The Strikes That Changed New York: Race, Culture, and Ocean Hill-Brownsville, 1960-1975
2002; Volume: 26; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0364-2437
Autores Tópico(s)Jewish Identity and Society
ResumoOn morning of May 9, 1968, a Jewish junior high school science teacher named Fred Nauman received a letter that would change York City. The letter Nauman opened that day was signed by chairman of a local school board in Brooklyn's predominantly black Ocean Hill-Brownsville section, which was part of an experiment in community control of area's public schools. It told Nauman, a chapter chairman of city's ninety-percent white, and majority Jewish union, United Federation of Teachers (UFT), that he had been fired.(2)The issue of whether this black local school board could fire this Jewish, unionized teacher on its own initiative, which was joined with this letter, would effect a fundamental shift in politics, culture, and race relations in York City. It would result in a series of three citywide teachers strikes launched by UFT in fall of 1968 aimed at obtaining reinstatement of Nauman and me of his union colleagues, who were also fired by Ocean Hill-Brownsville local school board that day. Lasting almost two months in all, and affecting almost one million public schoolchildren, strikes would be most bitter in city's moden history, rife with charges of racism, union-busting, and anti-Semitism.These strikes pitted city's middle class, which backed UFT, against York's black poor, and government, business, media, and intellectual elites, who rallied in support of Ocean Hill-Brownsville local school board and community control idea. They pitted city's traditional liberals and emerging neo-conservatives against acolytes of New Politics and Left. Most importantly, however, they pitted blacks against whites, and specifically, blacks against Jews. For both blacks and Jews, Ocean Hill-Brownsville was a crucial moment of self-revelation. It exposed hidden fissures beneath surface of what many had considered a model relationship. It forced each to confront unrealistic constructions of the other. And, it created an atmosphere in which continued Jewish ambivalence about white identity became impossible. Under pressure from city's black community at Ocean Hill-Brownsville, York's Jews, primarily those residing outside Manhattan in what were known as outer boroughs, came to grips with their whiteness and began to align with Italian, Irish, and Eastern European Catholics, who only recently had been their rivals.This shift, in which almost a century of ethno cultural animosity between Jews and Catholics was subordinated to imperatives of race, would have far-reaching consequences for political, economic, and cultural life in York in 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. It sundered informal political alliance between Jews, blacks, and Protestants in York that had defined city's political culture since end of World War n, by breaking off a crucial element - outer-borough Jews - and realigning them with Catholics. This new alliance reconfigured York's political landscape rightward. Only once in city's seven mayoral elections between 1973 and 11997 did voters elect most liberal candidate available to them. York's new governing coalition of outer-borough Jews and Catholics provided an electoral mandate for service reductions and budget cuts that marked city's fiscal crisis of mid- 1970s, cuts that disproportionately impacted city's black community.Perhaps most significantly, by removing mediating influence of city's Jewish population, Ocean Hill-Brownsville controversy helped substitute race for religion, ethnicity, and class as primary dividing line in York politics and social relations. Before Ocean Hill-Brownsville, pluralist social scientists such as Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan themselves could argue in their classic Beyond Melting Pot for existence of not one, but many New Yorks, defined by a series of overlapping ethnic, religious, racial, and economic identities. …
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