The Brooklyn Strike That Tested Black-Jewish Alliance

Contrary to the celebratory myth that the Civil Rights movement ushered in an era of seamless egalitarian brotherhood, the actual implementation of its ideals exposed bitter, ethnic rivalries even among the very groups that worked to undermine White society.

On May 9, 1968, 19 educators received letters from the Ocean Hill-Brownsville governing board telling them their work in the Brooklyn district had ended. 13 were teachers and 6 were administrators. The board said the personnel had obstructed an experiment in which Black and Puerto Rican parents would finally govern schools that had long failed their children. Jewish union organizer Albert Shanker and the United Federation of Teachers replied that the board had denied the educators due process.

The letters were suffused with ethnic tension. New York had not delivered meaningful school integration, and Black and Puerto Rican parents had watched a remote Board of Education preside over over-crowded schools, thin resources, and a curriculum that did little to reflect the needs of their children. Community control grew from that failure. If the system would keep neighborhood schools segregated, organizers argued, then parents should have real authority over staffing, curriculum, and daily school life. In response, the city created 3 demonstration districts in Ocean Hill-Brownsville, Harlem, and the Lower East Side.

Ocean Hill-Brownsville was at the center of this controversy. Ford Foundation support and Mayor John Lindsay’s decentralization agenda helped create the experiment, but officials never clearly settled the scope of its authority. Rhody McCoy, the Black unit administrator, and the governing board treated meaningful control as the power to choose and remove personnel. The UFT treated the same claim as a threat to a citywide contract, tenure rules, and the safeguards that protected teachers from arbitrary discipline. The mandate invariably invited a collision.

Shanker’s own path explains why he saw the conflict through labor rights and why his response became so charged. Born on September 14, 1928, he was the son of Yiddish-speaking immigrants from Czarist Russia who settled in New York City. His father Morris delivered newspapers, and his mother Mamie was a garment worker who held union cards in both the International Ladies Garment Workers Union and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union. At Stuyvesant High School he headed the debate team. At the University of Illinois he majored in philosophy and graduated with honors before pursuing a doctorate at Columbia. When funds ran out, a per-diem substitute teaching job at PS 179 in East Harlem drew him into union organizing. He built the United Federation of Teachers from the Teachers Guild, won collective bargaining rights for New York teachers through the 1960 strike, and became UFT president in 1964.

With respect to the May letters, the UFT was fiercely opposed to the firing of its members. The union went on strike three times that fall, and by the third strike, which began October 14, the citywide shutdown had drawn nearly 57,000 teachers from classrooms and left more than 1 million students out of school. Ocean Hill-Brownsville schools tried to stay open with replacement staff and community support. The immediate conflict forced a devastating choice on families who wanted both stable schooling and the power to shape it. In November, state intervention restored the striking teachers and ended the experiment’s effective autonomy.

This was no ordinary teacher strike. Richard Parrish, a labor and civil rights veteran and AFT vice president, broke with Shanker to help found the UFT’s Black Caucus, which opposed the strike, backed decentralization, and called for schools to reopen. An anonymous leaflet used strident anti-Jewish language and circulated widely. A Black teacher read a student’s anti-Jewish poem on WBAI, deepening the controversy. The UFT distributed the anonymous leaflet broadly, and historians have noted that its origins were never definitively established—with some scholars raising the possibility that it was a provocative plant rather than an authentic product of the community control movement.

Writing in a leftist publication,  Paul Buhle provides this summary:

Historian Jerald Podair has brilliantly captured the ambience of the social democratic milieu under pressure. UFTers of the middle 1960s determinedly insisted, for instance, upon a racially inclusive curriculum, but with entirely predictable contours. The union’s Committee on African-American History seemed to bury the old mint julep version of slavery and reconstruction. But it just as effectively buried Malcolm X (indeed, Shanker seized and destroyed thousands of copies of a curriculum guide which credited Malcolm’s historical contribution) and any approach which placed the black experience outside the melting pot that usefully melts all the unfortunate group traits of worthy aspirants in the process of a cheerful upward mobility.⁵

For this worldview, closely reflecting the pseudo-sociology of Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a “culture of poverty” rooted in a matriarchal black community rather than the repressive social conditions of the rural south or the increasingly jobless north was the real hindrance to African American advance. Such cultural determinists prided themselves upon banishing genetic theories of inferiority, but by assuming that youth could be remolded without broad changes in the property relations of society [my emphasis], they substituted a subtextually race-linked hypothesis just as virulent for the new era. Rising neoconservative operatives, like Shanker ally (and Reagan Administration official) Diane Ravitch, naturally used the cry of “competence” as a meritocratic club over the heads of victims in the failing systems, as if all school systems or individuals had access to the same resources or as if the ability of a talented and fortunate tenth of a talented tenth demonstrated the hopelessness of the 99 percent.

Ironically, the most articulately ferocious opponents of the UFT, the black middle class, shared this ideology to a very large extent, although with a difference. It wanted and demanded an affirmative action adjustment of available resources, exactly what the ideologues of meritocracy could never grant.

BLACK/JEWISH TENSIONS MEANWHILE FLARED, and not only in New York or among teachers, students and parents, but in the general population. Ranging from the emerging Jewish institutional support for the Vietnam war (which, it should be noted, ordinary Jews overwhelmingly opposed), subsidies to suburbanization alongside the abandonment of the inner cities, and the all-too-familiar black street rage at the Jewish teachers, lawyers, landlords, employers and caseworkers (many of whom warmly assisted African Americans, while others coldly cheated or demeaned them), the temperature rose.⁶ Power-seeking nationalists, most if not all of them thoroughly regressive, seized the moment on both sides — notwithstanding the media spin that portrayed one side of the polemic as civilized discourse and the other as barbaric noise.

Albert Shanker’s chief historic role was to pour gasoline on the spreading fire.⁷ Another, very different kind of leader might have taken early pride in the levels of teacher unionization achieved, and spent the next era striving to cool tempers. It would have been an honorable if not morally unmarred history, and a very unlikely one in this case. Shanker had a personal stake in the spotlight, according to friend and foe, amounting to megalomania. Like the calculating Vietnam hawk-propagandist-priest John O’Connor who raised himself through connections within the post-Vatican II’s New Right Church leadership into Cardinal status, Shanker was not just fighting for his political life. In his mind’s eye, he saw his name carved upon the historical record.

The crisis also created space for a more militant Jewish backlash. Meir Kahane founded the Jewish Defense League in May 1968 as a direct response to the antisemitism that surfaced during the Ocean Hill-Brownsville strike, borrowing the confrontational language of the Black Power movement—a movement he explicitly used as the model for the JDL—and channeling working-class Jewish fear into an ethnic politics of armed self-defense. The SPLC documented how “the strikes brought to the surface racial tension between the predominantly Jewish teachers union and Black residents seeking greater control over their neighborhood schools,” driving outer-borough Jewish workers toward Kahane’s organization.

The settlement did not erase that rupture. The 1969 decentralization law replaced the experimental districts with a weaker citywide structure of elected community boards while preserving central authority and teacher protections. New York eliminated that system under mayoral control in 2002. Meanwhile, Shanker went on to lead the American Federation of Teachers from 1974 until his death on February 22, 1997.

The 1968 New York school shutdown exposed the structural fault lines underlying the historic alliance between Black civil rights activists and the Jewish institutional establishment. While Jewish figures had provided vital organizational and financial backing to early civil rights battles, the Ocean Hill-Brownsville experiment proved that Black leaders were determined to operate on their own terms, even if it meant directly targeting Jewish union leadership.

This conflict revealed the inherent instability of coalitions managed by organized Jewry, where newly empowered groups inevitably push beyond their designated roles as golems and challenge the interests of their Jewish benefactors. Modern parallels abound, most visibly when Black Lives Matter factions alienated traditional Jewish supporters by embracing Palestinian liberation activism.

Disillusioned by Black unreliability over the course of multiple decades, organized Jewry is now scouting new non-White proxies to continue its campaign of national destabilization.

José Niño is a freelance writer based in Charlotte, North Carolina. You can contact him via Facebook and Twitter. Subscribe to his “Substack” newsletter by visiting “José Niño Unfiltered” on Substack.com.