Class Struggles: The UFT Story
Feb 3, 2005 4:08 PM
Standing PAT
As hard as PAT’s leadership sought to convey its opposition in terms of defending the “neighborhood school,” the racial overtones were in plain sight. “Color?” asked one opponent interviewed in a New York Times Magazine article of Sept. 20, 1964, quoted in Podair’s Princeton dissertation. “It wasn’t color holding them back. It was the kind of people they were. I worked with Negroes... They don’t work hard or help their children in school or care about their families or keep their homes clean.”
“[Another] was even more direct: ‘If I was God, what would I do to improve the lot of the Negro? I’d make everybody white.’ Others worried about what effect the increased visibility of blacks in the neighborhood would have on property values.
“Still others fretted over the educational consequences for their children. ‘I don’t know why the Negroes are behind, but they are, and I don’t want them hurting my child’s chances in school.’ Said another: ‘I don’t like (my son) with a lot of slow readers who will pull down his IQ... .’” Leading the UFT in this troubled time and undergoing his baptism of fire was its new president, Albert Shanker. (Charles Cogen had moved on to head the AFT.)
Shanker had helped organize sit-ins and demonstrations against segregation as a student at the University of Illinois. He’d joined pickets at Palisades Amusement Park, a popular New Jersey attraction that did not allow blacks to swim in its pools, and at Harlem’s Woolworth’s to protest discriminatory hiring practices in its nationwide chain of department stores.
Shanker acknowledges that he was drawn to civil rights because of his abiding sympathy for the underdog. Growing up in a white neighborhood, attending white schools, entering a profession which then was virtually all white, Shanker had little contact with black people. Race was an ethical abstraction, albeit a powerful one. That was until he met and befriended Rustin. A quarter century older than Shanker, Rustin would become his mentor, close friend and confidant until his death in 1987.
Rustin’s life reads like an epic novel. Pennsylvania Quaker … Raised by grandparents … High school football and track star … CCNY educated … Sang professionally with blues legends Josh White and Leadbelly … Gay with matinee-idol good looks … Marxist, broke with Party over civil rights … Helped organize A. Philip Randolph’s 1941 March on Washington … CORE’s first field secretary … Conscientious objector, jailed for 28 months during WWII … Took Freedom Ride in 1947, sentenced to chain gang … Traveled to India and worked with Gandhi ... Organized 1955 Montgomery bus boycott … Executive secretary of the War Resisters League … .
“My relationship with Bayard opened me up to a lot of ideas that I’d never been exposed to before,” Shanker said. “I could always count on him to give me an idea of what someone living on 125th Street thought about things.”
Indeed, anyone reading Rustin’s writings can see the germ of Shanker’s tough-minded analysis of the state of the races. Whether the subject is the perils of black separatism, the delusion of “community control” or the need to forge alliances with white liberals, Shanker’s ideas bear Rustin’s unmistakable intellectual prints.
No one will ever know what would have happened had Shanker not met Rustin. But at least for the early years of his presidency no issue more dominated the union’s agenda than civil rights.
For example, countering the white backlash groups like Parents and Taxpayers, the Shanker-led UFT supported a group of parents from Sheepshead Bay and Flatbush who were willingly busing their children into predominately black and Puerto Rican schools. Many of the parents belonged to EQUAL, an association promoting school integration. Its head, Ellen Lurie, was quoted in a November 1964 United Teacher story saying that parents are “less afraid of children having to bus than of children learning to hate.”
Out of South Africa
In 1965 Shanker drafted a letter to then-City Comptroller Abe Beame, asking that the city not invest any retirement money in Mississippi bonds until it changed its policy of racial discrimination. He also shot off a letter to David Rockefeller, president of the Chase Manhattan Bank informing him that the UFT’s executive board “has voted to withdraw our account and place it in a bank which does not do business in the Union of South Africa.” Quoting the union’s resolution, he wrote that the union acted “so that the vicious racial doctrine of apartheid as practiced in South Africa ‘be given no support, financial or otherwise.’ ”
In March 1965, news that blacks seeking voting rights in Selma, Ala., had been beaten by police, the state militia and local citizenry prompted an outraged UFT Delegate Assembly to adopt a resolution supporting voting rights there. “It is outrageous that citizens who peaceably assemble ... to register and vote should be brutally beaten as they were the other day” said UFT Secretary Jules Kolodny, pointing out that in four counties in Alabama’s “Black Belt,” only 319 Negroes out of a population of 75,000 had registered to vote.
On March 15, Shanker wrote to the union’s chapter leaders explaining that he had met with Andrew Young of the Southern Christian Leadership Council. Young explained that because of mob intimidation and violence in rural areas, cars were desperately needed to transport blacks to register to vote. “We need contributions from teachers from every school RIGHT NOW,” he wrote.
Sure enough, on March 21, 1965, Shanker journeyed to Selma to turn over the keys and registration to a station wagon to Martin Luther King. It was the first of four such gifts — totalling some $40,000 — that the union as part of its “UFT Selma Drive” donated to King’s Southern Christian Leadership Council for its Alabama voter registration drive. Shanker, along with Kolodny, Assistant Secretary Sid Harris and Vice President Abe Levine then joined the March on Montgomery.
Later that month King came to New York where Shanker presented him with a check for $10,000 from the teachers of New York at a reception run by the New York Central Labor Council.
In the spring of ’65 the UFT president took on the Board of Education for once again broaching the idea of the forced transfers of teachers to ease the problems of inner-city schools. He called it “a false issue designed to hoax the public into believing that inferior education is to be blamed on teachers rather than on large classes, dilapidated buildings, short-time instruction, inadequate textbooks and supplies, and failure to provide adequate services for children.”
The plan, Shanker said, “attempts to convince minority group parents that inferior education in ghetto schools is to be blamed on teachers … If the Board now finds it necessary to ‘spread’ talent, it is because it has been negligent in its responsibility to recruit it.”
At any rate, not everyone was pleased with the union’s social and political activism. In May 1965 a high school chapter leader and winner of a Trachtenberg Award openly scolded Shanker for his social and political activism. In a letter to the United Teacher that appeared right next to Shanker’s “President’s Column,” came the following friendly advice:
“I would like to send to headquarters some impressions from the front lines. A general should see if his army is with him or is he out in front with very little strength behind him … Many feel that you should be the president of the UFT and not try to solve all the problems of the world.”
The letter goes on to take issue with Shanker and the UFT’s leadership over such issues as spending money to further school integration and the grouping of grades 6-7-8 in junior highs a “direct appeasement” of racial extremists. “Many of us think the UFT has no place on any picket line. If you want to go — go only as a private individual.” If some in the union thought the leadership was doing too much, others felt that Shanker and the UFT had not done nearly enough in the fight for civil rights. One retired black junior high school teacher, who joined the Teachers Guild in 1953, characterized the union’s involvement as “window dressing.”
Now in her 70s, she recalls the young black men and women who were denied teaching jobs on the flimsy pretext of their “Southern” accents. She herself failed the oral exam.
“The Board of Examiners were the gatekeepers keeping colored folk out. If the union was so interested in having more black teachers, why didn’t it put up a fight?”
Others voiced similar sentiments that “self-styled liberals” in the North had proved they were better at attacking redneck racism than its Northern urban counterpart.
But fighting Northern-style racism was exactly what Shanker had in mind, when in 1966 he took himself and the union out on a limb over the issue of police misconduct and brutality in the black community.
People who know Shanker will tell you that one his cardinal rules is to avoid “splitters,” those outside, hot-button issues which could split the union. But Shanker’s trademark pragmatism was sorely tested when then-new Mayor John V. Lindsay named four outside civilian members to the Police Review Board creating the Civilian Complaint Review Board. Charged with looking into cases of police misconduct and recommending disciplinary action, the review board sent the Patrolman’s Benevolent Association into an uproar.
In an emotionally and racially charged campaign the PBA pictured the board as anti-police and succeeded in getting the issue placed before voters in a referendum. However, believing that many inner-city blacks were being subjected to police harassment, unnecessary force and outright brutality, the UFT was the only union which supported Lindsay’s board. It did so even though many of its own members wanted the union’s leadership to stay out of such non-educational matters. Though the union’s executive board overwhelmingly backed the stand 27-2, the Delegate Assembly, after a heated and often angry debate, voted to back the leadership by a much narrower margin, 486-375.
With police and most white ethnics on one side and civil rights groups and minorities on the other, the UFT fought hard to retain the civilian presence. UFT troops, in the person of George Altomare’s “network” of 100 activists, were pressed into action, this time distributing literature on street corners in favor of the CCRB.
PBA snubs teachers
As might be expected, the police didn’t take kindly to the publicity campaign, said Altomare. “We were getting a lot of dirty looks from the cops. They’d come up and ask us: ‘Why do you hate cops?’ Of course we’d tell them we had nothing against good cops only the ones that were guilty of mistreating blacks.”
Lindsay’s police review board went down to a crushing defeat that November. “Politically it was a mistake,” Shanker said recently. “For many years the PBA wouldn’t talk to us.” Besides, he added, in the bitter turmoil over Ocean Hill, “nobody on the other side [in the black community] ever remembered where we’d stood on that issue.”
In any case, by the end of 1966, Shanker was having serious misgivings over the direction of the civil rights movement. New, more militantly apocalyptic voices were now being heard.
In Oakland, Cal., Huey Newton and the Black Panthers had come up with their own answer to police harassment — guns. At SNCC, Stokely Carmichael had given longtime white civil rights organizers their walking papers, telling them the black struggle for freedom would be waged by blacks themselves. The talk now was of “Black Power” and a “Black Nation.”
1966 was the year many black activists turned their backs on the long-sought goal of integrated schools. Now lifelong integrationists like the black psychologist Dr. Kenneth Clark — whose research on the devastating consequences of separate schooling on the fragile psyches of young black children, had weighed heavily in the Supreme Court’s 1954 desegration ruling — was saying that blacks needed to run their own schools.
Still, Shanker would not be deterred from his lifelong commitment to racial integration. In Harlem the UFT was helping to get a new intermediate school off the ground. Named after Arthur Schomburg, some in the local community took the christening as yet another bigoted slur, figuring this Schomburg fella was no doubt some wealthy German Jew. As it happened Schomburg was black who, despite never rising above a bank clerk, had spent his life amassing a stunning collection of black history.
Shanker and the UFT didn’t know it then but the struggle for IS 201 would be the beginning of the end — indeed the dress rehearsal for what was to come in the Ocean Hill-Brownsville showdown.
