The Strike That Changed New York: Blacks, Whites, and the Ocean Hill-Brownsville Crisis.

Moore, Deborah Dash

The Strike That Changed New York: Blacks, Whites, and the Ocean Hill-Brownsville Crisis. By Jerald E. Podair. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002. xi + 273 pp. Brownsville, Brooklyn: Blacks, Jews, and the Changing Face of the Ghetto. By Wendell Pritchen. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. xi + 333 pp.

Brownsville, Brooklyn is slowly acquiring iconic status. Long in the Lower East Side's shadow, Brownsville has gradually emerged as a New York City neighborhood with distinctive messages for historians. Unlike the Manhattan immigrant section, Brownsville has attracted scholars interested in the children of immigrants, the second generation. Attention began with Gerald Sorin's The Nurturing Neighborhood: The Brownsville Boys Club and Jewish Community in Urban America, 1940-1990 (1990), a study of adolescent culture and neighborhood change that emphasized cohesive ties and collective responsibility among the area's working-class population. Carole Bell Ford followed Sorin's lead in her book, The Girls: Jewish Women of Brownsville, Brooklyn, 1940-1995 (1999), which explored the differences gender made for this generation of Jews. Both authors tracked their subjects after they moved out of Brownsville, arguing that their youthful experiences shaped enduring attitudes. Wendell Pritchett and Jerald E. Podair are also interested in post-World War II Brownsville, but they focus on the decades when the neighborhood became a ghetto for blacks, not Jews. Nonetheless, Jews are very much a part of the stories that they tell.

Although Pritchett begins his history with an account of Brownsville as a quarter of working-class Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, his real interest emphasizes the years after 1940 when Brownsville gradually changed first into a working-class residential district for African Americans and then into a black slum. Pritchett's case study is sobering. He characterizes the 1940s as optimistic years, a time when local left-wing Jews forged effective alliances with their working-class black neighbors in efforts to rebuild the area's deteriorating housing stock and inadequate social services, especially those for children. However, he argues that local activism could not overcome the institutionalized racism and anti-communism prevalent in the city. Pritchett charts efforts to secure decent public housing to replace deteriorating wooden buildings and observes how local radicals were among the few New Yorkers who actually agitated for housing projects. But Brownsville was not an island in the city, and coalition activities--boycotts and protests--were ultimately ineffective against elite desires to segregate African Americans in the poorest neighborhoods. City bureaucrats under Robert Moses's leadership saw places like Brownsville as dumping grounds for new black migrants from the South. Brownsville got public housing, but far too much of it and with income restrictions that doomed the projects as experiments in interracial living.

Pritchett is also critical of black churches and other local institutions, like the NAACP, that failed to meet the demands of a rapidly expanding black population. In 1940, African Americans were only 6 percent of Brownsville residents. A decade later, the numbers had almost doubled, and blacks made up 22 percent of the locality. During the 1950s, when the numbers of blacks in the area skyrocketed due to migration from the South and gentrification of Manhattan, the NAACP resisted working with left-wing Jewish radicals due to fears of being tainted by association with communists. Pritchett notes that even progressive labor unions were unwilling to invest in housing in Brownsville. Increasingly upwardly mobile Jews and blacks both left the neighborhood, unable to transform it into a viable working-class area in the political context of the 1950s. By the end of the decade, Brownsville had declined in total population even as thousands of poor African Americans and Puerto Ricans found homes in the district. However, despite popular perceptions, residents of public housing moved out much more slowly, delaying the increase in very poor tenants. Pritchett argues that although Brownsville organizations "endorsed racial integration as a positive goal rather than viewing it as a threat to community viability" (145), they were unable to prevent the section's slide into racial segregation and poverty. The neighborhood was significantly worse off in 1960 than it had been in 1940. The failure of local organizations, which Pritchett blames on the city's political elites, revealed the "limitations of postwar liberalism" (145).

Jerald Podair, equally concerned with the limits of postwar liberalism, examines events surrounding the Ocean Hill-Brownsville teachers' strikes of 1968 to understand liberalism's demise. It is instructive to read his account next to Pritchett's chapter on the successful hospital strike of 1962.

Pritchett analyzes the efforts of Local 1199, the hospital workers union led by Jews but with a black and Puerto Rican rank and file, to secure collective bargaining and improved wages and benefits by focusing on one private Brooklyn Jewish hospital, Beth-El. The story is a model one of interracial and cross-class cooperation, involving Jewish college students and neighborhood activists, black civil rights leaders and community organizers, as well as Puerto Ricans and labor unions. The wealthy board members of the hospital, despite their political connections with the Jewish borough president Abe Stark, who began his political career in Brownsville, eventually crumbled before this coalition. Yet in the face of success, the interracial and cross-class cooperation characteristic of the strike soon gave way to a new kind of neighborhood activism nourished by the Community Action Program [CAP] sponsored by the War on Poverty. In a sense, CAP provides the link to the Ocean Hill-Brownsville crisis because it encouraged a reorientation of black and Puerto Rican attitudes away from integration as a goal toward nascent ideas of "Black Power." Thus the city elites, who had frustrated efforts at integration in the 1950s, returned with ideas of community empowerment that would be crucial in creating the Ocean Hill-Brownsville school demonstration project.

Podair offers a compelling argument for the significance of the 1968 strike (actually a series of three strikes). Not only did the strike push Jews into an alliance with white Catholics in the city, but it also laid bare competing understandings of equality, pluralism, community control, and the role of education in a democratic society. Podair argues that the strike's effects reverberate to this day in New York City politics. The strike helped create conditions that made white New Yorkers ready to sacrifice the poor and most vulnerable members of society, a remarkable change in attitude from the post-war decades. Although there have been many books written about the New York City Teachers' Strike of 1968, Podair's study will become the standard history. In its conceptualization of the issues at stake, it speaks to twenty-first century concerns about race, politics, urbanism, public education, multiculturalism and unionization.

Podair begins by describing two New Yorks, one black and the other white. Jews inhabit the latter world and Podair moves rather effortlessly from speaking about whites to discussing Jews. The Jewish postwar world was a promising one, filled with decent jobs and improved housing. Jews viewed New York as a liberal city, endorsing its commitment to generous social welfare provisions and imagining possibilities of social mobility for all city residents. As New York moved to deindustrialize, however, recently arrived blacks did not face economic opportunities comparable to those of earlier generations of immigrants. Public education, a vehicle of upward mobility for Jews, failed black students. Podair insists on sharply divergent views of education between blacks and white teachers. The latter, including many Jews, embraced a hierarchical merit system, eagerly studying for the next exam to move up the ladder from teacher to department chair to administrator. With ruthlessly pragmatic attitudes, teachers lacked empathy for their African-American students' culture. Teachers wanted their students to follow their model, imagining it as a path out of ghetto poverty. By contrast, an articulate group of black activists and intellectuals mounted a critique of the individualistic, materialistic, competitive, middle-class public school culture, suggesting that black working-class students had an authentic alternative that was cooperative and mutual.

The teachers' strike erupted with such violence because blacks and whites did not share any perceptions. They understood equality differently; they imagined pluralism and the significance of black history differently; they thought about work and unions differently. Their views of the world, reflecting their socioeconomic experience, made compromise impossible. One of the most poignant sections of Podair's book deals with the failure of veteran black labor leaders, civil rights activists, and socialists to bridge the gulf between black teachers and administrators in the Ocean Hill-Brownsville Demonstration School District and the largely Jewish teachers in the United Federation of Teachers. Knowing of the successful hospital strike in 1962 makes painful reading of Local 1199's anguish, torn between its loyalties to fellow unionists and its sympathies with black parents and administrators. Yet the third and final strike forced everyone to choose a side; compromise and coexistence seemed impossible.

Podair argues that the strike made Jews white, allies of ethnic Catholics in the uniformed services whom they had previously shunned as antisemitic. Black antisemitism expressed in the course of the conflict pushed Jews into this new alliance, one that changed the city's political landscape. The anger and fury of middle-class Jews (Podair cites the instance where Mayor John Lindsay was booed off the podium of the East Midwood Jewish Center and then pelted with trash as his car drove off) sent a powerful message to the city's elites. Ocean Hill-Brownsville "clarified the changes in New York's class structure that had taken place over the past quarter-century. It established the city's white middle class as an independent force, with a distinct voice of its own and interests that were different from both the city's poor and Manhattan elites" (132).

Podair's contention that Jews became white as a result of the conflict carries his analysis to a contemporary conclusion. It is one of the few false notes in an otherwise brilliant book. Just as scholars now gravitate to the saga of ethnic, facial, and generational change in Brownsville, so are they fascinated with the moment Jews became white. Did it happen with Al Jolson and The Jazz Singer? Did it occur two decades later at the end of World War II? Was it a product of suburbanization? Or did it result from the crisis of Ocean Hill-Brownsville in 1968? The multiplicity of dates and times suggests an eagerness to erase Jewish cosmopolitanism and inbetweenness. Nevertheless, Podair has written an effective and powerful history of competing Jewish and black perceptions. And unlike Pritchett, who was ill served by sloppy editing (his map of Brownsville is printed upside-down), Podair benefited from a careful editor. Brownsville, Brooklyn, the neighborhood that pursued integrated housing, turned into a black ghetto and generated a controversy whose dimensions still invite recrimination. It is a disturbing legacy, but one that speaks both to Jewish dreams of America and confrontations with the possibilities available even in a city as generous, diverse, and Jewish as New York.

Deborah Dash Moore

Vassar College