Race War in High School - Harold Saltzman - Preface
Saltzman, Harold. Race War in High School: The Ten-Year Destruction of Franklin K. Lane High School in Brooklyn. New York: Arlington House, 1972.
As this book is published, we are getting ready to witness the great American spectacle that we will later call "The Making of a President—1972." While the economy and Vietnam would appear to hold center stage, there simmers barely beneath the surface that other issue—the burning question of forced busing as a tool to integrate the nation's public schools. In the early years of this decade, no conflict touched the sensitivities of more Americans, and more confounded, angered, frightened, and divided us, than did the struggle over mixing children to achieve racial balance in our schools.
From George Wallace's Alabama to Nelson Rockefeller's New York; from Pontiac, Michigan, to San Francisco; in Richmond and in Boston, Detroit, and Indianapolis; north and south, east and west; in the cities and in the suburbs; Americans are torn between Supreme Court rulings legitimizing the forced busing of children and presidential edicts that would forbid the use of federal funds to carry it out. And our national conscience is tested as never before as we strain to reconcile what we know is right with the realities that tell us it is so very wrong.
What have been the realities of integration? And why have so many decent law-abiding Americans gone to extremes to prevent their children from being bused to achieve some nebulous goal called racial balance? What has actually happened in the integrated schools? And why, in 1972, has race become the predominant concern of the school-connected constituency throughout the land?
This work was undertaken to tell what happened at just one of the countless American schools where integration didn't work. Didn't work because those who posed as the champions of justice wouldn't let it. The cast of characters in the tragic story of Franklin K. Lane High School, an integrated public high school in Brooklyn, New York, includes militant black students, panic-stricken whites, opportunistic politicians, adult agitators, irresponsible school bureaucrats, and angry teachers -—all caught up in a conflagration of their own making and rendered helpless to control events leading to the destruction of the educational process. Parenthetically but not accidentally, John Lindsay's emergence as a national figure, rising majestically out of the ashes of New York's school wars, makes the Lane story ever more significant.
Change the city and the names, and Race War in High School could be a case study of a conflict that has occurred and will reoccur in hundreds of schools where the issues of race and education collide. This is the sad conclusion of a 1970 report issued by the Policy Institute of the Syracuse University Research Corporation for the United States Office of Education:
One cannot visit urban high schools and not be directly aware of the clashes produced by mixing large numbers of young people and adults who come from very different neighborhoods, very different racial and ethnic strands, and very different age brackets. . . . Disruption is positively related to integration. We found that much of the physical fighting, the extortion, the bullying in and around schools had a clear racial basis . . .
The author would confess at the outset that his work is definitely a biased one—biased against hate, crime, terror, and all forms of physical and psychological abuse perpetrated by one group against another. The events are described as they happened. Names were not changed to protect the innocent—or the guilty. The analyses of these events stem in large part from the author's own experiences as a participant in the story, and he willingly assumes the responsibility for conclusions that may be distasteful, indeed bitter, to some readers.
This project could never have succeeded without the encouragement and support of numerous educators, government officials, and civic leaders who submitted to the interview process and supplied a voluminous amount of resource material. Special appreciation is owed James Baumann, William Hoffman, and Frank Siracusa—colleagues who provided much-needed documentation from their own records. Dr. Samuel D. McClelland of the New York City Bureau of Educational Research facilitated the collection of statistical data—with a minimum of red tape. School secretaries Sylvia Ehrlich, Helen Levenson, Bertha Brownstein, and Martha Dacher searched out records and reports long buried in dust-covered files. An immeasurable motivation was, and remains, the urgings of my colleagues to undertake and persist in the venture. Finally, there was the patient understanding of Mary Jo Saltzman, who endured long periods of inattention as only a loving wife could.
January, 1972
New York City
All that is necessary for the forces of evil to triumph is for enough good men to do nothing!
Edmund Burke, 1729-97
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