Jack Salzman, Cornel West Struggles in the Promised

Blacks and Jews: The Struggle in the Cities \\ 115
review board to consider complaints of police brutality. With the eruption of the
slogan "Black Power," the forthcoming election quickly became a referendum on
"law and order" and the fear of crime. Most liberal unions and reform groups, and
the major Jewish organizations, backed the proposal. Conservatives and the police
opposed it. When November came, the civilian review board was defeated. Polls
showed that a majority of Jews had voted against it. The heaviest Jewish opposition
was in Brooklyn and Queens, where working- and middle-class Jews lived.
Tensions were roiling in ghettos, in civil rights organizations, and in Black and
Jewish neighborhoods across the city. The rising Black militancy was demanding
power, real power. To many Jews, middle-class liberals as well as working class
conservatives, these demands for economic equality and the rumblings of anti-
Semitism coming from Ocean Hill—Brownsville now seemed to threaten them
directly.
Passions in New York reached a peak when Julius Lester, then a Black activist
and public radio talk show host, invited a Black teacher from Ocean
Hill—Brownsville onto his show to read a poem written by a Black student. The
poem, the teacher said, was dedicated to Albert Shanker. It began: "Jew-boy with
your yarmulke/Jew-boy I wish you were dead."
In fact, as McCoy and others claimed repeatedly throughout the strike, several
of the union handouts were inaccurate, quoting statements out of context.
None of the anti-Semitic leaflets represented official Ocean Hill—Brownsville policy.
Lester repudiated the poem on his show, saying it showed where anger and
bigotry could lead. For all the talk of Black Power and fear of anti-Semitism in
Ocean Hill-Brownsville, 70 percent of the teachers the community board in
Ocean Hill—Brownsville approved—before the strike and during the strike—
were white. Half were Jewish. The important thing, McCoy emphasized over and
over again, was not their background but the fact that the neighborhood parents
had approved them.
In the end McCoy and the Ocean Hill—Brownsville school board lost. The
striking teachers demanded that McCoy and the board be removed before they
would return to work. After weeks of bitter confrontation, the New York Board
of Education agreed. The Ocean Hill—Brownsville experiment was suspended.
McCoy and the board were dismissed from their jobs.
The Ocean Hill—Brownsville school strike and the bitterness it created was
part and preview of clashes that would recur between Blacks and Jews, especially
over affirmative action. McCoy had demanded Black control over Black lives.
Even more, he wanted control over white lives as well: the right to replace white
principals with Black principals, the right to hire, and fire, white teachers as well
as Black teachers. McCoy wanted to scuttle an examination system that Jewish
teachers and supervisors had based their careers on—but which had prevented
Blacks in any significant numbers from becoming schoolteachers. These issues, in
the form of affirmative action and quotas, in challenges to civil service rules and
fights with unions, in debates over seniority rules versus discrimination, would