The Ocean Hill Brownsville Conflict

The story of an Ocean Hill–Brownsville teacher who crossed picket lines during the racially charged New York City teachers’ strike of 1968. In 1968 the conflict that erupted over community control of the New York City public schools was centered in the black and Puerto Rican community of Ocean Hill–Brownsville. It triggered what remains the longest teachers’ strike in US history. That clash, between the city’s communities of color and the white, predominantly Jewish teachers’ union, paralyzed the nation’s largest school system, undermined the city’s economy, and heightened racial tensions, ultimately transforming the national conversation about race relations. At age twenty-two, when the strike was imminent, Charles S. Isaacs abandoned his full scholarship to a prestigious law school to teach mathematics in Ocean Hill–Brownsville. Despite his Jewish background and pro-union leanings, Isaacs crossed picket lines manned by teachers who looked like him, and took the side of parents and children who did not. He now tells the story of this conflict, not only from inside the experimental, community-controlled Ocean Hill–Brownsville district, its focal point, but from within ground zero itself: Junior High School 271, which became the nation’s most famous, or infamous, public school. Isaacs brings to life the innovative teaching practices that community control made possible, and the relationships that developed in the district among its white teachers and its black and Puerto Rican parents, teachers, and community activists. “Inside Ocean Hill–Brownsville is one of the finest accounts of this turbulent time in America’s educational history. As a firsthand analysis of a teacher embroiled in the Ocean Hill–Brownsville community fight for educational justice, it has no peer. From its vantage point forty-five years after the conflict, we finally have a corrective to a plethora of secondhand analyses that have been written over the years. It is a candid picture that I recommend highly.” — Maurice R. Berube, coeditor of Confrontation at Ocean Hill–Brownsville “Inside Ocean Hill–Brownsville makes a vital contribution to a much-needed reinterpretation of the epochal struggles over community control of the New York City public schools in the 1960s, and the divisive UFT fall 1968 strikes in opposition to that community-based movement. Writing from the firsthand perspective of a young Jewish math teacher at JHS 271, Isaacs brings this important story vividly to life with insight, candor, and humor. He evokes the attitudes and actions of a rich array of ordinary teachers, administrators, students, and parents who fought to defend the community-control experiment in the face of the lies and distortions perpetrated by UFT officials and the mainstream press. A must read for anyone interested in creating successful public schools, this book helps us remember what democratic public education might look like.” — Stephen Brier, The Graduate Center, City University of New York “Charles Isaacs’s Inside Ocean Hill–Brownsville is a firsthand account of the dramatic events of New York City’s greatest school crisis. Isaacs debunks many of the popular myths of black militants waging assaults on teachers. Instead, he demonstrates that the episode in Ocean Hill–Brownsville was a case of black and Latino parents, with the support of a number of teachers at JHS 271, struggling for the education of their children and for a more democratically run educational system. These parents faced one of the most powerful unions in the city and a bureaucratic board of education that wanted to protect the status quo. There have been many books written on the 1968 teachers’ strike, but Isaacs’s well-written, detailed account is by far the best.” — Clarence Taylor, author of Knocking at Our Own Door: Milton A. Galamison and the Struggle to Integrate New York City Schools

"This book revisits the Ocean Hill-Brownsville crisis - a watershed in modern New York City race relations. Jerald E. Podair connects the conflict with the sociocultural history of the city and explores its influence on city politics, economics, and culture. Podair shows how the crisis became a symbol of the vast perceptual chasm separating black and white New Yorkers. And the legacy of this critical moment, when blacks and whites spoke past each other like strangers, has ever since played a role in city issues ranging from mayoral elections to budget negotiations, disputes over police violence, and debates on welfare policy. The book is a powerful, sobering tale of racial misunderstanding and fear, a New York story with national implications."--Jacket.

The history of Black-Jewish relations from the beginning of the twentieth century shows that, while they were sometimes partners of convenience, there was also a deep suspicion of each other that broke out into frequent public exchanges. During the twentieth century, the entanglements of both groups have, at times, provided an important impetus for social justice in the United States and, at other times, have been the cause of great tension. The Ocean Hill-Brownsville Conflict explores this fraught relationship, which is evident in the intellectual lives of these communities. The tension was as apparent in the life and works of Marcus Garvey, Richard Wright, and James Baldwin as it was in the exchanges between blacks and Jews in intellectual periodicals and journals in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. The Ocean Hill-Brownsville conflict was rooted in this tension and the longstanding differences over community control of school districts and racial preferences.

Silver Winner, 2014 ForeWord IndieFab Book of the Year Award in the Education Category In 1968 the conflict that erupted over community control of the New York City public schools was centered in the black and Puerto Rican community of Ocean Hill–Brownsville. It triggered what remains the longest teachers' strike in US history. That clash, between the city's communities of color and the white, predominantly Jewish teachers' union, paralyzed the nation's largest school system, undermined the city's economy, and heightened racial tensions, ultimately transforming the national conversation about race relations. At age twenty-two, when the strike was imminent, Charles S. Isaacs abandoned his full scholarship to a prestigious law school to teach mathematics in Ocean Hill–Brownsville. Despite his Jewish background and pro-union leanings, Isaacs crossed picket lines manned by teachers who looked like him, and took the side of parents and children who did not. He now tells the story of this conflict, not only from inside the experimental, community-controlled Ocean Hill–Brownsville district, its focal point, but from within ground zero itself: Junior High School 271, which became the nation's most famous, or infamous, public school. Isaacs brings to life the innovative teaching practices that community control made possible, and the relationships that developed in the district among its white teachers and its black and Puerto Rican parents, teachers, and community activists.

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