Death at an Early Age

In October 1968, at the height of the Ocean Hill-Brownsville crisis, New York Mayor John Lindsay got heckled off the stage at a synagogue in Brooklyn. "Lindsay must go!" shouted the enraged crowd when he attempted to address the congregation about his support for school decentralization. As the Mayor and his wife left the temple protected by a battery of police, a mob about 5,000 strong attacked their limousine. Was this any way for a nice middle-class Jewish community to behave?

Although the 1960s continue to be remembered, and taught, chiefly as an era when left-wing protests and liberal commitments flourished, we have long known (but far less often acknowledged) that the same years also fostered the emergence of white populist movements motivated by harsh racial biases. Jerald Podair brings this far more sobering portrait of the 1960s and their racial and ethnic politics starkly to light in The Strike That Changed New York, his study of the decentralization and attempted desegregation of the city's public school system. As Podair meticulously re-creates, the angry white people--in newly reconfigured alliances of Irish, Italian and Jewish Americans--often got their way.

Meanwhile, there is a new trend evident, especially in journalistic writings about school desegregation in the 1960s. These writings downplay Northern white racism, bash black militancy as intolerant and foolishly hostile to integration, and lament liberal accommodation to radical demands. In these accounts, Brooklyn's Ocean Hill-Brownsville, where African-Americans set up a local all-black board to administer their district's failing public schools, becomes the textbook case. In Someone Else's House, for instance, Tamar Jacoby tells the Ocean Hill-Brownsville story as a cautionary one about the kind of tragedy that ensues when white liberals (like Lindsay) get themselves wrapped around the little fingers of black militants demanding "community control" through decentralization of public education.

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