11. The 1968 Teachers’ Strike and the Implosion of Integration

What are we coming to?

Are we a stone on the ground

To be kicked and trampled

Without uttering a sound

Should we let things come as they are

And carry on blindly?

Denise Brewer, “No,” Grossley (JHS 8) Highlights, 1968

Late in the summer of 1968, a group of civic leaders from Rochdale Village sat down with Albert Shanker, the powerful president of the United Federation of Teachers (UFT). Since May of 1968, the UFT had been threatening a citywide strike over teacher transfers in the Ocean Hill–Brownsville community school district, one of three experimental districts in the city that gave the local school boards increased powers to organize and administer their local schools. The sniping between the UFT, whose membership was largely white and predominantly Jewish, and the overwhelmingly African American leadership of the Ocean Hill–Brownsville school district had grown increasingly mean-spirited. Positions had hardened, and a teacher’s strike in the fall seemed inevitable.1

As the new school year approached, there already were portents of how unpleasant and racially charged the strike might be. Civic leaders in Rochdale thought their community, with integrated schools in a microcosm of the forces at play in the city at large—blacks, Jews, liberals, radicals, conservatives, union members, and union foes—was particularly vulnerable to tensions the strike might unleash. The Rochdale civic leaders knew it was something of a long shot, but asked for a meeting with Shanker and begged for a dispensation: let UFT teachers continue to report to the schools in Rochdale, regardless of events elsewhere. This would show the city, they argued, that the UFT supported integrated education, and would also protect integration in Rochdale. Shanker was a member of the board of directors of the UHF, was familiar with and supportive of Rochdale’s experiment in integration.2 But he was an imperious man. (It is obligatory, when writing of the 1968 teachers’ strike, to quote Woody Allen’s line in Sleeper (1973) to the effect that the world was destroyed when “a man named Albert Shanker got hold of a nuclear warhead,” and let me get it out of the way quickly.) Shanker was loath to make exceptions for what he thought was a very just cause. He rejected the group’s suggestion. Cal Jones, who attended the meeting, said that Shanker’s response had been so negative that the meeting turned uncivil, and Jones’s own riposte to Shanker didn’t improve things. In the end, Shanker didn’t budge. No exceptions for Rochdale.3

Those who had spoken to Shanker proved prescient. Jerald Podair gave his superb account of the 1968 teachers’ strike the apt title The Strike That Changed New York. In the broad impact of the strike, perhaps no part of New York City was as radically transformed as Rochdale Village. Rochdale was the perfect test case for integration, an integrated community with integrated schools, achieved (as many moderate organizations demanded) without busing, and where (as some progressive and African American organizations insisted) black and white teachers lived and sent their children to school in the same community in which they taught.4

But if Rochdale was the perfect test case for integration, it was also the ideal example of what happens to an integrated community when the supporters of integration fall out, quarreling and feuding. After the teachers’ strike, integration was more or less stopped in its tracks in Rochdale. Within a few years, white families started to leave in large numbers. A broad consensus exists, across a wide ideological spectrum, that the watershed in the history of integration in Rochdale was the strike. For Eddie Abramson, a moderate Democrat and a strike supporter, “The teachers’ strike was the turning point, it was never the same after that.”5 Another strike supporter, Harold Ostroff, said that problems with the schools, starting with the 1968 strike, doomed integration in Rochdale.6 Strike opponent Herbert Plever said of the strike that “it precipitated the flight from Rochdale.”7 Another strike opponent, Anita Starr, said it “killed the community,” and for Cal Jones, one of the leaders of the Rochdale Village Negro Cultural Society, after the strike, “a lot of the togetherness of Rochdale started going downhill…. That’s when all of the ill feelings started surfacing.”8 The strike rent the fabric of the integrated community that Rochdale had created. It would not be repaired.

The chain of the events that led to the Ocean Hill–Brownsville controversy began inconspicuously. In April 1967 the Board of Education disclosed plans to create three experimental school districts in which the communities would elect an administrator who would “share in the full administration of the district” and provide for “greater community involvement.” The Brooklyn district was something of an afterthought, and received much less attention in the press than the two districts in Manhattan, which had already been sites of controversy.9 But between the summer of 1967 and November 1968 the Ocean Hill–Brownsville Community School Board, as it came to be known, tangled repeatedly with the UFT, and the two organizations would be at the heart of the most bitter educational dispute in the history of the city.

The push for decentralization or community control—two different but overlapping programs—had been gathering for several years.10 There had long been complaints that, in the words of Jerald Podair, “the culture of centralization may have been more entrenched in New York’s education system” than in any other arena of governance in the city.11 The local school boards, once largely vestigial, had been strengthened in the 1962–63 academic year, with the end of enhancing citizen participation in school affairs.12 Mayor Lindsay and his budget experts thought that by disaggregating the gargantuan million-pupil school district they could squeeze additional funding from Albany.13 White groups calling for control of “neighborhood schools,” such as Parents and Taxpayers (PAT), wanted more localism, and this call was increasingly echoed by minority groups who wanted the same in their neighborhoods.14 By 1966 it was clear to Lindsay that something dramatic had to be done about the public schools; minority performance continued to languish, minority anger at the status quo was mounting, and integration as a strategy was failing.15 In this, Lindsay was joined by large segments of the business community and prominent civic organizations like the New York Urban Coalition and the Ford Foundation, who would become major supporters of New York City’s experiment in community control.16 The standard cliché is that Lindsay and his elite supporters of community control were “limousine liberals,” who formed a cynical misalliance of “wealthy whites and angry blacks” against the middle classes.17 But even absent Lindsay’s frequent tactical maladroitness, it is not clear what realistic alternatives to community control existed, since neither poor, nor middling, nor wealthy whites really wanted to make sacrifices to end the segregation of New York City’s public schools. Empowering minorities in their own neighborhoods was one of the few available options.18

And in the beginning at least, Lindsay and the Board of Education’s efforts at community control had the support (or at least the nonopposition) of the major groups that mattered in school policy. The UFT gave the policy qualified support, because they thought they could use it to get more teachers and teachers aides in the demonstration districts.19 It had the strong support of the minority community, and the initial indifference of even conservative whites, who thought it a salutary retreat from a policy of “coerced integration.”

But for all that, community control was controversial from the beginning. Shanker and the UFT were at best lukewarm, in part because they worried that hard-fought and newly won protections against what they saw as the arbitrary prerogative of supervisors to promote or transfer teachers would be eroded, and community control might open the possibility of hiring or promoting teachers who weren’t on the regular civil service lists (which usually required competitive examinations for promotion); they also wondered about the consequences of the balkanization of the city’s schools, now that the UFT was on its way to becoming as centralized and as powerful a bureaucracy as the Board of Education itself.20 And the experience at East Harlem’s IS 201, in the first experimental school district, where from its opening in the fall of 1966 local parent and neighborhood groups demanded the firing of the new white, Jewish principal, and made his life sufficiently miserable that he asked for a transfer before the end of the school year, was for many a tocsin.21

However, turmoil in the Ocean Hill–Brownsville experimental school district would soon dwarf that of IS 201. By the summer of 1967 the planning council for the Ocean Hill–Brownsville School Board had selected as unit administrator Rhody McCoy (previously an acting principal at a school in Manhattan), and had held elections for the local school. When McCoy went off existing eligibility lists (on which 99 percent of the candidates were white) to find principals for five schools with vacancies, the UFT sued to challenge the validity of McCoy’s own position as well as his appointments. (By far McCoy’s most controversial selection was the former assistant principal Herman Ferguson, the hero of the 1963 Rochdale demonstrations, by this time under indictment for conspiracy to assassinate Roy Wilkins and Whitney Young.) This was the first of many increasingly pitched and rancorous conflicts during the 1967–68 school year, which culminated on May 19, 1968, when nineteen teachers (including seven assistant principals), all members and supporters of the UFT, received letters from McCoy stating they had been terminated.22 The UFT pulled almost all its 350 members from the district almost immediately. The issue was not resolved by the end of the school year, and Shanker threatened a citywide teacher’s strike (the second in two years) if the fired teachers were not reinstated. Despite extensive negotiations (though generally through third parties) the two sides hardened their positions over the summer, and when school was scheduled to start on Sept 9, 1968, the strike was on.23

What became known as the teachers’ strike was actually three separate strikes. The first lasted only two days (September 9 and 10) but the settlement fell apart almost immediately, and it resumed on September 11, lasting until September 30. After a tense two-week interregnum, the third, longest, and bitterest of the strikes commenced on October 11, and lasted until November 17. In all, the three strikes covered ten weeks and thirty-seven instructional days. By its end, with mounting charges and countercharges of racism and anti-Semitism, it became the rawest confrontation over race in twentieth-century New York City.24

The teachers’ strike in the end was not limited to the particulars of the dispute in Ocean Hill–Brownsville school district, nor, when it became a citywide strike, was it confined to central Brooklyn. The witches’ brew that became the Ocean Hill–Brownsville controversy overflowed its cauldron onto almost every neighborhood in the city. And the consequences of the strike in the Rochdale Village microcosm were much the same as those in the macrocosm of New York City: bitterness, divisiveness, and debilitation. The issues of the strike were formidable in their complexity, and many could see merit and find fault with the stances of both sides. But as Cal Jones, president of the Rochdale Village Negro Cultural Society, remarked, there was no place for nuance or neutrality: “You had to choose sides, you could not be in the middle.”25 In many ways, the success of integration in Rochdale had been predicated on creating a broad middle position in favor of integration, blending the ideas of moderates, liberals, and radicals, a willingness to compromise, the presumption of good intentions, and in the African American theologian Howard Thurman’s phrase, “the search for common ground.” For many, during and after the strike, this became impossible.26 Severing the sinews of community like a butcher’s knife, the teachers’ strike was a brutal dichotomizer.

What gave the 1968 teachers’ strike its terrible significance was its ability to magnify real, but in the end relatively small, differences into unbridgeable chasms. It has been tempting for commentators to reduce the strike to a battle between eternally warring opposites: liberalism versus radicalism, integration versus separatism, “white values” versus “black values,” or what have you, in ways that make the issues that led to the strike seem far too clear and obvious.27 To be sure, all these polarities were present during the strike. There were radicals and extremists (on both sides), but in the broader scope of things, their influence, if noisy and newsworthy, was ultimately rather ephemeral. There certainly were organizations and individuals involved in the opposition to the strike who actively argued that white teachers basically had no business in classrooms with black students, and this perspective would become more popular as a result of the strike (and spawn a ferocious white backlash against minority parental involvement in the public schools).28 I remember my mom telling me during the strike, with a laugh, that the mother of a school chum of mine had called to tell her that the Communists were behind the strike opponents. But it is easy to give these positions too much weight as factors that led to the strike and caused so many, on both sides, to take the issues so seriously and emotionally. Certainly in Rochdale few blacks and no whites who opposed the strike did so in the name of black separatism. The strike was waged between two sides that passionately believed in the continuing importance of integration, and who both legitimately felt, by their own lights, that they were fighting to realize the promise of genuine integration in the city’s schools.

The 1967–68 school year was in many ways a harbinger of the problems in the year to come. In September of 1967, the New York City public schools opened with a two-week teachers’ strike, that paled in comparison with the Sturm und Drang of the 1968 strike, but nonetheless served as its precursor. At the newly opened IS 72 in Rochdale, the strike was very effective, with only three of seventy-six teachers reporting for work. As IS 72’s new principal, Stanley H. Bloch, acknowledged, the new school had “gotten off to a bad start.”29 Things would remain off balance, at IS 72 and Rochdale’s other schools, for the remainder of the school year.

The 1967 strike, like the 1968 strike, revolved around race, especially the demand by the UFT that the Board of Education make it easier for teachers to expel the so-called “disruptive child” from their classrooms, which was seen by some as an effort to unfairly target black students as discipline risks, an attempt to blame the victims of the school system for its failures.30 The arrayed forces resembled those that later emerged during the 1968 strike. William H. Booth, the former head of the Jamaica branch of the NAACP, now the city’s commissioner of human rights, complained that the UFT had used “schoolchildren as pawns” in the walkout, and that in general the union had not “supported the Negro Community in trying to get better education for their children.” This led to a call by Al Shanker for Lindsay to remove Booth from his office “since he is obviously anti-labor.” The Workman’s Circle, a Jewish organization of moderate socialist politics and a sponsor of the UHF, complained that “there has been an injection of Anti-Semitism against a trade union with an exemplary record of fighting for human rights.”31 Those who were surprised by the way the school strike of 1968 detonated racial and ethnic tensions had not been paying attention to the city’s school politics.

And then, on April 4, 1968, came the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Everyone who was in Rochdale at the time remembers just where they were when they heard about it (I was at home, in the evening, reading Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood) and what happened in the days that followed. School was foolishly not canceled the next day, and in IS 72 and JHS 8, there was a near complete breakdown of discipline; white students were assaulted in the halls, set upon by gangs of black children. At IS 72 students were assaulted and stuck with pins. (Students from Rochdale, like myself, who has started at JHS 8, finished their intermediate school education at JHS 8 in 1967–68.) At JHS 8 chairs, basketballs, chains, and fists were flung at students, white students huddled together in the cafeteria, frightened and cowering. After a few periods of mayhem in the classrooms and hallways, classes were canceled, and special buses were sent to take Rochdale students home from JHS 8. (Students were attacked on the way to the buses.) As someone who was at JHS 8 has said, “I don’t think anyone who wasn’t there could ever believe or conceive of what it was like to be there for that one day.”32

However, there was not a complete breakdown of the interracial cooperation and friendship that integration at JHS 8 had fostered and created, and one person argued that “there was an undercurrent of Martin Luther King’s dream going on amid the chaos.”33 One woman remembers that as a student at JHS 8 she was “good friends with Denise Brewer [niece of Guy Brewer, the powerful Democratic district leader] and Stephanie Conway. They were wonderful people who just happened to be rough, tough, and tall, and the right skin color at the time. They insisted on being my bodyguards that morning and didn’t let me go anywhere without them. They hooked arms with mine as we walked down the hall. At one point in the stairwell this little punk jumped up and hit me hard on the head and Denise picked him up by the collar and threatened to throw him down the stairs if he ever looked cross-eyed at me again.” Another woman remembers “sitting around in homeroom (sometime between when they canceled classes and when the buses came to get us) with everyone, black and white, talking about how stupid this all was, and how no one who had been paying attention to King’s message could do such things in his name.”34 But everyone, black and white, got a glimpse of the simmering racial rage, just below the surface, that was part of going to school or living in New York City in the late 1960s, ready to explode through any open fissure, and many students and their parents questioned whether integrated education could work, or was really worth the effort. To punctuate this sense of hopelessness, two months later Sen. Robert F. Kennedy was murdered. The Rochdale Village Democratic Club had been among the earliest New York supporters of his controversial presidential bid, and to show his thanks, he had planned to speak at IS 72 during his June 8 visit to Rochdale. As it happened, June 8 was the day before his funeral at St. Patrick’s Cathedral.35

The longer-lasting problem caused by the opening of IS 72 had already roiled southeastern Queens for several years. All of Rochdale’s students were slated for the new school, which would result in JHS 8 reverting to its former all-black status.36 Most parents in Rochdale were delighted with the prospect of an intermediate school opening in the cooperative, and if they felt somewhat badly about the end of integration at JHS 8, most felt it was out of their hands. After all, the new school would also be integrated. Many felt that it was the turn of the white neighborhoods north of Hillside Avenue to do their bit for integration in South Jamaica. Eddie Abramson wrote in September 1966 that the Board of Education “should stand up to the Jamaica communities [and force their children to go to JHS 8] the way it stood up to Rochdale [when it forced our children to go to JHS 8].”37 However, a coalition of PTAs in South Jamaica, Parents for Educational Progress (PEP), with many supporters in Rochdale, proposed new feeder patterns that would have kept JHS 8 integrated. (The proposal would have reserved IS 72 exclusively for the fifth and sixth grades, with Rochdale students continuing to be bused to JHS 8 for seventh and eighth grades.) Juliette Burnett, a leader of PEP, in the spring of 1967 scored the Board of Education for their “lack of courage, foresight, and sound planning” and that “if there is any place in the City of New York where integration can succeed, it is here in Queens. It is here that the good faith, the courage, the honor of the educational system of the great city of New York will stand or fail.”38

Rochdale was divided by the proposals to pair IS 72 and JHS 8. At a large meeting of parent and civic groups at a local high school in February 1967 the pairing patterns were supported by, in addition to PTAs from South Jamaica, the Rochdale Village Civic Association and the Rochdale Village chapter of the American Jewish Congress.39 PEP argued that “contrary to popular belief, PS 30 and 80, which are located in Rochdale Village, are not Rochdale schools, they are community schools” and they needed to be used “for the good of the entire community.” However there were many in Rochdale not pleased by the pairing proposal; at a meeting of the local school board in January 1966, Inside Rochdale reported that most of the white parents in attendance were opposed.40 This was the position of Inside Rochdale itself. In February 1967 Abramson wrote against an “enforced integrated school policy,” and offered the opinion that “if I were a black parent, I would feel resentment in my heart at forced integration,” which would lead to a “wall of angry silence in a classroom of mixed emotions.” Against forced integration, Abramson argued that “integration must be natural” as it was in Rochdale, where living in an integrated community with integrated schools was a matter of choice. (However, “natural integration” could be used by both sides, and the African American head of the PTA at PS 30, Mary Redic, supported the idea, arguing that “natural integration,” an idea beloved by many in Rochdale, required that students living in Rochdale and in the adjacent surrounding area attend the same intermediate school.)41 Abramson argued that “families in Rochdale have a perfect right to protest about sending their children to any public or intermediate school” other than those in Rochdale, and that the “utter frustration” of many Rochdale parents over possible busing “could lead to real bitterness.”42 In the end the pairing proposal was shelved, and an attempt to get students from white neighborhoods north of Hillside Avenue to attend JHS 8 was ended by a threat of a boycott, and by the fall of 1968, JHS 8 had lost almost all its white students. The two sides, with many white parents on one side, and the Rochdale Village chapter of the American Jewish Congress, the Jamaica branch of the NAACP, and the office of Mayor Lindsay on the other, would reemerge a few months later, as the events of the 1968 teachers’ strike unfolded.43

In the months before the strike, in Rochdale, as elsewhere in the city, there was a slow, deliberate choosing up of sides. Moderate democrats, like Eddie Abramson, were on the fence about school decentralization. Writing in Inside Rochdale in April 1968, he on the one hand recognized “the need to decentralize the power of the Board of Education,” but had “some reservations” about giving too much power on matters such as curriculum to “non-professionals.”44 Abramson, his co–district leader, Juanita Watkins, and most of the Rochdale Village Regular Democrats supported the union during the strike. New York City’s unions were nearly unanimous in their support of the strike, and many trade union members and officials began from a presumption of support for the UFT’s position. This included many black trade unionists, who made up a large part of Rochdale’s black population.45 The most prominent black union official living in Rochdale, Stanley Hill, who would later become president of the powerful municipal employees union, DC 37, was either neutral or supported the strike.46

However, the bulk of Rochdale’s black residents opposed the strike. The Rochdale Negro Cultural Society (and the American Jewish Congress), shortly before the strike commenced, sponsored a forum at the Rochdale Village Community Center, drawing a near capacity crowd to hear the Reverend C. Herbert Oliver, the chair of the Ocean Hill–Brownsville Community School Board, and its administrator Rhody McCoy. According to Cal Jones, they faced tough questions from an interracial audience, and explained, to Jones’s satisfaction, that they were opposing the UFT to uphold the right of black parents and children to chart their own destinies, not out of an unthinking hostility to whites or opposition to unions.47

And if most whites in Rochdale supported the UFT, there were many whites in Rochdale who took the other side, and felt that decentralization needed to be given a chance, and that if it was having a difficult birth, it ought not to be strangled in the crib. Among them were many like Sue Raskin, who had her criticisms of the Ocean Hill–Brownsville school district for its actions toward UFT teachers, but felt the problems should have been resolved within Ocean Hill–Brownsville, and did not require a citywide teachers’ strike.48 The liberals who opposed and supported the strike were torn by two conflicting imperatives; support of unions, and support of blacks and their struggle for civil rights. For many it was easier to raise the argument from the knotty and contested facts of the actual dispute into statements of general principle. For liberals who supported the strike, the main issue was one of job security and the right not to be fired arbitrarily. For liberals on the other side, the labor issues were irrelevant or being misconstrued, and the real issue was the struggle, as an advertisement in the New York Times claimed at the height of the strike, between black and minority parents and “the vested interests which fought attempts to integrate the schools [and which] are now fighting community control.”49

The same sides contended among liberals in Rochdale, often warring within the breasts of those undecided and uncertain. Rochdale was of course a bastion of union sentiment, built by a union-backed organization, and with many residents who were union members. For those raised in the labor movement, there was nothing more sacrosanct than a picket line, and no surer or faster road to perdition than to cross one. But many liberals found themselves committing this ultimate transgression (including, for teachers, crossing a picket line set up by their own union). Anita Starr, a teacher at IS 72, stayed out of the school for the first two days, but when she realized that “white people were outside and black people were inside, this would not work, and I got back in again.” Her husband remained ambivalent, and told her, “So now I am sleeping with a scab.”50 Many blacks in Rochdale were closely watching the actions of their white allies in integration struggles past. During the strike Cal Jones asked for an audience with teachers from PS 80, many of whom lived in Rochdale, asking them to cross the picket lines, arguing “Here’s a chance for us to do something good. It’s a community you live in and teach in. Don’t allow the strike to put you against your own community.” This attitude, either you’re with us or against us, was, Jones felt, “how those in the black community saw it.”51 Herb Plever, with a long history as a union activist, after some agonizing opposed the strike; he felt that “the school strike wound up with the entire black community being totally opposed to the closing of the schools, and it wasn’t an anti-union sentiment as much as a racial sentiment, and we were in a bind, pro-union and union organizers, and we didn’t know how to handle it.” He concluded that to keep the strike from pulling apart Rochdale, the UFT “had to maintain some contact and rapport with the black community,” but when this didn’t happen, Plever felt he had to make some sort of gesture, and with an interracial group of activists, “We went into the schools and re-opened them…to give support to a sense of frustration of the black community.”52 As far as can be determined, the teacher’s strike divided Rochdale more or less in half, with blacks and left-liberal whites on one side, and more moderate whites on the other. In a poll in Inside Rochdale in November 1968, of 1,002 responses, 530 supported decentralization, while 472 opposed it.53

One of the aspects that made the strike so contentious in Rochdale was that the cooperative’s two elementary schools and intermediate school remained open throughout the strike, so every day the schools had both pickets and strike breakers, glaring at each other. Whether or not a school opened depended on parental involvement, whether there were students in sufficient numbers to warrant an opening, and sufficient teachers and supervisory personnel. Not surprisingly, schools tended to stay open only in areas with large minority enrollments. (In southeastern and southern Queens, forty schools stayed open, while in northern Queens, only a single school opened.)54

Both sides of the strike tried to hold classes, strike opponents in the school buildings, strike supporters in “freedom schools” held elsewhere. In the three schools in Rochdale about fifty teachers, somewhere between a quarter and a third of the teachers, crossed the picket lines, to serve a combined enrollment of about 1,000 irregularly attending students.55 Cal Jones went around the city, trying to get teachers to staff the temporary school at PS 80, and claimed that “education was better than it ever had been; we had volunteers teaching second graders Spanish and French.” Almost all the teachers in the regular schools were black, and although a few white teachers did cross the picket lines, they were exceptions, and at most, as Cal Jones remembers it, there were “one or two white teachers.”56 The UFT’s alternative schools were held in local synagogues and churches, and though there were black teachers, most of the teachers and students were white. These makeshift classrooms were not free of racial tensions. Anita Starr, a teacher who had crossed the picket lines, sent her children to PS 80, but “they were not treated nicely by the black teachers who were there, so they went to a freedom school, and [PS 80] became entirely black kids.” She remembers that, when she crossed the picket line, not every black teacher was happy to see her.57 Herb Plever recalls that “there were rumors about black teachers not being very nice to white students” in some of the antistrike classrooms, and rumors that white parents were sometimes not at all happy to see black teachers in UFT freedom schools. At best the temporary schools were for both sides of the strike a stopgap.58

Opening a school during the strike, and keeping it open, involved a good deal of work. Because the custodians’ union supported the strike, the entrances were shuttered at most schools. At PS 80 strike opponents found a locksmith to open the doors, and Cal Jones persuaded a retired administrator (one of his old teachers from Harlem) to come to Rochdale, and PS 80 remained open for the duration of the strike. But because of the possibility that administrators supporting the strike would try to reclose the school, parents stayed in some schools twenty-four hours a day.59 The parents of Francesca Spero stayed in PS 30 during the strike. She told me, “My parents were strong union people, but they were sleeping in the schools to keep the schools open. I remember a tremendous sense of camaraderie in the school and the ability to keep the school open—we ran back and forth with our little wagons, bringing meals to people camping out in the schools.”60

But memories and feelings of solidarity with colleagues were balanced with anger and fear toward those on the other side. Strike opponent Cal Jones said, “We were going into the schools, and some of my neighbors who I had worked with on the House Congress were on the picket line blocking kids from getting into school.” In an effort to clear out the parents who were staying overnight, some right-wing groups made bomb threats to the Rochdale school buildings. Uninvited but tolerated by those in the buildings, on some occasions the Black Panthers and the Five Percenters (a Nation of Islam offshoot with a reputation for violence) patrolled the school grounds at night.61

Kenneth Tewel, who was UFT chapter chairman at Springfield Gardens High School, the high school the majority of Rochdale students attended, remembers the sort of racial bitterness the strike engendered. “We were upset that forty teachers [out of two hundred] went in, primarily minority, but some very liberal whites. They were led by Robert Couche, a guidance counselor and president of the Jamaica branch of the NAACP. They were upset that with forty teachers coming into the school, no kids showed up; they kept pushing for students to come in, we kept pushing for the teachers to get out of the school.” Tewel and the strikers tried to get to teachers crossing the picket line (almost all of whom were UFT members) by appealing to their history as union members, and there were numerous private meetings and efforts at moral suasion. When this failed, tactics got nastier. Strike opponents picketed Tewel’s house in a racially mixed part of Laurelton, and his neighbors received letters informing them he was an enemy of the black community. In turn, white teachers (almost all of them Jewish) who crossed the picket lines found their houses picketed, and letters were sent to their synagogues. As Tewel said, “I never realized how fragile Black-Jewish relations were, how much hostility lay underneath, and how quickly they could be torn apart. The passion of the dispute just amazed me.”62 For Cal Jones, the teachers’ strike in Rochdale was simply “a state of war.”63

Finally, in mid-November, the strike stumbled to its equivocal end, with nothing really resolved, and the long hot autumn, the summer vacation that almost lasted to Thanksgiving, was over. The final solution to the strike was thrashed out at Gracie Mansion, with most observers reckoning Al Shanker and the UFT as the sullen victors. (Shanker and his allies in Albany later saw to it that community control would survive only in a much-weakened form.) Thereafter, students and teachers trudged back to the classrooms, and people who had spent the better part of three months demonstrating, plotting, and screaming against one another, now were faced with the prospects of picking up the pieces and trying to get along. This task was obviously most difficult in interracial neighborhoods like Rochdale, split in two by the strike. Herb Plever was not the only person who found that “it was so split after the strike, there was such anger, there were friends of ours who wouldn’t speak to us.”64

The unpleasantness and acrimony left by the strike could be dealt with in two ways. One was to try to minimize the damage, to argue that integration in Rochdale was basically healthy, to let, as much as possible, bygones be bygones, and accentuate the positive in Rochdale as an integrated community. If this was sometimes accompanied by varying degrees of wishful thinking, it also was a positive way forward, and in truth, race did not trump all other concerns in Rochdale. The internal politics in the cooperative had not been fundamentally changed by the strike, and one would see in Rochdale, for many years after the 1968 strike, broad interracial coalitions tackling the major issues of local concern such as carrying-charge increases.

The other approach was to take the strike settlement as a temporary truce, and find new ways and venues of continuing to fight out the issues, particularly the racial issues that had dominated the strike, and there were many who “forgot nothing and learned nothing” from the strike other than how to intensify their sense of grievance. Both approaches could be found in Rochdale. In some ways the immediate poststrike impact was not that palpable, and events at the cooperative continued much as before. But the real impact of the strike on the cooperative was gradual and slowly cumulative. It would take several years before Rochdale residents understood just how profound the divisions created by the strike really were.

Most Rochdale residents remained unswervingly and unapologetically liberal in their politics. That November in the presidential election, held as the strike was ending, Rochdale’s election district went 8 to 1 for Hubert Humphrey over Richard Nixon, which was probably more a repudiation of Nixon than an enthusiastic endorsement of Humphrey.65 In the fall of 1969 Mayor Lindsay, in his successful reelection campaign, found a far warmer reception in Rochdale than in many other heavily Jewish areas of Queens, and an account of his campaign visit to Rochdale notes “He was frequently interrupted during his brief remarks by enthusiastic applause.”66

Just as the strike was ending, in November 1968, a new organization was founded in Rochdale, Neighbors for Understanding, which had as its purpose trying “to cut down on anti-Semitism and anti-Negro feeling.” The organization, largely based in Rochdale, saw the strike as a warning, that Rochdale had to “overcome the isolationist attitude which prevails in the co-op and the resulting suspicion and resentment of the surrounding areas.” One of the founders said that it was necessary, “for the cooperative and neighborhood to work together if we’re going to survive.” At the organization’s first meeting, some of the tensions of the strike were apparent, as some of the blacks doubted the sincerity of the whites, but the organization’s founders insisted that interracial cooperation was not an effort at feel-good hand-holding, and that “the white people weren’t there for altruistic reasons or because they felt guilty,” but because whites and blacks “need each other if our community is to remain livable.” In February of 1969 Inside Rochdale ran a story that challenged “newspaper and television accounts of the deterioration between black and Jewish communities.” A black resident of Rochdale said, “I don’t think there’s any hate around here. I don’t mean it’s all Love thy Neighbor but I get along fine…. There’s very little of that ‘burn, baby, burn’ feeling around here.”67

But against this was a new sense of racial solidarity and an effort to identify what might be called “race traitors” or appeasers. As we have seen in Kenneth Tewel’s description of the strike at Springfield Gardens High School, one of the most distressing aspects of the strike was both sides targeting apparent racial outliers; strike supporters living in racially mixed neighborhoods, or Jewish teachers who crossed the picket lines. White liberals who opposed the strike found themselves questioned on both sides. Sue Raskin comments that in the strike aftermath, “strike supporters in Rochdale Village didn’t go after black parents, it was white parents and teachers who had opposed the strike who they never forgave.” For some in Rochdale synagogues, Raskin would forever be the woman who “cared more about black children than white children.”68 When Anita Starr became the first white teacher to cross the picket line at IS 72, she received a visit at home from the principal, Stanley Bloch, who advised her to “look in the mirror” before deciding what to do. (That is, remember she was white and not black.) On the other hand, Starr found in the aftermath of the strike, despite her strike-breaking, that she was distrusted by many black parents and colleagues.69 The white left-liberals, squeezed on both sides, found themselves increasingly unable to influence educational policy.

It was not merely white liberals who were casualties of the strike, as can be seen in the changing fortunes in the career of William Booth, the city’s human rights commissioner and the former chairman of the Jamaica branch of the NAACP, an epitome of the black liberal. Booth’s support of decentralization brought him into increasing conflict with Jewish groups, who claimed Booth had a “singular insensitivity to anti-Semitic incidents.” He would write bitterly of going to meetings in predominantly white and Jewish areas of Queens during the 1968 strike, for instance in the predominantly Jewish neighborhood of Bayside, and see people offering him Nazi salutes, calling him “Black Hitler” and his associates on the Human Rights Commission “Nigger Lovers.”70 The next year Lindsay kicked Booth upstairs by naming him a criminal court judge, saying (in a charge Booth strenuously disputed) that Booth could have done a “better job” in dealing with the anti-Semitism that surfaced during the school strike.71

For many black and Jewish groups, the late 1960s was a time of pulling away from interracial coalitions. Perhaps this was because, as Jerald Podair has suggested, for many whites, the strike represented a defense of their own “middle class values,” against those who would traduce them. For many blacks, the fight against the UFT became connected with the need to define and defend a sense of “authentic blackness” against those who would deny its uniqueness, and for middle class blacks this often involved affirming a sense of solidarity with poorer and less advantaged blacks.72 But in many ways the dichotomous identity politics Podair describes was more a consequence of the tension provoked by the strike, rather than its cause, filling the vacuum created by the collapse of the ideals of integration. This was certainly the case for most of the middle class blacks and whites who lived in Rochdale.

Nonetheless, in South Jamaica even before the strike there was a growing impatience with white teachers and administrators. In the summer of 1967, in PS 40 in South Jamaica (near JHS 8) some black parents and the local chair of Queens CORE complained that “it’s a poorly run school…. Many white parents are complaining that some white teachers in the school are not interested in the children. Pupils have complained that teachers have called them ‘black monkeys’ and ‘black apes’ and used other racial epithets,” and she demanded the dismissal of the white, Jewish principal. The Jamaica branch of the NAACP defended the principal, but the outcry was a harbinger of things to come after the strike, when the value of integration and the white presence in the classroom was increasingly questioned.73

With this came a new political militancy. The Black Panthers had a strong chapter in South Jamaica, with many members from Rochdale, including white fellow travelers. By 1968 the Panthers were beginning to rival the NAACP as the most visible African American organization in southeastern Queens, selling their newspapers, setting up free breakfast programs and other community services, and engaging in paramilitary training. (In a sign of generational shift, the daughter of William Booth, longtime leader of the Jamaica NAACP branch, was an active member of the South Jamaica Panther chapter.) Herman Ferguson, the hero of the Rochdale demonstrations in 1963, and an assistant principal at PS 40 in South Jamaica, was a leader of the Revolutionary Action Movement and the Republic of New Afrika and functioned as a sort of senior advisor on revolutionary strategy for South Jamaican groups like the Panthers.74

Cal Jones argued it was less black politics in Rochdale itself than in South Jamaica that frightened some of Rochdale’s whites, a view seconded by Herb Plever: “The black power movement was accentuating the fear of whites in Rochdale, surrounded by a black community.”75 Sue Raskin claims that interracial meetings on educational topics became more difficult after the strike; provocateurs made deliberately inflammatory statements, and some tried to persuade white Rochdalers to butt out of South Jamaican educational affairs.76 This worked the other way as well. For Cal Jones, the strike shattered “the dream that having the sort of place we had when we moved there. It became clearer that it wouldn’t be that kind of community, and the strike brought out the worst. We saw that people in Rochdale supported a union that dissed us rather than supported us.”77

The respective worries of blacks and Jews about the other community of course long predated the 1968 teachers’ strike. Jewish concerns about black anti-Semitism were of long standing, and Jews were increasingly worried about black power and other manifestations of black radicalism from the mid-1960s on.78 In March 1966, a thousand people attended a meeting cosponsored by the local chapter of the American Jewish Congress and the Rochdale Village Negro Cultural Society, on “The Myths That Surround Us: The Three R’s: Race, Religion, and Reason,” at the Rochdale Village Community Center, as a means of “confronting the crisis in Negro-Jewish relations.” One of the main speakers, James Farmer, who had just resigned as national leader of CORE, acknowledged that antiwhite sentiment was on the rise among blacks, and Farmer was prepared to concede that the same was true for anti-Semitism, but cautioned that the perception of black anti-Semitism was often sensationalized, the result of “press misinterpretation of the alleged excesses of the Negro Revolution.” He argued for the continuing importance and relevance of the black-Jewish alliance, but cautioned that self-assertion can be awkward; he wanted his listeners to try to have “a sympathetic understanding of Negro efforts to end self-rejection and self-repudiation,” concluding his talk with Rabbi Hillel’s famous statement from the Pirkei Avot (the Mishnah tractate known as “The Ethics of the Fathers”): “If I am not for myself, then who am I for? And if not now, when?”79 However, most of those in the audience, which was three-quarters white, were in- terested in querying the black speakers, demanding to know, “if Negro leaders countenanced the storing of dynamite by advocates of black power,” and whether they would “condemn the racist incitements of inflammatory black supremacists.” Despite a large reservoir of goodwill, as in so many places in the late 1960s where similar discussions were held, blacks and Jews tended to talk past each other, blacks not wanting to be confined by what the civil rights movement had been, and Jews very worried about what the civil rights movement was becoming.80

By 1967 white Rochdale measured successful integration by how many black radicals they could keep out of the mix. Typical was the comment by Bernard Seeman in Inside Rochdale in September 1967, that Rochdale was still “a showplace for our city and nation to show that responsible integration can work.” But this would only continue if the “host of new extremist ‘leaders’” were kept from influencing the debate in Rochdale.81

At the same time the dominant white ethnic group in Rochdale, the Jews, were riding a crest of ethnic pride. On June 3, 1967, when I was bar mitzvahed at Rochdale’s Reform Temple Beth Am, Israel was spending one last, tense day under the 1949 armistice lines. The next day the Six-Day War broke out. If the run-up to the war was an occasion for great nervousness on the part of Rochdale’s Jews, its conclusion brought immense pride, celebrated in a standing room only meeting held in Rochdale’s community center. The speakers included a veteran of Israel’s War of Independence, the father of one of my classmates, whose words, according to Inside Rochdale, reduced the great audience to silence. He spoke “in a voice mixed with anguish and fear of the sufferings, the hopes and the determinations of the Jewish people for a homeland.” For many the Six-Day War created a new image of Jewish pride and demonstrated a new image of Jewish toughness; they refused to be pushed around and would defend what was rightfully theirs. There were many who thought that Jews in southeastern Queens, as much as those in the Middle East, needed to know how to identify and define opponents, and much like Israel, learn to preemptively defend themselves, and send them running.82

In October 1968, during the ongoing teachers’ strike, the Traditional Synagogue of Rochdale (Orthodox) hired a new rabbi, Meir Kahane, a person who would come to personify the new cult of Jewish toughness (and eventually become the Pied Piper of Jewish reaction on two continents). To some extent the role he would play in Israeli politics in the 1970s and 1980s was learned on the picket lines of Rochdale Village, though to be sure, he was far from a political innocent before coming to Rochdale; he had a long history of involvement in right-wing politics, and had published extensively on the need for Jews to support the war in Vietnam, and his reputation, as Eddie Abramson said, “of being to the right of George Wallace,” preceded him.83 (A forum in February 1969 at the Rochdale Community Center, sponsored by the left-liberal American Jewish Congress on “Responses to the Current Expressions of Anti-Semitism,” which included Kahane, was doubtless quite lively.)84 When he was appointed rabbi to the Rochdale congregation, Kahane was living in Laurelton, a community near Rochdale in southeastern Queens, predominantly Jewish, but by the mid-1960s, already beginning the rapid change that within a few years would make it an all-black neighborhood. He had founded his signature organization, the Jewish Defense League (JDL), in the spring of 1968, without much fanfare. But aided by the hurly-burly of the teachers’ strike, the JDL began to capture ever greater media attention. Finding it inconvenient to live in Laurelton and being an Orthodox rabbi at a three-mile remove from his congregation (and having to walk the distance twice on Shabbat) he moved with his family to Rochdale in the fall of 1968.85

Rochdale became a fertile recruiting ground for the JDL, and young Jewish teenagers were the ideal candidates. Most of us heard the pitch: Aren’t you tired of being beaten up or intimidated by blacks? Don’t you want to learn how to fight back? Political issues, though real enough, lurked in the background; the basic appeal was to join the Jets, before the next rumble with the Sharks.86 Most of us rejected the call of the JDL; but even those who (like me) had strong ideological objections to Kahane’s right-wing politics, understood the appeal of its rejection of the Diaspora tradition of Jewish pusillanimity. At the time, the JDL was not centrally concerned with trying to expel Palestinians from the West Bank, or even the defense of Soviet Jewry. It was about Jews defending themselves, individually and collectively, from blacks, whom JDL members thought were trying to take over their neighborhoods, and take over their schools.

It is not clear how active the JDL was in confrontations at Rochdale’s schools during the strike, but they would emerge in the public consciousness shortly thereafter, largely because of unfinished business the strike left behind. One of the first demonstrations that brought the JDL major media attention took place in Rochdale, on January 14, 1969, when Leslie Campbell, one of the leaders of the African Teachers’ Association in Ocean Hill–Brownsville, was among several people invited to speak at PS 30 in Rochdale, probably by the Rochdale Village Negro Cultural Society. Campbell (who later adopted the name Jitu Weusi) had in December 1968 achieved considerable notoriety by reading a vilely anti-Semitic poem by a student at an Ocean Hill–Brownsville school on a left-wing radio program.87 At a demonstration against the event at PS 30, which made the front page of the Long Island Press, the JDL appeared with placards bearing slogans such as “Schwerner and Goodman Didn’t Die for This” (as the JDL would evolve, they would leave behind tributes to Jewish civil rights martyrs) and “Afro-American Racist Teachers Must Go!” JDL members heckled the speakers, and by some accounts, prevented them from speaking.88

Kahane did not stay in Rochdale very long—only a year. He and the Traditional Synagogue were not a very good fit. Some members wearied of the controversy that trailed him wherever he went, and the unwanted attention he brought the congregation. Because of threats, razor wire soon wreathed the shul, making it look more like an auto parts store in a bad neighborhood than a house of worship. (An elderly and devoutly Orthodox member of the congregation who lived on our floor complained that Kahane had brought “too much monkey business” to the shul, and left for the Conservative synagogue.) By the fall of 1969, as the JDL became more and more of a full-time job, the Traditional Synagogue grew tired of having a rabbi who was increasingly occupied elsewhere. And as Kahane became more controversial, particularly on racial matters, he became worried about living in an interracial cooperative, and he moved out and onto bigger stages.89

But if the JDL and the views they represented were never a dominant perspective in Rochdale, they were not without their adherents. It is true an article in Inside Rochdale in August 1970, “Jewish Defense League Finds Few Backers,” found “scant sympathy for the JDL.” One black teenager interviewed for the article lumped the JDL together with all the other indignities he had suffered at the hands of white America, including the questions of the interviewer: “[The JDL] are just one more problem you people have created for me. I’ll face them like I’m facing you.” A white teenager sympathized with the problems whites faced living in a black neighborhood, and the problems that blacks faced in white America, “But as for the JDL, man, they’re sick.” The reporter also interviewed a Jewish shopkeeper in Rochdale who said, “It’s about time! Anyone who protects merchants from harassment from militants will get all the support I can give. It’s the natural instinct of man to fight back.” The JDL and the Black Panthers may not have been major forces in Rochdale, but they certainly shaped an environment that was more skeptical toward integration.

If Rochdale residents, in 1969 and 1970, were still generally optimistic about interracial cooperative living, they were increasingly doubtful that integration in education was viable. How could integrated schools survive in Rochdale amid a general political climate in which integration was no longer a priority, and instead was for many an obstacle to their educational goals? Both whites and blacks in southeastern Queens turned away from integration after the teachers’ strike. By the beginning of 1969 the Jamaica branch of the NAACP, which for many years had been so stalwart in support of interracial education, was calling for an all-black school district, with an end to plans for busing for racial balance, and an end to years of effort to achieve racial integration in South Jamaica’s schools.90 In this they were seconded by the whites in the district, and the last glimmer of integration in South Jamaica (outside of Rochdale) was extinguished when the pairing between JHS 8 and JHS 217 in Briarwood was ended in April 1969 when District 28 voted to end the project. Dr. Hugh McDougall, the new district superintendent, said that many parents and some members of the board felt “that the kids bused in were not benefiting” at JHS 8. Its enrollment would be 98 percent black by the fall. A suit, brought in 1970 to challenge the situation, went nowhere.91

Integration soon ceased to be a central concern to either black or white parents in the district.92 In 1970, nineteen candidates for election to School Board 28, which included Rochdale, parts of South Jamaica, and a large swath of predominantly white neighborhoods in southern Queens told the Public Education Association their highest priority if elected would be “better teachers,” “better curriculum material,” and “maintaining discipline.” None of them suggested (though it was one of the options offered) that “achieving racial integration” should be the highest priority. Elsewhere in the survey a majority of the candidates said that “integration was desirable but not a high priority.”93 Improvement of schools without attempting major changes in their racial balances was now the preferred method of both whites and blacks. In 1972 the Education Committee of the Rochdale Village Black Society (the new name for the Rochdale Village Negro Cultural Society) endorsed the recommendations of Robert Couche, chairman of the Jamaica branch of the NAACP, saying, “We question, at this time, whether integration should be the primary goal of parents and/or educators. We feel that it would be so much more beneficial to our children if the efforts of those concerned with integrated schools were re-directed into making our schools places of learning instead of educational wastelands.”94

Part of the rationale for decentralization was that the attempt to institute integration had become too divisive, and that by enhancing local control of schools, in both white and minority neighborhoods, racial fires could be slaked. This is not how it worked out in Rochdale and South Jamaica. Decentralization proceeded, but under the watchful eyes of the UFT, it often operated to minimize and marginalize minority input. Fairly typical in this regard was School District 28, a product of the after-strike settlement and a strangely shaped district in the classic serpentine and elongated shape of a gerrymander, stretching from Rochdale to LeFrak City in Rego Park to Forest Hills; Jimmy Breslin described it with his usual hyperbole in 1971, writing that it “appears to have been drawn by somebody who has palsy. Instead of placing the South Jamaica neighborhood in one school district, the lines in Queens were drawn to break the black area into three districts. Attaching each to a white district, thus assuring Albert Shanker’s teachers of never having to work directly under the Mau Maus they see in their sleep every night.” It worked as planned, keeping racial tensions simmering, with the whites firmly in charge.95

Out of the spotlight and without much in the way of media attention, School Board 28 seemed determined to become a reverse Ocean Hill–Brownsville, exercising community control for the express purpose of squashing the aspirations of black students and parents, and firing a black principal of a South Jamaica intermediate school on flimsy grounds (eventually reversed by the central board), which led to a boycott. The school board refused to negotiate with the parents, a decision backed by the UFT representative in Queens, because to do so “would be to go back to the dark ages.”96 The principal, Desiree Greenidge, was eventually reinstated; she was hailed by the Rochdale Village Black Society, which strongly supported her side in the dispute, and was a featured speaker at one of their meetings.97 The following year, the school board refused, on the most unconvincing of rationales, to allow students in the district to participate in an essay contest sponsored by the New York Chamber of Commerce on the topic “How Can Relations Between Ethnic Groups in the City Be Improved?”98 Schools in Rochdale and southeastern Queens were increasingly dominated by a starkly divisive politics of skin color.

Within Rochdale, the school that was most directly and adversely affected by the teachers’ strike was IS 72, which first opened, with a teachers’ strike, in the fall of 1967. As we have seen, the plans for its opening led to a prolonged debate on integration in South Jamaica. It was an attractive school, but it proved to be something of a Trojan horse, a gift that once opened, burnt Rochdale’s topmost towers. The initial impressions, at least to judge from external appearances, were very favorable. Sleek and modern, Inside Rochdale called it “the perfect new school.” The UFT chapter chairman said of the school, “It’s a fantastic plant; a well designed building and it has the most modern equipment you can get.”99 It was a neighborhood school, with all its students in walking distance.100 It was integrated, and was perhaps the very last school opened in New York City in the 1960s as a showcase for integration.101 Its precise racial balance when it opened was roughly equal, or perhaps 60 percent black and 40 percent white, with its teaching staff about two-thirds white and one-third black.102 But as Sue Raskin observed, “IS 72 opened as a disaster and was never anything but a disaster.”103

Although many of the problems of IS 72 were not of its own making (such as two teachers’ strikes in its first two years), many felt the difficulties of IS 72 were a result of a lack of leadership, and many people criticized the school’s principal, Stanley Bloch, as in Kenneth Tewel’s words, “a bit of a putz.” Anita Starr, a teacher at IS 72 from the time in opened, complained that “he only remained principal for three or four years; after a few years he ruined us and left.” He played favorites on the staff, and made too many individual deals—“I don’t think he could deal with teachers who said, you gave so and so a better program, why not me?”104 He had problems with black teachers, and according to Sue Raskin, “did not know how to cope with integration.” To quote Kenneth Tewel once again: “Middle school kids are squirmy, it’s just their nature. Middle schools are the hardest places to teach; they require an administrator who loves teachers and kids, but needs to be highly structured. Stan Bloch couldn’t do that. He invariably reflected the opinion of the last person he had been with, so that for some reason that place was turbulent. It never came together, it never got a reputation for being safe and secure, parents always worried about it, there was always a crisis of one sort or another.”105

The faculty was profoundly divided by the strike along racial lines, and in the words of Anita Starr, “The faculty wouldn’t talk to each other for years; everybody remembered who was in, and who was out, and who said what.”106 For another teacher at the school, staff meetings became “agitprop theater.”107 While some local school principals, like Ursula Day at PS 30, managed to work with the staff to overcome the bitterness caused by the strike, Bloch, who was closely associated with support of the UFT, was unable to do this.108 Some parents’ groups urged that Bloch look to George Korot’s success at JHS 8 in dealing with an integrated school population. But he did not, and what worked at JHS 8—quick response and solicitude toward parental concerns, a concern with educational excellence and innovative programs, and above all, keeping control of discipline inside and outside the classroom—did not happen at IS 72. Sue Raskin has suggested that JHS 8 worked in part because the administration knew that if things didn’t work out Rochdale parents would have demanded a rezoning, and this kept the administration on its toes. For IS 72, the administration knew that Rochdale parents had nowhere else to go, and became complacent.109

This had at least two consequences. First there was an increasing divide between black and white parents, teachers, and students. Black teachers began to feel that whites were not competent to teach minorities, or in the words of Anita Starr “a lot of the black teachers decided that white teachers shouldn’t be teaching black children; a lot of the white teachers were suspect after the strike, a lot of people said they were only there to collect a paycheck.”110 As a black teacher in IS 72 stated, the general attitude of black parents was, “What was being taught to my black child?…How was my black child being greeted? Was the homework meaningful? Is this teacher going to teach my black child?”111 And some teachers, black and white, felt that some bright black students were not being encouraged to take academic tracks in high school, and that the guidance counselors were biased against black students.112

Even white teachers who had opposed the strike, such as Anita Starr, ran into problems. A social studies teacher, during a section on the Civil War, assigned an excerpt from Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which some black parents felt to be a reading only appropriate for “Uncle Toms.” “There was a furor, they went to the principal, and wanted me to be dismissed. I met with the parents and they had never read the book, but [later] someone sat in the class and acknowledged that I was okay.”113 In general, said Starr, “if you were a white teacher and you wanted to have a positive impact on the teachers and the students, you had to keep proving yourself, and that was as a result of the strike.” There were separate white and black parent and teacher groups, with the result that “nobody spoke to anybody, and the administration was ineffectual in dealing with this situation. They didn’t know what the hell to do.” “A tighter administration,” suggests Starr, “would have gotten rid of teachers who shouldn’t be there. There were a lot of teachers who in effect said to the kids, ‘Given all the problems in this school, you’re lucky that I came here.’ The students said, ‘Don’t do us any favors, and don’t come.’” One consequence of this turmoil was that “the children, even those who were brighter and better behaved, they heard a lot at home, and there was greater challenge to the authority of the teachers.” This led to the other great problem, the breakdown of discipline.114

By 1969 and 1970 IS 72 had developed, as one black student remembered, “a ferocious reputation” as a dangerous place to go to school.115 I remember my two brothers telling me stories of regularly being stuck with pins by black girls and being pushed down the stairs by black boys.116 It is easy to assemble a collective horror story from former IS 72 students of regular fights in the cafeteria, with aides and teachers looking the other way, and the “violent bedlam in the halls during passing time.”117 One woman remembers her long hair being set on fire in the ladies room by girls using cigarette lighters. Thereafter she “never used a restroom at school. I don’t know how I held on from the time I left my apartment until I returned home after school.”118 Others reported smoke bombs exploding in the hallways, sexual assaults (primarily the fondling of posteriors), having their faces written on with markers, being punched, sometimes hard enough to be knocked out cold, and students coming to school with loaded rifles.119 One former student remembers “getting mugged most days for lunch money, which we eventually kept in our shoes—they got smart, and stole our shoes too.”120

Anita Starr remembers that “one day eleven students came to me on a Friday afternoon, and someone held a chair over my head, and said ‘Are you afraid, Mrs. Starr?’ I said, ‘Yes, I’m scared,’ and the student said, ‘That’s good, because if you said you weren’t I would have thrown the chair on you.’”121 Another teacher remembers being robbed in the classroom by the relative of a student, and being menaced by a student who was later convicted of rape and murder, standing outside her classroom for ten minutes, wanting to steal her leather jacket. She refused to teach without a guard in the room.122

Francesca Spero remembers that after she graduated from PS 30 and entered IS 72, “my black friends from 30 and the area disowned me. They could not hold onto the friendship because they would be ostracized.” She tried to make new black friends, among girls who had a reputation for toughness, “not the bad, bad ones, just the wannabe bad ones.” She tried to befriend her would-be attackers. A lot of the black girls were “turning into bullies,” and she decided that “I’m going to get into your head, and I’m going to be your friend, you’re not going to bully me, you’re going to protect me, I’m going to find out why you are a bully, and I am going to soften you up. This was my technique of survival, while the other kids pulled back hard and treated them as bad girls.”123 But this tactic didn’t always work, and she complemented it with a method of survival appropriate to IS 72’s Darwinian conditions. “You didn’t dress with good clothes, not that we could afford good clothes anyway. You wore very thick clothes that couldn’t be penetrated [by straight pins]; you tied your hair up in a ponytail, you didn’t wear braids, and you avoided the lunchroom.” To avoid being accosted to or from school, “We walked different ways back to school to avoid [bullies], and cut through the backs of buildings.”124

The racial differences at IS 72 also reflected class differences between the middle class whites and blacks who lived in Rochdale (and in the private homes that surrounded the cooperative), and those who came from a few blocks further away, areas of dire poverty. One black teacher commented, “You had kids coming from the Baisley projects, you had kids with no running water in their houses and no glass in their windows, going to school with black and white kids from good homes. The black kids from the good homes were just as tortured as the white kids were.”125 Not everyone had such dark views of IS 72. Some do not remember encountering great problems at the school, nothing beyond an “occasional food fight in the cafeteria.”126 There certainly were coping strategies, from Francesca Spero’s efforts at befriending the more threatening attackers (a strategy that probably was more effective for girls than boys) to the usual masculine approach of presenting a general image of strength against would-be intimidators. One man, the product of an interracial marriage, after listening to IS 72 horror stories, said, “I was never beat up, never robbed, and never harassed; maybe it’s possible the problem was you…. Some kids get the crap kicked out of them no matter what school they go to. That’s part of growing up. You have to learn how to take care of yourself.”127 Another black student said you had to avoid becoming a patsy. “There were bullies, they would ask for a nickel, and you would say you didn’t have any, and they would say, ‘So it would be okay if I go through your pockets and keep what I find?’ You have to stand up to bullies, or the nickel a day becomes a daily routine. You never let anyone go through your pockets.”128 But whatever strategy you employed, whether you were a tough guy or girl manqué or an easy mark, most who attended the school would have agreed with Francesca Spero. “I was wearing a mask in school. I was extremely uncomfortable. When I got to 72 I wanted to hide.”129

The security and disciplinary lapses at IS 72 went beyond problems in the hallways and cafeteria, and for many reflected a general sense of malaise, a feeling that no one was in control, and that there was no one to turn to for redress. Anita Starr said, “There was a sense of security missing, and this could be very stifling, and the lack of security kept you uneasy and from being the sort of student you could be, and the sense that you could go to the teacher and complain.”130 Although incidents were going on all around her, she remembers that “no one complained to me.”131 Spero remembers that she was angry all the time that the school didn’t help her.132

Some former IS 72 students are still angry at what happened, and still feel a sense of powerlessness, and that their problems were simply ignored. “What could our parents have been thinking of,” said one woman, “while we were being stabbed, molested and beaten in that school?…I’ll never forgive them for their neglect.”133 Some parents certainly had ideological commitments that made them reluctant to take school crime as seriously as they might. Francesca Spero would come home to complain of being beaten up by a gang of girls, only to find “Mother is comforting me, my dad wants revenge. My mother said they are the product of a sick society, they didn’t know what they were doing, they didn’t mean it.”134 (My mother also gave us a “products of a sick society” lecture after I or my brothers complained of harassment at school.) Others equally upset at conditions at IS 72 felt that their parents, still committed to living in Rochdale, and thinking of their own run-ins with the occasional bully from their own schooldays, couldn’t appreciate how bad the situation really was, and perhaps on some level refused to accept it.135

But in the end, almost all parents acknowledged that there was something very wrong about IS 72. By 1970, parents in Rochdale with elementary school children started to plan to move out of the cooperative before their children were ready for intermediate school.136 Even the principal acknowledged that the situation was hopeless. One student remembers that, according to his mother, “during a PTA meeting, Mr. Block, the principal, told parents that the only remedy for what was going on was to move away from the district. That is something for a principal to say!”137

No one was more upset by the developments at IS 72 than the progressive liberals, white and black, who saw in the chaos a refutation of all their cherished dreams about integration. When an early Martin Luther King Jr. Day’s celebration in 1971 became an occasion for a general rampage of black students against white students, the Rochdale Black Students wrote an open letter to minority students in the school, read out in every homeroom, stating that fighting in school was a betrayal of King’s legacy.138 In 1970 Sue Raskin and an interracial coalition of committed integrationist parents wrote to the chancellor of the Board of Education about conditions at IS 72, pleading with them to do something about the situation, and making suggestions for changes:139

There are many factors that cause people to remain in a community such as ours; moderate rents, beautiful apartments, attractive surrounding etc. They can accept along with the best features of the community, inconveniences and problems that come with urban living. However the one problem they cannot accept is a poor school situation. Parents sacrifice many things in order to provide what they feel is a good education. This above all is what is causing many white and middle class families to move out of this community. This creates the danger that this experiment in naturally desegregated living and education would be destroyed. Steps must be taken immediately to improve the schools and to undertake those steps which are necessary to introduce the process of real integration.

But by then it was probably too late. Integration was failing at IS 72, and its failure, like ripples from a stone in a pond, was steadily spreading outward, throughout Rochdale Village. Albert O. Hirschman, in a classic work of social science, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, discussed different responses to members and persons in organizations in decline, especially the choice between “voice,” that is, “to make an attempt at changing the practices [and] policies…of the organization to which one belongs,” and “exit,” to get out, and just leave the organization behind. In Rochdale, after the 1968 teachers’ strike, many discovered what Hirschman calls the “neatness of exit” in contrast to the “the messiness” of voice.140 In the words of Kenneth Tewel, “Rather than mass hysteria with everyone moving out at once, things got so strained that all the efforts at integration, and all of the good work that people did to try to maintain the integrated nature of those communities really just fell apart, because the people you relied on to do that, they just said screw it, they didn’t want to do it anymore…. The strikes accelerated what might have taken twenty years to occur, and given how people can change, mature, and grow up, might not have occurred at all.” Perhaps the most succinct explanation of the impact of the teachers’ strike on Rochdale was offered by Nancy Brandon, a black teacher who taught at IS 72. “Everyone wanted integration, but everyone wanted it on their own terms.”141