Blacks & Jews, pt. 4 - The Battle of Ocean Hill-Brownsville

As the weather warmed in early 1968, Americans were preparing for another summer of racial violence. Riots had increased in number and severity each year since Watts (1965), and there was no reason to believe that ‘68 would break the trend. The previous year, black residents of Detroit had fought pitched battles with the police amidst a city in flames, and only the intervention of the 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions succeeded in putting down the insurrection. When it was over, wrote the Detroit News, what was left was “something worse than a slum.” The ruined downtown resembled “inscrutable megaliths in a wilderness of rubble so desolate that you can stand in the middle of Woodward St., the heart of the riot, at midday and not see a single auto for miles in any direction.” Forty-three people were killed in five days and nights of violence. The Detroit riot came just a week after a race riot in Newark that had left 26 people dead. The Long, Hot Summer of ‘67 eventually saw mass violence in over 150 towns and cities across the country.

The black novelist James Baldwin wrote that, “Black has become a beautiful color not because it is loved, but because it is feared.” American political historian Fred Siegel accepted Baldwin’s terms, and wrote that:

Watts signaled a (black) secession of sorts from middle-class and white norms. The institutions such as the schools, the civil service, and the health department - so important to immigrant mobility - were redefined as dehumanizing instruments of white domination. Black power was to be a struggle not so much for self-sustaining freedom as for the self-satisfaction that comes from humbling one’s oppressor.

The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) had purged all of its white (mostly Jewish) members in 1967 and was now under the control of H. Rap Brown, a murderous militant who was emblematic of the changes that had taken place in the black rights movement since the focus shifted to the major cities. From his large platform, Brown openly called on black people to launch a Viet Cong-style guerilla war against white America. Brown was a thug, and would later be jailed on multiple occasions for charges running from murder to simple robbery, but in 1968 his brand of leadership was becoming dominant in the black ghettos.

People who lived in or near the riot zones didn’t need to consult the newspapers to know what was coming. Violence - small-scale, random street corner violence - was proliferating in every major city in America. Detroit’s infamous Halloween Eve “Devil’s Night” had been known since the 1940s as a night when the city’s youth engaged in minor pranks and acts of vandalism - egging, toilet papering, leaving rotten vegetables or bags of dog crap on someone’s porch. By the late ‘60s, Devil’s Night was used each year by youth gangs to set fire to buildings, and to rob, beat, and sometimes kill locals unlucky enough to be caught outside. The murder rate nearly tripled during the decade, in New York and other cities across the country. Things were falling apart, and to many people it was not inconceivable that the violence could spiral into a real insurgency - if not like Vietnam, then at least like Algiers, or maybe Northern Ireland.

Working and middle class whites fled the increasingly-black neighborhoods where most of the violence was concentrated as fast as their incomes allowed. Private schools proliferated as parents sought to protect their children from dangerous public schools. By 1967, school violence was so bad in New York that the United Federation of Teachers went on strike for two weeks to defend its members’ right to discipline seriously disruptive students, and to demand a police presence in the worst schools (a measure against which teachers had previously fought). They were opposed by the African-American Teachers’ Association (ATA), which argued that “the very concept of the disruptive child was an expression of white middle-class cultural bias against black culture.”

ATA member teachers were using their classrooms to radicalize and indoctrinate their students into the ideology of black nationalism. Politics was used as an excuse for violence, as when a gang of Puerto Rican students “rampaged” (NYT) through Eastern District High School in Brooklyn after accusing a Jewish teacher of harassing them. School district bosses, fearful of being tagged as racists, ignored the teachers’ pleas for help. Students got the message that their teachers and principals were powerless, and any semblance of order evaporated in many schools.

Harold Salzman, a liberal, Jewish teacher and union leader in New York City during this time, wrote about what happened in a book called Race War in High School: The Ten-Year Destruction of Franklin K. Lane High School. Salzman reported that teachers “had been told to avoid confrontations with black students” at all costs, and that they should not expect the support of the district if an incident resulted from their failure to do so. Salzman wrote:

‘Don’t enforce the rules where black students are concerned,’ they were continually advised. ‘Let the blacks do their own thing. Don’t compel them to produce identification cards. Don’t require them to stand for the morning pledge of allegiance exercise even though it is required by state law. Don’t make an issue over their refusal to remove their hats in the school building. And above all, remember that these are changing times, and are you sure you don’t harbor racist attitudes?’

In a variety of ways, sometimes subtle, sometimes more direct, most of Lane’s teachers had gotten that message from its own administration and from the central school board. In this turbulent era, the New York City school board wasn’t even backing up its own principals. At any given time there were more than twenty of them cooling their heels at board headquarters after having been ‘promoted’ to a desk job at 110 Livingston Street as a result of pressure from black militants.

If a principal couldn’t expect the support of the school board on matters related to fundamental school discipline, no less violence and lawlessness, it followed that a principal wouldn’t put his own neck on the line by sustaining a teacher who was foolish enough to try to break up a dice game or report a drug transaction on school premises. The name of the game for Lane’s teachers had become, ‘Mind your own business and don’t get involved,’ because, they learned, in New York’s tempestuous school system the ax most often fell not on the incompetent, but on a dedicated teacher who tried to do an honest job for his day’s pay.

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For a complex set of reasons, New York City was largely spared any mass violence while other cities burned in the summer of ‘67. In the aftermath, President Lyndon Johnson set up the National Advisory Committee on Civil Disturbances - better known as the Kerner Commission - to study the causes of the rise in urban violence, and NYC mayor John Lindsay was tapped to lead it. Lindsay was the quintessential Rockefeller Republican - an upper-class liberal, enlightened on racial questions, and seething with contempt for the ethnic politics that had shaped city life in the East and Midwest for over a century. For Lindsay, the protests of an Italian or Lithuanian or Polish community against the relocation of a violent public housing project to their neighborhood had no more legitimacy than the wails of white Southerners who didn’t want to share a drinking fountain. The Kerner Report reflected that perspective. It concluded that the causes of urban violence were economic inequality, failed social services, police brutality, and media bias - all of which existed, and continued to exist, because of the racism, latent or active, in the hearts of white Americans.

When his attention turned to the schools, Lindsay asked the Ford Foundation, led by former Harvard dean and JFK & LBJ National Security Advisor, McGeorge Bundy, to assess the causes and propose solutions for the ongoing deterioration, particularly in black-majority schools. Bundy’s tenure at the Ford Foundation was defined by its focus on racial issues. Taking the advice of black activists, he began pouring the Foundation’s resources into poorly-vetted local “community groups” in a boondoggle that was a domestic prelude to the US government’s dilemma in its covert war against Syria in the 2010s: with few resources on the ground to sort through local complexities and figure out who was who, they relied on self-appointed community representatives to tell them where to spend their money - much of which was siphoned off to local scam artists and the very militant organizations stoking violence in the ghetto. When they weren’t funding urban decay, outfits like the Ford Foundation were studying it, and that was what Mayor Lindsay had tapped McGeorge Bundy to do in New York City schools.