professional, meritocratic and committed to liberal ideals. “The UFT . . . feared community control for more than just self-interested reasons.” Podair tells us, “Union leaders, many of whom were active in the southern phase of the civil rights movement, were troubled by the ways in which arguments for community control in black neighborhoods seemed to echo those of southern “states rights” proponents,” not to mention the anti-black Parents and Taxpayers organizations within the city who sought to increase racial segregation within education.”
Podair posits that the controversy was essentially cultural and ideological in nature, and that the mutual contradictions of the worldviews were so strong that they might have erupted anywhere. The Ocean Hill-Brownsville schools were the flashpoint in the growing tension between Black Power and civil rights liberalism, important as a moment of destruction for the African American/Jewish ethnic alliance which had underwritten more than three decades of liberal municipal government (many of the members of the teacher’s union were Jewish, some of the publications and arguments supporting the school board were anti-Semitic). The confrontation, which drew out over three separate strikes, also had a “symbolic quality, as a destroyer of illusions. Until Ocean Hill-Brownsville, many New Yorkers, especially whites, believed in New York as an exercise in cosmopolitan humanism, a pluralistic city broadly integrated along racial, ethnic, and religious lines.” As conservative ethnic groups took up the cry for local control of schools New York’s pretension to a color blind municipal government suffered, and elements of racial antagonism suffused every municipal tax and service issue.
February 19, 2024
The Ocean Hill-Brownsville community control crisis is a clear example of why, we as members of society, must not take for granted the moral or political concreteness of institutions. Just because I associate unions with being progress and a force for bettering the world, doesn’t mean that like the UFT in this case, they can be used to regress race relations in our society. The same goes for the community board at Ocean Hill-Brownsville firing teachers on the basis of being white in order to create schools in a Black redline neighborhood that were run by black people.
March 15, 2010
Podair provides an interesting perspective on the culture and history behind the Ocean Hill-Brownsville strikes, looking at the decades leading up to them and summing up the events that followed as a result of them. The book doesn't necessarily lean in favor of one side of the issue or the other, telling it like it is/was and glamorizing neither viewpoint. What bothers me about the book is that Podair tends to repeat particular points multiple times throughout the book. Various individuals and organizations that play a role in the grand scheme of things are introduced more than once, often with similar or identical descriptions each time, though I suppose that would be useful to anyone picking up the book and skimming through it or reading no more than a specific excerpt.
August 9, 2016
A pretty decent read until the concluding chapters. Podair rightly goes after the sloppy, haphazard stewardship of Ocean Hill-Brownville's Black administrators and educators, but lets the white, heavily Jewish educational establishment off the hook. In any fight, it takes two sides to tangle. Ascribing the failure mostly to the Black antagonist is a disheartening disservice to readers -- of the book and recent history.
To make matters worse, Podair glides over the racist administrations of Koch and especially Giuliani, while belittling the accommodating David Dinkins, New York City's sole Black mayor. Of course this work is a bit dated and maybe an update could redeem the book. As it stands, it was a disappointment after a promising start.
To make matters worse, Podair glides over the racist administrations of Koch and especially Giuliani, while belittling the accommodating David Dinkins, New York City's sole Black mayor. Of course this work is a bit dated and maybe an update could redeem the book. As it stands, it was a disappointment after a promising start.
March 10, 2017
Podair argues that the 1968 teacher’s strike fundamentally altered race relations of New York City, shaking up the old alliance of Jews, white Protestants, and African-Americans against Irish and Italian Catholics for control of the city in favor of a purely racial alignment, though white elites mostly lined up with poor black residents against the American Federation of Teachers.. It shattered old vision of individualistic race-blind pluralism which much of the older left had clung to in favor of looking at groups. Ocean-Hill Brownsville became an experiment in local community control, in which the local board of nonprofessional community members made all decisions for the school, arguing that the mostly centralized white White New York lined up behind the mostly white jewish teachers and liberal, defending the 18 fired teachers as a right to due process and labor rights that were hard won, while Black New York aligned with the school board who argued that the community should run the school instead of the centralized Education Board and Teachers Union which had failed black children through standardized testing. Additionally, teachers generally fled black schools after their 5 years requirement before they could transfer, meaning black schools had inexperienced teachers learning on the job, while white schools had a wealth of experienced teachers. Three strikes hardened the new New York antagonisms which split off Jewish support for Civil Rights and sent Jewish New Yorkers to more conservative politics, away from democratic socialist labor traditions.
Key Themes and Concepts
-Black nationalist groups took the “neighborhood schools” concept, which segregationists had used, in order to argue for “community schools”. White conservatives later used the same argument to informally segregate schools.
-Worker vs Boss dichotomies broke down as it turned towards whites versus blacks. However, it also put middle class values of individualistic competitiveness and wealth accusation onto whites and working class values of cooperation and personal relationships onto blacks, which obscured class differences within white and black communities.
-The African American Teachers Association generally sided with the OH-B board in their demands for more community control, though also honored the picket lines.
-Anti-Semitic language by some members of the black community enabled whites to turn off entirely instead of listening to concerns of black community.
-The White and Black New York finally became a reality, as all other differences were pushed aside in favor of racial identity in New York, when the same situation had entirely different perceptions. Previously, there was a mirage that New York was run by pluralism.
Key Themes and Concepts
-Black nationalist groups took the “neighborhood schools” concept, which segregationists had used, in order to argue for “community schools”. White conservatives later used the same argument to informally segregate schools.
-Worker vs Boss dichotomies broke down as it turned towards whites versus blacks. However, it also put middle class values of individualistic competitiveness and wealth accusation onto whites and working class values of cooperation and personal relationships onto blacks, which obscured class differences within white and black communities.
-The African American Teachers Association generally sided with the OH-B board in their demands for more community control, though also honored the picket lines.
-Anti-Semitic language by some members of the black community enabled whites to turn off entirely instead of listening to concerns of black community.
-The White and Black New York finally became a reality, as all other differences were pushed aside in favor of racial identity in New York, when the same situation had entirely different perceptions. Previously, there was a mirage that New York was run by pluralism.
May 21, 2023
Amazing - if you want to understand modern race relations in New York, this is the book.
June 28, 2019
A lot of the early book and some of the latter part of the book were pedantic, giving more of a variety of people’s perspectives rather than trying to synthesize. It is written at times more as a dense history book than a cohesive narrative. But also it’s incredibly well researched and is such an interesting story. Highly recommend for anyone interested in NY history or race relations history
February 12, 2017
This is a book about a 1968 teacher's strike that looms large in my family's history, because it was the main catalyst that convinced my parents to move the family out of the city and to the suburbs. The strike was the result of a bitter power struggle between an African-American community-based school board in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, and the largely Jewish United Federation of Teachers. According to Podair it was a struggle with far-reaching consequences that changed the balance of power and the terms of interracial and interclass relations in the city for decades. The book appears to be well-researched and is basically good history. My main complaint is that the author pounds a bit too hard on his main theses. His synthesis is not badly argued, but overdone. It gets a bit repetitive, and sometimes I wish he would do a little more illustrating and a little less explaining or reiterating.
August 7, 2016
This book should be required reading for anyone jumping into the complicated politics of being a white (Jewish, middle class, your affiliations here) educator in New York City. Not only a great window into the history of the city's public schools, but the history of the city itself - the changing definitions of pluralism and opportunity, of community and prosperity. It's particularly interesting as a Jewish teacher trying to understand the ways other Jews have become allies to the black community in places like Ocean Hill/Brownsville, and the ways we have deeply failed in that role. Also good for beginners in union politics, political ethnography, and the spectrum of black liberation philosophies. Highly recommend.
January 31, 2017
Important for anyone who wants to understand the US school system
November 11, 2009
more footnotes please.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews