Ocean Hill-Brownsville and the 1968 Teachers' Strikes Over Community Control

In May 1968, letters went out from the governing board of a small experimental school district in Brooklyn to nineteen teachers and administrators. The district was called Ocean Hill-Brownsville, after the two neighborhoods it covered, both mostly Black and Puerto Rican, both poor, both served for years by schools that parents believed had given up on their children. The board, elected by parents and community members as part of an experiment in local control, was led day to day by a Black educator named Rhody McCoy, the district's unit administrator. The letters told the nineteen, most of them white and most of them members of the United Federation of Teachers, that their employment in the district was terminated and that they should report to the central Board of Education for reassignment. The union said that was a firing without due process. The board said it was exactly the kind of decision community control was supposed to allow. By November, New York's public schools had been shut by three strikes, more than a million children had missed weeks of school, and an alliance between labor and civil rights leaders that had carried the March on Washington five years earlier was in pieces.

In short: Ocean Hill-Brownsville was a fight over who should run public schools in poor neighborhoods, the families whose children attended them or the citywide system and its unionized teachers. Both sides had legitimate claims and both made damaging mistakes. The strikes left wounds between Black and Jewish New Yorkers and between labor and civil rights activists that took decades to heal, and the questions they raised about accountability have not gone away.

Why community control seemed like the answer

To understand 1968 you have to understand the decade before it. New York's schools were still deeply segregated more than ten years after Brown v. Board of Education. Integration campaigns had stalled; a large school boycott in February 1964, organized by civil rights activists, kept hundreds of thousands of students home to demand a real plan, and the city produced little. Many Black and Puerto Rican parents concluded that the city would not integrate their children's schools. If that was so, they asked, why shouldn't they at least control them?

The idea of community control drew on the language of the Black Power movement, which emphasized self-determination, and on a long American tradition of local school boards. It also drew support from unexpected places. The Ford Foundation, under its president McGeorge Bundy, a former national security adviser to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, funded experimental districts in 1967. Mayor John Lindsay, a liberal Republican, asked Bundy to lead a panel on decentralizing the city's schools, which recommended breaking the giant system into dozens of districts with real power.

Ocean Hill-Brownsville was one of three experimental districts. Its governing board had authority whose limits were never clearly defined: Could it hire and fire? Set curriculum? Control the budget? The central Board of Education said one thing, the local board assumed another, and the state law had not caught up with either. That ambiguity is where the explosion started.

The union's case

The United Federation of Teachers was led by Albert Shanker, a former math teacher who had built it into one of the most powerful unions in the city. The UFT was not a conservative institution by the standards of its time. Its members had marched for civil rights, many had gone south in the freedom summers, and its leaders had supported the 1963 March on Washington.

The union's argument in 1968 was about due process. Teachers in New York had won protections against arbitrary dismissal after long struggle, partly because in earlier decades teachers had been fired for their politics, their religion or their union activity. A transfer or dismissal had to follow procedures, with charges and a hearing. If a local board could remove teachers by letter, the union argued, any teacher could be removed for any reason, including race. The removed teachers, the union pointed out, had not been charged with specific misconduct in a way the contract recognized.

When a hearing officer later reviewed the cases, he found the charges against the teachers unsupported and recommended they be reinstated. The local board refused to take them back. Hundreds of other UFT teachers in the district walked out in solidarity, and the board replaced them with new teachers, many of them young, idealistic and white, some of them Jewish, recruited to teach in the district.

The community's case

The parents and activists behind the governing board saw a different story.

For years, they argued, their children had been taught by a system that expected little of them. Reading scores in their schools were among the lowest in the city. Teachers came and went. Few teachers or principals looked like the students or lived in the neighborhood. When parents complained, a distant central bureaucracy answered slowly or not at all. Community control was meant to change that by making the schools answerable to the people whose children were in them.

From this perspective, due process looked like a shield for incompetence and indifference. If a community board couldn't move a teacher who the community believed was undermining the experiment, then "community control" meant nothing. McCoy and his allies also pointed out that the central system routinely transferred teachers involuntarily for administrative reasons and called it routine; it was only when a Black-led board did the same that it became a scandal.

Both of these accounts are true in part. That is what makes the story hard.

It is worth adding that the nineteen were not a uniform group. Some were teachers, some were assistant principals and principals. The board's grievances against them varied, and the board was never required to prove them in the forum the union demanded. Much of the later argument over who was right turns on that missing process.

Three strikes in one fall

The UFT called its first citywide strike on the opening day of school in September 1968. A settlement was reached, then broke down when the reinstated teachers faced hostility on returning to the district. A second strike followed, then a third, which lasted into November. In all, the city's schools lost more than a month of instruction, with most of the system's students affected.

As the conflict wore on, it took a turn that became its most painful legacy. Antisemitic leaflets circulated in the district, some anonymous, attacking the Jewish teachers. Most of the teachers in the city's schools were Jewish, as were many union leaders, including Shanker. The union reproduced and distributed one of the worst leaflets widely across the city to show what its members were facing. Supporters of the local board argued that the leaflets were the work of a fringe and that the union amplified them to turn the city against community control. Critics of the board said its leaders did not denounce them clearly or quickly enough. Both of those claims have support in the historical record.

Racial accusations ran the other way as well. Some union supporters and their allies used language about the local board and its supporters that Black New Yorkers heard, with reason, as racist. Picket lines turned ugly. Teachers who crossed the lines, many of them Black and Puerto Rican, were heckled. Friendships ended.

The labor and civil rights alliance split along the fault line. Bayard Rustin, the chief organizer of the March on Washington and a lifelong ally of labor, backed the union and its due-process argument, a position that cost him standing with many younger Black activists. Others in the civil rights movement backed the local board. Progressives in New York found themselves picking sides in a fight between two groups they had assumed were on the same team.

Inside the district while the city was shut

One of the strangest facts about the fall of 1968 is that the schools at the center of the dispute were often open while the rest of the city's were closed.

In Ocean Hill-Brownsville, the governing board kept many of its schools running with the teachers it had hired to replace those who walked out, along with some teachers who refused to strike. Visitors, journalists and sympathetic educators described classrooms where Black history was taught, where parents walked the halls, and where teachers were trying new ways of teaching reading. Supporters of the experiment held up these classrooms as proof of what community control could do when given a chance. Opponents pointed to the police barricades outside, the confrontations at the doors when the reinstated teachers tried to return, and the disorder that sometimes followed.

Both images are real. The district was, for a few months, a place of genuine experiment and genuine conflict at the same time. Whether the experiment was working educationally is almost impossible to judge, because it never had the stable conditions a fair test requires. It existed for little more than a year before it was suspended, under siege for much of that time.

What the classrooms did show was how much parents wanted a voice. Turnout for the governing board's election, in a poor neighborhood where many residents had little reason to trust city institutions, was a sign of that hunger. A political system that cannot find a way to channel that energy into real influence will keep producing fights like this one.

How it ended, and what came after

The state government ended the strikes in November 1968 by placing the district under state trusteeship, returning the removed teachers to their schools, and suspending the local board for a time. The next year, the legislature passed a decentralization law that divided the city's schools into roughly thirty community school districts with elected boards. Those boards had real powers over elementary and middle schools, but less than community control advocates had wanted, and the union's contract and job protections remained citywide.

The community school boards lasted more than three decades. Some did good work. Others became known for patronage, low turnout elections and scandals. In 2002 the state gave control of New York City's schools to the mayor, under Michael Bloomberg, and the community boards' power was largely ended. The cycle had come almost full circle: from a central system that parents found unaccountable, to local control that critics found unaccountable, back to central control.

Shanker went on to lead the national American Federation of Teachers and became a respected voice for school reform, including the charter idea. Some who were on the community side of 1968 never forgave him. Some on the union side never forgave the board. The relationship between Black and Jewish New Yorkers, already strained, was damaged for years.

What the fight still teaches

This is a hard story for anyone on the left because there is no clean side. Here is our reading, as opinion.

First, both of the core values in the fight were right. Workers deserve due process; a teacher should not be removable by letter without charges and a hearing. And communities deserve power over institutions that shape their children's lives, especially when those institutions have failed them for decades. Progressives who treat either value as an obstacle to the other end up repeating 1968.

Second, the structure was set up to fail. Lindsay, Bundy and the Board of Education launched an experiment without defining who had what authority. When everyone believes they are in charge, conflict is guaranteed. A lot of modern fights over school governance, whether about charters, mayoral control or state takeovers, repeat this error.

Third, the damage done by letting a conflict become a fight about identity was enormous and lasting. Leaders on both sides made choices, such as spreading the most inflammatory material and refusing to denounce it, that made settlement harder and the wounds deeper. Anyone organizing today around a contested local issue can learn from that.

The coalition that eventually healed some of these wounds was built by people who refused to choose between workers and communities. Teachers' unions in many cities now partner with parents on campaigns for smaller class sizes, school nurses and counselors, the kind of demands that unite rather than divide. That model, sometimes called "bargaining for the common good," is in part a lesson drawn from the ruins of 1968.

The parents of Ocean Hill-Brownsville and the teachers who walked picket lines were, in the end, after many of the same things: schools where children learned, and work that was respected. The city lost the chance to give both of them that in 1968. It is not too late to give it to their grandchildren.

What you can do

Disputes over who runs schools are still decided by state lawmakers and local boards, and the people who show up shape them.

• Find out how your district is governed, whether by an elected board, an appointed one or a mayor, and who your state legislators are. Their phone numbers and latest votes are at the representatives lookup.
• Read about teachers' unions and their campaigns alongside parents on the topic page on workers and unions.
• Follow the newest union elections counted by the NLRB, and union membership over time, on the labor page.
• Find parent groups, civil rights organizations and education coalitions working in your community through the organizations directory, and ask how they work with the teachers in your schools.