Jack Salzman, Cornel West Struggles in the Promised

The Need to Remember \\ 247
pal of JHS 178 had lost control. Students ran the halls and some teachers had
abandoned their classrooms. Yet parents were frustrated by reform-minded teachers
reluctant to ignore eligibility lists, seniority, and collective bargaining agreements.
Teachers viewed these hard won gains as sacrosanct; parents viewed the
rules and the teachers as obstacles.
The poker-style gamesmanship of both sides continued though 1968, with
each confrontation followed by a raising of the ante. After a threatened strike by
Ocean Hill parents, teachers waged a 14-day strike over wages, disciplining
unruly students, and policy-making. Some parents (and some teachers) saw the
strike as further disregard for the well-being of the children. Parents soon picketed
teachers. Tensions exploded again in May 1968, when a community board and
its superintendent, Rhody McCoy, transfered 13 teachers, 5 assistant principals,
and 1 principal without securing other employment for them—as promised.
With UFT support, 350 teachers walked off the job. The state legislature settled
the immediate issue—though not the question of community control—in April
1969 when it divided the city into more than 30 districts. 50
The residue of interethnic suspicion lasted well after the controversy ended,
one suspects. Certainly some Blacks demonstrated their susceptibility to the racist
virus of anti-Semitism, and as the Botein Report on racial and religious prejudice
concluded, "Over and over again we found evidence of...vicious anti-Black attitudes
on the parts of some white people." Still, Jews and Blacks mobilized to fight
such prejudices. Teachers of both races praised intergroup cooperation, criticized
union leadership for seemingly fanning the flames of discord, and highlighted the
continued involvement of white and Jewish teachers in Ocean Hill—Brownsville.
Meanwhile, more conservative UFT members rejected radicalism and those members
who supported community control, undermining the view that this was simply
a battle between a Black community and white, overwhelmingly Jewish,
teachers. 51
Placed in historical context, therefore, the Ocean Hill—Brownsville controversy
symbolized what happened when two group histories converged more than
merged. When the Jewish community was small and contact limited, educational
relations turned on personal relationships. When elites in both groups came of
age, as they did in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the relationship
revolved around the formation of mutually beneficial institutions. By the
third phase, however, personal relationships and institutional arrangements had
not disappeared altogether, but now a wider cross section of both communities
knew each other. Some found the terms for common ground, pursuing civil rights
and equal opportunity. Others encountered the "other" and recoiled. For those
Blacks and Jews, ancient prejudices found new meanings as they struggled to
maintain or secure their place in American life.
That James Baldwin had Jewish friends and that his Jewish friends had a
Black friend is both the promise and the challenge. Each generation or two has
defined the terms of an educational relationship. At times that relationship adopt-