Blacks & Jews, pt. 5

Like the Manson murders and the Altamont Free Concert, the 1968 New York City teachers’ strikes were an unlikely landmark at the end of an era. Far from the most dramatic or explosive racial controversy of the era, the Ocean Hill/Brownsville strikes nevertheless helped catalyze a political realignment that remains in force today. Historian Fred Siegel writes:

(New York Mayor John) Lindsay’s reign of the best and brightest sparked a Kulturkampf between blacks and whites, blacks and Jews, unions and black nationalists, the ethnic heirs of the New Deal and the heirs to the civil rights movement. All these tensions crystallized around the Ocean Hill-Brownsville school-decentralization strife in Brooklyn, a conflict so intense that it was described in apocalyptic terms at the time. Even today, if you ask older New Yorkers “which side you were on,” you’ll see the embers of their anger burning brightly.

Elite liberals like John Lindsay abased themselves to show that they were down for the cause, and did their best to redirect black rage away from their penthouses and onto the humble homes of middle- and working-class whites. Siegel continues:

When Lindsay ran for reelection in 1969, he pioneered the top-bottom political coalition that would increasingly come to define liberalism. Lindsay’s two opponents in the campaign both attracted white lower-middle-class and middle-class supporters who were enraged by the mayor, whom they mocked as a “limousine liberal.” Faced with this, Lindsay cleverly jettisoned the intermediate stratum of society for a political alliance of the black and Puerto Rican poor on the one hand and wealthy white liberals on the other.

In city after city and neighborhood after neighborhood, racial activists and their elite liberal backers had swept aside the opposition of white ethnics trying to preserve their communities. In a matter of a couple of decades, most of the legacy parish communities in American big cities were broken up and scattered, as white residents fled increasing crime and decaying schools, and homeowners got what they could before their property values dropped any further. As a result, ethnic communities which had been locally organized around formal and informal institutions and hierarchies lost their capacity for self-help, and a century’s worth of built-up social capital evaporated in one generation. This was a real social and political revolution, imposed by liberal elites using black militants as their “battering ram.”

But the militants bit off more than they could chew when they took on the NYC teachers’ union. This time, it was the activists who found themselves on the back foot, unable to control the terms of debate even with the prestige press mostly standing in their corner. The mostly-Jewish teachers and union leaders had taken in left wing politics with their mother’s milk. Their politics typically ranged from anti-Soviet Trotskyites to New Deal Democrats, and they’d always supported civil rights and racial integration. These were not people to be easily cowed with frivolous accusations of racism, especially when their accusers were using language reminiscent of Old World anti-Semitism. It was the first time black militants ran into a group of card-carrying liberals willing to stand their ground.