Stokely Carmichael

Enjoy this special Carib Nation episode on Stokely Carmichael, an important figure in the history of the Civil Rights Movement in the US, Pan-Africanism, Black Power, the international Black Left, and a Caribbean-American from Trinidad! It's excellent to not forget Carmichael's immigrant roots and Caribbean influences in his politics and outlook.

Movin' On Up: The Music and Message of Curtis Mayfield

I finally watched this documentary about the life and contributions to music and society by Curtis Mayfield and The Impressions. It was a beautiful tribute to the life of a genius who ended his life paralyzed yet still writing music. The documentary included extensive interviews with several key people in Mayfield's life and music, from his wife and the remaining members of The Impressions (Cash and Gooden) to Johnny Pate and other musical legends, such as Carlos Santana and Chuck D. One prominent civil rights leader actually compares the music of Curtis and The Impressions to that of a spiritual force equivalent to Martin Luther King! I, though very biased as as well-known lover of The Impressions, am inclined to agree. Their music was and is uplifting, encouraging, spiritual, drenched in the ethos of the Black Freedom Struggle but timeless. Unfortunately, I do not recall Jerry Butler being an interviewee in this documentary, though his input on the early years of The Impressions and other aspects of Curtis's life would have been interesting.

Anyway, I learned from this documentary that the reason Curtis joined with The Impressions was because Jerry Butler said the group needed someone who could play an instrument to practice and rehearse with the vocal group. As a guitarist, Mayfield was perfect for the role. Fortunately, lengthy interviews with Johnny Pate reveal some additional facts around the The Impressions. Pate, much like in my extensive post on his impact on the sound of The Impressions, states his primary role was to emphasize and back-up Mayfield and The Impressions, which included jazz and pop arrangements with orchestras and string sections occasionally, but never to overpower Mayfield's voice (as well as enhancing their voices more generally). He also reminded me of the admirable falsetto of The Impressions, best exemplified on songs like "I Need You." Those guys really could sing high, and as an occasional singer myself, I know how difficult that can be.

Pate also revealed his love for "Woman's Got Soul," a jazzy song I have also blogged about. "People Get Ready" and numerous other hits and gems of The Impressions appear in the documentary, as live performances (such as a somewhat cheesy but interesting live TV show rendition of "People Get Ready" featuring The Impressions on a boat with groups of other ships following) or back stories. For instance, the original "We're a Winner" featured explicit lyrics alluding to the death of Uncle Tom, but of course no record label would distribute it so Mayfield changed the lyrics. Mayfield did not have to be that explicit anyway, the intent and meaning of the lyrics were obvious, or at least obvious enough for the song to face difficulties getting radio airplay. According to the members of the group, it was quite a battle to get "Choice of Colors" recorded, too, given its black and proud lyrical content. Unfortunately, or perhaps for the betterment of his career, Mayfield left The Impressions to focus on his solo career and multiple side projects in the 1970s, which is when I stop listening to the group.

Besides his music's lyrical content and gradual shift in the 1960s from more of the soul and pop sounds with slight jazz touches or gospel traditions, Mayfield's quick embrace of funk, black empowerment, and the 1970s milieu of soul and Black Power reveal his flexibility and ability to bridge the gap between the older generation of civil rights activism to something that would appeal to the more youthful aesthetics of pro-blackness (natural hairstyles, anti-colorist, pro-black self-ownership). Yet through it all, Mayfield remained an integrationist, with the hopes and ideals of the 1960s leading to his proud claims in "This Is My Country," asserting blacks' central role and contributions to the US while avoiding some fringe forms of black cultural nationalism that aimed to reorient African-American identity to Africa. By singing "we people who are darker than blue," which really had some resonance with his childhood experiences as the butt of jokes and insults because of the color of his skin, Mayfield also called for black unity among the black, brown and yellow, too.

Even when expressing disillusionment with the state of race relations ("If There's a Hell Below"), Mayfield still penned songs about the need for peace, maintaining hope, or spiritually uplifting music (or funkified versions of his earlier songs with The Impressions about love, unity across racial lines ("Mighty Mighty"), and the inequities and destruction of the proliferation of drugs in urban communities (though Super Fly and other blaxploitation flicks mostly glamorized the 'street life') in some of his other work. Intriguingly, Pate actually considered many of the songs on Super Fly to be quasi-rapping, another sign of Mayfield's relevance to the times he lived in and future generations of music, since he would be sampled often in hip-hop, too.

Indeed, Mayfield's passion for what he calls owning himself led to him running his own publishing company, record label (Curtom), writing soundtracks (Super Fly is the best-known), and, at the same time, recognizing when he needed a break. His wife, children, family, musical interests, and music career became, at a point, too demanding and difficult to balance for a man who wanted to, at the end of the day, be there with and for his family. Of course, he still made music, and even after the accident that paralyzed him at a show in Brooklyn, Mayfield wrote music, hosted visitors such as Chuck D, so to the end of his days, I like to think he did own himself more than most of us ever will. And though such a sentiment of 'self-ownership' could be seen as relic of some conservative strands in black political thought (I'm looking at your, Booker T. Washington and Marcus Garvey), I prefer to see Mayfield's stance beyond class or economic interests, but a much broader moral question of owning your own time, life, and taking responsibility for your decisions. This could mean a degree of personal autonomy, but really just a much broader question of determining and having the power to decide what you want to do with your life and not having your time and life schedule decided by others. As descendants of slaves and oppressed people with limited options set out for them, it makes perfect since for black folk to want that degree of collective freedom.

Rest in peace, Curtis, your life and music will forever live on. The documentary was put together quite well and some of the live footage of performances are priceless. May the music of The Impressions never die, nor shall its zeitgeist of that elusive goal of a freer world. "Keep on pushing!"

Why I Love Ella Baker

Ever since reading Barbara Ransby's excellent biography of Ella Baker over a year ago, I have wanted to write about why I love this woman's contributions to the Black Freedom Struggle and social justice. Ransby's biography, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement is a must-read for anyone interested in significant but lesser known figures in the Civil Rights Movement. A product of a middle-class black southern family, collective uplift and racial justice defined Baker from the start. From her days as a member of the small but growing cooperatives in New York City to SNCC, Baker's influence was paramount on many younger activists whose names have survived well over the years. Anywho, here are my reasons for loving Ella Baker, based on Ransby's text:

1. Ella Baker was interested in and supportive of cooperatives since the 1930s in Harlem. Baker was always interested in alternatives to the current systems, which is obvious from her support for the Young Negroes' League Cooperative as its national director. This site demonstrates the importance of cooperatives to Baker as a training ground for resistance, building activism, sustaining democratic and non-hierarchical structures, and empowering individuals through the collective. As someone who has lived in cooperative housing and appreciates non-hierarchical structures that empowers individuals to help themselves instead of rely on leaders, reading about Baker's days as a proponent of cooperatives in 1930s New York thrilled me. Her interest in economic and labor cooperatives also assists in elucidating her involvement with labor unions and organizers in the Jim Crow South, often being the only woman in attendance. Can you imagine that, a black woman travelling across the South to recruit for the NAACP? We know from McGuire's Dark End of the Street, that black women were frequent targets for phsyical and sexual violence. Indeed, sexual violence and rape was one of the underpinnings Jim and Jane Crow.

2. Baker's participatory approach to social activism focused on building people to lead themselves, instead of solely following 'leaders.' Her whole mentality far more democratic, empowering to the subaltern masses, and appealing than the leaders of the NAACP, SCLC, and other civil rights organizations. Indeed, Baker, who was a field organizer for the NAACP in the Jim Crow South during the 1940s, always believed the focus of the NAACP should be on training activists instead of persuading blacks to limit their activity to fundraising and supporting the national organization. Baker also butted heads with Walter White, current leader of the national NAACP at the time, for his undemocratic practices of making decisions without discussion with the rank and file. 

3. Baker was very involved with New York City activism, being elected the New York branch of the NAACP's president in 1952. During her involvement with NYC civil rights in the 1950s, Baker became very closely tied to the battle against school segregation, to improve educational facilities for black and Puerto Rican children. In addition, Baker served as a member of the Intergroup Committee chaired by Kenneth Clark, which was set up by the NY Board of Education to address some of the problems BLack and Latino children encountered in the public schools. She even ran for public office and engaged in various forms of protest: sending public letters, leading noisy street demonstrations, confronting the mayor in front of the news media, etc. Later, she became involved with national civil rights networks, including In Friendship, where she worked with Bayard Rustin as the organization endeavored to maintain it's interest in empowering, grassroots activism.

4. Baker was at the founding meeting of SCLC in January 1957! Bayard Rustin, Stanley David Levison, and Ella Baker helped lay blueprint for SCLC and King let the above two men in his circle, but not Baker. According to Ransby, he never treated her as a political or intellectual peer despite her experience in organizing. Can you imagine the chauvinism and ingratitude of being in such an environment? Despite her full-time staff position on campaigns for SCLC and her role in the founding of the organization, her work (and that of other women) was devalued. Ministers leading the organization, who often lacked the proper skills and were engaged in improper sexual relationships (all in spite of their Christian morality), of course took all the credit. Even MLK, who quickly became the center of hero worship, told Baker that's what the people wanted. In such an atmosphere, Baker concluded that hero worship for King deterred building local activists across the South as well as trapping poor blacks, particularly sharecroppers and the most destitute, in hopelessness without realizing the power to change their lives rested in themselves. Besides, unlike many in SCLC, Baker never internalized nonviolence as a way of life, solely as a tactic for justice, which may have been another reason for her leaving SCLC. 

5. She was also tied to the Shuttleworths in Birmingham, part of the the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights, which had the largest working poor membership of any of Birmingham’s civil rights organizations. Baker also knew the Simpkins, two organizers in Shreveport, Louisiana, who did not care to follow the politics of respectability model of SCLC and mainstream civil rights organizations. Although ambivalent to anti-communist sentiment among some aspects of the era, Baker was friends with the Bradens, two white radicals engaged in civil rights activism. Therefore, Baker, indirectly or directly, was connected to various campaigns and sites of resistance throughout the US during the turbulent period. New York City, Atlanta, Birmingham, and various other parts of the nation were stops on her endless train to social justice.

6. Baker, present at and coordinating the Raleigh meeting where SNCC formed, did the following tasks for the organization: she typed minutes, drafted internal documents, maintained a mailing list, kept in phone contact with interested students, and recruited new ones; found meeting sites and office space and secured funds from SCLC and sympathetic donors. She guided and trained young activists in the 1960s, but wanted them to remain radical and unconfined by bureaucracy. Baker's selflessness throughout these many years of activism took a toll on her health, but she kept trucking on, assuring the students and youths who increasingly took over the helm of civil rights activism since the sit-ins in Greenboro, North Carolina, would carry on the struggle. 

7. Baker's involvement in political parties returned in 1964, when she was the national director for the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, the very same party featuring prominent female leaders and voices, such as Fannie Lou Hamer, Annie Devine and Victoria Gray. Baker's support and organizing on behalf of this party brought her a lot of criticism from white liberals and some blacks, for thinking a campaign could be won with just poor people. She also stood by SNCC even when their positions differed from her own, which shows her trust and respect for the next generation's decisions in the Black Freedom Struggle. Many older activists would disagree or distance themselves from how youths and students engaged in struggle in the 1960s, so Baker standing aside and defending younger activists' right to make their own decisions is commendable. Even with the rise of Black Power and SNCC's transformation into a black-only organization, Baker sympathized and stood by Carmichael's conceptualization of Black Power. 

These aforementioned seven reasons provide more than enough reasons for loving Ella Baker, who played a largely behind the scenes role in several key moments and struggles in the Civil Rights Movement. Her ideology of empowering the oppressed to lead themselves, or, as Ransby would call it, radical democratic pedagogy, significantly shaped SNCC and the offspring of the student activist organizations from the 1960s, including Students for a Democratic Society. She nurtured and  guided SNCC, and even brought Bob Moses into SNCC, the latter taking the group into a radical democratic direction, according to Ransby. Thus, the Freedom Summer and various SNCC campaigns for voter registration in the South, are all extensions, to a limited degree, of Baker's interest in collective uplift, empowering the poorest of black folk, and ensuring democratic decision-making.

Oh, and in case I neglected to mention the fact, Baker never lost touch of the broader national and international dimensions of leftist social justice movements. She became involved in Puerto Rican Solidarity Organization after her friend, Annie Stein, a white leftist involved in the struggle for desegregation of NYC schools. In the 1970s, she was involved in the Mass Party Organizing Committee, an attempt to establish a viable leftist party in American politics. She did a lot in her life, for the Black Freedom Struggle, democracy in activist organizations, attempting to avoid paternalistic attitudes toward the oppressed. The fruit of the free of liberty sown by Baker has been cultivated over and over again. Rest in peace. 

New York City School Desegregation and The Civil Rights Movement

           Education was the primary battlefront for civil rights activism in New York City in the 1960s because of the woefully inadequate state of black and Puerto-Rican majority schools. The schools’ obvious inequality with white schools due to de facto segregation, and the immediate negative impact of overcrowded, inferior schools on the lives of minority children and their parents led to a movement across the city rooted in parent activism, which had limited success. The focus on education as the most visible, successful civil rights campaign in the city stems from its pressing, directly negative impact on the lives of children and their parents over decades. Occurring at a time when the city’s white population was declining due to white flight and increasing numbers of blacks and Puerto Ricans, the battle for integrated public schools faced insurmountable obstacles. Busing children from segregated neighborhood schools to low-income black and Latino neighborhoods, for example, was not an attractive proposal to white parents. Neither busing nor constructing schools in intermediary areas between white and non-white neighborhoods was successful or seriously pursued by the Board of Education. Finally, open enrollment did not improve the overcrowded, impoverished educational facilities available for black and Puerto Rican children in ghettoes, such as Bedford-Stuyvesant and Harlem. Education reform could not solve the fundamental problems of racial and economic oppression, which encompassed housing, unemployment, discriminatory policies, and an unfair economic system.

Racial minorities in New York City during the beginning of white flight in the 1950s quickly engaged themselves in the struggle to integrate public schools. Blacks in New York City, due to housing discrimination, poverty, and white flight, found themselves forced into living in already-existing slums in Harlem, or the neighborhoods such as Bedford-Stuyvesant and Brownsville in Brooklyn, which were rapidly losing their white population during the black influx.[1] The worst schools in New York unsurprisingly served these black and Puerto Rican neighborhoods such as Harlem, or areas in transition that would become predominantly black, such as Bedford-Stuyvesant and Brownsville in the 1950s and 1960s. Naturally, resistance to the unequal school system where black and Puerto Rican children were largely excluded from white schools in white neighborhoods and warehoused in overcrowded schools with inferior teachers, developed among parents, especially women active in the parent-teacher organizations.[2] However, both national and local civil rights organizations also spearheaded the movement, with the Brooklyn chapter of the NAACP, at the forefront in the late 1950s.[3]

Under the auspices of the Brown decision of 1954, supporters of school desegregation in the North used the rationale in that case to establish a legal precedent for desegregation. The Brown decision called for an end to segregated schools using the psychological argument of black inferiority instilled in the psyche of black children and the obvious unequal distribution of resources in separate and supposedly equal schools.[4] New York judge Justine Polier’s decision in favor of a group of Harlem parents boycotting the inferior, segregated Harlem school upheld the Brown decision in 1958, ruling in favor of the parents in the case, In the Matter of Charlene Skipwith.[5] The ramifications of the case were immense, since it defended the rights of parent activists to challenge the educational bureaucracy of New York City, a radical step in giving legal legitimacy to the demands of parents. Moreover, this early instance of a boycott against segregated, inferior Harlem schools, beginning with formal complaints issued to the Board in 1957, also established a precedent for city-wide school boycotts in 1964 and 1965, which drew hundreds of thousands of students out of school.[6] As mentioned previously, the parents involved in this early boycott were women, the “Harlem Nine,” who kept their children out of junior high schools, JHS 136 and 139.[7]

Soon groups such as the Brooklyn NAACP chapter, under the presidency of Milton A. Galamison in Bedford-Stuyvesant, demanded the construction of new schools in nearly all-black neighborhoods, in addition to pushing for open enrollment at white schools.[8] As pastor of Siloam Presbyterian Church, one of the largest congregations in the predominantly black neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant, Galamison had the connections and clout within the community to facilitate the grassroots organizers and parents, especially since the congregation during this period numbered in the thousands.[9]  Working with other New York branches of the NAACP, as chair of the Education Committee of the New York branch, as well as leftist white allies, such as Annie Stein, the daughter of Russian Jewish immigrants with a past as a member of the Communist Party, Galamison helped establish the Parents’ Workshop, which laid the foundation for subsequent waves of the desegregation struggle.[10]

Ella Baker’s role, however, preceded that of Galamison, since her involvement had begun as president of the New York City NAACP branch in 1952, leading to the city branch becoming involved in fighting for education improvements for black and Puerto Ricans. Baker also served as a member of the Intergroup Committee chaired by Kenneth Clark, the psychologist whose work was cited in Brown that demonstrated segregation’s negative effects on black youth.[11] Moreover, the Parents’ Workshop, a group of mostly women who became involved in school desegregation from their participation in PTAs, always served as the vast majority of participants.[12] Using momentum from Brown, the national civil rights movement in the South, and, to a limited degree, pro-labor and employment demonstrations in support of procuring black employment, the NAACP and other civil rights groups did address issues of poverty and class. For example, the Brooklyn NAACP chapter organized protests against police brutality in addition to voter registration drives, clearly connecting the movement in New York with the police violence of segregationists in the South.[13]

Unfortunately, the national leadership of the NAACP and other mainstream civil rights organizations remained reluctant to engage in the school desegregation effort in New York with the same amount of effort and will as local activists. Occurring during the height of McCarthyism, many NAACP chapters also purged Communists from the group in order to avoid the damning accusation of anti-Americanism.[14] This weakened the organization’s ties to leftist and sympathetic white allies, including the left-leaning Teachers Union, which supported the integrationist struggle before being replaced by the Union of Federated Teachers. Thus, the movement within New York City suffered from severe differences of opinion of activists on the ground, and the national leadership, as represented by Roy Wilkins. Galamison and Wilkins clashed over the methodology of struggle, and Galamison, whose conception of liberation theology was anti-capitalist, saw no problem in cooperating with leftist whites.[15] Indeed, progressive whites, often secular Jews like Annie Stein, were more cooperative and supportive, as were sympathetic unions to integrate schools, such as Junior High School 258 in 1955. This particular instance, a Bedford-Stuyvesant school that opened with a 98% African American student body aroused white and black fury. The Board deliberately built a school in an area where it was inevitably to be a black school instead of building it according to a pro-integration zoning pattern, at the intersection of black and white neighborhoods in Brooklyn.[16]

Of course, one cannot overlook the successes of the New York civil rights movement in dismantling former barriers to integration. As Kenneth Clark, the prominent black psychologist whose study was cited in favor of school desegregation in Brown v. Board, noted, the schools black children attended were the most overcrowded and poorly resourced.[17] He also claimed that the high school zones had been gerrymandered purposely to exclude large numbers of black students from attending the best academic high schools, which would be more difficult to maintain in the present since public schools provide passes.[18] However, residential housing segregation persists, as does the income gap, further perpetuating black and Latino under-performance. Many whites, as well as the Board of Education in the 1950s and 1960s, clung to the notion of the neighborhood school. Why would whites want to send their children to schools in high-crime, impoverished communities? Even Stokely Carmichael agreed that one could not realistically expect whites to want to send their children to schools in 1960s Harlem![19]

The neighborhood concept of sending one’s children to a school within the neighborhood, usually lacking racial diversity, appealed to parents for the simple reason of keeping their children nearby rather than busing them to distant and sometimes dangerous areas.[20] White racism and assumptions of inferiority also limited white receptiveness to black and Puerto Rican children in white schools. White parents protested, launched boycotts, and treated black students who did transfer to white schools poorly, similar to the situation black students integrating schools in the South experienced. Black students allowed to enroll at white schools in Ridgewood, Queens, in 1959 for example, endured large protests by white parents outside of the school, in addition to often hostile school environments where black students were kept in separate classes in future cases.[21] Needless to say, by 1964, after years of open enrollment and promises by the Board to build new schools exclusively on the fringe areas of white and minority communities, the number of segregated schools increased since 1960, especially since the Board continued to build new schools in black and Latino areas where they were inevitably black and Latino only.[22]

Thus, the resistance of white parents, and their influence over the Board, severely limited the chances for successful education reform. Working-class and middle-class white groups that stayed in New York often chose to send their children to private schools. The inability to find common ground between lower-class whites and blacks on the issue of education perpetuated racial tension without improving educational facilities for black and Puerto Ricans. Blacks and the burgeoning Puerto Rican population at the time continued to face employment discrimination, overpriced housing or slum conditions, and racial injustice everywhere. Indeed, the Board adopted racist assumptions to blame black academic under-performance on blacks and Puerto Ricans, claiming in a letter to Galamison racist beliefs and assumptions such as: indifference of parents, use of children as pawns in contests with the welfare system, absence of an academic tradition and interest in minority families, and emotional rejection and neglect by mothers of unwanted children.[23] These generalizations and stereotypes of black parents, and black women in particular, evince the emergence of the welfare dependency and the welfare queen stereotype of black women as poor mothers trying to cheat the system. Regardless of the visibility and participation of thousands of black parents, mostly women, their value of education and promoting improved education remained questioned, due to racist underlying assumptions that influenced white perceptions of racial minorities. Even when an estimated 464, 361 students, about 45% of total enrollment, did not attend classes to participate in the February 3, 1964 boycott for the Board to establish a timetable for real school desegregation, racist assumptions of black cultural inferiority continued to shape white perceptions of blacks as solely responsible for black under-performance.[24]

Still, one can easily understand why civil rights leaders and parents focused on education as a leading campaign in New York City. Galamison, the public profile of the school integration movement, utilized his status as a Presbyterian pastor and progressive Christian values to buttress his argument for improving educational facilities for all children. Indeed, one quotation from his correspondence with the Board of Education states, “I repeat this Board of Education has a moral and legal obligation to equalize the schools of this City by September 1959 and to find the necessary funds for the job.”[25] Like southern civil rights leaders, such as Martin Luther King, Jr., Galamison used morally righteous rhetoric for integrated schools. Furthermore, to deprive white children of an integrated school environment damaged whites as well as blacks, since white children matured in a world where racial segregation and white supremacy appeared morally legitimate.[26] Moreover, working-class and poor women activists engaged in the struggle through their parent organizations and the Parents' Workshop for Equality, established in 1960, saw education as a visible, direct example of racial discrimination that negatively impacted their children. The effects of sending their children off to overcrowded schools with poor facilities, sometimes leading to school days below the standard amount of time white students experienced, clearly revealed the negative impact of the status quo in education.[27]

In addition, education likely appeared as a more winnable campaign for the parents of black and Puerto-Rican children, especially more pertinent to parents of students attending ghetto schools. Demands for open enrollment and the construction of schools in the intermediary regions between minority and white neighborhoods seemed like a relatively easier goal than overhauling the current system, redistributing wealth and resources, eradicating capitalism, or miraculously curing the white populace of its racism. However, as Bayard Rustin, a New York-based civil rights organizer on the national level, realized after the first school boycott on February 4, 1964, social and economic conditions were more pressing as blacks faced an increasing problem with unemployment and a growing urban underclass that undermined public school education.[28] Public schools, as a result of increasingly ghettoized communities with fewer resources, did not significantly improve after some of the demands of integrationists were met. Though parents and activists possessed a reasonable rationale for demanding integration, especially since white schools had the better facilities, experienced teachers, and therefore better tools for academic success, black and Latino students still could not either enter these schools, or if they did succeed in getting transfers, often left due to white resistance and maltreatment.[29] In fact, white resistance in New York took a similar form to white resistance in the South, via protests to the Board of Education, white flight to suburbs, increasing enrollment of white children to private schools, racist language used at demonstrations at integrated schools, and even the storming of a Queens school to force two transferred students out![30]

The collapse of the fragile coalition of civil rights organizations that orchestrated the February 3, 1964 school boycott after the Board of Education failed to keep its promises for school integration also revealed the enormous disunity and disagreement within the pro-integrationist camp.[31] The expected opposition to the planned second boycott on March 16 of white groups also included the national chapters of the NAACP and CORE, which had previously supported the first boycott that Bayard Rustin had organized.[32] Thirteen chapters of the NAACP in New York withdrew from the City-Wide Committee for Integrated Schools, the coalition built from the Parents’ Workshop and Harlem Parents Committee, as well as the NAPRR, a Puerto-Rican civil rights group, disagreeing with Galamison’s authoritarian, unilateral decision making and the tactics.[33] Some of those who disagreed with Galamison, especially whites and some black nationalists, argued that the focus should be on improving existing black schools instead of mass transfers of children.[34] Whites, including the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, the Jewish-led UFT, and New York liberals were either too attached to the neighborhood school concept and racist beliefs to support full, immediate integration.[35]

The UFT, however, initially offered limited support to the first boycott, but refused to recognize the shortcomings of teachers. Their plan for city-wide integration, released prior to the first boycott in February, called for reductions in class size in difficult schools, additional counselors, remedial psychological services, supervisors and teachers. This rightly seemed too little, too late for black parents who had been demanding improved educational facilities since the late 1950s.[36] The UFT did not acknowledge that minority children often did not receive a full day of instruction, had the least experienced teachers or that 70% of math teachers in black and Puerto Rican schools were unlicensed, which seemed to blame disadvantaged children for their own predicament without acknowledging the role of teachers in ensuring a proper school environment.[37]

Black organizations, on the other hand, such as national leadership of CORE and the NAACP, were less committed to direct action-based, mass movements, preferring negotiation, as mentioned previously. Black nationalist leader Malcolm X, however, supported Galamison’s plan for a second boycott, which also received support from Adam Clayton Powell, the powerful Harlem Congressman.[38] X respected Galamison, inviting him to speak at the Audubon on April 5, 1964, and again on the day he would be assassinated in February 1965.[39] Perhaps Galamison won Malcolm’s favor, as well as that of some other black nationalists because the demands for the second boycott embraced more nationalistic aims, such as textbooks with black history, the appointment of a Puerto Rican to the Board, additional black principals and teachers, besides the older demands for a comprehensive city-wide plan for desegregation, and the cessation of school construction in segregated neighborhoods.[40]

The gradual infiltration of black nationalist ideology and the ascent of Black Power, already showing signs of its presence in some of the demands of the March 16 boycott, which withdrew an estimated 267, 459 children from schools, a surprisingly large number since many national civil rights groups, local black and Puerto Rican groups opposed it.[41] As the mid-1960s passed, SNCC and CORE were expelling whites, and placing blacks at the leadership of a struggle for self-determination rose in ideological prominence.[42] Accepting that the power to fully integrate New York City public schools was somewhat beyond the power of the Board of Education, the idea of improving majority-minority schools via community control developed as a logical outcome of black self-determination. Supporters of the shift to community control rather than integration also noticed that many of their white allies were more supportive of integration in the South rather than the North; Jewish allies especially, though disproportionately more supportive of civil rights for blacks than other whites, saw the pace of integration in New York as proceeding too rapidly.[43]

Galamison, who after the fallout from the second boycott, and along with the rise of Black Power, was no longer the leader of an integrationist movement after the dissolution of the coalition, publicly supported community control despite his distaste for what he initially perceived as a black separatist movement.[44] Even Galamison had been forced to acknowledge that Black power, defined as empowerment of blacks to control institutions within black communities appeared to be the most rational course of action, since years of pressuring the Board of Education to integrate schools through the system and through boycotts failed, and white control of institutions in black neighborhoods resembled colonialism, thereby fostering black consciousness and nationalist sentiments. Community control advocates like Robert “Sonny” Carson appealed to this kind of colonial relationship to court the favor of blacks during school demonstrations in 1967.[45]

Unfortunately, the community control movement also faced the similar dilemma of naiveté regarding education reform and race. Though it seemed rational and the best response to white resistance, the decentralization of New York City schools and the community control movement, supported by Mayor Lindsay in 1968, also fell short of fundamentally changing the balance of power within New York.[46] Black officials and leaders within black communities served on governing boards of schools, but that did not mean they best represented the interest of black children or their parents. Indeed, many further aggravated the problem between blacks and teachers, represented by the UFT and its leader Albert Shanker, a liberal Jewish union leader who had been in good relations with Bayard Rustin, A. Phillip Randolph and Martin Luther King.[47] The UFT, somewhat supportive of the integration movement led by Galamison earlier in the 1960s, became staunch opponents of the community control movement for violating what it considered labor rights the UFT saw as inviolable, such as involuntary transfers.[48]

Moreover, the chances for an alliance between teachers and the community control advocates became untenable in the late 1960s because of conservative trade unionism that focused on improving wages and working conditions, leading to Galamison and other activists painting teachers as part of the system that oppressed black children.[49] Forced into a hostile environment with the mostly white and Jewish-led teacher’s union immobilized the community control advocates in the late 1960s, culminating in the 1968 Ocean Hill-Brownsville UFT strike.[50] The immediate cause of the strike was the involuntary transfer of 10 teachers by the Ocean Hill-Brownsville community board, led by Rhody McCoy. From their point of view, transferring those white teachers unsympathetic to community control of education was necessary to protect the principle of community control. The UFT, on the other hand, saw this step by the Ocean Hill-Brownsville board as abrogating the integrity of the contract and civil service procedures established under the Board of Education with the union. This led to the community control advocates pushing to keep the public schools open during the UFT’s citywide strike, which began in May 1968. Ethnic tensions between Jews and African-Americans in New York flared as some community control supporters used anti-Semitic rhetoric to attack the UFT while the UFT responded by exaggerating the extent of anti-Semitism in the press to delegitimize the community control movement.[51] In truth, even UFT members loyal to the union hinted that the degree of anti-Semitism claimed by UFT leadership to have existed was exaggerated to discredit the community control movement.[52] The UFT likely planted anti-Semitic notices in the mailboxes of Jewish members to further discredit the movement, showing the depths to which the union would go to portray the community control movement as anti-Semitic.[53]

Their strike in September 1968, however, succeeded when a special trial found that McCoy and the governing board had failed to provide evidence against the involuntarily transferred teachers, thereby framing the issue as a labor-management dispute.[54] The governing board was eventually suspended on September 14 after failing to reinstate the dismissed teachers, revealing the weaknesses of the community control movement to positively change inner-city schools.[55] The teachers’ union won public favor against what they framed as extremists attempting to take over other schools in New York, which succeeded in swaying the public perception of the community control movement as anti-Semitic.

Interestingly, black and Puerto Rican support for community control was mixed, with some supporting the UFT in the struggle, as shown by the newspaper, El Tiempo. Even within Ocean Hill-Brownsville, the black neighborhood in Brooklyn that instigated the confrontation between the community control movement and the UFT, 24% of parents were unhappy with the governing board, nearly 47% had a negative view of the governing board and only 2% supported allowing black militants or local politicians to have the greatest say in running the district’s schools.[56] Thus, even within black and Puerto Rican New York, the black nationalists demanding community control lacked complete support, despite the rise of Black Power politics.

The community control movement, however, survived as decentralization was further implemented in 1969, but called for borough-wide elections and limited the number of community school districts to 33 with no fewer than 20,000 elementary and junior high school students.[57] Of course, conditions scarcely improved under community control, where corrupt local officials on the school boards abused their control of school budgets. Community control was initially designed to ensure local control over key policy decisions in personnel, budget, curriculum, and public policy, but the possibility for mismanagement, corruption, and the absence of participatory ways for parents to influence local school matters remained present.[58] Indeed, by 1976, even Kenneth Clark, one of the earliest proponents of decentralization, openly admitted that decentralization “had failed to improve education and so far had resulted primarily in power grabs and struggles over jobs and control of finances.”[59] A Puerto Rican example, Luis Fuentes in District 1 is one of many examples of community control misusing school funds and appointing unqualified individuals in schools under community control during the 1970s. Fuentes used the community control system to essentially appropriate funds for friends instead of using his position to improve the district’s mostly Puerto Rican student body on the Lower East Side.  [60] Even as early as 1970, Clark, as a member of the State Board of Regents, noted that fiscal irregularities already discernible existed on a wider basis.[61]

Clearly, decentralization did not result in significant improvement in the education of poor black and Puerto Rican New York. Indeed, in some cases, tensions with teachers or corruption within contributed to a further decline. Unemployment, massive white flight, dreadful crime, and government mismanagement and corruption flourished, regardless of who ran the schools in black and Puerto Rican New York. The black nationalist outlook that guided the community control movement was also misinformed, thinking that adopting the ethnic politics of other groups or controlling institutions within already impoverished communities would somehow allow them to transcend the broader system of unequal access to the distribution of resources, and broader manifestations of social inequality was rather naïve. Likewise, education reform without a total reform of society will likely result in superficial change that ignores the systemic causes of urban poverty and racism that will continue to exist while policymakers argue over the ramifications of their proposed school reform.

One must accept the movement’s successes, however, which include integrated public schools today, though they are overwhelmingly black and Hispanic overall at 32% and 40.3% of total enrollment respectively.[62] Nevertheless, blacks and Hispanic students still struggle in largely under-performing high schools, with few making it to the highly ranked specialized public high schools of Stuyvesant or Bronx Science due to entrance exams. The battle for the integration of New York City public schools succeeded to a certain extent in integrating the public school system, yet the issue of poverty and integration of the specialized high schools that are much better than the majority of New York’s public high schools persists. Nevertheless, the focus on school desegregation, necessitated by clearly inferior schools for racial minorities and parent activism to improve the prospects for their children, did have limited success.

Bibliography

Back, Adina. “Blacks, Jews and the Struggle to Integrate Brooklyn's Junior High School 258: A Cold War Story.” Journal of American Ethnic History. Vol. 20, No. 2 (Winter, 2001), pp. 38-6.9

Dodson, Dan W. “Public Education in New York City in the Decade Ahead.”

Journal of Educational Sociology, Vol. 34, No. 6 (Feb., 1961), pp. 274-287.

De Forest, Jennifer. “The 1958 Harlem School Boycott: Parental Activism and the Struggle for Educational Equity in New York City.” The Urban Review, Volume 40, No. 1 (2008), pp. 21-41.

Edgell, Derek. The Movement for Community Control of New York City's Schools, 1966-1970: Class Wars. Lewiston, N.Y.: E. Mellen Press, 1998.

Galamison, Milton A. Milton A. Galamison Papers, 1954-1964. State Historical Society, Maidson, WI.

 Gittel, Marilyn. “Community Control of Education. Proceedings of the Academy of Political Science , Vol. 29, No. 1, Urban Riots: Violence and Social Change (1968), pp. 60-71

Ransby, Barbara. Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003.

Ritterband, Paul. Ethnic power and the public schools: the New York City school strike of 1968. Sociology of Education, Volume 40, No. 2. (1974)), pp. 251-267.

Schiff, Martin. “The Educational Failure of Community Control in Inner-City New York.” The Phi Delta Kappan , Vol. 57, No. 6 (Feb., 1976), pp. 375-378

Taylor, Clarence. Knocking at our own door: Milton A. Galamison and the Struggle to Integrate New York City Schools. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997.

Taylor, Clarence. Civil Rights in New York City from World War II to the Giuliani era. New York: Fordham University Press, 2011.

Theoharis, Jeanne, and Komozi Woodard. Freedom North: Black Freedom Struggles Outside the South, 1940-1980. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.

---

[1] . Dan W. Dodson, “Public Education in New York City in the Decade Ahead,” Journal of Educational Sociology 34, no. 6 (Feb. 1961): 275.

[2] Clarence Taylor, Knocking at Our Own Door: Milton A. Galamison and the Struggle to Integrate New York City Schools (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 59.

 59.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Jennifer de Forest, “The 1958 Harlem School Boycott: Parental Activism and the Struggle For Educational Equity in New York City,” The Urban Review 40, no. 1 (2008): 22.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid 29.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Galamison Papers

[9] Taylor, Knocking 35.

[10] Ibid 91.

[11] Barbara Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 148-150.

[12] Taylor, Knocking 63.

[13] Galamison Papers

[14] Ibid.

[15] Taylor, Knocking 36.

[16] Adina Back, “Blacks, Jews, and the Struggle to Integrate Brooklyn's Junior High School 258: A Cold War Story,” Journal of American Ethnic History 20, no. 2 (Winter, 2001): 39.

[17] Ibid 42.

[18] Ibid.

[19] Derek Edgell, The Movement For Community Control of New York City's Schools, 1966-1970: Class Wars(New York: Mellen Press, 1998), 36.

[20] Ibid.

[21] Galamison Papers.

[22] Ibid.

[23] Ibid.

[24]Taylor, Knocking 141.

[25]Galamison papers

[26]Ibid.

[27]Ibid.

[28]Taylor, Knocking 155.

[29]Ibid 168.

[30]Ibid.

[31]Ibid 151.

[32]Ibid 123.

[33]Ibid 149.

[34]Ibid 147.

[35]Ibid

[36]Ibid 125.

[37]Ibid 126.

[38]Ibid 158-159.

[39]Ibid.

[40]Ibid 160.

[41]Ibid 161.

[42]Edgell, Movement 9.

[43]Ibid 7.

[44]Taylor, Knocking 179.

[45]Edgell, Movement 75.

[46]Ibid 31.

[47]Ibid 27.

[48]Ritterband, Paul. Ethnic power and the public schools: the New York City school strike of 1968. Sociology of Education, Volume 40, No. 2. (1974): 252.

[49]Taylor, Knocking 188.

[50]Ibid.

[51]Edgell, Movement 260

[52]Ibid.

[53]Ibid.

[54]Taylor, Knocking 197.

[55]Ibid 201.

[56]Edgell, Movement 292.

[57]Taylor, Knocking 205.

[58]Schiff, Martin. “The Educational Failure of Community Control in Inner-City New York.” The Phi Delta Kappan , Vol. 57, No. 6 (Feb., 1976): 376.

[59]Ibid.

[60]Ibid.

[61]Ibid.

[62]Fernanda Santos, “Black at Stuyvesant High,” New York Times, February 25, 2012.http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/26/education/black-at-stuyvesant-high-one-girls-experience.html?_r=2(accessed March 15, 2012).