Race War in High School - Harold Saltzman - Chapter 1: The Burning
Saltzman, Harold. Race War in High School: The Ten-Year Destruction of Franklin K. Lane High School in Brooklyn. New York: Arlington House, 1972.
Frank Siracusa made a point of coming to school early. He lived with his wife and year-old daughter in a modest four-room apartment only a few short blocks from Franklin K. Lane High School, which straddles the border between Brooklyn and Queens in New York City. He had become accustomed to rolling out of bed at 7:30 A.M. and taking the two-minute walk to the school he had taught in since 1961. Siracusa was a thirty-year-old chemistry teacher with a jovial personality that made him a favorite among students and colleagues alike. There weren't many people on the 306-member faculty who were more popular than Frank Siracusa, and there was no reason for him to suspect that January 20, 1969, would be different from any other Monday morning.
In addition to his duties as a chemistry instructor, Siracusa doubled as the coordinator for school aides, the corps of thirty-four nonprofessional adults who helped supervise students in the school cafeteria, study rooms, and hallways. The police had been on duty at the school all of the previous week as a result of an agreement between District 19 Superintendent Elizabeth C. O'Daly and the school's chapter of the United Federation of Teachers (UFT), the union representing the city's 60,000 teachers. There had been fifteen separate incidents of assault against white teachers by black students, and an even larger number of vicious and sadistic attacks by blacks against white students. It was all part of the aftermath of the Great School Strike which had ended just two months earlier.
But January 20, 1969, was to be a very different kind of day for Frank Siracusa, one that would see his picture on the front page of newspapers across the country and would raise serious doubts about integration in the nation's public schools. Siracusa, very much involved with the life of the school, was a member of the school's UFT executive committee and had been a recent speaker at a meeting of the Woodhaven-Cypress Hills Community Association. The association was a newly formed neighborhood group that came together to protest the growth of racial violence at the local high school. At its January 17 meeting, Siracusa had been one of the first speakers to expose the lawlessness which had become prevalent at Lane.
On the morning of January 20 Siracusa clocked in and went through his usual routine of checking the school aide roster and getting his materials in order for his first period class. It was only minutes before his morning class was scheduled to assemble when a stone came crashing through the window, shattering the glass and scattering fragments to all corners of his first-floor classroom. Cautiously, he approached the window, wary of yet another missile. Looking out at the courtyard he observed two black youths, about eighteen years of age: they were decked out in fashionable dashikis and sported the hairdo which had become the sign of black militancy. Siracusa thought about reporting the incident through the usual administrative channels, or of overlooking the matter entirely. Either way, the result would have been the same . . . the absence of any official response to student violence.
Many of his colleagues had, in fact, already thrown in the towel. They had been told to avoid confrontations with students. Don't enforce the rules where black students are concerned, they were continually advised. Let the blacks “do their own thing!” Don't compel them to produce identification cards! Don't require them to stand for the morning pledge of allegiance exercise even though it is required by state law! Don't make an issue over their refusal to remove their hats in the school building! And above all, remember these are changing times and are you sure you don't harbor racist attitudes? In a variety of ways, sometimes subtle, sometimes more direct, most of Lane's teachers had gotten that message from its own administration and from the central school board. In this turbulent era, the New York City school board wasn't even backing up its own principals. At any given time there were more than twenty of them cooling their heels at board headquarters after having been "promoted" to a desk job at 110 Livingston Street as a result of pressure from black militants. If a principal couldn't expect the support of the school board on matters related to fundamental school discipline (no less violence and lawlessness), it followed that a principal wouldn't put his own neck on the line by sustaining a teacher who was foolish enough to try to break up a dice game or report a drug transaction on school premises. The name of the game for Lane's teachers had become, "mind your own business and don’t get involved" because, they learned, in New York's tempestuous school system the axe most often fell not on the incompetent but on the dedicated teacher who tried to do an honest job for his day's pay.
But at Franklin K. Lane High School, and at countless other schools throughout the city, teachers were learning to look the other way. After all, if Mayor John V. Lindsay could tell the police to ignore the looting of stores during the Harlem riots and to do nothing while local residents carted off color TV sets, then it was perfectly clear that teachers couldn't engage in parapolice activities and expect the city's support. But Frank Siracusa was one of the few who hadn't been jaded by the strange thinking that permeated the highest levels of officialdom. Totally devoted to his school and its students, how could he ignore this transgression and maintain his self-respect? He put on his overcoat, descended the stairway adjacent to his room, and went on out to the courtyard. Slowly, he approached the two tall youngsters who by now were joined by a third youth, somewhat shorter and younger, but with as menacing a veneer as the older pair.
"I'm Mr. Siracusa," he said quietly. "I'm a teacher, not a cop, and I would like to know who broke my window."
There was no reply, no discussion, not even a denial or argument. In a flash, one of the youngsters drew a water pistol from his jacket pocket, spraying the teacher's outer garments with a liquid which was later discovered to be a highly flammable lighter fluid. Siracusa was befuddled.
"What's this all about?" he thought to himself.
For a brief moment Siracusa figured it to be a juvenile prank, unaware that one of the trio was circling behind him. Suddenly, he felt a thunderous blow crashing into his spine. As he dropped to the ground, anguishing in pain, defenseless, he felt the smashing of fists against his jaw and the pounding of booted heels into his groin. Lying helpless on the cold concrete, barely conscious, he sensed the burning flames from his overcoat which had been set afire by his assailants, who then left him there as a potential immolation fatality. Desperately, he struggled to get out of the overcoat, which was soon fully ablaze. Although suffering excruciating pain from the pounding he had received, Siracusa miraculously crawled out of the burning garment, and screaming for help, was found and carried to safety by colleagues responding to his cries.
A brand new chapter had been written into the annals of racial strife in the public schools, less than fifteen years after the United States Supreme Court spoke out against the doctrine of racial separatism in public educational systems.
Before the ambulance arrived to take him to the hospital, Siracusa, was emotionally overwrought and physically incapacitated.
Neither a personal visit by the mayor himself, nor the one by City Comptroller Mario Procaccino (campaigning hard for the Democratic party's mayoral nomination), nor a special delivery message of condolence by school board president John Doar, nor the bouquet of flowers from UFT president Albert Shanker . . . none of these gestures comforted Frank Siracusa in his moment of grief. The physical pain he was enduring was made more unbearable by the humiliation he felt. He was an excellent teacher, one who had tried to perform his duties professionally, with compassion and sensitivity. And now this! At his bedside at the La Guardia Hospital in Queens, Mayor John Lindsay expressed his regrets.
"Unbelievably outrageous,"1 His Honor announced, while Comptroller Procaccino told the ailing teacher, "Don't worry Frank, we'll get those . . ."
He was wrong, for the perpetrators were never found.
But even more outrageous than the burning were the circumstances that had led up to it. If the incident of January 20 was a fantastic occurrence, the road to it was even more unbelievable. Who was responsible? How could this have happened? These were the questions all New Yorkers were asking themselves as Frank Siracusa lay in that hospital bed, he too searching for some explicable rationale for the dastardly crime that had victimized him.
The Great School Strike of 1968 had ended on November 19 after 90 percent of the system's 60,000 pedagogical employees and most of its 1.2 million students had been out for thirty-six days. What had started the previous spring as a localized conflict had erupted in the fall into a citywide issue when Mayor Lindsay and the central school board refused to back up a decision of an impartial board-appointed arbitrator who ruled that Unit Administrator Rhody McCoy and the local board of the predominantly black Ocean Hill-Brownsville school district had acted illegally in terminating the employment of nineteen union teachers. Throughout the fall of 1968, and even after two aborted settlements, the battle raged—in many areas of the city reducing itself to a naked black-white struggle between parents in the impoverished ghettos and the striking teachers.
The aftermath of the Great School Strike was almost as bitter. The Afro-American Teachers Association (ATA), claiming in its membership 4,000 of the city's 6,000 black teachers, had actively and forcefully opposed the union's strike. The ATA gave over a portion of its office space in Brooklyn's Bedford- Stuyvesant ghetto to its youth corps, the Afro-American Students Association (ASA). From the overworked mimeograph machines at 1064 Fulton Street came a steady stream of diatribe against the union and the terms of the strike-ending settlement which added nine days to the school year and extended the regular school day by forty minutes to provide make-up instruction, enabling striking teachers to earn back the pay they had lost. But the militant black teachers, who had opened up schools and were paid during the strike, and their student compatriots, were hardly about to cooperate with the terms of the agreement. The November edition of the ASA Newsletter offered a hint of what was to come:
The UFT is coming back,
So are we, strong and black
The UFT smiles for they are sly,
We won't forget their remarks and let them go by
We now know who is with us and our friends,
Those pigs we once trusted and their fiends
Black students will get together and unite,
Our demands will be met or else we fight
No more bull about the good rule,
Time for us to do something about our school.2
Leslie Campbell, a teacher at Junior High School 271 in the Ocean Hill District, an ATA vice president, and a notorious provocateur of student violence, had helped in the organization and indoctrination of Lane's impressionable black students. Campbell was a separatist who had preached black self-determination. He had become the idol of frustrated youths into whose minds was fed a hodgepodge of Maoist dogma, Black Panther ideology, and all the catchy slogans about American imperialism, white slave-driving businessmen, and the genocide that the government is carrying forth against the black people of America.
The Lane chapter of the UFT registered its objections to the distribution in school of inflammatory literature in a note to the principal, Morton Selub. As was his custom, the school head never responded to the UFT protest, preferring to sidestep an issue that could conceivably force him to make a decision that would be unpopular to the militants.
On November 27 the school was besieged with its first major confrontation. Student demonstrators had been roaming the city streets all week, going from school to school, upsetting the educational tone and calling on students to join with them in protesting the make-up time which they felt was discriminatory against them. At 3:00 P.M., after most of the early-session students and teachers had left for the day, a marauding band of about 150 black youths, many wielding knives, sticks, and chains, invaded the school. Several teachers were set upon when they tried to contain small groups of outsiders who went on a rampage all over the building. Steve Margolis, an assistant dean, attempting to aid a teacher being assaulted, was knocked to the floor, his glasses broken, his face lacerated and jacket torn to shreds directly in front of the principal's office. Frightened Lane students were sent fleeing into the street as classes were canceled for the remainder of the day. It was a dramatic introduction, and it would get worse. Much worse!
The question of just who was responsible for the security of Lane's students was a matter constantly under debate between the union chapter and the school administration. The UFT had always maintained that the teacher's job was to teach, not to perform police or parapolice functions. It had become traditional at Lane for the principal to assign large numbers of extra teachers to toilet duty, hall patrols, and street guarding toward the end of every semester and just prior to extended holiday recesses. These were times when student drunkenness was not at all uncommon, when drug usage (already widespread at Lane) became an especially difficult problem, and when the gangster element declared open season on defenseless teachers and students.
Reluctantly, teachers had come to insist that they were not trained to cope with criminally inclined students in situations which called for professional police attention. Confronting a drunken student or one shot full of heroin (or suffering withdrawal) was outside the purview of responsibility with which teachers could be reasonably charged. Such situations were not, the union contended, within the normal scope of internal school discipline. Criminal activity on school premises; assaults, vandalism, extortion, theft, arson . . . were all felonious crimes demanding police involvement. But on this very matter, principal Morton Selub stood intransigent. Under no circumstances would he ask for the assignment of police inside the building. His was the traditional pedagogical view which blindly refused to concede, no matter how overt the evidence, that conditions within a school could be so dangerous as to warrant the presence of police as a deterrent. A week rarely passed, from the delayed opening of school in November to the burning incident in January, in which the UFT chapter committee didn't meet with Selub, requesting, pleading, finally demanding police protection for students and teachers.
The principal could not be convinced. It didn't seem to matter that the school had become a house of horrors, racial fires brightly burning, as well as a haven for a huge drug addict population which preyed on innocent children in the student body . . . robbing, extorting, assaulting. A top-ranking official of the city's Addiction Services Agency later told a special UFT Narcotics Committee that there were enough hard-core drug users at Lane alone to require the full-time services of the agency's entire staff.
Morton Selub was not alone in trying to keep the police out of Lane. William Cerrone, captain of the overworked and undermanned 75th police precinct in Brooklyn, concurred with the principal. First, he didn't have the manpower to assign patrolmen within the building. But more important to him was the fear that if stationed inside the school, policemen would find themselves in the untenable position of being called upon to make an arrest in a situation that was a matter of routine school discipline.
In addition to the school's refusal to have police in the building, there was also considerable confusion as to which precinct, the 102nd in Queens or the 75th in Brooklyn, was responsible for the school's security. With the school located squarely on the county border, half the building on either side, it had been traditional for both precincts to try to evade the major share of responsibility. Lane was both a Brooklyn and a Queens school, with neither community anxious to protect it.
Conditions in the school deteriorated steadily all through December. Selub saw fit to declare a school emergency and assign teachers to patrol duties whenever a rumor of a student uprising came to him. Teachers grew increasingly resentful and demoralized as the school survived on a day-to-day basis with everybody wondering when the final explosion would come. They waited, and talked, and worried. Selub vacillated and tried lulling his staff into a false sense of security. He also made repeated pleas to the student body, urging them to reject violence and to respect the rights of fellow students to live and learn. But the militants among the blacks had been indoctrinated too well by their adult heroes in Ocean Hill, and Selub's speeches didn't give the junkies the cash for the next fix. And the alienated youngsters who couldn't read or spell their own names had tuned out a long time before.
Soon Leslie Campbell, by this time one of the most controversial figures in town as a result of directing a student charge against a police barricade in front of JHS 271 in Ocean Hill, saw fit to make his own presence felt at Lane. Himself a 1958 Lane graduate, Campbell had more than a sentimental interest in his alma mater. He called for an appointment to see Selub, and the principal consented. Unexpectedly, on December 11 Campbell appeared at the school. Assistant Principal Peter Todaro, acting under the instructions of Selub who was absent, escorted Campbell and his two aides on a tour of the building. Campbell, at this time, was officially under suspense by the school board (assigned to Rhody McCoy's office, with pay) for allegedly harassing UFT teachers. He was later absolved of any wrongdoing and reinstated.
His visit to Lane was well planned. To the teachers of Lane and to the most fair-minded New Yorkers, Leslie Campbell represented the most extreme fringe of the black movement. A six foot, seven inch hulk of a man, he was immediately recognized by members of the faculty as he proceeded on his red carpet tour of the school. From time to time one of the trio would stop to open a classroom door and snap a picture of the teacher. A wave of fear went rippling through the school, and as if by some prearranged signal large numbers of black students began congregating in the first floor lobby. The school soon hummed with activity, pushing, shoving . . . students ignoring the instructions of teachers who were trying to clear the halls. Then, as if it had all been planned in advance, the blacks headed for the exits. There was a mass exodus of students and in a matter of minutes most classrooms had only a fraction of the register actually present. There was no doubting the demonic influence wielded by Leslie Campbell over Lane's black students.
Episodes like the Campbell incursion helped to contribute to the racial polarization that was rapidly dividing the school. The whites were becoming increasingly frightened as the violence became more and more racially motivated. Legitimizing the black rage instead of constructively channeling it was the Afro Culture Organization, the on-campus pseudonym for the Brooklyn based Afro-American Students Association which was prohibited from organizing in the schools. The new black school "club" came under the direction of two black teachers who had taken militant anti-union stances and who readily identified with the credo of the ATA. It was impossible to know exactly what went on behind the closed doors of the student meetings. On one occasion Leslie Campbell was the guest speaker. Once they distributed leaflets in the school calling for "the black brothers and sisters" to come to their meeting to demonstrate their black unity. White students did a slow boil as they tasted the bitterness of discrimination based on race. On yet another occasion, William Schmidt, a school aide who from time to time had been the only white person to attend the club's meetings, was told by one of the faculty advisers that he was no longer welcome. No reason was given for his exclusion.
Tension, fear, and distrust continued to build during the month of December, with seemingly nobody able or willing to put the school back together. Conditions reached a fever pitch during the last week of school prior to the abbreviated Christmas recess. (The extended vacation was cut short to provide make-up instruction time.) On December 18 an attractive young teacher was molested by a black youth after she had dismissed her class. In her official report of the incident, she wrote:
A matter of two minutes passed between the leaving of my students and the point where I walked into the store-room. He followed me and grabbed me from behind around the throat. I felt that I could not breathe. He pulled me to the floor, he on top of me, pulling tighter and tighter against my throat . . .
At this point, I had no breath and the pain in my throat was unbearable. I started to black-out. . . . I then became hysterical, throwing anything I could put my hands on, kicking, fighting, and yelling, "Please don't kill me." During the fight the boy had ripped off my chain belt, torn my stockings to shreds. Blood was pouring out of my mouth and all over my clothes. The extent of the rape, I could not tell, as I was only semi-conscious the entire time. The only thought I had was that of losing my life.3
The teacher never returned to Lane. Her career in the New York City public school system was over, she decided.
The situation in the school had by mid-December become intolerable. The deterioration was complete. Nobody was safe as gangs of black youths, many wearing the berets and insignia of the Panthers, roamed the halls, ringing fire alarms, breaking windows, setting fires, and assaulting any white youth who dared go into a lavatory or any other part of the building that was not under the supervision of an adult. Now on a daily basis Lane's UFT representatives appealed to Selub, and in a letter of December 23 the principal was asked: "How many more of Lane's teachers and students must be sacrificed . . . vilified, assaulted, molested . . . before the administration recognizes that its policy of keeping the police out and bringing the Leslie Campbells in is contributing to the prevailing anarchy in our school?"4
As usual there was no response from the principal who had, by this time, lost any semblance of control of his school. Among the numerous incidents that shocked the staff during those December weeks was the ugly unprovoked attack by five black girls against a young white girl. The hideous assault occurred in the auditorium, which was being used as a study hall due to the shortage of classroom space. Brutally attacking their victim, laughing and chanting, they stripped her of her clothing from the waist up. Viciously and sadistically they punched her in the face, and left her lying there helpless, half-naked and hysterical. Her only crime, the color of her skin!
Inaction and permissiveness at the top resulted in abject resignation and apathy on the part of many teachers who had come to view the situation as hopeless. It was becoming all too clear that Selub wouldn't move, and it was only at this point that I, as the school's UFT chairman, came to the conclusion that as teachers we had some moral duty to initiate a void-filling program in behalf of our students and ourselves.
A stunned administration had proven itself unwilling and/or unable to act. The teachers would have to fill the vacuum. Earlier, the chapter's executive committee had drafted a resolution formulating a broad action program to focus public attention on the school's severe problems and to mobilize local community support for a drive to seek solutions. In a December 19 memorandum to the Chapter Council (executive committee), I wrote: "The Council, as a duly elected and representative body must act now. A SAFE EDUCATIONAL ATMOSPHERE MUST BE RESTORED TO LANE, AND WE MUST BE PREPARED TO TAKE THOSE STEPS NECESSARY TO BRING THIS ABOUT."5
If there is anything a public school administrator dreads, it is publicity that shows his school in a bad light. To administrators of the public schools newspapers are anathema, and it is customary for them to try to keep their dirty laundry within the school. The educational bureaucracy was such that the road to advancement up the administrative ladder did not depend on achievement of any kind but on how good a soldier an administrator could be. Rule number one was to avoid any situation that might cause embarrassment to an immediate superior. This rule was especially important to an administrator who was serving his three-year probationary period and whose primary goal was to secure tenure in that particular rank. This was the bag Morton Selub found himself in during his second year of probation as a high school principal, when the UFT chapter decided to let the gruesome story out to the public.
On December 20 the union chapter, faced with a faltering administration, moved to fill the void. Unanimously, its twenty-seven-member executive committee voted to "undertake a public relations and publicity campaign to focus attention on the problems of Franklin K. Lane High School . . .”6 But they went even further. The time for requests and appeals had passed. Now they would call on the faculty to refuse to work under such conditions and they added a motion giving Selub just one last chance to act, stating:
That the Chapter Council directs its consultation committee to meet with the administration to advise it of the necessity of bringing police in the building in sufficient numbers to assure student safety and the protection of teachers on building patrols, and, that the committee suggest to the administration a series of other steps that should be implemented to tighten security, and, that in the event necessary police protection is not forthcoming to assure student and teacher safety the Council reconvene immediately to advise parents of the hazardous conditions within the building and to recommend to the chapter a vote for a job action that would entail teachers clocking in and reporting directly to the school auditorium for all-day faculty and departmental meetings.7
Now the gauntlet was down. The union chapter was for the first time openly pitting itself against the principal, expressing its determination to take the ultimate step unless he acted. The next move by the union was to apprise the press of the teachers’ position, and on December 26 a local newspaper carried the first story of the reign of terror that was sweeping the school. The headline read, "LANE TEACHERS ASK POLICE IN SCHOOL. "8 Meanwhile, the chapter leadership was quick to put the council recommendations to a faculty referendum and on December 26 and 27, in secret ballot, the teachers approved by a 148-14 count "to undertake the publicity campaign . . . ," and with a 155-8 vote approved the resolution calling for the chapter to help organize and actively participate with parents to achieve:
The creation of a safe educational environment for both students and faculty.
The reduction of the size of the student body.
The assurance of a truly integrated student body by correcting the racial imbalance.9
The third item was to become the most controversial, and was the basis for the soon to be made charge that we were demanding the removal of all black youngsters from the school.
On January 6, 1969, Selub missed his one last chance to win the confidence of his staff. He had called a conference of the faculty to discuss some school matter that was unrelated to the present crisis. A small number of teachers, those on the late session schedule, had come in early to attend the morning conference. But the large bulk of the staff, more than 200 teachers, came to the afternoon session hoping to hear their principal tell them what he was prepared to do to regain control of the building. He didn't. After sitting patiently for fifteen minutes I rose to request that the remainder of the meeting be devoted to a full and frank discussion of current school conditions. Selub refused, reminding me that only that morning he had discussed the entire matter with the chapter committee and that this was neither the time nor the place for a discussion.
"Mr. Selub," I appealed, "There is only one issue that has any relevance right now, and that has to do with all these people who are being attacked in this school."
"I repeat, Mr. Saltzman, this is not the time or the place, and I'm asking you to sit down," came the principal's reply.
Two hundred teachers watched. Who would back down?
"Mr. Selub," I began again, "as the elected representative of this faculty I have a commitment to every teacher in this room. I will not sit down and be part of a 'business as usual’ meeting while students and teachers are being assaulted here every day."
Selub’s face reddened. He couldn't tolerate this sort of challenge in front of his whole staff.
"Mr. Saltzman, I am asking you for the last time, please sit down. I refuse to allow you to use my meeting as a public forum," was his final retort.
It was a confrontation neither of us wanted, or expected. Privately, our relationship had been a good one, and even when we disagreed we were honest without overreacting on a personal basis. But now I was putting him on a spot in front of his faculty and our relationship would suffer because of it. There was only one thing to do to end the deadlock. I picked up my briefcase and overcoat and walked out of the meeting. Moments later, in the first-floor general office, I learned that just as Selub's meeting was getting started three black youths had attacked another member of the staff. Neil Benisvy, a business mathematics teacher, had attended the morning conference and was leaving school when the assault occurred. Benisvy was unknown to his assailants, and they to him. For no apparent reason the youths jumped him from the rear, knocked him down, and pummeled him in the face mercilessly until his skin was raw and he was drowning in blood. Rushed to a hospital, he was treated for multiple bone breaks in his nose. Although Benisvy's description of his assailants differed from the one given by Frank Siracusa two weeks later, in these assaults as well as in the preceding and subsequent ones, robbery was not the motive. Benisvy reported that the youths made no attempt to get at his wallet.
At almost the very moment Morton Selub was telling his staff that he would not discuss with them the matter of their personal safety in and around the school, Neil Benisvy became another of many casualties. The next day the UFT chapter sent a telegram to the district attorneys of Queens and Kings (Brooklyn) counties, advising: "Lane faculty requests judicial investigation into current school situation which aids and abets rash of crimes by students . . . Principal refuses to permit patrolmen to be stationed within building to combat crime on school premises.”10
That evening the union chapter made its boldest move. It was Open School Night, and the teachers had prepared a leaflet under the UFT letterhead. "Dear Parent," the letter began:
We know that your main reason for coming tonight is to find out how your child is progressing in his (her) classes. But we think that there is another matter that you should know about which may be even more important than homework and test marks, and that has to do with the very safety of your child in the school building.
The letter went on to tell the gruesome story of the fear and terror to which their children were being subjected, and laid the blame squarely on Selub's doorstep. It continued:
Nobody likes to admit that the problems of safety have gotten out of hand, but the simple fact is that teachers alone cannot provide the kind of safety your child must have. . . . As parents you have every right to expect that the school authorities will take all necessary steps to protect your child's person and property, and as teachers we could not in good conscience let you come here tonight without giving you a frank and honest picture of the school situation.11
The chapter had taken great care to keep the existence of the letter top-secret until the parents began arriving at 7:30 P.M. Had the administration learned of the message beforehand, it would have specifically barred teachers from distributing it. Few would have defied the principal since an act of insubordination is grounds for revocation of a teacher's certification. But by the time the letter came to Selub's attention at about 8:00 P.M., every teacher in the school had received a supply and was distributing them freely to visiting parents.
I was directing the operation from the social studies office on the second floor, and as I expected, it wasn't long before Selub found me to demand that the letters be recalled from the teachers. That was impossible, I explained, and even if I could, I wouldn't do it.
"The parents have a right to know the truth about what's going on here," I insisted.
Selub, still steaming from our confrontation at the faculty meeting the day before, viewed the UFT letter to parents as a most serious challenge to his authority as school head. He called over 10 Peter Todaro, his assistant principal:
"Mr. Todaro, I want you to listen to this as a witness," he said. "I am ordering Mr. Saltzman to call back these letters and if he refuses I will consider that to be an act of insubordination. Now, Mr. Saltzman, are you going to recall those letters?"
Paul McSloy, acting social studies chairman, grimaced when I again indicated that it couldn't be done. Selub and Todaro left, and for the next hour toured the building ordering teachers to stop distributing the unauthorized literature. Most obeyed, but the two administrators were unable to get to everybody and in one way or another we made sure that every visiting parent received a copy of the letter. There was no turning back from here.
For a brief moment the next day there was speculation among teachers as to whether or not Selub would follow through on his threat to file charges against me. But that afternoon, there was yet another explosion, this time in the student cafeteria. Michael Bettinger, a young social studies teacher, told what happened in his official accident report:
During my prep [preparation] period I was informed by students that there were no teachers in the students' cafeteria. I went down to the cafeteria [located in the basement] and called the dean's office. I noticed students stealing supplies. I went to pick up a box dropped on the floor. At that time my path was blocked by a male Negro student. I stood there for two seconds, did nothing, said nothing. At that time the student punched me in the jaw without provocation. As I started to chase him I was kicked, shoved, and punched. Trays, garbage, and cake were thrown at me. I was spit upon and attacked by a large number of students, at least 30. I gave chase to the student who originally punched me. After ten minutes I lost him12
Michael Bettinger, weeping and holding an ice pack to his swollen eye, made a direct report of the incident to an emergency meeting of the Chapter Council that afternoon. Then Tony LaMarca, a health education teacher who was in charge of supervision in the cafeteria, told about having witnessed the attack on Bettinger. LaMarca was a stalwart on the faculty, well liked by the students. But on this day, visibly shaken and on the verge of tears, he blurted out the rest of the story of how he tried to apprehend Bettinger's assailant. In his written report to the principal, he said: “As I was escorting him [the assailant] to the dean's office, the following events occurred: 1. His friends came running from the cafeteria and surrounded me. . . . 2. As they surrounded me they began taunting and shouting at me, ‘white mother fucker, what are you going to do now?’”13
LaMarca told of just barely being able to escape from the hostile mob, and tears rolled down his face as he told his colleagues, "And these were kids I've know for a long time, kids I have in the gym and with whom I thought I had a close rapport. But out there, it was like I was a perfect stranger to them. All that seemed to matter was that they were black and I was white."
Selub knew that for the council this was the last straw; that it would vote to recommend a job action, and that the faculty would sustain that recommendation. He realized, too, that the only chance to head off such a move was to come directly to the council and make a personal appeal using his own persuasive powers. Selub was gambling, putting his own prestige on the line. He waited in his office as the debate within the council proceeded on the question of whether or not to grant the principal permission to address the body. Feelings against the principal were running high, and there was a good deal of opposition to the proposal. But shortly after 4:00 P.M. Selub was notified that his request had been approved. For twenty minutes he appealed to the council, cautioning against "hasty" action, which, he thought, would make matters worse. In the exchange that followed various council members lashed out at him, accusing him of malfeasance and neglect of duty. Morton Selub felt the full force of the antagonisms that had been building against him for his wavering approach to the catastrophe which had beset the school. He returned to his office knowing that he had failed to sway the council and that it would vote instead for a job action. In the meantime the press had been advised of the possibility of a vote for a work stoppage. Several newspaper articles had already been written about the school's troubles, and word of a teacher walkout whetted the appetites of story-hungry reporters. They waited downstairs with Selub as the strategy and tactics of the chapter action were planned.
The presence of the UFT high school vice president, George Altomare, himself a member of Lane's faculty, was a welcome assistance. Several members were advocating an immediate walkout, but Altomare, well schooled in the art of bargaining, explained that the only thing better than a strike was the threat of one.
"It's easy to wave a red flag and be a hero when everybody is reacting emotionally," he chided, "but that's not responsible leadership."
In the end the body voted for a more moderate program, establishing a timetable, setting forth specific demands, and giving Selub and the school board a chance to improve conditions. The resolution read:
That a referendum be presented to the full chapter on Thursday, January 9, 1969 with the Council recommendations, and that all referendum ballots be counted by the Council elections committee at 3:00 P.M., and in accordance with the results,
at 7:40 A.M. on Friday, January 10, 1969 we apprise the principal that the faculty will consider Monday, January 13, 1969 to be a non-teaching day, and
that all teachers clock in at 8:40 A.M. on Monday, January 13 and report directly to room 230 for a faculty conference during which time arrangements shall be made for professional improvements
that we continue this same program each day until such time as the proper protective measures are taken so that we are able to assure student and teacher safety.14
At 6:00 P.M. on January 8 Selub was given the news. He had two days notice before his staff would walk off the job.
If there was doubt in anybody's mind about the determination of the faculty to go through with its job action, the 179-30 vote in favor of the proposal was a signal that there would be no instruction at Lane unless the administration acted, and acted quickly. It didn't take long for District 19 Superintendent Elizabeth O'Daly to step in and take the play away from Selub. On the evening of January 9 she summoned Altomare and me to a special meeting in her East New York office. As the UFT's District 19 representative I had dealt with O'Daly frequently. While relations between us were usually strained because of what she considered my over-aggressiveness, she knew that this wasn't a union bluff. O'Daly understood that unless police were assigned to the school she would be confronted with a wildcat strike that was likely to spread to other high schools in the district and have immense citywide implications. Joining O'Daly at the evening conference were Selub, the mayor's representative J. David Love, and top-ranking officers of the 75th police precinct and the 12th Division of Brooklyn. The television cameras were already set up when we arrived at her office, and before entering the meeting Altomare and I announced to the newsmen the results of the job-action vote taken by the teachers that afternoon. Now all of New York would know about the Lane debacle.
The meeting with O'Daly went well, for the decision to send police into Lane had been prearranged between Nathan Brown, the school board's executive deputy superintendent, and City Hall. Now O'Daly and the local police officials were just going through the motions to give the public the impression that this was merely a grass-roots matter that was being worked out cooperatively between the school, union, and police at the local level. The last thing the school board wanted to do was give the idea that it was adopting a policy of calling for police protection in troubled schools.
Lane's teachers were not alone in their battle. There was general support from the public, which had been reading about the assaults for several weeks. The issue was clearly understood by everybody and one with which most people could easily identify. Even the most anti-union person did not begrudge a teacher the right to work under safe conditions, and every parent who had a child in a public school knew what it meant to worry about a youngster's safety during school hours. And that fear was strongest among parents, black and white, whose children attended schools like Franklin K. Lane. The Lane Parents Association had been kept well informed by the chapter, and the teachers could expect their full support in the event a job action was necessary. On January 9 the association president, Mrs. Edna Richards of Woodhaven, wrote to Board of Education president John Doar.
"We are very much concerned with the problems at Lane High School," she wrote, "and hope that there will be changes made so that students need not attend high school in fear." And in recognition of the serious racial upheavals, she cautioned, "We ask that Lane High School be given speedy relief or there will be a mass exodus of white students.”15
Individual parents of Lane students also complained on their own. One such parent, Mrs. Rose Friedman, had this to say in a letter to Mayor Lindsay:
My daughter is a statistic!!! . . . She is in the top 1% of her graduating class. . . . In short, she gives a DAMN . . .
But alas, my daughter has now become another kind of statistic. She belongs to the deplorably high percentage of unfortunate students who have been attacked and assaulted on the school grounds.
I am writing this letter to plead and indeed, demand, that proper steps be reviewed and taken to insure the safety of the children on the school premises. This letter may label me a frantic mother, but please do not let me become a bereaved one.16
With letters like these coming to City Hall, it was not surprising that the mayor's newly created School Task Force steered the way for the assignment of police inside Lane High School. It was a precedent that would soon be repeated in other schools in all parts of the city. The pledge to assign the police beginning January 13 resulted in the calling off of the job action on January 10. shortly after Altomare and I, accompanied by council members Mark Smith and Seymour Cohen, signed a written statement in O'Daly's office. The school board was following a policy of granting more and more powers to local superintendents and community boards. Even though the central board had always insisted on a contractual provision with the union prohibiting negotiations or agreements at the local level, here was a time they actually encouraged it. For them it was a good precedent, giving de facto authority to local superintendents. The agreement with O'Daly stated:
For the duration of the emergency problem in pupil behavior at Franklin K. Lane High School, seven policemen are assigned for the full school day [8:00-4:00 P.M.] on continuous duty inside the school building. School staff and administrators will consult together on the time and place of these assignments. As the emergency diminishes and finally disappears the Lane chapter representative and school administrators will agree as to the systematic phasing out of these emergency measures. Until such time the police will remain on duty.17
The bringing in of the police was a bitter defeat for Morton Selub, and one he continued to resent. A year later, after the school had passed through a spring and yet another autumn Of racial strife, and with a full contingent of police still on duty inside the building, he was able to sit back and reflect upon events, telling one newspaper reporter: “I fought tooth and nail to keep them [the police] out last year. The police were brought in over my head. If I remove the police now I'd have the black community on my side, but the white community would be on my back.”18
On Saturday, January 11, Selub met with a committee of chapter representatives to work out the details of Monday's opening and the utilization of the seven policemen who would be on duty in the school. Fifteen specific methods of tightening security were agreed upon and set down in writing as part of the minutes of that consultation. But more important was the discussion of the chapter's long-range proposals, which went well beyond the immediate concern of student safety. Selub agreed to join the faculty in requesting the school board's zoning unit to reduce the school population to enable it to go on to a single session in February. He agreed, too, that the school needed a correction of its racial composition to assure the future of integration. Finally, he promised to look into the possibility of reassigning the present ninth and tenth grades, which were most heavily nonwhite. There was full accord between the principal and the teacher leaders that too high a percentage of ghetto children were being zoned into the already overcrowded school, and that What was needed was an immediate reduction of the number of students and a correction of the racial imbalance.
The next day, a Sunday, saw the chapter committee come to school, voluntarily, and work all through the day and well into the night preparing a schedule of emergency building patrols for teachers. By assigning every member of the staff to some security post there could be no criticism that teachers wanted policemen to do their job of enforcing ordinary school discipline.
All had gone well, but on the day the police were finally assigned, January 13, I made the first costly blunder of the campaign. Encouraged by Selub's consent to join with the chapter to demand a reduction of the student body and a correction of the racial imbalance, I jumped the gun. Feeling that the Lane story was still hot news, and anxious to capitalize on the events of the previous week, I hastily released the story to the press. It turned out to be a most serious error in judgment, for the New York Times ran the story under the headline, "UNION ASKS SCHOOL TO SHIFT NEGROES," and it began: "A spokesman for union teachers at Franklin K. Lane High School in Brooklyn called yesterday for the transfer of 1,100 Negro students out of the school following student disorders and alleged assaults on teachers in the last two weeks."
The article went on to talk about the gerrymander of the school's zone to take in more and more black students from Bedford Stuyvesant and Ocean Hill-Brownsville, and concluded: "Mr. Saltzman attributed recent student disorders, including a rash of extortions, vandalism, larceny, and numerous acts against other students to a group of several hundred black students that has grown from a small hard core group.”19
My relationship with Albert Shanker, UFT president, had always been a good one and there was no reason to believe that he would undercut my efforts at Lane with an expedient maneuver of his own- Without contacting me first, Shanker fired off a telegram to me and sent copies of it out over the wires. The Times story the next day was headed, "LANE SCHOOL PLEA DISOWNED BY UFT," and noted:
The teachers' union disassociated itself yesterday from a demand of its chapter chairman at the Franklin K. Lane High School for the transfer of 1,100 Negro students. . . . Mr. Shanker's telegram to Mr. Saltzman said that “while the call to transfer the Negro students was undoubtedly based upon a desire to achieve racial balance in the school, it will undoubtedly be misconstrued . . . I urge you to this proposal and to leave the specific methods of attaining balance to be worked out at the conference table.”20
It was the first time the union president had injected himself directly into the Lane affair and in so doing he gave the impression that the chapter did not have the full support of the central body. But if, indeed, the president was less than enthusiastic about the Lane chapter's campaign, other high school chapters made up for it by sending telegrams and letters to Lane to buoy up teachers' morale. Some schools were faring even worse than Lane, and in a sense the Lane chapter's action was a fight in behalf of all those high schools that were being disrupted. Teachers all over the city were watching to see how the Lane affair would be handled.
In the meantime Elizabeth O'Daly was writing to Executive Deputy Superintendent Nathan Brown, thanking him for having used his offices to facilitate the assignment of the police to Lane.
“Please accept my warmest thanks,” she wrote, “for the prompt and decisive action you took in helping me to prevent a work stoppage at F. K. Lane High School . . . We are following up with faculty and community action to try to improve conditions.”21
On January 18, two days before the burning, John Lindsay saw the opportunity to kill two birds with one stone. He had been under tremendous pressure to take action against black militant teacher Leslie Campbell for his reading of an anti-Semitic poem during an interview on a local radio station. The poem, which Campbell claimed was written by one of his fifteen-year-old students in the Ocean Hill district, began:
Hey Jew boy, with that yarmulka [skull cap] on your head,
You pale-faced Jew boy, I wish you were dead.
The large and influential Jewish community in the city was outraged, and one group after another rose up to demand Campbell's ouster. This was a clear case of anti-Semitism in the public schools, they argued, and it couldn't be tolerated. The mayor, up to this point, had ducked the Campbell issue, explaining that it was a matter for the school board to handle. The board, of course. with its black vice president, Milton Galamison—among others—firmly in Campbell's corner, wasn't about to take action against the fiery Ocean Hill teacher. But as the pressure on Lindsay mounted, the mayor grabbed at the chance of a politically expedient out. On January 18 he sent a letter to the board president, John Doar, who was also wary of taking any action against Campbell for fear of incurring the wrath of the black community. Even moderate blacks who did not hold to Campbell's extreme views could be expected to rally to his defense if any attempt was made to discipline him for his reading of the anti-Semitic poem. For Campbell himself, the prospect of being formally charged was not new, and many thought he was aiming for just such a confrontation with the school board. In 1967 a panel of superintendents heard charges against Campbell and ruled that he had been insubordinate for taking his class, against orders, to a Malcolm X commemorative ceremony in Harlem. As "punishment," they removed him from his post as a substitute teacher at JHS 35 in Bedford-Stuyvesant and reassigned him to JHS 271 in the newly created Ocean Hill-Brownsville experimental district.
But now, on January 18, Lindsay saw a chance to quiet the anger of the Jewish community against Campbell while appeasing the blacks. In his letter to Doar, which he released to the press, the mayor cited both Campbell and me in asking for a school board inquiry into racism in the schools. Referring to Campbell, the mayor said: "I am particularly disturbed by the public statements of the teacher involved, which strongly suggest that not only was the poem's content consistent with the teacher's views but also that the children in his classes were being encouraged to express themselves in this manner."22
The mayor then cited my own alleged demand that 1,100 black students be transferred out of Lane: "The request, though not explicitly defamatory in its wording, was, none the less regrettable. . . . While I am aware of the complexity of the Lane High School situation, I am sure you will agree that placing the entire blame on the shoulders of the school's black students and advocating their removal only inflames an already tense situation."23
Most observers felt that Campbell and I were going to hang together, an irony that threw together a teacher who had been a violent advocate of separatism and one who had stood up for integration. But the exigencies of the moment called for a politically viable solution and the mayor chose the path which to him seemed to offer the least resistance. On January 19, the day Lindsay's letter to Doar hit the press, and just twenty-four hours before the Siracusa burning, I responded to the mayor's charge with a public telegram of my own. I called attention to the fact that both Selub and the Parents Association president had concurred with me in separate letters or public interviews that there must be relief of the severe overcrowding in Lane, and that the racial imbalance had to be corrected if the city was serious about its commitment to an integrated society. In concluding, I said: "No smear tactic by the Mayor's office will convince the public that the Lane High School UFT chapter, the principal, and the Parents Association president are of the same mold as Leslie Campbell"24
One can only speculate about what might have happened had the burning not taken place the very next day. This was the third time in as many weeks that I found myself out on a limb only to have some unexpected tragedy occur to divert attention from me. There had been the heated exchange with Selub at the faculty meeting, which took place at the same time Neil Benisvy was being mauled. Then there had been the insubordination threat on Open School Night, which was followed the very next day by the assault on Michael Bettinger and the subsequent faculty vote for a job action. But it appeared now that the school board, at the very least, would transfer me to another school . . . using the threat of formal charges as the alternative to my consenting to leave quietly for an assignment elsewhere. Some of the best schools in the city were full of teachers who accepted this "punishment" rather than fight the board.
But any chance of the school board attempting such a political move was laid to rest with the first radio reports of the burning on the morning of January 20. It was a new ball game, and if Albert Shanker had any thoughts of not supporting the Lane chapter he quickly reversed his field. Learning of the morning's events, he immediately wired the mayor:
We are shocked by your attempts to equate the efforts of Harold Saltzman . . . with the antisemitic and racist activities of Leslie Campbell . . .
The horrifying incident Which occurred at the school today is an example of the kind of problem aggravated by such overcrowding. It is only one of a dozen incidents which have occurred at the school during the past three weeks. . . .
However, Mr. Campbell's activities include precipitating a riot in Ocean Hill-Brownsville in which a pitched battle with police ensued, and making anti-semitic remarks on television and radio. Your effort to tie two very distinctly different situations together was most unfortunate and should be condemned.25
With this final blast Shanker made sure to tie in the demonstration district he had been at war with for nine months. Soon the mayor was jumping on the Lane bandwagon, coming to the school's defense and forgetting about his request for an inquiry. First, a City Hall spokesman said Lindsay had asked Police Commissioner Howard B. Leary for a personal report on "this incredibly outrageous incident." The following day saw the mayor pay a personal visit to Siracusa at La Guardia Hospital, saying, "It was a horrendous incident which cannot be tolerated.”26 Even Mario Procaccino, running hard for the Democratic party nod to oppose Lindsay in the November mayoralty election, came to the hospital, only to miss the TV cameras which had left after getting His Honor filmed at bedside, in time for the Six O’Clock News.
School Superintendent Bernard Donovan made his first visit to the school on January 20 to confer with Selub. Afterward, he told waiting reporters, who by now were swarming all over the building, "The school is terribly overcrowded. When the register should be 4,000 and you have 5,600 kids that creates problems."27 Nobody bothered to tell the district superintendent that her own superior, Donovan, had come to the school, and feeling her own authority undermined, O'Daly rushed over after the superintendent left and let everyone know just who was in charge of District 19 schools. She made no attempt to conceal her anger at Selub for not apprising her of Donovan's visit. (O'Daly was still seething over Donovan's sabotaging her efforts as superintendent of the MES program in 1967.)
Meanwhile, Albert Shanker was holding another press conference at the union office, using the occasion to strike out at the board's decentralization plan. He talked about Selub's refusal to call in police even after repeated acts of violence, and attributed this to the principal's fear of angering black militants who could force him out of his job if the board's decentralization proposal were adopted by the state legislature. Brilliantly, he bound the Lane debacle to JHS 271, the hotbed of extremism in Ocean Hill,
"We may ask that Franklin K. Lane be closed," Shanker said, "if the violence appears to be organized from within as it was at JHS 271." But not wanting to leave the impression that he would take a hard line, he quickly added, "No one wants a strike. Everybody has had enough strikes for a while."28 Another alternative could be found for resolving the conflagration at Lane, he suggested.
While Lindsay, Shanker, Donovan, Selub, and O'Daly were all doing their own thing on the day of the burning, and with the school deluged with agents of the mass media, attention again focused on the UFT chapter. What would the local group do now, everybody wondered? An emergency meeting of the council had been called for 3:00 P.M. Panic had set in among the faculty as word of the burning spread. A number of teachers simply left the building and went home, fearful of a student conspiracy- Many others, who had always shunned the use of high-powered tactics in dealing with the administration, were now clamoring for an immediate walkout. It was fortunate that some six hours had elapsed from the time of the burning to the convening of the council, giving irate members a chance to talk out their aggressions and allowing emotions to subside.
After a more agitated group of council members had lost out in their bid to trigger an instantaneous wildcat strike, cooler heads prevailed. Yes, we could and we would walk out this time, I promised, but first we had to put ourselves into a negotiating position. There was no point to walking out unless we were absolutely sure what it was we wanted to accomplish. What is it we want? And what concessions should we demand from the board in return for our staying at our posts? And what should our strategy be this time? These were the questions to which the council addressed itself as the media waited for word from the meeting. Shortly after 5:00 P.M. a decision was reached. Once again the council would present its demands to Selub and give him until 2:30 P.M. the next day to reply. If the response was not satisfactory the council would convene a special meeting of the entire faculty and advise it of the principal's position. If the demands were not met the council would then ask for a vote on a job action to begin the following day (January 22).
The six demands formulated by the council were presented to Selub late Monday afternoon. They included reduction in the size of the student body to facilitate a return to a single session, rezoning of the school to correct the racial imbalance, closer scrutiny of the records of incoming junior high school students, a freeze on the admission of new students during the coming spring semester, a blanket rule barring the return to Lane of any student suspended or arrested for threatened or physical assault against a student or teacher, and the creation of a special educational program for emotionally disturbed youngsters whose presence in the building constituted a danger to themselves and other students.
The six demands, which were reduced to writing and set forth in rather specific language, were given to the staff in form of council minutes the very next day. The resolution calling for the job action in the event the demands were not met, stated: "That we ask the principal to close the school effective January 21 to enable the faculty to reorganize the school and reprogram the student body in accordance with the above proposals . . .”29
In his press conference Albert Shanker had indicated that he expected to meet with Donovan the next day in an attempt to resolve the Lane crisis. Vito DeLeonardis, UFT staff director, had been the middle man between the Lane chapter and Shanker's office since the trouble began. I spoke to him shortly after the council decision had been reached and told him our plan of action. He advised me of the meeting scheduled at board headquarters the next day. George Altomare would join Shanker at that meeting with Donovan, and I was to maintain close telephone communication with him to keep abreast of the proceedings there. It was possible, according to DeLeonardis, that the settlement we were looking for would have to be worked out locally at the school if Donovan refused to commit himself.
The minutes of the council meeting, complete with the demands and job-action resolution, were already in the teachers' letterboxes when they arrived Tuesday morning. Student attendance was especially light due to the general fear stimulated by the burning. Shanker phoned me at about 10.00 A.M., before leaving for his meeting with Donovan.
“What do you have to get to keep things going out there?” he wanted to know.
“A temporary closing down, at least for the rest of the week, and a reduction in the student body to get back on a single session next term,” was my reply.
“I’ll do my best,” Shanker promised, “but I don’t know if Donovan will buy it. You may have to get it out of Selub and O'Daly first. The mayor is coming in on it, too, and that should help.” I knew I was on my own.
Everyone knew that something had to give by 2:30 P.M. on January 21. Shortly before noon a luncheon conference was convened in Selub's office. bringing together the principal and his assistant, Peter Todaro, O' Daly and her executive assistant, Frances O'Connor, and the District 19 community relations coordinator, Edward Kissane. But the most important participant of all was the man who would crack the stand-off three hours later, the mayor's own personal representative, J. David Love. They would be calling for me shortly, I was told.
That call came at about 1:00 P.M. and I asked the other committee members to hold themselves in abeyance in the event I needed their assistance. For the time being, at least, I preferred to carry the ball alone. This was a one-shot deal, and a wrong word, even a facial expression, could upset the whole apple cart. It was a situation that required strong discipline and a single-minded purpose. Inside the principal's office the atmosphere was tense. While Selub tried to conceal his own uneasiness, O' Daly's trepidation was very much in evidence. Love sat back, watched, and listened.
The district superintendent didn't waste any time getting right down to the business at hand, addressing herself to the chapter's demands. I had begun by removing my wristwatch, placing it on the table before me, and pointing out that I had exactly ninety minutes before I was due at a faculty conference to report the results of the meeting and conduct a vote on the chapter resolution they had before them. O'Daly rather quickly consented to the demand that student assailants not be returned to Lane. Within half an hour agreement was reached on several of the others, with certain contingencies and modifications which did not weaken the effect from the teachers' viewpoint. In the meantime, Altomare had called from the board to tell me that the meeting with Donovan was over and that he had consented to neither of the major demands. Shanker was right. I would have to go for broke myself. The same information about the unproductive meeting at the board was transmitted to the other participants through other channels.
By 2:00 P.M. O' Daly and Selub had even agreed to close the school for the remainder of the week, but as a matter of protocol we had to leave the announcement to Donovan and not specify publicly the exact number of days the school would stay closed. But the big hang-up came over the question of the single session for the new semester scheduled to begin in less than two weeks. Yes, they would allow a single session, but it would have to be with a register which even after mid-year graduation would be about 5,000. I insisted on a maximum student body of 4,350, the figure Todaro had suggested as the most we could accommodate on a single session. The debate heated up. I refused to accept a single session with the school bulging at its seams and class size skyrocketing over the contractual limit of thirty-four. O'Daly, on the other hand, refused to make any commitment about reducing the register by 650 students and wouldn't act unless she received some signal from higher authorities. It was past 2:00 P.M. and O'Daly was becoming irritable. The pressure was wearing her down and she lashed out at me for what she considered my intransigence and irresponsibility for refusing to step back on the single session. We were deadlocked, and I reminded them that there were only a few minutes left.
The mayor's man had remained silent throughout the session, but at 2:30 P.M., when I got up to leave, J. David Love assumed the role for which he was sent. His function was to avert a teacher walkout that could trigger wildcat strikes all over the city and plunge the town into a new round of racial conflict even more terrible than that elicited by the Great School Strike. The mayor's own hopes of reelection in the fall were riding on the prospect of restoring peace and harmony to the city and he wasn't about to let a crisis in one school destroy his political future. Love had to be able to deliver. What else was he doing there, I thought?
Now it was Love's turn to go into action. He asked the parties to wait a while longer and went to the phone on Selub's desk. In hushed tones he reported on the areas of agreement and explained the hang-up. How far would the mayor go? Love returned to the table and asked us to hold on a while longer. He was expecting a return call in a matter of minutes. We waited. An explanation of the delay was sent up to the conference room where the staff had assembled. In the interim I gave the council committee an up-to-the-minute briefing as to where we stood and asked their indulgence to allow me wrap it up. They agreed.
It was nearly 3:00 P.M. when Love's call came through and we reconvened to hear the good news. Somebody had given somebody the word. It was OK to go on to the single session with a 4,350-member student body, but the details of just how the reduction would be achieved had to be left to the school administration. It was settled, and everybody breathed a sigh of relief.
The rest of the chapter committee joined me, and together with Love, Selub, and O’Daly’s representative (she left when Love came through with the news), we went over the seven areas of agreement, point by point, beginning with the closing down of school the next day. By 3:30 P.M. the meeting was over with everybody shaking hands and saying how good this would be for the school and how maybe now we could all get back to the business of education again.
The faculty roared its approval when the terms of the agreement were read off. As a bonus we would retain all of our teaching positions and twenty-six instructors who would have normally been excessed as a result of the contraction were allowed to keep their jobs for the remainder of the school year, at least. The settlement delighted the staff and this was their first moment of gaiety since the beginning of the term.
The exact role played by John Lindsay in bringing about the settlement remains a mystery. That there was a round-robin telephone network connecting City Hall, 110 Livingston Street, and union headquarters on Park Avenue South is not in doubt. But there remains the lingering question as to whether Donovan (or perhaps Doar) gave the actual go-ahead, through Lindsay, to drop or transfer 650 students from Lane's rolls, or whether Lindsay's newly created School Task Force (either with or without the mayor's knowledge) took it upon itself to usurp official Board of Education prerogatives.
At least one prominent New Yorker with reliable contacts at both City Hall and board headquarters believed in the usurpation theory. Paul Parker, a crack reporter for WINS radio news, did a series of broadcasts several months later revealing the circumstances surrounding the creation of the mayor's School Task Force. According to Parker's report, secret memoranda were dispatched by Louis Feldstein, the man the mayor had tapped to head up the project. Feldstein's confidential master plan, which was supposed to be restricted to a few upper echelon aides, was designed as an undercover operation to bring about resolution of nasty school problems which the clumsy school bureaucracy couldn't handle. It was conceived on the assumption that a major shortcoming of the school system was the disinclination of top administrators to exert leadership and exercise responsibility. Time and again there were confrontations and breakdowns in communications because administrators at all levels passed the buck, and in the bureaucratic maze that characterized the massive school system there was always somebody to pass the buck to. The mayor had reached the conclusion that since he was usually blamed for such breakdowns by a public that didn't understand how the intricate school system operated, he should be able to send in his own people to try to avoid the kind of catastrophe that might have developed if the Lane faculty had pulled off its planned walkout.
If the mayor and/or his Task Force aides had made a grandstand play, Selub and O'Daly weren't quibbling about technicalities. They weren't at all concerned about where the authority came from. Official word from City Hall was every bit as good as a directive from the superintendent, at this critical juncture. What is still unclear is whether or not Donovan and/or Doar were involved in any way. It should be noted that at no time subsequent to the agreement did either the superintendent or the board president make any public statement about interference from the mayor's office. Even the vice president of the board, Milton Galamison, did not raise the question of City Hall involvement when he came to the defense of the 678 suspended students in whose behalf a civil liberties suit was soon to be filed in federal court.
The next day Lindsay commented on the agreement, calling it “a gratifying step forward,” and praising Donovan, Shanker, and Selub for “this effective resolution of the difficulty.”30
And Albert Shanker had equally complimentary words for the mayor.
“We've criticized Lindsay at times," he said, "but this time he used his good offices to avoid an explosive situation.” And the January 22 edition of the union newspaper observed that "President Shanker announced his public acknowledgement of the ‘very great help of Mayor Lindsay, who saw the dangers of the situation' in arranging for a breathing spell in the volatile situation.”31
But for Lane and for Lindsay, it was only the beginning . . .
https://archive.org/details/harold-saltzman-race-war-in-high-school
New York Times, Jan. 21, 1969.
Newsletter, Afro-American Students Association, November, 1 968.
School Accident Report (Name withheld at teacher’s request), Dec. 19, 1969.
Letter to Morton Selub, Lane principal, from Harold Saltzman, Dec. 23, 1968.
Letter to the Lane UFT Chapter Council from Harold Saltzman, Dec. 19, 1968
Minutes, Lane UFT Chapter Council, Dec. 20, 1968.
Ibid.
The Woodhaven Leader-Observer, Dec. 26, 1968.
Lane UFT chapter referendum, Dec. 26—27, 1968.
Telegram to Kings and Queens county district attorneys from the Lane UFT chapter, Jan. 7, 1969.
Letter to the parents of Lane students from the UFT chapter, Jan. 7, 1969.
School Accident Report of Michael Bettinger, Jan. 8, 1969.
School Accident Report of Anthony LaMarca, Jan. 8, 1969.
Minutes. Lane UFT Chapter Council, Jan. 8, 1969-
Letter to Board of Education President John Doar from Mrs. Edna Richards, president of Lane Parents Association, Jan. 9, 1969.
Letter to Mayor John Lindsay from Lane parent, Mrs. Rose Friedman. Jan. 1969.
Agreement between District 19 Superintendent Elizabeth O’Daly and the UFT, Jan. 10, 1969.
The Village Voice, “Lane H.S.: The Powder Keg Could Explode Any Day” by Jonathan Black; Dec. 25, 1969.
New York Times, Jan. 14, 1969.
Ibid., Jan. 15, 1969.
Letter to Executive Deputy Superintendent Nathan Brown from District 19 Superintendent O’Daly, Jan. 16. 1969.
New York Times, Jan- 19, 1969.
Ibid.
Telegram to Mayor John Lindsay from Harold Saltzman, Jan. 19, 1969.
Telegram to Mayor John Lindsay from Albert Shanker, Jan. 20, 1969.
Long Island Press. Jan. 22, 1969.
Ibid., Jan. 21, 1969.
Ibid.
Minutes, Lane UFT Chapter Council, Jan. 20, 1969.
Long Island Press, Jan. 22, 1969.
United Teacher, Jan. 22, 1969.