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• Author: Kahlenberg, Richard D.
• Position: The Strike That Changed New York: Blacks, Whites and the Ocean Hill-Brownville Crisis - Book Review

THE STRIKE THAT CHANGED NEW YORK: Blacks, Whites, and the Ocean Hill-Brownsville Crisis by Jerald E. Podair Yale University Press, $35.00

PUBLISHERS USUALLY WANT book titles to overreach. I remember my initial hesitation when my editor suggested a book I'd written on affirmative action be titled The Remedy. (I gave in when he said people looking for the latest John Grisham novel might buy it by mistake.) So it is rare that we see a book title like this one, which undersells its subject, describing the dispute over the firing of white educators by a local black school board in Ocean Hill-Brownsville in Brooklyn as one that "changed New York." On fundamental issues of race, education, and labor, the new politics that emerged from Ocean Hill-Brownsville in 1968 devastated American liberalism so profoundly that the effects are still being felt 35 years later.

Jerald Podair's new book does an admirable job of telling all sides of the story itself in a clear and compelling fashion. Understandably frustrated with virulent white resistance to school integration, local black leaders in New York sought to establish "community control" over the schools, with the help of the city's white elite, most notably Mayor John Lindsay and the Ford Foundation's McGeorge Bundy. In May 1968, however, the movement turned ugly when the local Ocean Hill-Brownsville board summarily fired 18 white educators (and one black educator mistakenly included) for not supporting community control. The local school administrator, Rhody McCoy, said his ultimate goal was an all-black teaching force in the community.

Albert Shanker, president of the New York City United Federation of Teachers (UFT), protested the dismissals as a violation of the hard-won union contract requiring due process. When the school board balked at reinstating the teachers, the UFT staged a series of three strikes, which shut down the entire New York City public school system. With 1 million students stranded, in one case for more than a month, the Ocean Hill-Brownsville dispute turned into the largest and longest teachers' strike in American history.

Black activists labeled Shanker and the UFT racist for resisting a measure of black self-government. They noted that blacks constituted just 8 percent of the New York City teaching force (compared to 20 percent of the general population) and called for an elimination of the Board of Examiners' test for entry and promotion. They called for a curriculum teaching...