Fight the Man!: 8 Defining Strikes in New York City History
Teachers Strike of 1968
This one is complicated. What are strikes about ultimately? Power, right? I mean, yes, EVERYTHING is about power including the choice of which side of the bed you want to sleep on. But, also, strikes are about power. Money and vacation days and pension plans and whatever, but, really, many of those issues can be resolved without a mass job walk out. Striking workers and their crappy overlords are kind of like a couple locked in an acrimonious debate over who’s right and who works harder and whatever. And we, the innocent New Yorkers, are the sad little children stuck in the middle who have nothing to do but take a stick of butter out of the refrigerator and bring it into the closet where we can lick on its yellow-y goodness in peace until we fall asleep in a cholesterol-induced haze or, I guess, die of a heart attack at the age of 7.
Anyway. That’s what strikes are USUALLY about. But this one? Oh, this one was a mess of racial tensions and cultural sensitivities and a rapidly gentrifying Brooklyn neighborhood. It was, in the words of the New York Times, “a most unusual strike.” There’s no really easy way to sum this one up, other than to say that the strike was precipitated by the dismissal of over 80 employees, including 16 teachers, from the Ocean-Hill Brownsville school district. This neighborhood had changed dramatically in the prior decade, shifting from a population that was comprised of less than 10% African-Americans to one that became predominantly black and Latino. The community wanted self-determination within its own school district and started instituting a curriculum that focused on black and Latino culture and language, rather than what had previously been in place.
What sparked the strike was the firing of so many teachers, all of whom were white and Jewish, by school district leaders who were African-American. The Times noted in 1968 that, “the teachers’ strike and the controversy over school decentralization and community control have presented troublesome problems that are not usually found in ordinary labor disputes involving wages and working conditions.” In other words, this was a big, messy, racial and socioeconomic clash. And it didn’t end well.
Why didn’t it end well? I mean, the strike ended, eventually. The dismissed teachers were reinstated despite massive community protest. Students went back to school. But, the Ocean-Hill Brownsville school district had its local power stripped and handed over to the state of New York. The testing advances that had been made while the school district was under community leadership disappeared. Fast forward to now, and that neighborhood is home to some of the worst schools in the city and had a pretty notorious summer of 2012 because of all the children that were shot on its streets.
The question about this strike in particular is who is really speaking on behalf of the people? Was it the teachers’ union who demanded that the dismissed teachers be returned to their jobs? How could it be when there was overwhelming community support for the school’s staff to reflect the population of the neighborhood? Was it the administrators who decided to summarily fire those teachers without thinking of the repercussions? How blind could they have been to the backlash and unrest that this would cause?