GLEN ANTHONY Harris. The Ocean Hill-Brownsville Conflict

On May 9, 1968, a local school board in the predominantly African American Ocean Hill–Brownsville section of Brooklyn, New York, sent termination letters to a group of white, unionized public school teachers. The letters ignited a series of racially incendiary events that would reverberate through the city's history, affecting mayoral elections, fiscal policies, residential patterns, and policing measures well into the twenty-first century. The citywide strikes aimed at reinstating the terminated educators conducted by their union, the overwhelmingly white United Federation of Teachers, brought black and white New Yorkers into the streets. The forced return of the teachers to the Ocean Hill–Brownsville schools in November 1968 left a residue of racial bile that the passage of time has not dissipated. The Ocean Hill–Brownsville conflict is remembered today primarily as a struggle between blacks and Jews. Virtually all of the terminated teachers were Jewish. The strikes unleashed a torrent of invective and accusation—antisemitism on one side, racism on the other—that shocked observers accustomed to viewing the groups as “natural” allies. But Glen Anthony Harris argues that they should not have been surprised. He traces Ocean Hill–Brownsville's roots back over half a century, exploring a black-Jewish relationship by turns supportive and suspicious, mutual and competitive, through exchanges among a host of towering intellectual figures, including Franz Boas, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Nathan Glazer, Norman Podhoretz, James Baldwin, and Harold Cruse.

Archaeology · Art history · Desegregation · Economic history · Judaism · Political science · Racism · Sociology · White (mutation) · Wright · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Race, History, and American Society · Religious studies