Brownsville From the 1880s through the 1960s, Brownsville was predominantly Jewish and politically radical. The Jewish population consistently elected socialist and
American Labor Party candidates to the state assembly and was a strong supporter of
unionized labor and
collective bargaining. Black people made up 6 percent of Brownsville's population in 1940; this share doubled over the next decade. Most of these new residents were poor and occupied the neighborhood's most undesirable housing. Although the neighborhood was racially segregated, there was more public mixing and solidarity among black and Jewish residents than could be found in most other neighborhoods. Around 1960, the neighborhood underwent a rapid demographic shift. Citing increased crime and their desire for social mobility, Jews left Brownsville en masse, to be replaced by more blacks and some Latinos. By 1970, Brownsville was 77 percent black and 19 percent Puerto Rican. Furthermore, Brownsville was frequently ignored by black civil rights organizations such as the
NAACP and Urban League whose Brooklyn chapters were based in nearby
Bedford-Stuyvesant and were overall less concerned with the issues of the lower income blacks who had moved into Brownsville, thus further isolating Brownsville's population. These changes corresponded to overall increases in segregation and inequality in New York City, as well as to the replacement of blue-collar with white-collar jobs. The newly black Brownsville neighborhood had few community institutions or economic opportunities. It lacked a middle class, and its residents did not own the businesses they relied upon.
Schools Whites on the neighborhood's periphery lobbied with the school board against the building of a new school that would draw a racially diverse population. They were opposed by blacks, Latinos, and pro-integration whites, but nevertheless succeeded in functionally limiting the new school's racial makeup. In the years before the strike, Brownsville's schools had become extremely overcrowded, and students were attending in shifts. Junior High School 271, which became the nexus of the strike, was constructed in 1963 to accommodate Brownsville's expanding population of youth. The school's performance was low from the outset, with most students testing below
grade level in reading and math, and few advancing to the city's network of elite high schools. New York City's school system was controlled by the Central Board of Education, a large centralized bureaucracy. Activists in the 1960s alleged that the Central School Board was uninterested in pursuing mandatory integration; their frustration led them away from desegregation and into the struggle for community control.
Teachers union Brownsville's teachers were members of the United Federation of Teachers (UFT), a new union local . UFT was affiliated with the AFL-CIO, which included many workers in the region. The UFT held a philosophy of limited
pluralism, according to which different cultures could maintain some individuality under the umbrella of an open democratic society. The union also championed individualist values and
meritocracy. Some called its policies 'race-blind' because it preferred to frame issues in terms of class. The UFT contained a high proportion of Jews. Black leaders
Bayard Rustin and Reverend
Milton Galamison in 1964 coordinated a citywide
boycott of public schools to protest
de facto segregation. Prior to the boycott, the organizers asked the UFT Executive Board to join the boycott or ask teachers to join the picket lines. The union, however, declined, promising only to protect from reprisals any teachers who participated. More than 400,000 New Yorkers participated in a one-day February 3, 1964, boycott, and newspapers were astounded both by the numbers of black and Puerto Rican parents and children who boycotted and by the complete absence of violence or disorder from the protestors. It was, a newspaper account accurately reported, "the largest civil rights demonstration" in American history, and, Rustin argued that "the movement to integrate the schools will create far-reaching benefits" for teachers as well as students. However, when protesters announced plans to follow up the February 3 boycott with a second one on March 16, the UFT declined to defend boycotting teachers from reprisals. Later, at the time of the 1968 school crisis, Brooklyn
CORE leader Oliver Leeds and Afro-American Teachers Association President Al Vann would cite the UFT's refusal to support the 1964 integration campaign as proof that an alliance between the teachers' union and the black community was impossible.
Black schools and teachers The UFT's program for poor black schools was called "More Effective Schools". Under this program class sizes would shrink and teachers would double or triple up for individual classes. Although the UFT expected this program to be popular, it was challenged by the African-American Teachers Association (ATA; originally the Negro Teachers Association), a group whose founders in 1964 were also part of the UFT. The ATA felt that New York City's teachers and schools perpetuated a system of entrenched racism, and in 1966 it began campaigning actively for community control. The UFT opposed both involuntary assignment and extra incentives for experienced teachers to come to poor schools. In 1967, the ATA opposed the UFT directly over the "disruptive child clause", a contract provision that allowed teachers to have children removed from classrooms and placed in special schools. The ATA argued that this provision exemplified and accelerated the system's overall racism. In the fall of 1967, the UFT held a two-week strike, seeking approval for the disruptive child clause; most of the ATA's members withdrew from the union. In February 1968, some ATA teachers helped to produce a tribute to
Malcolm X that presented African music and dance, and glorified
Black power; the UFT successfully asked that these teachers be disciplined. == Community control ==