In May of 1968, in Ocean Hill-Brownsville, thirteen teachers and six administrators were transferred by the local community board to the Central Board for reassignment. The community board justified the decision by accusing the group of white teachers of undermining Community Control. However, the United Federation of Teachers (UFT), the labor union that represents New York City public school teachers, argued the transfers violated the teachers’ collective bargaining rights and due process, claiming their professional authority was unjustly stripped away. There was great tension between the Demonstration Districts’ right to self-determination and the teachers’ right to professional autonomy and job security.
Albert Shanker, who was the president of the UFT, framed the conflict as a violation of professional expertise. He argued that Community Control disregarded the “power and integrity of the professional teacher.” The UFT also alleged that antisemitism was rampant in the Community Control movement, and argued that the community board’s actions as an unjust attack on Jewish educators. Shanker leveraged these accusations to call for an end to Community Control, ultimately culminating in the Teachers’ Strike in the fall of 1968. On the other hand, the local governing board maintained that it had acted responsibly to protect the Community Control experiment, removing teachers that they believed were sabotaging the initiative by refusing to respect Black leadership in the schools. These advocates of Community Control defended their right to control their schools as inseparable from their responsibility to ensure that education reflected the needs and values of their children.
Not all educators sided with the UFT and Shanker. Jitu Weusi, an educator at JHS 271 in Ocean Hill-Brownsville, rejected the UFT’s claims of antisemitism and highlighted the active involvement of Jewish community members in the Community Control movement. “Many of the persons who supported Ocean Hill-Brownsville were Jews… [antisemitism] was a means for the teachers’ union to deflect criticism of their role from them to the community.” Charles Isaac was a Jewish teacher who opposed the UFT’s position, crossing the picket line to teach at JHS 271. He viewed the strike as an act of hostility against the community and its children. To counter media portrayals framing the teachers’ transfer as an antisemitic attack, Isaac wrote a rebuttal, gaining signatories in support from about half of the Jewish teachers at JHS 271.
“We see this absurd attack as… one more strategy of the educational establishment to destroy the concept of Community Control, and to repress the self-determination of Black and Puerto Rican people. This is nonsense, and we are tired of it.”
Isaac further attributed the narrative of a split between the Black and Jewish communities as “totally manufactured by the UFT” as part of its efforts to dismantle Community Control and restore its bureaucratic authority.
Teachers striked from September 9th, 1968, which was supposed to be the first day of school, to November 17th, 1968, pushing more than one million affected students out of classrooms. Amid this turmoil, resistance emerged. In some schools, non-striking teachers and community members took over classrooms, sleeping in schools on weekends to keep them open. Windows were smashed, locked doors forced open in efforts to reopen schools. During the chaos, Human Relations Teams were assigned to each school in Two Bridges, in order to work with pupils, parents, and staff members, and the district residents on complaints, concerns, threats, and actions stemming from the strike. When community members at P.S. 125-67 reopened the school themselves during the strike, only to find no food available, parents swiftly organized 200 lunches for children who depended on school meals.