WHEN DR. KENNETH CLARK STUDIED BLACK STUDENTS IN 1954, he determined that racist attitudes brought on by segregation caused white teachers to lower their expectations for the black students who were seen to have limited futures. According to Clark, the New York City public school system “was guilty of depriving black and Puerto Rican children of the ability to compete successfully with others.”
Clark’s finding embarrassed the New York City Board of Education.
Toward the end of 1955, Mayor Robert Wagner pledged to do something about it. But ten years later, nothing had changed.
When Clarence Taylor entered the seventh grade in 1965, the teachers at I.S. 211 placed him and twenty-five other black students in class level 7-19, with 7-1 being the top whites-only class. After 7-1 came 7-2 and then 7-3, and if you keep going until you get to 7-19 you can understand the extent of the racism when you consider that Taylor today is a professor of history at Baruch College.
As Dr. Clark found, the system caused many black and Puerto Rican youngsters to become discouraged and to drop out of school.
Taylor, however, took a different path. He made up his mind to work hard so he could get into a better class the following year.
Taylor’s plight was common. In a school where the I.S. 211 student body was racially mixed, the teachers—with one exception—were all white, and when the classes were assigned, the teachers almost invariably assigned the best classes to the white kids, and assigned the blacks and Puerto Rican students to the classes for the slowest kids. It was just such stereotyping that led black activists to call for local community control of the public schools.
A large part of the racial problem in the schools was that the school board, afraid to anger the white parents, refused to do anything about school segregation. The clash between the black parents and the white teachers became inevitable. When the white Jewish teachers went on strike, those blacks advocating community control were losers. The repercussions are being felt today.
CLARENCE TAYLOR “I was born in Brooklyn in 1952 in Kings County Hospital. My father’s parents were landowners in Alabama, one of the few in the South. So they were farmers. My mother’s family came from Augusta, Georgia. They were day workers, and they died when I was very young.
“My father, Clarence Taylor Sr., was born in 1930. He grew up on the farm, which was just outside Birmingham, Alabama. He left home when he was fifteen. He was part of the migration in the 1940s.
“He left because of a family dispute. He had twelve brothers and sisters. He and his brother, my uncle Melvin, got into a bad fight. My father threw a brick at him, hitting him in the eye, and Melvin lost the eye. My grandmother, who was incensed, either beat him or he escaped before she could. My father decided to leave and go north. And when he did, he came to Brooklyn, because an older sister, my aunt Mary, lived there. She had left to escape the cruelty of the South and because of the opportunities of the North, and so did other relatives. None of them ever talked about how bad things were.
“They all came to Brownsville. My father got a job working for a florist. He lived with his sister Mary for a while, but then he became very friendly with a couple from Jamaica, and they took him in as a son. He was trying to make ends meet delivering flowers, and then he took up boxing. He tried to make the grade as a light heavyweight, but he didn’t make much of a living at it.
“My father was eighteen and my mother was sixteen when they met. Her maiden name was Mamie Robinson, and she came to Brooklyn in the late 1940s, after her parents died. She came to stay with an older sister. She also came looking for better opportunities. My parents met at the Berean Missionary Baptist Church, one of the well-known black churches in the community. She went to Alexander Hamilton Vocational High School. She was the one who talked my dad out of boxing.
Brownsville was always a poor neighborhood, even more so when the Jews moved out and the blacks moved in. Brian Merlis Collection—Brooklynpix.com
“He then drove a yellow cab. He drove all over the city. He worked for a company. Eventually, when I was thirteen, he passed the New York City bus driver’s test, and he became a bus driver for the Transit Authority. When I was in high school, he got his high school equivalency diploma, and he went to New York Community College and became a Realtor. Before he died, he owned three buildings, one in Bedford-Stuyvesant and two in Brownsville. He rented them out as apartments. He did very well.
“Neither of my parents was involved in the civil rights movement, though my mother was a big fan of Martin Luther King. I can remember the day John Kennedy was killed, how hysterical she became. She wailed, ‘What are we going to do?’ I was just a kid. They paid attention to the civil rights movement, but they weren’t part of it. When I became politically active, my father was not happy with me.
“I grew up in the Breukelen Housing Projects in the East New York section of Brooklyn. There were ten or twelve seven-story buildings. [There are now thirty buildings, either three or seven stories tall, housing over four thousand people.] We lived there for a while. It was for lower-income folks, but people who made more money, like my parents, were able to hide their money, fudge their W-2s. It was not a slum. It was well kept. They had maintenance service to make sure it was clean.
“The area was mixed. It wasn’t a segregated housing project. The dominant group was blacks and Latinos, but there were white families living right next to us, an Italian-American family, and we got along very well.
“I began elementary school in 1959. I went to PS 260 on Williams Avenue. It was within walking distance. There was one black teacher. There were no problems, except the usual kid stuff with kids getting into fights. It was safe. I walked home. Of course, there were neighborhood bullies. There was one kid by the name of Floyd. He constantly picked on me, called me names. Floyd called me ‘Pillowhead.’ He thought my head was shaped like a pillow. Or he would call me ‘No-eyebrows.’ My eyebrows were very thin. It was mostly barking. I have a twin brother, Lawrence, and my brother and I weren’t fighters. So we were scared of this guy until the fifth grade, when I realized I was bigger than he was. So when he challenged me to a fight, I said, ‘Okay, let’s go fight.’ It was lunchtime, and as we stepped outside, and he said, ‘I don’t want to fight.’ I said, ‘I do.’ I knocked him down to the ground, and he started to cry. I said to myself, ‘Now he’ll leave me alone.’ And he did.
“My brother wasn’t bullied, but he had an adversary in his class. We actually had our own separate friends. My brother had no interest in sports whatsoever. My friends were more athletic. We played baseball a lot. In 1962 the Mets began playing at the Polo Grounds, and I became a Mets fan and so did my parents. I got it right away why they were Mets fans. The Yankees were not acceptable, because of their racial policies. Elston Howard was the first black player on the team, but he wasn’t treated very well. My parents were well aware of that. They grew up with the Dodgers, and when the Mets came in, it seemed like everyone who was black in New York City became a fan. I loved watching Willie Mays play. I enjoyed going to the games. My brother had no interest whatsoever.
“As we got older, my friends began to break up along racial lines. I got the distinct feeling that some of the kids who grew up as friends made a conscious decision not to be friends any longer. Some were Italians. Others were Protestants. The white friends I had who were Jewish stayed friends, until we went to separate high schools. It was disappointing to lose them as friends. I thought it was a real loss. But it was something that happened, so I just moved on and made other friends.
“Some of my friends ended up on the wrong side of the tracks. Oh yeah. Some of them died in their twenties. It was mostly drugs. Heroin. They weren’t doing well in school. A lot of them dropped out of school. They had no prospects, so they got involved in the drug trade. They were dealing.
“These kids gave up on school because of race. A lot of it was race. I was a victim of tracking. I wasn’t that serious about studying in elementary school. But I became a lot more serious when I entered junior high school at I.S. 211.
“My white friends were placed in 7-1 and 7-2, the best classes, and they put me in 7-19, and I was horrified. Some of the other black kids were in 7-23. First of all, just being in 7-19 bothered me, but when I was doing extremely well, it dawned on me one day in social studies class that we were going over the same material day after day. We had a white teacher, and I challenged him. I said, ‘We’ve covered this already several times. Why don’t we move on to something else?’ He didn’t lose his cool. Essentially, he said, ‘Not everybody gets it.’ I made a conscious decision to get out of this class by working extremely hard to make sure all my grades were tops.
“In the eighth grade, they put me in a better class, but I didn’t make 8-1. But when I got to Canarsie High School in 1966, I was put in a very good class.
“My friends, who were going to a vocational high school, didn’t want me going to Canarsie High. They wanted my brother and me to go with them. Some of them went to Westinghouse High School, studying to be dental technicians. Others went to Aviation High or Automotive High School. My close friend Lee warned me, ‘By choosing to go to Canarsie High and taking academic courses, you’re going to end up dropping out of high school.’ That was the prejudice in the black community. They were doubting that we were going to be successful. That had been drummed into a number of black kids, by the white teachers to a degree, but also coming from the black community.
“I remember going into my social studies class. I was the only black student in the class, and the first day of class I remember sitting next to a white student who I knew in junior high school.
“The class had already started, and I heard some mumbling from a couple of kids. Then five minutes later another black kid came into class, and this white kid exploded. He said, ‘What the hell is going on?’ Clearly he was offended at having two black students in the class. One was bad enough, when I walked in, but when a second black walked in, he couldn’t take it. As though somehow this was no longer a good class.
“I excelled in that class and did a hell of a lot better than he did.”
In February of 1967 the Brownsville Community Council was formed. For years there had been anger in the black community over how poorly the public schools were serving their children. On February 3, 1964, Bayard Rustin and the Reverend Milton Galamison had organized a boycott of the public schools. Almost 500,000 mostly black students had stayed home. Of the 43,000 mostly white teachers, only 3,500 had been sympathetic. Galamison, the head of the Brooklyn NAACP, called for busing to further integration, but he was opposed by the Anti-Defamation League and the New York Civil Liberties Union.
Albert Shanker was the head of the United Federation of Teachers. Library of Congress
The school board made one concession in 1965, when it agreed to send 1,700 Brownsville students to a white school in Bay Ridge to ease the overcrowding. The blacks were bused over, put in segregated classes, and treated badly by white children. To many black parents, this was further proof of the need for community control.
Thus was formed the Brownsville Community Council, which began negotiating with the New York City Board of Education to gain control of the local schools. Rhody McCoy, an acting principal in a “600” school, which was for kids who were emotionally disturbed or who presented disciplinary problems, was named superintendent of the school district. The white teachers, who were not involved in the selection of a black school superintendent, were furious. They called for a strike in September of 1967.
The strike lasted twelve days. Teachers demanded that disruptive children be removed from the classroom, and they began transferring out of the district.
By May of 1968 there was a crisis when McCoy fired thirteen white teachers and six white administrators for “incompetence.” UFT president Albert Shanker said the accusations of incompetence were based on flimsy charges and that the firings were illegal. McCoy was ordered to reinstate them, but he refused. All nineteen ignored McCoy’s letter and showed up for work anyway.
The United Federation of Teachers urged teachers to walk out until the nineteen were reinstated. By May 24 only a handful of teachers were at work.
CLARENCE TAYLOR “It was extremely emotional. I had become not only a good student, but one who was active in the antiwar movement. I joined the Peace Club. I remember when the teachers strike erupted, I made the conscious decision to go to school. I had also befriended a social studies teacher by the name of Merchant Chernoff. He was a left-wing teacher who was opposed to the strike. He was one of the seven thousand teachers who walked across the picket line and joined that group, Teachers for Community Control. I knew he was going in, and my brother and I made a conscious decision to go in and cross the picket line. I can remember all the screaming and yelling. One teacher in particular, who my brother and I became friends with, was a third-degree karate expert and a phys-ed teacher; he was very disappointed we crossed the picket line. We told him we were very disappointed he was out there picketing. He showed us an anonymous leaflet that had been circulated—an anti-Semitic leaflet—and he said, ‘This is what’s going to happen.’ It became really emotional.
“My friend got in a fight with one of my friends from the Afro-American Student Club. He kicked this guy through a glass door. Nothing happened to the guy. Luckily, even though the glass shattered, my friend was hurt but he wasn’t cut.
“Our point of view was that the strike was an affront to the blacks in the community. We were in support of community control, and we crossed the picket line because we didn’t recognize the strike. We were going to school. Merchant Chernoff was actually attacked by a colleague, a big, burly phys-ed teacher by the name of Levine, thrown to the floor, and beaten up. Lots of folks were extremely upset over the issue.
“Loads of students sympathized with the strikers. There were very few students in the building. Some white students—the radicals—crossed, but for the most part the students who crossed were black students.
The 1968 teachers’ strike pitted Jewish teachers against black parents in a struggle for community control of the schools. Charles Frattini, New York Daily News
“There were essentially three strikes. After two weeks the teachers went back. A deal had been struck where the thirteen teachers and principals who were dismissed were able to go back, but when they went back, they were harassed, and then Albert Shanker, the head of the UFT, pulled the teachers out again. Then there was another problem. Altogether the strike lasted two and a half months.
“The teachers who crossed the picket line conducted the classes. It was really strained. My brother and I were hanging out with Merchant Chernoff most of the day. If you wanted to go to a math class, there was a math teacher. It was an opportunity in many ways for us to discuss politics.
“The strike strained the relations between students and teachers. It really made people suspicious. I saw incidents in the school after the strike where black students would be called thugs. The confrontations were between the teachers who crossed the picket lines and those who were on them. When everyone went back to work, there was tension. I had a friend of mine who crossed the picket line, and for twenty, thirty years, people who struck would not talk to him.
“When I became a teacher myself—I worked in the New York City public school system—I went to the United Federation of Teachers convention, but I was involved with the teachers who crossed, the Teachers for Community Control, and this was ten years later, and Albert Shanker was yelling at them and calling them scabs.
“I once interviewed Rhody McCoy, and he told me a story of running into Shanker in Washington, DC, twenty years after the strike. Shanker wanted to push him and loudly complained, “What’s he doing here in this city?” I make the argument that Shanker played a large part in the Jewish-black hostility the strike created. Others do not see it that way. But he was really heating things up, and I make the argument he changed the strike from a collective bargaining strike to one where he was accusing blacks of taking over the schools. There was a lot of craziness going on in Ocean Hill–Brownsville and elsewhere. I’d never deny that.”
Fueling the enmity between the black parents and the Jewish teachers was an anonymous, viciously anti-Semitic leaflet that was placed in the mailboxes of teachers at Junior High School 271. In it Jews were called “Middle East murderers of colored people” and “bloodsucking exploiters” who shouldn’t be teaching black students because they brainwash them. UFT president Albert Shanker, certain that black separatists were behind the leaflet, made certain the leaflet was publicized.
CLARENCE TAYLOR “To blame the school board for that anonymous leaflet was wrong.
“No one knows where it originated from, but Shanker got a hold of it and made half a million copies and passed it throughout the city. Then a black by the name of Les Campbell went on the air and read an anti-Semitic poem written by a junior high school student. That was insane. It was clearly a very bad time.
“During my senior year, 1969–1970, the major focus for me politically was the Vietnam War. Lots of my close friends wound up being drafted or joining the air force so as not to be drafted. In Vietnam a lot of the soldiers were black. I knew kids from my neighborhood who went over there and were killed. My brother and I made a decision we were not going, to the disappointment of our father, who was not supportive of our decision.
“We were part of the antiwar movement. We were planning, if we got drafted, to go to Canada. We would just leave. It seemed that every weekend we went to Washington, DC, for a demonstration. We put up posters, and my father complained about it, and then we got involved in the Peace Club in school. It was very controversial, because we organized a one-day walkout. We shut the school down for a day as we called for the United States to end the war in Vietnam.
“A list circulated, of the ten greatest troublemakers in the school. I was on the list. I’m sure that my brother was not.
“I did extremely well in high school, and I got into Baruch College, but once I got in I decided I did not want to study business, so I transferred to Brooklyn College. I ended up majoring in history. I wasn’t involved in any political activity. When I got to college my main concern was doing well.
“Friends of mine were surprised I wound up in college. When I decided to go to college, my father fought me on it. My father had become successful. He had the Puritan attitude. He was an inflexible, nose-to-the-grindstone kind of guy. When my brother and I turned seventeen, he signed us up to take the New York City Police Department exam. He wanted us to become cops or work for the post office.
“He said, ‘Civil service. That’s the way to go.’
“I said, ‘No, I want to become a teacher.’
“When I went to college, tuition was free, and my father gave me the $36 for the consolidation fee that one had to pay every semester. That was it. He did not want us to go to college. Even after I became a college professor, I was talking to him, and he said, ‘Well, you can still go and do something else.’
“I didn’t end up in Vietnam or Canada, because they came out with the lottery, and my number was 276. The cutoff was around 150. My brother and I were extremely happy with our high numbers. We were out of that danger.
“After Brooklyn College, I started to teach. I taught as a substitute teacher at various places including my old junior high school, I.S. 211. I remember my first day of school. The rumor was that Sidney Poitier was coming into the classroom. Remember the movie To Sir with Love? Lulu sang the song. They were talking about me. I had a mix of kids, but I was the only black teacher in the school. Some things hadn’t changed.
“I got my first full-time job teaching special ed, because the need was so great, but after a year I decided it wasn’t for me. I went into social work. I went to Fordham, NYU, and other places, looking for a social work program, and when I was at NYU I got lost looking for the social work building, and I accidentally walked into the School of Education. I spoke to the director there and asked for directions. He said, ‘Look, I can offer you a great deal if you want to go to school here. You can get a master’s of education, and we’ll pay for it and give you a stipend.’ He asked me to apply.
“I have no idea how he knew I was a good student. But I said to myself, ‘What the heck,’ and I applied. I quit my teaching job and went to NYU full-time, and I got my master’s degree in a year. I went back to teaching special ed, and I did that for eight years. I worked with students who had been certified as emotionally handicapped or learning-disabled or physically handicapped. And I always had questions about how those evaluations were determined. I felt like special ed was a dumping ground for black and Latino students.
“In the classroom I encouraged these kids to fight to get themselves into regular classes, but I did not have a great deal of success. By the time they were placed in special ed, they were pretty much done. By the time they got to me in junior high school, their skills were so bad, they could not leave. This was what Rhody McCoy was fighting against. He had been a principal of a ‘600’ school, and he was fighting for community control so the black and Latino children would have a fairer chance. But obviously community control was defeated, and so special education courses increased dramatically.
“My take is that the school system has failed. It was failing these kids. It was so obvious, throughout the city, that these kids were moved into these classes, and these classes were relegated to some corner of the schools where they received fewer resources. They were trapped. They were doomed.
“Without community control, it’s very hard to prevent this without a movement consisting of parents. Legal action has to be taken.
“The problem still exists. It may even be worse at this point. My brother is a high school teacher. We do talk about it. So is my brother’s son, an intermediate school history teacher. He’s only been teaching a couple years, but he realizes how kids in special ed classes are discriminated against. I think the United Federation of Teachers holds a lot of responsibility for this.
“After eight years of teaching special ed, I moved into high school, and I also was enrolled at the graduate center of City University working on my PhD. After a few years of teaching high school, I got my PhD and moved on to teach at the college level. I was at Lemoine College in Syracuse for six years. I went to Florida International in 1996. I was there eight years. There were problems there, two departments on separate campuses twenty-three miles away. And I just didn’t like the political climate. But it’s a nice place to visit. I left there in 2004 and went to Baruch College. I’m teaching modern American history and African-American history. I’m the acting chair of the department at Baruch.”