Jack Salzman, Cornel West Struggles in the Promised

The Need to Remember \\ 245
narrow swath of real estate to answer Black demands for decent housing—it so
happened the property cut through the primarily Jewish communities of
Dorchester, Roxbury, and Mattapan. Soon Black militants confronted Jewish merchants
and civic leaders and clashed over housing integration, Black entitlement,
Jewish culpability, and a list of factors real and imagined. Caught in the crossfire
were long-time residents of Dorchester and Roxbury, stunned by the rapid transition
of a community from white and Jewish to Black and somewhat isolated. 43
Proclaiming, as did delegates at the 1972 Gary Convention, that "our cities
are.. .dying grounds. [And] the schools are unable—or unwilling—to educate our
children for the real world of our struggles," residents of the Ocean
Hill—Brownsville section of Brooklyn demanded action, too. Blacks had lived in
Brooklyn since the founding of the nation; in 1790 they accounted for 1 in 3 residents,
a share they would not reclaim until the late twentieth century. The school
conflict was born of the twentieth century, however. In 1940 Blacks accounted for
just 4.0 percent of the population. A declining overall population and a sixfold
increase in the Black population pushed African Americans to 25.2 percent of the
New York City total by 1970. As of 1968, Brooklyn held the largest proportion
of Blacks in the five boroughs of New York City (39 percent). 44
Significantly, the majority of Blacks lived among other Blacks. This close
proximity and sense of shared grievances stitched together a racial tapestry made
from the commingling of West Indian, southern, and northern Black threads.
From the fragments of this quilted world formed a racialized community that
acknowledged differences even as it coalesced around themes of common complaint.
Little bound that community as much as the goal of community empowerment.
45 Black, disproportionately poor, and symbolically disfranchised, many
members believed community control was the answer to a complex of befuddling
problems. It was not so simple of course, but in the late 1960s few knew this.
Elsewhere in the city, questions of race and desegregation had already shaped
the perceptions of some Jews. In 196.3, 87 percent of those attending PS 149 were
white, whereas almost 100 percent of those attending nearby PS 92 were Black
and Puerto Rican. To correct this racial imbalance, officials proposed grade-level
consolidation. First and second graders would attend PS 92; third through sixth
graders would go to PS 149.
This was not just a story about race, however. Reflecting a curious postwar
bifurcation in the city's schools, the overwhelming majority of whites were also
Jewish, including three quarters of those attending PS 149. A good number were
new to the area. They had moved from the Bronx and Brooklyn for better opportunities,
better schools, and to avoid the sizable influx of Blacks and Puerto
Ricans. When pressed many acknowledged that they worried less about their
children attending schools with Blacks than about their neighborhoods becoming
majority Black. Some apprehension had to do with the bug-a-boo of depreciated
real estate value. But faced with the possibility of sustained contact, Jews, just as
Blacks, worried about empowerment and control. 46