Blacks and Jews (Complete Series)

Summary

The Martyr Made Podcast: "Blacks and Jews (Complete Series)" Summary

Podcast Information:

• Title: The Martyr Made Podcast
• Host/Author: Darryl Cooper
• Episode: Blacks and Jews (Complete Series)
• Release Date: November 30, 2023
• Description: An in-depth exploration of the historical and socio-political relationship between Black and Jewish Americans, examining the alliance's rise, its eventual fracture, and the enduring tensions that have shaped American society.

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I. Introduction

Darryl Cooper opens the episode by contextualizing his six-part essay series, "Blacks and Jews," repurposed for the podcast in light of contemporary tensions within the Democratic Party over the Israel-Palestine conflict. He underscores the historical unity between Black and Jewish Americans— a collaboration that sustained the Civil Rights Movement until the late 1960s when ideological shifts led to animosity and antisemitism within the Black community.

[00:02] Darrell Cooper: "Black and Jewish Americans were uniquely united socially and politically until the late 1960s..."

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II. Historical Alliance Between Black and Jewish Americans

Cooper delves into the early interactions between Black and Jewish communities in the United States, highlighting that prior to the Great Migration, these groups had limited direct engagement due to geographical separations—the rural South for Blacks and urban North for Jews. The shared experiences of persecution—Black slaves identifying with ancient Hebrews and Jewish immigrants fleeing pogroms—laid a foundation for mutual empathy and support.

III. The Great Migration and Urban Dynamics

Between 1915 and 1960, approximately 6 to 7 million Black Americans moved from the rural South to Northern and Western cities. This mass migration significantly altered urban landscapes, leading to overcrowded, ethnically diverse neighborhoods. While Jews maintained a distinct group identity and were relatively more tolerant of Black migrants compared to other European ethnicities, tensions began to emerge as demographic shifts intensified competition for housing, jobs, and resources.

[04:18] Darrell Cooper: "When the First World War began in 1914, all of the cities that became well known in the 20th century as hubs of African American life still had virtually no black people living in them."

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IV. Shift in the Civil Rights Movement: From Legal Equality to Black Power and Third Worldism

The civil rights movement initially focused on dismantling legal segregation and achieving social equality, with strong backing from Jewish activists and financial support. However, by the late 1960s, the movement's focus shifted towards Black Power, identity, and global anti-imperialism—an ideology influenced by Third Worldism. This ideological pivot aligned African Americans with global liberation movements but distanced them from their Jewish allies.

V. Breakdown of the Black-Jewish Alliance: Key Events and Culprits

Several factors contributed to the erosion of Black-Jewish relations:

1. Third Worldism and Anti-Zionism: Influential Black leaders embraced Third Worldism, which often included anti-Zionist sentiments. This ideology framed Israel as an outpost of white imperialism, alienating Jewish supporters of the Civil Rights Movement.

2. Urban Conflicts and Riots: Events like the Watts riots (1965) and later riots in Detroit and Newark highlighted deep-seated frustrations within Black communities but also complicated alliances with Jewish Americans who were often seen as part of the establishment.

3. Ocean Hill Brownsville Strikes (1968): A pivotal moment where Black activists pushed for community control of schools, leading to conflicts with the United Federation of Teachers (UFT), predominantly led by Jewish members. The strikes exposed rifts over control, educational reform, and underlying racial tensions.

[10:40] Darrell Cooper: "A strong strain of political radicalism told the same story to those Jews who were unmoved by Judaism."

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VI. Ocean Hill Brownsville Strikes and Teachers Union Conflict

The Ocean Hill Brownsville school decentralization efforts aimed to give Black communities greater control over their local schools. Radical Black principal Rhodey McCoy's administration implemented curriculum changes promoting Black nationalism and anti-Semitic rhetoric, leading to the dismissal of teachers who resisted. The UFT supported the fired teachers, resulting in widespread strikes and escalating violence. This confrontation significantly strained Black-Jewish relations, as Jewish union leaders defended their members against what they perceived as racist attacks.

[136:02] Darrell Cooper: "The community control experiment began with a pilot program in three districts. Two of them came off without much trouble. The third was the Ocean Hill Brownsville School District in Brooklyn..."

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VII. Rise of Black Nationalism and Anti-Semitism

Black nationalist movements, influenced by figures like Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam, increasingly adopted anti-Semitic positions. Leaders like Louis Farrakhan propagated the notion that Jews controlled media, education, and civil rights organizations to the detriment of Black Americans. This rhetoric fostered environments where antisemitism could flourish within parts of the Black community.

[34:54] Darrell Cooper: "The racists are wrong, but I wish they were right, for I believe that the wholesale merging of the two races is the most desirable alternative..."

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VIII. Urban Decay and Mass Violence in Inner Cities

The post-Civil Rights era saw significant urban decline, driven by white flight, deindustrialization, and the rise of the drug trade. Inner cities became plagued with poverty, crime, and violence, disproportionately affecting Black communities. Events like the Los Angeles riots (1992) underscored the volatile mix of economic hardship, racial tensions, and fractured alliances.

[66:01] Darrell Cooper: "In the aftermath, President Lyndon Johnson set up the National Advisory Committee on Civil Disturbances, better known as the Kerner Commission, to study the causes of the rise in urban violence."

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IX. Long-term Consequences and Today's Political Realignment

The fracturing of the Black-Jewish alliance contributed to broader political realignments. The rise of mass incarceration, economic disenfranchisement, and continued racial segregation entrenched divisions. Modern political dynamics still reflect the historical tensions, with debates over policies related to Israel-Palestine often echoing past conflicts.

[157:25] Unknown: "...the Ocean Hill Brownsville strikes were an unlikely landmark at the end of an era."

[169:20] Darrell Cooper: "They were more alienated from the mainstream. Of American life and more isolated than ever in ghettos hollowed out by crime and racial violence."

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X. Conclusion

Darryl Cooper concludes by reflecting on the enduring complexities of Black-Jewish relations in America. He emphasizes that the breakdown of their alliance was not merely a result of changing political ideologies but also stemmed from deeper psychological and sociocultural wounds. The legacy of mutual support turned to mutual suspicion, leaving both communities grappling with their intertwined histories.

[189:23] Darrell Cooper: "Jewish life in the Pale of Settlement hadn't been easy, but on average it was better than that of the Russian peasant and certainly better than the life of an American slave."

Cooper suggests that understanding this fraught history is crucial for addressing ongoing tensions and fostering genuine solidarity between Black and Jewish Americans in contemporary society.

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Notable Quotes with Attribution and Timestamps

1. James Baldwin on Black-Jewish Relations:

   [12:04] Darrell Cooper: "We had to cope with all of them as best we could... The Jews... exploiting you... It is bitter to watch the Jewish storekeeper locking up his store... it is an American problem."

2. Norman Podhoritz on His Prejudices:

   [17:54] Darrell Cooper: "There thereafter ... may have stepped beyond the precincts of the black Jewish alliance."

3. Joe Wood on Norman Podhoritz:

   [28:00] Darrell Cooper: "Gentle reader, don't be afraid. Read the record and see for yourself... a profound self-hatred menaces in Podhoretz's essay."

4. Lyndon Johnson's Speech on Civil Rights:

   [75:17] Darrell Cooper: "And, stunningly, he raised his arms in the air and invoked the slogan of a movement that was not too long ago perceived as the preeminent irritant to America's national unity: 'And we shall overcome.'"

5. Paul Berman on the 1960s Political Shift:

   [90:20] Unknown: "At one point during negotiations at city hall, Shanker deeply offended Lindsay's sense of decorum... they were simply power brokers looking to put their own power ahead of the public good."

6. Fred Siegel on Racial Conflicts:

   [110:33] Unknown: "Racial activists and their elite liberal backers had swept aside the opposition of white ethnics trying to preserve their communities."

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Final Thoughts

Darryl Cooper's comprehensive examination of Black-Jewish relations unveils a nuanced and often painful history of collaboration, betrayal, and ongoing strife. By tracing the evolution of their alliance and its disintegration, Cooper provides valuable insights into the complexities of racial and ethnic dynamics in America. This historical perspective is essential for understanding present-day challenges and striving towards a more unified and equitable society.

Transcript

[Darrell Cooper]

Hey everybody, this is Darrell Cooper. This is the Martyrmaid podcast and this is the audio version of a six part essay series I did a while back called Blacks and Jews. I wrote this for my substack a while ago, so if it sounds like I'm reading instead of speaking naturally, it's because this is an essay series. So in this case I am. I decided to release this to everybody on the main feed because in light of the recent uproar and the brewing Democratic Party civil war over the Israel Palestine conflict, it's suddenly become quite timely again. Black and Jewish Americans were uniquely united socially and politically until the late 1960s when the civil rights movement was subsumed by a third worldist outlook that that caused the Black Panthers and other activist groups to turn on the state of Israel and then on American Jews themselves. It precipitated a split in the so called Black Jewish alliance which had been the backbone of the Civil Rights movement during its glory years and it led to some of the worst outbursts of public antisemitism in American history. The intra left wing conflict over the current war in Gaza is not a new story, in other words, and in fact is an example of scabs being torn off old wounds that had just barely begun to heal. I wrote this series as I was preparing the most recent episode of who's Inner City Blues. So those of you who have heard that will be familiar with some of the material here. But there's also a lot of material that was not in that episode and it's got a different focus. As I said, this episode was previously or this essay series with the audio.

[Unknown]

Versions I should say was previously released.

[Darrell Cooper]

On my substack, which can be [e-mail] so if you enjoy this kind of content, maybe you'll show a little holiday cheer and help support the podcast by becoming a subscriber for just 5 bucks a month or 50 bucks a year. This is a 100% listener funded show. I don't have sponsors or any other kind of funding except what you guys contribute. So your generosity is greatly appreciated. It's the only thing that allows me to keep doing this. Now obviously this is a controversial topic, but I did my very best to handle it honestly and fairly. But if you have any questions or comments or criticisms, you know where to find me.

[Unknown]

Here we go.

[Darrell Cooper]

I'm content to die for my beliefs. So cut off my head and make me a martyr. The people will always remember it.

[Unknown]

No, they will forget.

Hell does exist.

[Darrell Cooper]

God is a thought. God is an idea.

[Unknown]

It is a place.

[Darrell Cooper]

It is somewhere.

[Unknown]

Hell does exist, but its reference is.

[Darrell Cooper]

To something that transcends all things. I ask you why we must tear ourselves apart for this small question of religion.

[Unknown]

Long before the recent hullabaloo surrounding Kanye West's self immolation on the steps of the Anti Defamation League's headquarters, much ink had been spilled over the complicated relationship between American blacks and Jews, though not.

[Darrell Cooper]

Much recently, when every so often a.

[Unknown]

Black celebrity hits the news for saying something that causes Jews to feel threatened or offended, the press treats each story as hermetically sealed off from the others. At all costs. Do they avoid suggesting that the incidents might be in any way connected, or that they could reflect genuine friction between the two groups rather than merely the ignorance of one misguided individual?

[Darrell Cooper]

The Kanye spectacle is a re eruption.

[Unknown]

Of an old volcano, long dormant and perhaps thought extinct. Soon after Mount Kanye blew its top, NBA star Kyrie Irving got in trouble. Before them were Jay Z, Ice Cube.

[Darrell Cooper]

Professor Griff, Lupe Fiasco, Nick Cannon, Whoopi.

[Unknown]

Goldberg, and many more. Cannon was fired from his TV job in 2020 for promoting the theory that black people are descended from the biblical Israelites rather than from Ham, the cursed son of Noah. Ye Irving and Cube also came under fire for promoting this original version of Wakanda Forever.

[Darrell Cooper]

Griff, Fiasco and Jay Z went the.

[Unknown]

Traditional route by suggesting that Jews own and control the recording industry that signed their checks. It is comparatively rare for celebrities of other races to make such a glaring faux pas on the topic of Jews. It took a bottle of Jim Beam in sleep deprivation for Mel Gibson to join the rappers and agree out loud that Jews control the entertainment industry. So what gives? It turns out that there's a history here, but our understandable reluctance in America to talk honestly about groups as groups has caused it to be mostly forgotten even by the principals. Until about 100 years ago, black and Jewish Americans still had little experience with each other. Most blacks still lived in the rural south, while almost all Jews lived in the urban North. In antebellum times, black slaves identified their plight with that of the ancient Hebrews toiling under the whips of Pharaoh. And Negro spirituals expressed their hope that they would one day be led out of captivity into their own Promised Land. By the turn of the century, the railroads had been built and word had begun to trickle down to some southern blacks that their Promised land was just a short train ride to the North. And soon the stampede was on. Between 1915 and 1960, some 6 to 7 million black Americans migrated from the rural south to the big cities of the north and west, one of the largest mass migrations in human history and one whose consequences defined much of American domestic politics in the 20th century. Baltimore, Philly, Brooklyn, Harlem, Detroit, St. Louis, Chicago, Oakland. When the First World War began in 1914, all of the cities that became well known in the 20th century as hubs of African American life still had virtually no black people living in them. Even the Ku Klux Klan had shifted its focus. The second KKK was founded in 1915 in Atlanta, but failed to really catch on in the South. Instead, its strongholds were in the west and Midwest in cities like Chicago, Indy, Cleveland and Portland. Like the early progressive movement, the KKK of this period was a WASP reaction to the disorder brought about by mass immigration. The cities had multiplied in size in the blink of an eye, and many had been taken over by corrupt ethnic political machines. Millions of immigrants, Southern European Catholics, Eastern.

[Darrell Cooper]

European Jews, Central European freethinkers huddled in.

[Unknown]

Hastily constructed ghettos that seemed to emanate crime, vice and disorder. These were the neighborhoods into which migrating southern blacks were funneled when they made their way to America's great cities. And they lived cheek by jowl with Irish, Italians, Poles, Jews and others who'd only recently arrived themselves. In the early years of the Great Migration, blacks were not seen to be invading white neighborhoods, but Irish, Italian, Polish and Jewish neighborhoods. If, as time went on, nobody spoke of Italian black relations or Irish black relations the way they continued to do about Jewish black relations, that is because Jews alone among European ethnics retained a meaningful sense of group identity while the others melted into the generic American white population. From the beginning, Jews were relatively more tolerant than the other Euroethnics of black migrants. What they heard about Jim Crow in the south reminded them of their parents tales about the Pale of Settlement. Blacks had been slaves in America, just as Jews had been slaves in Egypt, and both had survived since in their own forms of exile. A strong strain of political radicalism told the same story to those Jews who were unmoved by Judaism. Both groups had gone through their own ordeal of integration in the American cities they now called home. The Eastern European Jews who began arriving in the 1880s were seen as uncouth, immoral and potentially dangerous by the well assimilated handful of German Jews who preceded them to America. Those German Jews were afraid that the unruly behavior of their eastern cousins would ignite the flame of anti Semitism in America and went as far as setting up training centers for newly arrived Osjuden to be taught how to behave in their new country. Similarly, when southern blacks arrived in the northern cities, they encountered very small groups of well assimilated blacks who had lived there for years and looked down on them as an embarrassment. Dark skinned blacks faced discrimination and exclusion by lighter skinned blacks. There was also a general prejudice against rural southerners, white or black, who were perceived to be rowdy, vulgar, ignorant and more prone to violence and licentiousness. Like the German Jews, these assimilated northern blacks had managed to find some peace and even some acceptance in their cities. And they worried that they would be associated with the behavior of their country cousins. So there were reasons for Jews to.

[Darrell Cooper]

Feel some sympathy for blacks.

[Unknown]

But tolerance has its limits when underclass groups start bumping against each other. And Jews who could afford it soon followed other euro ethnics out of the increasingly black inner cities. When they left the neighborhood, some sold their shops and other businesses or transferred their jobs near the suburbs. But many didn't. And a situation arose whereby real estate, commerce and professional jobs in black neighborhoods were owned by Jews who had moved out. This was bound to lead to conflict, and it did such that by 1967, the black author James Baldwin, fresh off receiving his Nobel prize for literature, could write in the New York Times magazine. When we were growing up in Harlem, our demoralizing series of landlords were Jewish.

[Darrell Cooper]

And we hated them.

[Unknown]

This is how Baldwin begins his we hated them because they were terrible landlords and did not take care of the building. A coat of paint, a broken window, a stopped sink, a stopped toilet, a sagging floor, a broken ceiling, a dangerous stairwell, the question of garbage disposal, the question of heat and cold, of roaches and rats, all questions of life and death for the poor and especially those with children.

[Darrell Cooper]

We had to cope with all of.

[Unknown]

These as best we could. The grocer was a Jew, and being in debt to him was very much like being in debt to the company store. The butcher was a Jew, and yes, we certainly paid more for bad cuts of meat than other New York citizens. And we very often carried insults home along with the meat. We bought our clothes from a Jew, and sometimes our secondhand shoes. And the pawnbroker was a Jew. Perhaps we hated him most of all. The merchants along 125th street were Jewish, at least many of them were. Of course, many Jews despise negroes just as their Aryan brothers do. It is true that many Jews use shamelessly the slaughter of the 6 million by the Third Reich as proof that they cannot be bigots, or in the hope of not being held responsible for their bigotry. It is galling to be told by a Jew whom you know to be.

[Darrell Cooper]

Exploiting you that he cannot possibly be.

[Unknown]

Doing what you know he is doing because he is a Jew. It is bitter to watch the Jewish storekeeper locking up his store for the night and going home, going with your money in his pocket to a clean neighborhood miles from you, which you will not be allowed to enter. Nor can it help the relationship between most Negroes and most Jews when part of this money is donated to civil rights. In the light of what is now known as the white backlash, this money can be looked on as conscience money, merely as money given to keep the Negro happy in his place and out of white neighborhoods. Despite his humble upbringing, Baldwin's antipathy was that of a black intellectual having less to do with the day to day friction between an underclass group and the people just visible above them, and more to do with his offense at the idea that Jews would presume to usurp black American's rightful claim to the title of America's chief victim. One does not wish to be told by an American Jew that his suffering is as great as the American Negro's suffering. It isn't. And one knows that it isn't from the very tone in which he assures you that it is. The Jewish travail occurred across the sea and America rescued him from the house of bondage. But America is the house of bondage for the Negro and no country can rescue him. What happens to the Negro here happens to him because he is an American. End quote. Baldwin had titled his essay Negroes are Anti Semitic because they're Anti White. But it was the first part of that statement that got people's attention.

[Darrell Cooper]

Shortly after the essay was published, the.

[Unknown]

Times ran a response op ed by Rabbi Robert Gordes entitled Negroes are Anti Semitic because They Want a Scapegoat. It mostly goes downhill from there. This wasn't the first time simmering tension between black and Jewish intellectuals appeared in print. A few years before Baldwin's Jeremiad was published, Norman Pod Horitz gave the Jewish perspective in a now famous essay in the neoconservative journal Commentary called My Negro Problem and Ours. Podhor's attempts to excavate the roots of his own prejudice from his childhood experiences living in a mixed Brooklyn neighborhood with Italians, blacks and other Jews. His older sister was a left wing political activist and he had heard more than once that blacks were uniquely persecuted. But this seemed Preposterous to the 12 year old Padhoretz. A boy's world is quite small, and in my world it was the whites, the Italians and Jews who feared the Negroes, not the other way around. The Negroes were tougher than we were, more ruthless, and on the whole they were better athletes. What could it mean then to say that they were badly off and we were more fortunate? Yet my sister's opinions were sacred, and when she told me about exploitation and economic forces, I believed her. I believed her. But I was still afraid of Negroes, and I still hated them with all my heart. The bulk of Pod Horiz's essay is an itemization of grievances accumulated against blacks from his boyhood, and partisans ever since have debated whether it should be considered a confessional or an apologia. His best friend Carl was black, but one day Carl hit him on the way home and accused him of killing Jesus. When I ran home to my mother, crying for an explanation, she told me not to pay attention to such foolishness. And then, in Yiddish, she cursed the goyim and the svartas, the svartzas and the goyim. Karl, it turned out, was a shvartza. And so was added a third to the categories into which people were mysteriously divided. Pod Horitz recounts the time a new playground was built across the street from his house by the city of New York. The park even had a baseball diamond, and Podhoritz and his friends were ecstatic for about a week. Then a gang of black kids arrive and order them to stay away from the park. We refuse proudly and indignantly, with superb masculine fervor.

[Darrell Cooper]

There is a fight, they win, and.

[Unknown]

We retreat, half whimpering, half with bravado. My first nauseating experience of cowardice and my first appalled realization that there are people in the world who do not seem to be afraid of anything, who act as though they have nothing to lose.

[Darrell Cooper]

Thereafter, the playground becomes a battleground, sometimes.

[Unknown]

Quiet, sometimes the scene of athletic competition between them and us. But rocks are thrown as often as baseballs. Gradually, we abandon the place and use the streets instead.

[Darrell Cooper]

This is the schoolyard manifestation of the.

[Unknown]

Feelings James Baldwin was expressing in his article. Not all black kids would grow up to be effete homosexual. Novelists like Baldwin and the ones in Podhoretz's story are of this more common type. Baldwin wrote screeds for the New York Times because he couldn't bring himself to beat anyone up. Or maybe Pudhoritz's schoolmates beat him up because they couldn't write essays for the Times. In another Example, Podhoritz tells of the time he had the temerity to answer a teacher's question after a black boy named Quentin had gotten it wrong. I had seen Quentin's face, a very.

[Darrell Cooper]

Dark, very cruel, very oriental looking face, Hardin.

[Unknown]

And there had been enough threat in his eyes to make me run all the way home for fear that he might catch me outside. Now, standing idly in front of my own house, I see him approaching from the project, accompanied by his little brother, who's carrying a baseball bat and wearing a grin of malicious anticipation. As in a nightmare, I am trapped. The surroundings are secure and familiar, but terror is suddenly present and there's no one around to help. I'm locked to the spot. I will not cry out or run away like a sissy, and I stand there, my heart wild, my throat clogged. He walks up, hurls the familiar epithet, hey Mo fucka, and to my surprise, only pushes me. It was a violent push, but not a punch. A push is not as serious as a punch. Maybe I can still back out without entirely losing my dignity. Maybe I can still say, hey, come on, Quentin, what do you want to do that for? I didn't do nothing to you, and walk away, but not too rapidly. Instead, before I can stop myself, I push him back. A token gesture and I say, cut that out. I don't want to fight. I ain't got nothing to fight about. As I turn to walk back into.

[Darrell Cooper]

The building, the corner of my eye.

[Unknown]

Catches the motion of the bat his little brother has handed him. I try to duck, but the bat crashes colored lights into my head. The next thing I know, my mother and sister are standing over me, both of them hysterical. My sister, she who is later to join the progressive youth organizations, is shouting for the police and screaming imprecations at those dirty little black bastards. They take me upstairs. The doctor comes, the police come. I tell them that the boy who did it was a stranger, that he had been trying to get money from me. They do not believe me, but I'm too scared to give them Quentin's name. When I return to school a few days later, Quentin avoids my eyes. He knows that I have not squealed, and he's ashamed. I try to feel proud, but in my heart I know that it was fear of what his friends might do to me that had kept me silent and not the code of the street. Having grown up in many poor neighborhoods where white kids like me were a vanishingly small part of the student population, I sometimes wonder how scenes like this are taken by people who grew up in more stable environments. An unprovoked baseball bat attack is a traumatic experience for a 12 year old unused to violence. I hear people protesting that all 12 year olds should be unused to violence, but I, and probably Pod Horitz, could tell you that there are situations where it comes in handy. Podhoric recalls these experiences not only the pain, but the shame and humiliation, maybe especially those in vivid detail that reveals the emotional valence they still have for him as an adult. In other circumstances, one could make the case that he came by his prejudices honestly. If a woman was beaten with a bat by a man, or a black by a white, and the victim confessed to having developed a lasting fear and hatred of all men or all whites, few would flinch and many would sympathize. Hell, even if Pod Horitz had confessed to hating Italians or other white Christians as a result of bad childhood experiences, he would have been in the clear. The reader can judge for himself whether Pothorotz is exhibiting courage, malice or blind stupidity when he the hatred I still.

[Darrell Cooper]

Feel for Negroes is the hardest of.

[Unknown]

All the old feelings to face or admit, and it is the most hidden and the most overloaded by the conscious attitudes into which I've succeeded in willing myself. It no longer has. As for me, it once did any cause or justification, except perhaps that I am constantly being denied my right to an honest expression of the things I earned the right as a child to feel. How then do I know that this hatred has never entirely disappeared? I know it from the insane rage that can stir in me at the thought of Negro antisemitism. I know it from the disgusting prurience that can stir in me at the sight of a mixed couple. And I know it from the violence that can stir in me whenever I encounter that special brand of paranoid touchiness to which many Negroes are prone. It is impossible to imagine essays like this or Baldwin's running in major publications today, and I will leave it to the reader to decide whether that counts as a gain or a loss. Podhoretz's conclusion perhaps provoked the strongest reaction. He was skeptical that there was any realistic solution to the Negro problem. The Negro mind and soul had been too damaged over many years such that they themselves would sabotage any potential solutions that did emerge. The only solution Podhoretz could offer was quite radical and alas, given his own prior admission of feeling distaste at the sight of mixed couples, also quite unrealistic, namely to eliminate the Negro altogether through miscegenation.

[Darrell Cooper]

When I think about the Negroes in.

[Unknown]

America and about the image of integration as a state in which the Negroes would take their rightful place as another of the protected minorities in a pluralistic society. I wonder whether they really believe in their hearts that such a state can be actually attained, and if so, why they should wish to survive as a distinct group. I think I know why the Jews.

[Darrell Cooper]

Once wished to survive, though I'm less.

[Unknown]

Certain as to why we still do. They not only believed that God had given them no choice, but they were tied to a memory of past glory in a dream of imminent redemption. What does the American Negro have that might correspond to this? His past is a stigma, his color is a stigma. And his vision of the future is the hope of erasing the stigma by making color irrelevant, by making it disappear as a fact of consciousness. I share this hope, but I cannot see how it will ever be realized unless color does in fact disappear. And that means not integration. It means assimilation. It means let the brutal word come out. Miscegenation. The Black Muslims, like their racist counterparts in the white world, accuse the so called Negro leaders of pursuing miscegenation as a goal.

[Darrell Cooper]

The racists are wrong, but I wish.

[Unknown]

They were right, for I believe that the wholesale merging of the two races is the most desirable alternative for everyone concerned. In my opinion, the Negro problem can.

[Darrell Cooper]

Be solved in no other way.

[Unknown]

As you can imagine, this passage in.

[Darrell Cooper]

Particular drew the ire of many readers, black and white.

[Unknown]

The next issue of Commentary ran letters to the editor, who had the thankless job of choosing a few from among the flood that used language safe for publication. Some congratulated Podhoretz's courage to write the essay, but others were outraged. One of the latter was the black author and Village Voice columnist Joe Wood, who wrote a blistering essay in response accusing Podhoretz of repressed homoerotic feelings for black men, envy of the black penis, Jewish self hatred and many other defects of body and character. And of course, racism. Podhoretz is barking from the shadows. Gentle reader, don't be afraid. Read the record and see for yourself. Remember how much the writer envied Negro strength. Notice how he fails to mention the millennia of stigma between Jewish past glory and imminent redemption. Notice how easily his lunatic description of black experience could be used to describe Jewish experience. Then dare to follow my reasoning to its unattractive and obvious conclusion. At bottom, a profound self hatred menaces in Podhoretz's essay. Each time he reveals his weakness as whiteness, he is confessing how much he hates his weakness as Jewishness. Gentle reader. Throughout his essay, Podhoretz unwittingly gives readers a glimpse of the peculiar blend of desire, anxiety, and racism that informed the Jewish American discourse during the Depression. This collision of impulses is never better.

[Darrell Cooper]

Revealed than in the writer's discussion of.

[Unknown]

His black playmate named Carl. It is here that Pod Horitz comes closest to describing how his boyhood world shaped his ideas about black people. The scrape with Carl is perfectly typical of New York City, where ethnic clashes are routine. But the incident also condenses nicely a worldview peculiar to immigrant Jews at the time, which can be boiled down to a question with goyim slamming you from above and blacks threatening from below, what is a person to do? In choosing to open his essay with.

[Darrell Cooper]

A spotty memory of a black boy.

[Unknown]

Whose most notable feature is his moral equivalence to goyim, Padhoretz dismisses the idea of a special black moral station. It is an understandable move. African Americans history of subjugation bestowed a moral authority historically reserved for Jews by Jews in Christian Europe. Since Jewish Americans could basically be themselves without the kind of penalties they had suffered in Europe, a Jewish identity based on that oppression made no sense. One way to deal with the resultant confusion was to hate the displacers, the blacks, end quote. Podhoretz's essay was ahead of its time, presaging a shift in black Jewish relations that still lay several years in the future. At the time he wrote it, 1963, the rest of liberal white America was only just beginning to catch up to a civil rights movement that Jews had been a part of for years. Jewish money and leadership was decisive in setting up the NAACP in 1909. Communist and socialist movements in America were heavily Jewish, and their organization took racial equality to a level the rest of America would not see for decades. In 1961, white and black activists took buses into the capitals of the Deep south to challenge Southern segregation laws, and the vast majority of those white Freedom riders were Jews. They were threatened, beaten, and jailed alongside the blacks, even, according to some reports, being singled out for special abuse.

[Darrell Cooper]

During the 1964 Freedom Summer, two Jewish.

[Unknown]

Activists and one goy activist were kidnapped and murdered in Philadelphia, Mississippi. Between half and three quarters of all donations to civil rights organizations at the height of the movement came from Jews, who comprised only about 3% of the American population.

[Darrell Cooper]

People spoke of a black Jewish alliance.

[Unknown]

Sometimes approvingly, sometimes not. This all began to change when the focus of the civil rights movement shifted from legal equality to black identity, black pride, black power, and from the Deep south to the Northern and western ghettos. Already, by the early 60s, the nation of islam was making its influence felt on black consciousness outside the south. The nation of islam doesn't have much to do with Islam, a fact with which Malcolm x came face to face on his fateful trip to Mecca in 1964. According to Nation ideology, God is black, and the movement's founder, a former clothing peddler and heroin dealer, was his latest earthly incarnation. The first humans were also black, spoke arabic, and are the ancestors of all.

[Darrell Cooper]

Colored people in the world today.

[Unknown]

One day, a rogue black wizard named yaqub decided to muck things up by creating the white race, breeding them over centuries from black recessive genes. The violence and underhandedness of the white.

[Darrell Cooper]

Devils caught the inherently peaceful blacks off.

[Unknown]

Guard, allowing whites to take over and run the planet. God determined that whites would rule over the conquered blacks for 6,000 years, a period conveniently scheduled to end in the 20th century, when the white race would be destroyed and the black paradise reinstated. In a 1959 interview with the Pittsburgh courier, Elijah Muhammad, the nation's leader, said, the human beast, the serpent, the dragon, the devil and satan all mean one and the same.

[Darrell Cooper]

The people or race known as the.

[Unknown]

White or caucasian race, sometimes called the.

[Darrell Cooper]

European race, Since by nature they were.

[Unknown]

Created liars and murderers. They are the enemies of truth and righteousness and the enemies of those who seek truth. This idea was elaborated upon by Muhammad's acolyte, Malcolm little, better known as Malcolm x.

[Darrell Cooper]

These aren't white people.

[Unknown]

You're not using the right language. When you say the white man, you.

[Darrell Cooper]

Call it the devil.

[Unknown]

When you call him the devil, you're calling him by his name. And he's got another name, Satan. Another name serpent, Another name beast. All these names are in the bible for the white man. Another name pharaoh. Another name Caesar. Another name France. He made this statement during the bloody war between France and Algerian insurgents. French, frenchman, Englishman, American, all these are just names for the devil. When people believe they're part of a chosen and holy race, they are liable to come into conflict with other people who believe the same about them. The nation of Islam and the Aryan nation might not agree on much, but they find common ground on the Jewish question. Both movements believe that they are descended from the biblical Israelites, and both reserve a special place in their demonology for today's imposter Jews, who were alleged by both groups to secretly control the world. Another nation of islam leader, Louis farrakhan, would later say the Jews came at the turn of the century into the black community. And they became strong, nursing from the breast of the black community, growing to disrespect the very breast that had nursed them to strength. They know someday they will be punished for the bad things they have done to blacks. They didn't apologize for putting my brothers and sisters to live in homes or apartments and charging them the highest rents. They don't apologize for setting up liquor stores when they don't drink too much themselves, feeding my brothers and sisters alcohol. They don't apologize for sucking the blood of our poor people that they might live well. As long as Jewish people control the media, then Arabs, blacks, Muslims will never have a balanced view.

[Darrell Cooper]

You don't have to be afraid to speak out against Jews if what you're.

[Unknown]

Saying is the truth. I'm not backing down from Jews because I know their wickedness. End quote. Farrakhan's words might be dismissed as the ravings of a sidewalk lunatic, but while it's true his star has faded in.

[Darrell Cooper]

Recent years, it can be difficult even today to get black activists and community.

[Unknown]

Leaders to unambiguously distance themselves from him. Very few, if any, could denounce Malcolm X and maintain any credibility in the black community. Let's save the question of whether they ought to be pressured to denounce them until later in the essay. Malcolm's unique talents played no small part in bringing the Nation of Islam to prominence in the black rights movement. He was based in Harlem, the intellectual capital of black America at the time, and his career coincided with the shift of the movement from civil rights and legal equality to black power and world revolution. The rise of post colonial nationalist governments in Africa did for many black Americans what the state of Israel had done for world Jewry. Only in part, of course. For reasons already explained by Baldwin, any Jew could migrate to Israel and find comfort and acceptance, whereas any black American who moved to West Africa would have found himself in a land far more foreign than the one he'd left. Nevertheless, many black Americans could not help but identify with newly sovereign African countries, self governed by their colored inhabitants. Charismatic African leaders like Patrice Lumumba made a profound impression on black American consciousness, especially in the northern ghettos and especially in Harlem. In 1960, the CIA tried and failed to assassinate Lumumba. But the next year, the Belgian government succeeded in facilitating his overthrow and murder. It had all happened very quickly. Lumumba was murdered in January 1961, when he had only been in office a few months. Harlem activists who'd held public celebrations of Lumumba's inauguration now staged A small riot at the United nations building in New York. It was here, according to many versions of the story, that the term Afro American or African American began to enter into common usage. The old term Negro denoted a specifically American identity and was still used by most people. In the early 60s, African American emphasized the status of blacks as a diaspora population with as much reason and right to identify with Africa as American Jews.

[Darrell Cooper]

Had to identify with Israel.

[Unknown]

Lumumba had come to power the same month, September 1960, that Cuban revolutionary leader.

[Darrell Cooper]

Fidel Castro visited Harlem, where he was.

[Unknown]

Honored with a parade and met several black leaders and intellectuals, including Malcolm X. In January 1961, the same month Lumumba was murdered, the US government broke off relations with Cuba and began its campaign to take Castro's life. Reports were trickling out of US Interventions.

[Darrell Cooper]

In Central and South America, Southeast Asia.

[Unknown]

And the East Indies. Britain was trying to maintain control of what was left of its dying empire, and France was engaged in a bloody war against the Algerian independence movement. African American intellectuals in Harlem began to promote the view that their problem was not a uniquely American problem, but was instead just the local manifestation of a global problem. The white Christian world had subjugated and oppressed the colored world for as long as anyone could remember, and a global revolution was now erupting to overthrow white power. This was all happening when Malcolm X was arguably at the height of his.

[Darrell Cooper]

Powers, and his charismatic eloquence exerted a.

[Unknown]

Strong influence on people getting their first taste of Third Worldism. After the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts were passed in 1964 and 65 respectively, the movement went looking for new dragons to slay and found them in the inner cities of the north and West. In 1965, just one week after the Voting Rights act was passed and white Americans concerned with such things were congratulating themselves for putting a capstone on the civil rights movement. The Watts riots exploded in Los Angeles. 34 people were killed and thousands were arrested. The focus of the movement shifted from the south, where traditional leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr. Had emphasized the Negro's American ness, to the north, where more radical leaders emphasized his African Ness. In 1966, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, SNCC, began to purge most of its white, mostly Jewish members and renounced its commitment to nonviolence. That same year, SNCC leader Stokely Carmichael introduced the world to a new concept of black power, while Martin Luther King, Jr. Was thwarted in his attempt to force the integration of Chicago neighborhoods. The old guard was fading and the new generation that took Their place was radical and globally conscious in a way that the Southern preachers never were. Paul Berman, a liberal Jewish writer who lived through this period, wrote of this transition in the black movement to an identity rooted in the third world. African American political thinking in the 20th.

[Darrell Cooper]

Century is usually described as a series of mighty antinomies.

[Unknown]

Booker T. Washington stands against W.E.B. du Bois and Martin Luther King Jr. Against Malcolm X, which is interpreted to mean self improvement versus the demand for rights, integration versus separatism, nonviolent protest versus what Malcolm coyly described as non nonviolence.

[Darrell Cooper]

But deeper than all these, I think, lies a still mightier antinomy of African.

[Unknown]

American political life which is the conflict between emancipatory liberalism and the philosophy of global anti imperialism or Third Worldism.

[Darrell Cooper]

By black emancipatory liberalism, I mean the.

[Unknown]

Ideas of democratic socialists like A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin, jurists like Thurgood Marshall, Christian activists like King, all of whom demanded that America live up to its liberal promise. The black liberals were always the people.

[Darrell Cooper]

Who won the biggest victories for African.

[Unknown]

Americans, and they were always the people who maintained the closest relations with the Jewish and non Jewish liberals. Yet those same blacks always had to contend with a special American complexity unlike anything in the experience of their Jewish counterparts. And here he echoes one of Baldwin's sentiments. The Jews turned to liberalism as the negation of every feudal and theocratic thing that had historically kept them down. But the African Americans had to struggle against a society that was itself fundamentally liberal except in connection with them. Third Worldism was simpler in every way. The idea of a worldwide revolution by the colonized and non white populations against the European and white imperialists conveyed a good and encouraging message without having to make many delicate distinctions. The message said, you the African Americans are hopelessly outnumbered within the United States and this unfortunate reality cannot be wished away by a lot of talk about liberalism and rights. But on a world scale, you are no minority at all. The news for you is therefore encouraging. You are many, not few.

[Darrell Cooper]

Strong, not weak.

[Unknown]

Time will right your wrongs. This shift from south to north from American emancipatory liberalism to global anti imperialism set a time bomb that eventually blew apart the black Jewish alliance that had achieved so much success in recent years. The bomb exploded in 1967 when the Israelis attacked several Arab states and occupied the remaining Palestinian territories. The global left reacted with vehement condemnation of Israel, which practically overnight was transformed.

[Darrell Cooper]

From a refugee state, an example of.

[Unknown]

The oppressed achieving liberty and prosperity, an example for other oppressed peoples to follow to an outpost of white imperialism. Berman writes, African Americans played no part in working up this new, unattractive image of Israel, and in the early years they displayed little interest in it even either. But in the 1960s, the new image of Israel came to be accepted by revolutionaries around the world, and the American blacks who wanted to adhere to the Third Worldist idea really had no alternative but to accept at least some part of that view of Israel. And this was easy enough to do. In the rhetoric of Third World revolution, the African Americans figured among European imperialism's earliest victims, and the Palestinians among the latest. It was sometimes believed that Palestinian skin tone was darker than that of the Israeli Jews, as if in pigmental confirmation of the proposed new link between Palestinians and African Americans. And if any further sign of brotherhood between Palestinians and African Americans was needed, there was the all too clear reality that as the years wore on and the Arab boycott against Israel took hold, the old warm relations between Israel and the newly independent countries of black Africa turned chilly. And one of the few African nations with which Israel did succeed in maintaining friendly relations was of all unappealing countries, the land of apartheid. In these ways, the link between Palestinians and African Americans and between Israel and white South Africa came to seem natural, not doctrinal. From the perspective of Jewish liberalism, the black impulse to support the Palestinians was astonishing. Like the black Third Worldist, the Jewish liberal pictured his or her own doctrine as no doctrine at all, but as a simple reality. There might be much to complain about.

[Darrell Cooper]

In Israeli policy, but to see Israel as a European colony and an agent.

[Unknown]

Of worldwide racism, no, that was inconceivable. Surely the African Americans will understand that Israel is the minority civil rights movement of the Middle east, and the terrorists and tyrants who oppose it are the majority enemies of justice. Surely the African Americans will understand how, just as poor whites in the American south are eager to attack the southern blacks, so are the poor Arabs in the Middle east eager to pounce on the Jews. Surely we, the persecuted minorities, can appreciate each other's predicament. Surely the hearts of African Americans will beat for Israel. Those were the thoughts of the liberal Jews. And of course, Bayard Rustin was not the only black liberal who did view Israel and the Jews in that way. But a sizable portion of black opinion shook its head in dissent, and at.

[Darrell Cooper]

This the Jewish liberal felt almost dizzy with shock.

[Unknown]

It was the feeling that Yankovic defined as a vertigo, the vertigo felt by the Jews when they discovered that large parts of the left all over the world were suddenly shifting to an Anti Zionism that had always been the province of Arab monarchists and dictators and other traditional right wingers. So the Jewish liberals said, in effect, you, the African American, look like my brother because you too have been spectacularly oppressed. But when you turn your eyes to the endangered minority population of the Middle east, the Jews, you see with the eyes of a majority oppressor. You are my false brother. And because you look like my brother, but are actually my false brother, you are undermining me. You are taking away my ability to summon the world's sympathy. End quote. At the SNCC conference in 1967, Black Panther delegates insisted that anti Zionism become part of the organization's program. And none of the remaining liberals were willing or able to stand up to them. There was always a set of Jewish.

[Darrell Cooper]

Activists on the extreme left, such as.

[Unknown]

The Weathermen, who backed the shift to anti Zionism, but they were a small minority.

[Darrell Cooper]

The split still mostly involved activists, particularly youth activists.

[Unknown]

But in the revolutionary year of 1968, youth activists would explode onto the streets and leave their stamp on the rest of American culture. That year, as black riots consumed cities across America, the building tension would lead to open conflict between non activist mainstream Jews and their black neighbors. Over the ensuing decades, one incident after.

[Darrell Cooper]

Another pulled the black Jewish alliance apart. Until in the early 90s, a traffic.

[Unknown]

Accident involving a black boy in New.

[Darrell Cooper]

York set off the most serious instance.

[Unknown]

Of anti Semitic violence in American history.

[Darrell Cooper]

Mississippi. Most histories of the 1960s protest movement in America will mark a point in 1966 or 67 when cooperation between black and white activists broke down. But cracks in the alliance had begun to appear a few years earlier, riding on the success of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Famous for MLK's I have a Dream speech, black civil rights organizations in Mississippi began recruiting volunteers for the 1964 Freedom Summer, a massive effort to agitate, educate and organize black Mississippians to vote in that year's elections. The white student organizations wanted to help and their help was wanted. But the organizers requested no more than 100 outside volunteers. For reasons that would soon become apparent. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, sncc, the largest southern based black led civil rights youth organization, interviewed white volunteers to weed out those with a John Brown complex. They informed those who made it through the interview process that they were not there to save the Mississippi Negro, but to assist the thousands of native black activists who had been on the ground living and working for years before the white students arrived and would remain there after the white Kids went back home for the fall semester. But word got out that something big was going down in Mississippi and others wanted in. White civil rights activists like Allard Lowenstein began raising money and recruiting white students from universities in the north and West. And soon at least a thousand, probably several thousand. Over the course of the summer, white students flooded the state to do their part. Most of the student volunteers came from rich families and were recruited from the very best universities and brought with them a variety of mixed motives. Undoubtedly, they were moved by sympathy for the Southern Negro, but others journeyed to Mississippi on their own personal hero quest. Back at Columbia and Cornell, the activists who'd previously gone south as volunteers or citizen journalists were the aristocracy of the student movement. They were respected, envied, desired, and other students understood that a summer in Mississippi could be their one way ticket to cool kid status. Unlike the black activists who had been and would be working for years at the grassroots level at the state, the white students only had a few months before they had to head back to school. So they needed to accomplish something now to make their trip worthwhile. If I seem ungenerous, I'm only repeating the complaints that would become common among many of the native black activists by the end of the Freedom Summer. While the sympathy of the college kids for the Southern Negro was real, it was also distant and detached.

[Unknown]

When the rubber hit the road and.

[Darrell Cooper]

A group of Harvard Law students found themselves in a room full of black activists with a second grade education, their eagerness, impatience to move things along often led them to take over the proceedings and begin ordering the black activists around. Over the summer months of 1964, resentment and enthusiasm grew side by side. When the Freedom Summer failed to achieve any immediate political results. Which is not to say it wasn't a success on other fronts. It opened the door to a new breed of young black leaders like Stokely Carmichael, who insisted that their movement would never get anywhere following the lead of bossy white students and philanthropists. The claim was baseless and really quite ridiculous.

[Unknown]

All of the civil rights movement's major.

[Darrell Cooper]

Successes, desegregation decisions at the Supreme Court, the Civil Rights act of 64, the Voting Rights act of 65, etc. Were achieved by the very people Carmichael and his allies attacked as white toadies and collaborators. Nevertheless, the idea began to spread that the movement's emphasis on racial reconciliation, incremental improvement and nonviolence reflected the existing leadership's excessive deference to white society. SNCC and other youth organizations emerged from the Freedom Summer with a new edginess but it would be years before people looked back and realized that 1964, 65 was the high watermark of the civil rights movement. To repeat a point made in the first part of this essay, a disproportionate.

[Unknown]

Share of the white activists were Jewish.

[Darrell Cooper]

I haven't brought it up here because at this early date it wasn't particularly important. Most of the activists were Jewish, and their Jewishness had something to do with their sympathy for the plight of southern blacks. But in 1964, the complaint of someone like Carmichael was not that there were too many condescending and pushy Jews in the movement, but simply that there were too many condescending and pushy whites. New York in 1964, most white Americans thought of the civil rights movement as a campaign to end legal segregation and solidify the democratic rights of black people in the former slave states. It was understood quite explicitly as finishing the job Reconstruction started, which is to say that it was considered by most white Americans outside the south almost as a foreign policy issue. Christopher Caldwell, in his excellent book Age of Entitlement, draws on polls, media reports and political debates of the day to demonstrate that whites in the north and west believed that the movement had nothing to do with them. They believed the Civil Rights act of 64 was a limited emergency measure to give the federal government tools to use against southern states unlawfully refusing black citizens their civil, legal and political rights. They believed that because that's how it was sold to them. And Caldwell believes that most of the.

[Unknown]

Salesmen believed it too.

[Darrell Cooper]

Within a year of the passing of the Civil Rights act, the Watts riots in Los Angeles, August 1965 would announce to the nation that these beliefs were misguided.

[Unknown]

But New Yorkers may have understood it sooner.

[Darrell Cooper]

Thousands of blacks rioted in Harlem and Brooklyn in July 1964 after a white cop shot a knife wielding black 9th grader. Earlier that year, nearly half of NYC's K12 student population staged a one day boycott of the city's schools in protest of de facto segregation and educational inequality. With nearly half a million students and teachers participating, it could be considered the largest civil rights protest of the decade. These were new problems in the urban North. Blacks had been migrating into the cities for decades by the 1960s, but like most immigrants, the first generation tended to keep their heads down and do their best to conform to the new environment. Their new circumstances were far from perfect, but at first glance it seemed to be better than Jim Crow.

[Unknown]

All of them knew from firsthand experience.

[Darrell Cooper]

That drawing the ire of white people carried serious consequences, and they tried to avoid conflict with their new neighbors. But their kids were a different story. By the early 60s, the first batch of black kids born in the Northern and Western ghettos had come of age. They'd grown up going to school with the kids of working class white ethnics in neighborhoods like the one Norman Pothoricz described in part one of this essay. Unlike their parents, they didn't fear white people. They understood rather that white people were more likely to be afraid of them. Pot Horitz relates a scene from his childhood that was probably there's an athletic meet in which the whole of our junior high school is participating. I am in one of the seventh grade rapid advance classes and segregation has now set in with a vengeance. In the last three or four years of the elementary school from which we have just graduated, each grade had been divided into three classes according to intelligence. In the earlier grades the divisions had been either arbitrary or else unrecognized by us as having anything to do with brains. These divisions, by IQ or however it was arranged, had resulted in a preponderance of Jews in the one classes and a corresponding preponderance of Negroes in the threes, with the Italians split unevenly along the spectrum. At least a few Negroes had always made the ones, just as there had always been a few Jewish kids among the threes and more among the twos where Italians dominated. But the junior high's rapid advance class, of which I am now a member, is overwhelmingly Jewish and entirely white, except for a shy, lonely Negro girl with.

[Unknown]

Light skin and reddish hair.

[Darrell Cooper]

The athletic meet takes place in a city owned stadium far from the school. It is an important event to which the whole day is given over. The winners are to get those precious little medallions stamped with the New York City emblem that can be screwed into a belt and that prove the wearer to be a distinguished personage. I am a fast runner and so I am assigned the position of anchorman on my class's team in the relay race. There are three other seventh grade teams in the race, two of them all Negro, as ours is all white. One of the all Negro teams is very tall. Their anchor man waiting silently next to.

[Unknown]

Me on the line looks years older.

[Darrell Cooper]

Than I am and I do not recognize him. He is the first to get the baton and crosses the finishing line in a walk. Our team comes in second, but a few minutes later we are declared the winners, for it has been discovered that.

[Unknown]

The anchorman on the first place team.

[Darrell Cooper]

Is not a member of the class. We are awarded the medallions, and the following day our homeroom teacher makes a speech about how proud she is of us for being superior athletes as well as superior students. We want to believe that we deserve the praise, but we know that we could not have won even if the other class had not cheated. That afternoon walking home, I am waylaid and surrounded by five Negroes, among whom is the anchorman of the disqualified team. Gimme my medal, muh fucka. He grunts. I do not have it with me, and I tell him so anyway, it ain't yours, I say foolishly. He calls me a liar on both.

[Unknown]

Counts and pushes me up against the.

[Darrell Cooper]

Wall on which we sometimes play handball. Gimme my muh fuckin medal, he says again. I repeat that I've left it at home. Let's search the lil muh fucka, one of em suggests. He probably got it hid in his muh fuckin pants. My panic is now unmanageable. How many times had I been surrounded like this and asked in soft tones, lend me a nickel, boy. How many times had I been called.

[Unknown]

A liar for pleading poverty and pushed.

[Darrell Cooper]

Around or searched or beaten up, unless there happened to be someone in the marauding gang like Carl who liked me across that enormous divide of hatred and who would therefore say, ah, come on, let's get someone else. This boy ain't got no money on him. I scream at them through tears of.

[Unknown]

Rage and self contempt.

[Darrell Cooper]

Keep your fucking filthy lousy black hands off of me.

[Unknown]

I swear I'll get the cops.

[Darrell Cooper]

This is all they need to hear, and the five of them set upon me. They bang me around, mostly in the stomach and on the arms and shoulders, and when several adults loitering near the candy store down the block notice what is going on and begin to shout, they run off and away. I do not tell my parents about the incident. My teammates, who have also been waylaid each by a gang led by his opposite number from the disqualified team, have had their medallions taken from them, and.

[Unknown]

They never squeal either. For days I walk home in terror.

[Darrell Cooper]

Expecting to be caught again, but nothing happens. The medallion is put away into a drawer, never to be worn by anyone. End quote. Among the many causes of white flight, irrational prejudice is the only one permitted to be mentioned in polite society. But concern for the immediate safety of one's children will drive even committed white liberals to start looking at real estate in the suburbs. Black kids in the 40s and 50s had grown up in a white country with white teachers and white politicians, white shop owners and landlords and cops, white heroes in the movies and on tv. They'd seen their parents bear insults that deserved retaliation and heard their warnings to give the white man a wide berth.

[Unknown]

What a revelation, then, that the white man's children were afraid of them.

[Darrell Cooper]

In his book Soul on Ice, Black Panther Minister of Information Eldridge Cleaver, I'll let others debate the question of whether he or his editors at Ramparts magazine actually did. The writing describes the special pleasure he took in raping white women. I did this consciously, deliberately, willfully, methodically. Rape was an insurrectionary act. I felt I was getting revenge. Cleaver is giving us a look at the intoxicating sense of power that comes from striking fear into someone perceived as an oppressor. What the Negro has discovered, wrote James Baldwin approvingly, is the power to intimidate. By the time this first generation of ghetto kids reached young adulthood, the urban situation was deteriorating rapidly. Already by the 1950s, the Black family had begun its decline, and more and more children were being born fatherless. Drugs were beginning to take hold, and gangs were growing in strength. Violent crime began a climb that wouldn't turn around until the early 1990s. Property values collapsed, and the white ethnics in the neighborhoods where most blacks lived fled as fast as their incomes allowed, taking their social and economic capital with them. Over the course of just one or two decades, neighborhoods that had been mixed became predominantly black or, in the case of New York City, black and Puerto Rican. When World War II came to an end, there were about 130,000 black New Yorkers. By 1964, there were 1.1 million. The number of schools in which minorities, mostly black, made up 90% or more of the student body tripled in the 10 years after 1955. Integration became a moving target. Schools which as recently as 1955 or.

[Unknown]

Even 1960 had been considered integrated, became.

[Darrell Cooper]

By the mid-60s almost entirely black and Puerto Rican. Brownsville, the Brooklyn neighborhood where Pod Horiz grew up, remained predominantly Jewish and Italian up through the 1950s. By the late 60s, it was 95% black and Puerto Rican, 77% black, 18% Puerto Rican. Other than the minority of beleaguered Jews and Italians who remained behind, the only white people with whom the black and brown majority interacted were representatives of authority teachers, cops, social workers and capital shopkeepers, landlords, pawnbrokers, bosses. It was only natural that whites continued to fill these roles, since most of the blacks and Latinos had only recently arrived. But the situation led to the toxic resentment voiced by men like James Baldwin the pace of black migration far outpaced the city's ability to house, educate and employ the new arrivals. But it wasn't for lack of trying. High modernist optimism still had room to run in those days, and NYC poured resources into parks, playgrounds, public housing and schools. To counter the self segregation taking place, the city started an open enrollment program to allow minority students in neighborhoods like Brownsville to transfer to middle class white schools and other parts of town with.

[Unknown]

Transportation paid for by the city.

[Darrell Cooper]

But no government program could overcome the demographic reality. While the overall number of white K12 students in New York City dropped by 8% from 1956 to 1963, the number of black students grew by 53% in those same years. The city tried to keep up. The American social historian Fred Siegel wrote. School spending in New York doubled between 1956 and 1967, while the city population.

[Unknown]

Remained the same and the number of.

[Darrell Cooper]

Educational personnel grew 60% between 1960 and 65. The rapidly growing school budget paid for programs and cultural enrichment.

[Unknown]

This meant money for concerts and museum.

[Darrell Cooper]

Trips, as well as for extra math and reading teachers. For some schools, psychologists, guidance counselors and teacher coordinators joined the staff. In the name of leveling up, New York, wrote Charles Silberman, added a staggering number of special services to schools and slum areas. At the time, the city spent some $200 more per pupil in slum areas.

[Unknown]

Than in white middle class schools.

[Darrell Cooper]

Then in 1964, the United Federation of Teachers, the New York City teachers union, backed the more effective schools program which provided saturation level services for ghetto schools, including reduced class sizes, two and sometimes three teachers per class, reading specialists and extended class hours. End quote. New York's teachers union, both members and leadership, was almost all white and very heavily Jewish. But these people were not unconcerned with civil rights or black advancement. The union didn't oppose the student boycott of 1964 and defended teachers who participated in it. Al Shanker, the U of T's president.

[Unknown]

And many of his colleagues marched with.

[Darrell Cooper]

Martin Luther King Jr. At Selma in 1965. These were liberal social democrats from the same social and political milieu as the many Jews who had helped shape Martin Luther King's integrationist message.

[Unknown]

Jewish Americans had been scarred by their.

[Darrell Cooper]

Early experience of the quota system that limited their numbers in some jobs in universities and so were deeply committed to the idea of meritocracy. The U of T encouraged its members to think of themselves as highly trained professionals and the union strongly defended New York's race blind Board of Examiners system. For teacher selection and advancement. Consciously or unconsciously, many of the teachers saw their black students and parents as new immigrants to New York City. Their mission, as they saw it, was to prepare their students to travel a path to success already mapped and proven by previous waves of peasant immigrants from the backward corners of Europe. It was a natural perspective for jewish teachers and administrators whose own parents had immigrated from the Russian empire and benefited from the settlement houses pioneered by Jane Addams to acculturate new immigrants to life in America. Nevertheless, it chafed on a growing number of black activists. After all, black people had been in America for going on 400 years, and they didn't propose to be told by second generation immigrants that they would have.

[Unknown]

To start from the bottom and wait.

[Darrell Cooper]

In line as if they'd just debarked at Ellis island. They wanted their slice of the pie, and they wanted it now. This was framed as a demand for community control. Simply put, black communities should be run by black people. The schools should have black teachers. The streets should be policed by black cops. The businesses should be controlled by black owners. At the time, the demand seemed less radical than it probably does today, since it was more or less how things had always worked in most American big cities. For example, Jewish predominance in New York's public school system Was a legacy of an ethnic patronage system that for years had ceded control of police and fire departments to the Irish, trash collection and.

[Unknown]

Construction to the Italians.

[Darrell Cooper]

Community control seemed to offer a shortcut.

[Unknown]

To black advancement in the creation of a black middle class.

[Darrell Cooper]

And the economic argument dovetailed well with the cultural case being made by the emerging black nationalist movement. Historian Fred Siegel writes, For the black nationalist teachers and administrators, the clash was an unprecedented opportunity for both self advancement and a partial answer to the land question that had always plagued them. Black nationalism, explained Bayard Rustin, offered a system of ideas which seemed to correspond with the interests of the emerging class of black professionals. Integration promised a tortuous struggle in unfamiliar institutions with uncertain rewards. But community control promised black professionals immediate, concrete gains, long overdue jobs and promotions to administrative and supervisory positions without the accompanying discomfort of venturing into foreign schools and neighborhoods under the ideological aegis of one's own community. It was a coincidental and perfect union of ideology and interest. The hope was not so much to respond to community demands as to create a political community, and not incidentally, a jobs fiefdom, by making the schools into the center of the struggle for black identity. End quote. There were many reasons to support community control, but the fact is that it challenged a fundamental pillar of the United Federation of Teachers. The union had only recently gained recognition from the city of New York, and the guarantees regarding teachers pay, job security, and working conditions had been negotiated with the city. Union leaders worried, rightfully, it turned out, that local boards of ideologically driven community representatives would assume the authority to hire, fire, and transfer teachers in violation of their union contract. If individual schools could do that, warned UFT president Al Shanker, there was no point even having a union. Unfortunately for Shanker, the black nationalists and community control advocates had unlikely allies in very high places, and the stage was set for a bitter fight that would permanently change New York City's political culture and reverberate across the country. We live in the waning days of the baby boomer. That generation was larger than any other in American history and wealthier. Their control over America's most powerful institutions has been more or less uninterrupted since the early 90s. They've used that control to turn their own generation's origin story, the 60s, into a new ur myth for the whole country, successfully replacing 1776, 1865 and 1945 with the desecrated monuments and fallen statues to prove it. There's almost no corner of American culture, including ostensibly conservative ones, where people still consider George Washington to be a more sacred figure than Martin Luther King Jr. If you don't believe me, go deface a monument to each of them and wait to see which one calls down the wrath of God or the Department of Justice on your head. The history of the 1960s has been supplanted by the myth of the 60s, and like all myths, this one has holes in it. One of the biggest misconceptions about the era mistakes the end for the beginning. The 60s, to most people, runs roughly through the Summer of Love 1967 to Woodstock or maybe Altamont in 1969. But the truth is that the great movements of the decade had by then run their course and had their effects. The black rights movement reached its zenith in 1964, 65 years before anyone had ever heard of a Black Panther. With the passage of the Civil Rights act and the Voting Rights act, the Summer of Love did not represent the birth pangs of the hippie movement, but its death rattle. What most people think of as the 60s marked the moment when opposition to the various revolutions crossed a critical threshold and the counterculture became a mainstream consumer phenomenon.

[Unknown]

Which is to say that it ceased.

[Darrell Cooper]

To be a counterculture in all but name, defining the exact moment when an era begins or ends is always somewhat arbitrary, but we can point to major turning points and vibe shifts with a little more precision. One of these moments came in the summer of 1965. People often point to the murder of JFK 1963 as the beginning of the 60s, and fair enough. But glance at Washington, D.C. in 1965 to take one example of the national mood, and you'd find politicians still speaking of the future as a 1950s space age utopia. In his book Nixon Land, author Richard Perlstein describes the buzz and optimism that defined the early administration of lbj, quote, I'm sick of all the people who talk about the things we can't do, Lyndon Johnson told an aide in one of his patented hell, we're the richest country in the world, the most powerful. We can do it all. The Great Society was the name Johnson gave his ambition. It rests on abundance and liberty for all, he said in a May 22 speech. A society of success without squalor, beauty without barrenness, works of genius without the wretchedness of poverty. The rhetoric was incredible. Still more incredible, it seemed reasonable. Lyndon Johnson successfully framed his reformist agenda as something that was not ideological at all, conservative even, simply a pragmatic response to pressing national problems swept forward on ineluctable tides of material progress. I doubt there have ever been so many people seeing things alike on decision day, lyndon Johnson said of his victory on November 5th. These are the most hopeful times since Christ was born in Bethlehem, he said while lighting the White House Christmas tree. And in his January 4, 1965 State of the Union address, he said, we have achieved a unity of interest among our people that is unmatched in the history of freedom. He continued, I propose that we begin a massive attack on crippling and killing diseases. I propose that we launch a national effort to make the American city a better and more stimulating place to live. I propose that we increase the beauty of America and end the poisoning of our rivers and in the air that we breathe. I propose that we eliminate every remaining obstacle to the right and the opportunity to vote. I propose that we honor and support the achievements of thought and the creations of art. Heart disease, cancer and stroke can be conquered not in a millennium, not in a century, but in the next few onrushing decades. The down payment on the revolution was a medical insurance program for the elderly funded out of Social Security contributions, another stalled New Deal era initiative steered by Johnson past its permanent obstacle, the American Medical Association. And then there was civil rights. The genesis of the Voting Rights act of 1965 echoed the genesis of the Civil Rights act in 1964. Following the March by martin luther king, freshly minted nobel peace prize laureate, from selma to montgomery, alabama, President johnson prepared to give the greatest speech of his career. Yet no one was prepared for the moral force of the speech Lyndon johnson gave to congress and the Nation on March 15. He wrote it himself and delivered it over the objections of temporizing. It is wrong, deadly wrong, to deny any of your fellow americans the right to vote. In this country, there is no issue of states rights or national rights. There is only the struggle for human rights. Their cause must be our cause, too, because it is not just negroes, really. It is all of us who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. Then, stunningly, he raised his arms in the air and invoked the slogan of a movement that was not too long ago perceived as the preeminent irritant to america's national unity. And we shall overcome. There followed the silence of a reaction too stunned for mere applause. Martin luther king cried. Senators cried. The next selma procession on March 21 was celebratory. Thousands of singing marchers, ranks of glamorous celebrities in the fore, Marching all the way through to montgomery. Should we defeat every enemy? Should we double our wealth and conquer the stars and still be unequal to this issue? Lyndon johnson had proclaimed then we will have failed as a people and as a nation. He signed the voting Rights act of 1965 on August 6 under the Capitol dome. He intoned about the slaves who came in darkness and they came in chains. Today we strike away the last major shackle of those fierce and ancient bonds. People cried. The negro's cause was America's cause. Who could argue with that? Those of you who have listened to God socialist, know what comes next. Less than one week after lbj signed the voting rights act, the worst urban violence since the draft riots of the civil war Exploded in the watts neighborhood of Los angeles. Unlike the riots of the 1860s, however, this revolution would be televised. Reporters couldn't go deep into the war zone without being attacked. But a helicopter streamed live footage of mass violence into homes across the United states for the next five days and nights. Aerial shots showed crowds of black people setting buildings on fire and dancing around them, then attacking and chasing away firefighters who tried to put out the flames. Rioters gave interviews, promising that the violence would soon spread into the suburbs, into the neighborhoods and into the homes of white people. More than once, viewers saw a TV news helicopter Forced to flee the scene because it was taking small arms fire from the ground. There had been racial violence before this in the 60s, but nobody was prepared for the scale and aggression of Watts. The televised scene seemed to portray a mindlessness and nihilism unfamiliar to people for whom Rosa Parks and and MLK had defined the racial question in America. Historian Fred Siegel writes, watts was unlike any earlier riot. We are still living. In its aftermath, Watts, the first major riot to be televised, inspired subsequent rebellions in Washington, D.C. detroit and Newark. The immediate damage to Los Angeles was obvious. 34 people, almost all black, were dead. Whole blocks had been razed and almost 4,000 arrests had been made. Much of Watts was never rebuilt. And neither was the relative optimism regarding race and integration that had briefly held sway in the wake of the historic 1963 Civil Rights March on Washington. The immediate response to Watts was to see it as the work of a small group of street toughs and criminals. The Tufts were involved, but the breadth of the participation suggested something much more ominous. Los Angeles was a city with an expanding black middle class, a city that, according to a National Urban League survey, ranked first among major American cities in the quality of black life. Yet post riot surveys showed that the rioters represented a cross section of black South Central Los Angeles. What had happened for blacks of all classes was that the surge in collective consciousness flowing out of the Southern civil rights struggle broke down barriers to the expression of the rage and hostility that had built up for so long. The primitive rebels of the Watts uprising, some of them gang members, were little concerned with integration and much concerned with authenticity and the power of violence to wipe away historic humiliations. Who has not dreamed, asked James Baldwin, of that fantastical violence which will drown in blood, wash away in blood not only generation upon generation of horror, but will also release one from the individual horror carried everywhere in the heart. Paul Williams, a young participant in the riots, described their almost mystical effect on him. Everyone felt high. It was like an out of memory period. Before, you were hoping for freedom within the civil rights movement, and when you came out the other end, you hoped for liberation, end quote. Mass media coverage of the Watts violence caused the race riot to metastasize in the same way that nationwide coverage of the Columbine High School massacre led to the proliferation of school shootings. Neither event was the first instance of its kind, but the coverage transformed it into something more than a local atrocity and opened up a new set of possibilities in the minds of many people across the country. A race riot has a lot in common with the scene from the movie Office Space where the protagonists take baseball bats to the computers, printers and other office equipment that symbolized the oppression of cubicle life. It makes no sense and from the outside appears utterly irrational and antisocial. Why would they burn down their own neighborhoods? Is a question that has been asked after every race riot since the 1960s. The answer is simple and disturbing. They burned down their own neighborhoods because they were bored and angry and because it was fun. It's fun to burn down a building. It's a thrill to tell a cop to go fuck himself. Hans Magnus Enzensberger, in a seminal essay about the rise of disorganized urban violence, describes what he called a molecular civil war. Their aggression is not directed only at others, but at themselves. It is as if it were all the same to them, not only whether they live or die, but but whether they had ever been born or had never seen the light of day. However huge the genetic pool of stupidity might be, it is not big enough to explain this urge to violent self destructiveness. And the nexus of cause and effect is so obvious that any child could understand it. Howls of protest at the loss of jobs are accompanied by pogroms which make it obvious to any thinking capitalist that it would be senseless to invest in a place where people go in fear of their lives. The most idiotic Serbian president knows, as well as the most idiotic Rambo, that his civil war will turn his country into an economic wasteland. The only conclusion one can draw is that this collective self mutilation is not simply a side effect of the conflict, a risk the protagonists are prepared to run. It is what they are actually aiming to achieve. The fighters know very well that there will be no victory. They know that eventually they will lose. And yet they do everything in their power to up the stakes. Their aim is to debase everybody, not only their opponents, but also themselves. A French social worker reports from a housing estate in the suburbs of Paris. They have destroyed everything. Letterboxes, doors, stairways. The health center where their younger brothers and sisters receive free medical treatment has been demolished and looted. They recognize no rules of any sort. They smash doctors and dentists, surgeries to pieces and tear down their schools. When they're given a new football pitch, they saw down the goal posts. This picture of molecular civil war resembles the full scale event, down to the last detail. A reporter tells how he witnessed an armed band smashing up a hospital in Mogadisha. This was no military operation. No one was threatening the men and no shots had been heard in the city. The hospital was already badly damaged, equipped only with the bare essentials. The perpetrators went about their business with a fierce thoroughness. Beds were slid open. Bottles containing blood serum and medicine were shattered. Then the men in torn and dirty camouflaged uniforms set about destroying the few remaining pieces of apparatus. They did not leave until they had made sure that the single X ray machine, the sterilizer and the oxygen generator were no longer usable. Each one of these zombies knew that there was no end to the war in sight. They all realized that within hours their own lives might depend on whether there was a doctor around to patch them up. And still their obvious intent was to eliminate even the smallest chance of survival. From Frantz Fanon's the Wretched of the Earth to the ravings of Prehaj Malcolm X, the intellectual architecture supporting a belief in the redemptive power of violence was already in place. Even in the immediate aftermath of Watts, the LA Times was referring to the destruction as an uprising, and who doesn't want to be part of an uprising? Essayist and 60s vet Paul Berman wrote that one of the remarkable things about the era was how rapidly new ideas migrated from fringe opinions to consensus truths. The Black Panthers, Mao and Malcolm Inspired militancy was to be heard only from a few Harlem street preachers in the early 60s, but by the summer of 1967 was found in every city with a black ghetto. An ideology of rebellion, rejection and defiance for their own sake had firmly taken hold. Until 1965, the Students for a Democratic Society SDS, the largest and most important left wing student group in the country.

[Unknown]

Had merely been the youth wing of.

[Darrell Cooper]

The stodgy Old League for industrial democracy. By 1967, Maoist radicals and nascent terrorists were battling for control of the organization of the student movement. Berman writes that by the 1967-68 school.

[Unknown]

Year.

[Darrell Cooper]

By holding daily demonstrations, by doing something outrageous or impudent against the war or American racism, by disrupting an occasional class or heckling a professor, preferably a good liberal, whose sin was to stand one inch to the right of the student left. By dressing slightly differently from the other students, in short, by resisting much, obeying little, the movement generated an atmosphere of confrontation which turned giddy and hot, which created a festival atmosphere which got hotter. There was a feeling that every aspect of the existing society had been discovered to be wrong and could be opposed, that in the splendid carnival of the student demonstrations, in rock concerts, in hippie neighborhoods and the continual insurrections of individuals, a revolution had already occurred, that the new society and the newer ways of living already existed in embryo. All you had to do was join the marches, the building takeovers, the amphetamine activism that went on night and day. The agit prop meetings in the dorms, the theatrical clothes, the music, and the strange new political rhetoric were signs of that new society. End quote. Young people crisscrossed the country in psychedelic buses, in VW vans, bringing a new level of connectivity to the movement. The mass media made celebrities out of photogenic protesters who competed for attention by raising the stakes, increasing the danger, showing their willingness to always go further. The difference between the white and black youth rebellions had to do with their human material. The black kids were tougher and more daring than the white kids, who always had one eye on the degrees and careers. They always expected to follow their protest phase. They were aware of their deficiency and did what they could to overcompensate. Kirkpatrick Sale, in his history of sds, wrote of an incident at Columbia University involving a leader of the Weatherman terrorist cell named Mark Rudd and a less radical non weatherman named Paul Rockwell. Rudd, in heavy boots, work shirt, leather jacket and cloth cap, gave off vibrations of restless energy during his speech, pacing back and forth at audience level in front of an unused podium, brandishing a chair leg, yelling at the students there for being soft and wimpy, and bragging of how he was preparing for the revolution. I've got myself a gun. Has everyone here got a gun? Anyone? Well, you better fucking get your shit together. After some 15 to 20 minutes of this, Paul Rockwell, a short, stocky SDSer, got out of his seat and moved toward the front of the room, declaring that Rudd had had his turn and now he wanted to speak. Rudd took two menacing steps toward Rockwell, hulking over him, but Rockwell just barreled ahead, slammed Rudd into the podium, pushed Rudd's fists away, and turned to face the audience. Rudd's face was a picture of stunned fear, all his rhetoric having done nothing to overcome his ingrained middle class unfamiliarity with and anxiety about violence. He stood there a moment, shrugged, then slunk off to join his friends to one side. The macho mood was dissipated. No one seemed to have joined the weatherman ranks that night. End quote Joe Wood, the black author and critic of the Norman Pod Horitz essay quoted in parts one and two of this series, accused Podhoritz of exhibiting homoerotic feelings to toward the black bullies of his youth. True or not, Podhoretz provided the ammunition for Wood's attack. He wrote, quote, there is no question that the psychologists are right about what the Negro represents symbolically to the white man for me as a child, the life lived on the other side of the playground and down the block on Ralph Avenue seemed the very embodiment of the values of the street. Free, independent, reckless, brave, masculine, erotic. What mainly counted for me about Negro kids of my own age was that they were bad boys. There were plenty of bad boys among the whites. This was, after all, a neighborhood with a long tradition of crime as a career open to aspiring talents. But the Negroes were really bad. Bad in a way that beckoned to one and made one feel inadequate. We all went home every day for a lunch of spinach and potatoes. They roamed around during lunch hour, munching on candy bars. In winter we had to wear itchy woolen hats and mittens and cumbersome galoshes. They were bareheaded and loose as they pleased.

[Unknown]

We rarely played hooky or got into serious trouble at school.

[Darrell Cooper]

For all our street corner bravado, they were defiant, forever staying out to do what delicious things. Forever making disturbances in class and in the halls, forever being sent to the principal and returning uncowed. But most important of all, they were tough. Beautifully, enviably tough. Not giving a damn for anyone or anything. To hell with the teacher, the truant officer, the cop. To hell with the whole of the adult world that held us in its grip and that we never had the courage to rebel against except sporadically and in petty ways. The neoconservatism of Podhoritz and the radical leftism of Mark Rudd are diametrically opposed responses to each man's youthful feelings of inadequacy in the face of black intimidation. Podhoretz grew up in a working class home in Brooklyn, playing in parks and walking home from school with the kids of poor and working class blacks and Italians. By his own account, he was intimidated and extorted and more than once beaten by groups of older black kids. He took a baseball bat to the head. As a small boy, he inherited liberal instincts from his family. But as neoconservative godfather Irving Kristol, who also grew up in Brooklyn, famously remarked about the movement as a whole, he was a liberal who had been mugged by reality. Rudd, on the other hand, grew up across the river in affluent Maplewood, New Jersey. I don't know what it was then, but today the small town has a median household annual income of $160,000. For Podhoretz, the Negro was wild and exotic, but also nearby. His feelings about blacks were shaped by his sense of the immediate physical, not to mention psychological, danger they represented to him. For Rudd, too. The urban Negro was exotic, but it was a mystique that could be admired from a safe distance. A city dweller's idea of wolves and mountain lions is different from that of a rancher whose livestock are their prey. If that comparison edges up too close for comfort to racial obscenity, read Tom Wolfe's account of the radical, chic soiree in the Manhattan penthouse of composer Leonard Bernstein and tell me if the Black Panthers they brought in as party props resemble anything so much as zoo animals brought in to arouse and titillate his guests. As an aside for any readers whose panties are beginning to bunch, I'm describing the perspectives of people like Podhoretz, Rudd and Bernstein, not whether their perspectives represent the ground truth or objective reality. In other words, I'm not saying that the Panthers in Bernstein's apartment were exotic zoo animals. I'm saying that is what they were.

[Unknown]

To Bernstein and to his friends, the.

[Darrell Cooper]

Weathermen were about as radical and violent as the white left got in the 1960s and 70s, which is to say, very radical, but not so violent. They just didn't have it in them. The black militants were built very differently. Crime and drugs were beginning to sweep through the inner cities, and in many neighborhoods and housing projects, street gangs became ubiquitous. By the late 1960s, the Black family was in full collapse, and the frustration and despair of poverty, substance abuse and single motherhood brought violence into many homes. By 1970, most inner city black kids would have personally witnessed or participated in a riot, sometimes more than one. This is a long way of saying something really quite obvious. Inner city black kids had a familiarity and comfort with violence that the white student radicals could only fantasize about. And this difference was reflected in the scale of the damage. When the two groups entered their terminal phase of radical militancy, the Weathermen, for all their posturing, ended up killing more of themselves than anyone else. The Black Liberation army, to cite just one group of black militants, ambushed and assassinated dozens of police officers across the country.

[Unknown]

I've been teasing you for a while.

[Darrell Cooper]

Now about the 1968 New York City teachers strike, but I thought that story would benefit from some more general background. The strike took place in a context where the hostile militancy and nihilistic violence on display in Watts 65, Detroit and Newark 67 and 100 cities in 1968 had found root in the minds of many of New York's black grade schoolers, as well as many of their African American teachers. White students, the few who were left in the neighborhoods we'll Talk about. And even white teachers were targeted, harassed and regularly assaulted, and worse, in schools that had descended into total anarchy. White liberals in city halls and college administrations had been cowed by feelings of racial guilt and the ever present threat of mass violence. The 1968 teachers strike was the first time violent black radicalism faced equally determined liberal opposition. And that's why it's remembered as a watershed moment in the history of American race relations. One of the major themes of the current essay series is how disruptive the influx of black Southerners was to the northern cities. And I thought it was worth saying a few words about previous mass migrations. Large scale population movements are bound to be disruptive even under the best of circumstances. And the black Great Migration was far from the first example in American history of new arrivals drawing the ire and bumping heads with previous residents. I also wanted to point out a historical pattern that I think has played out in the previous migrations and which was very much in play in the 1960s. So here we go. In the middle of the 19th century, roughly one quarter of the entire population of Ireland immigrated to the United States. The rapidity and scale of the transformation wrought on American society cannot be overstated. And the flood of humanity overwhelmed the country's adolescent institutions. In 1830, there were 17,773 foreign born residents in New York City, just under 9% of the population. For reasons I haven't been able to track down, we don't have the number for 1840, but by 1950 there were 235,733 recently arrived immigrants in the city, a 1,326% increase, which by that time shook out to about half the city's population. These were the demographic circumstances that set the scene for Martin Scorsese's film Gangs of New York. As with later mass migrations, the Okie Dust bowl refugees in California, the southern blacks moving to northern cities. Crime and disorder followed in the wake of the Irish migrants, and they soon found themselves in conflict with the previous.

[Unknown]

Residents of the cities in which they settled.

[Darrell Cooper]

Part of the problem was that as with most mass migrations, a majority of the new arrivals were young men. Some arrived unattached, others came with plans to bring their families in tow once they found employment. As anyone who's ever spent time in a mining camp or Marine Corps barracks knows, things tend to get rowdy when you put a bunch of fighting age men together with no marriageable women around to domesticate them. The later migrations of Okies and Southern blacks suffered from A similar gender imbalance, which often made them about as welcome as the hordes of Papist scum were with Bill the Butcher. In all three of these cases, the Irish, the Okies, the blacks. The vast majority of migrants were country folks, country back when that meant something. Most were illiterate and many had never even seen a major city. They were not accustomed to regimented industrial employment or the complex credit economy developing in the urban centers. They had little experience with urban police or the judicial system and often resorted to self help, that is private vengeance, if they felt they'd been wronged. The famous 1965 Moynihan Report drew explicit comparisons between the difficulties faced by blacks of the Great Migration and Those of the 19th century. Irish country life and city life are profoundly different. The gradual shift of American society from a rural to an urban basis over the past century and a half has caused abundant strains, many of which are still in evidence. When this shift occurs suddenly, drastically, in one or two generations, the effect is immensely disruptive of traditional social patterns. It was this abrupt transition that produced the wild Irish slums of the 19th century Northeast. Drunkenness, crime, corruption, discrimination, family disorganization, juvenile delinquency were the routine of that era. In our own time, the same sudden transition has produced the Negro slum, different from, but hardly better than its predecessors and fundamentally the result of the same process. In 1939, African American sociologist E. Franklin Fraser described its plight movingly in that part of the Negro family entitled in the City of Destruction. Now he's quoting E. Franklin Frazier. The impact of hundreds of thousands of rural southern Negroes upon northern metropolitan communities presents a bewildering spectacle. Striking contrasts in levels of civilization and economic well being among these newcomers to modern civilization seem to baffle any attempt to discover order and direction in their mode of life. End quote. The intake. Cities had their hands full figuring out what to do with all these people. During the Great Depression, tent cities dotted California's San Joaquin Valley to shelter the Okies as they followed the harvests looking for work. The locals considered the Okies vulgar, uncouth, ignorant and violent, and their settlements soon had a reputation as nests of crime and vice. In one famous case, the Los Angeles Police Department blocked the roads leading into LA county and forced back a caravan of Okies at the county line. Northern cities threw up cheap tenement housing to absorb blacks coming up from the cotton states. After the Second World War, some black neighborhoods in Harlem became so overcrowded that if the same density prevailed throughout New York City, the entire population of the United states in the 1960s could be jammed into just three of its five boroughs. Methven, 1970. The prejudice and resistance faced by black migrants was of course, greater than that experienced by the white Okies. But in both cases, their community's reputation for disorder was not entirely unearned, even if it was often exaggerated and overly generalized. Or consider this. During the peak years of the Irish migration, there were 10,000 to 30,000 homeless orphan children in New York City alone in the mid19th century. To make an obvious point, there were no government agencies with a mandate to address any of this. The hodgepodge of social welfare programs we now take for granted in the United States was thrown together on the fly to cope with the disruptions caused by these migrations, a fact which might go a long way to explaining why Americans feelings about the welfare state have been so different from those of Europeans. For example, New York City didn't have a public school system until 1842, when the need arose to civilize the spawn of Irish peasants and the packs of half feral, illiterate children running the streets and alleyways. The school system was worked into the corrupt Tammany hall patronage system as soon as it was established, with local boards controlled by often unlettered immigrant politicians who gave out teacher and principal jobs based less on instructional skills than on connections. New York Times, August 1969. The system muddled through the second half of the 19th century until, starting in the 1880s, another massive influx, this time of eastern and southern Europeans, overwhelmed the system once again. The schools were terribly overcrowded, with over 80 children per teacher in the primary grades, and thousands of children were denied admission because of lack of accommodations. It's from that same New York Times article. School facilities were decrepit and unsafe. The curriculum was rigid, based on rote memorization to accommodate teachers who lacked the skills to deviate from standard instructional manuals. There had always been reformers trying to update the school system, but to do that, they had to pry control away from the local boards and place it in the hands of dedicated professionals working on salary. At least that was the theory. Until the 1890s, it had been impossible to overcome the resistance of the current system's beneficiaries. But the crisis of that period created an opening for reform. It was the early progressive movement in miniature. A WASP led effort to centralize and professionalize government in order to subvert the power of an immigrant dominated patronage network. In 1896, the reformers successfully shut down the local school boards and brought New York City's public schools under the control of a bureaucracy that answered directly to the mayor. One of the reasons the reformers were able to break the resistance of entrenched interests in the schools is that they found an unlikely ally. Recent Jewish immigrants Unlike most of the other people flooding into the United States, the Eastern Jews who began arriving in the 1880s were not peasants. Many of them came from big cities in the Pale of Settlement, Odessa, Kharkov, Kiev and others. And even most of those who didn't were literate and numerate before they arrived. Jewish immigrants saw America as a new promised land. And Jewish parents saw the public school system as their kids ticket into it. They embraced education like no immigrant group in American history at the time and had an accordingly higher level of concern with how the schools were run. The Jewish students who benefited from the system carried on the tradition as adults. And already by 1925, half of the New York City Teachers Union Executive board were Jewish women.

[Unknown]

The reforms worked.

[Darrell Cooper]

The years after World War I are remembered by interested historians as a golden.

[Unknown]

Age for New York's public schools.

[Darrell Cooper]

In no small part because for the first time in the city's history, they were being taught and administered by people deeply concerned with education. Central to the reformers idea of professionalization was the introduction of an impartial merit system for hiring, promoting and placing teachers and administrators. While many legacy teachers were opposed to the higher standards, many Jewish educators, confident in their ability to compete in a.

[Unknown]

Strict merit based system, favored the reforms.

[Darrell Cooper]

At the time, many universities were placing limits on how many Jewish students could be accepted into each new class. A practice that reminded Jewish Americans of similar quotas they'd faced back in Russia. Jews were still over represented at top universities relative to their percentage of the total population. But their numbers would have been even higher if admissions were determined solely by academic merit. With good reason. Jews worried that abandoning strict standards of merit in favor of subjective judgment would inevitably lead to discriminatory quotas that negatively affected them. This was a major reason that Jewish Americans were such reliable allies of progressive era WASP elites in their battle against the immigrant run patronage system. The golden age ended around 1960 when another mass migration from the hinterlands, this time blacks from the deep south and not a few Puerto Ricans, had once again stretched the system beyond its limits. The mayor of New York City at the time was John Lindsay. Tall, handsome, the most frequent adjective used to describe him is patrician. The blue eyed Lindsay was the Platonic ideal of the old money white liberal. He came to power as an avatar of his class and of the educated professionals who served and identified with it. He shared his class's contempt for the white ethnics of the outer boroughs, seeing in their resistance to forced integration the northern equivalent of Southern segregationism. This is the same contempt, by the way, that caused east coast elitists to lose their shit. When Don from Queens became president of the United States in 2016, Lindsay promised to finish the job recent mayors had started by mobilizing black activists and community members to break the remnants of the old ethnic political machine. Much has been written about how forced integration policies following the Great Migration led to the breakup of white ethnic communities in northern cities. But what's less commonly understood is that this was a deliberate policy goal of the liberal technocrats. Charles Morris, a New York City welfare commissioner under Lindsay, said that he planned to put the black militants on the payroll and use them as a battering ram against the remaining working and middle class white ethnic communities left in the City. Siegel 1997. Judges and politicians never ordered black projects built in or relocated to wealthy WASP neighborhoods, and they never forced the children of wealthy wasps to bus across town to a dangerous public school. Invariably, it was the old Catholic and Jewish Catholic neighborhoods that were targeted, and it was expected and desired that the existing residents would scatter and thereby lose their cohesion. I was actually stunned at how explicit many liberal intellectuals and politicians were about this at the time, and can expand on it more in the future if you're interested. This is a pattern that's repeated itself throughout American history. Jewish predominance in New York's public school system was partly a legacy of progressive reforms designed to take control away from the previous generation's Irish immigrants. Those Irish immigrants, in their turn, had been used by the Eastern establishment to fight its crusade against the Confederacy. Nearly half of all Union soldiers were either recent immigrants often signed up on.

[Unknown]

The docks as soon as they left.

[Darrell Cooper]

Their ships, or else the first generation children of immigrants. We're not here to debate the causes of the US Civil War, so I'll just point out that there was great enthusiasm for it among the elites of the Northeast. And I've always found it unseemly that most of them bought their sons exemptions from combat while importing hundreds of thousands of foreign ringers to go south and kill the grandsons of the American Revolution. But I digress. The pattern can even be detected in colonial times, when northeastern colonial authorities, the patriarchs of the Eastern establishment, of which John Lindsay was a late representative, brought in tough Ulster Scots to be the cutting edge of the frontier, Lindsay's welfare.

[Unknown]

Commissioner might have said.

[Darrell Cooper]

Battering ram in a buffer against the increasingly hostile native tribes. In more recent years, Latin American immigrants have been a battering ram against black communities in Southern California. In almost every case, the liberal ruling class in America has sided with the new arrivals in their conflicts with the previous residents. This remained true when the simmering conflict between black New Yorkers and the predominantly Jewish teachers union came to a head in the late 60s. But this time the previous residents fought back and won. As the weather warmed in early 1968, Americans were preparing for another summer of racial violence. Riots had increased in number and severity each year since Watts, and there was no reason to believe that 68 would break the trend. The previous year, black residents of Detroit had fought pitched battles with the police amidst a city in flames, and only the intervention of the 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions succeeded in putting down the insurrection. When it was over, wrote the Detroit News, what was left was something worse than a slum. The ruined downtown resembled inscrutable megaliths in a wilderness of rubble so desolate that you can stand in the middle of Woodward street, the heart of the riot, at midday and not see a single auto for miles in any direction. 43 people were killed in five days and nights of violence. The Detroit riot came just a week after a race riot in Newark that had left 26 people dead. The long, hot summer of 67 eventually saw mass violence in over 150 towns and cities across the country. The black novelist James Baldwin wrote that black has become a beautiful color not because it is loved, but because it is feared. American political historian Fred Siegel accepted Baldwin's terms and wrote that Watts signaled a black secession of sorts from middle class and white norms. The institutions such as the schools, the civil service and the health department, so important to immigrant mobility were redefined as dehumanizing instruments of white domination. Black power was to be a struggle not so much for self sustaining freedom as for the self satisfaction that comes from humbling one's oppressor. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. SNCC had purged all of its white, mostly Jewish members in 1967. It was now under the control of H. Rapp Brown, a murderous militant who was emblematic of the changes that had taken place in the black rights movement since the focus shifted to the major cities. From his large platform, Brown openly called on black people to launch a Vietcong style guerrilla war against white America. Brown was a thug and would later be jailed on multiple occasions for charges running from Murder to simple robbery. But in 1968, his brand of leadership was becoming dominant in the black ghettos. People who lived in or near the riot zones didn't need to consult the newspapers to know what was coming. Violence. Small scale, random street corner violence was proliferating in every major city in America. Detroit's infamous Halloween eve, Devil's Night, had been known since the 1940s as a night when the city's youth engaged in minor pranks and acts of vandalism. Egging, toilet papering, leaving rotten vegetables or bags of dog crap on someone's porch. By the late 60s, Devil's Night was used each year by youth gangs to set fire to buildings and to rob, beat and sometimes kill locals unlucky enough to be caught outside. The murder rate nearly tripled during the decade. In New York and many other cities across the country, things were falling apart. And to many people it was not inconceivable that the violence could spiral into a real insurgency, if not like Vietnam, then at least like Algiers or maybe Northern Ireland. Working and middle class whites fled the increasingly black neighborhoods where most of the violence was concentrated as fast as their incomes allowed. Private schools proliferated as parents sought to protect their children from dangerous public schools. By 1967, school violence was so bad in New York City that the United Federation of Teachers went on strike for two weeks to defend its members right to discipline seriously disruptive students and to demand a police presence in the worst schools, a measure against which teachers had previously fought. They were opposed by the African American Teachers association, the ata, which argued that the very concept of the disruptive child was an expression of white middle class cultural bias against black culture. ATA member teachers were using their classrooms to radicalize and indoctrinate their students into the ideology of black nationalism. Politics was used as an excuse for violence, as when a gang of Puerto Rican students rampaged. That's from the New York Times through Eastern District High School in Brooklyn. After accusing a Jewish teacher of harassing them. School district bosses, fearful of being tagged as racists, ignored the teachers pleas for help. Students got the message that their teachers and principals were powerless and any semblance of order evaporated in many schools. Harold Salzman, a liberal Jewish teacher and.

[Unknown]

Union leader in New York City during.

[Darrell Cooper]

This time, wrote about what happened in a book called Race War in high the 10 year destruction of Franklin K. Lane High School. Salzman reported that teachers had been told to avoid confrontations with black students at all costs and that they should not expect the support of the district if an incident resulted from their failure to do so. Salzman wrote, quote, don't enforce the rules where black students are concerned. They were continually advised, let the blacks do their own thing. Don't compel them to produce identification cards. Don't require them to stand for the morning pledge of Allegiance exercise even though it is required by state law. Don't make an issue over their refusal to remove their hats in the school building. And above all, remember that these are changing times. And are you sure you don't harbor racist attitudes? In a variety of ways, sometimes subtle, sometimes more direct, most of Lane's teachers had gotten the message from its own administration and from the central school board. In this turbulent era, the New York City school board wasn't even backing up its own principals. At any given time, there were more than 20 of them cooling their heels at board headquarters after having been promoted to a desk job at 110 Livingston street as a result of pressure from black militants. If a principal couldn't expect the support of the school board on matters related to fundamental school discipline, no less violence and lawlessness, it followed that a principal wouldn't put his own neck on the line by sustaining a teacher who was foolish enough to try to break up a dice game or report, report a drug transaction on school premises. The name of the game for Lane's teachers had become mind your own business and don't get involved because they learned. In New York's tempestuous school system, the axe most often fell not on the incompetent, but on a dedicated teacher who tried to do an honest job for his day's pay. For a complex set of reasons, New York City was largely spared any mass violence while other cities burned in the summer of 67. In the aftermath, President Lyndon Johnson set up the National Advisory Committee on Civil Disturbances, better known as the Kerner Commission, to study the causes of the rise in urban violence. And New York City Mayor John Lindsay was tapped to lead it. Lindsay was the quintessential Rockefeller Republican, an upper class liberal, enlightened on racial questions and seething with contempt for the ethnic politics that had shaped city life in the east and Midwest for over a century. For Lindsay, the protests of an Italian or Lithuanian or Polish community against the relocation of a violent public housing project to their neighborhood had no more legitimacy than the wails of white southerners who didn't want to share a drinking fountain. The Kerner Report reflected that perspective. It concluded that the causes of urban violence were economic inequality, failed social services, police brutality, and media bias, all of which existed and continued to exist because of the racism latent or active in the hearts of white Americans. When his attention turned to the schools, Lindsay asked the Ford foundation, led by former Harvard Dean and JFK and LBJ National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy, to assess the causes and propose solutions for the ongoing deterioration, particularly in black majority schools. Bundy's tenure at the Ford foundation was defined by its focus on racial issues. Taking the advice of black activists, he began pouring the foundation's resources into poorly vetted local community groups in a boondoggle that was a domestic prelude to the US Government's dilemma and its covert war against Syria in the 2010s. With few resources on the ground to sort through local complexities and figure out who was who, they were forced to rely on self appointed community representatives to tell them where to spend their money, Much of which was siphoned off to local scam artists and the very militant organizations stoking violence in the ghetto. Well, when they weren't funding urban decay, outfits like the Ford foundation were studying it. And that was what mayor Lindsay had tapped McGeorge Bundy to do in New York City schools. The panel commissioned by Bundy to look into the issue consisted of university professors, black community activists, and wealthy philanthropists, but no K12 teachers or school administrators. As discussed in the previous essay, education reformers had managed at the turn of the century to take power out of the hands of corrupt local school boards that had long treated budgets, board seats, and teacher and administrative jobs as spoils for political loyalists. The reforms centralized control of the public school system and brought its management under the purview of salaried professionals working for the city. Now the Bundy report called on the city to reverse these reforms to decentralize and return to community control of the schools. Critics charged that community control was a euphemism for a return to an ethnic spoil system, but for that very reason, many black educators and activists were enthusiastic about it. According to the African American Teachers association, an ethnic spoil system was already in place, One which benefited white, mostly Jewish educators who had long since left the neighborhoods they were supposed to be serving. Historian Fred Siegel wrote, the ATA wanted what amounted to publicly financed black nationalist schools organized around the ideas of Marcus Garvey and Malcolm X. Like Eldridge Cleaver, the ATA wanted to assert pure blackness, unsullied by the need to hyphenate into an African Americanism. They wanted to eliminate the second half of the hyphenated term to speak not of African Americans, but of Africans in America. The ATA notes historian Jerry Poder, saw universalism as a Jewish liberal trick, a means by which Jews who did better academically by white standards would continue to hold on to jobs in the Board of Education. They pitted that which is private and ethnic as against that which is public and culture blind. They insisted that racial cultures were so separate that only black teachers could teach black children effectively. Individualism and personal merit, the ATA argued, was a myth perpetuated by whites to create black versions of the white middle class or black Anglo Saxons. The ATA called for an alternative black value system based on principles of collective work and responsibility, cooperative economics and unity. Giftedness in black children could be measured by a willingness to challenge authority. The United Federation of Teachers objected that the proposed reforms would give still theoretical boards of local representatives the power to nullify contractual rights the union had negotiated for its members with the city. The union was also concerned that bringing race into discussions of hiring, firing, promoting and placing teachers would erode standards and open the door to manipulation and corruption. Mayor Lindsay wasn't interested in their perspective, though, viewing it as the stubborn obstructionism of people trying to protect their privileges from a just racial rebalancing. The community control experiment began with a pilot program in three districts. Two of them came off without much trouble. The third was the Ocean Hill Brownsville School District in Brooklyn, and there the worst fears of the U of T were realized almost immediately during the debate over decentralization. The teachers had warned that in practice, community control would not mean more involvement by concerned parents, but a takeover of the schools by radical activists who were organized and prepared to take advantage of the reforms before they were even implemented. That's exactly what happened at Ocean Hill Brownsville. A radical black principal named Rhodey McCoy was chosen to take charge of the district. McCoy was an acolyte of Malcolm X, often visiting him at his home and attending the mosque where Malcolm preached. He was influenced by Harold Cruise's 1967 book the Crisis of the Negro Intellectual and agreed with it that Jews had too much power over the American left in general and the black struggle in particular. Cruz's book was published the same year as the Arab Israeli Six Day War and fit well with the anti Zionism.

[Unknown]

That had been incorporated into the Third.

[Darrell Cooper]

World identity of the black militants. The expulsion of white, again mostly Jewish, activists from SNCC that same summer was initially sparked by a debate over whether and how the organization should take a position on Zionism. Rhodey McCoy's intellectual influences, in other words.

[Unknown]

Led him to see Jews where others.

[Darrell Cooper]

Including other black activists, would have simply seen white people. Still, the UFT tried at first to be accommodative. A few teachers were uncomfortable with the direction of the program, and when McCoy demanded that they be transferred to another school, they agreed and the union expedited the move. Then the new community control board began implementing curriculum changes which included advocacy for black separatism and revolution. Pictures of Malcolm X, Elijah Muhammad and black nationalist slave slogans went up on the walls of classrooms taught by black radical teachers. A few black teachers began holding extracurricular training in martial arts and guerrilla warfare tactics, like the activists behind Lincoln detox, who believed that the way to cure drug dependency in black and brown people was to give them purpose by indoctrinating them into revolutionary politics. Black radical teachers turned their classrooms into training centers for black militants. White children were being openly discriminated against by some black teachers. Classes sometimes became struggle sessions, with white students being used as foils for the teachers, racial harangues. More white teachers became alarmed at what was happening. And this time, McCoy didn't wait for cooperation from the teachers union to act and summarily fired 13 U. Of T teachers and two administrators for ideological non compliance. Such a flagrant violation of the teacher's contract with the city forced the union's hand, and UFT members across the city walked off the job in protest.

[Unknown]

The city government was paralyzed on the issue.

[Darrell Cooper]

Mayor Lindsay, facing a tough election campaign and already looking ahead to a future run for president, did not want any trouble. The union took the fired teachers case to court, which ruled their dismissal had been illegal and ordered them reinstated. McCoy simply ignored the judge. He called on local black militants to blockade the school doors to prevent the teachers from returning to their jobs. Those who tried were threatened, harassed, sometimes worse. Mayor Lindsay, with the support of the ford foundation and the aclu, refused to have the police enforce the court order. Again and again, in arguments with U of T president Al Shanker, Lindsay asked, do you want the city to burn down? Shanker, in turn, accused Lindsay of being cowed by blackmail. The relationship deteriorated from there. Albert Shanker, the grim visaged UFT president, was the labor leader Lindsay liked least, a sentiment fully reciprocated by the queen's bred son of Russian Jewish immigrants. Lindsay viewed the brusque shanker as declassee, vulgar, and worse. He was the only person whom Mary Lindsay, the city's first lady, banned from the private living quarters at gracie mansion, the mayor's official residence. At one point during negotiations at city hall, Shanker deeply offended Lindsay's sense of decorum by putting his feet on the mayor's desk and revealing his sagging socks to the Lindsay people, Shanker and his union failed their test of selflessness and concern for the public interest. They were simply power brokers looking to put their own power ahead of the public good. One mayoral aide called Shanker a terrible, terrible person, while another remembers Lindsay calling Shanker an evil man. But to Shanker, Lindsay was the embodiment of every upper crust Protestant reeking of moral sanctimony in a whiff of genteel antisemitism who had looked down at him and his kind for generations. Lindsay's and Shanker's incompatibilities would impart an ethnocultural sting to the events to come at Ocean Hill, Brownsville and beyond. Shanker didn't back down, but neither did Rhodey McCoy. He invited black Panthers and other militants into the schools to speak to students and distribute literature, including one black nationalist leaflet insisting that black children should only be taught by their own black people and not by the Middle Eastern murderers of colored people, that is, by Jews. Another pamphlet was titled the idea behind this program is beautiful, but when the Money Changers heard about it, they took over, as is their custom in the black community. The fact that the Ocean Hill Brownsville Kultur Kampf erupted at a time when the black rights movement was making its plunge into third worldist revolutionary politics arranged the battle along new ideological lines. McCoy transformed a conflict that in other circumstances would have been framed as blacks versus whites into a fight between blacks and Jews. And by doing so, he ran right into the teeth of the teacher's defenses. In the current climate, the teacher's whiteness was their ideological vulnerability, but their Jewishness was their strength. If the battle had been understood as black versus white, the radicals probably would have routed the white teachers. But focusing on the teachers Jewishness put McCoy and the other radicals into a much tougher fight. In the former case, the teachers would have been on the defensive, fighting off accusations of white racism. But as it happened, they were able to go on the offensive, returning fire with credible accusations of anti Semitism. Throughout the summer, pickets and protests by both sides threatened violence. Black activist teachers led student revolutionaries against lines of police officers and with backing.

[Unknown]

From the Panthers and the Nation of.

[Darrell Cooper]

Islam, menaced the teachers demonstrations. When school was back in session, the teachers were still barred from their jobs and the city still refused to back them up. Schools were intermittently closed as teachers struck, came back, and then struck again. Sometimes the closed schools came under attack by black students who smashed windows and vandalized property. The prestige press attacked the teachers union and villainized its leaders. But Al Shanker was a bulldog, fearless, relentless and refused to back down an inch. In the end, the United Federation of Teachers got their way, more or less. After several strikes in protest of Lindsay's unwillingness to enforce the law, the New York state government stepped over the mayor's office and assumed control of the public school system. The community control boards were likewise stripped of any real authority and reduced to mere consultative bodies. The administrative victory was not the end of the matter, however. In the winter of 1968-69, racial violence exploded in schools across the city as black students, sometimes egged on by black teachers, threatened and attacked white students and staff. Student riots were reported in schools and black neighborhoods across the city. Harold Salzman, the teacher and union leader quoted above, described a notorious incident involving a popular chemistry teacher named Frank Siracusa. Just before the beginning of one of his classes, Siracusa was preparing the classroom when a large rock crashed through the second story window, sending glass spraying across the room. The teacher inched up to the window, half expecting to be hit with another volley. He looked down and saw two black youths brazenly staring up at him. Salzman says Siracusa was one of the more engaged teachers at the school and had spoken out against the increasing lawlessness at staff meetings, a stance that drew the ire of black activists in the African American Teachers association and may have led to his targeting. Fatefully, he decided that he had a responsibility to address the situation, and he went downstairs to confront the students. Slowly, he approached the two tall youngsters, who by now were joined by a third youth, somewhat shorter and younger but with as menacing a veneer as the older pair. I'm Mr. Siracusa, he said quietly. I'm a teacher, not a cop, and I'd like to know who broke my window. There was no reply, no discussion, not even a denial or an argument. In a flash, one of the youngsters drew a water pistol from his jacket pocket, spraying the teacher's outer garments with a liquid that was later discovered to be a highly flammable lighter fluid. Siracusa was befuddled.

[Unknown]

What's this all about? He thought to himself.

[Darrell Cooper]

For a brief moment, Siracusa figured it to be a juvenile prank, unaware that one of the trio was circling behind him. Suddenly he felt the thunderous blow crashing into his spine as he dropped to the ground, anguishing in pain. Defenseless, he felt the smashing of fists against his jaw and the pounding of booted heels into his groin, Lying helpless on the cold concrete, barely conscious, he sensed the burning flames from his overcoat, which had been set afire by his assailants, who then left him there as a potential immolation fatality. End quote. Siracusa was physically and emotionally scarred, but managed to survive the attack. By December 1968, Salzman wrote, the situation inside the school had become intolerable. The deterioration was complete. Nobody was safe as gangs of black youths, many wearing the berets and insignia of the Panthers, roamed the halls, ringing.

[Unknown]

Fire alarms, breaking windows, setting fires and.

[Darrell Cooper]

Assaulting any white youth who dared to go into a lavatory in any part of the building that was not under the supervision of an adult. Among the numerous incidents that shocked the staff during those December weeks was the ugly, unprovoked attack by five black girls against a young white girl. The hideous assault occurred in the auditorium, which was being used as a study hall due to the shortage of classroom space. Brutally attacking their victim, laughing and chanting, they stripped her of her clothing from the waist up. Viciously and sadistically. They punched her in the face and left her lying there helpless, half naked and hysterical. Her only crime the color of her skin. End quote. In another incident that same month, a young white female teacher was sexually assaulted by a black student on school grounds. In her after incident report, she wrote, a matter of two minutes passed between the leaving of my students and the point where I walked into the storeroom. He followed me and grabbed me from behind, around the throat. I felt that I could not breathe. He pulled me to the floor, he on top of me, pulling tighter and tighter against my throat. At this point, I had no breath and the pain in my throat was unbearable. I started to black out. I then became hysterical, throwing anything I could put my hands on, kicking, fighting and yelling, please don't kill me. During the fight, the boy had ripped off my chain belt, torn my stockings to shreds. Blood was pouring out of my mouth and all over my clothes. The extent of the rape I could not tell as I was only semi conscious the entire time. The only thought I had was that of losing my life. That same week, a teacher named Michael Bettinger responded to a small explosion in a cafeteria which he found crowded with unsupervised students. In his after incident report, he wrote, during my prep preparation period, I was informed by students that there were no teachers in the student cafeteria. I went down to the cafeteria located in the basement and called the dean's office. I noticed students stealing supplies. I went to pick up a box dropped on the floor. At that time my path was blocked by a male Negro student. I stood there for two seconds, did nothing, said nothing. At that time, the student punched me in the jaw without provocation. As I started to chase him, I was kicked, shoved and punched. Trays, garbage and cake were thrown at me. I was spit upon and attacked by a large number of students, at least 30. Salzman picks up the story Bettinger, weeping and holding an ice pack to his swollen eye, made a direct report of.

[Unknown]

The incident to an emergency meeting of.

[Darrell Cooper]

The Union chapter council that afternoon. Then Tony lamarca, a health education teacher who was in charge of supervision in the cafeteria, told about having witnessed the attack on lamarca was a stalwart on the faculty, well liked by the students, but on this day, visibly shaken and on the verge of tears, he blurted out the rest of the story of how he tried to apprehend Bedinger's assailant. In his written report to the principal, he As I was escorting him, the assailant, to the dean's office, the following events occurred. One, his friends came running from the cafeteria and surrounded me. Two, as they surrounded me, they began taunting and shouting at me, white motherfucker, what are you gonna do now? Lamarca told of just barely being able to escape from the hostile mob, and tears rolled down his face as he told his colleagues and these were kids I've known for a long time, kids I have in the gym and with whom I thought I had a close rapport. But out there it was like I was a perfect stranger to them.

[Unknown]

All that seemed to matter was that.

[Darrell Cooper]

They were black and I was white. Salzman, like most of his colleagues in.

[Unknown]

The school district, was a Jewish liberal.

[Darrell Cooper]

Who supported civil rights, and his sensitivity to the historical plight of black Americans.

[Unknown]

Comes through in his book.

[Darrell Cooper]

Rather than softening his account, his attempts to place the carnage in the context of the history of racism in America.

[Unknown]

End up making his account even more.

[Darrell Cooper]

Stark and shocking than if it had been written as a polemic by a white conservative. The book is incredibly hard to find.

[Unknown]

Today, and expensive if you do find.

[Darrell Cooper]

It, but there is an audio version on YouTube and I link to it in the written essay. I encourage everyone to listen to at least the first chapter to better understand the level of chaos faced by many New York City teachers during this time. What I've quoted here is only a small sample of incidents that occurred within just a few weeks at a single Brooklyn high school and Franklin K. Lane High School was not unique for an in depth series of Chapter by chapter.

[Unknown]

Discussions on Salzman's book scroll through the.

[Darrell Cooper]

Archive of the Pete Quinones show podcast. The teacher strikes had been on the front pages for months and deeply polarized New York City in a way that fractured the delicate Democratic Party coalition. Suddenly, liberal middle class Jews and conservative outer borough Catholics found themselves fighting on the same side and being attacked by the same high low coalition of elite WASPs and the Black militants they used as a battering ram. Then on December 26, 1968, a black radical teacher named Leslie Campbell, one of the most vocal and militant leaders of the student rebellions, one well known for encouraging and abetting student violence, was interviewed on a popular black radio station. He had brought with him several poems written by his black students and the host asked him to read one of them. The poem was titled A Tribute to Al Shanker. And again, that's the Jewish president of.

[Unknown]

The United Federation of Teachers.

[Darrell Cooper]

And here's the poem read on the.

[Unknown]

Air of a popular black radio station.

[Darrell Cooper]

In New York City. Hey Jew boy. With that yarmulke on your head, you pale faced Jew boy. I wish you were dead. I can see you Jew boy. No you can't hide. I got a scoop on you, yeah, you gonna die. I'm sick of your stuff. Every time I turn round you pushing my head into the ground. I'm sick of hearing about your suffering in Germany. I'm sick about your escape from tyranny. I'm sick of seeing in everything I do about the murder of 6 million Jews. Hitler's reign lasted for only 15 years. For that period of time you shed crocodile tears. My suffering lasted for over 400 years, Jew boy. And the white man only let me play with his toys. Jew boy. You took my religion and adopted it for you. But you know that black people were the original Hebrews.

[Unknown]

When the UN made Israel a free.

[Darrell Cooper]

Independent state, little four and five year old boys threw hand grenades. They hated the black Arabs with all their might. And you Jew boy, said it was all right. Then you came to America, land of the free and took over the school system to perpetuate white supremacy. Guess you know Jew boy, there's only one reason you made it. You had a clean white face, colorless and faded. I hated you Jew boy, because your hang up was the Torah and my only hang up was my color. So this is where things stood between blacks and Jews in New York city as the 60s decade came to its ignominious end. And since this is getting a little long, I think I'm going to leave you with that cliffhanger because, believe it or not, it gets worse. The political realignment that resulted from the conflicts we're discussing set the battle lines along which American politics is fought to this day. Like the Manson murders and the Altamont free concert, the 1968 New York City teachers strikes were an unlikely landmark at the end of an era. Far from the most dramatic or explosive racial controversy of the era, the Ocean Hill Brownsville strikes nevertheless helped catalyze a political realignment that remains in force today. Historian Fred Siegel writes, New York Mayor John Lindsay's reign of the best and brightest sparked a culture kampf between blacks and whites, blacks and Jews, unions and black nationalists, the ethnic heirs of the New Deal and the heirs to the civil rights movement. All these tensions crystallized around the Ocean Hill Brownsville school decentralization structure strife in Brooklyn, a conflict so intense that it was described in apocalyptic terms at the time. Even today, if you ask older New Yorkers which side you were on, you'll see the embers of their anger burning brightly, end quote. Elite liberals like John Lindsay abased themselves to show that they were down for the cause, and they did their best to redirect black rage away from their penthouses and on to the humble homes of middle and working class whites. Siegel continues. When Lindsay ran for re election in 1969, he pioneered the top bottom coalition that would increasingly come to define liberalism. Lindsay's two opponents in the campaign both attracted white lower middle class and middle class supporters who were enraged by the mayor, whom they mocked as a limousine liberal. Faced with this, Lindsay cleverly jettisoned the intermediate stratum of society for a political alliance of the black and Puerto Rican poor on the one hand, and wealthy white liberals on the other, end quote. In city after city and neighborhood after neighborhood, racial activists and their elite liberal backers had swept aside the opposition of white ethnics trying to preserve their communities. In a matter of a couple decades, most of the legacy parish communities in American big cities were broken up and scattered as white residents fled increasing crime and decaying schools and homeowners got what they could before their property values dropped any further. As a result, ethnic communities, which had been locally organized around formal and informal institutions, institutions and hierarchies lost their capacity for self help and a century's worth of built up social capital evaporated in one generation. This was a real social and political revolution imposed by liberal elites using black militants as their battering ram. But the militants bit off more than they could chew when they took on the New York City teachers Union. This time it was the activists who found themselves on the back foot, unable to control the terms of debate. Even with the prestige press mostly standing in their corner. The mostly Jewish teachers and union leaders had taken in left wing politics with their mother's milk. Their politics typically ranged from anti Soviet Trotskyites to New Deal Democrats, and they'd always supported civil rights and racial integration. These were not people to be easily cowed with frivolous accusations of racism, especially when their accusers were using language reminiscent of Old World antisemitism. It was the first time black militants.

[Unknown]

Ran into a group of card carrying.

[Darrell Cooper]

Liberals willing to stand their ground. Despite the legislative and judicial triumphs of the early 60s, by the end of the decade, black Americans were worse off than ever before. And things were only getting worse.

[Unknown]

They were more alienated from the mainstream.

[Darrell Cooper]

Of American life and more isolated than ever in ghettos hollowed out by crime and racial violence. The Vietnam War had put enough strain on the federal budget to justify cutting Great Society welfare programs to the bone. The white activists who'd spent their college years advocating the black cause moved on. Some to niche movements, others to cults, many to self improvement and still others to the normal middle class lives against which they'd momentarily and half heartedly rebelled. Energy went out of the black rights movement as the country soured on the possibility of a political solution to America's racial problems. High modernist public housing projects designed by prominent architectural theorists to socially engineer healthy living had become so dangerous and dilapidated that rather than try to repair them, most were simply demolished. Rat and roach infested war zones like Pruitt, Igoe in St. Louis and Cabrini Green in Chicago had become universally recognized symbols of the failure to integrate black Americans. After the Great Migration, lingering ghetto antisemitism festered out of sight and mind. There were occasional flare ups, but now there was no question who held the upper hand. In 1979, for example, Andrew Young, Jimmy Carter's black ambassador to the United nations, made the news after he secretly met with the UN representative of the Palestine Liberation Organization. The reaction was swift and unequivocal, and Young was out of a job a few weeks later. His firing hauled old resentments out of the basement and Young and a few black community leaders and activists made noises about the disproportionate power of Jews over American policy. A now familiar ritual then ensued as demands to condemn the anti Jewish bigotry of Andrew Young and his supporters were made on black figures from all walks of public life. It put the black public Figures in an impossible position, forced to choose between being castigated in the press for tacitly tolerating antisemitism. As they say, silence is violence, or.

[Unknown]

Being seen as bending the knee to.

[Darrell Cooper]

The ADL instead of standing with one of their own in his moment of need. The ritual is repeated in 1984, when civil rights activist and 84 presidential candidate Jesse Jackson was quoted referring to jews, using the pejorative Jaime and calling New York City Jaime town. One of the real tragedies of the great migration is that the industrial jobs.

[Unknown]

For which the southern blacks had made.

[Darrell Cooper]

The journey disappeared almost as soon as they arrived. Forget about employer discrimination. Surely there was some of that as well. But it wouldn't have mattered. New York city lost over 120,000 manufacturing jobs in just two years, 1969 and 70, and lost over 600,000 manufacturing jobs between 1967 and 1978. Small businesses that were destroyed by riots were rarely rebuilt, or else they were replaced by corporate outlets. They provided a few minimum wage jobs, but otherwise sent all their revenues out of the neighborhood. Over the course of the 1970s and 80s, the black middle class followed the white middle class out of the ghetto, and what was left of civil society in the inner cities collapsed in their absence. The drug market filled the economic vacuum, and congress responded by lengthening prison sentences for drug offenses. The street responded in turn. Since minors were not subject to the harsh mandatory minimum sentences, A generation of inner city black kids were put to work as runners and corner dealers, a shift in the ghetto economy that had catastrophic consequences for black culture. In the 1960s and 70s, many inner city drug markets were controlled by grown.

[Unknown]

Men with pretensions to respectability.

[Darrell Cooper]

This is often overplayed in pop culture.

[Unknown]

Portrayals like American gangster and the wire.

[Darrell Cooper]

But there was some substance behind the image. Frank Lucas, the Harlem heroin boss played by Denzel Washington, an American gangster, was 44 years old when he was arrested in 1975. There's a scene in the movie where Lucas men give away a truckload of Thanksgiving turkeys to the Harlem poor. And that really did happen. At the time of his arrest, Lucas owned office buildings in Detroit, apartment buildings in Los Angeles and Miami, a cattle ranch in North Carolina, and buildings and businesses all over Harlem itself.

[Unknown]

But as the war on drugs accelerated.

[Darrell Cooper]

Old school bosses like Lucas were all eliminated and replaced by kids who by now had been working the corner since primary school. Well, a kid with a wad of cash can't buy an apartment building.

[Unknown]

He can't hide his money in the Cayman Islands.

[Darrell Cooper]

Or launder it through legitimate financial instruments. Hell, a lot of them weren't old enough to buy a car. So instead the money was spent on expensive clothes, watches, jewelry, and for those.

[Unknown]

Who were of driving age, SUVs with.

[Darrell Cooper]

Big subwoofers and $10,000 rims. All of this bling, of course, marked.

[Unknown]

The owner as a dealer and made.

[Darrell Cooper]

The cop's job that much easier. Diamonds, gold chains and Yeezys are also.

[Unknown]

Easy and tempting targets for robbery. When I was a kid in the.

[Darrell Cooper]

Late 80s, guys got shot for their.

[Unknown]

Jordans and starter jackets on a regular basis.

[Darrell Cooper]

Instead of bosses controlling neighborhoods, you had.

[Unknown]

Teenage bangers holding down corners for six months, maybe a year before they were thrown in prison or killed by the next man up.

[Darrell Cooper]

Whatever order the bosses had previously imposed disappeared as the drug trade fragmented under the control of countless unsocialized violent children who fully expected to end up dead or in prison. Murder became easy. Violence spiraled completely out of control as.

[Unknown]

Crack flooded the streets in the 80s.

[Darrell Cooper]

The numbers are truly shocking to modern sensibilities. The US has seen a sustained spike in homicides and other violent crimes since the race riots in Ferguson, Missouri 2014. Baltimore, 2015, lots of places 2016 and everywhere 2020. Most big cities in America have over the last few years experienced their highest crime rates in decades. But these recent increases do not approach.

[Unknown]

The level of violence seen in the.

[Darrell Cooper]

1980S and early 90s. For example, New York City reported 433 homicides in 2022. In 1990, there were 2,605 murders in the city. In 2022, New York City reported 18,086 robberies. In 1990, there were 112,000 robberies in Los Angeles. In 2021 there were 382 homicides. In 1991, there were 1,856 killings. The rise in violent crime crossed all demographic lines. But in the cities, young black males accounted for an overwhelming share of the increase. To this day, African American men are responsible for at least 80%, sometimes 90% or more of gun crimes in many.

[Unknown]

Of America's largest cities.

[Darrell Cooper]

From 1989 until the Rodney King riots in 1992, Los Angeles county recorded over 6,500 drive by shootings, a rate of more than 5 per day. Los Angeles is an interesting case study because it seemed like an unlikely place.

[Unknown]

For the worst race riot in decades.

[Darrell Cooper]

For three decades before the 1965 Watts riots, LA had the highest rate of black homeownership of any major city. Likewise, the job market for African Americans was healthier than in most other cities as black workers benefited from the World War II boom when Japanese internment and Mexican deportation created a demand for low wage African American labor. Many people from other parts of the country were initially confused by LA gangsta movies like Menace to Society or Boyz na Hood because the hoods depicted on screen were nothing like the inner city projects back East. By comparison, the hood looked positively bougie. Or as travel writer Paul Thoreau once commented, in a Third World setting, Watts would be upper middle class because its drug dealers would have been long since executed. In the 1970s, Koreans began migrating to the US in large numbers and many of them settled in parts of Los Angeles they might have avoided if they'd first considered one of Thoreau's travel guides. Many of the immigrants were well educated. We're talking engineers, technicians and other highly skilled professionals. But their Korean degrees and credentials weren't recognized in the United States. Instead, they opened small businesses, liquor stores, laundromats, nail salons, things like that, and soon became a dominant commercial presence in Central la. Their success led to a West coast version of the situation James Baldwin described in his essay about black antisemitism. Only it was Asian business owners instead of Jews who were the target of black resentment. In 1992, a few months before the LA riots, tensions were pushed to a new high when an elderly female Korean shop owner shot a black girl who had just assaulted her. The incident was caught on the store's security camera and the video, often only depicting the shooting and not the preceding assault, was played on repeat by local news stations. The unspoken context of the shooting was that 37 Korean shop owners had been shot and killed by black robbers in just the three years before it occurred. The elderly Korean American woman shooter had been harassed, robbed and assaulted by black customers on multiple occasions. Which doesn't mean she should have shot the girl. The press focused on the alleged racism of Korean Americans and their supposed economic exploitation of black people. The LA Times ran stories about how Korean corner stores price gouged their black customers without mentioning that the higher prices were necessary to make up losses from shoplifting and robbery. Demagogues in the LA city government used the incident to further inflame the situation and on several occasions came close to making explicit calls for violence. The narrative surrounding the 1992 LA riot has always centered on the police beating of Rodney King, but in reality it was a multi day pogrom against the.

[Unknown]

Korean community of Los Angeles.

[Darrell Cooper]

Over 2000 Korean owned businesses were burned.

[Unknown]

Down on block after block.

[Darrell Cooper]

Korean Owned businesses were reduced to smoldering rubble, while neighboring businesses marked with signs reading Black Owned were left alone. The city government completely abandoned Koreatown rather than risk a confrontation with the rioters.

[Unknown]

And the Koreans, many of whom had.

[Darrell Cooper]

Served in the South Korean army before.

[Unknown]

Immigrating, were forced to defend themselves.

[Darrell Cooper]

The violence in Los Angeles was unique, but the hostility was not in cities across the country, inner city black communities were coming into conflict with neighboring minorities. In 1990, less than a month into the first term of new York City's first black mayor, quote, a boycott began of a Korean grocery store located on Church Avenue in Brooklyn. The boycott, set off by a dispute over how much a black customer owed the Red Apple market, was led by Sonny Carson, a convicted extortionist. It was an ugly scene from what I could tell by talking to local merchants. The boycotters who threatened store employees and intimidated would be customers had probably been involved in attempts to shake down other neighborhood stores. I listened as Sonny Carson's goons shouted about how the Koreans were slant eyed monkeys in a manner reminiscent of Sufi Abdul Hamed, Harlem's Hitler of the 1930s. Carson demanded that the offending store be transferred to black ownership, charging that Koreans were out to destroy the community's culture and economy. Wrote columnist Jim Sleeper, Korean Americans weren't the only ones losing patience with their black neighbors in Southern California. Latino gangs went to war with the less organized and increasingly less numerous black gangs and forced black residents out of swaths of Los Angeles in which they lived for decades. And then, of course, there were still the Jews. In 1991, a scandal erupted when Leonard Jeffries, a black professor at the City College of New York, delivered a two hour anti Semitic tirade at an event sponsored by SUNY's African American Institute and Governor Cuomo's Advisory Committee on Black Affairs. The scene was replayed a couple of years later when Khalil Abdul Muhammad, the representative and national assistant of Nation of Islam Minister Louis Farrakhan, with whom the Congressional Black Caucus had recently made a covenant, gave a speech at Keene College in Union, New Jersey. The striking thing, wrote Paul Berman, was the intensity. Rays of zeal and hatred beamed from his mouth. His topic was a book published by the Nation of Islam called the Secret History between Blacks and Jews. The national assistant said that the Jews were imposter Jews, demonic liars who rejected Jesus. He said to the Jews, jesus was right. You're nothing but liars. The book of Revelation is right. You're from the synagogue of Satan. Muhammad outlined a Jewish conspiracy over the millennia The Jews crucified Jesus.

[Unknown]

They dispossessed Palestinians.

[Darrell Cooper]

They exploited the Germans. Everybody always talk about Hitler exterminating 6 million Jews, but don't nobody ever ask what they did to Hitler. They went in there, in Germany, the way they do everywhere they go and they supplanted, they usurped, they had undermined the very fabric of society in the United States. They took control of the Federal Reserve in the White House and they persecuted the blacks. They dominated the slave trade. They conspired against such great black leaders as Jesus, Marcus Garvey and today Farrakhan. They participated in the civil rights movement in order to exploit the blacks. They used Hollywood against the blacks. The Jews and the Arab slum lords are sucking our blood in the black community. The Jews support apartheid. They raped black women.

[Unknown]

He said, what the Jews did, what.

[Darrell Cooper]

They did against Nat Turner, it's all in here in the secret history between blacks and Jews. But the worst is their lie, this lie of the Jews, which is in a sense their essence. The Jews, the hook nosed begle, eaten rock seating Jews were not in fact Jews.

[Unknown]

Muhammad addressed his black audience.

[Darrell Cooper]

For you are the true Jew, you are the true Hebrew, you are the true ones who are in line with Bible prophecy and scripture. So teaches the most Honorable Elijah Muhammad and the honorable minister Louis Farrakhan. The audience at Keene College cheered the speech. And with the polite exception of one soft spoken student, no one spoke up in opposition that day. In an essay written the year after the Keene College incident, black author Joe Wood concocted a fictionalized conversation to illustrate.

[Unknown]

The mentality that consistently allowed men like.

[Darrell Cooper]

Farrakhan, Muhammad and Jeffries to find an audience in the black community. It was simple and plain. You'd heard the Jews controlled jazz, the media, the Democratic party, the civil rights movement and Harlem real estate. And you wondered. You knew. This didn't explain why the police beat you up or why the public education system was a mess or why your neighborhood was without cable and regular garbage pickup. But you still wondered. Like when you saw the names on.

[Unknown]

The masthead of the New York Times.

[Darrell Cooper]

And on the credits of those Hollywood films. You would talk about it everywhere, even though you never saw anybody talk on a talk show speak about that. And you knew why. Everybody's an expert on black people and especially the Jews who claim they are our friends. But how come everyone can talk about the blacks but no one can talk about the Jews? You said, don't let them call you an anti Semite sister. You'll never work again. He said Jewish People do run the Times, you said. Definitely, he said. All you have to do is look at the names on the masthead to see that. And Jewish people do control most of the major studios in Hollywood. Just like they ran the teachers unions. Just like the Italians controlled carting and construction. And now Koreans run those fruit markets. That's the way it works. Why can't I say that? You know why. The real reason is what you do with the information, how you interpret it. I'm not out to get Jewish people. That don't matter. I know the Jews got it sewed up. They got the shit sewed up, he said, and can't admit it. I'm tired of reading about Israel and the Holocaust. About how they worked in the Civil Rights movement. They did that because the white boys didn't want them living one house over. My theory is they produced the Civil Rights movement. And the Pumped Up King and all them preachers. As a public relations diversion. So no one would notice them buying up mortgages. Well, you said, scratching your nose, you felt guilty whenever someone talked about the Jews. I think it's more that Jewish editors are not going to say anything bad about Jews. Just like if it was Irish editors there, you wouldn't hear anything about the Irish. Telling the truth is not anti Semitic. Am I right? You didn't say anything. He picked up the slack. I read where the Anti Defamation League said the white boys are the ones running around. Writing Hail Hitler and Jew boy and shit on the synagogues. They didn't report that. Desecrating graves and shit. Nigga's got better sense than that. Yeah, you said we're spending too much time shooting each other down. We're getting a lot of help, sista. True, but I'm not worried. Mr. Farrakhan's gonna lead us through shit.

[Unknown]

He laughed.

[Darrell Cooper]

Farrakhan is something, but did you read about the Grand Reby in Crown Heights? Schneerson in Them serious lunatics, sista. My theory is the Holocaust messed them up. The Lubovitchers are just the fringe version of a big psychosis. They all got over the Holocaust. Notice how no matter how comfortable life starts to feel. No matter all the power they have, they're always bringing back the Nazis. Either that or they're using the Nazis as an excuse to beat down niggas.

[Unknown]

Six million is a lot of million.

[Darrell Cooper]

You said in a light voice. I'm telling you, Holocaust got them psychotic. But I want to hear them talk about how many million of us died getting here. Six million is only a drop in the ocean compared to what we went through. I want to know how many of us died on the Jewish slave ships. They never teach about that holocaust. They prefer to call us svartas and forget about it. Then he continued. You don't hate them. Sometimes very quickly you said no. Good. Well I do. I'll be honest. I hate em sometimes. Because they were the minstrels. Al Jolson was a Jew and the Beastie Boys are Jews. Somebody even told me Elvis was a Jew. They bought our ship for a dime and made a mint off it. Fats Waller to Billie Holiday to Chuck Berry to all them rappers. It's the Jews making the money. They act like your friend, but they're the number one pimps of niggas. You got to admit that Jewish people definitely don't have a monopoly on that. But the Jews were the ones who made Hollywood. Selznick and Goldwyn and Meyer. Jews.

[Unknown]

You said that yourself.

[Darrell Cooper]

How many times you've seen a big nosed money grubbing cat named Goldberg up there on the screen? And how many times you've seen an ignorant can't talk gremlin actin nigga. So how are you going to say they're not responsible for that? It's a fact undeniable now. It's to the point where they don't even have to slander us anymore. They got their negro minstrels to say what they want in their papers and magazines and they give them a dollar and a prize and it's nothing but negro smiles. You know what I'm saying?

[Unknown]

Think about the times.

[Darrell Cooper]

They hate niggas because they know we got their number. You felt the pull of the words down down. You took a sip of water before you spoke. It's like nothing is more pathetic to me than a Jewish person. With all the Jews the Germans killed calling somebody a schwartza. But I still have to keep telling myself it's not only them. Because it's not. I ain't saying it's only. But I will say the Jews have done a majority of the thieving from us. It'd be lying to yourself not to admit it.

[Unknown]

Look at your history.

[Darrell Cooper]

They got us like Jesus and they're selling tickets to the show.

[Unknown]

Smart.

[Darrell Cooper]

Those Germans didn't kill em for nothing.

[Unknown]

What?

[Darrell Cooper]

I don't mean they shoulda killed them. I know you didn't. What I meant was the Jews must've done something. But that could sound like you're saying we deserve slavery. I'm not saying that. So what are you saying? I'm not saying they deserve to die. Nobody deserves that. All's I'm saying, sister, is that it's different. Because you have to remember that we weren't living in the same society as our oppressors. They didn't know us, but the Germans knew the Jews. Oh, but you said uh huh and let it slide. I know you think I hate them, he said in a muffled voice as if from underwater. But I don't. Only sometimes. And not all of them. Only the ones who use us. This hatred found its outlet in August 1991 after an Orthodox Jew ran over a couple of black boys in the Crown Heights neighborhood in Brooklyn. Most Jews had by then made it out of the rough parts of Brooklyn, but there were a few hanging around, including a significant Ljubovicher Hasidic community. The leader of the lubavitcher Hasidium was 89 year old Menachem Mendel Schneerson, and once a week Rabbi Schneerson made the trip out to Queens to visit the cemetery where his wife was buried. On his drive he was accompanied by.

[Unknown]

A police escort meant to protect him.

[Darrell Cooper]

From attack by rival Satmar Hasidic Jews? Don't ask. Regular members of the Lubavitcher Hasidic community would also follow along. And on August 19, 1991, a 22 year old rabbinical student named Yosef Lifsch was following the rabbi's motorcade when he lost control of his vehicle, jumped a curb and ran over two black 7 year olds. One of the boys, whose name was Gavin Cato, was trapped under Lifsh's car and the other, Gavin's cousin Angelo, was badly injured. Lifsh got out of his car and was set upon by a mob of black men who saw what happened. Before long an ambulance arrived on the scene. It was from an ambulance service sponsored by the Lubavitcher Hasidim for their exclusive use and rather than provide life saving care to the mangled boys, the ambulance loaded up the unhurt Lyft and sped away. Angelo Cato would eventually recover, but his.

[Unknown]

Cousin Gavin died at the hospital.

[Darrell Cooper]

A minor riot ensued in the afternoon and intensified after the sun went down.

[Unknown]

At around 11pm a member of the.

[Darrell Cooper]

Mob is said to have shouted, let's go to Kingston Avenue, a mostly Jewish street, and get a Jew. They found yankel Rosenbaum, a 29 year old doctoral student visiting from Australia, beat him, fractured his skull and stabbed him to death. For the next three nights, black youths wrecked the neighborhood, marauding through the streets, shouting kill the Jews. While the Jews hunkered down in their homes, Al Sharpton, pictured below as the slovenly scam artist he was before MSNBC gave him a makeover and a multi million dollar TV contract, showed up and did everything possible to make things worse. Invited to deliver the eulogy at Gavin Cato's funeral, Sharpton denounced the diamond merchants and shouted that the Jews were lucky the violence wasn't worse. All we want to say is what Jesus said. If you offend one of these little ones, you got to pay for it. No compromise, no meetings, no coffee Clatch. No skinning and grinning. Meanwhile, in remembrance of the dead boy, someone had hung a banner that read, Hitler did not do the job. Sharpton told an interviewer. If the Jews want to get it on, tell them to pin their yarmulkes back and come to my house. Before he died, Yankel Rosenbaum identified a black youth named Lemerich Nelson Jr. As one of those who'd knifed him. The 16 year old was arrested with a knife and three dollar bills, all covered in Rosenbaum's blood. But a heavily black jury found Nelson not guilty anyway. After the trial, several of the jury members attended a party with Nelson to celebrate their acquittal of him him. Over the next few years, moderate black intellectuals like Shelby Steel and Henry Louis Gates Jr. Of Obama Beer Summit Infamy wrote editorials trying to smooth things over, but were ignored or shouted down by black demagogues. Gaetz received no fewer than 10 death threats after publishing a New York Times op ed denouncing Farrakhan, Jeffries and other purveyors of black antisemitism. A few years later, Sharpton led a boycott against a Jewish clothing store in Harlem. In 1995, a black Pentecostal church that owned the property on which Fred Harari operated, Freddy's Fashion Mart, asked him to evict his subtenant, a record store run by a black South African. Harari tried to comply, whereupon Sharpton led.

[Unknown]

Protests at the store over the planned.

[Darrell Cooper]

Eviction and because Harari had no black employees. We will not stand by and allow them to move this brother, he shouted, so that some white interloper can expand his business. It didn't seem to matter that the white interloper had been told to evict the black tenant by the store's black church owners. Within a few days, a black man.

[Unknown]

Set fire to the store.

[Darrell Cooper]

The arsonist stood by the only exit with a revolver, shot at two cops and hit four customers trying to flee the flames. Later, firemen found Seven others who had been trapped in the building dead of smoke inhalation, end quote. The early 90s were a major turning point for black Americans not only in their relations with Jews, but with the rest of the country as well. Throughout the 70s and 80s, people were content to let the ghetto rot. If they want to kill each other, that's their problem. But by the early 90s, people had had enough. Cities elected law and order mayors like Rudy Giuliani and gave them a mandate to do whatever was necessary to clean up the streets. No one any longer believed it was possible to fix the inner cities. And policy has focused ever since on the narrower goal of how to help the good ones get out of the ghetto. Even the Democrats fell in line. In 1994, with Republicans about to sweep the midterm elections, Bill Clinton, with the vocal support of Joe Biden and even the acquiescence of the Congressional Black Caucus, signed the most significant anti crime legislation in decades, providing massive increases in funding for law enforcement and lengthening prison sentences for a range of crimes. The United States has tripled its prison population since 1990, and black men make.

[Unknown]

Up a disproportionate share of that increase.

[Darrell Cooper]

Mass incarceration of the black underclass. Some studies estimate that nearly one in three black males will see the inside of a prison cell at some point in their lives. May not be a viable long term strategy for fixing the ghetto, but it did fix violent crime. It's probably fair to say that there would have been no civil rights movement, at least as we know it, if not for the deep commitment of Jewish.

[Unknown]

Americans to the cause.

[Darrell Cooper]

I don't say that to underplay the predominant role of African American activists, But from the earliest days, Jewish volunteers provided the organizational sinews and Jewish money was the lifeblood that made the muscles of the movement work. Why did the relationship break down? First among the reasons has to be the embrace by black Americans of a separatist Third World identity. And not only because of the anti Zionism it required. Third Worldism consigned African Americans to the mentality of the exile, an outlook with whose pathologies Jews had been intimately familiar. After about 1965, the loudest voices in the black movement were no longer calling for integration into American society, but liberation from it. The complaint of many Jews who turned right on the racial question is implied in the title of arch neocon Norman Podhoritz by autobiography Making It. The complaint boiled down to we Jews were also oppressed. We too were hated, exiled, excluded. But we didn't let that slow us down we pulled ourselves up by our bootstraps and look at us now. So did the Irish, the Italians, even the put upon Chinese. Why can't you do the same? If you haven't gotten the message from many of the black writers I've quoted in this series, few things clang more harshly against their ears than an American.

[Unknown]

Jew comparing the obstacles they faced to.

[Darrell Cooper]

Those faced by African Americans. Jewish life in the Pale of Settlement hadn't been easy, but on average it was better than that of the Russian peasant and certainly better than the life of an American slave. The overwhelming majority of Jews in America had immigrated by the 1920s, years before Hitler ever came to power in Germany. And the truth is that Jews never faced significant discrimination in the United States States, certainly no more than the Irish and Italians experienced, or the Latin Americans, or the Chinese, or even poor whites.

[Unknown]

In the rural South.

[Darrell Cooper]

Meanwhile, African Americans faced legal restrictions comparable to the NSDAP's Nuremberg Laws right up until the 1960s. Some Jewish writers, like Podhorets, seem to despair at the possibility of ever making.

[Unknown]

Real progress on the racial question and.

[Darrell Cooper]

In their darkest moments, worried that something in the black soul might have been irreparably broken by slavery, by Jim Crow, by poverty, by everything. In the essay I've quoted throughout this series wrote quote, and when I think about the Negroes in America and about.

[Unknown]

The image of integration as a state.

[Darrell Cooper]

In which the Negroes would take their rightful place as another of the protected minorities in a pluralistic society, I wonder if they really believe in their hearts that such a state can actually be attained, and if so, why they should wish to survive as a distinct group. I think I know why the Jews once wished to survive, though I am less certain as to why we still do. They not only believed that God had given them no choice, but they were tied to a memory of past glory and a dream of imminent redemption. What does the American Negro have that might correspond to this? His past is a stigma, his color is a stigma. And his vision of the future is.

[Unknown]

The hope of erasing the stigma by.

[Darrell Cooper]

Making color irrelevant, by making it disappear as a fact of consciousness. Paul Berman put it a different way, and I'll leave you with this, since I'm having trouble figuring out how to close this thing out. The American Jews and the African Americans have never looked or sounded alike, and the difference in economic conditions has become ever more pronounced since the days of bedbug Jewish tenement poverty. As for the shared history of having someone's boot press on their vulnerable necks, this experience has taken Such different forms for blacks and for Jews as to be barely comparable. Any important element of Jewish and black, almost the sameness, if it existed at all, would have to lie in the zone of the invisible, which is to say the psychological, where all is murk. Still, I think a fateful trace of such an element does exist and can even be described, if only vaguely. Many populations have suffered catastrophic defeats, but not all defeats have the same result. The French, having been conquered by the Germans in the Second World War, were subjected to every terrible thing that Jankovic and his resistance comrades worked to destroy. But even so, the French could think back on their golden centuries of glory, and on that basis they could picture a future of renewed freedom and national self confidence.

[Unknown]

Maybe a bit chastened, but there is.

[Darrell Cooper]

A second kind of defeat from which you don't really bounce back. The calamity lasts too long. It is overwhelming. People who have undergone that second kind of experience can no longer remember a previous state of healthy self confidence, except maybe in versions that are mythological or religious. And their lack of pleasant secular memories is matched by a lack of any place on earth they can confidently regard as uniquely theirs. And their lack of geography is matched by an almost physical discomfort with their own bodies. Instead of a happy history or a home or a comfortable feeling about themselves, they carry around a memory of their own catastrophe, their enemy memory, in Shelby Steele's phrase. Anyone who wants to see an example of that plight in Europe today can wander into the main squares of the cities of Central Europe and contemplate the shabby looking Gypsies. The majority populations passing on the sidewalk treat the gypsies with contempt, and the gypsies glower and skulk and are frightening in return. Let's say a political miracle took place and the oppressed gypsies suddenly basked in the same rights and esteem as the majority populations and the doors of opportunity flew open and the days of gypsy oppression were over. Just how quickly would the remembered accusations of their enemies stop ringing in their ears? Steele, in his book the Content of Our Character, reminds us of how much harm these old memories can do, how they can leave people trapped forever in the worst moments of a bygone past, like someone huddling in an air raid shelter long after the real life planes have gone away. Yet if you think about the gypsies, it's easy to imagine that the ancient wounds have long ago inscribed themselves in the collective character, and around those wounds have grown all kinds of idiosyncrasies and compensatory works of originality. In music and dance, for instance, just to cite what all the world acknowledged long ago as expressions of a wholly admirable gypsy genius. Why would the gypsies want to abandon that? Obviously the sound and healthy thing would be to adapt their enemy memory to purposes that are strictly constructive and to find a way to rid themselves of the hang dog look and the outlaw trades, as the gypsies have done in the more enlightened democratic countries. But we can suppose that the gypsies room for maneuver is not unlimited unless they want to stop being gypsies altogether, which is inconceivable. End quote thanks for bearing with me through this difficult topic. I'm looking forward to taking on the next one. Thanks for listening.

[Unknown]

Sa Much spend it on the have not money we make it for we see you take it oh make me want to holler the way they do my life make me want to holler the way they do my life this ain't living this ain't living no no baby this ain't living no no no no inflation no chance to increase finance Bill's power sky high send that boy off to die oh maybe wanna holler the way they do my let down bad breaks, setbacks natural fact is oh harder than I can't pay my taxes oh made me want to holler and throw up both my hands yeah it made me want to holler and throw up both my hands cry Miss increasing trigger happy policing panic is spreading God knows where we're headed La Mother Mother Everybody thinks we're the mother who are there to judge us Mother mother simply call sweet where I am.

[Darrell Cooper]

Who sa.