Class Struggles: The UFT Story
Feb 2, 2005 5:28 PM
For the rapidly vanishing corps of UFT oldtimers, Nov. 7 is as close as things get to a high holy day. The year was 1960. As the nation watched and wondered whether it would be Nixon or Kennedy, for several thousand New York City school teachers, that Monday before Election Day was a day of reckoning.
In direct defiance of the law forbidding strikes by public employees, they refused to report for work, putting jobs and careers on the line.
The union elders had long admonished their younger itchin’-for-a-fight comrades not to be so gung-ho. “Wait until you have a majority of teachers on your side before striking,” they were told. But there was no holding them back.
For their part, Jeannette and John DiLorenzo, teachers at JHS 142 in Red Hook, Brooklyn, were ready to walk. Though new to teaching, both were veteran organizers and activists. In a little more than a year, they had signed up nearly all of the teachers at their school.
Come Monday morning, it seemed as if all of Red Hook had turned out in support of their striking teachers. Parents were handing out refreshments, while longshoremen from the nearby piers and merchant seamen from the Seafarers Union were out carrying signs of support. As the morning bell rang, some 80 teachers were giving an open-air civics lesson on democracy.
But the DiLorenzos’ hearts would soon sink. They had been detailed to check on some 30 other schools in south Brooklyn. As they rode by one school after another, a depressing realization began to sink in. “It was a terrible feeling,” recalls Jeannette. “It was pitiful passing by all the elementary schools and not a soul coming out.”
By the time they returned to JHS 142, half the striking teachers had deserted the picket line and returned to their classrooms. Word was out. The strike had fizzled and the superintendent of schools had fired the strikers.
By day’s end, Dilorenzo found herself hoping “to find a way to get back in that building with some kind of dignity.”
