9. Going to School

Not perfection

But she tries.

As she lies in wait

For things to come.

Anne Frankel, poem in Grossley (JHS 8) Highlights 1968

When I was beginning to think about this book, one of the things that convinced me to write it was when a former classmate shared with me our fifth-grade class photo, from my first year in Rochdale, 1964–65. There are twenty-eight of us in the picture. I am the little smiling tyke sitting directly behind the sign that informs the world that we are “Public School 30, Queens, 1965, Class 5-302” (see fig. 14, p. 309).

After studying the photograph, and with a little help from some longtime friends, I have been able to identify almost everyone in it. On my right is Howard Weinblatt. Behind me to the left is Karen Abramson, whose father, Eddie Abramson, was the editor of Inside Rochdale. Next to her is a boy whose last name I forget, but whose first name was Lieutenant, which I found very curious. Next to him was a sweet girl from the Caribbean named Susan Emmanuel, and next to her, Steven Watts, who was always talking to me about his involvement in a youth program sponsored by the Civil Air Patrol, which I thought was quite cool. In the next row, the tallest boys in the class and some of my best friends, Craig Katz, Edward Cambridge, and Saul Shorr, make for a distinguished trio. At the right end of the row is Gary Moore, who had to endure endless ribbing about his namesake, a popular television star of the era. Two of the people I have interviewed for this project are, to use their maiden names, Vicki Perlman, at the far right end of the first row, and Evlynne Braithwaite, on the far left end of the top row. I could tell you more names, but I won’t bore you. In the class photo, I look surprisingly neat and well turned out, given my subsequent history of sartorial ineptitude. The girls all look elegant. The boys look like a bunch of ten-year-olds.

I loved my fifth-grade class. It was a happy and vital time, and in our picture we all look eager. The wonderful Minta Spain (Mrs. Spain to you), my all-time favorite teacher and, I think, the only African American teacher I ever had, from K through 12 and from 13 to PhD, presided over her boisterous class with her enthusiasm, her sassiness and hearty laugh, and above all, her sharp, critical, sympathetic intelligence. When Mrs. Spain encouraged me to write to a publisher after I discovered an error in our textbook—the westernmost state was Alaska, of course, and not, as the book claimed, Hawaii, as any besotted student of the peculiarities of the international date line (which I was) would know—she put me on the road to becoming a historian. (I was a nuclear physicist for a while first.)

But the picture has a significance beyond personal nostalgia. Of the twenty-eight students in the class, ten of us were black, and eighteen of us were white. The district for our elementary school included children not only from Rochdale, but from the surrounding neighborhood as well, and this meant the percentage of blacks in PS 30’s classrooms was considerably higher than for Rochdale as a whole. Nonetheless, when I think back to fifth grade, what is striking is how oblivious I was to what was distinctive about our class. This was not because of a lack of interest in politics. By the time I entered fifth grade I considered myself a close and savvy student of current events. I remember bitterly complaining to my mother in the fall of 1964 how unfair it was that ten-year-olds like myself were being denied the opportunity to vote for Robert Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. I was already a veteran of several anti–Vietnam War rallies (thanks to my parents), and I cared deeply about the civil rights struggle (also thanks to my parents). I do not remember Mrs. Spain speaking much to us about racial matters, though she must have, during this remarkable school year that spanned the time from the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to the Voting Rights Act of 1965; during which Martin Luther King Jr. won the Nobel Peace Prize and marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, and Malcolm X was assassinated. I do remember her making us write reports on Dr. Alex Quaison-Sackey (I loved his name), a Ghanaian and a close associate of Kwame Nkrumah who was elected in the fall of 1964 as the first African president of the UN General Assembly.

But for all my precocious political savvy, I really never understood that our class was an experiment in integrated education, as important in its own way as anything taking place at Selma or in Ghana, a critical part of the worldwide quest by persons of color to be treated as full social and political equals, an effort to overcome the centuries-long legacy of racism and imperialism. I certainly do not remember giving any thought to how unusual our classroom situation was, and accepted it as perfectly normal. (Of course, our teachers had a vested interest in trying to make us as unself-conscious as possible about our situation, and largely succeeded.) We had the usual divisions and cliques, fights, and spats, and the very immature boys hated the somewhat less immature girls, but I do not remember any racial tension or incidents. (One day, toward the beginning of the term, in an asinine but near universal rite of passage, I was roughed up by a group of boys, white and black, during our lunch break, only afterward to be accepted by my assailants as “one of the gang.”)

The battle for integration in Rochdale was first won (and then lost) in the classrooms of PS 30 and Rochdale’s other schools. If schools are perceived as inferior or troubled, integration will not hold. Parents will not sacrifice the future of their children to an ideal, however important it might be. Without good schools, those who can leave will do so, and those who can’t will conclude that integration brings no tangible benefits and is not worth the candle.

For different reasons, everyone in the area, inside and outside Rochdale, wanted integrated education to work. In early 1965, during the middle of my year in the fifth grade, the Rochdale Village Public School Committee (RVPSC) initiated a program for improving the local schools. The RVPSC was committed to the “highest scholastic standards in a truly integrated environment at PS 30 and PS 80” [the other elementary school in Rochdale], not just for the benefit of the schools and students involved, but for the city and the nation as a whole, because “for the first time anywhere in New York City, a stable, diverse, ethnic elementary school population is assured for at least a decade, if not longer.”1

From the outset Rochdale was seen, by many of its residents and outside observers, as a test of a question that, as the 1960s unfolded, would come to utterly dominate New York City politics: Was integrated education possible? If, as Harvey Swados wrote, the eyes of the nation were watching Rochdale, the eyes of Rochdale were watching PS 30 and other local schools. Both successes and failures were apt to be exaggerated. If we were largely innocent of the racial histories and animosities of our parents, we also lacked adult means of insulating ourselves against slights or insults. It may be a bit of an exaggeration to argue that the future of integration as a national goal hinged on its outcome in Mrs. Spain’s fifth-grade class, but those of us in Class 5-302 did our part nonetheless.

One reason for the interest in integrated education in Rochdale was the knowledge that almost everywhere else in the city, integration was failing. Year by year the city’s schools were losing white students, with ever more minority students attending schools with overwhelmingly or exclusively African American and Puerto Rican student bodies. By the mid-1950s, in contrast to the de jure segregation of the Jim Crow South, and if there is a bit of disingenuousness in the distinction, since “de facto” segregation, as much as the “de jure” variety, was largely rooted in discrimination that was either perfectly legal (or flouted laws that were imperfectly enforced) the distinction remains an important one.2 In New York City by the 1960s, despite the abhorrence of racial discrimination avowed by all politicians and civic leaders, the city had what amounted to two school systems, a superior system for whites, and an inferior system for blacks and other minorities.

By the turn of the twentieth century, New York City schools had been formally integrated—one of the last important fights for ending legally separate colored schools was waged in Jamaica in the 1890s, just prior to consolidation.3 In the first decades of the twentieth century, clusters of minority population were in racially mixed neighborhoods, and the local schools reflected this mixture. But as the housing patterns changed, and minority areas grew larger and became more or less monoracial, so did the local schools that served them. Complaints about this trend arose by the 1930s, but de facto segregation steadily increased after World War II.4

The Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954 primarily dealt with de jure segregation in the South, but it also sparked a sustained fight by civil rights activists to address the problem of segregation in New York City’s schools, spearheaded by the psychologist Dr. Kenneth Clark, a professor at City College whose work had been a major buttress to the plaintiffs in Brown. De facto segregation was the subject of numerous reports, petitions, and demonstrations, which maintained that it was in its own way as serious a problem as Jim Crow education in the South, and because of its sub rosa character, even more difficult to root out.5 The New York City Board of Education and its supporters were sympathetic to these complaints (though generally they rejected the term “segregation”), but they tended to argue that the cause of the problem was housing discrimination, which led to the concentrations of minority population (true enough); lamentable as that was, it was a complex problem outside of their jurisdiction (which was also true enough, but since no one was adequately addressing housing discrimination in the city, this amounted to bureaucratic buck passing).6

The only methods the Board of Education had to balance the racial makeup of the city’s schools in the late 1950s and early 1960s were highly unpopular politically. Schools in adjacent white and minority communities could be paired; minority students could be bused to predominantly white schools (almost never the reverse; this was simply outside the realm of political possibility); and minority students could voluntarily transfer to white schools. The Board of Education was acutely aware of countervailing forces against integration; from politicians, from community groups, and to some extent from teachers.7 The late 1950s and early 1960s for the Board of Education was a time of caution; efforts to end segregation resulted in a handful of small-scale remedies that affected only a tiny number of the million students in the city’s schools, and even these programs met with public anger.8 By 1959, the New York Times was reporting that some blacks in the city, admittedly no more than a handful, were sending their children to schools in the South, arguing that they were attending segregated schools anyway, and schools that were overcrowded and on double sessions, so rather than de facto segregation they would take their chances with old-fashioned Jim Crow.9 And probably nowhere in the city was the fight against integrating the schools as pronounced as it was in Queens, despite that, save Staten Island, it had the lowest percentage of minority residents of any of the boroughs, at less than 5 percent.10

In 1964 a report prepared under the direction of New York State’s education commissioner, James Allen (commonly known as the Allen Report, though it was prepared by three educators, among them Kenneth Clark), lambasted the efforts of the board for their lack of commitment to ending segregation. The report found that almost a quarter of the elementary schools in the city had a minority student body of over 90 percent, and concluded that “nothing undertaken by the New York City Board of Education since 1954, and nothing proposed since 1963 has contributed or will contribute in any meaningful way to desegregating the public schools of the city.”11 And all the while, as the Board of Education tentatively nibbled at the problem, the changing racial balance of the city was making the underlying problem worse, year by year.

On the other hand, while it is easy to criticize the Board of Education for their pusillanimity and their glacial rate of progress toward integration, one should not minimize the difficulty of the task they faced. Subsequent history strongly suggests that if the Board of Education had pushed harder for integration, they would have faced more than an equal and opposite reaction. And those who argue that the tough left-wing radicalism of the immediate postwar years had been red-baited into a 1950s Cold War timorousness fail to explain how things would have turned out very differently if the Communist and progressive left had retained its strength. It would have faced the same obduracy on the part of the opponents of integration, and the same limited arsenal of remedies to effect their changes. Whatever the political configuration and ideology on the progressive side, their opponents would have been politically powerful, numerous, and tenacious, and would have been in a position to retard or thwart efforts at integrated housing and education. Support for integration was wide but shallow and lukewarm. Opposition to integration was almost always heated and vociferous.12 In any event, the Board of Education’s efforts on behalf of integration were weak-willed, halfhearted, poorly defended, easily defeated, and completely ineffective, with the upshot that, as the historian Jerald Podair writes, “New York’s schools were more segregated in 1966 than they had been in 1954.”13

But the timidity of the Board of Education in pushing for integration availed them little. By 1964 they were increasingly assailed by the opposite poles of the debate: those pushing for the immediate implementation of integration, and those adamantly opposed to any integration effort at all. In the early 1960s, the Reverend Milton Galamison, who had been a leader of the protests at the construction site of Brooklyn Downstate Hospital in the summer of 1963 and worked with community groups in Bedford-Stuyvesant and white liberals and radicals for improved integrated education, became known throughout the city as the leader of the movement for integration as the head of a new group, the New York Citywide Committee for Integrated Schools. When the Board of Education balked at implementing any plans for integration, he called for a one-day boycott by students and teachers for the immediate integration of the city’s schools, which took place on February 3, 1964 (about two months after the first families moved in to Rochdale). Planned by the veteran organizer Bayard Rustin, it was one of the most massive protests in the history of the civil rights movement, with about 464,000, or about 45 percent, of the city’s students participating. The boycott had a remarkably wide spectrum of support, ranging from Norman Podhoretz, the editor of the then liberal, Jewish-oriented magazine Commentary, to Malcolm X, in a never-to-be reassembled coalition.14 (In a sign of the rocky road ahead for school integration, the boycott was not supported by the United Federation of Teachers (UFT), and the superintendent of schools later called it a “nihilistic weapon.”)15

It is worth stressing (because it has been all too often forgotten and misunderstood) that for its proponents, the cause of integration was never simply better racial balances in the classrooms, but a general end to the inferior status of minorities in the New York City school system. Because minority areas tended to be poorer and, at least through the 1960s, less well connected politically than their white counterparts, the schools in minority areas were generally reckoned to be inferior, ill-serving their population. Fewer schools were built in black neighborhoods, and existing school buildings were generally older and more crowded than schools elsewhere. Schools in minority neighborhoods tended to be shortchanged in other resources such as gyms and libraries, had larger class sizes and also usually had underqualified and inexperienced teachers.16 Very few of the teachers in the New York City school system, and fewer of the supervisory personnel, were of minority background. (In 1955, of the 50,000 teachers in the system, approximately 500, or 1 percent, were black.)17

Antisegregationists argued that all this was connected to, and contributed to, the systematic underestimation of black intellectual abilities by the New York City school system. Segregation, said Kenneth Clark as early as 1954, was not just “gerrymandering” by skewing district lines to produce all-black schools, but denying students in minority schools facilities and pedagogical excellence equal to those at white schools.18 A decade later, in the Allen report, Clark and his colleagues coauthored the 1964 attack on the Board of Education for its foot-dragging on integration, which nonetheless concluded that “total desegregation of all schools, for example, is simply not attainable in the foreseeable future and neither planning nor pressure can change that fact.”19 A progressive integration advocate in the Kenneth Clark mode, Charles Silberman in the widely read 1964 study Crisis in Black and White wrote that “integration is a moral imperative—the greatest moral imperative of our time. But integration should not be confused with the mere mixing of Negroes and whites in the same classroom, or in the same school, or in the same neighborhood.”20 If interracial classrooms were a sign of progress, and a token of good faith by the Board of Education, they were not an end in themselves. Integration meant genuine and full inclusion of minorities in the structures of society, and not mere race mixing.

Rochdale came to South Jamaica bearing gifts in the form of desperately needed schools: two elementary schools and an intermediate school. For all the reservations South Jamaica residents had about the cooperative, the new schools went a long way to allaying their doubts. The local schools were notoriously substandard; no new schools had been built in the vicinity of the Jamaica Racetrack for half a century.21 Two of the last five wooden schoolhouses left in New York City, PS 110 and 161, overcrowded and on double sessions, with inferior facilities, would be closed with the opening of Rochdale’s elementary schools.22 Harold Ostroff said that when the UHF started to have discussions on the cooperative with local groups in South Jamaica, one request came up again and again: “to pay particular attention to the need for schools.” The UHF’s promise that Rochdale would have new schools, shared by Rochdale and the existing population of South Jamaica, “really crossed the roads into the surrounding community.”23 The usual resentments on this regard—improvements were coming to South Jamaica because the whites were moving in—seemed like a small price to pay for what parents desperately wanted, better schools and better education for their children.24

South Jamaica’s schools suffered the typical educational problems faced by black New Yorkers. By the 1930s several schools in South Jamaica had steadily rising black enrollment, and PS 40, near Merrick Boulevard, was among the first to be seen as a “Negro school.” Black parents complained that plans were afoot to remake it as a “Jim Crow school,” that is, to steer whites away from it.25 Although in 1935 PS 40 became the first public school in Queens, and perhaps in all of New York City, to offer adult education courses in Negro history, it soon developed the reputation as a troubled school, plagued with gang violence.26 In 1945 the Jamaica branch of the NAACP and the Queens CIO complained that students at PS 40 and 48 had been forced to eat lunch in the rain, sit beside broken windows, and sit two to a desk; had been struck by teachers; and had been humiliated by teachers for not being dressed properly.27

By the early 1950s, when schools in minority neighborhoods were on average ten to twenty years older than those in predominantly white neighborhoods, Jamaica had the largest collection of old wooden-frame schoolhouses left in the city, and black parents in Queens were demanding access to newer and better schools.28 Ramshackle schools were often placed on insalubrious, poorly drained, and dangerous grounds, near grade crossings (that is, active railroad tracks). At one South Jamaica elementary school in 1963, according to a complaint, “water linger[ed] for days after a rain and [got] deep enough for a child to drown.”29 By the end of the 1950s at least four elementary schools in the vicinity of Rochdale were at least 90 percent African American, with many others also seriously racially unbalanced.30

The fight for integrated education by blacks south of Hillside Avenue was paralleled by the fight of many whites north of the avenue, the so-called Mason-Dixon Line of southeastern Queens, to prevent it. The Queens Chamber of Commerce announced its opposition to “forced integration” in 1957.31 A few months before the first families moved in to Rochdale, the organization that came to epitomize “white backlash” (a brand-new term in the fall of 1963), Parents and Taxpayers (PAT), was formed in Jackson Heights and Rego Park, with one of its goals to keep black students on their side of the borough.32 It was PAT that made the preservation of the “neighborhood school” (a term in little use before the 1950s) a central theme in the city’s political debates.33

PAT soon gained considerable clout, and a number of politicians—such as William F. Buckley Jr. during his 1965 campaign for mayor on the Conservative line—jumped on their bandwagon.34 Jerald Podair has suggested that by 1966 PAT had largely stymied efforts to further school integration in New York City.35 What made the white neighborhoods of eastern Queens likely sites for integrated education—their adjacency to black neighborhoods—was the very reason most local residents were so adamantly against any such experimentation. In early 1960, in the same issue of the UHF house organ that announced plans to build Rochdale Village, Co-op Contact opined: “The policy of discrimination in housing and in everything else is a national problem in the north as in the south. The actions of some parents picketing a school in Queens a few months ago was as disgraceful as the situation in Little Rock.”36 Those Queens parents, the black students they were picketing, and the newly arrived residents of Rochdale, would soon have to find ways to share the schools of southeastern Queens. Though Rochdale was an ideal place to see if integrated education could work, it was hardly free of the underlying problems and tensions that had stymied integration elsewhere in the city.

Rochdale’s first school crisis occurred before any family moved in to the cooperative. Integrated education (and perhaps, even the cooperative itself) came close to failing before it started. Powerful forces, either through deliberation or indifference, almost allowed this to happen, but they were prevented from doing so by Rochdale’s prospective residents, who knew about the importance of education to the future of the cooperative. In the annals of grassroots activism of the early 1960s, of people banding together to take on City Hall (and even more impressively, the hydra-headed bureaucracy known as the Board of Education), this is an untold story.

As noted above, central to the efforts of the UHF to convince community groups that Rochdale would be a boon for South Jamaica was the promise of new schools. But although the UHF did the promising, the responsibility for building the schools fell to the Board of Education. The UHF and the Board of Education made for a poor team. The UHF was typically very fast and efficient in building their cooperatives, and Rochdale was no exception. The first families moved in to Rochdale a mere three and a half years after groundbreaking. The Board of Education had no similar incentive in building its schools, and they were typically unhurried in fulfilling their construction commitments, especially in African American neighborhoods. The UHF for its part was rather nonchalant in keeping track of the progress of the Board of Education, and narrowly concentrated on what they saw as their bailiwick, the building of housing. So by the spring of 1962, when the Rochdale construction site was abuzz with construction and construction workers, no work had been done on the buildings for Rochdale’s schools. According to information from the Board of Education, PS 30 was not included in the 1962–63 school budget, and was not expected to be completed until “1966–67 or later.” As a prospective Rochdale resident wrote to Harold Ostroff in March 1963, the “Board of Education does not feel it necessary to keep pace with a new community’s needs.”37

Inquiries to the UHF on the school building from those planning to move to Rochdale were met, according to one of the inquirers, with “vague and unsatisfactory answers.”38 One of those who heard the rumors was Herbert Plever, a lawyer then living in Crown Heights near Bedford-Stuyvesant. A visit to the construction site confirmed his suspicions. Plever did further searching. When his inquiries to the Board of Education proved fruitless, Plever contacted the City Planning Commission. He was told no progress had been made on the Rochdale school buildings because no funds had been allocated for that purpose.39

Plever, a man of the left, had a long history of activism in a number of progressive causes.40 But the political climate in 1962 was very different from what it had been ten or fifteen years earlier. The Old Left, the Communist and near-Communist Left, was largely moribund. But many who had been involved in the movement remained vitally interested in politics, had excellent organizing skills, and above all, as the issue came front and center in local and national debates, they cared about civil rights. (One of the finest legacies of the Communist Party in its death throes were legions of admirable ex-Communists, now freed from its ideological rigidities.) In New York City during the 1940s and 1950s the struggle for civil rights, had been carried out sometimes in tandem and sometimes along parallel lines by left and liberal organizations. Although the red scare dampened this natural civil rights alliance, it did not altogether kill it, and by the late 1950s and early 1960s, with the decline of the institutional left and the muting of the fierce Communist/ anti-Communist fights among liberals and leftists, there was room for a new sort of progressive organization.41

This sort of new type of grass roots, neighborhood-based organization coalesced around the cause of Rochdale’s public schools. Plever was the guiding force in the formation, in March 1962, of the Rochdale Village Public School Committee (RVPSC) and one of its major leaders. It had a left tinge, but without any sectarian baggage, and committed to pragmatic and nonideological goals. As Plever said, “Probably the majority of those in the Rochdale Village school committee were not from left-wing backgrounds. We met people we didn’t know and who were never left politically, and we didn’t have a political agenda in the school committee; we were probably less politically active than ever in our lives because we were involved 24/7 in the school committee.”42

Central Brooklyn, where most of the founders of the RVPSC lived before moving to Rochdale, was a hotbed of grassroots agitation for educational reform, and an area where, not coincidentally, there had been a model for the RVPSC: the Parents’ Workshop, a broad interracial and nonideological coalition, though significant elements of the leadership had been active in the Old Left. Founded in 1960, the bulk of Parents’ Workshop members came from local parent-teacher associations. They were led by the charismatic African American minister Milton A. Galamison, whose visibility in the organization would soon catapult him to citywide leadership in the struggle for integrated schools. The other leader of Parents’ Workshop was Annie Stein, a former labor organizer, a passionate advocate for school integration, and a longtime member of the Communist Party.43 (Stein would have a tangential role in the fight for integrated schools in Rochdale.) Commitment and activism on behalf of better schools in Central Brooklyn translated easily to South Jamaica, whose aging, overcrowded, racially segregated schools had many of the same problems. Plever said, “When we realized that we were being snowed,…a bunch of us who were active in the schools in Brooklyn decided to organize ourselves and figure out if we wanted to pull out of Rochdale or do something to improve the situation.”44

Plever and some of the other leaders of the RVPSC contacted the UHF with the information about the lack of work on the schools. The first impulse of some UHF officials was to pass the buck and respond in a narrowly bureaucratized way, arguing it was someone else’s problem. Sue Raskin, one of the leaders of the RVPSC, spoke to Arnold Merritt, the first manager of Rochdale Village, urging him to help speed school construction. She remembers being told “We are in the housing business, not a social agency.”45 This was not the response of Harold Ostroff, who was sympathetic to the concerns of the protesters, and had been in the dark about the Board of Education’s inaction. But his instinct was to keep things quiet, speak to the right people, and get things moving. The instincts of the RVPSC leadership, honed in innumerable street boycotts and rallies, was precisely the opposite: to bring attention and publicity to the problem, and develop a mass base for future protests.46

The RVPSC threatened to tell the press that the families of RVPSC were pulling out of Rochdale because the cooperative was a fraud and had made no adequate provisions for education. The RVPSC demanded, and eventually were given, a list of all the families intending to move to Rochdale, and they sent out a notice about the situation. Ostroff agreed to let the RVPSC hold a general meeting at UHF headquarters in Lower Manhattan, to which several hundred people came. The RVPSC also contacted politicians about the situation. All this accomplished little. The Board of Education remained largely unresponsive, trying to brush off the protesters with empty promises and platitudes.47 (One person who learned something from this was Harold Ostroff. After his experience with the Board of Education at Rochdale, for Co-op City he and the UHF insisted on building the cooperative’s three elementary schools, two intermediate schools, and one high school themselves, becoming the first private developers to build public schools in New York City.)48

Disenchanted with conventional protests, the experienced activists at the RVPSC opted for polite guerrilla tactics. Bernard Donovan, the superintendent of the Board of Education, received this alert on April 2, 1963: “Attached three postcards and eighteen letters from persons who expect to move to Rochdale Village, Jamaica this summer, expressing concern about the lack of adequate schools in the area. This looks like the beginning of a real campaign.”49 Donovan wrote Harold Ostroff later in the month, “We have received numerous letters of concern from your prospective tenants,” so many that, according to another letter from Donovan, “it is quite impossible to answer all the individuals who have written in.”50 When letters did not obtain the desired results, the protesters organized a phone chain, and every few minutes another member would call the Board of Education, utterly tying up the switchboard at 110 Livingston Street. In Herb Plever’s words, “After two or three days of that, I actually got a telephone call, and someone said, ‘Come down, we will talk.’” But as another member of the committee stated, the Board of Education couldn’t be trusted in any of their promises. One activist remembered, “We were never certain up to the last minute, and we felt that we had to always keep up the pressure.”51 In the spring of 1963, the board revised their building schedule and placed Rochdale’s schools at the front of the queue.52

However, the damage done by the board’s neglectful inaction could not be undone all at once, since even with an accelerated schedule, the school buildings would not be ready in time. Portable classrooms were needed for the first students. PS 30, from December 1963 through January 1965, when the new building finally opened, made use of twenty-four quonset huts in a temporary area (on which IS 72 would eventually be built) and also made use of community rooms in the Rochdale buildings.53

The RVPSC helped lay the foundations for close working relationships with the black families surrounding Rochdale. With the tardy pace of school building, there were local worries, as a newspaper headline put it in November 1963, that Rochdale would “swamp local schools.”54 While almost all the leaders of the RVPSC were white, they worked closely with local PTAs in South Jamaica, especially those at schools slated for replacement by Rochdale’s schools, and tried to bring pressure on the Board of Education and local politicians to accelerate the construction of Rochdale’s new schools. The building of Rochdale’s schools was a striking instance of what Rochdale could potentially bring to South Jamaica. It set the stage for future collaboration. For Plever, getting the Board of Education to turn around so quickly was “absolutely unique in all of the annals of New York City.”55 Without the change of policy by the board, many of the families in the RVPSC (and doubtless many others) would not have moved to Rochdale, and unless Rochdale’s schools had been built in a timely fashion, Rochdale Village itself would have been at least crippled, if not fatally wounded.

There have been allegations, notably by David Rogers in his classic study of Board of Education ineffectuality, 110 Livingston Street, that the tardiness of the board was part of a deliberate effort to undermine integration in Rochdale and South Jamaica, by delaying the building of PS 30 until the other new school, PS 80, could be readied as a replacement for the old wooden schools in South Jamaica, reserving PS 30 primarily for Rochdale’s students, thereby leaving one elementary predominantly black, the other predominantly white. There certainly were rumors to this effect current in 1963. A member of the RVPSC wrote the Board of Education in March 1963 that he had learned that “PS 80 is to be a replacement for substandard and wooden schools in the area. How many of those seats will be available to us living in Rochdale Village has not been determined.”56 The extent of the duplicity of the Board of Education is in the end difficult to determine, and several former members of the RVPSC were adamant that they knew of no plan to use PS 80 solely for students from outside Rochdale.57 In any event, such a plan was never implemented, and the RVPSC’s stalwart defense of integrated schools made a huge difference in challenging the almost malign slothfulness of the Board of Education. As they wrote the district superintendent in 1963, “In a district as ours where so much of our school population comes from Negro homes—we cannot have a predominantly Negro or a predominantly white school.”58

The RVPSC was not alone in its belief that Rochdale could become a test for integrated education. A number of people involved in the movement for improvement of racial conditions in the city’s schools, among them, Annie Stein, the leader of Parents’ Workshop in Brooklyn, and educators Max Woolf and Doxey Wilkerson thought Rochdale Village was “the best place in the city for integration.”59 In Rochdale, the Public School Committee argued that “in this advantageous setting, our failure to obtain quality integrated education at PS 30 and PS 80 may have profound implications for the future of public education in NYC.” And while the possibility existed for “long range educational programs and innovations” in which Negro and white pupils “have the potential for dramatic scholastic achievement in a democratic environment which can develop truly integrated, creative education,” the “mere existence of a balanced ethnic population, by itself, will guarantee neither integrated nor quality education.” They wanted an innovative program, carefully tailored to Rochdale’s elementary schools, to nurture the fragile flower of integration.60

The RVPSC took the initiative and approached Yeshiva University and Bank Street College to fund a special program in the development of “quality-integrated schools” through “curricular patterns and methods designed to achieve maximum educational value from the multi-cultural character of the student body,” and received a $5,000 grant from the New York State Education Department for this purpose.61 This led, in the summer and fall of 1965, to a “Teacher Institute on Individualizing Instruction for Classroom Integration at PS 30 and PS 80.”62 The institute was supervised by Doxey Wilkerson and Edmund Gordon, both professors of education at Yeshiva University, and both leaders in the field of what was being called “compensatory education”—the study of ways to equalize educational attainment among white and black students.

The institute was taught by Wilkerson and Rachel Weddington, of Queens College. Twenty-four teachers from Rochdale’s two elementary schools volunteered to participate, a commitment that involved a once-a-week meeting during the school year, visits to the homes of students, and a summer institute. One of the goals of the institute was to introduce teachers to the notion of the “homogeneous classroom” in which students of different ability levels were placed together, with individualized attention and instruction to students who were either somewhat faster or somewhat slower than the group as a whole. This was seen as a way of ameliorating one of the most challenging problems associated with integrated education, grouping students by ability, commonly called tracking. If, as was usually the case, black students underperformed their white counterparts in their grades and on standardized tests, one might create an integrated school, only to see the practical impact largely nullified by classroom assignments made on the basis of test scores, that would largely separate classes along racial lines.63

The RVPSC wanted Rochdale’s schools to explore “every known educational methodology old and new to prevent the creation of segregated classrooms.”64 This included an emphasis on teaching black history and cultural diversity, and exploring alternatives to tracking. The RVPSC wished to overcome the “unhealthy competitiveness” they argued characterized most educational settings. They wished to develop “human relations workshops and other programs to promote communication between parents, the schools, and the community.” They also proposed an “educational park,” with plans drawn up by Annie Stein and Max Woolf, that would have moved several local elementary and junior high schools to Rochdale (from both white and blacks areas) to make Rochdale the center of efforts at integration for all of southeastern Queens.65

But these proposed educational innovations ran into determined opposition. Far from agreeing to “homogeneous classrooms” most Rochdale parents wanted tracking strengthened, and Rochdale’s elementary schools were strongly tracked. The local UFT chapters, already cautious in 1965 about school programs that involved a large degree of parental involvement, were very cool about the plan, and tried to discourage teacher participation, as did the principal of one of Rochdale’s two elementary schools. Some teachers tried to convince black parents, appearances aside, that the new ways of organizing class assignments would not help black students but make them guinea pigs in a new-fangled experiment thought up by white bureaucrats.66 There was some red-baiting, primarily directed at Doxey Wilkerson. Wilkerson, before becoming a professor of education at Yeshiva, had been, in the 1940s and 1950s, one of the most prominent African Americans in the Communist Party. He left the party in the late 1950s, before joining the faculty at Yeshiva.67

In the end, few if any of these recommendations for reforming Rochdale’s elementary schools were ever implemented. Herb Plever remains convinced that “had the teachers participated in the programs without tracking maybe we would have won over the parents who were opposed” and Rochdale’s schools could have really pioneered innovative integrated education, and just might have provided an alternative path to the immovable objects and irresistible forces that collided so loudly in New York City’s educational politics later in the decade.68

But I wouldn’t want the story of integration in Rochdale’s elementary schools to end on a note of defeat. The final result was a compromise, one that went too far for some, and not far enough for others. Rochdale’s schools remained integrated, and tracking was sometimes modified to preserve integrated classes.69

One last comment on Doxey Wilkerson. At some point during my time in fifth grade, or so my mother later informed me (I have no recollection of it) I had a meeting with him, and he recommended to my mom and the school principal that I skip the next grade. I thank him for the vote of confidence, but my mother was probably correct in thinking that I was already, in comparison with my classmates, sufficiently immature, and skipping a grade would make things worse. Doxey Wilkerson was representative of a generation of committed believers in integration who genuinely thought that racial progress was possible, because all parents wanted schools that were safe, inspiring places for creative learning, staffed with attentive and committed teachers that helped every student to realize his or her potential. He told the New Pittsburgh Courier in 1965 that his study of Rochdale’s elementary schools convinced him that “contrary to common belief…white and Negro parents have strikingly similar attitudes and educational objectives for their children.” It was a belief that, by the end of the decade, in Rochdale and elsewhere, would be in tragically short supply.70

The question of Rochdale’s junior high school students presented even greater challenges than did its elementary schools. Junior high involved a broader area of South Jamaica and southeastern Queens, and therefore involved black-majority schools. Once again the problem predated the opening of Rochdale. When the Board of Education in the late 1950s decided that South Jamaica needed a new junior high school, there was considerable community consternation that its location was slated for Merrick Boulevard, in the heart of one of the poorer sections of South Jamaica, where it was feared it would attract no white students.71 When, in 1960, the Jamaica NAACP went along with the Merrick Boulevard site, it was widely excoriated in the black press, with an article in the New York Amsterdam News headlined “NAACP Bows to Segregated Site.” Further, an Amsterdam News editorial called their decision “a slap in the face to the Southern sit-down strikes, the wholesale slaying of Negroes in South Africa, and the struggle for freedom and civil rights here and throughout the world.” William Booth, a rising star in the Jamaica NAACP, defended the branch’s decision, arguing that wherever the school was located, its student body would be almost entirely black, and the building process would be more expeditious on Merrick Boulevard. In the end, the school was built on the Merrick Boulevard site, and the whole episode showed that black parents in South Jamaica who wanted integrated education for their children had very few options. The new school opened as Richard S. Grossley JHS 8 in 1963,72 and those who thought the school would not be able to attract any white students were both right and wrong. When the school opened there were almost no whites, but, starting in the fall of 1964, white and black students from Rochdale attended JHS 8.73

The Board of Education had promised a new intermediate school for Rochdale, but once again, it was not ready in time. Since the new junior high school was to be built on the site of the Quonset huts of the temporary elementary school, construction could not begin until 1965, and the new school would not be ready until the fall of 1967. Where would Rochdale’s junior–high-school-aged pupils go in the interim? Predominantly white schools within busing distance (in Springfield Gardens or Briarwood) warned that they were overcrowded and couldn’t or wouldn’t take Rochdale students.74 The obvious choice was JHS 8, which was underutilized and only a short, fifteen-minute bus ride away. Many of the problems that had been anticipated about JHS 8, because of its location, had indeed occurred, with a black enrollment close to 100 percent, and with a reputation that made middle-class black families reluctant to send their children there.75 When a pairing was announced in the spring of 1964 with a school serving the white neighborhoods of Briarwood and Jamaica Estates, parents in those neighborhoods engaged in a successful boycott of JHS 8.76 As usually happened in these circumstances, the Board of Education acquiesced to the refusal of white parents to have their children attend school with black children. JHS 8 was underutilized because white students and their parents wanted nothing to do with it.77

The proposal that Rochdale students be bused to JHS 8 caused much “fear and apprehension” among Rochdale parents.78 A teacher at the school remembered that “parents in Rochdale were really, really worried about sending their kids to JHS 8, and there was a lot of anxiety.”79 Even the RVPSC was at first skeptical of the Board of Education and the local school district’s proposal, saw it as a cynical effort to get Rochdale parents to shoulder the burden of integration in southeastern Queens, and called for a rezoning for all the district’s junior high schools.80 Because of this unified opposition the first group of Rochdale’s junior high school students, in the 1963–64 school year (approximately forty whites and ten blacks) were sent to JHS 231 in Springfield Gardens, with Rochdale’s students going to JHS 8 only in the fall of 1964, when they would represent a considerably larger body of students.81

There was a division among white parents of junior high school students in Rochdale over tracking, similar to the related conflict in Rochdale’s elementary schools. As Harvey Swados noted in 1966, “Within the white, predominantly Jewish membership of the JHS 8 PTA there had been a split between those eager to press for the establishment of classes for Intellectually Gifted Children and those who warned that because of educational deficiencies on the part of the ghetto children tested, the result would be segregated classrooms.”82 The principal of JHS 8, George Korot, heard these complaints and made concessions to Rochdale’s parents. The ninth grade was transferred out of the JHS to lessen the pupil load and to get the students into the more integrated student populations in the senior high schools sooner, and students were given a choice of high schools to attend.83 Rochdale parents strongly wished to have a heavy use of tracking and “special programs” (or SP) in the school, which did result in a large degree of racial separation for classes within a single grade. Indeed, there had to be an adjustment within each grade to correct for the racial imbalance.84 The SP classes were at least 70 percent white, and because JHS was 75 percent black, the lower classes in the grades were almost entirely African American.85 Most of the black students in the SP classes were from Rochdale; on the whole the blacks in special programs did not fare as well as the whites.86 The heavy tracking led some black observers to complain that in JHS 8 “classrooms have been skillfully segregated—Caucasians and Negroes together in the same building but separated in the classrooms.”87

This is to some extent true, but without the SPs and tracking, it is unlikely that Korot would have convinced Rochdale parents to accept assignment to JHS 8. Integration in JHS 8 (and elsewhere) was the art of the possible, balancing the conflicting fears and desires of whites and blacks, liberals and moderates, teachers and parents. With special funding the school was able to reduce class sizes, obtained enrichment programs, remedial experts, and new guidance counselors.88 In the end Rochdale parents accepted the placement of their children in JHS 8. By the spring of 1965, about a quarter of the student body was white.89 It was one of the very few times in the 1960s that children in New York City were bused to a predominantly black school for purposes of racial integration. A teacher remembers that the teaching staff “was aware how unique” JHS 8’s situation was.90

The responsibility for overseeing the integration of JHS 8 fell to its principal, George Korot, who, like so many administrative personnel in the New York City school system in the 1960s, was of Jewish background. Korot organized numerous meetings with parent groups from Rochdale and from South Jamaica, trying to deal with the concerns of both groups.91 He tried to be attentive to white and black parents’ questions about security, classroom problems, and any other parental issue.92 Korot realized that security was key to keeping the school calm, and promised to use his guidance staff to identify and if necessary weed out persistent discipline problems.93 They avoided major flare-ups and confrontations. “Good leadership,” said a teacher at JHS 8 during these years, “is not noticed, when it is smooth and well-lubricated, it is not noticed. That is what happened at JHS 8.”94 A white parent from Rochdale said that “whenever you heard of any problem, parents would run down to George Korot at 8.”95 He worked equally well with black parents, and as a president of the school’s PTA commented a few years later (when it had reverted to an all-black school), “We have our differences [with Korot], but they’re not black and white differences. We are one of the few schools that has bridged the bitterness.”96

Korot’s combination of solicitousness and firmness worked. He created an environment where black and white parents could work together effectively. For example, at one point when the school had a majority black enrollment, a white Rochdale parent—Susan Raskin, who had been leader of the RVPSC—was president of the PTA. In the words of Harvey Swados, writing in 1966, the parents of Rochdale students sent to JHS 8, “within the space, not of a lifetime, but of two years…were converted by their own children not merely to passive acceptance but to enthusiastic support of their children being educated in a school which is still 75 percent Negro.”97 Many Rochdale parents said the same thing, such as one parent, once very worried about sending her son to JHS 8, who wrote late in 1965,

After 9 months many of my fears are gone. Scholastically I find the school superior…. The transportation is easy by the Bedell St Bus. My son, a very average student, achieved the Effort Roll, and is striving for the honor roll…. To say there haven’t been incidents in JHS 8, as in the city, would be to deceive you. I would say the incidents have been minor. The Staff, including the Dean of Behavior and the Guidance Counselor have been most anxious to accommodate the children and the parents of Rochdale.98

One shouldn’t paint this story in too-glowing colors, and there are dissenting opinions. There were discipline problems at JHS 8. The area around the school was dangerous. One woman, who called the school a “zoo,” remembered getting out of school “too late for the bus and walking those scary few blocks to Rochdale, knitting needles on the ready for the inevitable attack.” (However, the same woman also remembered with fondness getting out of school and walking, on many of the same streets, to Jamaica Avenue at lunch.)99 For some white students, negative memories crowded out all else. “As you know we were the first set of kids sent to ‘integrate’ Grossley [JHS 8]. The daily bus trips were filled with apprehension. The first year I discovered we had to pay for protection or our pens and pencils would be stolen and other physical damage would follow.”100 Blacks from Rochdale sometimes had similar complaints.101

All I can say is that those weren’t my memories. I attended JHS 8 from 1966 to 1968, part of the last class from Rochdale to attend the school before Rochdale’s own intermediate school opened. There were always racial undercurrents, and there were occasional menacing incidents, but with one very important exception—the disturbances that occurred after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., to be discussed in chapter 11—I do not remember spending my days in fear, looking around the corner to avoid the next assailant. Many of my classmates concur.102 If I had a regret, it was that the SP class I was in provided a cocoon, primarily consisting of fellow Rochdale students, that largely insulated me from the 75 percent of the students who were not white. I remember less interracial friendship in JHS 8, on my part at least, than in elementary school. But I also remember a school that was intellectually vital. Because it was difficult to get teachers to come to South Jamaica, Korot had more freedom than usual in hiring teachers, and hired a young and committed staff.103 My charismatic social studies teacher, Kenneth Tewel, who went on to a career as a principal and top administrator in the city’s high schools, was one of the people who developed my love of history, and helped kindle a lifelong interest in African American history. (I remember doing a long report for him on the history of slavery in New York State, in which I tried to work in my new vocabulary find, “manumission,” in every sentence.) James Klurfeld, later the editorial page editor of Newsday, was a popular English teacher who, teaching at JHS 8 as part of a student deferment, introduced contemporary literature into popular classes.104 I had the best math teachers I ever had at JHS 8. A memorial program we had in the assembly after the death of Langston Hughes left a big impression. My formal musical career consisted of a stint playing third clarinet in the school band, which was a lot of fun, despite, as one member later recalled, playing tunes like “Fly Me to the Moon” at a tempo appropriate for a funeral dirge.105

JHS 8 could have been a better school, and integration there could have been more thoroughgoing and more carefully thought out. With time and hindsight came a deeper knowledge of how difficult the process was, of opportunities missed, and of the limitations of good intentions. In retrospect, Kenneth Tewel feels that his thinking about the possibility of integration at JHS 8 was somewhat “simplistic”; it had been a protective naivety, shielding him from the pervasive pessimism that overtook thought about integration later in the decade:106

We never really understood the deeper dynamics of integration or the real feelings of the black community; it was like an age of innocence…. I should have paid better attention to some of the learning problems of some of the black kids in this situation. For a lot of the black kids this was their first interaction with white students. But this was a happy time for us, the school was working, there was no great tension or strain.

Integration in JHS 8, as in Rochdale’s elementary schools, and in the cooperative itself, was built on partial victories and compromises. Some at the time (like the RVPSC), and many in hindsight, could see how partial a victory it was, and what might have been done differently. But no one had a free hand to shape it as they chose. Some wanted to push faster, some wanted to slow down, and many were happy just as they were. What is perhaps most important is to remember that integration in Rochdale followed no blueprint, and it was created, almost entirely, not by outsiders, but by the people who lived in the cooperative, and the people who lived near it. In the words of David Rogers,107

Rochdale offered the board [of education] an opportunity with built-in answers to the problems they claim to face in bringing about integration. There was a naturally integrated school population formed by whites buying into the area—quite the opposite from the typical unstable, transitional area…. [But despite the ambivalence of the Board of Education,] it was the parents who saw the opportunities for desegregation…it was the community leaders who began and carried through the community relations work in both communities, seeking out fears and intelligently answering them.

But it would not last. Successful integration in Rochdale, and in Rochdale’s schools, was, as Larry Lapka, a former Rochdale resident said, “a shooting star,” burning bright for its moment, then going dark and falling to earth, its downward trajectory determined by the racial gravitation of the times, “something we had no control over.”108