Race War in High School - Harold Saltzman - Chapter 2: Prelude
Saltzman, Harold. Race War in High School: The Ten-Year Destruction of Franklin K. Lane High School in Brooklyn. New York: Arlington House, 1972.
By the time calendar year 1970 began, the racial polarization at Franklin K. Lane High School was total. White students had been beaten and terrorized to a degree never before known in New York's long history of public education. And while the theoreticians and social scientists were lightly dismissing the violence, apologizing for it as the only mode of self-expression available to the blacks who had been "miseducated by the system," the seeds for a new generation of racism were being sown. But members of this new generation would have substance enforcing their bigotry, quite different from the know-nothing prejudice of their elders. For these whites had been on the receiving end of a wave of terror that matched anything thrown by Southern whites at black people in the post-1954 era.
The whites blamed Selub most of all, but they were also critical of the police, who, they felt, had been too soft on the criminal elements operating within the school. The degeneration continued in spite of the fact that by year's end there were still seven policemen on patrol within the building.
The white parents complained about their children coming home with marks on their bodies from beatings at the hands of black youths, and of extortions, and of futile attempts to resist. They were convinced that Selub had "sold out" to the blacks. They cited charges made by their children about a different standard of school behavior for blacks and whites, with whites alone penalized for certain infractions. It galled them that many blacks refused to rise for the morning pledge of allegiance exercise. And they felt that blacks were given preferential treatment, pointing to the large number of college scholarships supposedly open to all, but which they felt were awarded to blacks in disproportionate numbers. The white parents had reached the conclusion that it was the policy of the school to reward violence and bigotry with college scholarships. And many couldn't believe the depths to which the school had sunk as police patrols stood guard as if the clientele were inmates in a penitentiary rather than students in an American public school. Whatever glimmer of hope existed for an integrated society, was, as far as these whites were concerned, extinguished. And they could say without the slightest hesitation, as did one harried mother:
I'm sick of it, sick of knowing my son has to endure two more years of hell in Lane. That's why I'm taking him out of here and enrolling him in a private school. I can't afford it, but I talked it over with my husband and we'll borrow the money.
It'll be worth it just for once to see him smile when he leaves the house for school. He's learned one thing at this school that isn't listed on the program. Franklin K. Lane has given him a good lesson in hatred!"1
The white students themselves freely complained about the breakdown in discipline. They watched outsiders roam the halls and were bitter about Selub giving in to the demands of black militants. They felt they had been sacrificed, that Selub had completely capitulated to the blacks, and that as white students they were considered intruders by the school's black majority. They charged that Selub had followed a policy of appeasement, of constantly giving in, and of playing politics with their education.
And while the school bureaucrats were telling the public that Lane was simply a microcosm of society, and that what was happening there was only a reflection of events in the nation at large, a fifteen-year-old white girl, one of the assault victims, was saying:
I consider myself a liberal person and I always took an active part in civil rights, but not any more. I've seen too much. When the riot broke out in the cafeteria and the bomb went off last Wednesday my girlfriend and I headed for the doors. Five black girls grabbed me and held me while another one punched me in the stomach. My girlfriend started to run and a black girl grabbed her and tried to rip her blouse off. I kept screaming, "why, why?" but they were acting like animals, just beating up any white girl they saw. I started to cry. I wanted to run home and never come back to this place again.2
While conditions reached a frightening climax in 1969, a year of unprecedented racial turmoil at Lane, the turn of events was not at all unexpected. Nor can it be explained solely in terms of the newly awakened black consciousness that was sweeping the nation.
For more than four years prior to the disaster of 1969 the Lane staff had been witness to repeated acts of violence committed by black youngsters. Teachers continually cried out against the growing lawlessness, but their pleas almost always fell on deaf ears. In 1966 teachers who dared speak out against the deterioration of school tone were labeled "hysterical" by the administration. As the school fell apart in the mid sixties, so did its faculty. Once a stable and tightly knit unit, the 1965-69 period saw some of the most competent and experienced teachers find their way out of Lane.
As discipline problems increased, the deans objected to their hands being tied by the administration, which, they believed, had become overly guidance-oriented with the elevation of Mrs. Mary Cohen, an English instructor, to an assistant principalship (in charge of guidance). Their major complaint was that they were being compelled to keep on the rolls the most violent hard-core delinquents. There were a series of clashes between Cohen and various deans. She stayed, they left. Four different deans transferred out of the school over a three-year span, a loss of top-caliber personnel who could not easily be replaced.
The 1965-68 period was the prelude. Those who saw the handwriting on the wall and had enough seniority, transferred out. Those in the middle found themselves locked in. And the new young teachers, bursting with energy and enthusiasm after graduating from college, ran to greener pastures where they could teach rather than play policeman. Those who stayed hoped against hope that the downward spiral would by some miracle be reversed. The chronicle of that prelude is a story of educational politics, of administrative ineptitude, and of growing teacher militancy as a reaction to increasing student violence.
In 1962 Lane was not very much different from most of the other fifty-nine academic high schools in the New York metropolitan area, except for the fact that it had an integrated student body (28.7 percent black) long before integration became a public issue. Harry Eisner, Lane's principal from 1948 to 1962, was a strong believer in the concept of integration, and even though all was not peaceful on the racial scene during the 1950s, the faculty maintained its deep-rooted belief in integrated education. Eisner had been a magnificent administrator and was respected by students and teachers, blacks and whites. During his tenure even those youngsters who were not college bound received an education which was, in many ways, superior to what the average academic student was getting at Lane in 1969.
As the board's program of reverse segregation took form in the early 1960s, due largely to segregated housing patterns, the deterioration of Franklin K. Lane was set in motion. Harry Eisner retired from the public school system in 1962, and after his highly competent assistant, Jacob Peshkin, served as caretaker for six months, James J. O'Connell was appointed to the principalship in February, 1963. O'Connell had started out in the school system in 1930 as a teacher of English, advanced to a departmental chairmanship in 1952, and became an elementary school principal six years later. In 1962 he passed his third promotional examination in ten years and was elevated to a high school principalship.
He was assigned to Lane at a time when the 110 Livingston Street bureaucracy was pondering the fate of the school. It was decided that Lane would be the safety valve for Brooklyn, the place to send the bulk of the black students coming out of the junior high schools in the Central Brooklyn ghetto. They would be crammed into Lane, more and more each year, youngsters with long records of conviction for felonious crimes, youngsters who were academically disoriented, emotionally unstable, ill iterate, socially maladjusted, and an increasing number hooked on hard drugs long before the city took cognizance of the spreading evil in its high schools. Neither O'Connell, the union, nor the local community had any say over the death blow that was dealt to Lane by these zoning policies of the early 1960s.
Often, when O'Connell tried to suspend a black youngster, he found himself challenged by his superior, District 19 Superintendent Margaret Douglas. Douglas was the second-highest-ranking black administrator in the system and she wanted to know why most of the suspended youngsters were black. The relationship between O'Connell and Douglas was trying, to say the least. In 1967, when he had the opportunity to transfer to another school, closer to his Long Island home, he grabbed the chance and said good-bye to Lane High School. He was a devoted schoolman, but he had been put down and overruled by his superiors at the district level and central headquarters. The 150 teachers who gathered in a local restaurant in June, 1967, to wish him well felt a deep sense of loss and were truly saddened to hear him admit to his administration's failings. But those closest to him knew that as a nontenured principal his arm had been twisted many times, first by Dorothy Bonowit, the Queens high school superintendent, and later by Margaret Douglas. [Note: Dorothy Bonowit died in 1969, Douglas in 1967.] . . . when the high schools were placed under the jurisdiction of local school boards. Major decisions affecting the school were made at the top, often without his knowledge or consent, and sometimes over his explicit objections.
On the other end O'Connell found himself faced with a strong and militant union chapter. The teacher leadership of Lane was bent on preserving the school as an institution of learning and unwilling to surrender to the school board's hypocrisy on the question of integration or safety in the schools. Starting when George Altomare came to Lane in 1956, the school had developed an active union orientation. There had been a long history of chapter initiative, and in 1965 the chapter chairman, Carl Golden, directed the research of a comprehensive study showing the trend toward reverse segregation at Lane High School. The study, a slap at the board's zoning policy, revealed that Lane had been singled out by the school board as a means of sidestepping the integration issue (see Chapter 4). Golden had gotten the ball rolling, and in 1966 George Himonidis, the new UFT chairman, took up the fight. Himonidis, a social studies teacher and a candidate for a doctoral degree from Columbia University, had leadership qualities that won him the respect of the entire staff. Endowed with a scholarly intellect, articulate, highly personable, and a clever strategist to boot, he rallied the faculty in 1966 and 1967 to give teachers hope and a sense of purpose. His outstanding leadership served as a shot in the arm to a disgruntled and demoralized staff.
There was little that the UFT chapter could do about the broken promises of 1965 and the unkept pledges of zoning superintendent Jacob Landers to correct the gerrymander that had kept all but a tiny section of Queens (Woodhaven) out of Lane district and added on more and more of the Bedford-Stuyvesant ghetto. But zoning was only one of several issues important to the new chapter chairman. For Himonidis, decidedly liberal, a changing student body did not have to mean anarchy and chaos, and he was a constant thorn in O'Connell's side as he forced the administration to maintain standards of discipline consistent with universal concepts of law and justice.
During the 1962-66 period the rate of daily student attendance dropped in direct proportion to the percentage rise of its nonwhite enrollment (see Appendix C). The union chapter was first to call attention to this monumental truancy problem. Complicating the growing absentee rate was the growth of student cutting which the school found itself unable to control. There was little or no follow-up on offenders and the existing feeling among the students was that they could cut with impunity. Lateness was still another serious problem which increased as more black students came in by train from the outlying black communities. It wasn't at all unusual for hundreds of students to queue up, day after day, to get a late admission pass hours after the start of the school day. Lastly, and most serious, was the matter of asocial behavior, an emanation in part of black frustration and of black resentment toward the white community for making them feel uncomfortable in that neighborhood. Furthermore, the black students were angry about having to cope with subjects requiring the fundamental skills of reading, writing, and arithmetic with which they had never been provided in the earlier grades. And as a consequence, blacks experienced a sense of inferiority through having to compete with better-trained white students in academic classes or being placed in the nonacademic course of study for slow learners unable to do college preparatory work.
O'Connell's inability to deal with the school's mounting problems brought his policies under fire in the fall of 1966, when a UFT council statement zeroed in on the growing menace. A chapter resolution began:
A dangerous and explosive atmosphere has existed at Lane High School since the opening of school in September. There have been numerous cases of students being set upon, threatened, and/or beaten both on school grounds and in the immediate vicinity thereof. The situation has deteriorated to the point where a teacher responsible for maintaining order in the student cafeteria was attacked, kicked in the stomach, and sustained injuries requiring hospital treatment. Many of these outbreaks have had racial overtones and have not been confined to boys alone.3
And this was a full two and one-half years prior to the collapse of January, 1969!
The racial crisis was out in the open by 1966. Society at large had not yet begun the great debate about "racism in the Northern schools" and the attention of the civil rights movement was still, for the most part, confined to the South. Lane was in every sense both a forerunner and a prototype as early as 1965. Integration, poorly planned and recklessly implemented, had taken its toll on what had been a fine public school a few years earlier. All the danger signals were there in 1965, but the human element was never a primary concern of the school bureaucrats, who dealt with charts and statistics and for whom a student was merely a number. Youngsters who disliked and distrusted each other were thrown together with absolutely no understanding of the other's needs or life style. Mutual hostility grew as impoverished blacks and subsistence whites scratched and clawed at each other; the whites struggling to hold onto the little piece they had carved out for themselves, and the blacks pitted against them for a share of the action. But Lane High School sat way back in the distant crotch of nowhere, on the border where two counties intersect, and the attitude of the school board was: We don't care what kind of problems you are having between the blacks and whites, just keep things quiet out there!
By October, 1966, after repeated incidents of racial violence against teachers and students, the UFT Chapter Council unanimously passed a resolution seeking to pressure school authorities:
"Should the emergency situation continue without abatement," the resolution concluded, "and all other means of restoring a healthy educational atmosphere fail, we could not in good conscience fail to support those teachers who for reasons of personal safety would choose not to honor such assignments [to cafeteria and hall patrol where most of the violent acts took place]. "4
While O'Connell was taken to task by the union chapter, the UFT leaders also offered him the opportunity to join with them in a campaign directed at the school board's policies. It was a campaign to secure the assignment of additional nonprofessional security personnel. For almost six months, extending into the spring of 1967, there was an ongoing exchange of letters between Himonidis—requesting more security services— and Assistant Superintendent Maurice Hopkins, former head of the High School Office. A typical Hopkins response to an urgent plea for assistance was: "The number of school aides available for assignment to the high schools is limited by the budget," and, "Obviously, this emergency cannot be expected to continue indefinitely."5
O'Connell was caught in the middle. He knew that the union was fighting his battle, but to support the chapter leaders meant embarrassing his superiors. And that, of course, was contrary to the cardinal rule. The chapter carried the same message to District Superintendent Douglas. Still no relief.
O'Connell, himself, finally wrote to Hopkins, telling him that he needed more security personnel to protect the health and safety of staff and students. In reporting one particular melee in the cafeteria he told Hopkins: "An outbreak of violence in our cafeteria during the third period yesterday resulted in serious injury to one of our school aides. Specifically, Mr. Herman Goodman was struck on the head with a chair. The resulting wound required fifteen stitches."6
The Goodman assault was only one of many against the staff during the 1966-67 school year. The contagion spread. In addition to assaults against students, aides, and teachers, there was an endless stream of reports about vile and abusive language, and of overt criminal activity in the school. How could any one not see, in 1966, the path on which the school was embarked as its nonwhite population climbed to 54.8 percent? There could be no quality education for any students in this climate of fear and tension.
George Altomare had given up his union vice presidency in 1964 to take a full-time job as a UFT organizer, but he returned to his teaching post at Lane in 1967 to qualify as a bona fide candidate so he could recapture his old title in the next union election. The matter of the disruptive child was already shaping up as a key strike issue as the contract talks proceeded in the spring of 1967. When Himonidis decided to lead the Lane chapter into a confrontation with school authorities on the issue of student violence, Altomare was there, and he was instrumental in drawing up the list of demands that were presented to Douglas. The Lane chapter, through its local action, helped solidify the union's disruptive child stance, which placed the burden of blame on the school board for having failed to provide special facilities for emotionally disturbed youngsters.
Lane was not the only school where teachers were being assaulted in 1967, and in a general statement to the public during its negotiations for a new contract, the union declared:
Whenever there are threats against teachers, effective police protection must be provided. . . . Many of the present problems stem from past failures of the Board of Education. UFT is initiating a positive program of cooperation with parents and community groups through the establishment of teacher-parent-community councils in each school . . . Let us work toward programs to improve educational performance, not create situations which will insure an exodus of qualified people from the city schools.7
The union's disruptive-child program was its Armageddon. During the fourteen-day strike of September, 1967, anti-union forces told the black community that white UFT teachers didn't want to teach their children and that the union was looking for a way to throw black children out of school and into the streets. There was little the UFT could do to combat that kind of misrepresentation, and the union's negotiators were forced to back off. In the end they were made to swallow as a face-saver the mere inclusion in the contract of a school board administrative circular setting forth an overly complicated procedure for removing disruptive children which was understood by very few and almost impossible to administer. For all practical purposes, the disruptive child issue was buried in 1967, and with it would die schools all over New York.
Morton Selub replaced James J. O'Connell as Lane's principal in September, 1967, and Hyman Bursky and Jim Lewis were elected as the new cochairmen of the UFT chapter, replacing Himonidis, who had become disgusted with the board's continued neglect of the school. The 1967-68 school year followed a similar pattern. Bursky and Lewis, the latter being the first black union chairman in the school, carried forth the quest for more security personnel and worked hard to make the newly created faculty discipline committee a viable unit that would function in the best interests of students as well as teachers. The purpose of the five-member committee, recognized as a de jure school body by the administration, was to refer special problems of student behavior directly to the district superintendent and make sure that teacher concerns were adequately represented at suspense hearings.
But in 1968 Hopkins was still playing the game of holding back on sufficient security allocations until a crisis arose. The new chairmen wrote to remind him that "Lane is one of the largest school buildings, over a quarter mile around (on each of five floors), and with numerous entrances." It was also noted by the chairmen that Lane was one of the most difficult schools as evidenced by the record number of assaults against teachers and students. "Assaults continue to occur here al Lane," they concluded, "despite the efforts of the Guidance Committee to improve teacher-student relations and to eliminate some of the sources of tension."8
Nearly eighty new teachers (representing about 30 percent of the faculty), most on their very first professional assignment, were employed at Lane in 1967 to keep up with the skyrocketing student register and to replace those who, like James J. O'Connell, had become fed up with the turmoil of recent years and left the school. With a student enrollment of almost 5,400 in a building constructed for 3,800, each lunch period saw 1,000 students packed into the basement cafeteria. The close contact only exacerbated existing tensions between the races. With these tensions mounting there was no comparable increase in the security force, nor were any special programs introduced to bridge the gap between neighborhood youngsters and those transported in from the ghetto. No one was quite sure what was coming next.
By March, 1968, there were sustained outbreaks that stopped just short of mushrooming into full-scale race riots. Fights, thefts, and vandalism were becoming commonplace. Many teachers, convinced that neither the principal nor the school board would back them up, chose to shun their responsibility of providing for school security if it meant jeopardizing their own safety. The very last thing a teacher wanted was a confrontation with a student, one that might result in violence. Even Selub had told them not to stand in a student's path if the student refused to stop at the teacher's command. Teachers, too, had become increasingly aware of the dangers to themselves and had learned to look the other way. One female teacher, angered over an incident in which she felt teachers were shirking their duty, wrote a letter to Selub, saying:
Recently, I had occasion to help control a large group of students in the auditorium while a fight was broken up. This brawl had, in my opinion, riot potential. I found myself in this role because other teachers, some of them male teachers, refused to get involved, and passed by. While it is true, school teachers are not peace officers, and are not expected to place themselves in a position of possibly incurring personal injury, there are ways of assuring proper supervision within their control. . . .
The apathy displayed by some of our teachers who have voiced great concern in the "interest and welfare of children" is appalling. . . . Perhaps we will go along, doing nothing constructive, preferring the path of least resistance. That path, however, leads away from scholarship and decency in our school, away from good citizenship and responsibility in our society and towards decay and destruction of both education and humanity.9
In 1968 it was apparent to everybody within earshot of Lane that no constructive educational program was being conducted at the school. Indeed, what had once been considered the exception—the emergency occurrence—had now become the norm. Lane was a public school seething with frustration and discontent. Racial conflict was spurred on by a growing narcotics problem which school and city officials chose to ignore. a problem which by 1970 had completely overwhelmed educational and law enforcement officials.
Finally, the new principal, Morton Selub, had never managed to win the trust and confidence of his staff, and they blamed him for the crisis. Experienced teachers left in droves during the 1967-68 period. Even the UFT diehards, defeated in their efforts to reverse the demise, got out . . . Himonidis to a suburban school system, Bursky on a transfer to a top academic school in northeast Queens, Altomare back to the union with a full-time vice presidency. Teachers weren't the only ones to flee. Anyone who could find a place to go, went.
Joining teachers in the flight from Lane were the white parents, who began finding ways of avoiding the enrollment of their children there. By giving the false address of a relative or friend, many were able to get their youngsters registered in nearby John Adams or Richmond Hill high schools. The white flight reached irreversible proportions, it seemed, just four years after the school board had issued an integration plan in 1963, stating its goals:
In the years since the historic 1954 decision of the United States Supreme Court, and even earlier, the New York City Public Schools have pursued earnestly their commitment to the objective of racial integration in the schools. Much has been accomplished. Nevertheless, our midsummer 1963 stocktaking makes it clear that much rnore has to be done, Our past programs and activities were appropriate for their time, but we now propose to embark on a new series of endeavors which we hope will hasten the day when our city is completely integrated and all of our children will enjoy equal educational opportunity. We believe that school integration is an important part of our pursuit of excellence for all children.10
That noble dream of 1963 had turned into a nightmare by 1968, and mass hysteria by 1969. Nobody could say that the Lane breakdown came about unexpectedly, that there wasn't time for correction and stabilization, or that it all happened too fast. There was time, plenty of it, and all the signs and warnings had been there since Carl Golden wrote his 1965 analysis (see Chapter 4) predicting the events that took place in the fall of 1969. But the bureaucrats at 110 Livingston Street weren't listening, and everyone was either too busy, or too preoccupied, or just didn't give a damn!
In 1968 an official United States Government Report told the nation that we are moving toward two societies, "one predominantly white and located in the suburbs . . . and one largely Negro, located in the central cities."11
Franklin K. Lane High School had become living evidence of that polarization.
https://archive.org/details/harold-saltzman-race-war-in-high-school
New York Sunday News, Nov. 9, 1969.
Ibid.
Minutes, Lane UFT Chapter Council, Oct. 27, 1966.
Ibid.
Letter to Lane UFT Chapter Chairman George Himonidis from Assistant Superintendent Maurice Hopkins, Nov. 30, 1966.
Letter to Assistant Superintendent Maurice Hopkins from James J. O'Connell, Lane principal, March 2, 1967.
UFT Statement, May 24, 1967.
Letter to Assistant Superintendent Maurice Hopkins from Lane UPT Chapter Chairman Hyman Bursky, Dec. 5, 1967.
Letter to Morton Selub, Lane principal, from Mary E. Roche (teacher), March 15, 1968.
Board of Education, City of New York, Plan for Integration, August 1963.
Report of National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, 1968.