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The Martyr Made Podcast
Sticky: #23 – Whose America?, pt. 2: Inner City Blues
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The Great Migration of 1915-1960 saw over six million African Americans move from the rural South to the big cities of the North and West. It was one of the largest mass migrations in human history, and one whose consequences defined American domestic ...
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Daryl Cooper
Hello, everybody. This is Daryl Cooper and this is the Martyr Maid podcast. So figuring out how to begin these episodes is always one of the hardest parts of making them for me. I don't, I don't know if that's true for other history podcasters, but it's definitely true for me. And as I pondered how to open this one, I was reminded of an old interview with Lee Kuan Yew, the founder and longtime leader of Modern Singapore, by the German magazine Der Spiegel back in the mid 2000s. Now, Singapore is a city state and it's carved out of the southern tip of the Malaysian peninsula across the Singapore Strait from the Indonesian island of Sumatra. It's one of the four so called Asian tigers, the other three being South Korea, Taiwan, and until recently, Hong Kong. If you throw in Japan, you've got these five Asian countries that were devastated by the Second World War, and in Korea's case, the Korean War, but which all roared into modernity and became very rapidly. They became orderly, economically powerful, high tech modern states. Now, if you've ever been to Singapore, I do not need to tell you it is a gorgeous city. It is safe, it is clean. Coming from the United States, it's almost impossible to imagine that a city of that size could be run so well. Of course, to achieve that result, Singapore does things a little differently than we do them. Here, plainclothes police officers can stop anyone on the street and make you produce identification. Chewing gum is not sold in Singapore because they don't want it getting all over the place. In my experience, they won't stop you for chewing gum that you brought from someplace else, but if you spit it out on the ground, you will find out very quickly how Singaporeans feel about that. Recently, they executed someone for trafficking 2 pounds of marijuana. They do not play around. I remember the first time I'd ever heard of Singapore. I was a teenager back in 1994, and it was because a young American had been caught vandalizing cars and public property. Those of you who are old enough might remember this too. And in addition to a few months in jail and a small fine, and again, this is an American citizen. He was sentenced to be beaten with a cane and that sentence was carried out. Most Americans would probably say that goes a little too far and that they would rather put up with a little disorder in the streets than what we would consider a serious infringement of our liberty. But the not inconsiderable number of Singaporeans that I've talked to over the years on my visits there, they would not have it any other way? Under the leadership of Lee Kuan Yew, who died a few years back, Singapore has been a one party state, not a democracy in any meaningful sense of the word. The one party state manages the place like a corporation. And so the German interviewer wanted to press Lee on this question of democracy, which of course in the west is considered by most people to be an end in itself, something to be pursued and embraced regardless of the outcomes it creates. Now, unlike Taiwan, Hong Kong, South Korea and Japan, though, Singapore's population is not homogeneous, not in terms of ethnicity, race or religion. There's a Han Chinese majority, but large Hindu, Indian and Muslim Malaysian minorities, giving Singapore a complex set of issues to navigate that the other tigers don't really have to worry about. And so the interviewer asks, Lee says, during your career you've kept your distance from Western style democracy. Are you still convinced that an authoritarian system is the future for Asia? And Li says, I cannot run my system based on your rules. I have to amend it to fit my people's position. In multiracial societies, you don't vote in accordance with your economic interests and social interests. You vote in accordance with race and religion. Supposing I'd run your system here. Malays would vote for Muslims, Indians would vote for Indians, Chinese would vote for Chinese. I would have a constant clash in my parliament which cannot be resolved because the Chinese majority would always overrule them. And so I found a formula that changes that. Well, one way to think about the United States of America is as one big real world experiment to see if what Lee says here is true. And since the 1960s, the points have mostly been racking up in favor of Lee's position. Unlike most other countries, maybe, maybe all other countries in world history, really, America since its founding, has, has never had a stable core population, at least not for long before it was swamped by new arrivals. Sure, at the time of the American Revolution, our cities were mostly full of Englishmen. But within one generation, immigrants from Ireland and Germany were cramming into neighborhoods old and new, displacing the old stock wasps, becoming the majority population in many big cities and in many cases coming to dominate local government and state government. In many of these places. No sooner had the children of the Irish and German migrants begun to assimilate than they themselves were swamped by a new mass migration, this time of Jews and Italians and Slavs and other people from southern and eastern Europe. By the time the children of these migrants had begun to assimilate to the American middle class they were soon overwhelmed by massive waves of black migrants from the rural South. In the case of New York City, Puerto Ricans. In some cities like Detroit, Baltimore, D.C. black people soon became an absolute majority of the population. And this happened in the course of a couple decades. Places that had always had black populations of less than 5%. A lot of the big cities up there, 1 or 2%, suddenly found themselves with a black population of 50, 60, 65%. Just a massive demographic transformation that totally changes the face of a city. In places where they didn't quite become the overall majority, they became the overwhelming majority in large swaths of the city. And then finally today, of course, mass immigration from Latin America is pushing black people out of neighborhoods that they've held down since the Great Migration. At each stage of the peopling of America. Lee would probably have found support for his point, for his argument. You know, he would go through our history books, pointing to passage after passage, saying, see, I told you so. In the 19th century, WASPs voted for WASPs. The Irish voted for Irish Catholics, The Italians voted for Italians. Jews just voted for liberals of whatever ethnicity, but they voted for them as a bloc. And of course, today blacks and Latinos vote as a bloc. Well, figuring out how to get all these different kinds of people to get along, that was until the 1960s or so, the central task of American politics and Society. Since the 1960s, things have changed as opportunists have discovered that they can profit politically by actually generating and fostering group conflict. And those people always existed, but there was a. There was a cap on their behavior due to the norms in society. Those people will always exist in any democracy, a diverse democracy, but for a variety of reasons, that style of politics has pretty much completely swallowed up all other politics over the last few decades. The British conservative philosopher Roger Scruton wrote somewhere that the distinction between conservative and liberal politics is that liberals conceive of politics as a means of achieving certain goals, of progressively moving society toward some better state where the problems that have always beset us over the centuries are finally solved. Conservatives, on the other hand, Scruton says conservatives understand social problems as permanent features of the human condition, and so ask a liberal what the purpose of politics is, and they might tell you the elimination of poverty or the elimination of racism, or the promotion of scientific achievement, or, depending on the era, a eugenic population. Conservatives follow Aristotle's formulation in saying that politics is much more like managing a friendship. What's the purpose? What's the goal of a friendship? There isn't really any goal except to make sure that we're still friends, and hopefully better friends tomorrow. And so to a conservative, that's the purpose of politics as well. And if you don't think that way, you are not a conservative. It's rooted in an essentially tragic view of the human condition, one that assumes frustration and suffering and compromise are a part of life and always will be. You solve today's problems, and new ones will replace them tomorrow, probably new ones that are the direct result of your solutions to the old ones. But as long as we're all still friends tomorrow, as long as we're all still talking to each other in good faith, then we'll be able to meet tomorrow's problems, whatever they turn out to be. American political history has been a long battle between these two perspectives, with one holding ground a while and the other pushing back. And today, now, for about a century or so, the liberal view of politics as a means to push society toward progressive goals has been dominant. Well, as with so many things about the United States, there's no better place to see this battle play out than in the history of New York City. Being a primary point of entry for new immigrants, New York took the brunt of the mass migrations from Europe more directly than any other place. It's a bit different in a city like, say, a Midwest city like Chicago. Chicago received new immigrants when they showed up, and the great waves of European migration created bulges in Chicago's growth. But between and during those waves, there was a constant trickle of domestic migrants, people from the countryside or from small towns or from the big cities back East. A lot of times the population bulges happen because European immigrants were coming into places like New York. And then the people who were already in New York and therefore Americanized a bit, moved out to Chicago. And so that made the bulges of new immigrants relatively less conspicuous. When waves of immigration crashed into America in the mid and late 19th century, they hit New York City first, and a lot of those people stayed there. And so each wave was felt very dramatically and permanently changed the nature of the place. And this happened basically once a generation from the founding of the country. The history of New York City politics is the history of each of these successive groups elbowing their way in while the established interests try to hold their ground against the newcomers. And who the established interests are and who the newcomers are changes every time. First it was the Irish trying to elbow their way into a WASP power structure, and then it was Jews and Italians coming in after the Irish had taken over, and so on. And so forth. And often this led to conflict like real violent conflict, until a new equilibrium was reached that allowed everyone to live together in peace and cooperation again. This pattern held as long as New York was a working class city, which is hard to even imagine today. But New York was always a working class city, not just in the composition of its population, but in its leadership. You had ordinary working people in the highest offices in the city government. It really was up until the 60s or 70s a working class city. Since then, industrial workers have been pretty much run out of town, and the oligarchs finally won their long war for control of the city. The urban upheavals and riots of the 1960s are viewed by most people today as conflicts between black people and white people or black people in a white system, partly because that's what they did eventually become, partly because that's the way Americans were accustomed to thinking about civil rights and other racial issues, since for most of our history, black history meant southern history. And in the south, things did break down to black and white. But urban politics in the north was always more complicated than that. When the great migration of southern blacks into the cities began in the early 20th century, the black migrants were not settling in communities that really thought of themselves primarily as white. In New York City, to stick with the theme, they came into a city that was mostly Irish, Jewish and Italian, with a WASP upper crust that included descendants of Dutch and Germans and other Northwest Europeans for whom assimilation to WASP culture was not a big leap. Now, today, we're entirely programmed to think of people in racial terms and think of ourselves in racial terms. Even the people who claim to be colorblind are still reinforcing the basic premise of viewing people according to color. They just happen to reject that. But when black people began to push into these cities, they were entering into an arena that had been defined by an ethnic politics that in many cases had only recently settled into an uneasy peace. And so today, when we read about incidents like the infamous riot when Martin Luther King, Jr. Made his first foray into the northern cities in 1966 in Marquette park in Chicago, what we see today when we look at the pictures or read about it or see it in a documentary, we see a bunch of white people protesting against a bunch of black people who want to come live in their neighborhood. That's how it's taught in schools. That's how it's presented by the mass media. But that is not how the residents of Marquette park perceived themselves at the time. Two thirds, 30,000 out of the 45,000 people who lived in Marquette park were Lithuanian Catholic. Chicago had a section known as Little Lithuania, and it was as Lithuanian Catholic as San Francisco's Chinatown was Chinese. Upton Sinclair's polemic against the Chicago stockyards, the jungle, it centered on a Lithuanian stockyard worker. There were Lithuanian markets, Lithuanian community centers, Lithuanian churches that were not just Sunday morning institutions, but were real centers of a tightly knit and organized community. And that's what the people who came out against Martin Luther King, Jr. Thought they were defending. That's not necessarily to defend the conduct of the protesters. The whole situation was very ugly and unfortunate. But from their perspective, they couldn't understand why mlk, this national figure from the south, from far away from what might as well have been a foreign country down in the south, and his coterie of activists, had brought their operation and the attention of the national press up to Chicago to radically transform their little Lithuanian community. They couldn't understand the passion against the idea of segregated communities. They'd always lived in segregated communities by choice. This was true in all the northern cities. The European ethnics in those cities, whether Lithuanians or Jews, Irish, Italians, Poles, you name it, when they moved into the cities, they took up with their own in their own neighborhoods, again, by choice. Immigrants still do this today, and of course they do. Right? You're brand new to a place. It's nice to have the comforts of a local community that shares your experiences, your traditions, your religion, your foods. It's part of the immigrant experience. The typical pattern is that the first generation, the immigrant generation, sets up what amounts to a colony and transplants a bit of the old country to their new home. So there's a little outpost of the old country. The second generation is raised in America, though they're comfortable here and they want to venture out into the larger society. And they feel the conservatism of their immigrant parents to be a burden. But they have enough respect for them and attachment to their community to stay relatively close to home, even as they do assimilate culturally. And then their kids, the third generation, raised in America by parents who were raised in America, they shed most of the old identity, which they associate less with their parents and more with their grandparents. You know, that's a long time ago now, and they just become plain old Americans. But even as this process took place with the European ethnics, their ethnic communities remained intact. And so when African Americans began setting up shop in the northern cities, they were moving into places where, for as long as anyone could remember, the Irish lived over there. The Jews lived over there, the Italians lived over there, and so forth. And everybody thought this arrangement was perfectly logical and appropriate. It would have been considered wildly inappropriate for one of the other European ethnic groups to try to move in on the territory of one of the others. And it was not uncommon for there to be conflict when that did happen. And so the expectation of many people, the optimistic expectation, was that black Americans, who of course, were not exactly immigrants, but culturally and geographically shared the immigrant experience. You know, moving from the life of a sharecropper on the Mississippi Delta to a big industrial city was not much further of a leap than coming over here from the Irish countryside. And so the expectation was that black Americans, whatever problems they may have been having as the Great Migration started up, that they would follow the same path traveled by the Irish and other previous immigrants and then take their place as one of several ethnic blocs in the city. And for a number of reasons, which we will talk about, that did not happen. And the consequences of that failure have played a defining role in American domestic politics ever since. Today's episode focuses on a conflict between Jewish and African Americans in New York City in 1968. It started as a fight over management of the New York City public schools, of all things, a battle between the city's teachers union and various community activist groups. But it grew so intense and lasted so long that it consumed the attention of the whole city for many months for most of a year, and the whole country for weeks at a time throughout 1968. And it led to waves of violence and a split in one of the more fruitful political alliances in 20th century America, namely the Black Jewish Alliance. And so this episode, needless to say, is going to cover some controversial topics, and I will be treading on dangerous ground from the very first sentence where I use racial slurs. And there are a few. I'm not going to baby you by using euphemisms when they come up in quotes or when I speak in vernacular, I'm just reading the quotes as they're written. But I've tried in good faith to tell the truth. And where I voice my own opinions and perhaps veer occasionally into polemic, I have done so in good faith as well. Of course, my inbox is always open, so if you have a disagreement or a question or a comment, please don't be shy about sharing them. A few housekeeping items before we jump in. First, I would like to thank all of you who have subscribed to the Martyrmaid substack. You guys are how I'm able to do this and a day does not go by that I don't that I don't appreciate it. Those of you who are subscribers will be familiar with some of the material in this episode because I've been writing about it as it's been in development on the substack, we've had Q&As on various topics, and the subscribers are actually developing a strong community and having great discussions among themselves in the comments section. And all you subscribers, I know I've been neglecting you guys over the last month or two. It just got to a point where I didn't feel like I was ever gonna finish this episode unless I just isolated myself from the world and focused on nothing but this. So this episode is the reason I've been neglecting you. And I will be back in the saddle as soon as this one's released. And so if you'd like to support this podcast, subscribing to the sub stack is the best way to do it. It's just five bucks a month or 50 bucks a year. And if you know, I know it's it's tough out there with prices of everything going up and so forth. If you happen to be at a place in your life where you would like to subscribe, but but the subscription fee is just a little out of reach right now, just shoot me an email@myrmademail.com and we'll get you set up. There's already an archive of podcasts and essays available only to subscribers, so new subscribers will have a lot of catching up to do. So if you like this podcast and would like me to keep doing it, please do consider signing up@martyrmaid.substack.com next. As many of you are surely already aware, but not all of you. Not enough of you, unfortunately. History on Fire, the great history podcast by my friend Danieli Bellelli, is back out from behind the Luminary paywall. I can tell you, I don't think I'm speaking at a turn here, that Danieli was reluctant to put History On Fire behind the paywall a few years ago, but Luminary made it very hard to say no. And I think that now that he's back out in the wild, I know I and his other fans and I think he too are very happy to be back out in the wild. So every History on Fire episode is going to be free again. There's a great archive on everything from the Spanish conquest of Mexico to Bruce Lee, to things that only Danieli could really pull off, like A multi episode series on the Italian painter Caravaggio or the Tupac Shakur of Renaissance Italy as Danieli calls him. You can find his podcast wherever you got this one. And when you listen and enjoy it, as I know you will, you can get exclusive content from Danieli and help support that show on the History on Fire Patreon. And finally, if you guys like Martyr Maid, then you should all be grateful to my friend Jocko Willink. I was actually about to stop making this show a few years back. It was just taking too much time and I had a busy day job and it was Jocko who convinced me to take the plunge and just make a go of doing this thing full time. He has promoted the show as well as the show that he and I do together, which is called Jocko Unraveling. And I know the questions are coming in because they come in every day. There will be new episodes coming soon. Same excuse I just gave to the Substack subscribers. I've been so obsessed with this for the last little while that I've just completely shut out the rest of the world. And Jocko works more than any person I've ever met in my life, so he's hard to pin down too. But now that this episode is finished, we will get, we will get back on the unraveling. So look forward to that. I owe a lot to Jocko, so if you like Martyr Maid, then maybe you owe him all a little something as well. So it's not a big ask, but go check out Jocko Podcast if you, if you haven't already. It is consistently one of the best podcasts out there and has been since it got started. Check out the podcast we do together again called Jocko Unraveling. And then check out origin main.com. even if you don't feel like buying anything right now, just go check out the website Origin. Maine, Maine with an E like the state. Origin is Jocko's brick and mortar company and they make everything from super high quality buffalo hide boots to archery, hunting gear, hoodies, Jiu Jitsu, GI's, jeans and a lot more. And these are high end handmade products. They're on the pricey side, but they will last you a lifetime. And, and you know, one of the things that's always most impressed me about Jocko has been, and this is not a, this is not an advertisement in the sense of like a sponsorship. Neither is Danieli. I'm doing this just because I love these guys. But one of the things that's always most impressed me About Jocko has been his commitment to not just making things in America, but to developing a labor force that has real skills. The people who work at Origin know how to make a pair of buffalo hide boots. They know how to make a super high quality pair of jeans. And I don't mean they just know how to sew the pieces of denim together. They know how to make them. As our manufacturing base has been shipped overseas for several decades, a lot of these skills have atrophied here in America. Our boots and jeans were being made over in Bangladeshi sweatshops, and in the meantime, our own people were forgetting how to do it. And the older folks who actually had the knowledge, they were all retiring. If you were to go start a boot making factory today, depending on where you are in a lot of parts of the country, you would have a hell of a time finding people with the knowledge and skills to actually man your shop. You know, lately I've been watching developments in the artificial intelligence space. I don't know how much attention you've been paying to that, but they are starting to make some AI programs that do some pretty scary and pretty impressive things. You know, creative work, writing stories, making illustrations and music, researching and answering questions. And they're getting very, very good. Good enough that if I was a lawyer or an office bureaucrat or yes, a history podcaster, I would start worrying that my field was going to go the way of blue collar factory work in the age of robotics. But knowing how to make a high end pair of boots is never going to stop being a useful skill. And people who know how to do it can look forward to the future without worrying that they're going to be obsolesced by technology. And so this aspect of Jocko's business is very important to him and it's something that I've always really respected about him. So again, check out originmain.com oh, and if you're a caffeine addict like I am, if you can't tell from how fast I'm speaking and you find yourself slamming energy drinks that you know are probably burning out your adrenal glands and doing who knows what else, check out his Jocko Go energy drinks. They're available in a lot of stores now, especially in the east Coast. Wawas and some other stores. They're my favorite energy drinks and they've improved my life actually a lot since I switched over to them. They're sugar free, but they don't use, you know, artificial sweeteners like Splenda or NutraSweet. They use Monk fruit, which is much better, much easier on the digestive system and the boost they give you. You know, Jocko didn't go the route of just putting 300 milligrams of caffeine into it. Like the rains or bangs that you have out there, these give you much less of a high and crash like monsters or rock stars. And the rest, Jocko Go maybe only brings you up to about 75% of where those hardcore ones will, but then it'll keep you there for longer and much more steadily and let you down much more easily. So you get less jittery, less of that caffeine anxiety, so you can actually pound one and sit still and focus on whatever it is you want to do. Okay, this was the longest introduction in Martyrmaid history, but we are finally done. One final note. I have been talking into this microphone eight hours a day for the last several days, trying to get this right. So if you can't tell, my voice is a little shot, by the time I get to the end of this thing, you probably will be able to tell. For that I apologize. You're about to listen to who's America? Part two, Inner City Blues, and I really hope you enjoy it. Here we go. I'm content to die for my beliefs so cut off my head and make me a martyr the people will always remember it. No, they close again. Hell does exist. God is a thought. God is an idea. It is a place. It is somewhere. Hell does exist. But its reference is to something that transcends all things. Why we must tear ourselves apart for this small question of religion. One of the better known Jewish American fiction writers of the post war period is a guy named Bernard Malamud. And like much of the work of other Jewish American novelists like Philip Roth and Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, a guy who Maholamud was always remembered and thought of right alongside. But Malamud has fallen off a little bit in terms of notoriety compared to those guys. But just like their work, a lot of Malamud's is about what it's like to be Jewish in America. I think it was Albert Goldman who said that Jews have always been students and their greatest themselves. Well, Maholamud fits into that tradition and he wrote two stories. Well, he wrote a lot of stories, but two that I'm going to talk about. One just before the 1960s began and one just after the 60s came to an end. And these two stories bookend a major theme of Jewish life during that decade. The first of the two stories called Angel Levine appeared in a collection called the magic barrel in 1959. It's a short story, and the second story, called the Tenants, was published in 1971. Both stories take place in New York City, and both center on the unique and complicated relationship between Jewish and black Americans. The protagonist of Angel Levine is a beat down Jewish man named Manischewitz, who, Malamud informs the reader early on, has suffered many indignities and reverses. And just generally, he's had a long stretch of things not going his way. His business was lost to a fire, his son died in a war. His only other child, his daughter, had run off to get married to a lout. Malamud calls him, and Manischewitz is hardly in touch with her. And he himself is beset by excruciating back aches, and his wife's health is declining right before his eyes. There was, writes Malamud, little hope. But then a ray of hope pokes through in the form of a mysterious black man named Alexander Levine, an interesting character for many reasons, not least that Levine is a Jewish name, usually, which gives an early hint of where the story's headed. Levine himself claims to be a Jew. Manischewitz really doesn't buy it, not at first, but his skepticism softens a bit when he hears Levine say a prayer in perfect Hebrew. It doesn't quite break through his wall of disbelief, but it helps. On top of being a Jew, Levin also claims to be an angel. An angel on probation, sent to help Manishewitz through his rough patch, sort of like Clarence and It's a Wonderful Life. Well, Manishewitz doubts this as well, and he voices his doubt by saying, so if God sends to me an angel, why a black? And so Levine hears this, and he can see that his help is not wanted, or at least not trusted. And so he departs, leaving Manischewicz to his misery. And then one day, Manischewitz's wife, Fanny collapses and seems to be on the brink of death. And he, desperate now enough to reach for the flimsiest lifeline, goes out into the city in search of the black angel. His search leads him to a synagogue in Harlem, and there he finds a group of black worshippers bent over a copy of the Torah, discussing and sermonizing on its contents. On de face of de water move de spirit. From de spirit arise de man. A bit primitive, maybe, to a lifelong Jew like Manishevitz, but still there was an innocence about them, and they seemed dedicated. So his skepticism at the possibility of identity, of a common identity between himself and the denizens of black Harlem, it softens a bit more. Then his search leads him on a mini odyssey of black New York. And as he wanders around witnessing scenes of suffering and of black people being put upon, he gradually begins to open to the possibility that maybe the idea of a Negro angel is not so crazy after all. And finally, he finds Levine. And by this point, he's so exhausted and overwhelmed that he cries out, I think you are an angel from God. And at that moment, his wife miraculously recovers, and Levine is released from probation and taken up into heaven. When Manischewitz gets home to find his wife healthy again, he gushes to her about what he's seen, and he says, it's a wonderful thing. Believe me, Fanny, there are Jews everywhere. Now, this is a pretty straightforward redemption story. And the mechanism of redemption for Manischewitz is the realization of a common identity between himself and Levine and of brotherhood between his people and Levin's people. It's also one of the more direct examples of the magical Negro motif that used to be in such heavy circulation. In many ways, despite the identity of the protagonist and the author, the story is Christian in its themes, very sentimental and focused on universal brotherhood. But that's pretty normal for Mahlamud Manashevitz. Initial skepticism over Levine's claim to Judaism was not really the hard part to overcome. In fact, Malamud presents it as pretty natural that there would be a black Jewish. And it's really only his claim to be an angel that Manischewitz really struggles with. But he has to get past the first obstacle to even deal with the second one. When Manischewitz wanders through Harlem, seeing black people suffering just as he has been suffering, his revelation is one of a deep kinship rooted in the common experience of suffering between black people and Jewish people, both of whose identities and uniqueness as peoples to Malamud were rooted in their claim to being history's greatest victims. And this gives Manischewitz the faith he needs to precipitate the miracle. Fast forward about a dozen years, and now we're on the other side of the 1960s, and Maholamud publishes the second story, called the Tenets. The Tenants is a story that would have been as impossible for Malamud to write in 1959 as it would have been for anyone to write Angel Levine in 1971. Too much had changed Angel Levine in 1971. People would have laughed it off as a parody of the dull sentimentality that had pervaded black Jewish relations before the 60s. The theme of the Tenants runs in almost the perfectly opposite direction to the first story. It's about two writers. One an established but struggling Jewish writer named Lesser, and his neighbor in the same apartment building, a black man named Willie, who's still only an aspiring writer. The two become acquainted, and Lesser, as the more experienced writer, tries to take Willie under his wing and guide him as someone who's been there and done that. But soon enough, Willie starts to resent what he interprets as Lesser's condescension toward him. And his resentment takes the form of believing that Lesser looks down on him not because he's young or an unaccomplished writer, but because he is black and Lesser is a Jew. And so he becomes increasingly defensive, deflecting every criticism or bit of advice as an attempt by this Jew to tell him what the voice of a black writer should sound like. In one of their arguments, Willie says, you tryin to kill off my natural writin by pretendin you interested in the motherfuckin form of it. Though the truth of it is you afraid of what I'm gonna write in my book, which is that the blacks have to murder you white motherfuckers for crippling our lives. He then cried out, oh, what a hypocrite shit ass I am to ask a Jew ofe for advice on how to express my soul work. Just in reading it, you spoil what it says. I ought to be hung on a hook till some kind brother cuts off my white balls. Well, over the course of the novel, Lesser comes to realize that the common ground that he thought he'd found with Willie at the beginning of the story, that that was only superficial and that in fact Willie is a raging anti Semite. He finds a note written by Willie that reads, it isn't that I hate the Jews, but if I do any, it's not because I invented it myself, but I was born in the good old US of A. And there's a lot going on that gets under your skin. And it's also from knowing the Jews, which I do. The way to black freedom is against them. The novel ends with the two men slashing at each other in a murderous frenzy, one with an axe, the other with a saber, both of them screaming racist curses at each other as they bleed out. It's a brutal scene that Mahlemud intends to represent as a one on one pogrom. So what happened? What happened between those years that led to such different attitudes of Bernard Malamud about the relationship between black And Jewish Americans. Most of you probably noticed Kanye West's recent decision to commit seppuku on the steps of the Anti Defamation League's headquarters. But long before Kanye went DEFCON 3 on the Jews, a lot had been written about the complicated relationship between American blacks and American Jews, although not so much had been written about it recently. Recently, it's been a topic that people have avoided. When every so often a 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 all the others at all costs. They avoid suggesting that the incidents might be in any way connected or that they could reflect genuine friction between these two groups of people, rather than just the ignorance of Kanye west or one misguided individual. Well, the Kanye spectacle was a re eruption of an old volcano, long dormant and perhaps thought extinct. Soon after Mount Kanye blew its top, NBA star Kyrie Irving got in trouble for antisemitism. Before them, it was Jay Z, Ice Cube, Professor Griff of Public Enemy, Lupe Fiasco, Nick Cannon, Whoopi Goldberg, and many more. Nick Cannon was fired from his TV job, I don't know if you remember, in 2020 for promoting the theory that black people are descended from the biblical Israelites, I guess, rather than from Ham, the cursed son of Noah. Kanye, Kyrie Irving and Ice Cube. They came under fire for also promoting that OG version of Wakanda Forever, Griff, Fiasco and Jay Z. They went the more traditional route by suggesting that Jews own and control the recording industry that sign their checks. Now, it's 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 and sleep deprivation for Mel Gibson to join the rappers and agree out loud that Jews control the entertainment industry. So what gives? Well, it turns out there's a history here. But our maybe understandable reluctance in America to talk honestly about groups as groups has caused that history to be mostly forgotten, even by the people implicated in it. Until about a hundred years ago, black and Jewish Americans still had virtually no experience with each other. The same was true of black people and other European immigrant groups. Most black people still lived in the rural south. And by most, I mean pretty much all. While almost all Jews, Irish, Italians and the rest of the Euroethnics had settled in the urban north, what black and Jewish Americans knew about each other was often filtered through the lens of popular mythology. In the pre Civil War period, 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, Jim Crow was in full force, and post Reconstruction, blacks had been relegated in the south mostly to subsistence farming and lives that were little better than their lives under slavery. And in many ways, materially speaking, they were a lot worse for many people. But the railroads had been built by then, and word began to trickle down to some southern blacks that their promised land might be just a short train ride to the North. And so they started migrating. And soon the stampede was on. Between 1915 and 1960, some 6 to 7 million black Americans migrated out of the rural south to the big cities in the north and West. It was one of the largest mass migrations in human history, and as I said in the introduction, one whose consequences defined much of American domestic politics in the 20th century and really even to our own day. It's hard to really even imagine it today, but Baltimore, Philly, Brooklyn, Newark, Detroit, St. Louis, Chicago, Los Angeles, Oakland. When the First World War began in 1914, all of those 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 Atlanta in 1915, but it never really caught on in the South. Instead, it caught on in the west and Midwest and in big cities like Chicago, Indy, Cleveland, Portland, places that still had virtually no black people living in them. See, like the early progressive movement, the KKK of that period was a WASP reaction. WASP for you non Americans unfamiliar with the term, is what we call white Anglo Saxon Protestants. Just think old stock Americans. Basically, it was a WASP reaction to the disorder brought about by mass immigration. Decades of almost unregulated immigration had caused American cities to be radically transformed, to multiply in size many times over, sometimes by orders of magnitude. Many cities had been consumed by crime and decay and had been taken over by corrupt immigrant political machines backed by voters who voted for their own kind or for candidates who pandered to them. Millions of immigrants, Southern European Catholics, Eastern European Jews, Central European free thinkers, all people who were very foreign and very strange to the old stock wasps were now huddling in hastily constructed ghettos that were black boxes to the people outside them and that seemed to the natives to emanate filth, crime, disease, vice and disorder. Well, these were the neighborhoods into which migrating southern blacks were funneled when they made their way to America's great cities. These were the neighborhoods they could afford to live in. And they lived cheek by jowl with Irish, Italians, Poles, Jews, and many other people who had only recently arrived themselves when the Great Migration got underway. Most Jews and Italians had only been in the United states less than 30 years, and a majority had been here less than 20 years. In those early years of the Great Migration, nobody saw blacks as moving in on white neighborhoods, at least not primarily, but on Irish and Italian and Polish and Jewish neighborhoods. And if, as time went on, nobody really spoke of Italian black relations or Polish or Irish black relations the way that they continue to do to this day about Jewish black relations, that's because Jews alone among European ethnics managed to retain a meaningful sense of group identity, while the others just melted into the generic American white population. Which is another way of saying that they had exchanged their ethnic identities for a racial identity. From the beginning, Jews were relatively more tolerant than the other Euro ethnics of the black migrants. What they heard about the Jim Crow south reminded them of their parents tales about the Pale of Settlement back in the Russian Empire. They knew that blacks had been slaves in America, just as Jews had been slaves in Egypt, and that both of them had survived in their own form of exile ever since. A strong strain of political radicalism told that same story to the Jews who were not moved by religion. Both groups had gone through their own ordeal of integration in the American cities they now called home and faced discrimination and occasional mistreatment, not only from the majority population, but from members of their own group who had preceded them to the cities. The Eastern European Jews who began arriving in the 1880s. They were seen as backward, uncouth, immoral, and a potentially dangerous criminal or radical political element by the well assimilated handful of German Jews who had come with the previous generation's migration from the German states. These German Jews were already pretty prosperous in America, and they were afraid that the unruly behavior of their eastern cousins would ignite the flame of antisemitism in America. And so they went as far as setting up what amounted to training centers for newly arrived ostjuden to make sure that they got started in a productive trade, to keep them from turning to crime and to teach them English and to just generally teach them how to behave in their new country. Well, southern blacks had a similar experience when they arrived in the northern cities. When they got there, they discovered that small groups of well assimilated blacks had lived there for years, many of them since before the Civil War. And these relatively Cosmopolitan northern blacks looked down on southern black migrants with the same embarrassment. Dark skinned blacks faced discrimination and exclusion by lighter skinned blacks. Like the German Jews. These assimilated northern blacks had managed to find some peace and even some acceptance in their cities, and they were worried that they were going to be associated with the unruly behavior of their country cousins. There was also a general prejudice against rural Southerners, white or black, who were perceived by Yankees to be rowdy, vulgar, ignorant and more prone to violence and licentiousness. The old TV show the Beverly Hillbillies, about an Appalachian family who struck it rich in oil and moved out to the big city. That's a humorous take on what for many years was one of the more open forms of bigotry in the country. I would maintain that it still is. Even that show, which tries not to be too cruel in its presentation of the Clampett family, made it clear on a weekly basis that, sure, these people, they're not bad people, they have their charms, but they're not people that you want moving into your nice manicured neighborhood either. This attitude really came out during the 1930s when the dust bowl sent migrations of displaced southern white farmers out to California looking for migrant farm work in the San Joaquin Valley. The Okies, as they came to be called because most of them were from Oklahoma. These are the people several of John Steinbeck's novels, like the Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men are about. The Okies were not a welcome presence to the native Californians, not at all. The same was true when thousands of people from Appalachia began moving up to Chicago and Detroit and other cities in the Midwest. The Okies set up tent cities on the outskirts of California Cities and their settlements had a really nasty reputation with the natives as havens for criminals and rowdy drunks and violent men and loose women, much like the reputation of the ghetto in the suburbs. In more recent years, sheriffs and police departments would harass the Okies when they came into some towns, just to let them know that they were not wanted around there. At one point, LA county sheriffs posted up at the county line on Route 66 to block a car train of Okies coming into LA. And they forced him to go back and head north and find someplace else to go. You know, these are the kind of things that if there was a racial element to it, would probably have a national day of mourning today. But you know, the black people who were part of the great Migration, this was just one of the forms of discrimination they faced. They Faced it because they were black, because they were from the south, because they were rural, and because their previous lives down south. You know, again, these people were mostly sharecroppers, tenant farmers, agricultural workers. Their lives down there had not prepared them for life in the big city. And so there were reasons for Jews to feel a certain affinity for their black neighbors. But tolerance has its limits when underclass groups start bumping against each other. The black novelist James Baldwin was born and raised in Harlem in the 20s and 30s. When he was born, black people still made up Only less than 3% of the population in New York City, up from less than 2% at the turn of the century, but still very small number, hardly noticed by most people, because the majority of black New Yorkers lived up in Harlem, and people didn't get around back then quite as much as they do today. The great movement of white people to the suburbs, which we call white flight, in response to the influx of black migrants, that wasn't even a thing yet, because there was nothing to fly away from in a city that was not only segregated by race, it was segregated by ethnicity. And yet Baldwin already. Baldwin tells us in a 1967 essay for the New York Times magazine that there was already a good deal of friction between many black New Yorkers and their new neighbors. Baldwin opens this essay saying, when we were growing up in Harlem, our demoralizing series of landlords were Jewish, and we hated them. 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, especially those with children. We had to cope with all of these as best we could. The grocer was a Jewish, 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 second hand 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 even 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 exploiting you that he cannot possibly be 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 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. Now, despite his relatively humble upbringing, Baldwin's antipathy was not that of the man on the street. It was the antipathy of a black intellectual, which is to say that it had less to do with the day to day frictions between underclass groups and the people just visible above them, as he's kind of describing here. And much more to do with his offense at the idea that Jews, especially after the Second World War, would presume to usurp the rightful claim of black people to the top of America's hierarchy of victims. In the countless polemics written against Jews by black authors since the end of World War II, and there have been many, the most common complaint they consistently put forward is that they're offended by the temerity of America's prosperous Jews to compare their own lot with that suffered by black people. Now the Jews, of course, they didn't see things that way at all. From their perspective, they were reaching out to the black community. They were saying, hey, look, I get it, I'm with you. I know I have more or less white skin, but my history's taught me all about oppression. And so I understand you in a way that none of these other white skinned people can. But increasingly, by the 1960s, black leaders and black intellectuals and black activists, they were not receptive to that outreach. They saw it as Jews basically trying to play both sides, to be white when it was convenient, like when they wanted to move into a neighborhood with other white people. But to play the victimized minority who understands the struggle and is down for the cause whenever that was convenient. Baldwin wrote in that same essay, 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. Baldwin had titled that essay Negroes are Anti Semitic because they're anti White. But it was the first part of that statement that really got people's attention. Shortly after the essay was published, the Times ran a response op ed by Rabbi Robert Gordes entitled Negroes are anti Semitic because they want a scapegoat. And it mostly goes downhill from there. Around that same time, Richard Wright, the black author who wrote the book Native Son, said to hold an attitude of antagonism or distrust toward Jews was bred in us from childhood. It was not merely racial prejudice. It was part of our cultural heritage. All of us black people who lived in the neighborhood hated Jews, end quote. Wright said that he and his friends would follow the Jewish kids around chanting, bloody Christ killers. Never trust a Jew. Bloody Christ killers. What won't a Jew do? Well, both Baldwin and Wright are writing about their experiences as kids and young men in the 1930s. A few years before Baldwin's Dreamiad was published in 1963, Norman pod Horitz gave the Jewish perspective of that same period and that same dynamic. In a now famous, or maybe infamous essay in the neoconservative journal Commentary called My Negro Problem and Ours, Podhoretz attempts to excavate the roots of his own prejudice from his childhood experiences living in one of those neighborhoods where he experienced the hatred and hostility that Baldwin and Wright are telling us about. Podhoretz's older sister was a left wing political activist, and so he grew up listening to her lecture him about civil rights and about how blacks were persecuted and downtrodden. But to the 12 year old Padhoretz, it seemed preposterous to think that the black kids who bullied him and his friends every day were the persecuted ones. A boy's world is very small and he says, 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 by him against blacks from his boyhood, and partisans ever since have debated whether the essay 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 shvartzas. The shvartzas and the goyim. Carl, it turned out, was a schwartza. And so was added a third to the categories into which people were mysteriously divided. Podhoritz recounts the time a new playground was built across the street from his house by the city of New York. The park had a baseball diamond, and Pod Horowitz and his friends were ecstatic for about a week. And then a gang of black kids arrived and ordered them to stay away from the park. We refuse, proudly and indignantly, with superb masculine fervor. There is a fight, they win, and 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. Thereafter, the playground becomes a battleground, sometimes quiet, sometimes the scene of athletic competition between them and us. But rocks are thrown as often as baseballs, and gradually we abandon the place and use the streets instead. This is the schoolyard manifestation of the feelings James Baldwin was expressing in his Times article. Most black kids would not grow up to be a feat. Homosexual novelists like James Baldwin and the ones in Pod Horitz's stories are of the more common type. Baldwin wrote screeds for the New York Times because he could not bring himself to beat anyone up. That's just not who he was. But his writings, as the 60s wore on, were giddy over the idea of black violence, striking fear into the heart of the white man and give every impression that he would have preferred to be fighting in instead of writing. Who has not dreamed, Baldwin asked, 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. But the flip side is that maybe Podhoretz's schoolmates beat him up because they couldn't write essays for the Times. Another one of Podhoretz's beatings came after a track meet among the city's junior high schools. There is 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 either been 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 it to 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 light skin and reddish hair. The athletic meet takes place in a city owned stadium far from the school. It is an important event to which a 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 prove the wearer to be a distinguished personage. I am a fast runner and so I'm 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 anchorman, waiting silently next to me on the line, looks years older 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. With but a few minutes later we are declared the winners, for it has been discovered that the anchorman on the first place team 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'm 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 tell him so anyway. It ain't yours, I say foolishly. He calls me a liar on both counts and pushes me up against the 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 muhfucka, one of them suggests. He probably got it hit on 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 a liar for pleading poverty and pushed 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 rage and self contempt. Keep your fucking filthy lousy black hands off of me. I swear I'll get the cops. 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's 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 they never squeal either. For days I walk home in terror, expecting to be caught again, but nothing happens. The medallion is put away into a drawer, never to be worn by anyone. Podoretz recalls all these experiences, and not only the pain, but the shame and humiliation, maybe especially those in such vivid detail that it reveals the emotional valence that they still had for him as an adult writing it. And you know, in other circumstances, people would make the case that he came by his prejudices honestly. If a woman was beaten by a group of five men, or a black was beaten by a gang of five whites and the victim later confessed to having developed a lasting fear and hatred of all men or all whites, most people wouldn't flinch at that. Most people would sympathize. They might say, it's unfortunate that you feel that way, but I understand why you would. Hell, even if Pod Horitz had confessed to hating Italians or other white Christians as a result of bad childhood experiences, he probably would have been in the clear and the article probably would have gone off without too much notice. You guys can judge for yourselves whether Podhorets is exhibiting courage, malice, or blind stupidity when he writes. The hatred I still feel for Negroes is the hardest of 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. End quote. Well, it's impossible to imagine essays like this or Baldwin's running in major publications today, and I'll let you decide for yourself whether that counts as a gain or a loss. Pod Horiz's conclusion perhaps provoked the strongest reaction from critics. He was skeptical that there was any realistic solution to the Negro problem, as he calls it. He thought that years of suffering and oppression and the resulting resentment had warped and damaged the Negro mind and soul, so that they themselves would sabotage any potential solutions that did emerge. That's what he thought. The only solution Pod Horiz could offer was very radical and, alas, given his own prior admission to feeling distaste at the sight of mixed couples, also quite unrealistic, namely, to eliminate the Negro altogether through miscegenation. When I think about the Negroes in 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 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'm 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 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, accused the so called Negro leaders of secretly pursuing miscegenation as a goal. Those 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 for everyone concerned. In my opinion, the Negro problem can be solved in no other way. Well, as you can imagine, this passage in particular drew the ire of many readers, black and white. The next issue of Commentary ran letters to the editor, who had the thankless job of choosing a few from among the flood that actually used language that was safe for publication. Some people congratulated Pudhoritz for his courage to write the essay. Others were predictably outraged. One of the latter was the black author and Village Voice columnist Joe Wood, who wrote a blistering essay in response for a book several years later in which he accused Podhoretz of harboring repressed homoerotic feelings for black men, of envy of the black penis, of Jewish self hatred, and many other defects of body and character, and, of course, of 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. And then dare to follow my reasoning to its unattractive and obvious conclusion. At bottom, a profound self hatred menaces in Pothoritz'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, Pohoretz 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 revealed than in the writer's discussion of 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 with goyim slamming you from above and blacks threatening from below. What is a person to do? In choosing to open his essay with a spotty memory of a black boy whose most notable feature is his moral equivalence to goyim, Podhorets dismisses the idea of a special black moral station. It is an understandable move. African Americans history of subjugation has 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. And we're talking about kids here. But the black adults who had made the move up from the south, they were like most immigrants in the sense that they tended to keep their heads down and avoid conflict and do their best to conform to their new environment. Their new circumstances were far from perfect, but these people were used to Jim Crow and so it didn't seem so bad. They all knew from firsthand experience down south that attracting negative attention from white people usually carried very serious consequences, and so they tried to avoid conflict with them. Their kids were a different story. And by the early 60s, that first batch of black kids born in the northern and Western ghettos, Baldwin and Wright, the people Podhoritz is talking about, the guys in school. He's talking about those kids have come of age by the early 60s and they had grown up going to school with the kids of working class white ethnics like the Podhoritzes. So unlike their parents, they did not fear white people. They understood, like Padhuritz said, rather, that white people were more likely to be afraid of them. Padhoretz relates another incident that happened after he made the mistake of answering a teacher's question after a black boy named Quentin had gotten it wrong. I had seen Quentin's face, a very dark, very cruel, very oriental looking face, harden. 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'm 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 the building, the corner of my eye catches the motion of the bat his little brother has handed to 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 was 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 am 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. End quote. You know, having grown up in many poor neighborhoods where white kids like me were a vanishingly small part of the student population, and where I learned not to take a beating too personally, 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 pretty traumatic experience for a 12 year old who's not used to violence, and people are saying right now that all 12 year olds should not be used to violence. But I, and probably Podhoritz, can tell you that there are situations, at least when some familiarity with it comes in handy. Now, Joe Wood, Pothorotz's critic that I just quoted a minute ago, he's got a point when he says that some of these encounters that have so shaped Pod Horiz's outlook are just examples of typical schoolyard bullying that happen to have had a more lingering effect on Pod Horitz because of the racial and political connotations that they had for him then and in real later life. Wood's point is that if Podhorets had gone to school with only Jews and Italians say, then the Italian bullies would have picked on him for being Jewish. And if you went to an all Jewish school, Jewish bullies would have picked on him for wearing glasses or being skinny or something. And that's true up to a point. Like I said, I went to several inner city, mostly black schools and I got jumped more than once by gangs of black kids. I had my stuff stolen one time by a kid who was threatening me with a knife. But I went to a lot of white and Latino and mixed schools too, and schools with a lot of Cambodians and Vietnamese and Laotians and Hmong students. And I saw that kids got bullied at all of those schools and that the black schools I went to, black bullies went after black kids more than they went after me. So in other words, those experiences didn't imbue me with any deep seated emotional triggers when it came to race. The same way Pod Horiz confesses that his experiences did for him. And yet, on the other hand, Pod Horiz knows something about what he's talking about too, because the fact is there were Italians and Jews in his classes and they weren't the ones bullying him. And furthermore, he says the Jews and the Italians didn't really bully the black kids much, although the Italians did it more than the Jews. Now, this was still at the time Pod Horitz and Baldwin and Wright are all talking about when they're kids. This is still a relatively small issue, one that did not touch the vast majority of New Yorkers. That would change after World War II. When World War II ended in 1945, there were about 130,000 black New Yorkers. And by 1964, less than 20 years later, there were over 1.1 million African Americans in the city. Just a massive, massive influx. And I don't care who you are, I don't care who the natives in the city are or who the migrants to the city are. There are going to be problems when you move nearly a million people into a city in less than 20 years. Years. And those problems are going to be even worse if the people moving in are not prepared for life in the city. Many of the black migrants coming in, most of them were impoverished, poorly educated by southern schools, functionally illiterate country people with no real skills that were useful for an urban trade. And that's not a dig on them. You know, these people were mostly sharecroppers or small farmers down south. And their segregated schools were Less than ideal. The same was true of the Irish migrants in the 19th century, by the way, and Italian immigrants later on. Both of those groups were made up primarily of poor, unskilled, illiterate farmers from the hinterlands of their old countries. And it was a huge and not always smooth adjustment to turn those folks into people who were fit for urban living. The black migrants faced a major challenge that the previous migrants had not. When the Irish and the Jews and the Italians showed up. And there were other immigrants to New York, obviously, but those were the overwhelming majority of them. So those are the ones I'll talk mostly about when those three earlier groups showed up. New York City was still not really built out and populated at the peak of the Irish migration, a huge migration that totally transformed the city. But at the peak of it, almost all New Yorkers still lived in a little strip of lower Manhattan south of what's today Grand Street. Most of the rest of Manhattan, it was still farmland. And the same was true in the outer boroughs. By the time the Jews and Italians started showing up, things had been built up a lot, but there was still a lot of room. And so when they showed up, they didn't have to push their way into established Irish Catholic parish communities. They were able to spread out. And pretty soon there was a setup where everyone was basically comfortable with the Irish living over there, the Jews over there, the Italians over there. And where those neighborhoods bordered each other, the population would be mixed. That was New York City. That was most big cities by the early 20th century. But when black people started showing up in huge numbers after World War II, that situation had changed. The city was more or less built and populated. There would still be a lot of development. Obviously, the Manhattan skyline would change a lot. And there were some areas that hadn't been built up that would be later. But in general, there was not a ton of room for newcomers, especially 900,000 newcomers in less than two decades. There just wasn't a lot of room for them to take up in. And as a result, they did have to push in on established Irish, Jewish and Italian neighborhoods if they were going to find any place to live. Now. The cities all tried to alleviate the situation. Big public housing projects went up all over the country to house so many new people. New social welfare programs and jobs programs were established. More schools and facilities were built. But there was just no way that the cities were going to keep up with the pace of the migration. And very quickly, the existing neighborhoods became extremely overcrowded, unpleasant places to live. There wasn't Enough housing, and the overcrowded housing that did exist started to deteriorate rapidly from so much population pressure. By the 1960s, some black neighborhoods in Harlem were so overcrowded that. And this is from journalist Eugene Methven, 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. That is some serious population density. City services could not meet the needs of so many people. The infrastructure couldn't support them, the economy couldn't employ them, and the schools could not effectively educate all their kids. The other main groups, the Italians and the Irish and the Jews, they mostly got what they needed from the city because they were politically organized. They elected politicians to local government from their own neighborhoods to go in and see to their needs. And there would be political consequences if their needs were not met. The black people in the city did not have anything like that yet. They weren't organized politically. And so in a city that had been governed by ethnic politics for at least a century, they were the one large demographic group with nobody working full time to advocate for them. Which is another way of saying that as a neighborhood got blacker, it had less representation in city government, and so it was more neglected. And this wasn't even really the result of racial discrimination so much as it was just a legacy of how the New York City political system had been structured over the years. Years. Ethnic politics, like I said, was taken for granted as a fact of life. Nobody talked about identity politics the way they do today. When Irish Catholics, to use an example, voted for Irish Catholics from their neighborhood to go represent them, it was just assumed that that was how things worked. Because. And this is something that really is different today to the point that it's hard for many of us to imagine. It wasn't just that the city had x number of Irish people. It had intact Irish Catholic parish communities that perceived themselves and were perceived by others as communities. And I don't use that word community in the loose way that we use it today. I mean that it was a well organized corporate entity with networks and hierarchies and associations and political advocacy groups. The community had a reality of its own. It wasn't just a collection of individuals who happened to fit into the same category. And so that's how things had always been. But in the early days of the great migration in the 30s and 40s and 50s, the black population in New York had not developed that yet in any significant way. And so as neighborhoods became blacker, they had Less political influence, and with less political influence, they were neglected and began to decline. And as they began to decline, white people and eventually middle class black people began to move out, and they took their social and economic capital with them. Over the course of just one or two decades, depending on the neighborhood, neighborhoods that had been mostly white became mostly black, or in the case of New York City, black and Puerto Rican. The number of schools in New York city in which minorities, mostly black, made up 90% or more of the student body, tripled between 1955 and 1965. Brownsville, the Brooklyn neighborhood where Pod Horiz grew up, it was still predominantly Jewish and Italian all the way up through the 1950s, and by the late 60s, it was 95% black and Puerto Rican, 77% black, 18% Puerto Rican. To put numbers on that, there was a Jewish community of about 175,000 in Brownsville when Pod Horiz was growing up, still well over 100,000 by 1955. But by the late 60s, there were only about 5,000 Jewish Jews left in Brownsville. Other than the minority of beleaguered, mostly elderly Jews and Italians who remained behind, the only white people with whom most of the black and brown majority ever interacted were either representatives of authority, teachers, cops, social workers, or representatives of capital, shopkeepers, landlords, pawn brokers and bosses. So Brown versus the board of education. The supreme court decision desegregating southern schools kicked off the civil rights era in 1954. A year after that, Rosa Parks, an employee and activist of the naacp, had her famous confrontation on a city bus in Montgomery, Alabama. She was arrested for refusing to give up her seat to a white person. And Martin Luther King, Jr. Rose to national prominence, leading a year long boycott of the Montgomery public transit system. The civil rights movement had its golden age from about the time of that boycott in 1955, 56 up to about 1964. In 1959, a series of sit ins to desegregate facilities in Greensboro, North Carolina, made headlines. In 1961, the Freedom Riders, a group of black and white, mostly Jewish activists, rode buses down into the deep south to force the issue after several states and cities refused to abide by the supreme court's ruling to desegregate in 1963, of course, was the march on Washington for jobs and freedom, better known as the event where Martin Luther King gave his I have a dream speech. And then in 1964 was the Mississippi Freedom summer. And it was here that cracks started to show up in the coalition riding on the success of the march On Washington. The year before, black civil rights organizations in Mississippi started recruiting volunteers to spend the summer of 1964 on a massive effort to agitate, educate and organize black Mississippians for that year's elections. White student organizations from northern universities wanted to help, and their help was wanted. But the organizers requested no more than 100 white volunteers from outside Mississippi. For reasons that would soon become apparent, the student nonviolent coordinating committee, sncc, which was the largest southern based black led civil rights youth organization, interviewed white volunteers to weed out ones with what they called a John Brown complex. The ones who made it through the screening process were warned that they were not there to save the Mississippi negro. They were there 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 who would remain there long after the white kids went home for the fall semester. But word got out that something big was brewing in Mississippi, and other student activists from around the country didn't want to miss out. And so white civil rights activists like Allard Lowenstein started raising money in recruiting more white students from universities outside the south. And pretty soon at least a thousand and probably several thousand over the course of the summer, white students were flooding into the state to do their part. Most of these student volunteers came from rich or at least upper middle class families and were recruited from the top universities in the United States. And they brought with them a variety of motives. For sure, they were moved by sympathy for southern blacks, no question about it. But a lot of them also pictured the Freedom summer as their own personal hero quest. Back at Columbia and Cornell and NYU and Harvard, the activists who had gone south to work as volunteers or citizen journalists in the previous summers, they were the aristocracy of the student movement. And a lot of students saw Mississippi as their one way ticket to cool kid status back on campus. That meant they had different goals and were working on a different timeline than the local blacks. Because whereas the blacks had been and would be working for years at the grassroots level in the state, the white students only had a few months to make something happen that would give them some good stories to tell and make their trip worthwhile before they had to head back to school. Now it seems I'm being a little bit ungenerous to the white activists. Maybe I am, but I am only repeating the complaints that would become common among many of the native black activists by the end of the summer. The sympathy of the college kids for the people they were trying to help. It was real. I don't Want to sound like I'm denying that, but it was also a sympathy that was distant and detached and could come across as condescending and patronizing. When the rubber hit the road and a group of Harvard Law students found themselves in a room full of black Mississippians with an elementary school education, their eagerness, a less generous person would say, their impatience to move things along often led to them just taking over the proceedings and effectively ordering the black activists around. And you can kind of understand how that could happen, even if the person has nothing but good, pure intentions. If you are a group of students from Harvard Law with lots of experience in political organizing with SDS or some other campus group, you probably do know better than other people how to best get things done. But you can't just come into someone's home and start ordering them around, no matter what your intentions are. And so over the summer months, resentment and enthusiasm grew side by side. And when the Freedom Summer failed to achieve any immediate political results in the 64 elections, which is not to say it wasn't a success in other ways, it opened up the door to a new breed of black leaders like Stokely Carmichael, who started putting out the message that they were never going to get anywhere following the lead of bossy white students and philanthropists. Carmichael had grown up in New York, and so while southern black activists were following the lead of Martin Luther King and the other black ministers of the sclc, Carmichael had been steeped in the rhetoric of Malcolm X and other black militants in Harlem. And he brought that attitude to the Southern movement probably more forcefully than anyone else, especially once he became the chairman of sncc. What Carmichael was saying, it really didn't make a lot of sense at face value, you know, given that all of the civil rights movement's major successes, the desegregation decisions at the Supreme Court, the Civil Rights act of 64, the Voting Rights act of 65, all of them, they were all achieved by the very people Carmichael and people like him were calling Uncle Tom's and their white allies. But still, the experience of many black people with the white activists that summer opened up space for them to think maybe Carmichael had a point, and that maybe the movement's emphasis on reconciliation and incremental improvement and non violence, maybe that reflected the existing leadership's excessive deference to white society. And so SNCC and other youth organizations emerged from the Freedom Summer with a new edginess. Although it would be a few years before people looked back and realized that it probably represented the high water mark of the civil rights movement. A couple years later, under Carmichael's leadership, sncc would purge all of its white members. And then he turned the organization over to a young criminal named h. Rap brown to lead sncc through the worst of the riot years. In 1965, despite the Selma march and the passage of the voting rights act, the golden years of the civil rights movement came to an end. Partly that was because everything that could be achieved from a legal standpoint had pretty much been achieved. And the southern civil rights leaders who had spent so many years fighting for straightforward demands of legal equality weren't exactly sure where to go from there. And so they started to lose influence. It was becoming obvious by then that the problems of the northern ghettos were by far the most pressing issue for black people in America. Things were starting to get really bad in a lot of inner cities. But the reasons were much more complicated than down south. The cities were segregated, as segregated as anywhere in the south, but not by law. And black people faced discrimination, but not officially. It was interpersonal. The people who were still down south, yes, there was segregation, there was discrimination, there was government neglect. But at least black southerners were still living in mostly intact families with communities that could engage in a certain amount of collective self help and gave people a social context to live in. In the north, the whole fabric of black community life had been torn apart by the pressures brought to bear on people by the great migration. That year, 1965, the Irish American scholar and future New York senator, Daniel Patrick moynihan was working for the labor department, and he authored a report on the ongoing collapse of the black family. And he pointed out that his Irish immigrant ancestors had had a similar experience when they'd arrived in America. He wrote, quote, 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 Frazier described its plight movingly in that part of the negro family entitled in the city of destruction. Now, quoting 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. Now, it wasn't that all black Americans were on a one way slide downhill as they moved into the cities. Not at all. What was really happening was the black population of America was splitting up and heading in opposite directions. The black middle class was growing throughout this period. Incomes had risen 150% between 1940 and 1960. Black homeownership had gone from 23% to 38% in that same period. Between 1940 and 1970, the percentage of black men holding down white collar jobs increased more than 400%. And black life expectancy improved from 53 years in 1940 to 63.6 years in 1960. Now, under normal circumstances, these numbers could only be seen as evidence of astounding success, helping an underprivileged group catch up with the rest of society. But the problem was that the improvements were only being felt by a part of the black population. And in the meantime, a whole lot of people, the ones who were not part of the increase in homeownership or white collar jobs, were watching their situation rapidly getting much worse. In his book the Culture of Narcissism, the American social critic Christopher Lasch complained that in the 60s and 70s, left wing politics in America became less about getting anything done to actually help the lives of people at the bottom and much more about their self esteem, identity and authenticity. Less a vehicle for collective change, in other words, than for individual self expression. Another social critic, Eric Hoffer, wrote about the effects on people of going through periods of intense and unpredictable change. He wrote that there is a close connection between lack of confidence in the passionate state of mind and as we shall see, passionate intensity may serve as a substitute for confidence. A population subjected to drastic change is a population of misfits, unbalanced, explosive and hungry for action. Action is the most obvious way by which to gain confidence and prove our worth. And it is also a reaction against loss of balance, a swinging and flailing of the arms to regain one's balance and keep afloat. Thus, drastic change is one of the agencies which release man's energies. But certain conditions have to be present. If the shock of change is to turn people into effective men of action. There must be an abundance of opportunities. There must be a tradition of self reliance. Given these conditions, a population subjected to Drastic change will plunge into an orgy of action. The millions of immigrants dumped on our shores after the Civil War underwent a tremendous change. And it was a highly irritating and painful experience. Not only were they transferred almost overnight to a wholly foreign world, but they were, for the most part torn from the warm communal existence of a small town or village somewhere in Europe and exposed to the cold and dismal isolation of individual existence. They were misfits in every sense of the word. And ideal material for a revolutionary explosion. But they had a vast continent at their disposal and fabulous opportunities for self advancement and an environment which held self reliance and individual enterprise in high esteem. And so these immigrants from stagnant small towns and villages in Europe plunged into a mad pursuit of action. They tamed and mastered a continent in an incredibly short time. And we are still in the backwash of that mad pursuit. But then, he says, things are different. When people subjected to drastic change find only meager opportunities for action. Or when they cannot or are not allowed to attain self confidence and self esteem by individual pursuits. When a population undergoing drastic change is without abundant opportunities for individual action and self advancement, it develops a hunger for faith, pride and unity. It becomes receptive to all manner of proselytizing and is eager to throw itself into collective undertakings which aim at showing the world. In other words, drastic change under certain conditions creates a proclivity for fanatical attitudes, united action, and spectacular manifestations of flouting and defiance. It creates, in short, an atmosphere of revolution. We are usually told that revolutions are set in motion to realize radical changes. Actually, it is drastic change which sets the stage for revolution. The revolutionary mood and temper are generated by the irritations, difficulties, hungers and frustrations inherent in the realization of drastic change. Where things have not changed at all, there is the least likelihood of revolution. Well, that passage right there explains pretty clearly why riotous militancy and extremist separatism among African Americans got going up in the north, among the people undergoing the drastic changes of the Great Migration and who had been yanked out of a southern milieu where they were, you know, poor and discriminated against, but where they had some continuity with the past and some community and more or less intact families. And they were thrust into an environment up north where everybody felt alone in their dingy, rundown tenement or housing project in Detroit or Chicago or New York. And as Hoffer writes, quote, the result was not emancipation, but isolation, an exposure. An immature individual was torn from the warmth and security of a corporate existence and left orphaned and Empty in a cold world. It has been often said that power corrupts. But it is perhaps equally important to realize that weakness, too, corrupts. Power corrupts the few, while weakness corrupts the many. Hatred, malice, rudeness, intolerance and suspicion are the fruits of weakness. End quote. Now, Hoffer wrote that book in 1963, and he had more in mind the post colonial revolutions in the third world when he talked about drastic change leading to turmoil. But two years after he published it in 1965, it became clear to everyone that he did not have to look that far from home to prove his thesis. And when people think of the most important years of the civil rights era, people might point to 1954, the Brown versus Board of Education decision, maybe 1963 when Martin Luther King gave his famous speech, or 1968 when King was killed. But I think 1965 was the most important turning point. That year, Martin Luther King led the march to Selma, Alabama, and the Voting Rights act was signed into law. And that's what most people remember about 1965 when it comes to civil rights. But it was also the year Malcolm X was murdered. And it was the year of the Watts riots in Los Angeles. The Watts riots changed the way the whole country looked at the race question. It all started over the police trying to arrest a drunk driver and then getting into a scuffle with some of the neighborhood people who tried to interfere. But as with most race riots, the proximate cause was really not that important. Something like Watts does not happen because some drunk gets roughhoused by the cops. Something like that builds for a long time. Once it kicked off, reporters could not go into the riot zone without being attacked. But TV news helicopters kept a live broadcast up for five nights, and the nation sat in front of their TVs and witnessed destruction on a level that they had never really considered before. In peacetime, at least, nobody alive had ever seen anything like it, because nothing like it had really happened since the Draft riots during the Civil War. Aerial shots showed crowds of black people setting buildings on fire and then dancing around the flames and then attacking and chasing away firefighters who showed up to try to put out the flames. Some rioters gave interviews and they were promising that the violence was soon going to spread into the suburbs and into the neighborhoods and homes of white people. More than once, viewers saw the TV news helicopter providing their live feed have to flee the scene because it started taking small arms fire from the ground. The scale and aggression of the violence in Watts was unprecedented in modern America. At least the televised Scene seemed to portray a mindlessness and nihilism that was unfamiliar to people for whom Rosa Parks and MLK had always been the face of the black struggle in America. Historian Fred Siegel wrote, 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. 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. Mass media coverage of the Watts riots 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 of its kind, but the coverage transformed them into something more than local atrocities and opened up a new set of possibilities in the minds of many people across the country. The writer and veteran of the 60s revolutions, Paul Berman, wrote that one of the remarkable things about the era was how rapidly new ideas migrated from fringe opinions to being consensus truths. The Black Panthers, Mao and Malcolm. Inspired militant rhetoric was only heard from a few Harlem street preachers in the early 1960s, but by the summer of 66 67, it was the predominant rhetoric of inner city activists everywhere. An ideology of rebellion, rejection and defiance for their own sake. As goods in themselves, had firmly taken hold. Until 1965, the Students for a Democratic Society SDS, which was the largest and most important left wing student group in the country. Until 1965, it had just been the youth wing of a stodgy old social democratic League for industrial democracy. By 1967, Maoist radicals and nascent terrorists were battling for control of the organization. Berman writes that by the 6768 school year, 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 and rock concerts and hippie neighborhoods and the continual insurrections of individuals, a revolution had already occurred, that the new society and 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 all signs of that new society. End quote. Young people were crisscrossing the country in psychedelic buses and VW vans, bringing a new level of connectivity to the protest movement. The mass media made celebrities out of photogenic protesters who competed for attention by raising the stakes, always raising the stakes, increasing the level of risk and danger, and showing their willingness to always go further when others might pull back. That's how you got your face in a news story. This was happening in both the white and black protest movements, with the important difference that the two were working with very different human material. The black kids were tougher and more daring than the white college kids, who always had one eye on the degrees and the careers that they expected to follow their protest phase. The movement was for them a means to accrue valuable experiences that would give them credibility among the people whose opinions they cared about and to give themselves a sense of meaning and authenticity in their lives. The black kids were much more serious, much more angry, or at least they had better reasons to be. And the white kids, they were aware of the deficiency and they did what they could to overcompensate for it. Kirkpatrick Sale in his History of SDS wrote about an incident at Columbia University involving a leader of the Weatherman terrorist cell named Mark Rudd and a less Radical non weatherman SDSer named Paul Rockwell. Columbia at the time had been taken over by student radicals, and many of them were armed and had taken over buildings and some were holding hostages while they made demands on the university. And so at a rally, Rudd's up on stage trying to get everybody riled up. Quote, 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, and no one seemed to have joined the Weatherman ranks that night. End quote. So white revolutionaries like Paul Rudd, rather Mark Rudd, Paul Rockwell, confusing white revolutionaries like Mark Rudd, knew their limitations better than anybody, and so they all worshiped the black revolutionaries for their animal courage and their apparent lack of concern for consequences. It's like Norman Podhoritz wrote after he and his friends lost the fight over the baseball diamond. He said, 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. Now, Joe Wood, the black author whose critique of Podhoritz's essay I quoted earlier, I mentioned that he accused Pod Horitz of exhibiting homoerotic feelings toward the black bullies of his youth. Maybe true, maybe not. But Podhoretz did give Wood the ammunition he needed for that attack when he wrote, there's 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 in cumbersome galoshes. They were bareheaded and loose as they pleased. We rarely played hooky or got into serious trouble in school. 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. End quote. Well, this is the same rapt fascination that you would find in a left wing revolutionary like Paul Rudd, or any of the Weathermen or any of the men and women who joined the various cults surrounding black convicts in California. But Podhoretz and Rudd, both Jews who grew up in the same region of the country, they took that feeling in opposite directions. Podhoretz became a leading neoconservative, which back then was much more focused on domestic policy than foreign policy. They argued for stricter punishments for law breaking and taking a much harder line on rioting. And meanwhile, Rudd and his friends, they became role playing revolutionaries. The neoconservatism of Podhoretz and the radical leftism of Mark Rudd, these 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 so he'd 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. Now Kristol was a man who chose his words carefully. When he referred to the experience of being mugged. Everybody knew that what he was saying was that he, Pod Horitz and the rest of the New York Jews who made up the early neocon movement had been driven away from their liberal upbringing to a more right wing stance because of their direct experience with the great migration of blacks into their neighborhoods. Mark 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 income of $160,000 a year. For Podhorets, Negroes were fascinating, wild and exotic. That much is clear from the quote I just read. But he was also nearby. His feelings about blacks were shaped by his sense of immediate physical, not to mention psychological, danger that they represented to him in his real life experience as a boy. For Mark Rudd too, the urban black militant was exotic, but it was a mystique that could be admired from a safe distance. City dwellers idea of wolves and mountain lions is going to be different from that of a rancher whose livestock are their prey. And if that comparison edges up a little too close for comfort to racial obscenity, go 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 that they brought in as party props resemble anything so much as zoo animals brought in to arouse and titillate Bernstein's guests. This is an ultra elite party for the highest of high society Manhattan, Anglo and Jewish friends of Bernstein. And a few Panthers were brought in to stand around as party props. And for one of them to give a short speech to elicit donations while the assembled partygoers ooh and ah over his funky afro and street slang. Now I want to be very clear here for those of you whose undergarments are beginning to bunch. I'm describing the perspectives of people like Pothoritz, Rudd and Bernstein, not whether their perspectives represent 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 that's what they were. To Bernstein and to his friends, the Weathermen were about as radical and violent as the white left got in the 60s and 70s. Which is to say, very radical, but not so violent. They talked the talk, but at the end of the day, they just didn't have it in them to really walk the walk. The black militants built very differently. Crime and drugs had already swept through the inner cities. In many neighborhoods and housing projects, street gangs were ubiquitous. Many of the recruits to the black militant organizations had done time in prison, and out east, it was a majority of them. By the late 60s, 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 murdered dozens of police officers around the country. And so the white radicals of sds, like Rudd and the Weathermen, they orbited around the black radicals the way the little yappy dog in old Looney Tunes cartoons would orbit around the big, tough bulldog. A race riot has a lot in common with that scene from the movie Office Space, where the protagonists take baseball bats to the computers, printers, and other office equipment that symbolize the oppression of their cubicle life. It makes no sense. And from the outside, it appears totally disorganized and 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. And the answer, I think, is simple and disturbing. They burned down their own neighborhoods because they were bored and angry because it was fun. It is fun to burn down a building. It's a thrill to tell a cop to go fuck himself. You don't have to speculate. A lot of people will tell you. Like Paul Williams and that Seagull quote above, everyone felt high. Hans Magnus Enzensberger, in a seminal essay about the rise of disorganized urban violence in the late 20th century, describes it as what he calls 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 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 from a housing estate in the suburbs of Paris writes. No, quoting the social worker. 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 are given a new football pitch, they saw down the goal posts. And now back to Enzensberger. 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 Mogadishu. 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 with only 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 camouflage 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. End quote. There wasn't any one factor that caused the second half of the 60s to become known as the riot era. From Frantz Fanon's 1961 book, 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 years before. Even in the immediate aftermath of Watts, the LA Times was already referring to the destruction as an uprising. And who doesn't want to be part of an uprising? The black sociologist and author Kenneth Clark spoke after Watts of how the dark ghettos now represent a nuclear stockpile which can annihilate the very foundations of America. Siegel writes, quote, militants saw Watts as both a promising turning point in the black liberation struggle and a repudiation of integrationist liberalism. And they were not alone. What might be called the riot ideology broadly took hold not only among many blacks, but among opinion and policymakers as well. Post riot surveys showed that though whites and Latinos were resentful, the riots boosted black self esteem. According to LA historian Rafael Sonnenschein, the riots unified, mobilized and energized the black community politically. Policymakers at the time didn't fully embrace the argument of radical sociologist Robert Blauner, who insisted that the liberal humanist value that violence is the worst sin cannot be defended today if one is committed squarely against racism and for self determination. But neither did they fully reject that, end quote. The cities tried to cope and head off the crisis and the state and federal government tried to help them cope. Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty can be looked at in retrospect as an attempt by the federal government to take some of the burden of the Great Migration off the shoulders of local governments. The big non profit foundations like the Ford foundation, the Rockefeller foundation, all the outfits listed as sponsors whenever you listen to NPR had always in the past been focusing on things like building public libraries and setting up scholarship funds and jobs programs or curing hookworm in the South. But in the early 60s they began to focus almost exclusively on racial issues. Both the feds and the foundations started pouring billions of dollars into the inner cities. In 1962, the Ford foundation had created the Mobilization for Youth, which received millions of dollars from the federal government to serve juvenile delinquents in Manhattan's Lower east side. Founded to provide opportunities for at risk youth, the Mobilization for Youth organization soon morphed into an early pioneer of the confrontation politics that would lead to the race riots later in the decade, the Mobilization for Youth aimed to put into practice ideas about welfare reform being promulgated by a group of radical left wing sociologists at Columbia. And I know that all of those descriptors are pretty redundant. The sociologists would Write openly back in the 60s about their goal of bringing as many people as possible onto the welfare rolls. With the explicit goal of overburdening state and local governments, of ratcheting up racial and class tensions, and of creating a powder keg that would blow past conservative resistance to more radical economic redistribution at the federal level. That sounds like hyperbole. It gets even worse than that, though. Two leading Columbia sociologists, Richard Cloward and Francis Fox Piven, Whose papers on welfare reform would soon be marching orders for the government of New York City, wrote that when attachments to the role of work deteriorate, so do attachments to the family, Especially the attachments of men to their families. Well, that sounds like something a critic of welfare expansion would say. Right? They predicted that putting more people on welfare would lead to family breakdown and spread certain forms of disorder, including school failure, crime and addiction. Well, these guys must really be against welfare expansion. If they think it's going to lead to family breakdown, school failure, crime and addiction. Right. In 1966, they elaborated that family breakdown Would lead to a weakening of social control, Especially over the young. And it was the young who were the most prominent in the disorders of the 60s. Sounds pretty bad and pretty prescient, right? Here's the thing. These two were not dissident sociologists Pushing back against the campaign to expand the welfare roles. They were the most important and prominent advocates pushing for it. They dismissed the politics of compromise and consensus as a bourgeois trick. And they favored what they called dissensus politics, which was when a group or minority engages in actions which are designed to dislodge or threaten to dislodge not only the minority, but more importantly, other significant constituent groups in that same alliance. Through the cadre's ability to generate defections among other groups in a coalition, Its impact becomes far greater than the voting power of the minority. If the strategists of consensus look for issues and actions to bring people and groups together, Then we strategists of dissensus look for issues and actions that will drive people apart. Well, that's just a long winded way of describing what revolutionaries everywhere had always referred to as agitation. These people believed that trying to help the poor, especially poor minorities, to lift themselves into the middle class Was at best a delaying tactic designed to mollify the poor with false illusions of progress and contain revolution. Even those who were successful at getting into the middle class. Would have merely carved out their own place in an unequal, hypocritical and fundamentally racist society. Effectively, they would have become collaborators with that society. The system required total overhaul, not reform. Revolution and the desperate poor, with no attachments and nothing to lose, were the best revolutionary foot soldiers welfare dollars could buy. These people did not see the poor as potential members of the middle class. That was a bad outcome as far as they were concerned. They saw the poor and located the value of the poor in their potential as revolutionaries. Fred Siegel writes. The real power of the poor, argued Piven and Cloward, came from a street smart version of self help. Their ability to menace and riot, rent, strikes, crime, civic disruptions, they argued, are the politics of the poor. In order to fend off the violence or threat of violence, local government would have to open up the welfare rolls. They assumed this would mean procedural turmoil in the cumbersome welfare bureaus and fiscal turmoil in the localities where existing sources of tax revenue were already overburdened. The aim was to generate severe political strains and deepen existing divisions among elements in the big city democratic coalition, the remaining white middle class, the white working class, ethnic groups, and the growing minority poor. If the system could, through threat and intimidation, be overloaded, if New York City was faced with welfare bankruptcy, then it was assumed the mayor and the governor would have to become lobbyists for change in Washington. In 1966, New York City Mayor Jackson John Lindsay named Mitchell Ginsburg, a board member of the Ford Foundation's Mobilization for Youth and a part of Cloud and Piven's clique at Columbia, as his first commissioner of social services. And Mitchell got right to work putting those ideas into practice. He ordered his department to prepare an advertising campaign to encourage people to get on welfare. And he mobilized other employees of his department and of the poverty agencies to go door to door trying to sign people up for benefits. At the same time, he took dramatic steps to hobble his own agency's ability to properly vet people according to need. He eliminated the interview and investigation process that was meant to see whether an applicant was really eligible and instead told people at his agency that they were to rely solely on the applicant's word that they were eligible. And so, predictably, the welfare rolls absolutely exploded. Meanwhile, the Mobilization for Youth hit the streets to do their part, staging sit ins and riots at welfare offices and organizing Puerto Rican welfare mothers to have confrontations with employees of the welfare agencies, even leaving a load of dead rats on the doorstep of the mayor's residence. Again, this is an organization conceived and funded by the Ford foundation and federal government, and one of its board members is serving as New York's welfare commissioner and its Employees are being paid to go out and create havoc. The Mobilization for Youth was just one of countless organizations that received government and foundation funding to go raise hell on the streets. Another one, the National Welfare Rights association, or organization rather NWRO strong armed the New York City government by holding intense demonstrations and small riots in welfare offices. And then bragged about how this strategy had forced the city to hand over $3 million in new grants to them over a five week period. By the late 60s, Raising Hell was a multi billion dollar industry. But the question was what to do with all this money. City agencies tasked with distributing federal war on poverty funds had a problem. Namely that their middle class civil servants knew nothing at all about the impoverished ghettos where help was most needed. And so when word got out that the agencies had a pile of money that they didn't know what to do with, enterprising locals in cities across the country set up organizations to help them figure it out. In his essay, MAU Mauing the Flat Catchers, Tom Wolfe explains how the whole thing worked in humorous detail. Starts off, quote, going downtown to MAU MAU, the bureaucrats got to be the routine practice. The poverty program encouraged you to go in for MAU Mauing. They wouldn't have known what to do without it. The bureaucrats at City hall and in the Office of Economic Opportunity talked ghetto all the time. But they didn't know any more about what was going on in the ghetto than they did about Zanzibar. They didn't know where to look. They didn't even know who to ask. So what could they do? Well, they used the ethnic catering service. They sat back and waited for you to come rolling in with your certified angry militants, your guaranteed frustrated ghetto youth looking like a bunch of wild men. Then you had your test. Confrontation. If you were outrageous enough, if you could shake up the bureaucrats so bad that their eyes froze into ice balls and their mouths twisted up into smiles of sheer physical panic, into shit eating grins, so to speak. Then they knew you were the real goods. They knew you were the right studs to give the poverty grants and community organizing jobs to. Otherwise they wouldn't know whites had been studying the urban Negro in every way they could think of for 15 years. But they found out they didn't know any more about the ghettos than when they started. Every time there was a riot, whites would call on Negro leaders to try to cool it. Only to find out that the Negro leaders didn't have any followers. They sent Martin Luther King into Chicago and the people ignored him. They Sent Dick Gregory into Watts. And the people hooted at him and threw beer cans. During the riot in Hunters Point. The mayor of San Francisco, John Shelley. Went into Hunters Point with the only black member of the Board of Supervisors. And the brothers threw rocks at both of them. They sent in the middle class black members of the Human Rights Commission. And the brothers laughed at them and called them toms. Then they figured that the leadership of the riots must be the gangs. So they sent in the ex gang leaders. From groups like Youth for Service. To make a liaison with key gang leaders. What they didn't know was that Hunter's Point. And a lot of ghettos were so disorganized. There weren't even any key gangs, Much less key gang leaders in there. That riot finally just burned itself out after five days. That was all. But the idea that the real leadership in the ghetto might be the gangs. Hung on with the poverty youth welfare establishment. It was considered a very sophisticated insight. The youth gangs weren't petty criminals. They were social bandits, primitive revolutionaries. Of course, they were hidden from public view. That was why the nature of ghetto leadership had eluded everyone for so long. So the poverty professionals were always on the lookout for the bad acting dudes. Who were the real leaders, the natural leaders. The charismatic figures in the ghetto jungle. These were the kind of people the social welfare professionals. In the Kennedy administration had in mind. When they planned the poverty program in the first place. It was a truly adventurous and experimental approach they had. Instead of handing out alms, which never seemed to change anything. They would encourage people in the ghetto to organize. They would help them become powerful enough. To force the establishment to give them what they needed. From the beginning, the poverty program was aimed. At helping ghetto people rise up against their oppressors. It was a scene in which the federal government came into the ghetto. And said, here is some money and some field advisors. Now you organize your own pressure groups. To sell the poverty program. Its backers had to give it the protective coloration of jobs and education. The Job Corps and Operation Head Start. Things like that. Things the country as a whole could accept. Jobs and education were things that everybody could agree on. They were part of the free enterprise ethic. They weren't uncomfortable subjects like racism and the class structure. Or giving poor people the money and the tools. To fight their local city hall. But from the first, that was what the lion's share of the poverty budget went to. It went into community organizing. Which was the bureaucratic term for power to the people. The term for finding the real leaders of the ghetto. And helping them organize the poor. And how could they find out the identity of these leaders of the people? Simple. In their righteous wrath, they would rise up and confront you. It was a beautiful piece of circular reasoning. The real leaders of the ghetto will rise up and confront you. Therefore, when somebody rises up and confronts you, Then you know he's a leader of the people. So the poverty program not only encouraged MAU mauing, it practically demanded it. Subconsciously. For administrators in the poverty establishment, Public and private confrontations became a ritual. That was the way the system worked. By 1968, it would be standard operating procedure. To get a job in the post office, you filled out forms and took the civil service exam. To get into the poverty scene, you did some MAU mauing. If you could make the flat catchers lose control of the muscles around their mouths, if you could bring fear into their faces, your application was approved. There was one genius in the art of confrontation who had MAU mauing down to what you could term a laboratory science. He had it figured out so he didn't even have to bring his boys downtown in person. He would just show up with a crocus sack full of revolvers, ice picks, fish knives, switchblades, hatchets, blackjacks, gravity knives, straight razors, hand grenades, blowguns, bazookas, molotov cocktails, tank rippers, Unbelievable stuff. And he'd dump it all out on somebody's shiny walnut conference table. He'd say, these are some of the things I took off my boys last night. I don't know, man. Thirty minutes ago, I talked the panther out of busting up a cop. And they would lay money on this man's ghetto youth patrol like it was now or never. End quote. Many people first heard the term community organizer When Barack obama ran for president in 2008, because he used to do that. But it was born out of this era. The federal government was pumping oceans of money into the cities. And figuring out how to get your hands on that money became a cottage industry. That's what a community organizer does. That's what they are. They. They go into an area, get together enough locals to start a nonprofit, and they start applying for grants. That's. That's what a community organizer does. And most of the time, 95% of the nonprofit's money Turns out to be going to the salaries of the people who set it up. Not. Not all of them. Don't get me wrong. Some of this money went to dedicated activist groups trying to really make a difference. But a huge amount of it went to every kind of scam artist, criminal organization and radical militant group that you can imagine. Organized crime was not going to miss out on the bonanza. And so they became professionals at setting up front organizations to get this money. Even worse, this money that was meant to cool things down in the ghetto very often went right to the groups who were actively working to precipitate the violence. In fact, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, the founders of the Black Panthers, wrote up that organization's 10 point plan in the offices of Oakland's anti poverty agency. Once the war on poverty got going, programs that had been foundation initiatives got rolled into federal community action programs. Journalist Heather McDonald writes the Ford Foundation's urban cadres soon began tearing up cities. Militancy became the mark of merit for federal funders. According to Senator Moynihan in Newark, the director of the local community action program urged blacks to arm themselves. Before the 1967 riots, leaflets calling for a demonstration were run off on the CAPPS mimeograph machine. The federal government funneled community action money to Chicago gangs posing as neighborhood organizers who then continued to terrorize their neighbors. The Syracuse, New York CAP published a remedial reading manual that declared no ends are accomplished without the use of force. Squeamishness about force is the mark not of idealistic but but moonstruck morals. Syracuse CAP employees applied 7 million of their $8 million in federal grants to their own salaries. End quote. When a few Years later in 1968, Congress cut back on the funding available for these inner city community organizing jobs, New York's Mayor Lindsay attacked the federal government, warning that Washington would be to blame if, as he thought likely, the inner cities erupted into violence. One week after he said that, a group of demonstrators organized by one of the city's own poverty agencies went out to make Lindsay's point by marching on City Hall. 1500 youths, mostly black and Puerto Rican, led by 29 year old Willie Smith, the director of the city's neighborhood youth corps, marched on City Hall. The rally got out of hand and the youths rampaged in the streets surrounding City Hall, Breaking windows in the Woolworth Building, looting newsstands and food wagons, mugging a middle aged woman, assaulting the police and stomping on and smashing six cars parked in the City hall parking lot. The cars included those owned by Republican councilman Joseph Medouno, the wife of Lindsay's appointment secretary Harvey Rothenberg, and a city car used by the mayoral aide Teddy Mastroianni. No doubt a combination of Smith's leadership and Lindsay's early warnings had set off the crowd. Smith, a city employee, told reporters after the disturbance. Violence, that's the only thing this city understands. Signs held by the young demonstrators exemplified the riot ideology. Earn or burn. No money, no peace. A cooler. New York is up to you. And give us something to do this summer besides rioting. End quote. The city employee who led that riot was not fired. In fact, he was not even disciplined. His boss wanted to take action, but others at City hall warned him that the black community will blow up if you do that. Mayor Lindsay told that supervisor to let it go because if you stand by this decision, there may be riots and burning and killing. Then again, it was Lindsay himself who had said that the riots were something that had to come. The price we must pay for this affluence. Well, this approach to urban poverty quite simply led to the destruction of, of many cities. And that's not really hyperbole. Take the city of Newark for example. When the feds and the foundation started handing out War on Poverty grants, the Students for a Democratic Society, sds, again the largest left wing student group in the country, dispatched their activists to different cities to go do some community organizing and get their hands on some of that money. And Newark was one of the first places on their list in 1964. Newark is a satellite on the periphery of the New York City metro area. It's across the Hudson and on the other side of Jersey City from Manhattan. But the drive from Manhattan to Newark is no longer than the drive to East Brooklyn. So it's part of that urban milieu. 1960, Newark was 66% white. 1960, mostly working and middle class Jews and Italians. By 1967, just seven years later, it had gone from 66% white to 62% black. Many of the remaining whites were elderly people who couldn't afford to move or couldn't bring themselves to at any rate. And so they had no influence on the culture of the streets and the sidewalks books. No influence on the culture in the schools. Three quarters of all Newark school kids were black. And one in three residents of the city were black and under 25 years old. Volatile group, under 25 year old people. Roughly half of those people had grown up without fathers. Newark was the second to last stop on the Pennsylvania railroad coming up from the southeast. The last stop was Harlem. And a lot of Newark's black residents were migrants from the south who were trying to get to Harlem. But when they heard next stop Newark, they thought the conductor had said next stop New York. And so they got off there. And they just decided to stay. Almost all of Newark was either a business district or a slum, and people were packed in very tight. The population density of Newark was always top three in the United States. It was ringed by suburbs that were not part of the city proper, but which were home to many people who came to work each day in Newark, which meant that the city's population roughly doubled during working hours, which drove population density even higher, and which meant the city had to provide services for all those suburbanite commuters, even though it only had the power to tax Newark's 400,000 or so local residents. And so, as a result, property taxes skyrocketed and what was left of the white and black middle class got out of the city as well, which of course exacerbated the problem even more. And it became a vicious circle like that. Fully 1% of Newark's total population were drug addicts. Police estimated that that 1% was responsible for half of the city's crime. But somehow there was never any money available for treatment or rehab center. The crime rate was among the highest in the country every year, despite the fact that Newark had a police force that was proportionally larger than any force in any big city in the country. More than half the black population had less than an 8th grade education, and at least 40% of black kids lived in broken homes. Corruption in the city government was endemic, and as a result, and people knew about that. So as a result, the city government had no credibility or legitimacy with the people. A few years after this time, a bunch of police and public officials would be indicted for being on the take from organized crime rings. And no one was minding the store because the citizens who would have cared about the decline of the city, they were not sticking around to try to stop it. They were just getting out. Journalist Eugene Methven, in his book the Riot makers, writes, In 1964 and 65, Rutgers center for Urban Studies took two polls of Newark Negro men which revealed a volatile condition. Almost a fifth of Newark's Negroes had sunk into anomie, the label sociologist Emile Durkheim applied to a state of normlessness, disorganization, frustration and bitterness in which people seek desired ends not by planning and rational action, but rather by spastic and pointless acts. These Newark men were totally unorganized, unattached, amoral and alienated. They had no ties to churches, police schools or social workers. They, quoting the Rutgers report, reject all forms of culturally sanctioned remedial agencies, including political parties, Negro action groups, legal personnel and state agencies. Instead, they had substituted a vague desire to fight back or a belief that the situation is hopeless. In short, declared Leonard Zeitz, the sociologist who authored the report, they hated everything. Zeitz warned Newark City hall, the great danger present in this set of attitudes is that some force, as yet not evolved in the Negro community, may come into being, which may possibly crystallize the spastic hostility and formless apathy into a cohesive antagonistic force bent on self destruction. End quote. Well, SDS saw this as an opportunity, and so they began pouring into Newark. SDS National Secretary Greg Calvert told a New York Times reporter, we are working to build a guerrilla force in an urban environment. We are actively organizing sedition. SDS got support from Communist Party usa, who sent Jesse Gray, their chief black organizer, who had helped precipitate a small riot in Harlem the year before. During that riot, Gray had famously announced to a reporter that he was looking for 100 skilled black revolutionaries who were ready to die in guerrilla warfare. SDS also got help from core, the Congress on Racial Equality and other black militant groups. And so the activists rented a slum apartment and started off by knocking on doors to take surveys of people's grievances. But this was really just a pretext to sound out the city's black residents and to find and recruit the people who were the most angry and the most ready to do something about it. Soon they developed a cadre of local black residents and they put them to work agitating in their own neighborhoods, organizing weekly meetings and working with CORE and other civil rights organizations to pull off protests and demonstrations of civil disobedience. Not to call for any specific reforms or programs. This is very clear from their internal writings. Just to turn up the temperature in the city. Over time, they identified a handful of locals, maybe a hundred or so, who showed up for every meeting and who would stand up to speak at rallies and who were the most vocal in their anger. And they began developing them as an inner cadre that would plan more direct and and dramatic action. By summer 1965, SDS had been working to set conditions for nearly a year when President Johnson's War on Poverty targeted Newark. There was no better place for a war on poverty to target. But for the reasons I described earlier, the way it was handled created more problems than it solved and sustained and exacerbated the ones it was supposed to fix. Rather than spending the money themselves, local bureaucrats from the federal anti poverty agencies would find local community organizations who presumably knew the city and its population and their needs better than any Bureaucrat, and they just gave them the money to spend as they saw fit. And so in Newark, civil rights leaders, mostly a bunch of ministers, moderate people, set up the United Community Corporation to receive the millions of dollars that would be coming into the city and to put it to work. The UCC divided Newark into eight districts called Area Boards, each of which got its cut of the money and worked with independent authority over staff hiring and just how the money was spent in general. Now, when the War on Poverty came to town, sds, as I said, had already been on the ground getting organized for over a year. So they were very ready to take advantage of it. And so they began to agitate against the civil rights leaders who set up the United Community Corporation. And they put their activists to work telling the local black population that the program was a fraud and that those black ministers are stealing or wasting the money and that new leadership was needed at the ucc. The SDS leader on the ground in Newark, Tom Hayden, he bragged about how they got the community to protest against the program and its leaders. He said, we tried the approach of implying that soon more City hall people would be paid to get rich, patrol and control the neighborhood unless we did something to expose and resist them. Well, it worked. Soon they got about 70 of their followers to take over a meeting of UCC area board number three, which usually only had about 50 people show up. So their 70 just swamped it. And they called for a vote on new leadership and got their own people elected as trustees and board chairman. Before long, they did the same with area board number two, which covered about 100,000 people in the city's Central Ward, which was the black heartland of Newark. Then they got strong footholds in Area Boards Number five and seven. And in a very short period of time, sds, this organization, whose national secretary is telling the New York Times that they are actively working to build a force for urban guerrilla warfare in America, was running the war on poverty in Newark. They had staff. They had offices, jobs to hand out, and millions of dollars from the federal government at their disposal. SDS described its goals in one of its publications. Success meant. This is a quote. Success meant the project's ability to continually enlarge its diverse basis, to penetrate all permeable local organizations and to create or control newly developing transitional structures, while at the same time assuring its own autonomy so that its activity swings the level of the city's political dialogue and activity to the left as a locus of opposition in the city. The project seeks to become associated with every Manifestation of opposition activity. The project must seek, recruits and build opposition in whatever areas it can and with whatever means present themselves in the course of its probing at all levels in the community. The project also seeks to control or absorb established or new structures in the community that may become resources at every level. Our goal is to disrupt, to challenge hollow democratic rhetoric, to challenge authority, and to challenge the bases on which power is legitimated in society. End quote. See, these people are not trying to help the black community of Newark. They're trying to start a revolution. They might tell themselves that after the revolution, the people of Newark, oh, they'll be much better off. But in reality, that part of it never entered their minds. That's not what they wrote about. That's not what they talked about. It never entered their minds. The revolution was the thing. Whatever came after could be dealt with after. Well, the Watts riot in 1965 opened their eyes to some new possibilities and they went to work to set conditions for a similar explosion in Newark that summer. A white cop shot a black suspect who had just knifed his partner, and SDS saw the opportunity it needed. Their mimeograph machines ran off thousands of flyers and leaflets denouncing and attacking the police. They organized a march on City hall and they brought a truck with loudspeakers shouting slogans against the police. They rounded up drunks and teenagers and put them in the crowd around City hall. While CORE ran their own marches and rallies at a downtown park, police began to find leaflets and flyers teaching people how to make Molotov cocktails and to train them on overcoming police tactics during an uprising. Caches of Molotov cocktails and other weapons were turned up by police in the Central Ward. Firemen began to respond to false emergency calls and went into booby trapped buildings that were meant to maim them. One of the battalion chiefs fell three stories when a stairwell that had been rigged to collapse under a grown man's weight fell out beneath him. He ended up with a broken back. In the first two years after SDS arrived in town, assaults on police officers more than doubled. But even as the temperature turned up, the police department in Newark stood down and totally failed to try to stem the growing unrest or to prepare for it. When it eventually came, the city's police director later told a New Jersey governors commission that they had been afraid that any actions they took would only provide more fodder for anti police propaganda. Well, the city did what it could to de escalate the situation and respond to the people's demands. The mayor was An Italian, but a liberal Democrat. And he integrated the city government. He appointed black people to be his administrative assistant, his budget officer, the executive secretary of the city's planning board. Newark had never had a black person sit on the city zoning Commission, so the mayor put a black person in charge of it. He created a civil rights division in the city government. He promoted black firemen and police officers to positions of higher authority. The city got its first black chairman of education, its first black fire captain, its first black welfare director. He instituted tough and real equal opportunity standards for city contracts. And he stopped construction on a school after CORE complained about hiring discrimination with the construction companies. He managed to squeeze the federal government for urban renewal grants, adding up to $286 per resident. And with that money, the number of substandard housing units in the city was cut in half from 34% in 1960 to 16% by the summer of 67. And so after the riots in other cities in 64, 65 and 66, the Newark government breathed a sigh of relief, thinking that everything they were doing must be making a difference. They were wrong. By 1967, SDS had set conditions in Newark and they kicked off that year's protest season on April 1st by picketing a Jewish meat market they said was exploiting black people. When that spring, the city raised a proposal to purchase property in the city's central slum and to move its residents into newly built projects some blocks away and use the area for a new state medical school, which would provide a lot of jobs that had been approved already at the state level for Newark SDS flyers on stationery bearing the name of one of the city's official anti poverty agencies said that the proposal was an attempt by whitey to use Negro removal to maintain their power in the city, hearings on the proposal routinely turned into raucous demonstrations near riots, with SDs and their local activists doing everything they could to just shut the meetings down. One leader told the board that blood would flow in the streets if the medical school project went forward. Meffin writes, quote, the catalytic figure was one Hassan Jeru Ahmed, a flamboyant 42 year old wig salesman and self commissioned colonel from Washington D.C. hassan had a police record, including arrests in 1966 for passing 21 worthless checks in Washington, D.C. a 1957 forgery sentence of two years in Pittsburgh, and a 1950 commitment for mental observation with a couple of lieutenants. Colonel Hassan showed up in Newark in late March on the invitation of SDS leaders in the city. Sporting bizarre uniforms, black berets and fezzes. Hassan and company opened a black liberation center in a central ward storefront, hung out a photo of Malcolm X in a banner proclaiming the Black Panther is coming and hooked up a loudspeaker to broadcast to passersby. They immediately linked up with sdsers From Area Board 3, whose president endorsed the new operation. Soon, neighbors reported to police that unidentified Negroes were conducting rifle target practice behind Hassan's center. At his first rally on April 20, Colonel Hassan told his listeners that the government was preparing army bases for use as concentration camps for Negroes. His literature accused whites of playing the final trickery upon black men before opening the gates of all out genocidal slaughter. Hassan mixed violent words with violent action and brought Negro residents flocking to the city hall hearings on the medical school just to see his pyrotechnics. One Sunday afternoon, May 21, Hassan held a We Ain't gonna move rally to set the stage for the first medical school site hearing the next day. Speakers included the defeated Negro candidate for mayor, the leader of the local corps branch, and one other Negro politician who urged the crowd. If you expect to get anything for yourselves, you will have to give and take some physical beatings. Hassan, proclaiming that even a small number of people could create a disruptive demonstration, led a rehearsal. He had his audience rhythmically yell the word no louder and louder until the whole building shook. Even the small group there, he declared, could start destroying the white man's precious property and force whitey to want to stop and talk it over. Hassan announced, and the news media widely publicized, that the next day he would lead a large group, a battalion of 250 Black Beret mercenaries from his Black Man's Liberation army, to the hearing. We'll tear the joint down if we have to. We expect trouble with the police, and we're counting on there being at least 100 policemen there to stop us, he proclaimed. Within minutes after the city hall hearing opened, the wife of a Hassan lieutenant hurled eggs at board members on the dais, either trying to duck or stop the throwing. A reporter in the front row tangled with the woman, and her husband slugged him. Police carted the struggling couple out. The audience clapped and stomped periodically as Hasan and other militants delivered fiery speeches. Hassan led the audience in heaping insults on the Negro chairman of the committee, calling him a tom and a house nigger. Razing slum buildings on the medical school site was a political move to get rid of Negro votes. Hassan cried. He climaxed his pyrotechnics by Leaping across the room, ripping up the stenographer's transcript and hurling his machine against the wall. At that, police carried him out, struggling amid screams from the crowd. Then another lieutenant, Captain Raffio, hurled a map rack at the board members on the Daisy. The hearing dissolved in a general melee. Incredibly, Newark officials decided that neither Hassan nor his lieutenants should be prosecuted. They were simply released. Here was an open signal for all to see. City hall no longer had the moral nerve to enforce law and order in Newark in the face of violent challenge. End quote. Well, this went on for months. Hassan took his crew to a board of education meeting that devolved into a melee and had to be shut down. He met with a group of radical black elementary school teachers and got them to hand out leaflets to their kids to give to their parents that read, are your kids getting kicked around? Your black children are being cheated out of their education. Are you sick of white people running black schools? Come to the board of education meeting. Another leaflet read, Black men and black women, now is the time to unite in a solid front in the black revolution. We are fed up with tyrants who lie, steal and cheat our people. Defeat the white race. Do not sit idly by Morley flits with instructions for making bombs and Molotov cocktails and for how to most effectively torch a building and what to say to police if arrested during a riot were papered all over the city. Young school children were paid to post and distribute these leaflets all over their neighborhoods. The city complained to the federal anti poverty agency that the funds they were sending were going to radical groups trying to foment unrest. The city said the acceleration of this kind of practice by the anti poverty agency will undoubtedly lead to riots and anarchy in our city. Well, by mid June, militants were turning virtually every city meeting open to the public into a near riot as more activists from sds, CORE and the Communist party in New York poured into Newark to add their bit of fuel to the fire. The radical black playwright Leroy Jones, about whom we will have more to say later, shouted at one city committee hearing, hiroshima and Nagasaki after the atom bomb will look like Sunday school picnics compared to Newark when we get through with it. At that meeting, the angry crowd screamed and threatened the committee all night long. And the committee tried to wait them out. But at 3:30am they decided to adjourn until the next evening. Evening, at which point the protesters took over the hearing room and declared that the city government's board was no longer in effect and that a new people's board had replaced the committee. Well, by July, everybody knew what was coming. It was just a question of when. The police department was begging the state and other localities for riot gear, and the head of the New Jersey Fraternal Order of Police said that the city was as keyed up as an armed camp awaiting an attack. On July 13, 1967, the attack was launched. Two Newark patrol cops were cruising the city when a taxi started tailgating them, revving up his engine behind them at a stoplight and flicking his headlights at them. And so they got behind the cab and pulled it over. But. But before they could say license and registration, the black driver shouted, what the fuck you call this, you white motherfuckers? And so they ordered him to step out of the car. And as he got out, he threw a haymaker sucker punch at one of the cops and busted up his mouth. And so the other officer tackles him while his partner recovers. And the two cops subdued him and arrested the man. Very soon, word began to circulate that a black man had been violently arrested by white cops, and the SDS cadre sprang into action. The Area Board 3 chairman ordered all the poverty workers on his payroll to go to the 4th Precinct ready for action, and he began putting in phone calls for reinforcements. Protesters gathered outside the station house, and a few of the protest leaders were allowed inside to go see and talk to the man who was arrested, who was then taken to a hospital with a cracked rib and a lump on the back of his head. But the crowd outside was not in a mood to be placated, and they started throwing rocks and bricks at the police station. The city's police director arrived on scene, only to be hospitalized by rocks thrown from the roof of the 14 story housing project across the street. And then around midnight, a firebomb exploded, and then a car was torched in the parking lot across the street. When firemen tried to deal with it, they were attacked by a mob, and then another car was on fire. And so the police decided they should go out and disperse the crowd. And so they tried, and the crowd scattered. But this just spread the chaos into a wider area. A block away, a garbage can was thrown through the window of a liquor store and then other nearby businesses. They were all looted. The police managed to get the situation under control and only had to make 11 arrests that night. By 2:30am the crowd had gone home to sleep it off. The Newark News headline the next day read, mayor's Appraisal. Trouble in Central Ward called an isolated incident, but nobody really thought that was the End of it. Around noon the next day, a gas station attendant saw that the 90 car parking lot of the housing project across the street from the station was completely empty. And he had never seen it anything but completely full. Everybody in those apartments knew there was going to be a riot and they didn't want their own car in the war zone. That morning, SDS activists were distributing leaflets telling people to come to a mass rally at the 4th Precinct that afternoon. But somehow the Newark police didn't catch wind of it, and so they were caught off guard when people started showing up. Hundreds of people came. At the appointed time, James Threat, the African American director of the city's Human Rights Commission, showed up to try to calm things down. Lifted up on the shoulders of two men to get above the crowd, he announced that the mayor is going to appoint a Negro captain in the police department. You're going to have the first black captain in Newark's history. The crowd just screamed that he was an Uncle Tom. Later on, he said, I did not sense it until I was lifted up where I could look down into their eyes. And then I knew I was in a mob. They called me Tom and house nigger and such. They were laughing on the outside and crying with hate on the inside. Even the blackness of my face did not keep me from being a part of the man, and I knew it was time to go. And so he turned toward the door of the police station. And as he headed in, a bottle smashed against his heels. And as if it had been a signal, the crowd began hurling all manner of missiles at the station house, shattering windows and sending people inside scrambling for cover. And this went on for two hours as police just hid inside, putting up benches and tables against windows and doors. Protesters left and came back with loads of bricks and bottles and rocks and cinder blocks to throw at the building. A squad of officers was dispatched out the back door to try to surprise and flank the crowd and try to chase them away. But within minutes, they streamed back in, wounded and bleeding. Methven writes. About 9:15pm, four officers in an unmarked police car, all its windows smashed, picked up 4th Precinct Captain Charles Ziza at his home. About 9:30, they pulled onto the Newark ghetto's main drag, Springfield Avenue. Ziza gasped. Before them was an incredible carnival of piracy. We just saw masses of people, must have been 10,000 over 10 blocks. Men, women and children smashing windows, looting, singing, shouting, setting fires. The only vehicles in sight were about six cars and pickups with heavy chains hooked to the rear. Men were heaving these chains over the steel grills and bars in front of store windows and snatching them right out. And as far as we could see, there was not a single police car or policeman inside. Sight. And now back to Methven. At 7th Street, Ziza saw four men smashing the windows of a ladies apparel store. It was too much for him, a lifelong cop. Stop the car. He barked, and with a bound was out leading his four officers. The four looters were in the store windows undressing mannequins. Ziza collared one, cowed another with his pistol, and fired a fast shot at a third who fled around the corner. This was the first shot and the first arrest of a looter in the Newark riot. It was also the first attempt by the Newark police department in well over two hours of wholesale rioting to enforce the law. On Springfield Avenue, Ziza and his crew put three prisoners in their car, firing a shot or two in the air to hold snarling packs of rioters at bay. At the 4th Precinct, they found chaos. Senior officers and foot patrolmen in unbelievable disarray. Ziza's first words were, what the fuck are all these cops doing in here? Why aren't they out on the street? It took urgent minutes to get any semblance of organization restored. But within an hour, Ziza, a man with the veteran military commander's habit of command, took a dozen shotgun armed officers up on Springfield Avenue and marched them in a picket line down the street, driving looters before them without firing a shot. The first bad fire, a children's furniture store, was already an inferno. Ziza called for a radio equipped emergency truck and soon had a mobile command post in the Springfield riot area. By midnight they had cleared a good part of the avenue, made several arrests and begun receiving sniper fire from the rooftops. And as fast as police cleared looters out along Springfield, they simply shifted to other sections. In the south ward, a mob led by an ex pugilist and bouncer in a local bar looted a Sears Roebuck store of 24 rifles in a demonstration of the rioters pre planning and organization. Fire hydrants throughout the riot zone had been opened up to spray into the street. In order to take away the water pressure firefighters needed to extinguish fires. The snipers seemed to multiply and police officers and white civilians who were stupid enough to go outside came under fire from rooftops and windows. Around 2:30am A message came over the police radio. A green Volkswagen bus with three black men inside was heading west on Springfield Avenue, shooting at targets as they passed by when the police located and stopped the van. The men didn't shoot at the cops and inside the van was the playwright Leroy Jones and two workers from the poverty program in town. The looting went on all night long and at 4:10am the first rioter was killed by a policeman. The next morning, the state governor came to Newark to assess the damage. He saw people lined up in front of smashed stores, some of them driving grocery carts, just casually looting every business in the area. He saw a black couple stop their brand new Cadillac in the middle of the street, go into a shoe store and loot everything they could carry. The rioters were having a great time. The governor told a newsman that the whole thing had a holiday atmosphere. The National Guard began trooping into the city the next day. The riot zone was cordoned off as officials bickered over a plan of action. And even with the National Guard in town, the looting and burning continued throughout the day. A black Muslim calling himself Haking X told a Life magazine reporter that the riots would continue until every white man's building in Newark is burned. They didn't get all of them, but in the end over a thousand businesses were looted and many of them burned. At 5:10pm on Friday, a police officer was killed by sniper fire from an upper floor window of the Scudder Homes housing project. And the police who were there on scene lost their minds and responded with wild gunfire and ended up killing a 74 year old innocent bystander and wounding several others. Word of the slain officer spread around the department and panicky cops began shooting at anything that looked like a threat. National Guardsmen and state police and the Newark police wound up shooting at each other on several occasions. Now these snipers were not just random shooters. These were squads of riflemen who had been trained for the purpose. They moved to a different floor after taking each shot. They moved from building to building around the riot zone. Gradually, the police and the Guard managed to get things under control. Mostly it was just that the rioters gave up out of exhaustion. After several days and nights of non stop carnage, an amateur writer named Jules Spone, who had been born in Newark in 1941 and lived there his entire life, wrote quote, According to Russell Sackett, a reporter with Life magazine, reporters had a clandestine meeting with members of the sniper organizations near the outskirts of the riot zone. The Newark Snipers belonged to a group of young civil rights workers that was formed in Mississippi back in 1965. The group had fraternal contact with other black extremist organizations such as RAM the Revolutionary Action Movement, US The Swahili Speaking group in Los Angeles, and the Deacons for Defense and Justice. He was told there were more than 50 members of this group who were active in and around Newark. Members of the Black Nationalist, Black Muslim, Black Panther and other insurrectionist groups were already in this city stirring up trouble. Many of these insurrectionists came from California, Pennsylvania, New York, Ohio and other states. They were well armed with rifles, M1s, shotguns, small arms, knives and Molotov cocktails. The black community knew well in advance that these armed agitators were in the city and did nothing to stop them and actually aided and abetted them. Of the 1,381 Negroes arrested, only 662 had prior criminal records. End quote. 26 people were killed in five days and nights of rioting. Over 700 people were wounded and Newark never recovered. From what I understand in the last five or six years or so, it started to pick up a little bit, but it took that long. I mean, 50, 60 years. Thinking back on the aftermath, Spone wrote, after the riots, Newark was a changed city. There was mutual distrust on both sides, black and white. I worked for the National Newark and Essex bank at 744 Broad street from 1967 to 1970, and I continued to live in the Ivy hill Apartments until 1974. Week after week you could see the neighborhoods changing as more and more burned out buildings, homes and stores and vacant lots began appearing. A week or so after the riots, my 70 year old aunt Anna, who had been living on William street between High street and Springfield Avenue, was mugged by two black guys when she didn't hand over her pocketbook fast enough, they grabbed it from her and threw her on the ground, causing her to fracture her hip. I could have gotten her into one of the new senior citizens apartment houses that were just being built, but she didn't want to leave the home she had been in for the past 30 or 40 years. Even though it was no longer safe for a white person to be living in that neighborhood any longer, businesses in the downtown area were finding it harder and harder to get people to come to work downtown for fear, real fear of being mugged and held up on the way to or coming home from work. Market street, from Broad street all the way down to Penn Station was a real danger zone for working class people At a certain point in time. The police set up a police cordon along Raymond Boulevard in the evenings, and people were told to walk only along that street on their way to Penn Station. The Two main areas of Newark that have survived pretty much intact are the Down Neck and the North Newark areas. That is because both of these areas were mostly Italian neighborhoods in the 50s and 60s. When the blacks came to the Italian neighborhoods looking for trouble, the men came out in force and chased them out of there. The Italians were the only group who stood up for and protected their neighborhoods. All the rest of the groups, Irish, Poles, Germans, Jews, fled the city without putting up much of a fight. It's a shame, but I understand why they did it. End quote. The Jewish American novelist Philip Roth, famous novelist, great novelist. He was born and raised in Newark by second generation Jewish immigrants. And the city figures prominently in several of his novels. His best book, I think most people think, is called American Pastoral. And the main character in American Pastoral is this Jewish man named Swede Levov. Swede is his nickname because he has blonde hair and blue eyes. So they call him the Swede. Swede Lvov, who took over his father's glove manufacturing business, which had been in Newark since it was open decades ago. Now, most of the novel takes place in the late 60s, early 70s, and it's about how Swede Levov, who's a liberal, but an old school liberal, you know, family man, basically still a bourgeois family man, how he copes with the disruptions and the chaos of that decade, especially after his daughter gets caught up in it all. And so at various points in the novel, they discuss the 67 Newark riot and the effect that it had on the business and on the city in general. Now, obviously it's a fictional account, but it's by an author who was born and raised there and whose work mostly consists of unpacking the Jewish American experience in the 20th century. And he has a lot of insight into what the working class and middle class Jews in places like Newark were thinking and talking about at the time. The Swedes father, who started and grew the glove business, had moved to Florida and turned the business over to his son. And every time he spoke with him, he tried to get him to leave town. And Roth picks up, quote, what we've got. Now, his father argued each time he flew up from Florida to plead with his son to get the hell out before a second riot destroyed the rest of the city. Is that every step of the way, we're no longer making one step, we're making two, three and four steps. Every step of the way, you've got to go back a step to cut it again, to get it stitched again, and nobody's doing a day's work and nobody is doing it right. The whole business is going down the drain because of that son of a bitch Leroy Jones. That Peek a Boo, Boopy Doo, whatever the hell he calls himself in that goddamn hat. I built this with my hands. With my blood. They think somebody gave it to me. Who? Who gave it to me? Who gave me anything, ever? Nobody. What I have, I built with work. W O R K. But they took that city. And now they're gonna take that business and everything that I built up. A day at a time, an inch at a time. They're gonna leave it all in ruins. And that'll do them a world of good. They'll burn down their own houses. That'll show whitey don't fix them. Burn em down. Oh, that'll do wonders for the black man's pride. A totally ruined city to live in. A great city turned into a total nowhere. They're just gonna love living in that. And I. I hired em. How's that for a laugh? I hired em. You're nuts, Lvov. This is what my friends in the steam room used to tell me. What are you hiring schwartzes for? You won't get gloves, Lvov. You'll get drek. But I hired em. Treated em like human beings. Kissed Vicky's ass for 25 years. Bought all the girls at Thanksgiving turkey every goddamn Thanksgiving. Came in every morning with my tongue hanging out of my mouth so I could lick their asses with it. How is everybody? I said. Hope you're well. My time is yours. I don't want you complaining to anybody but me. Here at this desk is not just a boss. Here is your ally, your buddy, your friend. And the party I gave for Vicki's twins when they graduated. What a jerk off I was. Am. To this day, I'm by the pool and my wonderful friends look up from the paper and they tell me they ought to take the schwarzes and line them up and shoot them. And I'm the one who has to remind them that that's what Hitler did to the Jews. You know what they tell me as an answer? How can you compare Svartesas to Jews? They're telling me to shoot the svartzas and I'm hollering no. And meanwhile, I'm the one whose business they're ruining because they cannot make a glove that fits bad. Cutting the stretch is wrong. The glove won't even go on. Careless, people, careless. And it is inexcusable. One operation goes wrong, the whole operation is spoiled all the way Through. And still when I'm arguing with these fascist bastards, Jewish men, men of my own age who've seen what I've seen, who should know better a million times over, when I'm arguing with them, I'm arguing against what I should be arguing for. Well, sometimes you wind up doing that. The Swede said to his father, why? Tell me why? I suppose out of conscience. Conscience? Where's theirs, the Shvartza's consciences? Where's their conscience? After working for me for 25 years? End quote. Well, the Swede refuses to be swayed by his father and he keeps the factory in Newark. And then fast forward, years later, the Swede's an old man, his father's dead and gone. And the book's narrator, a guy named Skip Zuckerman, who basically channels Roth, the author in the novel. Skip is talking to the Swede about the past. They're catching up. And Skip asks about the business and what it's like these days running a business in Newark. And he learns that the Swede eventually did have to give in. And he left town. In the early 70s, virtually the whole industry had moved offshore. The unions had made it more and more difficult for a manufacturer to make any money. You could hardly find people to do that kind of piecework anymore, or to do it the way you wanted it done. And elsewhere there was an availability of workers who could be trained nearly to the standards that it obtained in the glove industry 40 and 50 years ago in America. His family had kept their operation going in Newark for quite a long time, out of duty to long standing employees, most of whom were black. The Swede had hung on for some six years after the 67 riots. Held on in the face of industry wide economic realities and his father's imprecations as long as he possibly could. But when he was unable to stop the erosion of the workmanship, which had deteriorated steadily since the riots, he'd given up managing to get out more or less unharmed by the city's collapse. All the Newark made factory had suffered in the four days of rioting were some broken windows. Though 50 yards from the gate to his loading dock out on West Market, two other buildings had been gutted by fire and abandoned. Taxes, corruption and race, said the Swede. My old man's litany. Anybody at all. People from all over the country who couldn't care less about the fate of Newark made no difference to him. Whether it was down in Miami beach, at the condo on a cruise ship in the Caribbean, they'd get an earful about his beloved old Newark. Butchered to death by taxes, corruption and race. My father was one of those Prince street guys who loved that city all his life. What happened in Newark broke his heart. It's the worst city in the world, Skip, the Swede was telling me. Used to be the city where they manufactured everything. Now it's the car theft capital of the world. Do you know that? Not the most gruesome of the gruesome developments, but it's awful enough. The thieves. The thieves mostly live in our old neighborhood. Black kids. 40 cars stolen in Newark every 24 hours. That's a statistic. Something, isn't it? And they're murder weapons. Once they're stolen, they're flying missiles. The target is anybody in the street. Old people, toddlers. Doesn't matter. Out in front of our factory was the Indianapolis Speedway to them. That's another reason we left. Four or five kids drooping out the windows. 80 miles an hour right on Central Avenue. Further down were the auto show rooms. Central, Cadillac, La Salle. There was a factory where somebody was making something in every side street. Now there's a liquor store in every street. A liquor store, a pizza stand and a seedy storefront church. Everything else in ruins or boarded up. But when my father bought the factory, a stone's throw away. Cuyler made water coolers. Fort Gang made fire alarms. Lasky made corsets. Robbins made pillows. Hoenig made pen points. Christ, I sound like my father. But he was right. The joint's jumping, he used to say. The major industry now is car theft. Sit at a light in Newark, anywhere in Newark, and all you're doing is looking around you. Bergen, near Lyons. That's where I got rammed. Remember Henry's? The sweet shop next to Park Theater? Well, right there. Right where Henry's used to be. Took my first high school date to Henry's for a soda in a booth there. Arlene Danziger took her for a black and white soda after the movie. But a black and white doesn't mean a soda anymore. On Bergen street, it means the worst kind of hatred in the world. A car coming the wrong way on a one way street. And they rammed me. Four kids drooping out the windows. Two of them get out laughing, joking, and point a gun at my head. I hand over the keys and one of them takes off in my car. Right in front of what used to be Henry's. It's something horrible. They ram cop cars in broad daylight. Front end collisions to explode the airbags. Donuting. Heard of donuting? Doing donuts you never heard about this? This is what they steal the cars for. Top speed. They slam on the brakes, yank the emergency brake, twist the steering wheel, and the car starts spinning. Wheeling the car in circles at tremendous speeds. Killing pedestrians means nothing to them. The skid marks are enough to frighten you. They killed a woman right out in front of our place. Same week my car was stolen, doing a donut. I witnessed this. I was leaving for the day. Tremendous speed. The car. The car. Groaning, Ungodly screeching. It was terrifying. Made my blood run cold. Just driving her own car out of Second Street. And this woman. Young black woman, gets it. Mother of three kids. Two days later, it's one of my own employees. A black guy. They don't care. Black, white, doesn't matter to them. They'll kill anyone. Fellow named Clark Tyler, my shipping guy. All he's doing is pulling out of our lot to go home. 12 hours of surgery, four months in a hospital. Permanent disability. Head injuries, internal injuries, Broken pelvis, broken shoulder, fractured spine. A high speed chase. Crazy kid in a stolen car. And the cops are chasing him. And the kid plows right into him. Crushes the driver's side door. And that's it for Clark. 80 miles an hour down Central Avenue. The car thief is 12 years old. To see over the wheel he has to roll up the floor mats to sit on. Six months in Jamesburg and he's back behind the wheel of another stolen car. No, no. That was it for me, too. My car's robbed at gunpoint. They cripple Clark, the woman gets killed. That week did it. That was enough. End quote. Less than one week after the Newark riot ended, a massive conflagration that matched the pattern of Newark down to the last detail blew up in Detroit. Sniper groups engaged in running gun battles with police and National Guard to the point that the 82nd and 101st Airborne Regular army units had to be called into the city. 43 people were killed, nearly 1,200 wounded, and over 7,200 people were arrested. The Detroit News wrote that when it was over, what was left was something worse than a slum. They said that 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. Fred Siegel wrote that the race riots 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 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. In the wake of Watts, Detroit and Newark, James Baldwin wrote that black has become a beautiful color, not because it is loved, because it is feared. Well, people who lived in or near the inner city did not need to consult the newspapers to know how things were going. Violence, like small scale, random street corner violence, was out of control in every major city in America. In Detroit, for example, the infamous Halloween eve Devil's night, had been known since the forties as a night when the city's youth got up to some minor mischief, you know, some minor pranks and acts of vandalism like egging and toilet papering things and leaving rotten vegetables or bags of dog crap on someone's porch. By the late 60s, Devil's Night was the purge. It 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. Things were falling apart, and to many people it was not inconceivable that the violence could spiral into a real insurgency, that it could get organized, if not like Vietnam, then at least like Algiers or maybe Northern Ireland. And people's heads were spinning. And for all the negative connotations attached to the idea of white flight, you really got to try to put yourself in these people's shoes. Take East New York, for example. East New York is a Brooklyn neighborhood directly to the east of Brownsville, and until the 1950s, it was also primarily Jewish and Italian. In the late 50s, the black neighborhood directly to the west in Brownsville started to expand east into east New York, and the effects were witnessed and felt immediately in those seven blocks, seven streets. Rather that the black neighborhood moved to the east. Property crime and violence and drugs and prostitution, gang violence, people getting mugged, kids getting bullied and attacked. And people could not deny what they were seeing take place with their own eyes. Vincent Kanato, in his book the ungovernable City, described what was happening in east New the dangers of operating a business in the inner city increase as store owners realized they could not rely on police for protection. In 1970, an American Jewish committee report described the decline of east New York from a stable working class neighborhood to a minority ghetto. Jews had made up 60% of the neighborhood's residents in 1957. But by the late 60s, Jews appear to have flown out of East New York. The the report observed, as one drives around the neighborhood, one has the impression that this is a blighted area, barren, empty and deserted. The AJC report found that of 41 synagogues in East New York in 1959, only four remained. In 1970, Jewish shopkeepers, fearful of vandalism and crime, followed their customers out of the neighborhood. White Jewish residents describe their neighborhood to the AJC investigator. Teenage youths are seen at 9pm going up a street of two family homes ringing doorbells until they find one in which nobody is at home. They break a pane in the door and walk in. A local bakery, possibly the last Jewish bakery in East New York, was robbed and broken into six times in a two month period. In 1966, there were seven crimes reported for every 100 residents. One out of every seven youths in the neighborhood between the ages of 7 and 20 was arrested during 1965. In 1968, there were 408 fires in vacant buildings. In 1970, nearly 40% of East New York residents were either on or eligible for welfare. Over half the population was under 18 years old and 45% of the young people lived in female headed households, meaning that East New York was dominated by youths lacking male supervision. In 1971, a policeman who had grown up in East New York and moved out in 1967 said of the neighborhood, this place makes Bedford Stuyvesant look beautiful. In 10 years it was completely destroyed. His old house had become abandoned and was decaying and cinder blocked with garbage piling up in the yard. One journalist described the area in 1971. Now this is the journalist. The vacant houses in East New York, many in the Model Cities tract, are now burned out, vandalized, shattered, filled with old shoes, smashed furniture, forgotten dogs and a sour effluvium of neglect and despair. Professional strippers often brazenly drive up in trucks in broad daylight and remove the copper, brass and lead plumbing the sinks and radiators for sale to scrap metal dealers. Windows and doors are sealed with tin or cinder blocks or left open and broken. The sidewalks and streets are littered with garbage, wind whipped newspapers and rotting mattresses. A smashed telephone booth lies on its side in the middle of the sidewalk. The phone coin box ripped out. Broken glass has always been crunched underfoot. Now back to what had just a decade earlier been a stable working class community was now a bombed out slum. Parts of New York City suffered such quiet riots of self destruction and destabilization which worked as effectively to destroy a city as the fires of Watts or Newark The Jewish and Italian residents of East New York saw their neighborhood changing rapidly before their eyes and they did not like what they saw. One Jewish man said he had been shocked by the lifestyle of the new residents. My family began to feel unsettled by the men hanging around during the day and the crime and the drugs. He remembered his neighborhood had been quiet on Jewish high holidays, but with the increasing numbers of newcomers, suddenly there was noise and gangs and bodegas. We no longer felt comfortable sleeping outside on mattresses, on the fire escape on hot summer nights. A former Italian resident of East New York was even blunter. The neighborhood was totally destroyed. As soon as the blacks moved in, buildings started burning down and we had more crime. My sister and two of my little cousins went trick or treating one night and about six or seven niggers ripped them off. So what did East New York's Jews and Italians do? They left. End quote. I'm sorry about the slur, but I am not going to treat you guys like children and say the N word. The Italians were tough. I mentioned that earlier. And they did defend their neighborhoods more tenaciously than the Jews or anyone else who wanted no part of trouble with the blacks and instead just moved out as soon as they were able. I remember one story from the LA riots back in 1992. Black rioters had been rampaging through South Central Los Angeles, attacking Koreans and Korean businesses as well as any other non black people or businesses they could get their hands on. And at one point a group of them started making their way up into Little Armenia. And what happened has become part of LA lore. The Armenian business owners called out all their sons and brothers and they showed up in force and beat the shit out of the rioters, hog tying the ones who couldn't escape to hold them until the police came. When the cops got there, they found a bunch of Armenian dudes standing around a bunch of beat to hell hogtied young black guys. And they just loaded the rioters up into the car and thanked the Armenians for their help and drove off. Well, that was the Italians in New York and other eastern cities back in the 60s. They just didn't have the same fear of blacks that you see in Pod Horiz's essay. For example, if the blacks wanted to fight, the Italians were going to give them a fight. And so in 1965, the remaining white residents of East New York had had enough. And gangs of young Italians, mostly Italians, but also Jews and other whites all working together, started forming up gangs and going after the black residents. Some of Them formed an organization called sponge, which the newspaper said stood for the Society for the Prevention of Negroes Getting Everything. But in reality, the N stood for something else. Kanato writes about them. The club's membership was mainly Italian American youths and numbered less than 100. Its name had long been an inside joke among neighborhood whites and played off their belief that blacks were sponging off the government at their expense. The group made headlines in 1965 when it battled members of CORE, the Congress of Racial Equality, who were protesting the lack of opportunities for blacks at the World's Fair. Sponge's leader, James McMenamin, was a 24 year old wall street clerk. When a SPONGE member was asked why an Irishman was speaking on behalf of the predominantly Italian group. His response showed how racial solidarity cut across ethnic and religious lines. Because he said, Irish, Jewish and Polish guys are on our side. That's why. Blacks and Puerto Ricans complained that they were constantly harassed near the subway by white youths. They claimed white youths would drive through black neighborhoods threatening and intimidating blacks. Whites complained about increasing crime. One told the mayor, the niggers give our women a tough time. They ruin the neighborhood. They bring in dope, they bring trouble, End quote. So then on July 20, 1966, an 11 year old black kid caught a bullet and nobody knows who shot him. It might have been a stray bullet, but black community leaders at the time insisted that it was a white sniper. And so black protesters gathered near the subway station and members of SPONGE and other white toughs around the neighborhood assembled to counter protest. A thin line of police was all that was preventing the situation in East New York from breaking out into an open race war. A group calling itself United Black People distributed leaflets that read White pickets protest integration in New Lot section of Brooklyn's 75th Precinct. Eric Dean, 11 years old, was shot on his way home by white racist gangs or police unknown. Tonight, find out the facts. Killer at large Eric Dean shot on way home by white gang. Whitey has done it again. Innocent Eric Dean was shot down by white racist cops or gangs. Whitey wanted for murder. Justice now. And then later that night, a three year old black kid caught another bullet from another unknown shooter. And so a thousand policemen were called into East New York. And when they got there, they were met with showers of bottles, tire jacks, bricks and molotov cocktails. And 10 of them were injured. The city's human Rights commissioner, William Booth, came to the neighborhood to try to talk to the people and restore calm. And so he was talking to a group of about 100 young black guys to try to get him to go home. And one of them shouted that blacks couldn't walk down certain streets without being harassed. And so Booth says, look, I'm an American, and you're an American, and we can go anywhere we want. And so, upon hearing that, the mob ran toward the area in question, shouting that they were looking for whitey. When they got there, they looted stores and vandalized cars and broke windows and beat up about a half dozen people they were able to catch up with with. Now, New York City managed to avoid the worst of the race rioting. In 1966 and 67, there were small riots, and I say small, but in just one of them, four people were killed, but still small compared to what other big cities were experiencing in those years. There were small riots in Harlem and Brooklyn, the Brooklyn neighborhood of Brownsville, actually, and an incident, the incident we just talked about, between blacks and whites in east New York. But in general, New Yorkers were breathing a sigh of relief that their city had been spared. But the city itself was still in steep decline, the effects of which were not much different from a riot just in slow motion. Crime again, absolutely out of control. From 1955 to 1965, murders increased by 123%. And then between 1966 and 1973, murders went up another 137%. Most other violent crimes were following the same trajectory. The sociologist Marshall Berman, who was born in the Bronx and lived through this era, he wrote that the 60s were years when violence and violent death became everyday facts of city life. So many ordinary, decent people like ourselves, who had worked all their lives to stay clean, suddenly found themselves entangled as victims, witnesses, or survivors in ferocious crimes. There was nowhere you could get away from it. We all learned, often without noticing, that we were learning to be very alert in public places to respond to subliminal signs. End quote. No one had ever really seen anything like this in the United States. There was a big spike in crime in the cities when the Irish showed up in the mid19th century. There was crime during prohibition when gangs were fighting for control of the liquor trademark. And there was a spike in crime during the worst years of the depression, but never at this scale and never so random and senseless. Never in the history of American cities had people been afraid to go outside in the evening or at night. The increase in violence overwhelmed the NYPD's ability to respond to it. And criminals figured out that as long as they didn't take the subway to go Mug some rich person in Manhattan, there was a good chance they could do what they wanted without getting caught. It wasn't just robberies and homicides either. People would just set fires and burn down buildings. Not during a riot, just for something to do on a Tuesday night. Something like 40% of all buildings that stood in the South Bronx in 1960 had been burned. 40% had been burned by the middle of the next decade. It was crazy. New York Times reporter David Burnham wrote, the fear is visible. It can be seen in clusters of stores that close early because the streets are sinister and customers no longer stroll after supper for newspapers and pints of ice cream. It can be seen in the faces of the women opening elevator doors, in the hurried step of the man walking home. Late at night on the subway, the fear manifests in elaborate gates and locks, in the growing number of keyrings, in the formation of tenant squads to patrol corridors, in shop buzzers pressed to admit only recognizable customers. And finally, it becomes habit. Another Times reporter, Murray schumach, wrote in 1968 that there is little doubt that the slums of the 20s and 30s, for all their poverty and congestion, were much safer for the public than they are today. Middle aged New Yorkers can recall that before World War II, they used to walk without fear on the city streets in any section at night. Those who grew up in such slums as Brownsville or Harlem remember that during the day they left doors open for ventilation, and at night they slept on roofs, fire escapes, parks or beaches. After concerts in Lewiston Stadium, couples strolled down dimly lighted Riverside Drive without concern about muggers. Transit policemen were not needed on subway trains late at night, and ice cream parlors did not worry about staying open until midnight to get the business of the crowds leaving the last neighborhood movies, end quote. Well, James Baldwin was right that the events of the 60s were leading white people to fear black people. But it was working and middle class white people who were afraid. You know, the elite white people who ran the show and whose kids were in $50,000 a year private schools. They were hosting Black Panthers at parties in their Manhattan penthouses. They were able to hold on to illusions that were a privilege of the rich, illusions that people in the middle and on the bottom could not afford to hold. New York journalist Jim Sleeper wrote about the racial element years later. He said violent crime is only the most obvious source of many whites growing conviction that a disproportionate number of blacks are unwilling or unable to join the larger society to share in a common endeavor. But it wasn't just white people who were afraid. By the mid-60s, the black middle class was completing its own exodus out of the inner cities to get away from the chaos. Vincent Cannado, in his book the Ungovernable City, wrote, crime in New York City had its biggest effect on minority neighborhoods. For stores in the Harlem business districts along 116th and 145th streets, crime and theft became a cost of doing business. In 1966, the owner of an appliance store on 145th street, who had lost $3,000 worth of merchandise during a break in, called the Strip the worst block of all New York. You'll hardly find a business on this street that hasn't been robbed recently. Harlem is a jungle. Black and white businesses on 116th street reported similar stories. One refrigeration and gas maintenance company had a total of 14 burglaries in two years. A nearby glass and mirror factory had six. A men's clothing store reported three burglaries in its first month of operation. Police reports noted that 34 of the 47 businesses along 116th street between 7th and 8th Avenues had been burglarized during the first nine months of 1968. In 1967, an Amsterdam News editorial stated now, quoting the editorial, we can't get rid of crime by ignoring or compromising with it, and we can't use slingshots or statistics to fight animals bent on killing. The paper called for restoring the legitimate, unbiased use of firearms by our police, the return of the right of a man to defend his home against robbers. At the end of 1968, the New York NAACP called for an end to the reign of criminal terror in Harlem. The report on crime demanded that in Harlem the attitude toward crime and criminals must change and noted that there were people known to cheer when some offender rushes from a store. The report called for greater police protection in Harlem, harsher criminal penalties for murderers and drug dealers, and vigorous enforcement of the city's anti vagrancy laws. The NAACP report reminded New Yorkers tired of the city's coddling of criminals who the real villains were. It is not police brutality that makes people afraid to walk the streets at night. Crime also affected the northern Manhattan neighborhood of Inwood. Long a working class Irish enclave. Inwood and nearby Washington Heights saw an influx of immigrants from the Dominican Republic in the 1960s. In response, many of the Irish moved to the suburbs, like those in Rockland County, New York and Bergen County, New Jersey. Those who remained, though, felt their lives increasingly constrained by fear. According to One study of the changing face of Inwood by the late 1960s. Now quoting the study. Robberies, muggings and rapes struck a much wider range of people, especially the elderly. And burglaries made people feel vulnerable even in their own homes. It was not just the reality of crime that hurt. It was also the perception of crime and the raw fear that seeped into every corner of daily life. At its best, life on a block in northern Manhattan once made many Irish feel like part of one big happy family. Now they felt more like vulnerable individuals, alone, isolated and fearful of the sound of footsteps behind them on a dark street. Fear of crime combined with a rush of changes that signaled the end of life as the Inwood Irish had recently known it. And now back to Kanato. The many Irish bars in the neighborhood experienced a rash of holdups and many customers felt that the streets were just too dangerous for late night bar hopping. Crime and racial conflict became hopelessly interwoven. Similar developments were occurring in the Bronx. The neighborhoods of Mott Haven, Morasanya and Hunts Point had dissolved into the amorphous South Bronx. A graffiti splattered area filled with burned out buildings, chronic drug abuse, Puerto Rican gangs and roving packs of wild dogs. According to Dr. Harold Wise of the Martin Luther King Jr. Health center in the South Bronx, by 1972 the area had become a necropolis, a city of death. There's total breakdown of services. Looting is rampant. Fires are everywhere. 40% of residents were on welfare and and 30% of employable individuals were unemployed. As the social decay crept northward, so did the boundaries of the South Bronx. Along the Grand Concourse area, elderly residents felt threatened by muggers and businessmen began to experience more break ins. One 80 year old woman was held up three times in four years. A local dry cleaner had been robbed six times in six months during 1969. Other businesses had similar stories. In the Grand Concourse police precinct, overall crime had risen 69% in 1968 alone. According to one report, bands of rowdy youths waylay children and make off with their bicycles. Pocketbook snatchings are so common that women try to outwit criminals by hiding their purses in shopping bags. In the evenings, muggers hide in the lobby alcoves of apartment buildings or under stairways. The journalist Jill Jones documented the flight of white Jews from the South Bronx. Now, quoting Jones, the Jews moved because what they saw in these new families scared them. The symptoms of poverty and social disintegration that they had struggled so hard to escape from on the Lower east side and to avoid in their own lives on Charlotte Street. They saw men standing around the streets drinking, gambling during the day. They saw families with too many children crammed into too small a space. They encountered housewives who didn't understand the neighborhood codes about garbage disposal. They saw sons and daughters growing up too much on the streets without supervision. They saw casual attitudes towards sex, procreation and marriage. They saw men without steady, decent jobs. Now back to Kanato. Fear gripped residents as they fled the streets and park benches for the security of their multi locked fortress apartments. In a 1968 letter to a Brooklyn congressman, Emanuel Seller, one constituent wrote, thousands of people of Jewish faith have stood by helplessly to see their businesses destroyed, their lives in constant peril as politicians blithely court the Negro vote and ignore those who elected them to office. Why is it your sworn duty to protect robbers, muggers and rapists? In 1967, Jay Kriegel received a letter from the Rabbi Eugene Sack of Park Slope, Brooklyn. The letter read, my fervent good wishes in your efforts to bring a little law and order to the city. Last week the neighborhood grocer's delivery boy was beaten and stabbed and severely wounded by a gang of hoodlums whose color I will not mention. We have installed extra locks in our house. Also, we are considering bars for the windows. The neighbors are gathering to hire extra private police. And shortly I will begin to consider that great American privilege of carrying firearms for personal protection and the protection of my family. And finally, back to in relaying the letter to the mayor of New York, Kregel called the rabbi one of the calmest, most liberal men I know. He also worried that if the letter was indicative of sentiment in that area, we have an even worse problem than I thought. Edward Bates, owner of Bates Pontiac Corporation on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx, wrote to the mayor about the effect that robberies and thefts were having on his inner city business. Frankly, in all our years in business, we have never been faced with a dilemma as seemingly unsolvable as the thefts and burglaries to which we are continuously exposed, wrote Bates. Our neighborhood is overrun with hoodlums and prowlers. Tires and accessories have been stolen and brand new cars damaged during the thefts. Earlier, two of Bates workers were held up in broad daylight while going to the bank. End quote. This is how people were talking in the aftermath of the 67 riots. Working in middle class people. I mean again, in Manhattan penthouses like Leonard Bernstein's and the one that Mayor John Lindsay lived in. You know, it was those work to them, it was these working class and middle class Catholics and Jews who were viewed as having sole responsibility for any racial tension in the city, period. But in the factories and offices and among truck drivers and longshoremen and insurance agents and salesmen and construction workers, they had had enough. Enough of having their kids come home bleeding from school, enough of getting mugged and carjacked and seeing their neighborhoods go up in flames because some criminal got shot trying to stab a policeman. They'd had it. And, you know, there's kind of this misconception today, at least on the dissident right I've seen this misconception that this stuff only affected the Catholics, the Italians and the Poles and the Irish, and that the Jews, 90% of whose politics did range on the spectrum somewhere between liberal and communist, that they were fully on the side of integration at all costs, and that they were doing everything they could to push it as far as possible. That is not true. And you have to look at the class element to really have a sense of what was going on back then. People point out instances, and there were instances like this where a court case to force an Irish or Italian parish neighborhood to accept the relocation of a black housing project, and the judge is Jewish, and the lawyers arguing on both sides of the case are all Jewish, and they're sitting there discussing among themselves whether this Catholic neighborhood should have this imposed on them. But what people miss is that the same thing was being done to poor working and middle class Jewish neighborhoods, especially in New York, with the largest population of Jews in the country. And so, sure, Leonard Bernstein and his rich Manhattan friends, they were on the side of the rioters and the cop killers and the Black Panther. And they were joined in this view, by the way, by a lot of the rich Manhattan wasps. But down at ground level, Jewish guys were standing shoulder to shoulder with Irish, Italians and all the rest. Nathan Glaser and Dan Patrick Moynihan wrote a book in 1963 called beyond the Melting Pot about the major ethnic groups in New York City. And in the 1970 edition, there was an extended introduction where they discussed what they had gotten right and what they'd gotten wrong. In the 1963 book, the authors were still thinking entirely in ethnic and religious terms. There were Jews, there were Irish, Italians, and more recently, blacks and Puerto Ricans, which is not how it would be framed in 1970 or today. Today they would talk about whites, blacks and Latinos. Racial, not ethnic terms. Maybe Jews would get their own chapter still, but only as an idiosyncratic portion of the white population. It's funny. In the 1963 book, Glaser and Moynihan observed that NYC politics had always been divided up into Catholics, Protestants and Jews. You know, if there was a Catholic mayor, then there was going to be X number of Protestants and Jews in his cabinet and vice versa and so forth. That's how it always worked. And they actually predicted that since blacks were mostly Protestant Christians, that they would become part of the city's Protestant coalition and that that would be their primary identifier and their primary mode of political organization. They recognized in 1970 how silly that sounded. And they remarked about how over the course of the 60s, the Protestant, Catholic, Jewish distinction, along with ethnic distinctions, at least among the middle class, had faded into the background to become almost invisible as working in middle class. Protestant, Anglos, Italian and Irish Catholics and Jews just looked at each other as white people. And that was how they were viewed by black and Puerto Rican people, as well as by the policymakers at each level of government. This shift in perspective was fundamental to the civil rights revolution. You couldn't have a code of laws that favored Catholics over Protestants or Italians over Irish or blacks over Jews that just would not have gotten by in modern America. But if you lump all those people into just two groups, the white majority and the colored minority, then you can get away with favoring minority people of color over, quote, unquote, white people. This was a massive transformation in the demographic and social composition of the United States. Northern cities before World War II, they were almost all made up of these organized ethnic neighborhoods that were working with generations of built up social capital. These were communities that had some capacity for self help. And so when we encountered a crisis like the Great Depression, say, we never could have gotten through that as well as we did if these parish communities in the big cities were not able to take care of themselves. To some degree, the Catholic churches in Irish and Italian and others neighborhoods, they had real pull in their communities. The priests were real leaders in their communities with genuine influence. This is why, for example, the Catholic League of Decency was able to put hard limits on sex and violence in the movies for so long. Catholic communities were organized, and so the priests set a lot of pull. And if they said boycott this movie or this studio because they're putting out smut, people would do it. And so those standards lasted all the way up until the 1960s. And the biggest factor was that those Catholic neighborhoods were mostly gone, broken up and scattered by the Great Migration. All those people had moved out to the Suburbs. And now, you know, there's this scene in the Sopranos where Tony's taking his son AJ On a drive through the old neighborhood in Newark where Tony grew up. And so they drive past this old Catholic church, and Tony tells his son that his grandfather came to this country with $4 in his pocket, but he was a stonemason, and he'd helped build that church. Everything else in the neighborhood that they're driving past is destroyed. And they're driving past crack houses and there's trash everywhere and things are run down. And Tony's trying to impart to his son some respect for their family's history in the area. In. And so he tells them that the neighborhood didn't used to be like this, not when it was all Italians living here, because even though they were poor, they cared about their community. The existing Irish Catholic churches, they let Italians in the door, but they weren't exactly welcome. And so Tony says the people wanted a new church, and so the neighborhood got together and they built one. They didn't ask or expect anything of anyone except themselves. He says his son's not really getting it. And so Tony says, this church right here, people from the old neighborhood still drive from miles around to go to this church. And his son says, well, how come we don't do that? And that's really the rub. There are still people, mostly elderly people, who drive in from the old neighborhood to go to the old church that their grandfathers built. But it's not. It's not the same. It's a place to go to church on Sunday mornings. It's not the center of a functioning community the way it was in the past. The people live out in the suburbs now, and suburbs are great for nuclear families. But you can't build a real community out in the suburbs, or at least usually you can't. Or it's really difficult because, you know, you're an Italian Catholic and your neighborhood on the left is a Jew, and to the left is a German Protestant. And all three of you have different political views and different ideas of how things should be. That's not to say you can't all be good neighbors. But a community is more than just good neighbors. In it is an organized corporate entity, self conscious and capable of self regulation and mobilizing its members for action. People today remark all the time about how nobody knows their neighbors anymore. And it's true, that was inconceivable back in the old days. You didn't just know your neighbors, you knew everybody, and everybody knew you it was like a small town or a village located in the middle of a big city. That's what people meant when they said the Italian American community. Think I might have said this earlier, but it wasn't like today, when the term just means the Italian American population. It was a real community. And cities were made up of communities like that. And so again, when something like the Great Depression did come along, they were organized enough to bear some of the loads, taking care of their own people without having to resort to government programs. Communities that can take care of themselves, that regulate the behavior of their members to some degree. They make it much easier to run a society. They take a huge load off the government. But once those communities are wiped out and you just have a bunch of individual families living in isolated existence, the extended family maybe lives out of town or even out of state, then the government has to do all those things. And it's like Charlie Laduff said, negative changes hit the ghetto first, the trailer park second, and then finally start working their way up into the middle class. And that is what we have been seeing since the 1960s. The decimation of families and communities created a terrible situation for inner city blacks first. But eventually those same trends caught up with poor whites and then working class whites. And Charles Murray shows in his book Coming Apart, the statistics clearly demonstrate that poor and working class whites have been on the same downward trajectory already traveled by poor and working class blacks in decades past. So anyway, that was a long aside. In the Aftermath of the 67 riots, 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 since New York City was the most notable big city to have avoided major rioting, the city's mayor, John Lindsay, was asked to lead the Kerner Commission. Now, John Lindsay was the quintessential Eastern establishment Rockefeller Republican, a Yale educated elite liberal, enlightened on racial questions and seething with contempt for the ethnic groups and ethnic politics that had shaped city life in the east and Midwest for over a century. Century. For Lindsay, the protests of an Italian or Lithuanian or Polish community against the relocation of a 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. They were the same thing as far as he was concerned. The Kerner Report that eventually came out reflected that perspective. They 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. Not white Americans like him, of course. Well, when lindsay's attention turned to the schools, Lindsay asked the ford foundation. We've already caused enough trouble in this episode. But he asked the ford foundation, led by former harvard dean and jfk and lbj national security advisor. In other words, Lindsey's kind of guy. Mcgeorge Bundy was his name. He asked him to set up a commission through the ford foundation to assess the causes and proposed solutions for the ongoing deterioration of the schools, Particularly black majority schools. Bundy's tenure at the ford foundation was defined by its focus on racial issues. When they weren't funding urban decay like I described earlier, Outfits like the ford foundation were studying it. And that's what mayor lindsay had tapped mcgeorge bundy to do for new York schools. The New york public school system by this time served about 1.1 million students. It employed 70,000 teachers, 43,000 administrators, and it was and still is the largest school system in the country. When the Brown vs Board of Education supreme court ruling to desegregate the southern schools was handed down in 1954, New York City activists and education bureaucrats sprang into action. At the time, the ruling was understood by most americans outside the south as something intended to strike a blow against jim crow in the south. And they were right about that. But they were wrong that that's what it was only about. Because almost as soon as the ink was dry on the ruling, People were on the clock looking for ways to make it apply to institutions other than schools, and not just in the south, but everywhere. In the ruling, the court had overruled previous decisions which had permitted segregation as long as everyone had access to institutions and facilities of the same general quality. It's called separate but equal is the way they put it. In the brown ruling, the court said that it was impossible for separate but equal to exist, because under segregation, even if the segregated facility had the same quality as everywhere else across the board in every measurable way, it still wouldn't be equal. Because the very act of segregating some people Inevitably generated, according to the court, a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds In a way unlikely to ever be undone. So proponents of integration argued for a very broad ruling reading of this ruling. They said that since the spirit of the court's decision was that any segregated institution or facility did unlawful violence to to the psyche of the minorities they served, then it didn't matter whether the segregation was accomplished legally, as it had been in the south, or just naturally by people sorting themselves into different neighborhoods as it did in the north. Diane ravitch, the historian of New York's public school system, writes, militant integrationists in the north, anxious to erase the stigma of racism that had permeated American society from its beginnings, read the decision to mean that any large clustering of blacks was evidence of racism. From this perspective came the proposition that democratic ideals required the dispersion of blacks in equal proportions and always in a minority. Throughout the New York city school system. The assumption was made and stated openly by leaders of the integration movement and by school officials in both cities, city and state, that a school where blacks predominated was by definition incapable of providing equal educational opportunity. No matter what kinds of teachers or facilities or pupils a school had. Even a school in which every pupil was the intellectual equivalent of Frederick Douglass or Stokely Carmichael or Roy Wilkins. A black school could never be a good school in the eyes of militant integrationists. Thus, the effort to eliminate all forms of racism, whether written or unwritten, turned into a well intentioned but ill fated demand that no school have an enrollment that was more than 50% black or 50% black and Puerto Rican. The problem was that with so much rapid demographic transformation, integration became a moving target. During the 1950s, New York City lost over 800,000 mostly middle class white residents and gained over 700,000 mostly poor black and Puerto Rican residents. Schools which as recently as 1955 or even 1960 had been considered integrated, became by the mid-60s almost entirely black and Puerto rican. Well, to counter this self segregation taking place, the city started an open enrollment program to allow students in black neighborhoods to transfer to middle class white schools in other parts of town. It was a voluntary program and transportation was paid for by the city. Teachers and principals in the inner city were against the program because they thought that all that it would do, and I can understand where they're coming from, was take away their best students, the ones with enough interest in school and concern from parents to actually take advantage of the program. And so the student population left behind would be in even worse shape than it was currently. Black parents and students were not enthusiastic about the program either. Despite the insistence of black activists, the reality was that neither kids nor parents were really excited about being bussed halfway across the city to attend an unfamiliar school. A lot of single mothers had to work and they couldn't be around to make sure that their kid made it back from some faraway school. In another borough. And so, as a result, only about 677 students. I guess that's not an amount. That's pretty precise. Only 677 students total took advantage of the program. No government program could overcome the demographic reality. While the Overall number of K12 students in New York City public schools dropped by 8% each in 1956, between 1956 and 1963, the number of black students grew by 53% in those same years. By the end of that period, black and Puerto Rican kids made up a straight majority of all students in the public schools. So even if every student in the city was spread out evenly across the whole system, the minority kids would just make up 53% of every school instead of 90% of some of the schools. Whole swaths of the city and the surrounding area, big, big areas were now overwhelmingly black. And so to even move in the direction of integration would have meant busing black kids again halfway across the city to go to school in white areas and forcing parents in those white areas to have their kids bused halfway across the city into the ghetto. That was a political non starter. Obviously, the way it was put by the chairman of the city's board of education was the schools cannot solve a problem created by the residential decisions of the people of New York. We would think that having a total city student population that was 53% black and Puerto Rican would be a pretty strong argument against the push to make sure that no school had more than 50% black and Puerto Rican kids. But good arguments are not known for making much of a dent in the certainty of activists and bureaucrats. The state education commissioner announced that any racial imbalance existing in a school in which the enrollment is wholly or predominantly negro interferes with the achievement of equality of educational opportunity and must therefore be eliminated from the schools of New York state. Then he clarified that by racially imbalanced, he meant any school with a population that was more than 50% minorities. Diane Ravitch pointed out, stating that predominance of a particular racial or ethnic group in a school makes the school inferior is, on the face of it, a libel against that group, whether they are black, Italian, Jewish, or whatever. Well, finally, by about 1964, the city was forced to admit that true integration was just not an achievable goal. And so instead, they shifted their focus to where it probably should have been all along. Away from helping get the motivated minority of ghetto kids into white schools and instead trying to actually improve conditions in ghetto schools. Schools, as well as building new Schools to alleviate overcrowding. Well, finally, by about 1964, the city was forced to admit that true integration, as they'd been defining it, Was not an achievable goal. And so instead, the focus shifted to where it probably should have been all along, Away from helping to get the motivated minority of ghetto kids out of the neighborhood into white schools, and instead trying to actually improve conditions in ghetto schools, as well as building new schools to alleviate overcrowding. One of the schools slated to be built was called Intermediate School 201, or IS201 in East Harlem. And IS201 was a political lightning rod from the very beginning. Black activists in the city actually tried to block it being built because building new schools in the ghetto, they thought, was a cop out from pursuing integration. Even though at $5 million, the school was set to be the most expensive school in New York city, the brutalist design of the place made it look like a prison. The architectural historian Robert a.m. stern said it was part of a movement to turn public schools into fortified strongholds, Refuges against the decaying city. The school confronted its neighborhood with windowless facades Consisting of two floors of brick and concrete. An open ground floor space beneath the building was intended for public use as a passageway or recreation area. But the space was so low, especially in relation to its width and length, that it was very dark and dreary and proved to be uninviting inside. The lack of windows in the classroom was meant to heighten students concentration by isolating them from their undesirable surroundings. But the design became a symbol for the status of inner city blacks as invisible members of society. End quote. Another problem arose when the city chose to name is 201the Arthur A. Schomburg school. A meeting had been held with the local neighborhood school board to get approval for the name, and they gave their approval. But then activist board members who were not at that meeting raised a stink about a school for black and Puerto rican kids being named after a Jewish. Which is funny, because Arturo Schomburg, as Mr. Schomburg was born, was not Jewish at all. He was a well known, though apparently not well enough, known to the Harlem parents and activist organizations. A well known historian of black culture who had been born in Puerto Rico to a black mother and a white father. Schomburg had moved to New York in 1891. He was part of the Harlem renaissance. He ended up selling his large collection of books and prints and paintings and photographs and so forth to the New York public library in 1926, and that became the nucleus of the Schomburg center for research in black culture, which was in Harlem. So he was the perfect person to name a mostly black and Puerto Rican Harlem school after. But the fact that it took a lot of back and forth with angry parents to explain that gives you an idea of the mood in the city at the time. And so While this is 201, controversy is brewing. The Bundy panel. The Ford foundation's Bundy panel is wrapping up its work and preparing a report on the schools for mayor Lindsay. The Bundy panel was made up of wealthy philanthropists, executives from the Ford foundation, academics who specialized in educational policy, and black and Puerto Rican community activists. Missing from the panel were any K12 teachers or administrators, no representatives of the teachers union, and no representatives of the working and middle class white white parents whose kids would also be affected by whatever the panel put out. And McGeorge Bundy had actually requested representatives of those groups to be on the panel, but mayor Lindsay vetoed it. You know, it's just, it's how Lindsay viewed the role of government and his role as mayor specifically. As far as he was concerned, he did not work for everyone in the city. The working and middle class white people did not need him working on their behalf. They were fine. They had representation through their labor unions, their economic power, their Italian American associations, and Irish American and Jewish American associations. Those people had all the representation they needed. And Lindsay's job as mayor, as he saw it, was to represent the people who had no representation. Some very poor whites and all minorities. He saw all of those white institutions as he saw them again. You know, the unions, the churches, the Catholic churches anyway, the community organizations and parents groups. He saw them all as obstructionist, self interested, and essentially racist in their foundation. And he did not want those people or their representatives on the panel. Those people were the problem that the panel was tasked with solving. That's just how Lindsay saw things. So the panel released its findings in November of 1967, and the solutions it proposed were quite radical and involved bringing over a century of school reforms full circle. Back when the New York City public school system was created in the 1840s to deal with the hordes of Irish kids suddenly running the streets of New York. The protestant run system had a hard time getting Catholics to put their kids in the schools. And so, after a fierce battle in both the city and in Albany, which led to more than one Catholic riot, the Catholics finally pushed through a reform to radically decentralize the school system. Each neighborhood would now have its own local school Board that controlled pretty much everything. Hiring and firing teachers, promotion, salaries, maintenance and building budgets, curriculum, everything. The city board of education would have almost no meaningful role at all in how the schools were run. Well, the reforms placated the Irish catholics, but very quickly the schools were taken up into the city's corrupt patronage political system. Everything from teachers jobs to building and supply contracts were handed out to politically connected people who happened to have bet on the right horse in the previous election. Yet people sitting on some of the school boards in Irish neighborhoods who couldn't even read. Half the teachers could do nothing more than read out of a textbook and just have the kids recite it back. That was their capacity as an educator. School facilities were starting to fall apart because of corruption and how maintenance contracts and janitorial jobs were handled. And so for years, reformers tried and tried to overhaul this system. But the genius of the patronage system is that it puts so many people on the payroll, it makes sure that so many people have a stake in keeping things the way they are, that the reformers can never get past first base. Now, the system muddled along mainly because, you know, in the 19th century, most Irish kids were dropping out after 7th or 8th grade to go to work, to help support the family, which was fine for most kids since you could get a decent enough job to get by and have a decent life as long as you knew how to read and write and just do basic arithmetic. But then the Jewish and Italian migrations kicked into gear in the 1880s. The Italians treated education more or less like the Irish, but not the Jews. The Jews were obsessed with education. They were not pressuring their kids to drop out after eighth grade to get to work. Kids and families who did that were shamed in the Jewish community. And Jews wanted as much education as they could possibly get. They took advantage of city college. New York has a free city college for the city's residents. And it got to the point by 1920 that the student population at City College was 85% Jewish. It was still 60, 65% in 1960. Their attitude toward education, though, set them up for serious disappointment. When they first got here and got a look at the condition of the school system. The millions of new Jewish and Italian students completely overwhelmed the system, and the corrupt, sclerotic local school boards were completely incapable of dealing with the crisis. The physical condition of the schools got to be really bad. Teachers were unable to manage overcrowded classes. Everybody knew something had to change. But the current system stakeholders still fought reform, you know, incompetent Teachers in the system, they had secure jobs in the patronage system, and they knew they were going to be in trouble if suddenly they had to compete in a merit based system. The members of the local school boards had a lot of influence in their communities because of their ability to hand out jobs and contracts, and none of these people wanted to give that up. But this time the reformers, who had always been mostly WASPs, this time the reformers had one of the immigrant groups on their side. New York Jews were Democrats just like all other immigrants, but their concern for education lined them up on the side of the Republicans and the Reform Democrats on that particular issue. In 1896, they were finally able to completely overhaul the public school system. They eliminated the local boards altogether and centralized all authority in a single city board of education. Teachers and administrators were no longer hired, fired, placed or promoted based on who they knew. They all had to take a pretty serious civil service examination. And the ones who scored the best got their pick of assignments and promotions. People who sat on the board of education and the bureaucrats who staffed it, they were trained, credentialed education professionals, not people who got their job because they knew a guy. It was a strict meritocratic system. Well, this opened up teaching as a career opportunity for New York Jews who were confident that they could out compete other working and middle class groups for those jobs as long as the system was based on merit. And they were right, they did outcompete everyone else. By 1920, more than half the teachers and administrators in New York public schools were Jewish. Over the next few decades, that would grow until about 70 to 75% of all teachers and administrators were Jews in New York City. The New York City public school system was by the 1950s. It's not really an exaggeration to say it was a Jewish operation, but here's the thing. Nobody complained because the Jews did a great job. The period from World War I up to about 1955, 1960, is remembered by everyone as the golden age of the New York City public school system. It was the best in the country, far and away, and it was the model that other cities looked to when they wanted to improve their own schools. Nobody was particularly concerned about Jews having so much control over this municipal function, because again, that's how the city had always worked. The police and fire departments were mostly Irish. The Transit Workers union was mostly Irish, always run by the Irish. The police department anyway. Still today, even Today, something like nine out of the last 10 NYPD police chiefs have been Irish. Italians controlled sanitation and construction contracts, and the Jews controlled the schools. Everybody had a piece of the pie, and nobody really complained too much about it, as long as everybody did their jobs. Like I said, that golden age came to an end by 1960, when another huge wave of migrants, blacks from the south and Puerto Ricans, flooded into the system and overwhelmed it once again. So what the Ford foundation recommended was that the city undo those 1896 reforms and radically reduce the power of the city board of education and devolve control of the schools back down to local boards. Now there were white parent groups, parent groups from white areas who had been fighting for community control of schools for years. And if they had been invited to participate in the process, it probably would have helped smooth out the transition to a decentralized system. But they were not invited. The teachers union, they had been also advocating for a certain amount of decentralization. Many people felt that the system had just grown too big for a single board of education to effectively manage, and that if local boards were stood up to represent parents and students, the teachers would be able to respond more precisely to the needs of different communities. But the teachers wanted nothing to do with what the Bundy panel was talking about, which they said was not decentralization, but balkanization. Under the Bundy report, charges could be brought against a tenured faculty member by a community board of laymen with no professional expertise. This proposal is anti professional. It would encourage local vigilantes to harass teachers. No teacher with professional integrity could teach in such a district. End quote. The union charged that so called community control, at least as formulated by the Bundy panel, would not actually empower parents, but local militants and activists, because those people were already organized and would make sure that their people got control of the school boards. The union charged that community control was just a euphemism for a return to the old ethnic spoil system, or in this case, a racial spoil system system. For years, black militants had been making the case that black students should only be taught by black teachers in schools run by black administrators. And the union warned that bringing race into hiring, firing, promoting and placing teachers would lead to conflict, and that it would erode standards and open the door to manipulation and corruption. But according to the African American Teachers association, the ata, an ethnic spoil system was already in place, One which benefited the white, mostly Jewish educators who had long since left the neighborhoods they were supposed to be serving. Most of all, the union was concerned that devolving so much power to the boards of laymen would have the effect of invalidating their contractual rights. That the union had negotiated for the teachers with the city. So a self appointed People's Board of Education was stood up by a group of black and white militants. And they released a statement that read, quote, the People's Board plan proposes that all appropriations will come directly to the local school board. School personnel are to be hired by community supervisory bodies and program and policy for education to be worked out by each community using the school system's central headquarters merely as a resource center. In other words, what they wanted was not different districts. They wanted effectively separate school systems in each district. The People's Board at one point took over the Board of Education's meeting room by creating a ruckus and forcing the real board out of the room. And the minister who led the People's Board made their goals very clear. He said, we're trying to get rid of the Board of Education. There is no other solution. Vincent Kanato writes, quote. Even more troubling was the growing intimidation of white principals and teachers in inner city schools. In 1966, there were 213 attacks on public school teachers. The following year there were 224. In December 1966, a group of 30 protesters blockaded the office of Kate Tuchman, a white Jewish principal of Public School 125 on the border of Morningside Heights in Harlem. Earlier, a group of militants had asked Tuchman to waive her right to be principal. They barricaded her in her office for nearly an hour, waiting for her answer to their request. Two of the people involved, Babette Edwards and Robert Nicholl, were both activists in the IS201 controversy and the People's Board of Education. Their appearance at PS 125 suggested that the protests came not from parents at the grassroots, but from a highly motivated and vocal band of militants. The following spring, black militants in Brooklyn engaged in low level terrorism against white principals and teachers in schools in Brownsville and Bedford Stuyvesant. At PS 284, 50 predominantly Jewish teachers refused to work after a flier attacking teachers was distributed. Written on some of the notes were messages such as, out of here, you no good Jew bastard. And don't come back here in September if you know what's good for you. Two days later, the principal of PS284, William Emmer, asked to be transferred out of the school. He and nine other teachers had been singled out by Brooklyn core, the Congress on Racial Equality, led by Sonny Carson and the Brownsville Community council. By June, 30 of the 50 teachers at PS284 asked to be transferred out of the school. The previous week, Harry Levine, principal of Junior High School 258 in Bedford Stuyvesant, requested a transfer after Brooklyn corps demanded he leave the school. Levine said he had been threatened. CORE asked all principals in Brooklyn's ghetto schools to create a plan to improve reading scores and hire more black teachers. The principals obliged, but the response was unsatisfactory to core, and Carson said his group considered all but five of the 32 principals in the area to be fired. Michael Romano, president of the elementary school principals association, wrote that black radicals really don't want white principals in the schools. Carson said, if the superintendent thinks we're kidding, he had better wait until September and see what happens when those teachers, those principals, try to come back to our community. One of the worst examples of the intimidation of school personnel occurred on January 19, 1968. Four black men entered Junior High School 117 in the Clinton Hill section of Brooklyn, Brooklyn, asking to see the principal, John o'connor. When o'connor arrived, the men, none of whom had children at the school, called him a honky and pushed him. When the acting assistant principal, George Elias, stepped in, he was pushed. Robert Goldberg, head of the social studies department, became involved. One secretary who witnessed the fight called it a wild western brawl with fists flying everywhere. O'Connor, 47, and Goldberg, 29, were knocked out. While Elias, 45, was knocked down. A secretary fainted. Some parent and community representatives seem to condone the violence. Margaret Campbell, chairman of the parents organization of District 13 in Bedford Stuyvesant, said, we don't say that anybody should beat up anybody, but we also say that nobody should have to feel they have to beat someone. This system has made people feel like this. While we don't condone it, we're in a position where we cannot condemn it, knowing their root causes. Albert Vann, president of the African American teachers Association, called the attack at JHS117, but an inkling of the increasing hostility felt by the black community as it begins to realize that it has no control over forces that directly and adversely affect its life and the lives of its children. End quote. The next month, the United federation of Teachers, the New York teachers union, took out a full page ad in the New York Times. The ad displayed an open letter to the people of New York titled end chaos in the schools. It was written by UFT president Al Shanker and it read in teachers in our public schools are becoming targets of a mounting volume of attacks by extremist groups. Ugly pressure tactics are employed. School Officials are hounded and harassed. Teachers are deprived of the most elementary right of due process. Threats and intimidation are the order of the day. Teachers are beaten in their classrooms by the self styled profits of education reform. School after school has been enveloped in a climate of fear and chaos. Shanker warned that if the city did not take action to get this situation under control that the union would have no choice but to use its striking power to shut the schools down until something was done. That same month, the temperature was turned up on the controversy over is 201 in Harlem. African American Teachers association activists at the school announced that they would be holding a memorial event for Malcolm X for their students. The acting principal of the school had refused to let the event go forward as planned, but he was overruled by the city superintendent. Organizers banned reporters from the event with the exception of a black journalist for the Amsterdam News, which is a black newspaper in New York. The program featured speeches by Malcolm X's widow Betty Shabazz, by James Baldwin and by a school employee named Herman Ferguson, who was actually out on bail after being indicted for plotting to kill the moderate civil rights leaders Roy Wilkins and Whitney Young. Ferguson told the crowd to arm themselves because Vietnam was just a warm up for what white America had planned for black people. People. He told the kids and the adults who had come that after destroying the black population, quote, the white man will come in with his defoliation chemicals and spray all the watermelon patches and remove all vestiges of us. Black people not only needed to be armed, he said, they needed to be prepared to kill. When the deer hunting season comes in the fall, I certainly don't want any brother to have the unfortunate experience of developing buck fever when he sees his first deer, zeroes in on him and then can't squeeze off the shot. End quote. There weren't a lot of deer in New York City and everybody knew exactly what he meant. Leroy Jones, the playwright who had been arrested in a van with two other guys for riding through the Newark riot should shooting out of the windows. He put on an anti white play for the IS201 audience. James Baldwin got wild applause when he referred to America as the Fourth Reich. But then he was booed off stage when he said that some white liberals were not so bad. Moderate black leaders and community members were called stupid black niggers, Uncle Tom's and the white man's niggers who frequented white dirty ass Jewish owned bars. These are just quotes. I'm sorry, don't blame me. A running theme of the program, according to the Amsterdam News reporter, was the need to avenge Malcolm's death. This event was held during the school day and was attended by students and then adults in the community who wanted to come. And so that caused a predictable uproar. Kanato writes, quote, what caused the uproar was the blatant anti white attitudes that permeated the program. The most offensive moments came during Jones's play performed by his spirit house movers and players. One character said, we're not going to let the white man get us all to killing each other. We're not going to eat his nasty ass. Pig, wake up. He went on to call the white man a diseased white bitch who gave his diseases to blacks because of the white man who ate filth. Another character said, white people, your ass will be set on fire. Next, a 20 minute pantomime was performed which the Amsterdam News described as follows. Now quoting the Amsterdam News. The silent drama opened with the white man on all fours while the black man walked proudly upright. Then the white man steals his knowledge from the black man and gradually lowers the black man until he becomes a prone, head scratching, obeying servant. Suddenly there appears on stage a tall black thinking brother dressed completely in black. He forces the white man to return this stolen knowledge. The man in black then removes his head scratching brother from the white man's slavery spell. Next he forces the white man back to crawling on all fours. The play received a deafening sustained standing ovation. The rhetoric of the militants of the African American Teachers association became more extreme as the debate over decentralization heated up. One statement from the ATA claimed that black children are being slaughtered through educational genocide. An activist group involved with the IS 201 controversy called the Board of Education the Board of Genocide. And this kind of language made compromise impossible. How can anybody compromise with somebody who is actively trying to commit genocide against his children? You can't. And that was kind of the point. To make any half measures in the direction of community control in impossible. As we should all be able to see very clearly today. There are a lot of people who actually want polarization and want conflict because that delegitimizes the moderates on both sides, on all sides who as far as the extremists are concerned are the only thing keeping them from winning a total victory. And that's what they were after. It would be total victory or total defeat, period. They were not willing to compromise. Before long, the activists even turned on the Bundy panel is not going far enough. One spokesman said that it was a Mechanism to contain guerrilla warfare. We must destroy that mechanism, encourage incidents. An official from the ocean hill school district said that they needed to create a crisis in every school, and maybe hunting season will start early. When the fall semester opened in September 1967, the city superintendent decided it was too dangerous to open is 2001 with the rest of the schools. And so, as students got to work in the rest of the city, local militants took over is 201 for a protest demonstration. One protester shouted, we got too many teachers named Ginsburg and Rosenberg in Harlem. This is a black community. We want black men in our schools. Parents threatened to boycott the school if their demands to replace the school's Jewish principal with the black one were not met. The leader of the protest said, it's not really the principal himself at issue. It's just that he's white and only negro or Puerto Rican is acceptable to us. The superintendent tried to explain to them that hiring principals and teachers based on their race violated state and federal law as well as city anti discrimination statutes. And so even if he tried, it would just be overruled by the courts. But the activists did not want to hear it. The leader of CORE in Harlem warned that if I were that principal, I would not come here. It might not be safe for him. And so the superintendent acquiesced and promised to replace the principal. Then he changed his mind and told the parents that the principal would remain in place. Then by noon that same day, he changed his mind again and promised to transfer him. That principal got a call from the board of education that day while he was eating lunch. And then immediately afterward, he put in a request for transfer out of is 201. The superintendent was happy to have something to bring to the militants, and he told them he would be appointing a black female principal named Beryl Banfield. But Banfield, noble woman refused the appointment. She said that the current principal was well respected by her and others, and anyway, she didn't want an appointment based solely on her race. So then the entire staff at IS201, almost the entire staff, black, white and Puerto Rican, refused to teach unless the principal was reinstated. And the next day, 53 of the 55 teachers at the school stayed home on a wildcat strike. 35 other principals in Harlem wrote the superintendent to protest the dismissal of IS201's principals. That day, the superintendent changed his mind yet again, said that the principal would keep his job. When the school opened, a crowd of protesters assembled at IS201 to physically prevent the principal from entering the Building. The protesters chanted black teachers for black Harlem. And the leader of the protest, who was also the president of Harlem corps, told reporters that this was only a skirmish, a prelude to war. With the help of the police, the principal and teachers made their way into the school. And despite the threat of boycotts from groups claiming to speak on behalf of the district's parents, more than 90% of students showed up for school. The high attendance rate indicated that the so called parents groups were not really representative of parents views, but those of a small band of ultra radical militants. But it's the squeaky wheel that gets the grease, as they say. And so it was the militants who got attention from the city government. Regular parents got ignored. Even when they did complain, Things continued to get more intense Inside and outside is 201. And the city failed to do anything to support the city staff. It was getting dangerous for the principal and his white teachers in the classrooms, in the cafeteria, and in the parking lots. Soon enough, the principal gave up and transferred out. By January 1968, only 20% of the original teachers would still be at the school. New York Times reporter Leonard Bouder visited is 201 that month, and he found it in a state of bedlam. He said in his short time there, he saw several fights between students, total chaos in between classes, hallways filled with trash and graffiti, bulletin boards, chalkboards and floor tiles torn up and defaced. A black teacher at the school told him that the kids know their parents are hostile to the school, and they come here feeling that way, too. They're uncontrollable. Even the Ford foundation described the school as an armed camp. Vandalism was rampant. Children roamed through the halls seriously undermanned. Several of the staff were observed standing in the hallways with yardsticks to protect themselves. End quote. While none of this made mayor Lindsay think twice about whether community control of the schools was a good idea, the program would go forward, period. It was set to begin with a pilot program in three districts, and the whole thing was funded by the Ford foundation. Two of the districts came off without too much trouble. Well, one of them was is 201. And it didn't come off without trouble, but it was already having trouble. The third was the Ocean Hill Brownsville district in Brooklyn. And there the worst fears of the UFT were realized almost immediately during the debate over decentralization, the teachers union had warned that in practice, I think I might have mentioned this, community control was not going to mean more involvement by concerned parents, but a takeover of the schools by radical Activists because they were already organized and prepared to take advantage of the reforms before they were even implemented. And that's exactly what happened in Ocean Hill Brownsville. Elections were held for the local school boards, but Election Day came and went and turnout was so low that it was decided to extend the election and send paid activists door to door to help parents fill out and return their ballots. It wasn't just parents. Everybody in the community. 20 of the people sent around to collect ballots were also on the ballot, and not surprisingly, almost all of them won their seat. An organization representing ordinary non militant parents complained that their candidates had been harassed and intimidated and in several cases were not even placed on the ballot. But the city ignored them. The man chosen to head up the Ocean Hill Brownsville district was a guy named Rhodey McCoy. McCoy had grown up in Washington, D.C. and moved to New York as an adult. He had been an acolyte of Malcolm X, often visiting him at his home and attending the mosque where Malcolm preached. McCoy was heavily influenced by a 1967 book by Harold Cruz called the Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, and he agreed with it that Jews had too much power over the American left in general and the black struggle in particular. The that's a major focus of the book. Cruz's book was published the same year as the Arab Israeli Six Day War, and it fit well with the anti Zionism that had been incorporated into the Third World identity of black militants in America that same summer. The expulsion of white, again mostly Jewish, activists from SNCC 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, led him to see Jews where other people, including other black activists mostly, would have simply seen white people. McCoy wrote an article for an education journal that spring that read in part, whites cannot prepare fast enough to cope with the determination and commitment of those of us who are pledged to wrest from them their illegal hold on the future of ourselves and our children. If whites are not willing to relinquish this stranglehold, if they are not willing to work with blacks in resolving these Herculean problems, then the battle lines are drawn. There will be massive, persistent and even violent confrontations. End quote. One of McCoy's first acts as head of the Ocean Hill Brownsville district was to appoint Herman Ferguson, the man indicted for plotting to kill the two moderate civil rights activists, who was still out on bail, as principal of one of the schools. Ferguson had a long and public record of extremist racial rhetoric, even beyond that is 201 Malcolm rally. In 1967, he wrote in the newsletter for the African American Teachers association, black teachers must begin to assume our natural role as a revolutionary force in the just struggle for liberation that is now going on in the third World that encompasses black America as well as Latin America, Asia and Africa. In March 1968, Ferguson published an article in the Guardian in which he wrote that it wasn't enough for black people to get control of their schools. Once we really take this control, he said, we must be prepared to teach our black youth how to survive in the hostile society that we do not yet control. In the article, Ferguson described his ideal school. He said students would learn in classrooms adorned with pictures of great black fighters like Malcolm X, Marcus Garvey and Muhammad Ali. They would start the day pledging allegiance to the black red and green pan African flag and reciting a poem by Leroy Jones. Morning classes would consist of physical exercise, martial arts training, instruction in gun weaponry, gun handling and gun safety. End quote. Loudspeakers, he said, placed in the ceilings would continuously bathe the black student with the quiet sound of Malcolm X preaching. Leroy Jones reading one of his poems, Aretha Franklin singing a soul song, and other black heroes speaking to him and filling him with a constant pride in his blackness. He said math classes would take a practical approach and would teach students things like wind velocity and muzzle velocity and other mathematical considerations involved in firing, repairing and making weapons. Home economics would teach students first aid and, quote, how to survive off the surrounding environment when all food and fuel supply lines into the black community are cut off. End quote. Shop class would instruct students in things like making electronic timers and gunsmithing. As Kanato says, all this could be dismissed as the quasi fascistic dreaming of a crank, except that it was written by a man deemed by Rhodey McCoy of becoming a principal. End quote. And Fred Siegel wrote the ATA again, that's the African American Teachers association 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. They said giftedness in black children could be measured by a willingness to challenge authority. End quote. In April 1968, of course, Martin Luther King, Jr. Was assassinated in memphis, and black students rioted in schools across new york city. A female student in the ocean hill brownsville district named karima jordan said, we just threw chairs around, wrote on the walls, avenge king, Kill whitey. Students rampaged through the halls, and many teachers had to lock themselves inside their classrooms to keep safe. A black nationalist teacher named leslie campbell, one of the leaders in the ata, who had been brought into one of the schools in the ocean hill brownsville district by rhodey mccoy, was asked to speak to students at a school assembly to try to calm things down. And instead, he told the students, brothers and sisters, you have to stop fighting among yourselves. You have your money and finally get enough for a leather jacket and your brother steals it. You've got to get your minds together. If you steal, steal from those who have it. Stop fighting among yourselves. When the enemy taps you on the shoulder, send him to the cemetery and you know who your enemy is. End quote. The speech fired up the students so much that they tore through the halls, attacking any white students and teachers that they could corner. One white female teacher was punched and her hair was torn out and her clothes were ripped off. Well, despite everything, the uft was trying at first to be accommodative. A few teachers were uncomfortable with the direction of the program at JHS271 in the ocean hill brownsville district. And so mccoy demanded that they be transferred to another school, and they agreed, and the union agreed to expedite the movement. 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 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 and effectively turned their classrooms into training centers for black militants. White kids were being openly discriminated against by many black teachers. Classes sometimes became struggle sessions, with white students being used as foils for the teachers. Racial harangues more white teachers started becoming alarmed at what was happening. And this time, McCoy didn't wait for cooperation from the teachers union to act. He summarily fired 19 UFT teachers and administrators for ideological non compliance. Asked why the situation hadn't been handled with more tact, one radical said that confrontation with the board of education and the teachers union had to come sooner or later. And so it was better to start the fight in the spring. Spring to hang the threat of summer riots over the heads of city officials. They learned from experience that the city was so desperate to avoid a riot that in the end, they would always buckle. And if they could get away with firing these teachers, then they would set a precedent that would carry forward into the future. McCoy didn't even pretend that the firings had anything to do with performance. He admitted openly that they had been fired for what he called their politics. All the fired teachers were white, except for one black teacher who was a victim of mistaken identity. And that teacher was reinstated as soon as the mistake was recognized. Such a flagrant violation of the teacher's contract with the city forced the union to do something. Al Shanker, the leader of the union, said that if they didn't take a stand now, then there was no point in even having a teachers union. And so, after giving the city fair warning and a chance to reinstate the teachers, UFT teachers across the city walked off the job in protest, promising to shut down the schools until the fired teachers were back in their classrooms. You know, in city after city and neighborhood after neighborhood, racial militants and their elite liberal backers had just swept aside the opposition of the white ethnics trying to resist the changes in their communities just swept them aside. But their long run of success in the 1960s had made them overconfident. They were so used to everybody buckling and giving in and surrendering to all their demands. When it came down to do what we want or there will be violence, they were so used to the city's buckling that they became overconfident. And by picking a fight with the teachers union, they had bitten off more than they could chew. This time, it was the activists who would be put on the back foot, and they found themselves unable to control the terms of the debate over decentralization civilization, even with the Lindsay administration and most of the prestige press on their side. See, McCrory's strategy of getting militants to focus on the teacher's Jewishness was a huge tactical mistake. By choosing that path, he 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 that, he ran right into the teeth of the teacher's strongest defenses. In the current climate in 1968, the teacher's whiteness was their vulnerability, but their Jewishness was a strength. If the battle had been understood as black versus white, then the radicals probably would have routed the white teachers. But by focusing on the teachers Jewishness, that mobilized the Jewish community against them. 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 well substantiated accusations of anti Semitism. The mostly Jewish Teachers Union Again, 70, 75% of all the teachers and administrators in the public school system were Jewish. The same was true in the union and in the union leadership. These people had taken in left wing politics and organizing with their mother's milk. Their politics typically ranged from anti Soviet Trotskyites to new deal democrats. And they had always supported civil rights and racial integration. Al Shanker, the union leader, and many other union executives and members had made the trip down to Alabama in 1965 to go join Martin Luther King's march to Selma. They knew all the militants tricks better than the militants themselves did. And they were not people to be easily cowed with frivolous accusations of racism, especially when their accusers were using language reminiscent of old world antisemitism. Probably no other group in the country was as well organized as New York Jews. They had built a network of charities and jobs programs and youth summer camps, religious institutions, educational institutions, anti defamation organizations, and they could all work together with military precision when they really needed to. And so this was the first time that black militants ran into a group of card carrying liberals who were actually willing and able to stand their ground. The school year ended without the question of the fired teachers being resolved. We're talking June 1968. So the 67 school 68 school year ended. And during the summer the union went to court and a judge ruled that the firing of the teachers was completely illegal, violated the teacher's contract with the city and to reinstate them. But McCoy said he was going to ignore the judge and he would use whatever means were necessary to keep those teachers away from his school. Some 150 cities across the country burned in the summer of 68. New York managed to avoid the worst of it, but everyone's attention was still focused on the battle over the schools. And as the new school year approached in the fall, everybody expected a confrontation. McCoy was still promising to keep the teachers out of the school. Al shanker warned the mayor that the union would go back on strike if the city did not enforce the judge's order to reinstate the teachers. But on the night before the first day of school, mayor lindsay took it upon himself to go public and announce that there would be no strike, Even though he hadn't discussed it with shanker. The union immediately countered that the strike would indeed go forward if the teachers were not brought back. And so that night, the board of education announced that the teachers would be reinstated. But Rhodey mccoy said, if they returned to campus, I. I can't guarantee their safety, which he meant as a threat. But even if he hadn't, it was probably true he could not guarantee their safety. When they came back to the school, McCoy said, Fine, we're being forced to take you back, but nobody can make us put you back in the classroom. And so instead, the reinstated teachers were sent to an unused room to just sit around and do nothing all day. This was not a move designed to placate the union, and that day, Shanker made good on his promise and told his teachers to go home. 93% of the city's 70,000 teachers stayed home the next day, and only about 4% of the city's more than 1 million students had a class to attend. White parents groups, citizens councils, community organizations, they could all be ignored. But the teachers union was demonstrating how organized they really were and making a statement that they had independent power of their own, that the city would have to reckon with whether it wanted to or not. The mayor's office, the ocean hill brownsville governing board, the board of education, the commissioner of education, the superintendent, and the New York times and most of the major media all supported decentralization and community control. They were laying into the teachers union. Only the teachers and administrators opposed it. But they could not and would not be ignored. That strike only lasted two days before the union extracted what sounded like guarantees to protect the teachers of ocean hill brownsville. But Rhodey mccoy and the militants standing behind him were not part of that deal. And so when the fired teachers tried to return, Sonny carson, the head of Brooklyn corps and a gang of black panthers and other militants were asked by mccoy to come to the school and physically prevent the teachers from entering it, which they did. In an interview, Carson said that if it was up to me, they wouldn't be letting them in simply because they're white. I don't think any white person is interested in giving black children an education by whatever Means necessary. They are going to be kept out. The NYPD sent Lloyd Seeley, the assistant chief inspector and the highest ranking black cop on the force, with three other officers and they escorted the teachers into the school. But once inside, all the union teachers in the school were ordered into the school's auditorium. One incident that day gave life to the union's worst fears. At the auditorium, the teachers encountered a crowd of 50 to 100 young people who hooted and cursed at the teachers and called them faggots and honkies. One of the teachers described the scene. The president of the PTA and some others walked back and forth by us, pointing to various people, saying, you. You're gonna get it, you pigs. We'll never let you back. We'll get you. One man went up and went to the microphone where he informed us that if we reported to work, we would be carried out in pine wood boxes. Bullets were thrown at us. One man with a violin case walked back and forth by us and acted as if he had a gun in it and made believe he was shooting us. He poked it at us and went rat a tat tat back to kanato. Teachers believed McCoy had orchestrated the whole scene. A community liaison person with the governing board kept giving signals to the people walking up and down, said one U of t teacher. McCoy looked up at the lights at one point and right then they started going on and off. When the auditorium went dark, voices shouted, it's dark now. We can see you, but you can't see us. We're going to get you now. According to a Post story, among the teachers exiting the auditorium, many of the women could be seen crying as they left the building. Some men teachers, their voices trembling, said they feared for their lives and sought protection from clusters of police in the neighborhood. As the teachers filed out of the auditorium, someone threw a bullet at them. Another teacher described leaving the auditorium as an anti union activist shoved and threatened teachers. A pregnant teacher was punched in the stomach. A woman who said she was a member of the governing board waved the sheet with the teachers names and addresses and chanted, you better never come back. We have your names and we know where you live. If you come back, we know where to find you and we will bury you. End quote. Now, Mayor John Lindsay did not get along with any union leaders. Actually, that's a huge understatement. He could not stand them and they could not stand him. He saw them as narrow minded, bigoted power brokers protecting privileges that they had accrued through years of complicit Sea City government and they saw him as an insufferable self righteous limousine liberal. That term actually came into being to describe John Lindsay, who was bigoted against working class whites and knew nothing about what happened in his own city outside of his posh Manhattan neighborhood. In his first year in office, Lindsay had picked a fight with the mostly Irish transit workers union in the city and that led to a strike that shut down the subway system for 13 days and cost the city hundreds of millions in lost economic activity. The next year he picked a fight with the mostly Italian sanitation workers union and that led to a strike that ended with 100,000 tons of uncollected garbage piled up on the streets of New York. Both of those strikes became bitter personal between Lindsay and the union leaders and both times the Governor of New York State, Nelson Rockefeller, had to step in and impose a settlement. When the garbage men went on strike, Lindsay actually requested that the Governor send in the National Guard to come pick up trash, but only to pick it up in black and Puerto Rican neighborhoods. Because as far as Lindsay was concerned, the working and middle class whites in Queens and South Brooklyn and Staten island, those people all supported the sanitation workers strike and so they were complicit in what was happening. Rockefeller refused to do that. Lindsay also failed to avoid work stoppages by hospital workers, welfare department social workers, and he failed to stop job actions by the police and fire departments. Michael Harrington, author of the book the Other America, wrote, quote, John Lindsay is not once given the slightest hint that he has any sympathy for or understanding of unionism. He has botched every negotiation he has handled in part because he is so obviously contemptuous of organized workers. He is capable of a charismatic relationship to the under organized ghetto, but not of any ongoing participation in collective bargaining. Edward Hurley, who was later to become one of Lindsay's top labor aides, said that Lindsay looked down on blue collar workers and union leaders picked up on this right away. A reform Democrat who had actually voted for Lindsay said that many people found abrasive Lindsay's self righteousness, arrogance and claims to omniscience. He comes on as if he's bearing the white man's burden with him. It's a matter of noblesse oblige rather than facing people as people. And journalist Jack Newfield, who started out as one of the mayor's most adoring admirers but later became more critical, said, the real trouble with John is that he can't have an equal relationship with someone his own age. He can only relate to older father figures or else, all those teeny boppers on his staff who idolize him. And so by the time the confrontation with the teachers union came about, Lindsay's reputation with the city's unions was already set in stone. But he hated UFT president Al Shanker more than anybody else. In an article on the 50th anniversary of the Battle of Ocean Hill, Brownsville, Vincent Kanato and journalist Jerry Podear or historian Jerry Podare rather wrote, quote, lindsay, whose personal experience with whites outside Manhattan was perfunctory and who, in the words of a contemporary observer doesn't understand the life of a mailman or a cop, appeared to view municipal politics as a zero sum game in which the gains of the city's middle class had come at the expense of the minority poor. To Lindsay, New York's public sector unions and the white ethnic groups that predominated in them were self interested impediments to racial justice in the city. In contemporary lingo, Lindsay saw these working class whites as deeply laden with white privilege. 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 who married 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 and Shanker's incompatibilities would impart an ethnocultural state Singh to the events to come at Ocean Hill, Brownsville and beyond. In meetings, Lindsay told Al Shanker that the strike could lead to riots in the city. And was that what he wanted? Shanker told Lindsay that he was sick of being afraid of doing the right thing because people are raising the fear of civil disorders. He accused the mayor of giving into Blackmail and pandering to extremists. He said Lindsay's position was the response of a type of white liberal who somehow has come to feel that because of a hundred or two hundred years of constant rejection and saying no strictly on the basis of race, the way to overcome the evil of this negativism is to constantly say yes. Lindsay accused Shanker of not caring about the children of New York City and of deliberately stirring up racial strife for his own purposes. Shanker said that Lindsay was the one stirring up strife by accommodating this minority of vocal extremists and framing the issue in racial terms. He said the mayor has categorized every strike as a strike against the poor and the blacks and Puerto Ricans. To have the mayor constantly telling the people of the ghetto that the unions are against you, that they're striking against you and your children, well, he is inciting polarization and racial hatred. End quote. After the incident in the auditorium with the teachers, the UFT walked out again for the second time in a week. And so McCoy in Ocean Hill Brownsville district declared all those teachers fired. And he started hiring a bunch of young radical teachers just out of college to take their place in flagrant violation of the law. He had wanted to replace the fired teachers with black teachers, but it turned out that he couldn't find enough qualified black teachers to fill the vacated slots, and so he ended up hiring mostly whites. He brought representatives of the Black Panthers and other militant groups into the schools and gave them free reign to walk the halls and go into the classrooms distributing literature and talking to the kids about black power. Leaflets were being distributed to students that said black children should be taught by black people and not by the middle Eastern murderers of colored people, by Jews, in other words. Another pamphlet that was being passed out to students said, 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, mobs of activists, including many students, often led by radical teachers from the ata, broke into the schools while they were shut down and vandalized them. That second strike lasted 17 days. Finally, on October 6, the Board of education suspended the Ocean Hill Brownsville governing board for refusing to obey the court order to accept the UFT teachers back to their jobs. But the next day, Rhodey McCoy said there was no way he was letting them back in and that he would continue to obey the orders of the suspended governing board and ignore the board of education and the superintendent. So the board of Education suspended McCoy and seven of the district's eight principals for insubordination, and the UFT called off the strike. Once the teachers went back to school, they encountered the replacements who had been brought in and who still refused to leave. The young radical teachers, as well as members of the ATA screamed at teachers in the hall, at union teachers, rather, in the halls. They threatened them, broke up their classes. Mobs of students rampaged through the halls, breaking windows and pieces of furniture and pulling fire alarms. Many of the union teachers said that the situation was intolerable and they went home and the superintendent once again ordered the school shut down. Outside, hundreds of protesters fought with police. Groups of students were led by black radical teachers on attacks against the police lines. The wishy washy superintendent panicked and ordered the reinstatement of McCoy and the suspended principals. And so, for the third time, the UFT went back on strike on October 14th, and they would not come back until well into November. The union published a full page ad in the Times that asked should life in the classroom be guided by people who are responsibly concerned with education, or should educational policy and practice be dictated by an assortment of miscellaneous militants like those now performing at school doors and in school corridors? One of the teachers at the center of the controversy, Fred Naumann, said that avowed racists are teaching impressionable children. These children are being indoctrinated into a program of hatred of the police and all constitutional authority until they receive notoriety. Bulletin boards contain shameful anti white propaganda. The next day, the union ran another full page Times ad titled, mayor Lindsay, when will you begin to act like a mayor in our school crisis? The ad attacked the mayor, refusing to put an end to vigilantism. Time and again, you have seemed to come to grips with the problem. You issued directives, you gave assurances, you made pledges, but they ended up as so many words. No action. The record of vacillation, indecision, permissiveness and backtracking is so bizarre that the people of New York, including the parents of Ocean Hill Brownsville, are rubbing their eyes in astonishment. End quote. The union would run several more full page ads in the Times. The teachers strikes and the war of Ocean hill Brownsville was on the front pages every day for months and consumed the attention not only of New Yorkers, but the whole country for months. For New York, most of the year, really. As the conflict wore on, the rhetoric of the militants became even more stridently anti semitic. Protesters showed up to union events and shouted that the Jewish teachers were Christ killers who should go back to Israel. One protest leader in the Bronx got on a loudspeaker and announced that Hitler didn't finish the job. The uft, savvy as ever, made recordings of the things the protesters were saying and make sure that those words were put into the newspapers. The recordings made heavy use of the word pigs and references to lampshades, Christ killers and gas chambers. Al Shanker made damn sure that the public heard about these things. And he called on the Jewish community organizations to take action against what was really the worst upwelling of open antisemitism in recent memory, the United States. The Jewish organizations obliged and the newspaper started running letters to the editor from Jewish New Yorkers attacking the black militants and the Lindsay administration for coddling them. When one of Lindsay's aides showed up at a school where union teachers were picketing, the teachers threw up Nazi salutes at him. Finally, just as it had in the previous two strikes of the transit and sanitation work, the state of New York got involved. After a 27 hour marathon negotiation, a settlement was reached between mayor Lindsay and Al Shanker, with the state Commissioner of education acting as guarantor. The agreement. It was not an agreement Lindsay was happy with, but the state told him that he was going to make an agreement or the state was going to make one for him. According to the agreement, the Ocean Hill Brownsville principals and teachers who were hired in violation of established regulations were all to be removed. A state trustee would be appointed to oversee the district, taking it out of the hands not only of the governing board, but out of the hands of New York City. Altogether. A three person panel was to be set up to monitor the treatment of teachers throughout the system. And Rhodey McCoy would be allowed to remain as a disempowered administrator of the Ocean Hill Brownsville district if he agreed to abide by the settlement, which they knew he would not. And so the agreement was effectively to remove Rhodey McCoy as well. And the governing board overseeing the district was to be abolished. And the community control experiment came to an end. Some of the teachers felt that after everything that they had been through, the settlement didn't go nearly far enough. But the overwhelming majority signed off on it. On the other side, militant leaders complained that the mayor had laid down in total capitulation to the union. But he really had no Choice. On Tuesday, November 19, New York City teachers returned to their schools for the first time in five weeks. The administrative victory was not the end of the matter, however. ATA leader Leslie Campbell and Brooklyn Corps Chairman Sonny Carson, both of whom had been very prominent in the Student rebellions and led student riots in different parts of the city, created the citywide student Strike Committee and began to organize and incite violence and vandalism. And at schools throughout the city. On December 2, they led hundreds of students as they threw rocks and bottles at police who were providing security for the Ocean Hill Brownsville teachers, many of whom had had serious threats made against their lives. Several teachers had threats the police took so seriously that they received around the clock protection at their homes. Hundreds of black students stormed through schools throughout the city, shutting several of them down and destroying property in and around the schools. Student riots occurred in 4 out of 5 New York boroughs and they continued every day for the entire week. About 50 adult militants led by deposed members of the abolished governing board shoved their way into JHS271. They barged into classrooms, started screaming at union teachers in front of their students. The PTA president was part of the group and she stormed into a classroom telling the teacher to get out. And when the teacher wouldn't budge, teacher was a female, she was punched in the face and two other teachers were attacked in a similar fashion. Well then on December 26, 1968, Leslie Campbell, the ATA teacher who was at the center of so many of the the problems over the course of the year, was interviewed by Julius Lester on a popular black radio station out of Harlem. And he had brought with him several poems written by his black students. And Lester asked him to read one of them. The poem he chose was titled A tribute to Albert Shanker. 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 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. When the UN made Israel a free 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. Jewish organizations made sure that that poem was reprinted in full in a full page ad in the New York Times. The following year, 1969, saw an explosion of attacks against Jewish houses of worship. Kanato writes, quote, the spate of attacks was indicative not only of greater lawlessness, disorder in the city, but of a general lack of respect toward symbols of authority. Attacks against synagogues, yeshivas and Jewish centers heightened the fears of New York's already jittery Jewish community. The spokesman for the National Society of Hebrew Day Schools warned Lindsay in a telegram that a rash of fires and vandalism created a climate of fear so that learning has been effectively throttled. In December 1968, that's the month Campbell read the poem on air, there were 90 crimes at houses of worship in the city in 1969. There were 1039 such attacks. Of those attacks, 633 were burglaries, 50 were arson, and 356 were vandalism and criminal mischief. End quote. Now, there was a dispute at the time, and there kind of still is among people who, who care about this stuff, whether that increase in attacks were. Whether it was an organized effort to intimidate the city's Jews or if they were just part of the overall increase in chaos and violent crime in New York. But the Jews in the city, they didn't need to be told what it was about as far as they were concerned. There was no question about it. It was obvious. A Jewish writer named Meir Kahane was the editor of the Jewish press, and he started to receive a lot of letters from Jews around the city with stories of being harassed and attacked. And so in response, he created the Jewish Defense League, which subsequently became known to the FBI as a violent extremist organization. One study of Jewish terrorism in the US between 1980 and 1985 showed that 15 of the 18 Jews indicted for terrorist acts were members of the JDL. These were very serious people. They weren't afraid of anybody. When black militants showed up to intimidate and harass a Jewish business or public person, the JDL would show up and go toe to toe with them in the streets. And if they wanted to fight, they'd have a fight. To this day, the JDL is suspected in the 1972 bombing of a Manhattan theater that killed two people and injured several others. But meanwhile, violence just escalated in the schools after the settlement was reached between the teachers union and the city, it just got worse and worse. Majority black schools had long been unsafe for white students, but now they were unsafe for white teachers and other adults. Harold Salzman, who was a teacher and union leader at the time, described the decline of his school, Franklin k. Lane high school in south Brooklyn. Lane was located in an integrated neighborhood with about 50, 50 white and POC. But then the city, in all its wisdom, decided to use Lane as a dumping ground for ghetto kids in an effort to placate black parents who were demanding integration of their own schools. The city had wanted to build more schools in the ghetto area to alleviate overcrowding at the existing schools. But the activists did not want new black schools. They wanted integrated schools. And so Lane went from having about a 50, 50 racial distribution to being mostly black. And as the situation deteriorated in the school, white parents pulled their kids out. And you had this school that was almost all black in a neighborhood that was about 50, 50. Now, Lane was built to accommodate just about 3,000 students, but by the late 60s, it would have over 5,000. This is just one example of the illogical outcomes of the city's policies. As the local white kids were pulled out of school and sent somewhere else to private school or another district. Parent participation and involvement in the school completely collapsed, since the kids being bussed in were from far away and the parents weren't making the trip for parents night. As the demographics of the school changed, so did academic standards. Physics and chemistry were dropped from the curriculum, as were foreign languages, except for Spanish. Honors classes were eliminated altogether as the atmosphere in the school became more hostile. Students stopped participating in sports and extracurricular activities, many of which were eliminated. Lane had a champion basketball team, but they couldn't get anyone to come to the games. Hard drugs had also changed life in ghetto school schools. The official in charge of New York city's drug treatment service center, the city agency, said that just one high school in ocean hill Brownsville district had, quote, enough hardcore drug addicts to require the service resources of her entire agency. And there were many, many schools like that. Salzman wrote, quote, lastly and most serious was the matter of asocial behavior, an emanation in part of black frustration and of black resentment toward the white community for making them feel uncomfortable in that neighborhood. Furthermore, black students were angry about having to cope with subjects requiring the fundamental skills of reading, writing and arithmetic with which they had never been provided in the earlier grades. As a consequence, blacks experienced a sense of inferiority through having to compete with better trained white students in academic classes or being placed in the non academic course of study for slow learners unable to do college preparatory work. For more than four years prior to the disaster of 1969, the Lane staff had been witness to repeated acts of violence committed by black youngsters. Teachers continually cried out against the growing lawlessness, but their pleas almost always fell on deaf ears. In 1966, teachers who dared speak out against the deterioration of the school tone were labeled hysterical by the administration. As the school fell apart in the mid-60s, so did its faculty. Once a stable and tightly knit unit, the 1965-1969 period saw the most competent and experienced teachers find their way out of Lane. In 1966, school officials wrote in a report to the city, a dangerous and explosive atmosphere has existed at lane high school. Since the opening of school in september. There have been numerous cases of students being set upon, threatened and or beaten both on school grounds and in the immediate vicinity thereof. The situation has deteriorated to the point where a teacher responsible for maintaining order in the student cafeteria was attacked, kicked in the stomach, and sustained injuries requiring hospital treatment. Many of these outbreaks have had racial overtones and have not been confined to boys alone. End quote. The teachers at lane were at a loss. As salzman said, a lot of the more experienced teachers, they left for greener pastures. And so the teachers who were left behind and who were brought in Were mostly inexperienced and they didn't know what to do. So at an open school night, the teachers prepared a letter for the parents who attended. That read in part. We know that your main reason for coming tonight Is to find out how your child is progressing in his or her classes. But we think that there is another matter you should know about which may be even more important than homework and test marks, and that has to do with the very safety of your child in the school building. Nobody likes to admit that the problems of safety have gotten out of hand, but the simple fact is that teachers alone cannot provide the kind of safety your child must have. As parents, you have every right to expect that the school authorities will take all necessary steps to protect your child's person and property. And as teachers, we could not in good conscience let you come here tonight without giving you a frank and honest picture of the school situation. End quote. The teachers kept the existence of that letter secret, knowing that the school administration would forbid their distribution. When they started handing them out, the School principal, an overwhelmed and unfortunately pretty weak personality, went to Salzman and ordered him to stop distributing the flyers and to go back and get the ones that had already been distributed. But Salzman refused, and the principal threatened to bring charges against him and other union leaders. The aftermath of the teacher strikes brought total chaos to Lane and other schools. For a full week in late November, student militants just roamed the streets, going from school to school, breaking in, barging into classes, and getting the students in them to join their protest or get out. On November 27, a gang of about 150 black kids invaded Franklin K. Lane High School wielding knives and sticks. Several teachers were attacked and beaten, and the students rampaged through the building, breaking windows and furniture as frightened students scattered and ran home. Salzman describes a notorious incident involving a 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. So the teacher inches up to the window, half expecting to be hit with another rock. He looks down and he sees two black youths brazenly staring up at him. And so, Salzman says Siracusa was one of the more engaged teachers at the school and had spoken out recently against the increasing lawlessness at staff meetings, a stance that drew the ire of black activists in the ATA and very likely led to his targeting. Fatefully, he decided that he had a responsibility to address this situation, and so he went downstairs to confront the students. Quote, slowly he approached the two tall youngsters, who were by now joined by a third youth. 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 highly flammable. Lighter fluid. Siracusa was befuddled. What's all this about? He thought to himself. For a brief moment, Siracusa figured it to be a juvenile prank, unaware that one of the trio was circling behind him. Suddenly he felt a thunderous blow crashing into his spine as he dropped to the ground, anguishing in pain, defenseless, he felt the smashing of fists against his jaw, in the pounding of booted heels against 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. Siracusa was physically and emotionally scarred, but he did survive the attack. Salzman writes that by December 1968, that same month, when Leslie Campbell read that poem on air, that the situation inside the school, he said, has become intolerable. The deterioration was complete. Nobody was safe as gangs of black youths, many wearing the berets and insignia of the Panthers, roamed the halls, ringing fire alarms, breaking windows, setting fires, and assaulting any white youth who dared 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. In another incident that same month, a young white female teacher was sexually assaulted by a black student on school grounds. In her after action 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. End quote. And that same week, a white teacher named Michael Bedinger 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 period, I was informed by students that there were no teachers in the students cafeteria. I went down to the cafeteria located in the basement and called the dean's office. I noticed students stealing supplies. I went to pick up A box dropped on the floor. At that time, my path was blocked by a male Negro student. I stood there for two seconds, did nothing, said nothing. At that time, the student punched me in the jaw without provocation. As I started to chase him, I was kicked, shoved and punched. Trays, garbage and cake were thrown at me. I was spit upon and attacked by a large number of students, at least 30. Salzman picks up the story. Bedinger, weeping and holding an ice pack to his swollen eye, made a direct report of the incident to an emergency meeting of 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 Bedinger. Lamarca was a stalwart on the faculty, well liked by the students. But on this day, visibly shaken and on the verge of tears, he blurted out the rest of the story of how he tried to apprehend Bettinger's assailant. In his written report to the principal, he As I was escorting him, the assailant, to the dean's office, the following events. 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. All that seemed to matter was if they were black and I was white. And finally, Salzman writes that by the time calendar year 1970 began, the racial polarization at Franklin K. Lane High School was total. White students had been beaten and terrorized to a degree never before known in New York's long history of public education. And while the theoreticians and social scientists were lightly dismissing the violence, apologizing for it as the only mode of self expression available to the blacks who had been miseducated by the system, the seeds for a new generation of racism were being sown. But members of this new generation would have substance enforcing their bigotry quite different from the know nothing prejudice of their elders. For these whites had been on the receiving end of a wave of terror that matched anything thrown by southern whites at black people in the post1954 era. The white parents complained about their children coming home with marks on their bodies from beatings at the hands of black youths and of extortions and of futile attempts to resist. They were convinced that the principal had sold out to the blacks. They cited charges made by their children about a different standard of school behavior for blacks and whites, with whites alone penalized for certain infractions. It galled them that many blacks refused to rise for the morning pledge of allegiance exercise, and they felt that blacks were given preferential treatment, Pointing to the large number of college scholarships supposedly open to all, but which they felt were awarded to blacks in disproportionate numbers. The white parents had reached the conclusion that it was the policy of the school to reward violence and bigotry with college scholarships, and many couldn't believe the depths to which the school had sunk. As police patrols stood guard, as if the clientele were inmates in a penitentiary rather than students in an American public school. Whatever glimmer of hope existed for an integrated society was, as far as these whites were concerned, extinguished. And they could say without the slightest hesitation, as did one harried mother, I'm sick of it, Sick of knowing my son has to endure two more years of hell at Lane. That's why I'm taking him out of here and enrolling him in a private school. I can't afford it, But I talked it over with my husband, and we'll borrow the money. It'll be worth it for just once to see him smile when he leaves the house for school. He's learned one thing at this school that isn't listed on the program. Franklin k. Lane has given him a good lesson in hatred. End quote. These passages from Salzman, by the way, are from a book he wrote shortly after this period called race war in high the 10 year destruction of Franklin K. Lane High school. He was a union leader, as I said, and a teacher at lane for a long time. And, you know, he was like most of the teachers, he was a liberal Jewish, pro civil rights, pro integration. And that comes through in his book, and it actually gives his argument more power Than if it sounded like it was written by a racist polemicist. These were some of the events of the 1960s that had caused Bernard Malamud, the author whose two stories I described at the beginning to take such a different view of the racial dynamics of New York City. By 1970, the flight of whites and the black middle class out of the inner cities was virtually complete, and they had left behind dangerous, hostile, economically and physically ruined hellholes. Since the mid-1950s, the focus of the country had been on civil rights and racial justice and A big part of the reason for that was the support for the movement by the well organized and well funded Jewish organizations around the country. But by the end of the 1960s, relations between Jews and the black activists had completely broken down. Jewish citizens and activists went from advocating for the black ghettos to demanding that the state take a firmer hand against them. Them. That critical base of support without which the civil rights movement very likely never would have gotten off the ground. At least not until a long time later. That base of support was the only thing keeping the rest of white America from turning away from the ghettos altogether. And when it evaporated, that is exactly what happened. White people out in the suburbs happy to have escaped the cities and didn't want to think about them anymore. They turned inward. They elected politicians who cut welfare budgets and increased police and prison budgets. Rather than trying to fix the ghetto, the policy became to patrol the borders of it and just keep the chaos contained. It's really important to recognize, and this is probably something I have not. In fact, it's definitely something I've not emphasized enough, but I'll emphasize it now, that despite all the madness I'm describing in this episode, the great majority of people who lived in the ghetto were perfectly good, ordinary people. When we describe the increase in crime or drugs, we're not talking about 70% of the population being criminals or drug addicts. A 100% increase in crime, a doubling of crime. It's a massive increase that will be felt dramatically by the people living in an area. Very often that just meant that instead of 1% of the population being criminals, it went up to 2%, something like that. The majority of people, they were not activists, they weren't militants, and they didn't share the activist views on most things. They wanted the police around, they wanted the government to be more aggressive toward criminals and drug dealers. But the country, by this point, they, the country had had enough and they just did not want to hear it. And so things just got worse and worse and worse. In 1940, New York City had about the same population that it does now. A little bit less, but very close. And there were 275 murders. 1940. In 1970, there were 1,117 murders. And in 1990, there were 2,245 murders. This is what it was like in most big cities in the United States. And it's even worse than it sounds because most of these cities had no murders. Or, you know, maybe one husband came home and found his wife cheating on him. And There was a murder of passion or something. But if you were to look at a, a map of all the murders in New York City, there's whole swaths of the city that have none of them. And then certain swaths of the city that you won't even be able to see the map because they're just covered with them. You'll have like a square mile or two of just concentrated chaos. In LA county in 1990, there were 2,589 killings in the three years preceding the Rodney King riots. In 1992, there were about 6,500 drive by shootings in Los Angeles. That's almost five a day. And in all of these cases, and this remains true to this day, unfortunately, but it was true in the 60s and it was true in the 70s and 80s and 90s. And it's true today that in pretty much every big city in America that has a significant Black population, between 80 and 95% of serious violent crimes are committed by the black people in that city. But again, I want to emphasize, committed by a very small number of people. Most people, they're not, they're not a part of this. They're victims of this. This. The LA riots in 1992 really shook the country out of a long period of apathy over what was going on in the ghetto. After that riot in which people watched a live feed of a mob of black men pull a white driver out of his truck and smash his skull with a cinder block, things changed. The Congressional Black Caucus, the NAACP and other black activist groups joined the tough on crime Republicans and passed a series of laws under the Clinton administration that nearly quadrupled the prison population and made it so that more than half of all inner city black men would end up at some stage of the criminal justice system at some point in their lives. And it turns out that if you put a few million poor minorities in prison, the crime rate goes down. And so from the mid-90s until about 2014, the year the current spate of race riots started up and Black Lives Matter was born. Violent crime declined throughout that period, reached levels that it hadn't been, that hadn't been seen since 1950. Since 2014, violent crime has exploded once again in cities across the country, just as they did in the 1970s. Police officers in many cities have retreated and refused to be proactive for fear that they're going to end up in a viral video. It's hard to blame them. The cop who shot Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, you know, the hands up don't Shoot guy. That guy's working at Walmart today. Despite the fact that the Obama Department of Justice determined that he had acted in self defense after Brown broke his orbital bone and was wrestling for his gun. Doesn't matter. He's fired and he's ruined. In cities like San Francisco, Portland, D.C. crimes are committed today with a level of impunity that we have not seen in decades. And while the effects of it are being felt by everyone, the good people unfortunate enough to be stuck in the inner cities, they get it the worst. As bad as the situation is today, it's nowhere near what it was at the peak in the late 80s and early 90s. But it's trending in the wrong direction. After the rebellions in the 60s, it took the country almost 30 years to concern itself with crime again. And that was only after experiencing decades of chaos on a level the country had never witnessed. So let's hope it doesn't take that long to reverse the trend this time. It takes effort to make a society like ours work. When you take in people from all over the world, people from different backgrounds, different races, ethnicities, religions, political beliefs, and you throw them all into the same pot, that mixture is as likely to lead to an explosive chemical reaction as it is to a nice meal. In fact, the chemical reaction is the likely outcome if you don't. If you don't expend real effort to turn it into something else. It means having patience with other people and understanding that you and your group are not going to get everything you want, but are going to have to compromise with the competing interests of others. And it means obeying basic rules of civility between individuals and groups and placing limits on the rhetoric and behavior of people toward one another. Other does anyone feel particularly good about the direction of the country right now? Polls certainly indicate that the answer is no. But these things will not fix themselves. They will get worse and worse and worse unless we fix it. We're going to have to fix it. And the only chance we have to do that is by understanding that we all inherited this country and its problems from people who inherited the people from the people before them, and by coming back to the table to talk honestly, face to face. Thanks for listening. It was Coney Island. They called Coney island the playground of the world. There was no place like it in the whole world like Coney island when I was a youngster. No place in the world like it. It was so fabulous. Now it shrunk down to almost nothing, you see, and I still remember in my mind how things used to be. And you know, I feel very bad. But people from all over the world came here from all over. The wetter. It was a playground. They call it the playground of the world. Over here, anyways. But I. You know, I even got. When I was. When I was very small, I even got lost in Coney Island. But they found me on the beach. And we used to sleep on the beach here. Sleep overnight. They don't do it anymore. Things changed, see? They don't sleep anymore on the beach. Sa sa Sa Sa Sa sa It Sa sa It It It Sa sa sa Sa Sa Sa Sa Sa sa sa sa sa It Sa sa.