The 1968 New York City Teachers Strike
and Teacher-Student-Parent-Worker Control of the Schools 

A Crucial Battle Against Liberal Union-Busters, Undermined
by Pro-Capitalist Bureaucrats Who Fostered Racist Reaction

“Community Control” activists leaving Junior High School 271 in the Ocean Hill-Brownsville section of Brooklyn, on 21 November 1968, after blocking union teachers from entering the school. 

By Marjorie Stamberg

The following presentation to Class Struggle Education Workers was given in three parts, in November 2021, July 2022 and July 2023. 

Part I

We often say that the schools are where race and class come together. We stress this to underscore that the issues affecting teachers and education generally are not isolated from, but largely determined by, the broader conditions of capitalist society, particularly in its epoch of decline. And problems in the schools are a direct reflection of social decay, from mass homelessness affecting over a tenth of all students in the New York City schools to the COVID-19 pandemic that led to schools being shut and then only partially reopened, with the disaster of “remote learning” – an oxymoron, we said, a contradiction in terms – most affecting the poorest and most socially vulnerable students.

More specifically, race and class interests can come into apparent direct conflict, serving to obscure the fundamental fact of the exploitation and social oppression by the capitalist rulers of all working people and oppressed sectors. This is what happened in the 1968 New York City teachers strike, when we saw ghetto populations, black militants and most of the left manipulated by bourgeois politicians and powerful corporate forces against union – the United Federation of Teachers. And the social-democratic leadership of the UFT responded with a narrow trade-unionist outlook, that was at best insensitive to and at times antagonistic to the needs and desires of the African American population, instead of leading black, Latino, Asian and white working people in struggle against the city authorities and their Wall Street patrons.

But “class” and “race” are not just different sectors, or sociological categories as the “intersectionalists” would have it.[1] Exploitation and political domination by the capitalist ruling class are fundamental, and constitute the basis of racial oppression. And when push came to shove, when the bourgeois politicians decided to “play the race card,” and to hypocritically use legitimate black grievances against the union, class-struggle militants had to stand with the union.

To be clear from the outset, Class Struggle Education Workers (CSEW) and the Internationalist Group uphold the position of the Spartacist League, which we came out of, namely that we support the 1968 strikes by the UFT – which were utterly necessary in the face of blatant union-busting – while sharply criticizing the union misleadership of Albert Shanker that played into the hands of the corporate “community control” fraud. I want to say, speaking personally, that this understanding, of critically but emphatically supporting the strikes, was key in my being won over to the SL, as I had been on the other side, writing in the New Left Guardian in favor of community control. At the same time, we point out that the program of the CSEW for educator union-led teacher-student-parent-worker control of the schools could have gone a long way to overcome the poisonous racial polarization that lasted for four decades.

I want to come back to that later, after we have looked at the background and origins of the strikes and the specifics of how this played out. Today I want to talk about the background. The three strikes in the fall of 1968 were one of the most bitter episodes of NYC labor and black history, so it’s important to study them carefully. It’s also worth noting that both the UFT bureaucracy and the various reformist oppositions (currently the M.O.R.E.,[2] New Action Caucus and Solidarity, before that ICEUFT,[3] TJC,[4] TAC,[5] CSW[6] and others) have generally stayed well away from the hot potato of 1968.

So, first off, it’s important to note that New York City today is very different than it was six decades ago. In 1960, when the UFT held its first strike for union recognition and collective bargaining, very few public workers at all were unionized, whereas today, 98% of NYC and New York State teachers and staff are unionized. As for the racial and ethnic composition, in 1960, 97% of NYC teachers were white and the overwhelming majority of them were Jews, while in 1963, 40% of New York City public school students were black or Puerto Rican. Today, 85% of NYC public school students are African American, Latino or Asian, as are 42% of the teachers. There is still a racial disparity, and in the Bloomberg years[7] the number of black teachers was cut in half – falling from 27% in 2002 to 13% in 2008, while the number of Hispanic teachers fell from 18% to 11%. But they have since picked up again.

This is no accident but the result of a conscious effort. By 2008 we had formed the CSEW, and we became involved in the campaign to “Stop the Disappearance of the Black and Latino Teachers,” which was led by Sean Ahern. There was a resolution in the Delegate Assembly, which passed, and it has actually had an effect. One of the ways that Bloomberg made the teaching force whiter was by recruiting from Teach for America and his own outfit, the Teaching Fellows, which brought in large numbers of teachers from Colorado, for some reason, who had never seen the inside of an urban classroom and were utterly clueless. We had our own experience with this when the Fellows said that one of our supporters, a young Latina woman from the Bronx, was “not up to their standards.” But after we went to bat for her, they “relooked at it.”

So the context is very different from the 1960s, and this is probably part of the reason that the UFT in the fight over the last several years against charter schools has been able to counter the appeals to black parents by the charter operators and their Wall Street hedge fund backers. Also, the UFT has learned from 1968, belatedly, and has made an effort in outreach to the black community. As comrades know, in 2014 the UFT marched in Staten Island to protest the police murder of Eric Garner, while the M.O.R.E. did not – partly because it was appealing to Staten Island UFT members, many of whom were married to cops. Also, today black workers are significantly more unionized than whites, whereas in the 1960s, the unions were often perceived by many in the black ghettos and Latino barrios as a white preserve.

This study by Clarence Taylor
documents the history of the
NYC Teachers Union, led for
decades by supporters of the
Communist Party, and the
witch hunt that destroyed it.
From 1949 to the late 1950s,
over a thousand TU members
were investigated and hundreds
were fired or forced out,
labeled “subversives” under
the state’s Feinburg Law. None
were ever found to be negligent
in the classroom.

A second important factor is that in the 1960s, big social changes and movements were underway across the country. A decade earlier, U.S. society was in a kind of Cold War deep freeze, with the population regimented by anti-communism. Hundreds of teachers were fired or forced out just in New York City for being reds. This was written about in the book Reds at the Blackboard by Clarence Taylor. The Communist Party largely went underground. Meanwhile, in the schools, students practiced crawling under their desks for a Soviet nuclear attack! This rigid social control was broken by black struggles for equality, particularly after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision ordering desegregation of the schools. That developed into the civil rights movement and once the ice broke, everything cracked: there was a huge social upheaval. There was SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) with the Freedom Riders and lunch counter sit-ins in the South. There was SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) and the New Left and later the anti-Vietnam War movement.  

When the civil rights laws of 1964-65 changed little for black people in the North, there were a series of ghetto explosions of enormous magnitude. This began in 1964 with the so-called “Harlem Riot,” triggered by the police shooting of a young black man. In 1965, Malcolm X was assassinated. In 1966, Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture), the head of SNCC, raised the call for “Black Power,” and the Black Panther Party was formed in Oakland. These events led to the lasting split in the civil rights movement between the reformist liberal-integrationist wing and the black power radicals. At the same time, there was a large-scale move of white people from New York City to the suburbs beginning in the 1950s, and consequently, the proportion of non-white students in the schools grew, becoming a majority in 1966.

In the midst of this, there was a wave of unionization, particularly of public sector workers. AFSCME[8] took off, organizing state and municipal workers across the country. Its District 37 won collective bargaining representation for NYC public hospitals, school staff and other municipal workers. Local 1199, one of whose main leaders was Communist Party supporter Moe Foner, unionized the private hospitals. There were a series of strikes: the 1960 teachers strike which led to recognition of the UFT as bargaining agent; the 1966 transit workers strike; the 1968 sanitation workers strike. Even the media said it: “New York is a union town.”  We chant that today, and this week when the leader of the Amazon Labor Union in Staten Island was asked why he thought an organizing drive here would be successful when it failed in Alabama, his answer was: “because New York is a union town.” 

That became true in the 1960s and is still true today. Whereas in the U.S. as a whole only 6 percent of workers are members of a union, in New York about 25% of all workers in the city are unionized, everybody from bodega workers to Macy’s, the major supermarkets and particularly city workers. That took a dip during the pandemic as many union workers were laid off, like in hotels or the construction trades. But now that’s back up.

The Defeat of Liberal Integrationism in New York City

The third major development that played a key role in the 1968 was the fact that school integration had been defeated in New York City. When we think of the demise of desegregation in the North it calls to mind the 1974 battle of Boston, with racist councilwoman Louise Day Hicks and white mobs stoning school buses with black children. Or we think of Joe Biden, who led the anti-busing movement in Congress later in the ’70s that basically put an end to school integration in the North, a fact which we have called attention to in our press. But the fact is that school integration was first defeated in New York City, and the racist reaction began almost immediately after the 1954 Supreme Court ruling. References to this are in Diane Ravitch’s book The Great School Wars (1974) and Matthew Belmont’s Why Busing Failed (2016).

When half of all public school students walked out
on “Freedom Day,” 3 February 1964, demanding integration
of NYC schools, the New York Times, the
house organ of the bourgeois establishment, went
ballistic, denouncing the “violent, illegal” and “adult
encouraged truancy.”

So, for example, in 1957, when a Commission on Integration handed in a report proposing rezoning, the head of the Board of Education declared there would be no long-distance busing and the “principle” of the neighborhood school would be maintained. When a black minister in Brooklyn, Rev. Milton Galamison, formed a City-wide Coordinating Committee for Integrated Schools, it met a solid wall of racist reaction against whatever strategy they came up with. They tried them all: free transfers, rezoning, sister-schools, creation of new schools, busing – these were some of the attempts. At the end of each wave of agitation, boards would be created to investigate, studies would be commissioned, implementation plans would be designed, and ignored.

There were protests and counter-protests. The biggest attempt was in February 1964, when Bayard Rustin and Rev. Galamison coordinated a citywide boycott of public schools to protest de facto segregation. It was huge: 460,000 students stayed out of school. NYC rulers had conniptions. A New York Times editorial headlined, “A Boycott Solves Nothing” and another labeled it a “violent illegal” movement of “adult-encouraged truancy.” This house organ of the bourgeois establishment decreed that the demands for integration were “unreasonable and unjustified.” Meanwhile, white racists formed “Parents and Taxpayers” committees; 15,000 marched across Brooklyn Bridge to oppose integration. 

CSEW protested notorious segregation of NYC elite schools outside Stuyvesant
High School in Manhattan, May 2021. In the 2025-26 school year, out of
781 incoming students at Stuyvesant, 8 (1%) are black and 27 (3.3%) are
Hispanic, while 62% of students in NYC public schools are black or Hispanic.

By the mid-1960s, the refusal to integrate by the Board of Education, city rulers and the media, all conciliating the white backlash, was notorious. The Times’ education reporter wrote that among “educational experts,” the “generally felt, but never publicly stated, belief [was] that integration of the schools … is impossible, either now or on any future timetable.” In her 1974 book, Ravitch wrote that because black and Hispanic students were now the majority in the New York City public schools, therefore “Integration, which many people had relied on to equalize education, was no longer numerically or politically possible.” This is radically false. 

Richard Rothstein’s groundbreaking
analysis showed
how residential segregation
in the U.S., key to the de facto
segregation of the schools,
was the direct result of government
policy. See review
by Charles Brover, “American
Apartheid by Design”
(November 2018) at edworkersunite.
blogspot.com.

What is true is that liberal integrationism failed, and this failure has endured: In 2014, Gary Orfield and the UCLA Civil Rights Project reported that 60 years after Brown v. Board of Ed, New York schools are still the “most segregated in America.” This segregation deepened under mayors Rudolph Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg. Programs to improve education were slashed, and whole schools in African American and Latino communities were labeled as “failing” and shut down. At the end of the 2000s, we participated in furious meetings of hundreds of parents, students and teachers where we denounced this as racist – which neither the UFT nor the reform groups would say.

City rulers tried to keep white middle-class students in the public schools with zoning manipulation (as in the District 2 plan that gave preference to students living in the lily white posh Upper East Side), with the specialized high schools, and with “gifted and talented” programs. This segregation remained intractable under “progressive” Democratic mayor Bill de Blasio as well, who as we warned would be “Bloomberg lite.” Although he campaigned against school segregation, appointed yet another commission to study integration and brought in Richard Carranza as chancellor vowing to end segregation, de Blasio quickly backpedaled whenever there was conservative, liberal and/or ethnic opposition. So the struggle to integrate NYC schools remains one of the most urgent tasks for revolutionaries, requiring fierce struggle within the UFT and organization of parents, teachers, students and all school workers.

We have written about this many times, for example in the April 2017 CSEW leaflet “Integrate New York City Schools!” One of the main arguments of those claiming integration is impossible was that it was just the result of residential segregation. But as Charlie Brover underlined in his article on “American Apartheid by Design,” reviewing Richard Rothstein’s book, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America, the “redlining” to keep black people out of “white neighborhoods” – for which Donald Trump’s father, the former Ku Klux Klansman, was notorious, constructing huge segregated housing complexes in Queens – was government mandated.

Liberal integrationism failed, but we stand on the Marxist program of revolutionary integrationism, emphasizing that the fight for free, secular, high-quality, integrated public education for all, although it is a simple democratic demand, requires a socialist revolution to be fully realized. And along the way, it is entirely possible – and we fight for that – to make certain gains, such as abolishing the specialized high schools, turning the charters into public schools, abolishing all private schools and so on. 

But to come back to the struggle culminating in the 1968 NYC teachers strike, it is important to understand how support for “community control” of schools in black neighborhoods was a response to the defeat of integration. For many black parents and activists, the initial demands were for integration with white students or community control. And for city officials, as Ravitch points out in her book, “Community control appeared to be a way out…. If the parents assumed control, they would have only themselves and their appointees to blame.” She notes that “the idea of black control of black schools appealed to a surprising cross-section of whites,” that foundations saw it as a way to “engage the energies of black militants by ceding to them a part of the system at no sacrifice to anyone outside the ghetto.” And, Ravitch wrote:

“Conservative whites recognized that black control of black schools implied white control of white schools, which they could comfortably support, for it guaranteed that black problems, black dissidence, and black pupils would be safely contained within the ghetto.”

So the liberal, conservative and ruling-class support for “community control” was centrally in order to get integration off the agenda. The obstacle was the teachers and the UFT.

The Players

 So that’s some of the background and context. Now let’s look at the players.

First there is the liberal Republican mayor John Lindsay, who took over from “progressive” Democrat mayor Robert Wagner Jr. in January 1966. Lindsay was a wealthy, aristocratic, “silk stocking” district Republican (and Liberal Party) politician. He was a liberal, not an out-and-out reactionary like Rudolph Giuliani. He was a featured speaker along with Coretta Scott King at the biggest antiwar rally, at the Central Park Sheep’s Meadow in 1967. He was going to make New York “fun city” with lots of glitz, like the newly constructed Lincoln Center playhouse for the rich. Shanker commented that Lindsay epitomized the “sanctimonious upper-crust moralist with an added whiff of genteel antisemitism.” But at bottom, Lindsay was a ruling-class operative, elected to take on the unions.  

New York’s Republican/Liberal Party mayor John Lindsay (right) was met on his first day in office with the 1966 TWU Local 100 transit strike, defying the 1947 no-strike Condon-Wadlin Act. Thousands of transit workers protested (above) the jailing of TWU leader Mike Quill. The strike won, setting off panic in the ruling class, which passed the no-strike Taylor Law, which was then used in 1968 against the striking teachers. (Right: AP)

 

By 1966, the city was in the midst of a strike wave, first by the construction trades, then transit, sanitation, taxi drivers, hospital workers and teachers. Lindsay was elected on a program to resist what he called the “coercion” of the strong unions in vital services. The Transport Workers Union (TWU) Local 100 strike broke out on his first day as mayor. The city got an injunction declaring the strike “illegal.” At a rally of thousands of striking transit workers, TWU leader Mike Quill made his famous defiant reply: “The judge can drop dead in his black robes.” Quill vowed to “rot in prison” before he’d call it off. Quill was put behind bars, but unfortunately he was the one who died, collapsing of a heart attack in jail.

Until then, public employees could be prosecuted and fired under the Condon-Wadlin Act, which was passed in 1947 at the height of the Cold War “red purge” of the unions. But the 1966 transit strike had shredded that, and so the next year the state passed the Taylor Law, which provided for heavy fines for strikers and the union, and jailing of the leaders. Lindsay was determined to use the Taylor Law to force settlements on the unions. And he constantly played the race card, blaming the TWU, then the garbage union, then the UFT for striking against the needs of the “black community.”

Then we have Al Shanker, president of the UFT.  Born and raised on the Lower East Side, his parents were Russian immigrants and his mother had been an activist in the social-democratic-led garment trades unions. In college, Shanker joined the YPSL,[9] the Socialist Party youth, and developed into a hard-core anti-Soviet Cold Warrior, and a Vietnam War hawk. Shanker was an early activist in civil rights, but as a liberal, in favor of integration through a supposedly color-blind “meritocracy.” Shanker was first active in the Teachers Guild, which was set up to counter the Communist Party-led Teachers Union.[10] After the McCarthyite purge of NYC teachers and defeat of the TU, he went on to found the UFT in 1960. 

UFT leader Al Shanker (center) during 1968 strikes at picket line of
the CSA, representing administrators. UFT/CSA rhetoric against
“mob rule” in the schools inflamed racist reaction. 
(Photo: Bob Gomel / Life Magazine)

Shanker’s closest collaborator was the UFT administrator Yetta Barsh, who was married to Max Shachtman.[11] The Shachtman-Shanker collaboration became the defining political profile of the UFT. It was this that made the UFT and its parent, the American Federation of Teachers, into key operatives in the overthrow of leftist prime minister Cheddi Jagan in then British Guiana (now Guyana) in 1964; in overthrowing the Unidad Popular government of Socialist Salvador Allende in 1973; and as the channel for funneling CIA dollars to the anti-Soviet, nationalist Solidarność in Poland during the 1980s. The UFT/AFT was a linchpin of the “AFL-CIA.”[12] The Shachtmanite Albert Shanker was an all-round anti-communist counterrevolutionary who we opposed tooth and nail. I remember well how the SL protested outside UFT headquarters in 1981 with signs denouncing Shanker as a “CIA stooge,” which earned us a warning from the Wall Street Journal.

So you had the arch-anti-communist “color-blind” liberal integrationist and proponent of meritocracy, who insisted that teachers could only be hired from among those who were certified by the racist NYC Board of Examiners, which put him at loggerheads with the black community and the demand for more black teachers, which as I’ve said we strongly support.

Then there was McGeorge Bundy, the head of the Ford Foundation. Bundy wrote the school decentralization plan and designed the three “demonstration districts” for community control, one in Ocean Hill-Brownsville, one on the Lower East Side and the other in East Harlem, centered on IS 201, a windowless monstrosity that became the site for the first UFT strike in 1967.  Bundy had been the national security advisor for John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson during the Vietnam war, a hard-core war hawk, and also during the U.S. Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. He was the No. 1 Cold Warrior. And when he was made president of the Ford foundation, he brought his old Vietnam War hawk pal, former U.S. Secretary of Defense (war minister) Robert McNamara, with him.

National Security advisor McGeorge Bundy (left) and General William
Westmoreland (center) in Vietnam in 1965. Bundy was architect of failed
“strategic hamlets” counterinsurgency program in Vietnam and phony
“community control” in New York City that sparked the 1968 strikes. (Photo: Robert Pepper / Library of Congress)

The Ford Foundation had money, a $3 billion endowment. With that, Bundy sought to co-opt the militancy of the black struggle, to build an “entrepreneurial” layer in the black community and to stop union power cold. According to Shanker, “Bundy has been the guiding hand behind the forces that are out to destroy the union,” and in that the UFT leader was right. There is an insightful article by Richard Armstrong in the New York Times Magazine (20 April 1969) titled “McGeorge Bundy Confronts the Teachers.” The article describes how the UFT had sent 500 lobbyists to Albany to support some legislation, when 45 chartered buses from New York City showed up with 2,000 people, as Armstrong describes them, “middle-class housewives, slum mothers in new spring frocks, Black Panthers in leather jackets, berets and jeans – to lobby for a sweeping decentralization of the New York schools.”

Shanker charged that they were paid for by the Ford Foundation, and while it was not possible to pin down how many of the bus tickets were paid for by the foundation, the article shows how it financed the whole community control project. How the Queens College professor who ran a training program for administrators in Ocean-Hill Brownsville got a grant of $542,000 ($4.2 million in 2021 dollars); Galamison got $160,000 for his Scope program, which financed Kenneth Clark, another main proponent of community control; $334,000 ($2.6 million today) in direct grants to the Ocean Hill-Brownsville district, etc. A Foundation official declared, “We are very active in developing minority leadership and a minority entrepreneurial class.”

For McGeorge Bundy, supporting community control in New York City schools was a counterinsurgency operation to buy off black militancy and undermine the “enemy,” the union. The community control districts would be like Bundy’s “strategic hamlets” operation against the Viet Cong in Vietnam. In fact, the districts had no real power, they were creations of the Ford Foundation and the school administration, with the backing of Mayor Lindsay, and in the aftermath of the ’68 teachers strike, the Board of Education simply dissolved them.

1967: The First Round

So, it’s important to see the experimental districts as growing out of the defeat of integration, and the substitution of black capitalist enclaves, where local entrepreneurs could patch together a system, paid for by the Ford Foundation, installing their own administrators, unincumbered by the unions or union rules. As parents argued for more control over the failing schools and for more black teachers in the community, the mayor and ruling class promoted the scheme in which the black community could be set against the union. In fact, Ravitch notes the irony that “local control” was the slogan of the racists who opposed integration.

Another irony is that the UFT had been in favor of special projects in Ocean Hill-Brownsville. They had pushed the More Effective Schools project and were involved in a proposal of funding creative educational programming, for which they sought Ford Foundation funding. But the ruling class had a different idea.

Brownsville in Brooklyn in 1969. The impoverished 
ghetto areas of New York had decaying, 
overcrowded schools with inexperienced 
teachers. This was the result of government
policy, not teachers unions. 
(Photo: The New York Times)

 The ghetto schools were in fact in a desperate state. Jerald Podair writes in The Strike that Changed New York (2002) that by the 1960s New York City had in effect a dual public school system. There was the white cohort of experienced teachers, high test scores, the majority of National Merit and Westinghouse scholarships in the comprehensive high schools in white areas, and specialized schools like Bronx Science, Brooklyn Tech and Stuyvesant. And in the de facto black school system there were decaying facilities, overcrowded classrooms staffed by struggling first-year teachers who were probably not going to stay very long. Podair cites statistics stating that by the mid-1960s, black students were 30 percent of the city’s public-school students, but earned only 2.3 percent of academic (college-bound) diplomas. So there was a very real crisis. 

And who was teaching in the schools? By 1967, two-thirds of New York City teachers, supervisors and principals were Jewish. A generation before, for Jews, education was the main route out of poverty.  Pervasive antisemitism of a white Protestant ruling class meant there were only limited career paths in the private sector. The way out was through the free-tuition city colleges like CCNY and access to the G.I. Bill.[13] And the Jewish teachers met increasing hostility. Richard Kahlenberg in his biography, Tough Liberal: Albert Shanker and the Battles Over Schools, Unions, Race, and Democracy (2007) cites the oft-repeated remark, that of the five whites that black people saw in the ghetto, the cop was Irish, the other four were Jewish: the landlord, the corner store-owner, the teacher, and the social worker (who came to throw you off welfare if it was discovered a man was living in the house, evidenced by shoes under the bed).

So this charged situation would lead to an explosion of very real antisemitism in the course of the 1968 strikes, which the UFT leadership exploited, playing into the hands of the anti-union forces. But we will come to that next time. For now, let’s just say New York City was at a flashpoint waiting to explode.

A showdown came in the fall 1967, as the UFT launched a strike with contract demands calling for smaller class size, a wage increase, professional development and prep time, more funding for the UFT-supported More Effective Schools program and a clause that would give the teachers greater leeway to suspend unruly students. There is a clause in the DOE-UFT contract today which allows teachers to remove students “who so seriously disrupt the classroom as to impede effective instruction,” provided they give a written statement with substantiating material. But at the time this became known as the “disruptive child” clause, a conception loaded with racism. Many black people saw it as a white assault on the culture of poor black children, criticizing it as giving teachers police powers. Many members of the African American Teachers Union who were also in the UFT withdrew from the UFT at this point.

This was the most problematic UFT strike of the five that occurred in 1967-68, and under the circumstances a class-conscious leadership would not have raised the demand for that clause. So teachers went out on September 11, 1967, ignoring an injunction. The strike lasted for 14 days. In the Ocean-Hill Brownsville demonstration district, schools stayed open as black teachers crossed the picket line. Rev. C. Herbert Oliver, chairman of the demonstration district governing board, declared that “no union, or Board of Education, has the inherent right to educate children.” When the teachers came back after the strike they were met with angry protests. In later accounts, written in the light of the 1968 strike, the 1967 walkout is portrayed as just about the “disruptive child” clause. But that is not what the city rulers who were pushing the community control scheme were objecting to, and for which they jailed UFT leader Shanker.

NYC rulers denounced the 1967 UFT school strike
for breaking the state’s no-strike Taylor Law. 

A comrade dug up a New York Times (17 September 1967) editorial linking the UFT’s 1967 strike, and I’m quoting here, to “disturbing recent signs of a rise in strike sentiment among letter carriers, hospital workers and other Federal employees. In terms of the New York school system, the lesson in lawlessness the teachers are giving is doubly disturbing.” The Times editorial continued:

“The teachers’ resort to power tactics has had the further ill effect of encouraging advocates of ‘black power’ in the poverty neighborhoods to impose their rule-or-ruin policies on school administrators. In any such attempts, the example of lawlessness set by the U.F.T. will provide a handy precedent, to the detriment of the teachers as well as the schools…. The city cannot yield to U.F.T. irresponsibility.”

So that brings me to the leaflet on the 1968 teachers strike put out by the Spartacist League in November of that year under the headline “Beware Liberal Union Busters!”. We will talk of that in more detail in the next session when we go into the development of the strike. But here I want to talk about the section of that leaflet dealing with the ’67 strike. It said, and I’m going to quote a section of it:

“The roots of the current impasse can be traced to last year’s [1967] school strike and the narrow, self-interested approaches of the UFT and the middle-class Black Nationalists who put themselves forward as spokesmen for the community. At that time the Spartacist League issued a leaflet (‘Smash the Taylor Law,’ 24 Sept. 1967) which criticized both the gratuitous scabbing of Floyd McKissick[14] and H. Rap Brown,[15] which exacerbated the fears of the teachers that black militants would not support their demands for higher wages, and the UFT leadership’s continued indifference to the needs, fears and concerns of the black students and their parents. Under the heading ‘Support Ghetto Struggles,’ we warned: ‘the equally middle-class policy of “professionalism” advocated by the UFT leadership has held the union largely aloof from many of the past struggles of the ghetto communities, widening the gap between teacher, student and parent. Such a situation [of UFT indifference combined with Black Nationalist calls for “keeping the schools open”] provides a ready excuse for the development of racist attitudes.’ We called for a radical alliance of teachers with the doubly oppressed black and Puerto Rican working people and the first steps toward building a labor party to lead united, militant struggle against the liberal union-busters.”

So while the SL supported the 1968 teachers strike, it was sharply critical of the way the Shanker leadership conducted it, and it put forward an alternative class-struggle perspective. The Spartacist League was uniquely able to hold the class line against Lindsay’s union-busting precisely because it had devoted much effort and study to the struggle against black oppression, and actively supported black radicals from as early as the 1964 Harlem ghetto explosion. In that period, two main groups on the left came forward to support the struggle against racist police brutality – Progressive Labor with Bill Epton, and the Spartacist group with Jim Robertson, formed by the Revolutionary Tendency which had been expelled from the Socialist Workers Party.[16] The SL’s line on Black Power was to turn it into workers power. This is laid out in the Spartacist May-June 1967 special supplement, “Black and Red – Class Struggle Road to Negro Freedom.”[17]

The SL could understand what Lindsay and Bundy were up to, and also that what was being supported by the black nationalists was actually playing into the hands of the capitalist rulers, while the bulk of the left scabbed or supported scabbing in the ’68 strikes and thus acted as tools of the racist ruling class. But before we get to that, I want to go through the development of the three citywide strikes in 1968, which we will talk about next time.

Part II

Just to briefly recap. Last time we talked about the background to the strike, how the United Federation of Teachers was part of, and had been playing a leading role in the drive of municipal workers organizing; that there was a completely segregated school system where all the struggles to integrate them had been defeated; where the teachers were 97 percent white and the majority of students were black and Latino. The city was ready to blow, and the country was already on fire, literally, with ghetto explosions in all the major cities. In Vietnam, black troops were radicalizing, fragging their officers and refusing to be cannon fodder in U.S. imperialism’s war on Indochina.

 Upon UFT (and later AFT) leader Al Shanker’s death in 1997, a New York Times editorial commented that the time of the strikes, New York was “A City at War,” saying that 1968 was an “annus horribilus like no other.” It was marked by the assassinations of Martin Luther King in April, then Robert Kennedy in June. There was the Columbia University revolt in April-May, where it and other campuses were “paralyzed by turmoil,” the Times editorialized. “Then came the 55-day ’68 teachers strike, an event so corrosive that, a generation later, people say it determined many of their views about race and education.”[18]

That was the climate in New York. In February 1968 the garbage strike began, When the sanitation workers in Teamsters Local 841 walked out, Liberal/Republican mayor Lindsay wanted to call in the National Guard to collect the garbage, but the Guard refused to scab. The garbage strike put New York City on edge and deeply shook its rulers. The New York Times headlined, “How to Avoid Strikes by Garbagemen, Nurses, Teachers, Subway Men, Welfare Workers, Etc.” [19] This establishment “paper of record” warned, “New York, the capital of cool” had reached “a point beyond which it could not be pushed.” 

Republican/Liberal mayor John Lindsay wanted to
call in the National Guard to break the February 1968
sanitation workers strike, but troops refused to scab.
 (Photo: Pettman Archives)

So you had the country in turmoil and the local rulers in an anti-strike frenzy. That sets the stage for the next part of the story. What we are going to be looking at today is the concrete development of the 1968 teachers strikes, who supported them and who scabbed, and why was the Spartacist League uniquely able to recognize the class line.

Looking at the line-up, the United Federation of Teachers was led by the Shachtmanite Socialist Party, which four years later became Social Democrats USA, of which Shanker was a member. These Shachtmanites were the right-wing of the civil rights movement, led by Bayard Rustin and A. Philip Randolph, both SP members. They were hardline anti-Soviet Cold Warriors, who used their union ties to topple left-wing governments around the world, leading the U.S. labor federation to become known in Latin America as the “AFL-CIA.” Most, but not all, of local labor officialdom backed the UFT in the strikes.

On the other side, supporting “community control,” you had the Black Power movement, the Black Panthers, the Young Lords, the Communist Party, the Socialist Workers Party, the various wings of the New Left Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), from Weatherman to Progressive Labor … and much or most of the bourgeois political establishment, both liberal and conservative, including “wealthy patricians on the boards of the city’s leading social-welfare organizations; and representatives of the city’s corporate elite,” as Diane Ravitch put it in her book The Great School Wars, 1805-1973 (1974).

In the discussion during the last session, one person asked a question along the lines of how come people were taken in by this scheme of community control? Well, if you put yourself back in that period, ask yourself what did the union look like to black and white radicals? The UFT leaders were screaming anti-communists, the very definition of “State Department socialists,” supporters of the Vietnam War, whose politics domestically were based on the ideology of liberal “color blindness,” and supporters of “meritocracy” in hiring, a mainstay of systemic racism. The ghetto schools were traps for black youth, with decrepit facilities, starved for funds, seeming like prisons. So much so that SDS, the main New Left group, was calling for high school revolts as “breakouts.” Even when a new school was built, like I.S. 201 in East Harlem (El Barrio), it literally had no windows. And the kids had practically given up on graduating, the colleges were sealed off.

Meanwhile, every attempt to overcome the segregation of New York City schools had been stymied. So, as a result of the failure of school integration, the idea of community control came along, and it touched a chord. The sentiment was, “we will take control of the schools, we will run them, we will build schools where black people are respected, where black kids can graduate and go to college and have a chance to be hired.” Anyone who stood in the way of this was considered a racist. White teachers were seen as the obstacle to this struggle.

What this missed, as we went over last time, is how top-level capitalist forces were pushing “community control.” The Ford Foundation was handing out money in the ghetto to hire a slew of principals, administrators, teacher-trainers, etc., in a plan personally written by Vietnam war criminal McGeorge Bundy, along with fellow war criminal Robert McNamara. Their agenda was to build black capitalist enclaves in the ghetto and drain off black resistance, just as other poverty programs co-opted black militants, and to use the black population as pawns to break the unions.

May 1968: Ocean Hill-Brownsville Strike Over Teacher Firings

So on the teacher strikes: going back to the 1960 strike, the UFT won the right to collective bargaining. The 1962 strike won a huge pay increase, freed teachers from lunchroom duty and established a grievance system that put curbs on the principals’ dictatorship. As we noted, already in the 1966 TWU transit strike, Mayor Lindsay played the race card, saying the strike hurts blacks and Latinos who rely on public transit. This is a preview of his line in the ’68 teachers strikes. As I said last time, the 1967 UFT strike was the most problematic from our point of view, with a series of supportable contract demands, but also including what came to be known as the “disruptive child” clause, which became a flashpoint, leading many to see the UFT as racist.

In Ocean Hill-Brownsville, the schools stayed open in the1967 strike, and black teachers crossed the picket line. When the teachers came back after the settlement, they were met by angry protests. The situation was very tense going into 1968, and that spring, on May 7, the OH-B governing board met to vote on a report by a personnel committee appointed by district Governing Board chairman Rev. C. Herbert Oliver which called for the removal of a principal, five assistant principals and 13 teachers. When a CUNY professor on the board objected that they should have some kind of hearing, Oliver “moved to the attack,” and according to journalist Martin Mayer’s account:[20]

“[A]s though on signal, the door to the meeting room burst open and fifteen to twenty militants rushed in and ranged themselves against the wall. This was a community board, they said, and they were the community, and they were there to see that the board did what the community wanted.”

The next day, Ocean Hill-Brownsville superintendent McCoy sent registered letters to the 19 telling them that they had been “terminated.” Eighteen of the 19 were white, and the other one was quickly reinstated when they realized he had been sent the letter because of a name mix-up. Two of the teachers were chapter leaders. Fred Nauman, the chapter leader at JHS 271, the focal point of the fight, was a Jewish refugee from Hitler’s Germany. 

UFT chapter leader at JHS 271 Fred Nauman and protesters. (Photo: Wide World Photo)

The apologists for community control argued that these were just “routine transfers out,” which the union blew out of proportion in its war against community control. The New York Civil Liberties Union wrote that “the UFT has used ‘due process’ as a smokescreen to obscure its real goal, which is to discredit decentralization and sabotage community control.” This is false. Mayer printed the termination letter in full. I’ll read from it:

“The Governing Board of the Ocean Hill-Brownsville School District has voted to end your employment in the schools of this district. This action was taken on the recommendation of the Personnel Committee. The termination of employment is to take effect immediately.”

The teachers were fired. Were there any further doubt, McCoy was quoted in the New York Times saying, “No one of these teachers will be allowed to teach anywhere in the city. The black community will see to that.”

Even if it were only a transfer, it was clearly punitive and the teachers had the right to receive written charges and a hearing, as Diane Ravitch noted. But McCoy at first refused to file charges, and then when he did, they were full of holes. It seems there were a few ineffective teachers (one was a devotee of the British radical pedagogy Summerhill model in which children were “free from adult authority,” and his classroom reflected it), but in the large majority the charges were baseless. For the OH-B Governing Board and McCoy it was a test case of their assertion of the right to get rid of teachers at will, for whatever reason. As Board president Oliver later wrote, “we were talking about hundreds of teachers.”

The UFT rightly demanded the 13 teachers be returned to the classroom. With the schools in the district shut, the UFT went to court. The Board of Ed brought in a respected retired black judge, Francis Rivers, as a special trial examiner. Rivers ruled that the teachers must be presumed innocent unless shown otherwise. Three of the 13 had been charged with “expressing opposition to the project,” but there were no witnesses and no evidence was produced. Five teachers were charged with “incompetency,” yet they had consistently received good ratings and commendation letters from their principals. One teacher had been charged with allowing students to throw chairs, but a photo of the classroom showed the furniture was bolted to the floor. 

Ocean Hill-Brownsville superintendent
 Rhody McCoy in 1968.
 (Photo: Sam Falk / The New York Times)

So the judge upheld the teachers’ First Amendment rights and ruled that their dismissal was an unfair labor practice, and ordered the return of the teachers. The governing board ignored the decision. McCoy sent a registered letter: “Decentralization means we decide. No Donovan [the school board superintendent], No Shanker, No Lindsay. We Decide.” As an aside, a few words on McCoy. He was a Black Muslim, attended Mosque No. 7, which had been Malcolm X’s mosque, and had visited Malcolm in his home. We rightly see Malcolm as a radical, but by that point the Nation of Islam in New York was led by Louis Farrakhan and appealed in particular to black small businessmen, middle-class and petty-bourgeois layers. That certainly included Rhody McCoy, who saw himself as a boss, and aggressively asserted that.

When the district schools reopened in May without the 19 educators, the UFT correctly called a walkout of teachers in Ocean Hill-Brownsville. They had to, otherwise the union there would be gutted, which was certainly McCoy’s intention. Three hundred fifty teachers walked out. The Governing Board declared they were gone for good. Remember that both the community board and the OH-B district itself were on the Ford Foundation payroll. This was not the UFT facing off with “the black community” but the union facing powerful bourgeois forces that were cynically manipulating the community. The bottom line was a class issue: whether teachers had rights to resist bosses who wanted to blame them for the outcomes of underfunded, overcrowded, racially segregated schools. 

Al Shanker speaking to May 1968 UFT rally protesting dismissal
of teachers by Governing Board of Ocean Hill-Brownsville
School District. (Photo: United Federation of Teachers / Tamiment Library)

McCoy spent the summer lining up “replacement workers” for the 350 teachers who had walked out. Who were they? Ironically, there were not enough black teachers to hire, because they could not get certified through the Board of Examiners which enforced the so-called “meritocracy.” Some were young liberal and radical teachers, many of them Jewish. The New Left saw unions – not just the leadership – as “bought off,” or worse, racist job-trusts. As Jerald Podair writes in The Strike That Changed New York, many “replacements” came from elite Ivy League private universities. This is the same recruitment pool that two decades later Wendy Kopp turned to for her union-busting Teach for America corps. They saw themselves as outsiders and were willing to serve the black nationalist leadership. The UFT resented them, dismissed them as new teachers just out of college, or just teaching to get a draft deferment.

Fall 1968’s First Strike

UFT Membership voted overwhelmingly on 8 September 1968 to strike the next day. 93% struck. (Photo: Bettman Archives)

So school was getting ready to open for the fall semester. On September 6, the UFT Delegate Assembly voted for a citywide strike to demand that the terminated teachers who wished to return (now down to ten, all of them Jewish) plus the 350 who were fired for walking out get their jobs back. Shanker told the delegates, “If we don’t strike, there will be no union.” That was absolutely correct. Firing 350 teachers? That is proof right there that the community control project was designed to break the union and its ability to protect its members against arbitrary management action. Against that threat it was necessary to mobilize union power. On September 8, the UFT membership voted by a seven-to-one margin to walk out on the 9th, the first day of the school year.

The first strike lasted two days. Almost 54,000 out of 57,000 teachers struck, or 93%, compared to 77% in the 1967 strike (and 12% in the 1960 UFT walkout). The central school board quickly settled with the union. By this point, it was becoming clear that the Ocean Hill-Brownsville district had no real power; a judge had ruled saying the community control districts were simply a division of the Board of Education. The settlement provided for the return of all ten of the dismissed teachers who wished to come back, full salary and return of the 350 teachers who walked out in the spring, plus a commitment that going forward, teachers would have guarantees of due process in termination proceedings. McCoy argued the local board had not been part of the settlement, that he would take the teachers back under protest, but also he would keep those he had hired to replace them. Central could pay for double staff.

When the teachers came back on September 11, it was mayhem. As they reported for work, they were told to go to the auditorium of PS 155 for an “orientation session.” When they got there, black protesters led by Brooklyn C.O.R.E. leader Sonny Carson tried to block their entrance. Carson had 50 people with sticks, helmets and bandoliers chanting “Jew pigs.”[21] As Podair described the scene: “While the men cursed the teachers, threw the bullets at them, and threatened to ‘carry you out in pine boxes,’ McCoy entered the room, and quietly observed the scene, offering no assistance to the terrified educators.” He then told them to report back to their respective schools, but when they arrived, there were no class assignments.

 

Brooklyn C.O.R.E. leader Sonny Carson 
with his attorney F. Lee Bailey in 1974. 
(Photo: Newsday) 

As for Carson, he was a demagogue, a hard black nationalist whose defense against charges of anti-Semitism was that he was against all whites.[22] There was a forum in Newark, where Carson was a speaker along with Amiri Baraka (then known as LeRoi Jones) and Ron Karenga, the head of the US Organization that was used by the feds and the LAPD against the Black Panther Party, killing John Huggins and “Bunchy” Carter (in January 1969). At the forum, Carson said that “Adolf Shanker” got the shock of his life when the “governing board fired all 350 pig teachers” and that “the community” would keep the teachers out of the schools by any means necessary. This was uncritically quoted by the Socialist Workers Party’s Militant (14 July 1968).

The Second Strike

So on the first actual day of classes, September 11, when the Ocean Hill-Brownsville teachers tried to come back, they were blocked at the door and given no class assignments. The UFT executive board met and voted to call a second strike demanding reinstatement of the OH-B teachers. The strike was portrayed in the media as white teachers against black parents. A New York Times (16 September 1968) editorial, “To Open the Schools,” arrogantly speaking in the name of “the community,” said of Shanker’s vow to continue the strike despite a ruling by the state education commissioner: “This is a threat to carry illegal labor union tactics beyond the point of public tolerance; and if it is pursued it will have the devastating effect of placing the teachers of this city at war with the community.” 

Shanker brought in fellow Shachtmanites Bayard Rustin (second from left) and A. Philip Randolph for support, but they were shunned even by establishment civil rights leaders. (Photo: United Federation of Teachers / Tamiment Library)

Stung by the bad reception in the liberal press, Shanker called on his black Shachtmanite cronies Bayard Rustin and A. Philip Randolph for support. They held a press conference, saying it is the “right of every worker not to be transferred or fired at the whim of his employer,” and got some black trade-unionists to sign on to an ad in the Times supporting the UFT. In response, they were promptly “read out of the civil rights movement,” even by establishment black leaders.[23]

The strike was justified, but in the face of liberal opposition, Shanker adopted policies that appealed to right-wing conservative constituencies. UFT signs to “End Mob Rule in the Schools” were deliberately inflammatory, whipping up racial fears. An anonymous flyer showed up in OH-B teachers’ mailboxes demanding that the “blood sucking exploiters” and “middle east murderers of colored people” must “shut up and get out.” This might have been seen as the ravings of a lunatic, but Shanker saw it as an opportunity and ordered 500,000 of the anonymous anti-teacher fliers to be printed and handed out everywhere. So he effectively portrayed the governing board and all of Ocean Hill-Brownsville as antisemitic. The governing board disavowed the leaflet and said it would not tolerate antisemitism. But the incident served to galvanize the Jewish community, which was already turning sharply to the right, due to the 1967 war in which Israel occupied the West Bank.

The second strike lasted almost three weeks, until a settlement was reached after an all-night session with Mayor Lindsay. All the fired teachers would be returned to Ocean Hill-Brownsville, but the scabs would also be allowed to stay. When the teachers went back on September 30, there were 1,000 cops on duty. The Ocean Hill-Brownsville governing board ordered McCoy to fire the disputed UFT teachers. With the UFT poised to call another strike, Board of Ed chief Donavan said he was reassigning seven principals who had been hired by the governing board.

This time the teachers worked for two turbulent weeks until on October 11, Superintendent Donovan reinstated the seven principals, and declared that the principals had a legitimate right to reassign teachers to hall and lunchroom duty. On October 13, the UFT Delegate Assembly voted again to strike and on Monday, October 14, 50,000-plus teachers returned to the picket lines for the third time that fall.

The Third Strike  

Members of the City Council visit a classroom in PS 87 in Ocean Hill in 1968. In the 1960s, almost all of teachers in NYC public schools were white, and overwhelmingly Jewish, while by 1968 most of the students were black or Puerto Rican. A class-struggle leadership would have fought for an emergency hiring of black and Hispanic teachers. (Photo: Neal Boenz / The ew York Times)

The third strike lasted five weeks, from mid-October to the end of November. This time, what had been a more-or-less localized dispute in Ocean Hill-Brownsville went citywide. Taken together with the September strikes, the New York City school system, with over 1 million students, was struck for more than eight weeks in the fall of 1968. Almost every school outside the demonstration district closed. The OH-B superintendent and governing board claimed the right to run the schools as they wished, including getting rid of teachers who were “unwanted,” in the name of community control. Shanker demanded the governing board be dissolved. There were death threats to UFT members. There were outbreaks of antisemitic ravings. New York City was completely polarized.

Flier for a public meeting in 1968 promoting phony
“community control” of the schools in Ocean Hill-
Brownsville. School leaders were on the payroll of
the Ford Foundation, which together with the Republican/
Liberal mayor was on a union-busting drive. 

The battle lines were drawn, and the two sides confronted one another with pickets and counter-pickets, and mounted cops in between. The city labor tops lined up with the UFT. They were mainly Jews and white Catholics, led by New York Central Labor Council (CLC) president Harry Van Arsdale, who (along with AFL-CIO chief George Meany) was also a Vietnam hawk like Shanker and his Socialist Party pals. The CLC held a huge pro-strike demonstration at City Hall with up to 40,000 striking teachers present. The newly founded municipal union DC 37, on the other hand, supported the community control district, as did Local 1199, both unions with large black membership. Podair sees it as the white middle class against the black poor. Diane Ravitch portrayed the situation in her book The Great School Wars:

“Picketing teachers claimed that they were subjected to antiwhite, antisemitic invective. Governing board partisans charged the teacher pickets with using antiblack invective. Tension increased each day. Parents were angry because the schools were closed; blacks were angry because a small, black school board was being stepped on by a powerful union; union members were angry because it appeared that the mayor was union-busting; Jews were angry because Jewish teachers were pushed out of their jobs without cause while the Board of Education complacently tolerated outbursts of anti-Semitism at its public meetings.”

Focusing on the line-up of social forces on each side, as most writings on the ’68 NYC teachers strikes do, obscures the basic issues at stake, and the class forces at work. Supporting, bankrolling and manipulating black “community control” advocates at the local level were not only wealthy white business leaders and “philanthropists” and the liberal Republican mayor Lindsay. So, too, was virtually the entire bourgeois press and the capitalist “establishment,” avidly seeking to quash municipal worker strikes and to keep a lid on the seething black neighborhoods. For the ruling class, “community control” was a form of urban counterinsurgency just as much as military occupation of the ghettos: the carrot and the stick. And not a whole lot of carrot: NYC superintendent of schools Bernard Donovan explained to the Ocean Hill-Brownsville governing board in the summer of 1967 that there would be no more money for the district. As Mayer put it, he told them, “in effect, that anybody could run better schools if he had a lot more money, and that the purpose of the experiment in community involvement was to find out whether its advocates could run better schools on the same money.”

And behind the racial and ethnic dynamics, there was a fundamental class question at stake, defense of the union against a union-busting attack by the capitalist state.

Without the financing of the Ford Foundation and authority of the Board of Education and the city government, the Governing Board of the Ocean Hill-Brownsville Demonstration School District would not have existed for one minute. In digging in its heels against arbitrary removal of teachers, the United Federation of Teachers’ 1968 strikes were utterly justified, and necessary, but the policies of UFT leader Al Shanker, a pro-war anti-communist, whipped up a racial backlash that undercut the strikes. Shanker poisoned relations with the African American population (including many teachers and other union members) by pitching the battle as one against black vigilantes and anti-Semites. A class-struggle leadership would have put forward a program to unite black and white working people in a fight against capital for integrated quality education for all, beginning with the black ghettos and Latino barrios.

Les Campbell and Al Vann taught at JHS 271 in 1968. 
Vann went on to lead the Brooklyn Democratic Party. 
(Left: Daily World, right: schoolcolorspodcast.com)

Jerald Podair writes that this third strike changed the political landscape of New York. Whereas before, Jews and blacks had been natural allies (as in the civil rights movement), now New York blacks and Jews were at loggerheads. Black teachers Al Vann and Leslie Campbell (Jitu Weusi), both of whom were at Junior High School 271, a focal point of the OH-B struggle, played a noxious role in this, quoting from the anti-Semitic forgery by the tsarist police, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. On WBAI radio, Campbell recited one of his students’ poems, “To Albert Shanker,” beginning “Hey Jew boy,” and saying “You came to America the land of the free, Took over the school system to perpetuate white supremacy.” But instead of whipping up frenzied fears of antisemitism, union leaders should have pointed to the racist practices of Henry Ford, whose fortune was financing the “community control” hoax.

Above all, a class-conscious union leadership would have fought for a union program to provide quality education for all by drastically improving the overcrowded, underfinanced, racially segregated and physically dilapidated schools in poor black and Latino neighborhoods. It would have called for emergency hiring of thousands of black and Latino teachers. It would have involved parents, students and workers, under teachers’ leadership, to rip control of the schools from the disastrous management of the racist educrats, and to fight the aspiring black capitalist bosses who sought to take their place. That would necessarily mean waging a fight for genuine integration of the schools, combatting government-sponsored residential segregation. And it would require a break from the Democratic, Republican and other bourgeois parties and politicians – they, not teachers, are the ones responsible for the sorry state of public education. 

The New York Post (19 November 1968), then a 
liberal newspaper, and the rest of the bourgeois 
media breathed a sigh of relief at the end of the UFT 
strike, which they unanimously opposed. 

As city rulers grew more desperate, a deal was worked out in late November. The UFT returned to the schools. The Ocean Hill-Brownsville governing board was suspended and the district was put under state trusteeship. Three principals were assigned to Central. Lost pay due to the strikes would be made up with a lengthened school day and holidays. The Governing Board was not at the bargaining table. The community control experiment was over. Later the Board of Ed divided New York City into 30 community districts. There was a gradual decentralization which became a gravy train for local politicians. The outcome: The OH-B administrators and many other supporters of community control went on to cushy jobs in academia, think tanks and the like. Al Vann went on to run the Brooklyn Democratic Party. The racial divide that Shanker exacerbated took decades to overcome, and his bureaucratic successors run the UFT up to today.

So next time we’ll deal with the role of the left and the aftermath of the ’68 strikes, their relevance today, and the program of Class Struggle Education Workers to cut through the black-white polarization and take the battle to the racist bosses.

Part III

In this final part of our analysis of the 1968 New York City teachers strike, we will look at the role of the left, at the outcome of the strike, and at its longer-term consequences. The strike established the power of the United Federation of Teachers, and at the same time the way it was run by the UFT leadership under Al Shanker polarized the city, leading to a deep black-white split that marked New York City political and social life for decades. It erected a political – and emotional – DMZ [demilitarized zone, as between North and South Korea], a line that could not be crossed between the UFT and black New York. Only with the 2000s did it become possible to unite teachers with African Americans and Latinos against the capitalist forces seeking to corporatize and privatize public education.

Even today, more than half a century later, the ’68 teachers strike is highly controversial, with diametrically opposed views within the union and on the left. Actually, there were four UFT strikes that year, one in the spring in the Ocean Hill-Brownsville district, and three citywide in the fall. Involving over 50,000 teachers, and lasting eight weeks – 55 days, most of the fall term during which time they were front-page news every day – taken together, the 1968 NYC teachers strikes were the biggest school strike in the history of the United States. That is still true today. And they set the stage for a series of teacher strikes around the country in the 1970s, so that today, over 70% of all teachers nationwide are represented by unions, and in many northern states, over 95%.

The strikes – all of them – were also illegal, under New York state’s Taylor Law outlawing strikes by public employees. Eventually the United Federation of Teachers was fined $250,000 and Shanker went to jail for a few days. But these were token measures, because the bottom line was that the UFT won and the “experiment” of so-called community control of the schools lost. Keep in mind that this was pseudo-community control, since real power rested with the mayor and the Board of Education. Despite Shanker’s misleadership that played into the hands of the corporate “community control” fraud, the ’68 NYC teachers strike was waged against blatant union-busting, asserting union power to defend teachers against punitive discipline by the bosses. 

That’s big, and we still have that power today, despite the best efforts by the UFT leadership to undercut it. Moreover, for the last decade and a half, public school teachers have been under attack by supposed “reformers” who want to blame educators for the sorry state of schools in inner city areas, just as the forces pushing “community control” did in 1968. And just as the Board of Ed in ’68 refused to give more money to the Ocean Hill-Brownsville district, today the Department of Ed refuses to spend the $1.6 to $1.9 billion it would take to hire the 17,700 more teachers it would take to lower class sizes to the level required by the state law it is ignoring. And when white racist parents in suburbs like Loundon, Virginia go after teachers for teaching about systemic racism or about sexuality, they echo the arguments for “community control.”

We in the CSEW, and the Internationalist Group, have a very different program: for educator-led teacher-student-parent-worker control of the schools. More about that later.

Before getting into the particulars on the response of the left, I want to make a more general point. We have gone into how ruling-class forces designed and financed the community control “experiment,” but what is striking in the many books written about the ’68 strike, and looking back at the newspaper coverage, is how almost the entire ruling class lined up against the UFT, with the left in tow. Richard Kahlenberg, in his hagiography of Al Shanker, Tough Liberal, titles his chapter on Ocean Hill-Brownsville the “Liberal Assault on Labor.” It was certainly that. The New York Times, the New York Post (which at the time was liberal), the New York Civil Liberties Union, and the rest all vituperated against Shanker and the strike.

But they weren’t the only ones. The Wall Street Journal ran front-page stories on educational progress in Ocean Hill-Brownsville under community control. Time magazine did an article on “Teachers Who Give a Damn,” praising the OH-B scabs. The head of Time, Inc. was a member of the Citizens Committee for Decentralization of the Public Schools, as was the head of IBM; the committee’s chair was the CEO of electronics giant RCA (Radio Corporation of America). Republican Lindsay, the original “limousine liberal,” was pushing for “community control.” The mayor, elected to quash labor militancy, had been vice chairman of the Kerner Commission on the 1967 upheavals in Newark and Detroit. He was out to prevent a “riot” in New York City, and the UFT was in the way.

There is a famous scene in Woody Allen’s 1973 film Sleeper, a sci-fi spoof in which the main character (Allen) awakens in 2173, after being cryogenically frozen for 200 years, and is told that the old world had been destroyed after “a man named Albert Shanker got hold of a nuclear warhead.” That kind of captures the apocalyptic way the 1968 teachers strike was viewed at the time by the media, corporate and political establishment: New York City, the center of world finance, was in danger of exploding, and the UFT was about to set off a civilization-destroying conflagration. This is ironic since as national security advisor to presidents Kennedy and Johnson, Ford Foundation chief McGeorge Bundy, the author of the “community control” scheme, set nuclear policy for U.S. imperialism!

The Left Scabs on 1968 NYC Teacher Strikes

So how did the left view the strike? Pretty much the same as the bourgeois liberals, although of course the several groups had various explanations.

First and most important was the Communist Party. The CP continued to have support among teachers, going back to when they led the Teachers Union (TU) until it was broken by McCarthyite repression in the early 1950s. The UFT when it was founded included an explicit clause banning communists. But by 1968 CP supporters, including some children of former TU members, were in the Teachers Action Caucus, which opposed the strike and acted as strikebreakers, some working as “replacement teachers” (scabs) in the Ocean Hill-Brownsville district. Others who continued to teach there, crossing UFT picket lines daily, were members of the African American Teachers Association, led by Al Vann and Les Campbell at JHS 271.

The TU had a good record defending black rights, and after the red purges (in which it lost hundreds of members to anti-communist witch-hunting, as well as being barred as collective bargaining agent for NYC teachers), it continued to function as a civil rights organization. But the long-since reformist, Stalinist CP was wedded to the politics of the “popular front,” of allying with liberal bourgeois politicians. Thus in World War II, in the name of the imperialist “war effort,” the CP supported a ban on strikes. On paper it said the ’68 UFT strike had “strong overtones of racism” (Daily World, 24 October 1968), but in practice it treated it as an outright racist strike, while pretending that issue of due process could be easily resolved and backing OH-B superintendent McCoy 100%.

Early on, a statement (“CP’s Proposals for Effective Community Control of Schools,” 13 February 1968) admitted that McGeorge Bundy, the Ford Foundation and the mayor were pushing community control “to further their own interests,” namely to “shift the blame for future educational failures onto the backs of parents and local communities,” “to see further divisions between parents and teachers; among Negroes, Puerto Ricans and whites,” and to see “local communities fighting against each other for limited funds.” That is in fact what the bourgeois politicians intended and what “community control” would mean under capitalism. Nevertheless, the CP said “we favor many of the decentralization proposals” of Lindsay and Bundy.

It was clear that McCoy would only back down ever so slightly from his assertion of total control, and only under orders from his bosses, the Board of Ed (“hand-picked by the large banks and corporations,” as the CP put it) and NYC mayor Lindsay. So the CP’s line was that the UFT should just eat it on job security, in the interests of reestablishing political alliances with black and Puerto Rican bourgeois politicians, which the strike disrupted. And while supporting black comedian Dick Gregory for president on the minor-league bourgeois Peace and Freedom Party ticket, it also highlighted black Democratic Party “progressives” like Gary, Indiana mayor Richard Hatcher, who got a two-page spread in The Worker [formerly Daily Worker) (9 June 1968).

The Socialist Workers Party’s Militant called the UFT
strike “racist,” advocating and engaging in scabbing
on behalf of the capitalist rulers.  

A second major left group that opposed the 1968 UFT strikes and supported scabbing was the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), which was 1,000% in favor of community control. In the 1950s, the SWP rejected the program of revolutionary integrationism and by the ’60s had embraced the politics of black nationalism.[24] So after the assassination of Martin Luther King, the SWP issued a call for “Black Political Power” (Militant, 15 April 1968). Lots of rhetoric against capitalism, but nothing about a multiracial revolutionary workers party. Instead it said that “Afro-Americans must have their own independent political party” – that is a black bourgeois party. And instead of socialism it called for a “new society based on human dignity, justice and brotherhood.”

In the middle of the second strike, a rally of several thousand supporters of community control was held at the Manhattan Center, sponsored by the NYC Council on Poverty (a city government agency that distributed poverty program funds) and the New Coalition, an opposition group inside the UFT that opposed the strike (and scabbed on it). Lead speakers were McCoy and Rev. Oliver, while the spokesman for the Coalition was SWP supporter Jeff Mackler (Militant, 4 October 1968). The SWP claimed that Lindsay supported the UFT and opposed community control, when in fact his appointees on the Board of Ed supported the OH-B governing board against the union, but only backed down in the face of the UFT’s solid strike.

As I mentioned in Part II, the SWP’s tailing after black bourgeois leaders in ’68 took a grotesque turn, publishing without criticism the ravings of Sonny Carson against “pig teachers.” It equated the “militants” who played a key role in the ’68 teachers strike with Black Power advocates like the Black Panther Party. No, they were careerists posing as radicals. As noted, Carson tried to shake down Lindsay for some city funding in 1967. His predecessor as leader of Brooklyn C.O.R.E., Major Owens, went on to head the city’s poverty programs. And in the years after the strike, Owens and Al Vann from JHS 271 became the leaders of the Brooklyn black Democratic machine, with Owens in Congress and Vann in the state senate and later city council.

In 1968, the by-then reformist SWP was avidly pursuing popular-front alliances with capitalist politicians in the antiwar movement, leading up to the formation in 1970 of the National Peace Action Coalition (NPAC) with Indiana senator Vance Hartke on its board. Also on the NPAC board was the same Jeff Mackler who was the voice of the SWP’s teacher supporters in the ’68 strike. And some years later, after Mackler and other leaders of NPAC had been booted out of the SWP, his Socialist Action group prettified communal violence between black people and Jews in Crown Heights as a “rebellion” by black youths, adding that “Black leader Sonny Carson outlined the demands of the rebellion” (Socialist Action, October 1991).

Also active in opposing the 1968 strikes was a Shachtmanite social-democratic group, the International Socialists (I.S.), whose founders had split from Shachtman when he entered the Socialist Party. (The I.S. was different from the ISO, followers of Tony Cliff,[25] which some may have been familiar with. Both I.S. and the ISO are now history.) The anti-communist I.S. was known to many radicals for long opposing calls for a victory by the Viet Cong in the Vietnam War. In the ’68 strikes, the I.S. was part of the New Coalition with the SWP and other would-be radicals. Afterward, it put out a pamphlet, Crisis in the Schools, which is cringe reading for any real Marxist. Its line was that 1968 was “a reactionary strike against the black community.”

But that was only for starters. The pamphlet alibis the Ford Foundation, saying that some radicals wanted to see its community control plans as a diabolical scheme to pit black people against the union, whereas “the most progressive sectors of American capitalism” wanted a more educated black workforce. According to the I.S., it could be that “the Ford Foundation saw its grants … as legitimate experimentation with improving the quality of ghetto education at relatively little cost.” So these social democrats called for “demanding that the liberals live up to their own rhetoric.” The I.S. didn’t see the class line, just as on Vietnam, where it agreed with Democratic “doves” who wanted to get out of the war because the U.S. couldn’t win it.

One of the I.S. pamphlet’s articles declared, in capital letters, “IT WAS ABSOLUTELY CORRECT, AS WELL AS ESSENTIAL TO BREAK THE UFT STRIKE AND TO CROSS THOSE PICKET LINES.” In justifying scabbing, it wrote “White people in general, and teachers in general, are partially motivated by racial prejudices.” This is liberal white guilt to the max. Even admitting that McCoy projected “total disregard for teachers’ rights” and that the local boards were demanding “more-or-less arbitrary powers over teachers” (as the Central Board had), still it held that under community control, local coalitions should have the right to move teachers whom they deemed had racist attitudes out of the district.

Then there was the New Left, in the form of SDS, and the various factions within it. This included the Guevarists who became the Weathermen (since disappeared), the Maoists who became the October League (also defunct) and the Revolutionary Union (later Revolutionary Communist Party, now revcom.us) and the Progressive Labor Party. All these supposed “communists” blithely waltzed across the picket line or supported scabbing. Their argument was fairly simple: they supported the black community, what some called the “internal colony” in the name of self-determination. PL was all over the map, first explicitly supporting community control, only to do a complete 180 in early 1969 to declare that all black nationalism is reactionary.

The Black Panthers, for their part, patrolled some of the schools in Ocean Hill-Brownsville. They were in a life-and-death struggle as the FBI’s COINTELPRO was shooting them down in the streets, and jailing the Panther 21 for the cop fantasy of allegedly plotting to bomb the Bronx Botanical Garden and Macy’s. The Panthers were well aware of the bourgeois program of co-opt or kill. So there was some criticism in “the movement” about the aims of McCoy and the other community control administrators. But they were mainly caught up in the anti-union demagoguery of Carson, Les Campbell and Al Vann. 

At bottom all these left groups were suckered in by the bourgeoisie’s community control ploy because they lacked a Marxist understanding of the class line between capital and labor, between the bourgeoisie (in all its varieties) and the proletariat. The picket line is the class line in real time, the battle line of the class struggle. It makes concrete the choice posed in the song Which Side Are You On? written by Florence Reece, the wife of the National Miners Union organizer in Harlan County, Kentucky at the time of the 1930s coal wars known as “Bloody Harlan.” But the CP and SWP popular-frontists were seeking black bourgeois allies, while the sectoralist New Left radicals were tailing after the sector that was deemed the most progressive.

The Spartacist League, when it stood for revolutionary
Trotskyism, put forward a class-struggle program
for black liberation through socialist revolution, while
most of the left tailed after black nationalism, and
scabbed on the 1968 NYC teachers strike.

In contrast to this popular-frontism and tailism, the Spartacist League, which we in the Internationalist Group came out of, stood fast. The SL leaflet, “New York City School Strike: Beware Liberal Union Busters” (pp. 63-64 of this issue) warned about the Ford Foundation, exposed illusions in the “‘community control’ fraud,” denounced the scabbing by leftists, but sharply criticized and called to oust the Shanker leadership for its “conservative and dangerous policies of ‘professionalism,’ elitism toward other trade union struggles and condescension toward the black working people.” It ended with a call to forge “a radical alliance of teachers and militant parents and students based on student-teacher-parent control of the schools.”

The SL was able to uphold the class line because it had long fought for proletarian leadership of the struggle for black liberation, as the Revolutionary Tendency did inside the SWP against the black nationalist line of George Breitman and for the revolutionary integrationist program of Richard Fraser, synthesized in the 1963 document by Jim Robertson and Shirley Stoute, “For Black Trotskyism.”[26] After the RT’s expulsion, the Spartacist League intervened in the 1964 Harlem “riot” against racist police murder, raising a program of transitional demands:

“to bring the Negro masses to the recognition in struggle that fundamental solutions to their problems are not possible within the framework of the capitalist system.”

–“Harlem Riot and Beyond,” Spartacist No. 3, January-February 1965.

Another factor was that the SL was active among municipal workers, and witnessed up front how the city rulers were out to bust the unions.

 I also want to add, on a personal note, that the Spartacist League’s line on the ’68 teachers strike played a key role in winning me to Trotskyism. I had covered the strike for the New Left press, on the other side. After having arguments with West Coast comrades, I flew to New York to speak directly with Jim Robertson about the strike. What won me over as we talked was that the SL was not ignoring the struggle for black rights, but on the contrary was fighting against the bourgeoisie’s cynical misuse of that struggle. After about three minutes, I was convinced: the class line is key, including and especially in the struggle for black liberation.

The Aftermath 

Thousands of NYPD white cops rioted against black Democratic mayor
David Dinkins over proposal for reform of toothless Civilian Complaint
Review Board, 16 September 1992. (Photo: Keith Meyers / New York Times)

How did it end? Podair writes: “When civil servants with master’s degrees and mortgages became angry enough to take to the streets, Lindsay knew not only that the UFT had beaten him at Ocean Hill–Brownsville, but that his brand of racial politics had failed as well.” The capitalist powers-that-be doubtless made it clear to the mayor that he had to have labor peace in New York. It took another month to work out the final deal, but Lindsay and the Board of Ed gave in to most of the UFT demands. The community control experiment was over. McCoy remained as district superintendent, but stripped of his power. There was intermittent skirmishing for some weeks, but by early the next year things calmed down.

But things had begun to change. One important development in 1969 was the winning of open admissions with free tuition at the City University of New York (CUNY). This was the result of a militant occupation of City College by African American and Latino students, but was pushed through with support from the unions in the Central Labor Council. It brought a vastly positive benefit for the black population, a truly radical step that grew directly out of the civil rights movement, providing the children of black, poor and working-class parents access to higher education. The deal was, if you graduated from any city high school and managed to get a diploma, you gained admission to one of the CUNY schools, and you didn’t have to pay for it.

This was widely popular and made a huge difference in terms of black youth entering careers of all kinds, notably generating a growing pool of black educators. But by the mid-1970s, in the wake of the municipal fiscal crisis, tuition was introduced, and as the gains of the civil rights movement were methodically chipped away over the years, open admissions was also scrapped under Giuliani in 1999. We have written about the fight over this in the article “Smash Racist Purge of CUNY – Fight for Open Admissions, Free Tuition!” which is reprinted in the special supplement to The Internationalist (January 2008) on Marxism and the Battle Over Education. The fight to restore those gains remains a battle cry of the CUNY Internationalist Clubs today.

The Lasting Impact

Podair (along with many other opponents of the 1968 teachers strike) essentially blames the UFT for every defeat suffered by workers and black people in subsequent decades. His thesis is that the strike turned New York City into a seething cauldron setting the black poor and middle-class whites at each other’s throats. He blames the strike for pushing Jews from being historic allies of black freedom struggles into joining with Catholics and outer-borough white racists. It is certainly true that for at least the next three decades, the city would be divided by the bitterness stemming from the strike. But there were other factors at work as well, such as Israel’s 1967 war, which pushed the liberal Jewish community sharply to the right.

Mainly Podair’s focus ignores or masks the fundamental class forces that were at work. A few years later, in 1975 the New York banks proclaimed a “fiscal crisis,” jacking up interest rates on outstanding loans. Democratic mayor Abe Beame saluted and proceeded to cut off social services, close hospitals in ghetto areas, freeze housing allowances, slash welfare rolls and introduce tuition at CUNY. Although NYC’s debt paled in comparison to that of the federal government, under both Democrat Johnson and Republican Nixon, due to paying for the Vietnam War and huge poverty programs with deficit financing, the federal government under Republican president Ford refused to “bail out” New York City, a policy summed up in the famous Daily News headline: “Ford to City: Drop Dead.”

Beame was followed by Ed Koch, the lapsed liberal who continued the vicious austerity policies, working closely with the Emergency Financial Control Board to extend the freeze on welfare benefits and housing allowances. Koch closed a number of municipally owned hospitals, virtually all in black neighborhoods. He raised tuition at CUNY, which by the later 1970s had been creeping up. I ran against Koch as the Spartacist candidate for mayor in 1985 on a program of “From Soweto to Harlem: Smash Racist Terror.” He got some 868,000 votes, whereas we got a couple thousand. But that’s another story.

Four years later came David Dinkins, a liberal black Democrat (and member of the Democratic Socialists of America), who from Day One of his administration was up against a blue wall of police opposition, culminating in an ominous demonstration of thousands of armed cops who turned their backs on the mayor as he was speaking. This was when in 1991 a Hasidic Jewish motorcade careening through Crown Heights struck and killed a black youngster. This set off the communal violence I mentioned earlier, when a Yeshiva student from Australia was pinned against a parked car and stabbed to death by a black youth, as the mob screamed, “Kill the Jew.” And as the tumult continued, egging on the angry crowds was Sonny Carson, of 1968 teachers strike fame, who in 1990 led a racist boycott of Korean greengrocers in Flatbush.

Then in 1993 came the fascistic Republican mayor Rudy Giuliani, and in 2001 the billionaire Republican mayor Michael Bloomberg. The black community had been completely alienated from the UFT for more than three decades, but that changed. It began under Giuliani who went after both the UFT and African Americans with a vengeance. And then Bloomberg, the voice of Wall Street, imposed a mayoral dictatorship on the schools – with the aid of the UFT under Randi Weingarten, it should be noted. He proceeded to decree viciously racist policies, closing schools in black areas and even naming a disastrous schools chancellor, Cathy Black, who knew nothing about education and whose only “qualification” was that she dripped with hatred of black people.  

So the Giuliani-Bloomberg onslaught, along with the eclipse of black separatism as a political force, laid a basis for reconciliation. Bloomberg in particular tried to line up the black community and replay the script of 1968. He tried to play the race card with the non-union charter schools, but this time it didn’t work: the black community by and large sided with the teachers to defend public education. Why didn’t it work? One reason is that the UFT made a conscious effort to work with black organizations, bringing in African American students and parents to meetings of Bloomberg’s Panel, or what we and other opponents called Puppets for Educational Policy, the PEP. That was different from 40 years earlier.

Another reason is the ’68 demonstration districts like Ocean Hill-Brownsville had a lot of perks for black entrepreneurs and middle-class professionals, with positions in poverty programs, school staffing, paid PTA positions, etc. All the elected members of the OH-B governing board were already on the district payroll as “election consultants,” for example. This time the charter schools have few perks for the community. They are creatures of the hedge fund capitalists, who after the 2008 Wall Street crash needed a steady cash flow, while the CEOs like Eva Moskowitz give themselves juicy salaries. Meanwhile, the charters’ cherry-picking of students (very few English Language Learners, or ELLs) and dropping “underachieving” students, soon became known to black and Latino parents.

But while the UFT under Randi Weingarten and her successor Michael Mulgrew rebuilt ties to black organizations, they are still wedded to capitalism. Today Mulgrew is spearheading city rulers’ drive to cut health care costs by forcing retired city workers off Medicare, in favor of a privatized “Medicare Advantage” which lets giant insurance companies decide what medical treatment retirees receive. Next up, the health care of in-service teachers is on the chopping block. The UFT and AFT tops, like all of labor officialdom, are literally acting as the bosses’ agents in the workers movement. They must be kicked out in order for the teachers union to lead a struggle for quality, integrated, public education for all, first and foremost the most oppressed. 

Randi Weingarten, then UFT president, with billionaire mayor Michael Bloomberg and his schools chancellor Joel Klein (in background), 17 October 2007. Weingarten and Bloomberg agreed then to “bonus
pay” for teachers based on school test scores. Marjorie Stamberg campaigned against this, winning a majority of several hundred teachers in her citywide school to vote down what would have been a $3,000 per teacher bribe. The program died. (Photo: John Marshall Mantel / New York Times)

But what is to replace them? The several opposition caucuses in the UFT, including the Movement of Rank and File Educators (M.O.R.E.), New Action, Solidarity and others, grouped together in the United for Change coalition, do not have a qualitatively different program than the bureaucracy’s Unity Caucus. And by and large, they are just as anti-communist.

Class Struggle Education Workers

Class Struggle Education Workers, which is fraternally allied with the Internationalist Group, has fought since its inception in 2008 on a program calling for educator-led teacher-student-parent-worker control of the schools. This is the same program put forward in the Spartacist leaflet on the 1968 teachers strike. Some, such as the latter-day SL, which has renounced just about everything the SL stood for when it led the fight for revolutionary Trotskyism internationally, claim that this is the same as “community control.” Not at all. Leaving aside that the 1968 “experiment” was a blatant fraud, with actual control in the hands of city rulers, “community control” under capitalism inevitably means control by local bourgeois politicians. 

 Class Struggle Education Workers sign at 27 January 2011 protest against Bloomberg’s racist closing of schools. (Internationalist photo)

The CSEW in the New York City public schools grew out of a fight in 2008 to defend the teachers who had been “excessed” as their schools were closed. They were put in a pool called the Absent Teacher Reserve, but they weren’t fired. If the UFT had not waged and won the 1968 strikes against punitive “transfers,” those teachers would simply have lost their jobs. Also early on, as Bloomberg’s Department of Education, rather than hiring from CUNY, was bringing in white trainees from Wendy Kopp’s union-busting Teach for America operation who knew nothing about urban schools, we actively supported the fight to increasing the hiring of African American and Latino teachers.

The CSEW also played a prominent role in opposing Bloomberg’s racist closing of schools in black and Latino areas. This included testifying at a January 2011 hearing on the closing of Paul Robeson High School in Crown Heights, Brooklyn where we noted the racist hostility to Robeson, a Communist leader who was jailed in the McCarthyite witch hunts and blinded in jail, and that the school was being closed to provide a training school for IBM. I said:

“Was there ever a more concrete example of corporatization and privatization of schools and what is going in this country than that? … I want to say one good thing has come out of this mayoral control, and that it has united the immigrant, black, Latino, majority-minority people of this city with the teachers union who were separated for a long time but we are united today in struggle to fight against privatization.”

This, we added, won’t happen through the ballot box, but by building a class-struggle workers party. And at a PEP hearing, the CSEW called the school closings racist, while the UFT and other opposition groups carefully avoided making that crucial, and obvious, point.

Marjorie Stamberg called for
 teacher-student-parent-workers 
control of the schools at February 2012
 meeting of the mayor’s rubber-stamp 
Panel on Education Policy. 

The CSEW also fought very concretely for teacher-student-parent-worker control of the schools during the COVID pandemic. At that time when many teachers, and union opposition groups in particular, were calling to keep the schools closed, we fought to use union power to make the schools safe to reopen. We pointed out that “remote education” is an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms; that all education is social; that keeping schools closed hurt black, Latino, immigrant and homeless students in particular, as well as their parents, who had to work through the pandemic while white middle-class parents could work from home. Our fight for this is documented in a series of articles in Marxism & Education No. 6, the journal of Class Struggle Education Workers.

Had the UFT leadership in 1968 put forward a program of building councils, under union leadership, of teachers, students, parents and workers, that could have undercut the appeals of the white capitalist rulers and aspiring black bourgeois politicians who were pushing the illusion of “community control” – which is just another form of capitalist control of public education. But as we have seen in the struggles over the last decade, the present union and black leaders cannot fight the racist, capitalist drive to corporatize and privatize public education, because they are all beholden to capital, particularly through the Democratic Party. Yet this is the same party whose hedge fund operators are financing, and whose politicians are authorizing, anti-union charter schools.

In 1968, it would have been very difficult to break through the smokescreen obscuring the union-busting alliance of corporate elites, capitalist politicians and black nationalists, supported by the overwhelming majority of the left, lined up against the teachers union. Today the Weingartens and Mulgrews, as well as the Al Sharptons and the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortezes, are all Democrats, responsible for strikebreaking – as with the railroad workers who had a contract they voted against stuffed down their throat by Biden and the Democratic Congress – and for the imperialist war being waged today against Russia in Ukraine and tomorrow against China.

The struggle for teacher-student-parent-worker control of the schools can only succeed as part of a broader struggle throughout society for the liberation of all the oppressed through socialist revolution. That is why we need a Trotskyist party, like we of the Internationalist Group are building, and why we need transitional organizations like Class Struggle Education Workers.■

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[1] See ““Intersectionality” arose in response to the divisions between different categories of identity politics, positing the need to take into account often overlapping social identities (gender, race, ethnicity, class, etc.). Marxism, in contrast, holds that the various forms of social oppression are centrally engendered by class society, and that there should be a united revolutionary struggle of all the oppressed, led by the working class, which alone has the power to overthrow the capitalist system and eliminate the material basis of oppression.

[2] Movement of Rank-and-File Educators

[3] Independent Community of Educators

[4] Teachers for a Just Contract

[5] Teachers Action Caucus

[6] Coalition of NYC School Workers

[7] NYC's billionaire former mayor Michael Bloomberg instituted mayoral control of the schools during his 12 years (2002-13) in office, replacing the Board of Education with a NYC Department of Education, which continues today. Bloomberg governed as a Republican, but both before and after he was and is a Democrat, and always a representative of Wall Street.

[8] American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees 

[9] Young People’s Socialist League

[10] Supporters of the Communist Party were influential in the Teachers Union in New York City from the 1920s on, and from 1935 until its demise in 1964 due to McCarthyite witch-hunting, CP supporters led the TU. By 1949, the TU came under heavy fire from the state government, backed by the Board of Education, under the state’s Feinberg Law aimed at rooting out teachers deemed by investigators to be “subversive.” From 1949 to the late 1950s, over 1,150 TU members were investigated and some 400 educators were fired or forced out in this vicious “red hunt.”

[11] Max Shachtman broke from Trotskyism in 1939-40, refusing to defend the Soviet Union in World War II. After a period of centrism, by the early 1950s Shachtman became a propagandist for U.S. imperialism, from the Korean War on. Those who followed his course became avid Cold Warriors, lining up with the most anti-Soviet counterrevolutionary sectors. This history is extensively discussed in the Internationalist pamphlet DSA: Fronting for the Democrats (February 2018).

[12] This is a shorthand expression describing the international counterrevolutionary actions of the AFL-CIO labor federation. While domestically AFL-CIO affiliates were labor unions, their international activity was run as a conduit for and often as an operative arm of U.S. spy agencies. Currently these international operations are carried out by the AFL-CIO Solidarity Center, most of whose funds come from the U.S. government.

[13] A 1944 law that provided benefits for returning World War II veterans, including paying for tuition and living expenses for college education. It expired in 1956.

[14] Floyd McKissick was the national director of the Congress of Racial Equality (C.O.R.E.) during 1966-68. He sought to take the organization in a more militant direction, and at the same time was a registered Republican.

[15] H. Rap Brown was chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in 1967-68, when SNCC was in alliance with the Black Panther Party under the watchword of Black Power.

[16] see “Harlem Riot and After,” in Spartacist No. 3, January-February 1965.

[17] See Internationalist Group Class Readings, What Strategy for Black Liberation? Trotskyism vs. Black Nationalism (March 2010). This is a reprint of the SL’s Marxist Bulletin No. 5 (Revised) originally published in 1978.

[18] New York Times, 1 March 1997.

[19] New York Times, 25 February 1968.

[20] Martin Mayer, The Teachers’ Strike (1968).

[21] Ravitch notes that “Carson and his followers were on the front lines of the action in Ocean Hill throughout the strikes of 1968,” and cites a top advisor of the district superintendent to the effect that McCoy had an understanding with Carson and other “militants,” so that he could call them in or call them off.

[22] Carson was also a shakedown artist. In a letter to Lindsay from June 1967, at the height of the ghetto upheavals across the country, Carson promised the mayor that he would “have a real cool summer” if funds for his organization were forthcoming (see Podair).

[23] Richard Kahlenberg, Tough Liberal: Albert Shanker and the Battles over Schools, Unions, Race and Democracy (2007).

[24] See “In Defense of Revolutionary Integrationism,” published in Spartacist No. 49-50, Winter 1993-94, when the Spartacist League stood for revolutionary Trotskyism. Also see the speech by Charles Brover “Revolutionary Integrationism vs. ‘Critical Race Theory,’” in the CSEW journal Marxism & Education, No. 6, January 2022.

[25] Tony Cliff, in later years leader of the British Socialist Workers Party, broke from Trotskyism in 1948, at the height of the first anti-Soviet Cold War, refusing to defend the bureaucratically deformed Soviet workers state, claiming it was “state capitalist.”

[26] Available in What Strategy for Black Liberation? Trotskyism vs. Black Nationalism.

Class Struggle Education Workers is an organization, fraternally linked to the Internationalist Group, of union and non-unionized activists in all aspects of education fighting for a revitalization and transformation of the labor movement into an instrument for the emancipation of the working class and the oppressed.  See the CSEW program here. The struggle for students’ and educators’ rights, and mobilization against the genocidal war on the Palestinians continues. If you are interested in joining these efforts, contact the CSEW at cs_edworkers@hotmail.com.  ■