Race War in High School - Harold Saltzman - Chapter 4: Integration, Racial Strife, and Enter the Community

Saltzman, Harold. Race War in High School: The Ten-Year Destruction of Franklin K. Lane High School in Brooklyn. New York: Arlington House, 1972.

The turmoil at Lane struck at the very basis of the belief in integration in the public schools. It was widely accepted in New York school circles that an integrated society could only be achieved if children were schooled together regardless of race. But in the midst of all the name-calling and blame-placing, few people remembered that Lane had been the first coeducational academic high school in the entire city to become more than just tokenly integrated—way back in the early 1950s. Sadly, there had been a long history of racial antagonism among the student body and no one had ever made an effort to solve the problems created by integration. For years Lane was something of an orphan of the community. Few, if any, of the community's civic leaders had become involved in the school's life, and there was no broad base of support to sustain the school during a period of storm. Instead, white parents had avoided sending their children to Lane as the black enrollment soared in the 1960s. In 1962, 67.1 percent of the student body was white. In 1969, with the school population upped to more than 5,000, the white enrollment had declined to 30.7 percent (see Appendix A). A variety of conditions had brought on the sudden change. While the New York City school board was publicly committed to a program of integration in the early 1960s, there were no significant efforts to integrate the high schools or to prevent already integrated schools from tipping over and becoming all black. Various artificial devices were introduced to break the neighborhood school concept, which, because of segregated housing patterns, fostered de facto segregation. One such change was the abandonment of the traditional 6-3-3 (elementary-junior high school-senior high school) arrangement and replacing it with a new 4-4-4 setup which allowed the school board to manipulate large numbers of students for the sake of integration. For Lane it meant the doubling of the size of the incoming class as the ninth grade was lopped off the junior high schools.

Another reason for the rather rapid increase over a relatively short time span was the new accent on vocational education. Black youths who had not learned to master the most fundamental skills in the early grades were, for the most part, unable to compete in the academic high schools, which by nature were geared to prepare students for college. In 1962 Lane was still a fine academic school, its graduating class able to compete with most for state regents scholarships and merit awards. Meanwhile, the twenty-eight vocational high schools had become, literally, dumping grounds, where academically retarded and disoriented blacks could go if they failed to meet the minimum reading grade level required for admission to the academic schools. For most black youngsters the vocational school experience was only a waiting period, a place to hang around until he reached the age of sixteen when, with his parent's consent and a job, he could leave school.

But in the late 1950s the supporters of vocational education began to marshal their forces to win a reversal of this trend, which had all but destroyed the trade schools. And the school board, anxious to get more blacks into academic high schools, agreed to allow the trade schools selectivity in choosing students. Soon the vocational schools were giving their own entrance examinations, barring students who hadn't acquired the competency level they felt was necessary to handle the type of technical training they offered. By the early 1960s the academic high schools began feeling the impact of that policy shift as they were forced to take in those students, mostly black, who were rejected by the vocational schools and who were also totally unprepared to achieve in an academic college-bound course of study. These were the students who started entering Lane in ever-increasing numbers in the early 1960s. The school was unprepared to meet their needs, and they all too soon became alienated from it. Placed in a "general" or non-college preparatory course of study, they had little extrinsic motive to succeed.

Nor was the school board especially concerned with the severe overcrowding created by these shifts. Coupled with the general population rise, schools like Lane nearly doubled in size during the decade of the sixties. Meanwhile, the city's school construction program lagged well behind the rise in high school enrollment. During this period of growing registration, only two new academic high schools were built in the entire borough of Brooklyn, while one (Girls High School) was actually closed down. Not a single new high school was built in the core area of Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brownsville, and East New York. Sharp increases in student populations forced the high schools to go on to overlapping or multiple sessions, beginning frequently before sunrise and running until 5:00 or 6:00 P.M. with students and teachers coming and going in shifts. By 1969 schools that had been built for 3,000 students were carrying registers of 4,500 and more. In 1968, of the seventeen academic high schools in Brooklyn, only one was operating below capacity while the rest were overutilized at rates from 116 percent to to 166 percent. During this period Lane's enrollment jumped from 3,650 students in 1958 to 5,374 in 1968.

At the same time the school board never did implement an integration program for the high schools on a boroughwide basis. Yes, Lane could be integrated; there had been little opposition to it as far back as any one could remember. But it was a different story for the schools in most other parts of Brooklyn. Even in 1968 most were either only tokenly integrated or almost exclusively white as a result of segregated housing patterns (see Appendix B). Even the board's Open Enrollment Program, allowing ghetto blacks to choose to go to all-white schools outside their own zone, did little to further integration.

Not only did the school board do little to integrate white schools or to build new high schools in the black areas, but its zoning plans had the effect of creating reverse segregation in schools such as Lane which were already well integrated. By gerrymandering Lane's zone and extending it further and further into the Central Brooklyn ghetto, more blacks were added to the school's rolls each year. While there was a rather complete population change in the core of East New York during the 1960s, the immediate neighborhoods of Cypress Hills and Woodhaven remained exclusively white. Nevertheless, the local high school became predominantly black. In making these zoning changes the school board never admitted that it was politically impossible to bus large numbers of black youngsters to all-white schools. At the same time it followed a policy of not building new high schools in Central Brooklyn, the core area which in 1969 was home for most of the borough's 650,000 blacks. The excuse was that the whites would never send their children to a school located in a black community. The path of least resistance, and the one ultimately adopted by the high school zoning unit, was to transport into Lane more black youngsters and turn an already integrated school into a segregated one. Such was the disregard with which Lane was treated by central school authorities during the 1960s.

[Note: On April 12. 1972. as a result of a suit filed in Federal District Court, Brooklyn, by six Lane parents, Judge John R. Dooling ruled that the zoning of Lane High School resulted in de jure segregation. The court is expected soon to order the Board of Education to draw a new attendance zone for the school]

James J. O'Connell, Lane's new principal, saw the handwriting on the wall as the white population dipped from 67.1 percent in 1962 to 45.2 percent in 1966. Along with the UFT chapter chairman, Carl Golden, he attempted to get a reversal of the trend. O'Connell appealed directly to the school board's central zoning unit, enlisted the support of his immediate superior, Dorothy Bonowit—the Queens high schools superintendent— and worked cooperatively with Golden. But when push came to shove, O'Connell backed off. He was still on probation in 1965 and he wasn't about to make a lot of noise in an open fight with those who could determine whether or not he would be granted tenure in his new rank. Faced with the choice of rocking the boat and incurring the wrath of his superiors (risking the denial of tenure, at worst—at best being ostracized as a maverick), O'Connell backed off. The struggle to preserve integration at Lane was lost in 1965 after a half-hearted fight. There had been meetings with zoning head Jacob Landers, Golden, O'Connell, and Bonowit, but they resulted in little more than promises which were never kept by the zoning people. The very transportation routes laid out by Golden were used, instead, in 1965, to relieve another school (George Wingate High School) which was able to mount more community and faculty pressure for a zoning change.

The racial strife of 1969 was the logical culmination of eight years of reckless zoning by the central board. As early as 1965 the local UFT chapter issued a detailed analysis entitled, "STATEMENT OF PRINCIPLE AND NATURE OF COMPLAINT," focusing on the school board's discriminatory zoning against Lane. In this comprehensive study Golden pointed out that quality integrated education had been a goal best exemplified by Lane for many years. It noted that the school was ideally located to maintain integration and prevent an exodus of whites from the school system and the city. The paper appealed to the board to enable the school to provide an environment in which "racial enmity could be minimized and diminished, and mutual respect encouraged and increased." The study predicted in 1965 that the city's zoning policy would turn Lane into a segregated school. It noted, too, that while the nonwhite population of Lane had already exceeded the 50 percent mark, the four other senior high schools closest to Lane in each direction had nonwhite enrollments of only 33 percent, 4.5 percent, 22 percent, and 16.8 percent.

"These figures clearly indicate," the study charged, "that Lane alone amongst its immediate neighbors has become, and will remain, a segregated school as defined by Commissioner James E. Allen [New York State commissioner of education]."

The paper went on to show that transportation and space could not be used as excuses to justify the mass influx of blacks into the school. Public transportation facilities were available with no increase in travel time to other nonintegrated schools. It was also noted that none of Lane's neighboring schools were being utilized to their fullest capacity according to the board's own figures.

The move toward reverse segregation had resulted in a serious decrease in the level of educational opportunity available at Lane. The study revealed that the science curriculum had suffered as classes in physics and chemistry were dropped. The modern language curriculum was truncated by the elimination of German, Latin, Hebrew, and Russian. For the first time there were no honor classes at each level of English and social studies as had existed in all the years prior to 1965. The number of new members inducted into Arista, the honor society, had dropped from the usual sixty or more each year, to less than thirty. The local superintendent had even directed O'Connell to drop a number of special courses because of low registration. White students began using this lack of educational opportunity as a convenient means of getting a transfer to a nearby school which did offer subjects that Lane had dropped for lack of academic talent. This reduced educational program was in direct contradiction to the concept of quality integrated education which the school board was publicly expounding.

The sudden and dramatic shift of student population had also led to a decline in extracurricular activities. There were fewer clubs, and even a victorious basketball team found it difficult to sell tickets. Once-popular attractions like the senior dance and the senior-faculty basketball game no longer drew crowds, and as a result of student drunkenness and racial clashes practically all evening social activities were discontinued. Students stopped participating as readily in student government and there was general apathy toward extracurricular activities. Parents told their children to come home right after school as it was becoming dangerous to remain after 3:00 P.M. because of the increasing number of fights. As a consequence, the enriching extracurricular activities were quickly disappearing, making it impossible for either black or white students to enjoy opportunities available to almost every other high school student.

The dream of integration was turning into a nightmare. Lane was the safety valve, putting off real integration in the high schools of Brooklyn. In 1968 Commissioner Allen's office responded to the UFT chapter's allegation that the board's zoning policy had segregated Lane. The State Education Department wrote:

In investigating the situation of Franklin K. Lane I find that it is essentially as you report. However, I am sure that this is temporary. There is presently a thorough study of the entire Brooklyn zoning in progress. Franklin K Lane will be included in this study as will all of the high schools in Brooklyn. This state financed study is in operation presently and the results of it will be known in November of 1968.¹

The results of that study were known in 1968 but there was no comprehensive boroughwide rezoning. In May, 1969, after a local protest forced the board to back off from a general rezoning plan, there was an interim move to shift 2,200 black and Puerto Rican students into ten predominantly white schools to alleviate the racial imbalance in four others, one of which was Lane. The plan drew a loud howl from John Lindsay, and the mayor publicly criticized the board for daring to zone black youngsters into white schools. It was an election year, and how, the mayor thought, could he let the school officials put him in such an embarrassing position when he was actively campaigning to win back those white middle-class votes he had lost when he sided with the Ocean Hill extremists in the Great School Strike.

The New York Times, which usually supported Lindsay on controversial issues, was critical of the mayor's protest, and on its editorial page, said:

Inasmuch as only slightly more than 2% of Brooklyn's academic high school students are affected, it is difficult to understand why Mr. Lindsay considers that the measure requires policy review either by the Board of Education itself or by City Hall. Indeed, the suggestion that the Mayor's office should be involved in such changes, which can never be expected to please all students, parents, or principals affected, can only increase the risk of politicizing what ought to be a strictly educational administrative decision. Mr. Lindsay's reaction, whether he realized it or not, is certain to be cheered by those least enthusiastic about integration . . .²

And retiring Schools Superintendent Donovan chimed in with: "I do not think we deserve any condemnation from the Mayor if he is as devoted to integration in the schools as we are. If the Mayor doesn't share our goal, then he should say so publicly."³

The temporary and modest change was to result in about 300 fewer black students enrolling in Lane in September, 1969. A key factor in the board's move was the increasing pressure from community groups protesting the growing racial imbalance. The UFT chapter at Lane, the Parents Association, and the newly formed Woodhaven-Cypress Hills Community Association had all taken firm public stands on the issue of racial balance. All three groups had come out strongly in favor of the concept of restoring Lane to the status of an interborough school, serving white students from Queens on an equal basis with the blacks from Brooklyn. But even there, the forces within the body politic, and the educational bureaucracy itself, were stacked against any such change. The issue of race had become so explosive that public officials, even the local politicians, avoided the Lane issue like the plague.

In May the mayor reneged on commitments about rezoning given by his own representative, J. David Love. The board had first published a preliminary rezoning plan in March, 1969, which, if adopted, would have cut off the small remaining portion of Queens from the Lane zone, sealing forever the school's fate as a segregated institution. Only a leak by one of the local superintendents in Brooklyn, revealing that the plan would bus out students from his all-white district into a predominantly black high school (Thomas Jefferson High School) resulted in a white reaction which forced the board to kill the plan. It had been released to the district superintendents as a confidential document, but the outcry against the busing killed any general rezoning for 1969.

There weren't many people around that spring who were willing to talk about integration and rezoning for Lane or any other school in New York. Six months earlier Selub had said:

"I feel rezoning Lane is advisable, but just how it should be done I don't know. . . . I think the teachers are right when they say the racial balance should be restored. The school is becoming tipped over and that isn't good for anybody. The ethnic balance in the school doesn't reflect the school neighborhood in any way. . . . I would think that the proportion [of nonwhites] should be closer to 50% and arranged so that it wouldn't tip over. That way we could provide for the needs of everybody."⁴

Privately, Selub, and almost everybody else close to the Lane situation, conceded that the only way it could be done was to shorten the Brooklyn side of the district while extending it deeper into Queens. But zoning itself was a highly political issue and it was for this reason that the Woodhaven assemblyman, Frederick Schmidt, broke with the Community Association. The association's plan, supported by parents and teachers, called for pushing the lines deeper into Queens and extending them into Ozone Park, a community which was also part of Schmidt's 29th Assembly District. It didn't take a political genius to realize that the people of that area would oppose such a plan and that it was political suicide for an elected official to be anything but unequivocally opposed to such heresy. When the chips were down, the assemblyman abandoned Woodhaven and jumped on the bandwagon with the rest of the Queens County Democrats who were attacking the proposal. It killed any hope of reviving Lane as an interborough and integrated school.

Fred Schmidt wasn't the only local politician to abandon Lane. For years the school had gotten its very best students, those who were admitted to the honors program, from the Forest Park Housing Cooperative in Woodhaven, a complex of apartment buildings. But when the trouble began in the fall of 1968, the parents of these youngsters united in a concerted effort to get their children transferred out of Lane. Nobody could blame them. Their children came home each day with macabre stories of white girls being attacked by black girls, of extortions, of the fear of entering the study hall in the auditorium or of going into a lavatory for what might be lurking there. These parents had developed real prejudices, a reaction which was in direct contradiction to the liberal traditions of their Jewish heritage. But, they argued, the safety of their children comes first.

It was not at all unusual, then, that the parents in the middle-income housing cooperative enlisted the help of their city councilman, Arthur Katzman of Forest Hills (the first city Democrat to endorse Lindsay's reelection bid a few months later). They wanted Katzman, an avowed liberal, to get their housing unit zoned out of Lane's district and into the more severely overcrowded Richmond Hill High School located about two miles farther east. Richmond Hill was a quiet local school which in 1969 remained rather isolated from even the general movement of student unrest. But what was most important for these Woodhaven parents was the fact that in spite of severe overcrowding, the black minority in the Richmond Hill school had not created the furor that was sweeping Lane. Katzman discussed the matter of rezoning with Richard Streiter, the mayor's education aide, who communicated with Deputy Superintendent Brown. That zoning change was made, and Lane was moved a little closer toward becoming an all-black school.

The Community Association's own rezoning plan was given wide publicity throughout eastern Brooklyn and southwestern Queens with some 50,000 copies of the proposed zoning changes distributed. The goal of changing the lines to achieve integration was one which had the endorsement of most local groups, and although the teachers were somewhat suspicious of the association's politics, they did support the rezoning idea. The association's leaders asked me to attend a zoning meeting they had set up with Nathan Brown at board headquarters. The conference had just gotten under way when I arrived at the deputy's office. Assembled around the large conference table were Brown, zoning director Hillary Thorne, Assistant Superintendent Frederick Williams, and the association leaders. The fact that both Thorne and Williams were black further aroused the suspicions of the association leaders: William Hoffman of Lane, Michael Long and Joseph Galliani of Cypress Hills, and Tony Sadowski of Woodhaven.

As the secretary showed me to a seat and announced my presence, Brown looked up and asked, "Are you the Mr. Saltzman from the UFT?"

"I am," came the reply.

Mike Long quickly interjected, explaining that he had asked me to be present in an advisory capacity.

"I'm sorry, but I don't meet with teachers and community people in the same meeting," Brown replied, obviously annoyed at my presence. "If Mr. Saltzman wants to meet with me on this matter I am always happy to meet with teachers. But he has no business here today."

It was a closed case.

Knowing Brown's reputation, and not wanting the meeting to break up, I rose to leave. Galliani, the most vituperative of the association leaders, had some choice words for Brown and followed me out as a gesture of protest—hoping that the others would follow suit. They didn't, and after Galliani had cooled off he returned to the conference. The deputy superintendent, however, was less concerned about resolving the issue of Lane's zone than he was about sizing up the association. He had read newspaper accounts of meetings where nearly a thousand local residents had shown up to cry for the principal's head, and he knew, too, of their successful demonstrations outside the school and of their political expertise in rallying large numbers of people to their cause. But Brown had the same feeling of contempt for the association that he had for the city's black militants who had taken over schools by force and had even once held him captive in his own office. To Brown, the Community Association represented a white backlash, certainly a force to be reckoned with and not to be taken lightly. The meeting itself accomplished little, with each side accusing the other of stimulating unrest at the school. They were on different wavelengths.

The UFT chapter was quick to take Brown up on his offer to meet and requested such an audience. Brown responded by having Selub set up a luncheon meeting in the principal's office on April 22. Altomare and I spoke in behalf of the six-member teachers committee we had assembled.

The school had been on a single-session schedule since February, we reminded the deputy superintendent, and we had endured what no other school had been through . . . both qualitatively and quantitatively. Give us a chance to recover, time for wounds to heal, we pleaded. Keep the incoming freshman and sophomore classes down to about 800 pupils in the fall. Let the school get back on its feet. At least with the maintenance of a 4,300 student body and a single-session day we could begin to solve our problems. Moreover, if the incoming class was kept down to 800, that would also assure an eventual return to a fifty-fifty black to white ratio and help restore local confidence among whites that their children weren't going to be outcasts in a black school. We had all the statistics ready for Brown; feeder patterns, the size of the junior high school graduating classes, maps, and transportation guides. We had done our homework well. How could he refuse us? Surely, our arguments were responsible, our goal legitimate.

But Brown had come to Lane not to save a school, but only out of the necessity of fulfilling a commitment made out of expedience. Cynically, he suggested a plan to reduce by 100 the number of black youngsters coming in from the Brooklyn side and to add 100 whites from Ozone Park, with a contingency that the white parents consent to go along with the shift. They would never approve such a plan, we argued, if given the option. And the minimal number of students involved would have no immediate affect on the school either. It would hardly alter the balance, wouldn't reduce overcrowding, and would not facilitate the maintenance of the single session we needed. It was simply too little, too late, we protested.

Nathan Brown's announcement of the proposed zoning shift went even further into Queens than the Community Association had requested. And it came right in the midst of the Democratic party's primary campaign for Queens borough president, a wide-open affair. In a borough where the Democratic enrollment was two and one-half times that of the Republicans, a victory in the Democratic primary virtually guaranteed victory in the general election. On the eve of such an important county election, the three major candidates seized upon the zoning question and came out in vehement opposition to any such shifts. An emergency meeting had been called by civic and political leaders of the Ozone Park-Howard Beach neighborhood to protest Brown's proposal of zoning their youngsters into Lane. Present at the meeting were the three major Democratic hopefuls for the borough presidency: State Assemblyman Leonard Stavisky, State Senator John Santucci, and incumbent (interim) Sidney Leviss. All three spoke out against the change and in favor of retaining John Adams as the neighborhood school for that area. Joining in the public protest and pledging their support in the fight against the rezoning were City Councilman Walter Ward of Howard Beach and Woodhaven's own assemblyman, Fred Schmidt.

The 18,000 petitions submitted to Brown from the residents of Woodhaven and Cypress Hills was not nearly enough to match the pressure that was being mounted from nearby Ozone Park. A potent coalition of parents, politicians, and civic groups came together to blast the proposal and muster opposition to it. There was little anybody could do or say that could lessen local hostility as they held rallies and mobilized community antagonism against the plan. Emotions were running too high. Even Tom Pappas, the UFT chapter chairman of John Adams High School, was dragged into the fray, warning of internal union division if the Lane chapter continued to push for a rezoning that affected his school. Soon Brown began stepping back, and in response to a Lane chapter telegram endorsing his plan, the deputy superintendent wrote:

May I point out to you, however, that the parents of the children concerned have mounted a very strong campaign in opposition to this proposal. If the mail, telephone calls, and other public meetings taking place are any indication, it seems to me that the community groups which indicated support for such a zoning plan either do not have children in the public schools or do not speak for the majority of the community.⁵

On May 19, 1969, after Brown decided to drop the plan entirely—less than three weeks after proposing it—he wrote to the president of the District 27 local school board, declaring: "Since the parents involved are not receptive to the change we have decided to withdraw the proposal. It was never our intent to force any zoning decisions on the community."⁶

While the zoning question remained cloudy, a great many of the truants who had been transferred out in January returned, and more could be expected back in the fall. Another 1,300 new students would be added to the rolls and almost 1,000 more would be taken in on transfers from vocational schools or as new residents in the Lane district. The register would again soar to 5,400 with no solutions to the problems that had caused the breakdown the term before. This, along with the presence of an astute, politically aware, and separatist oriented cadre of militants, set the stage for a reenactment of the previous fall's disruption.

The struggle for integration was being lost, and many were beginning to lose faith that it could ever be won. Perhaps Mary Cohen, a lifetime integrationist, put it best at a November 3 conference with the UFT and high School Superintendent Jacob Zack. Facetiously, she suggested that if the board was unprepared to move to make Lane viable, then the school should be taken apart, brick by brick, and rebuilt in Bedford-Stuyvesant. It was her contention that at least with an all-black student body there would be no racial clashes and the school would be insulated by the local black community.

The Community

Morton Selub was a youngish forty-eight years of age when he assumed the principalship of Lane High School in the fall of 1967. Since 1961 he had been the chairman of the English Department at Martin Van Buren High School, a school located in a very affluent residential neighborhood of eastern Queens. In 1966 its black enrollment was 10.2 percent (mostly middle class), giving Selub little recent experience in dealing with the kind of student he would come in contact with at Lane. Bearing a startling resemblance to comedian Danny Kaye, Selub even had the entertainer's sharp wit and sense of humor. Wearing flowered ties and plaid sports jackets, he was anything but the stereotyped high school principal. An outgoing, pleasant, likable sort of a guy, he had a ready smile and friendly word for everyone with whom he came in contact. At his premier address to the Parents Association in 1967 he said, almost jokingly: "People ask me why I chose to come to Lane when I could have been appointed principal of a nice quiet school in Staten Island. My answer is, because this is where the action is." How many times, over the next three years, would he regret having made that decision?

The son of a pharmacist, Selub attended public schools in the Jewish community of Brooklyn where he was born. After graduating from high school in 1935 he began his college studies at night at New York University while holding down an assortment of jobs during the day. In World War II he was a first lieutenant in the Air Corps and saw action in the Mediterranean theater. After the war he began his teaching career in the city's public schools.

But in 1967 Morton Selub came to a troubled school that was crying out for vigorous and dynamic leadership, for imaginative and creative direction. It needed, above everything else, a and time-tested administrator who knew the pitfalls in dealing with the school system bureaucrats. For all his charm and wit, Morton Selub,—nontenured and insecure in his new post—was exactly what Lane did not need in 1967.

There was a job to do in 1967 if the school was to be saved. The Parents Association, once a supportive and active organization, had steadily declined in both membership and stature in the 1960s as the composition of the student body changed. Each year fewer parents from the local community joined as the number of white youngsters attending Lane decreased. As the school became less a part of the community's life there was little incentive for local parents to get involved. At the same time the parents of the black students, living in the outlying areas, had neither the time nor the inclination to travel to Lane for an evening meeting of the Parents Association. Anyway, it wasn't their community. And just as their children felt embittered each day about making the reluctant trek into what they sensed was hostile territory, so did the parents refrain from any active involvement with the school. Even on Open School Night, Lane was not a place a very great many black parents visited. So it was that the Parents Association became a paper organization, its total membership down to 117 by 1969 with rarely more than 25 parents showing up for the monthly meetings. It was far cry from the 500-600 active membership it had known just a few short years before. There was no concerted effort by the administration to build up the dying organization, and the only real drive to save it came from the UFT chapter, which in the fall of 1967 tried to spearhead a membership campaign. It met with little or no success. When the school found itself in the throes of the worst disruption in its history, there was no influential parent group to give it sustenance or help bring about a detente between the warring blacks and panic-stricken whites. Only after two months of violence, when the UFT chapter distributed a bristling letter on Open School Night, were the parents even apprised of the hazardous conditions in the school.

If Selub missed the boat with the parents, groups of whom were later to descend upon him demanding that their children be protected or transferred out, he was a total failure in the eyes of the local community. In the end he would find himself alone, challenged by both the immediate white community and the blacks. Just as he had chosen not to weld a close alliance with the parents' group, he rejected the notion of establishing close ties with the neighborhood. To the progressive and very liberally oriented principal, the Woodhaven and Cypress Hills communities represented the polar right. Exclusively white, their population of German, Irish, and Italian descent was decidedly conservative. A. Frederick Meyerson, the Democratic-Liberal state senator whose East Brooklyn polyglot district takes in Cypress Hills, had once observed at a meeting of local chapter chairmen visiting him in Albany (the state capital), that the people of Cypress Hills harbored some of the most intolerable reactionary views in the entire city.

Even though Cypress Hills had been the home base of Anthony Travia, the forward-looking Democratic speaker of the State Assembly from 1965 to 1968, the reactionary label was firmly imprinted on the community. Travia, a veteran of twenty-one years in the assembly, had also avoided getting involved in Lane's problems. He resigned his assembly seat in 1968 to accept a federal judgeship and was succeeded by Vito Battista, a Republican-Conservative, who after years of' campaigning for various state and city offices, finally won an elective post. But Battista, with an eye toward the 1969 mayoral race in New York, refrained from any active involvement in the drama unfolding at Lane.

Even in the early 1960s, when the school's zone was being gerrymandered to bring in more blacks from Central Brooklyn. there was no audible voice of protest in the community. All the local politicians, realizing they needed a broad base of support in a general geographic area that was becoming increasingly nonwhite, skirted the issue of Lane. Fearful of alienating the black communities of East New York and Bushwick, they left the school bureaucrats with an open field to exercise the deathblow. The neighborhood residents, leaderless, and ignorant of the changes being manipulated by the school board, could do nothing to hold back the deluge.

Selub had assumed the principalship of Lane on the eve of a tremendous citywide struggle over the question of decentralizing the city's 947 public schools. At issue was the question of how much real control neighborhoods should have over their local schools and the amount of authority exercised over them by the central Board of Education. The mayor had commissioned McGeorge Bundy, head of the multimillion-dollar Ford Foundation and former adviser to President Kennedy, to do a comprehensive study of the public school system and come with a plan to decentralize its massive bureaucracy. But the Bundy Report, released in November, 1967, shook the very foundations of the school system, striking fear into the hearts of its 60,000 professional employees. It called for breaking up the central authority and replacing it with thirty to sixty fully autonomous local community boards. The hiring and firing of teachers, signing of union contracts, disciplining of staff, and promotions to supervisory rank were all powers Bundy suggested be removed from the central authority and given over to new locally elected school boards. In a city where 93 percent of the pedagogical staff were white and 51 percent of the public school students black and Puerto Rican, and where the Bundy-Lindsay aristocrats were pitting the lower and middle classes against each other, the concept of "community control" of the schools was a most serious threat to the job security of teachers and to the union which exercised the power in their behalf.

It was against this backdrop that the struggle was waged in Ocean Hill-Brownsville in 1968. Never was the real issue the job rights of the nineteen teachers who were summarily dismissed (the union had agreed behind the scenes, before the firings, to permit the quiet easing out of teachers the local board didn't want), but rather about the kind of decentralization bill the legislature would eventually pass.

While most school administrators, for reasons of self-preservation, sought to establish closer ties with the communities in which they worked, Selub moved in the exact opposite direction during that hectic 1967-69 period. The new principal never made an effort to build a bridge between the school and the local community. Finding the conservative flavor of the Woodhaven and Cypress Hills neighborhoods distasteful, he used it as a convenient rationalization to remain aloof from them. Even in the early days when Lane was more of a neighborhood school, there had always been a certain standoffishness between the school and local community, and Selub was by no means the first Lane principal to isolate the school from the neighborhood. In a sense the school was always a bit too left for the neighborhood, the neighborhood a little too right for the school. With two opposing sociopolitical orientations the barrier was never breached.

Selub, meanwhile, remained something of a mystery to the community, and it was not at all unusual that they later turned on him, placing on his shoulders the entire blame for the breakdown. He almost never visited a civic or fraternal group in either Woodhaven or Cypress Hills. Except for the infrequent meetings of a school-community council (an advisory group of local clergymen and parent and civic leaders), Selub chose to conduct his business exclusively from his first-floor office perched atop the Dexter Court hill overlooking the area. Rarely did he return to the community in the evening or on a weekend to attend a civic meeting, a bazaar, or some other local affair which brought together large numbers of local residents and community leaders. Rejecting the white community, neither did he make any overt gestures of friendship to the black neighborhoods. He had been equally inaccessible and aloof from both, and both demanded his removal when the explosion came. The principal who had hidden himself from the masses, and the masses who had voluntarily disassociated themselves from the school, clashed bitterly when the horrors of Lane were unveiled early in 1969.

If the school administration, even before Selub's arrival, had failed to involve the community in Lane's affairs, there was another side to the coin. Tragically, none of the established civic groups in either Woodhaven or Cypress Hills had made the Lane problem a chief organizational concern. The first inklings of trouble appeared way back in 1965 and during the five-year fall there was no movement in the community to come to the school's assistance. With the established groups abstaining, and there were many, and with the parents and local residents crying out for help, there was a leadership vacuum. It was in that atmosphere that the Woodhaven-Cypress Hills Community Association was born, a militant organization emerging out of anger and fear created by the racial strife. Its leadership sounded the call and an agitated community responded. It was the very first time that a local association had come together for the expressed purpose of finding solutions to the school crisis.

Anchoring the new association, which had its organizational drive in late December, 1968, and early January, 1969, was a Lane social studies teacher, William Hoffman. It was only his second year at the school, but unlike most other teachers he recognized the need for strong teacher-community cooperation. Strategically inclined, he viewed the battle as one which had to be fought with the same weapons employed by the black militants: demonstrations, confrontation, coercion. Hoffman believed that the school board, and Selub, wouldn't move against the Lane disrupters or initiate any zoning change unless there was a countervailing force exerting pressure with equal intensity from the other end of the political spectrum. He served as the association's "inside man," supplying information and suggesting tactics to the other four members of the executive committee.

Joining Hoffman as the one-two punch of the association was Michael Long, a thirty-year-old Conservative party district leader from Cypress Hills. Tall, blonde, and extremely good looking, Long had a charisma that attracted a large following. A dynamic speaker, fiery and dramatic, and claiming to be totally devoted to the salvation of Lane, he became the group's chief spokesman.

The third member of the executive committee was Joe Galliani, a youth worker and grass-roots Cypress Hills politico who ran the 38th Assembly District's Independent Club. Highly charged and vitriolic, Galliani gave the group a bombastic tone that often threatened to spill over into violence.

With Hoffman school-based, and Long and Galliani rallying the forces in Cypress Hills, it was essential to balance the leadership with Woodhaven representation since a major issue was the fight for a general rezoning that would restore the school to its interborough status. Walter Donovan became the fourth member of the leadership. An attorney and a Woodhaven resident, he had run unsuccessfully as the Republican candidate (against Schmidt) for that Queens assembly seat in 1968. He gave the association the political and geographic balance it needed. From the very beginning, Woodhaven Assemblyman Fred Schmidt, a Democrat, was fearful of the new group. Never forgetting political realities, he saw it as a possible power base that could be used in a campaign against him. Donovan's involvement with it intensified that concern. Schmidt was the darling of Woodhaven, and had behind him most of the established civic groups, including the Woodhaven Interfaith Council, a committee of local clergymen with a strong liberal point of view. In 1965 a smear campaign, totally unfounded, had been waged against him by political opponents, and the assemblyman was forever wary of moving too far right . . . giving his enemies ammunition to use against him. Schmidt's close identification with the Interfaith Council gave him the liberal balance he needed to answer his critics and he could ill afford to alienate the church group by throwing in with the conservative association. But even more important was his anticipation of their program to push the Lane zone further to the south and east to draw white students from Ozone Park, part of his own 29th Assembly District.

While Schmidt was fearful of the association, the Woodhaven Democrats realized the potential appeal and political clout of the new bicounty association. In just two weeks it had enrolled more than 500 dues-paying members and there was no telling how high or in what direction it would go. Lane itself was becoming more of a political issue in Woodhaven. The racial unrest at the school was a contributing factor in keeping young people from moving into the residential middle-class neighborhood where the local high school was considered a community menace.

Ever since his election to the New York State Assembly in 1964, Schmidt had avoided the Lane issue, realizing that the ultimate solution of rezoning had to hurt him politically. Complicating the situation for him was the fact that there were some residents who wanted all of Woodhaven zoned out of the Lane district and into the high schools serving the adjacent communities of Richmond Hill and Ozone Park. It didn't matter to them that those schools were more severely overcrowded than Lane, with both having annexes to house the overflow. The only important consideration was the fact that they were predominantly white schools, free of racial violence. Originally, the Queens Conservative party had broken with Long on this issue, advocating the removal of all Woodhaven youngsters from Lane. But other Queens County legislators, four key assemblymen—John Flack of Glendale, Rosemary Gunning of Ridgewood, Joseph Kunzeman of Queens Village, and Alfred Lerner of Richmond Hill—all Republicans elected with Conservative support, had made the neighborhood school notion a key issue in their political campaigns. If Lane was the neighborhood school for Woodhaven, it just didn't jibe to move its youngsters to schools in other communities. The Queens Conservative organization quickly changed its stance.

The overwhelming majority of Woodhaven parents and residents were tired of running, fearful of drops in realty prices, concerned that Woodhaven was becoming a community of elderly people as its young left, and angry over repeated acts of vandalism by black youths who swarmed their streets turning over garbage cans and defacing property. The residents of Woodhaven wholeheartedly endorsed the proposal to cut off the Brooklyn boundary about two miles to the west, thus eliminating the Brownsville and Bedford-Stuyvesant sections from the district. Coupled with a moderate extension into Queens, this could return the school to a racial profile that would be about 60 percent white. It was also expected that as the profile changed from the rezoning, local residents would not feel the need to send their children to parochial and private schools as a means of avoiding Lane. It was hoped that in time, as conditions at Lane improved, more neighborhood youngsters would come to Lane. Every year hundreds of neighborhood whites found some alternative to Lane: a private or parochial school, a nonzoned vocational or technical public high school, some even used the address of a friend or relative to register their child in a nearby academic high school . . . anything but the local school! With a rezoning, residents hoped, this white exodus from the school and community would stop. They were to be sorely disappointed.

The Woodhaven Democrats understood all too well that they could get caught with their pants down, and it was for this reason that Tony Sadowski, Woodhaven's Democratic district leader, got into the act and became the fifth member of the executive committee of the fledgling community association. Sadowski wasn't about to let Donovan steal the show for the Republicans. He went along with almost everything proposed by the Cypress Hills leaders in terms of organizational policy, but when he was unable to prevent them from adopting the plan of extending the district lines into Ozone Park, Sadowski broke with the group. Although Schmidt had never thrown in with it, he did come to the very first meeting of the association on January 10, 1969, and told the crowd of over 500 people: "We can't tolerate fear in the school or fear on the street. This is America, and what's going on shouldn't happen."⁷

But at that very first meeting it was Mike Long who provided the two fundamental themes that would become the basis for the organization's program. "The first thing that has to be done is to get a change in leadership," he said. "In addition to attacks made against teachers and students, women are afraid to walk out on the streets because of students who loiter in the area." Mike Long wasn't one to mince words. He went on to talk about the question of rezoning. Without going into the details of what was later proposed for Lane, he asked the assemblage to put the pressure on local assemblymen Schmidt and Battista "to go back to Albany and bring back the neighborhood school. They should go to Albany and demand the end to busing. Albany has to tell Lindsay, we've had it."⁸

In 1969 the New York State Legislature did indeed pass an anti-busing law which prevented the state education commissioner and nonelected school boards from ordering the busing of students for the purpose of achieving racial balance. This was the law cited less than a year later by Mississippi Senator John Stennis in his campaign to compel the United States Justice Department to apply the same standards of integration to Northern schools as were being applied to those in the South. But the new state law brought no relief for Lane. The no-busing law, which was later thrown out by the courts, was not applicable as a solution to Lane's problems. *

*In 1972 (he New York State Legislature passed another anti-busing bill. In vetoing the measure, Governor Rockefeller averred that it was substantially the same as the 1969 law that had been declared unconstitutional

The first meeting of the Woodhaven-Cypress Community Association was a grand success, and the leadership, encouraged by the enthusiasm of its newfound following, scheduled another meeting for the following week. It flooded the neighborhood with flyers announcing the second session on January 17. The Lane chapter council, while privately excited about the formation of a new community group that would stand up for the school, was nevertheless wary of forming an alliance with it. Long's insinuation that Selub be replaced worried a number of council members. Some feared that if Selub was dumped the board would assign a black principal as it had done recently at Boys High School and Thomas Jefferson. two predominantly black schools that were having racial problems. Others, while being quite willing to blame Selub for his inaction, were not ready to call for his removal. Still others, of liberal leanings, pictured the new group as a right-wing extreme with which the union must never ally. The council split between those favoring open alliance and those wanting repudiation of the association. There was no choice but to follow a middle course to avoid internal council feuding.

It was a well-known fact that the New York City school board didn't act unless put to the wall and forced to make changes to avoid some pending catastrophe. And even then it could always be expected to do what was expedient rather than act with integrity and conscience. A leaderless and apathetic community was the board's signal to gerrymander the Lane zone and increase its nonwhite population from 32.9 percent in 1962 to 54.8 percent in 1966, and 69.3 percent in 1969. Had there been a school-community relationship al any time over that seven-year period, or had there been any kind of community leadership willing to stand up to the irresponsible zoning shifts, it is inconceivable that the school could have deteriorated as it did. There were those who called the new Community Association bigoted because it talked about the neighborhood school, and yet in 1969 all but a handful of state legislators voted for the anti-busing bill, which was itself a reaction to integration.

The hypocrisy was glaring.

In 1967, under pressure from the state education department, the school board had created a number of skip zones, and redistricted several thousand black youngsters from the deteriorating sections of southeastern Queens to the distant middle-class white schools of the central and northeastern sections of the borough. But as the lawlessness in these schools rose in direct proportion to the increase in its bused-in students, outcries against the busing began resounding through the borough as calendar year 1970 opened. Schools such as Van Buren, John Bowne, Bayside, and Benjamin Cardozo, with histories of academic excellence, had begun experiencing breakdowns spurred by their bused-in minorities. The limousine liberals of affluent Queens County watched disconcertedly as parents and teachers of these progressive bastions cried out in protest. But the Arthur Katzmans of Forest Hills had the political sophistication that was lacking in the Mike Longs of Brooklyn.

The appearance of the new Community Association, with its right-wing flavor, also presented some special problems for UFT's high school vice president, George Altomare. He had returned to his teaching post at Lane, a victim of an Albert Shanker purge during the 1968 strike. Altomare and I, both members of the union's citywide executive board, were extremely conscious of the UFT priority of rebuilding its bridges into the black community. These were bridges that had been all but destroyed during the disastrous 1968 school strike which had pitted the powerful white union against the black community. The liberal coalition of organized labor and civil rights groups had been shattered in the battles over Ocean Hill and over disagreements on the specifics of school decentralization. But 1969 was above all a time for healing to enable that coalition to be rebuilt. How would it look for a union bent on convincing the black community of its progressivism to have two of its officials courting a group which in the eyes of the liberal establishment represented something pretty close to the polar right? Because of this overbearing union priority, the marriage between the association and the Lane UFT chapter was never consummated. From time to time various teachers attended association meetings and gave direct reports to the chapter council. I myself had turned down several invitations to appear as a guest speaker. It was not until March 26 that I attended my first and only association meeting, at Hoffman's urging. He had told me that the other members of the executive committee were complaining that the chapter was using the association as a battering ram, and that they (the association leaders) needed to be able to show teacher support to answer their own critics. Reluctantly, I accepted the invite to address a general membership meeting on the zoning issue.

The association had picked up steam after the January 20 burning of Frank Siracusa, a white science teacher and Woodhaven resident, by three black youths. Coincidentally, Siracusa had delivered a speech from the floor at the association's January 17 meeting, castigating the school administration for its failure to deal with the mushrooming violence. (He was never quite convinced that the burning was unrelated to his remarks that evening.) Following the burning, the association drew a massive crowd to its January 30 meeting. All the politicos were there for this one. The vote to demand the removal of Selub carried nearly unanimously. Earlier, Mike Long had charged that Selub hadn't done anything in the past and wouldn't do anything in the future to assure student safety.

Then it was Sadowski's turn, and Schmidt squirmed in his seat as the district leader cried: "Bring back racial balance and we'll have peace again."⁹

The zoning question was next on the agenda, and Long for the first time suggested cutting off the Brooklyn boundary at Pennsylvania Avenue, a point about two miles to the west, thus eliminating a large section of the nonwhite area.

On March 26 1 addressed the association for the first time and was shocked to learn that its executive committee had earlier in the evening voted to call for a mass demonstration at the school (on March 28) just two days off.

Sandra Feldman, Shanker's girl Friday, was already leaning on me to disassociate the chapter from the association's zoning proposals, contending that the chapter's association with the group was a source of embarrassment to the central organization. The next day the Long Island Press carried the story under the heading, "FRANKLIN K. LANE PARENTS PLAN DEMONSTRATION AT SCHOOL," with Mike Long cajoling, "I'd like to see a thousand of our neighbors there. If we get a tremendous turnout then Mayor Lindsay and the Central Zoning unit will know who we are when we go there."¹⁰

The article tied in the call for the demonstration with my address on the zoning issue. To anyone reading the story there could be little doubt that the UFT was a cosponsor, at least, of the March 28 demonstration.

The demonstration came off as planned with several hundred association members marching along Jamaica Avenue in front of the main entrance, and within police barricades, until thirty minutes before the dismissal of school. It was only then that they agreed to disband, on the basis of a pledge made by a mayoral aide, Rick Tapia, that they would be granted an audience with top school officials to present their zoning plans. Shouting, "Selub Must Go," and bearing signs with slogans like, "MAKE LANE A NEIGHBORHOOD SCHOOL," they marched until they were convinced they had made their point.

The community had entered the field of battle.

From the association's viewpoint the demonstration was a grand success. It had shown its ability to turn out masses of local people in a non-crisis situation, and had gotten extensive press and television coverage for its demands. The demonstration had even won the association an entrée into the inner sanctums of the school bureaucracy, and on April 11 its leaders met with Deputy Superintendent Nathan Brown to present their case. But the meeting with Brown was unproductive, and at the next general membership meeting of the association Mike Long announced: "One of the things Brown accused us of is being bigots . . . I never heard of any one in this community mugging others, or that the children of this community were causing problems."¹¹

Brown's bigotry smear, or at least Long's interpretation of what the deputy had said, was more than enough to rally the community behind the plan for a sit-in demonstration in the school auditorium the following week.

On April 14 the UFT chapter decided for the first time to throw in with the association and support the April 16 sit-in which the council was referring to as a "Parents-Teachers-Community Vigil for Quality Integrated Education." The vigil, an evening affair in the school auditorium, promised to be a peaceful session. The teachers were, by this time, angry about the broken promises of January 21 and frustrated over having been deceived by the mayor and the school board. Convinced that Lane was being steered along a predetermined course dooming it to segregation in reverse, they decided there was little to lose by supporting the sit-in. There wasn't the slightest indication that there would be any rezoning or any reduction in the size of the incoming class the next September. All signs pointed to a return to the multiple session ten-period day. Time was getting short. Junior high school records were starting to come in. It was either now or never! We would support the sit-in, it was decided, and take whatever criticism resulted from it. How could things get any worse?

For most of the forty teachers who participated, the sit-in with about 300 parents on the evening of April 16 was a degrading experience, one which they would never quite forget. The vigil was planned as a peaceful protest against the board's zoning policies and was intended to focus attention on a matter of deep concern to the community. The community association had chosen an evening on which the regular Parents Association was meeting so as to avoid giving the impression that they were forcing themselves into the building. They had even apprised Selub and the 75th precinct that they would be at the school on April 16, and that they would leave peacefully when asked.

Things might have gone differently that evening if Selub had been permitted to handle the situation on his own. He had met with both Long and Galliani in the past and accommodations had been worked out on matters of mutual concern. Even on this night of the sit-in Long had told Selub that they would leave on his request. It was all prearranged. There would be no infraction of the law, Selub was told. But when the principal finally went before the assemblage to make his announcement at 10:00 P.M. he flubbed, forgetting to mention the fact that he and Long had reached an accord on the time limit. It appeared to the demonstrators that Selub was throwing them out under the threat of arrest.

Complicating the affair was Elizabeth C. O'Daly, the District 19 superintendent, whose contempt for the Cypress Hills community and its leaders was well known. O'Daly had come into the school system in 1928 and, like so many of her contemporaries, had been intimately involved with various ultraliberal groups. By 1946 she had advanced to the position of principal, then to assistant superintendent in charge of the junior high school division in 1958, and a district superintendency in charge of the Brownsville-Bedford-Stuyvesant schools in 1961. In 1964 she was tapped for the sensitive post of heading up the board's More Effective Schools (MES) program. In 1967, after having clashed with Donovan over MES policy, she left that position and came to East New York as head of the largest of the school system's thirty districts.

O'Daly's own political philosophy, well to the left of center, made it impossible for her to deal fairly and objectively with the people of Cypress Hills. She could well afford to be contemptuous of their politics since only six of her district's thirty-one schools were located in that section of the district. Her primary concern since coming to East New York was with the black community in the core area of the district where almost two-thirds of the district's schools were located.

O'Daly saw the sit-in as a challenge to her authority, a breakdown in her administration. It had always been her policy, however, to refrain from the use of police against local demonstrations. Several months later, in fact, she refused to order the removal of nine black militants who had taken over the seats of the local school board and declared themselves to be the new people's board. The rump group forced the bona fide board to adjourn to another room to conduct its public meeting, but O'Daly dared not risk inflaming the passions of the militants by using the law to oust the pretenders. But on the evening of April 16 it was quite another story at Lane High School, and she saw fit to take the hard line against frustrated neighborhood people whose politics happened to differ from her own.

Under O'Daly's direction, Selub signed a document authorizing the police to remove any person who refused his order to leave. At 10:00 P.M. O'Daly, armed with the two black members of the local school board and the captain of the 75th police precinct, accompanied Selub on a dramatic march up the aisle and to the front of the auditorium where the principal proceeded to read a prepared statement warning that persons refusing to leave would be arrested for trespassing. Long had given him his out, but in the heat of the moment Selub forgot to announce the accord reached earlier in the evening. It was a costly error for the beleaguered principal, and the crowd hissed and chanted, "DOWN WITH SELUB," and "O'DALY MUST GO," as they left in disgust.

They had assembled peacefully, exercising their right to protest. They had seen their neighborhood high school torn apart with racial strife, their children maligned, and property destroyed. And they had come to tell the school bureaucracy and city fathers that they wanted a change. But instead they had been treated almost like common criminals.

April 16, 1969, was not a night the local community would soon forget.

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https://archive.org/details/harold-saltzman-race-war-in-high-school

1. Letter from Esther M. Swanker, assistant to the deputy commissioner of education for New York State, to Harold Saltzman, July 3, 1968.

2. New York Times, May 15, 1969.

3. Long Island Press, May 16, 1969.

4. Woodhaven Leader-Observer, Dec. 26, 1968.

5. Letter to Harold Saltzman from Deputy Superintendent Nathan Brown, May 13, 1969.

6. Long Island Press, May 21, 1969.

7. Ibid., Jan. 11, 1969. 8. Ibid.

8. Ibid.

9. Ibid., Jan. 31, 1969.

10. Ibid., March 27, 1969.

11. Ibid., April 12, 1969.