Episode 4: "Agitate! Educate! Organize!"

In the wake of the 1968 teachers’ strikes, Black people in Central Brooklyn continued to fight for self-determination in education -- both inside and outside of the public school system.

Some veterans of the community control movement started an independent school called Uhuru Sasa Shule, or "Freedom Now School," part of a pan-African cultural center called The East. Other Black educators tried to work within the new system of local school boards, despite serious flaws baked into the design.

Both of these experiments in self-government struggled to thrive in a city that was literally crumbling all around them. But they have left a lasting mark on this community.

CREDITS

Producers / Hosts: Mark Winston Griffith and Max Freedman

Editing & Sound Design: Elyse Blennerhassett

Production Associate: Jaya Sundaresh

Original Music: avery r. young and de deacon board

Additional Music: Pharaoh Sanders, Asase Yaa Cultural Arts Foundation, Brother D with Collective Effort, the Black Eagles, Chris Zabriskie, Tynus, Blue Dot Sessions

Featured in this episode:  Beth Fertig, Jitu Weusi, Fela Barclift, Lumumba Bandele, Cleaster Cotton, Dr. Lester Young, Al Vann, Annette Robinson, Dr. Adelaide Sanford,  Heather Lewis, Dr. Segun Shabaka, Michael Bloomberg.

School Colors is a production of Brooklyn Deep, the citizen journalism project of the Brooklyn Movement Center. Made possible by support from the NYU Metropolitan Center for Research on Equity and the Transformation of Schools and the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

TRANSCRIPT

MARK WINSTON GRIFFITH: In the late 1960s, the Brooklyn neighborhood of Ocean Hill-Brownsville was at the center of a movement demanding community control of public schools. 

DOLORES TORRES: The plan for community control was. Get people on the local school board that lived in the community. Had children in the community.

RHODY MCCOY: Everybody in that community began to play a role in the schools. The school became the focal point of the community.

LESLIE CAMPBELL: Ocean Hill-Brownsville was not just an instance of confrontation it was in fact a city-wide symbol. 

MARK: At least on paper, some might argue that they got what they were fighting for: the state created 32 local school boards with something resembling independent decision-making. But 32 years later, it was all undone.

BETH FERTIG: Today as the state now prepares to do away with those boards Ocean Hill-Brownsville is quiet. 

MARK: This is WNYC reporter Beth Fertig in July 2002.

BETH FERTIG: In fact it seems the school boards are going out with barely a whimper.

SCHOOL BOARD MEMBER: Whereas the community school board of District 23 is on record to support the maintaining of school boards as the democratically elected governing structure…

BETH FERTIG: Last week members of Community School Board 23 in Ocean Hill-Brownsville passed a resolution opposing the new state law which abolishes local boards. Only 20 people attended the meeting in a school auditorium and all came for other items on the agenda.

MAX FREEDMAN: How did this happen? How did we go from tens of thousands of people taking to the streets to demand control of their schools to apparently nobody giving a damn?  

MARK: You’re listening to “School Colors,” a podcast from Brooklyn Deep about how race, class, and power shape American cities and schools.

MAX: When New York City’s local school boards were abolished, it was based on a couple of key ideas: first, that thirty years of educational failure had proved that communities simply could not be trusted to govern their own schools. And second, that, well, parents were not really interested in governing their schools anyway.

MARK: But the truth is more complicated. In the wake of the 1968 teachers’ strikes, Black people in Central Brooklyn continued to fight for self-determination in education -- both inside and outside of the public school system. 

MAX: Despite the flaws and compromises built into the local school boards, a generation of Black educators still tried to make them work. Even as the city was crumbling all around them.

MARK: At the same time, others tried to build something new. They started a pan-African cultural center called The East and a school, Uhuru Sasa Shule -- an inspiring model of how a village can educate and raise its own, free of bureaucracy and anti-blackness in the classroom.

MAX: Both The East and the local school board have been gone for a long time now. Neither one of them gets talked about much these days. And neither one was perfect.

MARK: But both of them give the lie to an idea that is deeply baked into American political culture. An idea that was used to justify throwing democracy in public education out the window in favor of Mayoral Control -- not just in New York but in big cities that serve mostly students of color all over the country. The idea that nonwhite people are not fit for self-government.

MAX: So what happened to Ocean Hill-Brownsville? Well, the place called Ocean Hill-Brownsville became part of District 23. But so much of the political energy from the movement called Ocean Hill-Brownsville really flourished next door in Bedford-Stuyvesant. 

MARK: Bed-Stuy, District 16, is where we started “School Colors” in Episode 1. And in this episode we come home.

FELA BARCLIFT: It was about the Black experience. It was about revolution.

ADELAIDE SANFORD: It's about hiring people because there was no industry. 

HEATHER LEWIS: Everyone is just in survival mode. 

LUMUMBA BANDELE: Eighties was crazy!

HEATHER LEWIS: Kids are going to school for half a day. 

SEGUN SHABAKA: The government was hostile. 

HEATHER LEWIS: The buildings are falling down. 

CLEASTER COTTON: The pressure that we went through as children killed many of us.

ANNETTE ROBINSON: One of the board members objected to that. And then she came over and she hit me.

LESTER YOUNG: This is what goes on. When you let them run the schools.

MICHAEL BLOOMBERG: The public has clearly said enough.

ADELAIDE SANFORD: Very often the wise are not powerful and the powerful are not wise.

MARK: This is Mark Winston Griffith.

MAX: And Max Freedman.

MARK: Welcome back to “School Colors.” 

THE SETTLEMENT

MARK: The system created in 1970, in the wake of Ocean Hill-Brownsville, was known as Decentralization. 

MAX: Now, on paper, “decentralization” might sound like just a more bureaucratic way of saying “community control.” But they were not the same thing.

MARK: Community control advocates wanted the city divided up into as many as sixty-four districts.

MAX: Instead, we got thirty-two: half as many districts, twice as big as Ocean Hill-Brownsville had been.  

MARK: Community control advocates wanted each local school board to control budgeting, curriculum, and personnel for every school in their district. 

MAX: Instead, the central Board of Education still controlled finance, operations, and construction.

MARK: Local school boards had jurisdiction over elementary and junior high schools, but not high schools. 

MAX: Local school boards had the power to hire and fire principals and superintendents, but not teachers. All the rules for teachers were dictated by a central union contract and a central licensing exam.

LESLIE CAMPBELL: The settlement was far from what we wanted. I would say uh. Let’s say we wanted 100 percent, we got 49.

MARK: Leslie Campbell was a firebrand social studies teacher in Ocean Hill-Brownsville and the union’s #1 boogeyman. 

LESLIE CAMPBELL: And everybody forgot about uh the struggle as they went about the mad scramble of getting what that 49 percent was to give. The mad scramble for jobs I mean. Who’s gonna be the new principals assistant principals superintendents assistant superintendents --

MAX: Secretaries, janitors, cafeteria workers -- maybe the local school boards couldn’t hire and fire teachers, but they controlled a lot of jobs. And those jobs could be like catnip to local politicians. But we’ll get back to that later.

THE EAST

MARK: Decentralization was a set of compromises designed to defuse an explosive situation. Some people were willing to accept those compromises and some were not. Leslie Campbell was not.

LESLIE CAMPBELL: I felt I was part of the freedom struggle of Black people. I was part of the ongoing struggle of the Black community to establish itself, to obtain self-determination, to obtain dignity, and to obtain liberation. 

MAX: After being dismissed from his teaching position in Ocean Hill-Brownsville, Campbell didn’t stay in the system for long. 

LESLIE CAMPBELL: I felt like hey I did what I had to do and it’s time for me to move on. I left Ocean Hill and I started a school.

MARK: Campbell pooled his money with a few members of the African-American Students Association, and they acquired an abandoned building at 10 Claver Place in Bedford-Stuyvesant. It was an unremarkable three-story rowhouse without heat or running water. But they got skilled workers from the community to donate their services to fix it up. And they called this place “The East.” As in the opposite of “The West,” positioned against the dominant and oppressive Western culture. In that spirit, Les Campbell changed his name: to Jitu Weusi, meaning “Big Black” in Swahili. (That’s what we’ll call him from this point forward.) The East officially began operation on December 31, 1969. And right away, Black people from across Brooklyn and beyond were drawn there. People like Fela Barclift. 

FELA BARCLIFT: I had such horrible school experiences. It is just the worst. I feel terrible even talking about it so bad. 

MAX: Fela Barclift was born in the deep South, but she grew up in Bed-Stuy. She had always been a big reader, so when she got to high school, Fela -- known as Frances at the time -- was placed in the quote-unquote “academic” program. But she noticed right away that she stuck out.

FELA BARCLIFT: It was mostly all white kids in there. And I. At some point I think in my sophomore year I I actually explored the school and found out that all the black girls was on another floor and the sound was so loud you couldn't hear because they were all typing at once.

MAX: This was the so-called “commercial” program, where the girls were being trained to work as secretaries. 

FELA BARCLIFT: And then all the black boys were on the lower floor like almost in a basement area. Playing cards. Shooting dice. Sleeping. You know. It was just a nightmare. When I saw what was really happening it was like wow this is my school. I mean I remember one white teacher that would walk past me and literally flinch. Like she hated me and it wasn't anything I had done. It wasn't personal. It was just racism. I just tried to get through it. You know I just did what was expected or asked of me and otherwise I was in my own world. Where I kind of lived until I got out of there.

MARK: Luckily, by the time she got out of there, it was 1969. And there was The East. 

FELA BARCLIFT: I went down there every weekend for the music and I lived right there in Bed-Stuy so. It was like I've found myself as a black person and now I'm going there. So people would be in all kinds of attire doing all kinds of interesting things with themselves their body their hair their clothes. And of course there was the food which was I mean. People loved the Joloff rice and you know there was some interesting cooks up there. The most the most wonderful thing of all was the music.

MARK: The East became a real destination, especially for jazz artists. 

FELA BARCLIFT: All the musicians that you could think of. 

MARK: Max Roach, Sun Ra, Sonny Rollins, Archie Shepp, Betty Carter, Nina Simone. 

MAX: Pharaoh Sanders recorded a live album from The East. That’s what you’re hearing right now.

FELA BARCLIFT: And then I wanted to keep coming and not paying. So I started to work there as a waitress. And then just gradually got more and more into the whole East vibe. Because Jitu would would talk every weekend. He would take a moment or two to not a moment or two a half an hour or so to like talk about black people black education. What we needed for our children. What we needed for our community. How we had to come out of that thinking that integration was so important and that we can do it ourselves and. You know he was creating a school and that school was going to be a school for liberation and. And so after a while when they started the school I was right there. 

MARK: Uhuru Sasa Shule launched in February 1970 with just two full-time teachers. One was Fela Barclift. The other was Adeyemi Bandele. Lumumba Bandele is his son.

LUMUMBA BANDELE: You know particularly coming out of Ocean Hill-Brownsville folks realized that we had the ability to actually educate our children. We we did it. But more important or equally as important we had the responsibility to do it we could not continue to to rely on the public school system to do that. 

FELA BARCLIFT: It was perfect. It was perfect for my mind body and spirit to be able to be someplace where I could feel like a human where I could make a real contribution and where I could use my mind you know in a way where I could feel like I was someone. So. Yeah that's what Jitu offered me and it was a good offer I took him up on it.

MAX: At first, Uhuru Sasa was just a part-time program for high school students like Cleaster Cotton, who had been in Jitu’s class in Ocean Hill-Brownsville.

CLEASTER COTTON: Uhuru Sasa Shule means “Freedom Now School.” And at that building is where we got to continue our education about who we are culture everything.

MAX: By this time, she was going to public high school in Manhattan, but… 

CLEASTER COTTON: at the end of the day we could not wait to get on the train to come back to Brooklyn to go to Uhuru Sasa. 

MARK: By the spring, Uhuru Sasa was running a full-day elementary school. 

FELA BARCLIFT: It was so much fun. Because we had a hundred percent latitude. It was it was about the black experience it was about. I hate to say it but no I don't hate to say it. It was about revolution. And we were to create our own way of delivering that message to the young people that we served.

LUMUMBA BANDELE: You know we you know it was when we say it was African centered education when we were taught math we were taught math not only from a historical perspective about who the first mathematicians were but literally using content around math problems that we recognized and can relate to. 

CLEASTER COTTON: We were the first children to receive the seven principles of blackness which you know as the seven days of Kwanzaa. And it is the seven principles that is the foundation of everything. 

MARK: The East was part of a national network of pan-African nationalist institutions that began popping up in the late 60s and early 70s. And the East was more than just the jazz club and the school. The East had: Uhuru Sasa Shule.

MAX: Imani day care.

MARK: Black News.

MAX: A bookstore.

MARK: A printing service.

MAX: A recording studio.

MARK: The East Caterers.

MAX: Sweet-East Restaurant.

MARK: Kununuana food cooperative.

MAX: Mavazi clothing cooperative.

MARK: The Evening School of Knowledge.

MAX: The Universal Temple of Thoughts.

MARK: They had a farm in Guyana.

MAX: They had a political party.

MARK: And all of these were established just in the first three years. 

MAX: This was only possible because of tremendous effort by a group known as “the East Family.” East family members made collective decisions for, and dedicated every working hour to, the organization.

LUMUMBA BANDELE: People who identify themselves and who identified as East family members had one unifying factor. They all worked their asses off.

MAX: Everybody was expected to put in what they called Kazi: Swahili for work. 

LUMUMBA BANDELE: That was really rooted in self-sacrifice. Like your commitment to the liberation movement was based on how much you can sacrifice sacrifice your personal space sacrifice your personal life sacrifice your sleep your energy all of that.

MARK: Sometimes the idea of family could be taken quite literally.

LUMUMBA BANDELE: Everybody is really doing an intentional move to reclaim their African identity rejecting Eurocentric values cultures norms. Polygamy was very common. We talk about having two. I had two mothers. I thought it was normal. 

MARK: And sometimes the expectation of sacrifice went a little too far. Certainly too far for Fela Barclift.

FELA BARCLIFT: You know they had all kinds of interesting things happening there. But then they came out with this decision that they were going to connect every single woman with some man or some family. And the women weren't going to be able to choose whose family they were going to be matched up with. But every single woman was going to be put in a family with someone of the hierarchy's choice. 

LUMUMBA BANDELE: So there was that. There was that. Understanding at this time. This was many people's like introduction to what was presented as African traditions.

MARK: Presented as African traditions, often by African-Americans who didn’t have much experience on the continent.

LUMUMBA BANDELE: What that African tradition was going to look like was certainly going to be revolving around the existence and the life of of men. Of Black men. Uplifting preserving supporting black men. You know even if you're talking about supporting and protecting black women it’s so that they can protect support black men. Alright so there's no question about it. Patriarchy is the order of the day. 

MARK: Some men no doubt took advantage of this “extended family” structure to have access to more women. But we also heard stories of powerful women who resisted their given roles and pushed back against patriarchy in the East. But Fela said that when she found out she was going to be assigned to some man in the East family, she didn’t push back -- she just straight out left. 

FELA BARCLIFT: The next day I handed in my resignation I was like OK it's time to go back to college and get my degree. I'm not ready for this so.

DISTRICT 16

MAX: In truth, Uhuru Sasa Shule served relatively few children, especially at the beginning. So it’s important to point out that most Black families in Bed-Stuy had little choice but to rely on the public school system, like it or not. 

MARK: The vehicle for those families to exert power in the public schools was supposed to be the local school board. But the way the school boards were set up, most school board members across the city were backed up by a group which already had money and infrastructure to get the word out: 

MAX: The teachers’ union, anti-poverty organizations, various Democratic political clubs, the Catholic Church… 

MARK: Sometimes these different machines worked together, sometimes they were at odds; each district had its own particular cocktail of interests vying for power.

MAX: In District 16, the board was initially dominated by a State Assemblyman named Calvin Williams. 

LESTER YOUNG: He was he was the owner of what was called Black Pearl. 

MAX: Dr. Lester Young is on the New York State Board of Regents but he started out as a teacher in District 16. 

LESTER YOUNG: Black Pearl was the largest um private taxi. They used to call them gypsy cabs or whatever. Whatever it was. He was the largest vendor in central Brooklyn.

MARK: Let me explain: In those days, few yellow cabs went beyond downtown and midtown Manhattan, certainly not to pick up Black folks. Until Lyft and Uber, gypsy cabs were the only taxis that served Central Brooklyn, and Black Pearl was a pioneer company among them. Calvin Williams had constituents alright, and he knew how to mobilize them.

LESTER YOUNG: And I remember attending a board meeting where Calvin Williams had all his cab drivers show up. And I mean you can imagine what this looked like and he had all these guys come out and come into the board meeting because he was trying to have his way. Alright so yeah there were those kinds of things going on. 

MARK: At that time, District 16 included half of Bed-Stuy but also most of Bushwick -- which back then was predominantly white, mostly Italian-American. And I imagine that all these organized Black people must have scared the hell out of the white folks. 

MAX: That might explain why in 1973, parents in Bushwick basically seceded from District 16. They complained to the city that the District 16 school board was dominated by Black board members from Bed-Stuy. 

MARK: Essentially, these white parents used the same arguments that parents of color had made in Ocean Hill-Brownsville: their interests were not being represented, and they too deserved community control. 

MAX: So Bushwick was split off into District 32. And New York City’s district map has not been altered since. 

MARK: Today, District 16 has the smallest student population in the city. This might have something to do with it.

MARK: At the same moment that the physical shape of District 16 we know today was being forged, so too was the political identity of the neighborhood. One of the key figures in that identity is Al Vann. And his path to prominence ran right through the schools. 

AL VANN: My name is Albert Vann I call myself a black man. In America.

MAX: Al Vann and Jitu Weusi had co-founded the Afro-American Teachers Association here in Bed-Stuy back in 1964. Both of them wound up teaching in Ocean Hill-Brownsville. And after Ocean Hill-Brownsville, while Jitu was busy starting up the East, Vann started his own political club.

AL VANN: The thinking at that time among. Those of us who were involved in the struggle as it were. A lot if not most did not believe in electoral politics. They thought that to get involved in the U.S. government to that extent on that level was almost. Against. The movement. Uh when I came to the realization. That this was a way to move there if you wanted to make change in a system you had to be a part of that system. Everybody did not fully agree with that.

MARK: Nevertheless, in 1973 Al and Jitu both ran for school board in District 13 - which covers the western half of Bed-Stuy. The teachers’ union tried to get them both kicked off the ballot. They succeeded with Jitu, but Al made it through.

MAX: And the school board was just the beginning. Al Vann would go on to serve on the State Assembly and City Council for nearly 40 years. 

MARK: Meanwhile, Vann’s political club ran candidates for school boards across Black Brooklyn. In District 16, which covers the eastern half of Bed-Stuy, one of those candidates was Annette Robinson. 

ANNETTE ROBINSON: It was an exciting environment a very competitive environment. People were running from all walks of life. To the extent that you know people got kind of feisty you know they got kind of feisty. Yeah. 

MARK: They would tear your poster down, challenge your poll workers, your signatures, try to get you kicked off the ballot - you know, the usual stuff. But sometimes that feistiness could get pretty out of hand.

ANNETTE ROBINSON: I was chairing the meeting at that particular time. And what happened was I made a ruling. And so one of the board members objected to that. She says I don't give a F what you say Annette Robinson. That's what she said to me. And then she came over and she hit me.

MARK: Whaaaat.

ANNETTE ROBINSON She came over and hit me. Yeah. It became the thrilla in Manila. It really did. And the lady bit me. Yeah. She bit me. I had to go and. I went and got a tetanus shot.

MARK: Wow.

ANNETTE ROBINSON: That's right. It was it was that heated it was that heated she bit me. And I was getting to knock her out with a chair. That's what I was getting ready to do and the police came they ran up on the on the stage and said No don't do that. That's my personal story. You know yeah. She was gonna get the chair. No you're not gonna do that to me. 

MARK: I’ve known Annette Robinson for decades. She cuts a rather dignified figure on the Bed-Stuy political scene, so it was fascinating to imagine her getting down and dirty this way. 

ANNETTE ROBINSON: It was an unfortunate incident. And I was quite embarrassed by it. To be standing up in public and I'm presiding over a meeting and then I'm ending up in a fistfight with another adult. You know it was not a good look.

MAX: So the school board politics could get ugly. But there were still idealists in the system. 

LESTER YOUNG: We understood in the early days that working in the New York City public school system was not about a job. We were a part of something and we were going to show that our kids could in fact do this.

MAX: Dr. Lester Young started out as a teacher in District 16 in 1969, in the immediate wake of the Ocean Hill-Brownsville struggle. 

LESTER YOUNG: So when I came into the system. I'll never forget. I was interviewed by the principal and the principal said you're great. I want to hire you so you got one more interview you got to go through. And I said What is that. She took me down to a room and I was interviewed by a whole committee of parents and the first question the parents said to me was What do you know about this community. Why do you want to be here. And so I always understood that my check said New York City Board of Education but I worked for the community. 

MAX: This kind of direct parent engagement in teacher hiring was actually pretty rare under Decentralization; the teachers’ union fought against anything that would undermine their control. 

MARK: But this was no ordinary school and no ordinary principal. It was P.S. 21, under the leadership of Adelaide Sanford.

ADELAIDE SANFORD: I knew the power that a liberating education could provide for people who had been oppressed and depressed and and isolated.

MARK: We first met Dr. Sanford back in Episode 1. She was one of the first Black principals in New York City. 

MAX: During Ocean Hill-Brownsville, Dr. Sanford helped organize her parents and teachers to sleep in the school building overnight and keep the custodians from locking them out.

ADELAIDE SANFORD: And we stayed open the whole time much to the chagrin of the union. 

MAX: She resented how the union continued to protect its teachers from accountability.

ADELAIDE SANFORD: Nobody talked about why every teacher got a satisfactory rating and the children weren't learning. But there was the unspoken acceptance of the fact that these children really could not learn. 

MARK: Dr. Sanford did not accept that her students could not learn. And she did not accept that she would have to have teachers in her classrooms who believed that. So if she had an unsatisfactory teacher, she would give them an unsatisfactory rating.

ADELAIDE SANFORD: I began to give U ratings. And no teachers had ever gotten a U rating. Regardless to what infraction existed.

MAX: Every time she gave a U rating, the union would appeal. And every time the union appealed, Dr. Sanford worked overtime to make sure she had dotted all her “I’s and crossed her “t”s. She says she never lost a single case.

MARK: But what would happen next to that unsatisfactory teacher, that was out of her hands.

ADELAIDE SANFORD: That was up to the Board of Ed to decide but they couldn't stay there. They could be sent to another school they could be sent for training they could be fired. I understand very few were fired. 

MARK: You could spend years in legal limbo trying to remove a teacher. So most savvy principals and superintendents, rather than fight for that U rating, they would do the opposite of what Dr. Sanford did. 

MAX: They’d give the unsatisfactory teachers excellent recommendations -- if they agreed to leave and voluntarily transfer to another district. This became known as the “dance of the lemons.” With fictitious recommendations in hand, an unsatisfactory teacher could play musical chairs around the city for years. But the lemons almost never got fired, only transferred — inevitably to the poorest and brownest districts. 

MARK: Expectations were low for a school like P.S. 21, which served primarily children from the projects. Thanks to Dr. Sanford’s insistence on teacher quality and cultural affirmation, her students were doing really well. But whatever magic they were working at P.S. 21 wasn’t shared or replicated -- even within District 16.

ADELAIDE SANFORD: When we were given an award for having the highest reading scores of any urban school in the state. The school board which was all black at that time voted not to make a public acknowledgement or celebration. Of that event. 

MARK: What board members told her was that they didn’t want the other schools in the district to feel bad because they weren’t doing as well as P.S. 21. 

ADELAIDE SANFORD: It was still an aura of competitiveness which is most unfortunate.

MAX: And that aura of competitiveness wasn’t only between schools within District 16; there was also competition between District 16 and other districts. When a new gifted and talented program opened up at Philippa Schuyler Middle School -- very close to District 16, in District 32 -- a group of parents from Dr. Sanford’s school wanted to send their children there.

ADELAIDE SANFORD: The school board would not permit the children from District 16 to go to District 32 even though they had passed the entrance exam. 

MARK: District 16 didn’t want to lose the “cream of the crop” -- and the money that went with them.

ADELAIDE SANFORD: We sued the school board. And we won.

MAX: Not only did the students from P.S. 21 get to go to Philippa Schuyler, but as a result of the lawsuit, District 16 finally created a gifted program of its own, at P.S./I.S. 308.

MARK: No matter who you talk to, everyone agrees that some level of dysfunction was baked into the design of the school system under Decentralization. But things only got worse when New York City all but collapsed. After the break.

MIDROLL BREAK

ANTHONINE PIERRE: Hi, this is Anthonine Pierre, Deputy Director of the Brooklyn Movement Center. As you know, BMC is a member-led community organization building power with low- and moderate-income Black folks in Central Brooklyn. If you wanna talk with other listeners about what you’ve heard on School Colors so far, come meet us in person! We’re hosting a discussion group at BMC next Thursday night, October 17, starting at 6:30pm. If you’re a parent, don’t worry -- we will have childcare. Let us know you’re coming by writing to contact@brooklyndeep.org -- or if you can’t make it, hit us up to let us know what you think about the show. Peace.

FISCAL CRISIS

MAX: How and why New York City almost went bankrupt in 1975 could probably be its own podcast series. Let’s see if we can do the short version. New York used to have the most generous welfare state in the country. But over the course of the 1950s and 60s, middle-class white people fled the city by the millions, taking their tax dollars with them; and manufacturers did the same. So by 1975, New York had many many more poor people to support, and much much less money to do it with. 

MARK: To cover its budget, New York borrowed money like it was going out of style. But then the banks decided to stop lending, so the city needed a bailout from the federal government. And the feds would only swoop in to save the day if New York City agreed to completely change the way it did business. The city budget was put into the hands of a small group of unelected Wall Street types, who proceeded to slash and burn city services.

MAX: If Ocean Hill-Brownsville had exposed the hypocrisy of old-school liberal politics, the fiscal crisis signaled their collapse. If Ocean Hill-Brownsville had undermined the dream of a common public life, the fiscal crisis gutted common public institutions.

MARK: Tens of thousands of municipal workers were laid off; public hospitals were closed; CUNY, the city’s public university system, began charging tuition for the first time. 

MAX: And $132 million was cut from the public school budget. Almost 30% of the city’s teachers -- 15,000 people -- were laid off. Fewer teachers meant class size went up to 45, 50, in some cases as many as 60 students per class. Here’s historian Heather Lewis.

HEATHER LEWIS: It it decimates not only teachers but also leadership and and and and it everyone is just in survival mode. The fact that you have superintendents and teachers and parents actually trying to make something happen under decentralization in the 70s in the midst of this broader collapse of the city's infrastructure and supports is pretty amazing. 

MAX: Basic maintenance of school buildings -- not to mention other neighborhood amenities like sanitation and fire safety -- was put off indefinitely.

HEATHER LEWIS: Kids are going to school for half a day. The buildings are falling down. I mean it's it's frightening. Just that alone. Not to say what's actually happening when the kids are there. 

MARK: Hell yeah, it was frightening. And traumatic, for me and my entire family. I was in junior high school and have vivid memories of my education being dismantled, brick by brick, it seemed. Class periods were cut in half and classrooms were crammed with kids. Teachers, gym, music classes, garbage collection, disappeared. And any sense of normalcy, gone. But that was just the half of it. 

MARK: Both my parents worked for the city, which was laying off people left and right. It was the first time I ever heard the term “pink slip” and I remember staring, along with my brother and sister, at a letter that my father had received from the Board of Education, convinced that my father had been axed. It turned out to be a false alarm, and I hadn’t thought about it for many years. But one day when we were working on this episode, that scene all of a sudden came flooding back, and recalling the fear and anxiety literally brought tears to my eyes.   

MAX: By that time, were you still living in Brooklyn?

MARK: Nah. We moved to Southeast Queens because my mother thought the neighborhood was too dangerous. For a while, it seemed like everybody who could get out of Black Brooklyn, got out.

MAX: You can see that in the census data. The number of children living in District 16 dropped by almost half between 1970 and 1980. We lost almost thirty thousand kids in one decade alone.

MARK: So this is when you saw the first big drop in enrollment in District 16 schools -- but it wouldn’t be the last.

MAX: Now If there’s one thing that the school boards were criticized for the most over the years it was patronage: people getting jobs based on political connections instead of experience or ability. And in the desperate aftermath of the fiscal crisis, there were even more incentives to run the public schools like patronage mills. Dr. Adelaide Sanford explained why.

ADELAIDE SANFORD: Look at District 5 in Manhattan. District 5 was the hiring hole. That was a district where the principal and the superintendent would say look it's not about reading scores it's about hiring people because there was no industry. 

MARK: Look: as long as there have been poor people migrating to New York City, each group has had leaders who used government programs to give out jobs and contracts to their community. And in the 1970s -- basically as soon as a generation of Black leaders happened to grab a little bit of power -- the need to mine public schools for employment was more urgent than ever. Not to totally excuse this kind of thing, but only to point out that when people of color get any kind of power in this country, they have so much more to prove. 

MAX: And Lester Young says the local school boards were kind of set up to fail. 

LESTER YOUNG: They were responsible for hiring principals for hiring the superintendent for voting on the budget for establishing policy etc. And the question on the table is well what was it that we did to build their capacity to do this. 

MAX: The answer is, not much.

LESTER YOUNG: There was really no training for boards.

MARK: It’s important to remember that the experiment in community control of schools in Ocean Hill-Brownsville in the late 60s relied on infrastructure established by the federal War on Poverty, which created all sorts of social programs and required the quote “maximum feasible participation of the poor.” The community control experiment itself was made possible by funding from the Ford Foundation. Most of the board members in Ocean Hill-Brownsville were parents who didn’t necessarily have experience with education policy, but the superintendent made it his business to see that they received training.

MAX: None of these conditions were in place during Decentralization. And so in neighborhoods where parents were already well-resourced, well-educated, and more experienced with budgeting and administration and stuff like that, the school boards functioned reasonably well. But school boards in districts like 16 had a heavier lift. 

THE ARMORY

MARK: In the middle of everything else going to hell, the East seemed to be thriving. 

MAX: In 1976, they outgrew their original home at 10 Claver Place and moved into the Sumner Avenue Armory on what’s now Marcus Garvey Boulevard. The armory is massive -- it’s literally like a castle, with these two huge turrets in the front, occupying almost a full city block. 

MARK: Once you got inside, there were classrooms to the left and right and a huge open space down the middle, big enough to hold four full basketball courts, where neighborhood kids, even those who didn’t go to Uhuru Sasa, could still come to play ball after school. 

LUMUMBA BANDELE: It was my 360. 

MARK: Lumumba Bandele.

LUMUMBA BANDELE: We were there early for school. We would stay for after school stuff. My parents more than likely had meetings. After school we would get home late. And do it again and then we'd be there on the weekends for drumming class for dance class for martial arts. 

MARK: But it’s not as though the East was insulated from the poverty and violence outside. In the late 1970s, there was a series of high-profile police killings of unarmed Black men in Brooklyn. And in response, Jitu Weusi co-founded a new organization, the Black United Front. In 1978, he resigned from his leadership of both The East and Uhuru Sasa Shule to focus on the Black United Front. Dr. Segun Shabaka took over from Jitu as Executive Director of the East.

SEGUN SHABAKA: Listen. The government was hostile. We were a black power organization. One of the major black power organizations. And the government in and of itself was hostile to us. We know by the number of agents that came that they planted that lied about what they saw.

MARK: To make matters worse, Mayor Ed Koch held a grudge against the East after the Black United Front disrupted his first inauguration at the Brooklyn Museum.

SEGUN SHABAKA: He was on the stage but he couldn't get a word in. And we were yelling. Fired up ain't gonna take no more. The chants we had back then. So that put a target on us after that. You follow? 

MAX: But the East’s challenges weren’t all coming from the outside. The East was a big, complicated organization and they struggled with financial management.

SEGUN SHABAKA: We did not take care of our business like we should especially in a society that hates black people and don't want to see black people empowered. 

MAX: As the neighborhood was sinking deeper into poverty, parents had a hard time paying even the modest tuition, so the school couldn’t pay its staff. After Jitu stepped down from Uhuru Sasa Shule, the school had four different headmasters in five years.

SEGUN SHABAKA: There were conflicts and there was pressure that people didn't want to bear. You know you making tremendous sacrifices in terms of pay to build this institution. And so some people just couldn't take it. 

MARK: When Lumumba Bandele was nine years old, in the middle of the school year, he left Uhuru Sasa. He went literally just a couple blocks down the street to P.S. 44, but it might as well have been another planet. 

LUMUMBA BANDELE: My world was turned upside down. I went from having teachers who I knew intimately. We had we had small classrooms. 

MARK: They wore kufis and dashikis, they spoke Swahili, everybody was sort of related to everybody else -- 

LUMUMBA BANDELE: And I went into public school oddly enough in Black History Month the beginning of Black History Month so.

MARK: It was February 1981.

LUMUMBA BANDELE: And I walk into this room and this Italian woman from Long Island uh Miss Pinata was her name. 

MARK: Miss Pinata actually did talk about Black History Month. You know, the usual names: Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman -- 

LUMUMBA BANDELE: And when I raised my hand to ask like about all of the other historic figures and leaders she didn't know any of the names that I was mentioning.

MARK: They got into an argument about Joseph Cinque, an enslaved West African who led a successful slave revolt on the Spanish ship Amistad.

LUMUMBA BANDELE: And she said I don't know about that. I don't think that's true. So my father had to come in and set her straight but that was my introduction to the public school system. 

MARK: But it wasn’t all bad.

LUMUMBA BANDELE: There was some things I was pleased to see exist at P.S. 44. Back then the schools were closed for black solidarity day. And when we did the color guard for assemblies the red black and green flag was part of that. But it still was not an African centered institution and I think fundamentally that's what made Sasa what it was and P.S. 44 was not that.

MAX: Dr. Adelaide Sanford, the principal at nearby P.S. 21, admired the work that was being done at Uhuru Sasa. But she didn’t see it catching on in the public system.

ADELAIDE SANFORD: I thought that what they did was important but it wasn't becoming a part of policy. It was so isolated. I mean what Jitu did with the East that school and a couple of other independent schools that sprang up. They were localized and they did well but I didn't see leadership following that. There was no Jitu after Jitu. 

MAX: By this time, nearly all the schools in District 16 had Black leadership. But those leaders weren’t necessarily change agents. Even though local school districts had some power to set local curriculum… when your success is still measured by a state test, the state test will probably dictate how you spend instructional time.

ADELAIDE SANFORD: So you have to be willing to do the other pieces before school after school weekends whenever you can. The other pieces that enhance their sense of culture their sense of legacy their sense of responsibility and because a person becomes a black principal doesn't mean that they have those instincts or they're willing to work that hard.

MARK: Uhuru Sasa closed for good in 1983. The East hung on for a couple more years. Music remained a major draw.

LUMUMBA BANDELE: We would have you know rap artists come through. You know we had our own cultural rap artists brother D was one of them you know. He had his song. “How you gonna make a black nation rise. Educate agitate organize.”

BROTHER D:

How We gonna make the Black Nation rise?

We gotta agitate, educate and organize!

How We gonna make the Black Nation rise?

AGITATE! EDUCATE! ORGANIZE!

How We gonna make the Black Nation rise?

AGITATE! EDUCATE! ORGANIZE!

Gonna organize! Organize!

AGITATE! EDUCATE! ORGANIZE!

LUMUMBA BANDELE: And not just hip hop you know at that time the roots reggae roots scene was heavy. And on the weekends. Oh my God. It was packed with some of the best reggae sets reggae bands that would come through.

MAX: Sure, the armory was in disrepair. The city owned the building, and they wouldn’t fix the roof and the boilers. But for a time, the East was still like an oasis for many young people in the community.

LUMUMBA BANDELE: This is part of why the East was so important because. Eighties was crazy. You know I don't like to define the 80s by crack and that because it was so much way so much more than that. But the spaces that we occupied were safe spaces. And so all of the craziness happened outside.

MARK: But when the craziness on the outside came on the inside, that spelled the end of the road for the East.

MAX: To offset expenses, the East used to rent out the space to other groups for parties. At one of these parties, a big fight broke out. There were a few stabbings.

LUMUMBA BANDELE: It made the papers and then the mayor said this is the final straw and he put things in motion to shut it down.

SEGUN SHABAKA: We didn't have legal support. You know I had to go represent the organization. I'm not a lawyer. But we didn't have the resources and people didn't come to our aid  like they should have given the work that we had put in you know. It was uh it was a difficult time. You’re giving like 15, 20 years of your life to something it's not easy. Just walk away and leave it all like that.

MARK: About ten years after leaving the East, Fela Barclift found herself drawn back to education when she was looking for child care for her own young daughter. She couldn’t find anything that wasn’t Eurocentric, down to the picture books and the dolls.

FELA BARCLIFT: I couldn't put her in any of those things so I said I know what I'm gonna do. I'm going to start something. This way I can be closer to her myself. And also I can create a program kind of that mirrors some of what we were trying to do at Uhuru Sasa. 

MARK: She called her program Little Sun People. And in 2019, Little Sun People is thriving. My own kids went there. And Mama Fela is still the director. I asked her if anything in particular comes to mind that makes her think to herself, “Yeah, I did good.”

FELA BARCLIFT: I guess just being able to stay alive and functioning for 38 years is a kind of a big deal given the success rate of most black institutions.

MARK: As someone who runs a black institution myself, I can attest to that. But the East gave us a number of institutions that are still around.

MAX: The armory was converted into a homeless shelter called Pamoja House -- but it’s operated to this day by an organization called Black Veterans for Social Justice, which grew out of the East.

MARK: And the International African Arts Festival, which started out as Uhuru Sasa’s graduation ceremony, still takes place in Central Brooklyn every summer, attracting thousands of people. 

MAX: At its height, Uhuru Sasa Shule was a thriving full-time school for pre-K to 12th grade with a faculty of 20 and more than 300 students. Many people like Cleaster Cotton feel that this place literally saved their lives.

CLEASTER COTTON: The pressure that we went through as children killed many of us. It didn't kill us because our mentors and our teachers Jitu and all of those we stayed close to them. We learned skills that can help us actually make a life. And many of our friends did not make it out of Ocean Hill-Brownsville alive. And those who made it out we will run into them in the street. We can't recognize them because of the toll that life has taken on them because they were a part of these statistics.

DO OR DIE

MAX: Bed-Stuy in the 80s was rough. Family income was down, violent crime was up. And the federal government was not inclined to help. Historian Heather Lewis.

HEATHER LEWIS: There is a withdrawal of support for dealing with poverty for creating more equity and we're in a period of time when the focus is on the individual the focus is on law and order the focus is on depriving metropolitan areas of resources. Beginning of locking people up more.

MAX: And you could see the consequences in the schools.

HEATHER LEWIS: You actually see a closing of the gap of the achievement gap between African-Americans Latinos and whites in the 70s. It's actually beginning to decrease. And then it starts widening. Beginning in the 80s. And gets wider and wider. 

MARK: I returned to Central Brooklyn in 1985, fresh out of college. This is when the idea of “Bed-Stuy, Do or Die” was in its heyday. 

MAX: Okay, I’ve heard that expression a lot but -- I’m almost embarrassed to ask, what does it mean? 

MARK: For many of us living here, it meant we were not to be fucked with. But it also meant you had to watch your step. This is where you’d get your gold necklace snatched, your car vandalized. The murder rate was through the roof. You’d hear gunshots at night and not think twice about it. 

MAX: So… why was it like that?

MARK: It wasn’t just Bed-Stuy, it was all of New York. The city had always been known as a place where anything goes. But once the eighties arrived, crack and AIDS added a whole new level of desperation, petty vandalism and vulnerability. The result was the narrative that the city was predatory, out of control and that the niggas had taken over. And you needed a sheriff like Giuliani or Bloomberg to come riding into town to put these people back in their place. 

MAX: Let me guess. That’s not how YOU saw it. 

MARK: Nah. Because that’s white supremacy to me.  And what that narrative misses is the vibrancy and creativity that was born out of this desperation. Remember, hip hop came to dominate popular culture during this time. Central Brooklyn was the center of New York progressive politics. There were dozens of youth programs, economic development organizations, cultural movements and a level of activism that doesn’t even exist anymore. I know this all sounds kind of nostalgic. And I mean, it’s not like our local politicians control the forces of global capital or the mass incarceration machine. But even so, this was a time when I felt that Black people actually were running shit here in Central Brooklyn. I don’t feel that way anymore.  

MAX: On the surface, it may have looked like Black people were running the schools, too. But they were still subject to centrally negotiated union contracts, the central Board of Education bureaucracy, AND the authority of New York State.

LESTER YOUNG: There were boards and they voted on their budgets. However the decisions about what came to certain districts in terms of budgets was made still at central.

MAX: As a teacher and a principal in Central Brooklyn, Dr. Lester Young had always understood that his schools didn’t get the same resources as schools in wealthier parts of New York. But when he became an assistant commissioner for the state department of education in the late 1980s, he got to see exactly how that happened up close and personal. There’s one particular meeting he’s never forgotten, with the Board of Regents and the Commissioner at the time.

LESTER YOUNG: And he was talking about how we had to redistribute resources and talent in the state of New York. And and one of the Regents at the time raised his hand and said “Look. You know in my heart I think everything you're saying is correct” he said. “But I can't go back to my community unless you make my box bigger than theirs.” 

MARK: By this time, one of the Regents was Dr. Adelaide Sanford. After retiring from P.S. 21, Dr. Sanford had joined the State Board of Regents, hoping to spread the kind of work she had done as a principal by making changes at the state level to curriculum and teacher training. But she walked away disappointed. 

ADELAIDE SANFORD: Very often the wise are not powerful and powerful and not wise. That's a bad combination.

MAX: Back home in New York City, eye-popping stories of malfeasance on the local school boards started to pile up. We’re talking bribes and kickbacks, missing and misappropriated funds, creating totally unnecessary jobs to give to family and friends. 

ANNETTE ROBINSON: Everybody was not corrupt.

MARK: Annette Robinson served three terms on the District 16 school board before moving on to the City Council and State Assembly.

ANNETTE ROBINSON: Were there some people that committed some bad acts? Yes they did. That didn't mean that everybody had to be painted with the same brush because it didn't happen everywhere.

LESTER YOUNG: We're not known for the good.

MARK: After working at the state level, Lester Young came back to Brooklyn to work as the Superintendent of District 13 for more than a decade.

LESTER YOUNG: And what they do is they talk about the picture where they where they caught somebody hoisting a piano out of a school building on a Saturday and say look this is what goes on when you let them run the schools. Well basically what they're saying is that this is what goes on when you let the people in that community run their schools. 

MAX: The most egregious examples of corruption on the school boards came from just a handful of districts. Those districts were not all in Black and brown neighborhoods. And no one we interviewed could or would tell us definitively that jobs were bought and sold in District 16. 

MARK: But even if it wasn’t corrupt like that, the school board wasn’t necessarily effective. At least three times over the course of the 80s and 90s, the Chancellor suspended the District 16 board because they couldn’t agree on a new superintendent. In 1998, one school board member was arrested for threatening another with a knife. Later that year, seven schools in the district were removed from the school board’s direct control in an effort to turn them around. 

MARK: But the story we tell about Decentralization flattens the whole system into the worst of its failures. Like, “We tried giving power to Black and brown people after Ocean Hill-Brownsville, but they couldn’t handle it and the schools were overrun with corruption and chaos.”

MAX: I used to be a history teacher and this really reminds me of the way that most schools used to teach about Reconstruction. Like, “We tried giving power to Black people after the Civil War, but they couldn’t handle it and the government was overrun with corruption and chaos.”

MARK: Right. Forget about the details. This is what goes on when you let those people run things.

MAX: For decades, this narrative about Reconstruction was used to justify Jim Crow; in other words, to keep black people out of and away from power. It’s not a perfect analogy, but it does seem like a certain narrative about Decentralization was used in a similar way: to justify completely dismantling whatever bits and pieces of the dream of community control still lingered in the old local school boards. 

AL VANN: Power corrupts. Tends to corrupt. We know that. 

MARK: One of the heroes of community control, Al Vann.

AL VANN: So what you do is you try and create a system that is prevent or make it very difficult for that to occur. You don't throw out the system. Because you can find some evidence in some places that they were corrupt and that they got their son a job. To some people that who have had nothing and that opportunity they would take advantage of that. But clearly. Whatever corruption that existed in the decentralized school system was a minor. Minor minor compared to the corruption that exists in the mayoral control system or in the so-called centralized system prior to decentralization.

MARK: In fact, in 1991, a state commission recommended more local accountability, not less. 

MAX: They said the districts were still too big, the bureaucracy was still too powerful, important decisions were still being made too far away from schools and parents. 

MARK: They said there should be 50 districts instead of 32. Smaller districts with an independent financial officer to oversee each one. 

MAX: But instead, the pendulum swung in the opposite direction. 

LESTER YOUNG And I think that we have to go back and we have begin to ask some critical questions. We have to ask ourself. What we fought for 1968 around school governance is that still an issue today. And I think it is. I'm not necessarily suggesting we ought to go back to what it was but I don't see how going from a democratic process to we have a mayor who controls everything and doesn't have to answer to anyone and just does stuff. How does that work.

EPILOGUE: MAYORAL CONTROL

MICHAEL BLOOMBERG: The Board of Education is intrinsically incapable of meeting the educational needs of our children. It must go. 

MARK: In 2002, the New York State Legislature gave nearly total control over the New York City school system to the new mayor, Michael Bloomberg. 

MICHAEL BLOOMBERG: There are simply too many cooks over at 110 Livingston Street each with their own competing recipe which produces a political stew rather than a sound education. We do not need more commissions. We do not need more studies. We have waited too long for change it's time to act.

MAX: Ultimately, Decentralization was this kind of in-between system, where there were local boards, but people didn’t necessarily feel close to them or empowered by them. So by the time Bloomberg said we're going to get rid of this completely, it doesn't work, there was not much of an upswell of people saying No. 

MICHAEL BLOOMBERG: Rightly or wrongly the public has clearly said enough. They are saying read our lips. Eliminate the Board of Education and the local school boards. Then give us control over our schools through the mayor.

MARK: At least one veteran of the community control movement was none too pleased: Jitu Weusi. Jitu was never a fan of decentralization, but mayoral control was not the answer in his opinion. Here he is in 2009. 

JITU WEUSI: Look at this mess that we’re in now, this so-called mayoral control. Look at this mess.

MARK: In the years since leaving Uhuru Sasa Shule and the East, Jitu had returned to the public school system, serving as an assistant principal in Bed-Stuy for many years.

MAX: Under Bloomberg, both Junior High School 271 -- the flagship institution of community control, where Jitu was a social studies teacher back in the day -- and Junior High School 258 -- where he finished out his career -- were closed by the city. 

JITU WEUSI: And it’s going to get worse. Believe me, the next four years it’s going to get worse.

MAX: What he’s referring to is that when this interview was conducted, Mayor Bloomberg had just been elected to a third four-year term in office. 

MARK: But four years later, Jitu would be gone. He died in May 2013. 

JITU WEUSI: We’re still on a struggle. We’re still on and in the struggle. That’s the most important thing. An old mentor of mine used to say. “The struggle is my life.” And at the time I didn’t understand what she was talking about, but I understand it now. And I would say that that’s the way I feel about me. You know. The struggle is my life.

MARK: And the struggle continues… on the next episode of “School Colors.”

FELICIA ALEXANDER: The faces was like “District 16’s here? Like, oh my goodness!”

ANDRE FARRELL: Some of these schools they look like monsters. You know like, just bad.

EVA MOSKOWITZ: I’m not sure parents want control. I don’t think they want to manage.

DAISY GRIFFEN: They want us to be like puppets with our heads down when they say to do stuff but we’re not having it.

FELICIA ALEXANDER: They looking at me like I’m crazy.

NEQUAN MCLEAN: I feel like I was robbed.

LESTER YOUNG: What’s happening by default is that the district’s going to disappear.

MAX: “School Colors” is produced and written by Mark Winston Griffith and Max Freedman. Editing and sound design by Elyse Blennerhassett. Production associate Jaya Sundaresh. Original music by Avery R. Young and de Deacon Board. 

MARK: Additional music in this episode by Pharaoh Sanders, Asase Yaa Cultural Arts Foundation, Brother D with Collective Effort, the Black Eagles, Chris Zabriskie, Tynus, and Blue Dot Sessions. Archival material courtesy of WNYC and Steve Brier at the CUNY Graduate Center. Special thanks to Harold Anderson, Sharon Dunn, Norm Fruchter, Lena Gates, Colleen Stonebrook, and Dr. Renee Young.

MAX: School Colors is a production of Brooklyn Deep. Follow us on Twitter and Instagram @BklynDeep. You can find more information about this episode, including a transcript, at our website, schoolcolorspodcast.com. 

MARK: Brooklyn Deep is part of the Brooklyn Movement Center, a member-led organizing group in Central Brooklyn. Remember, you can join us at the Brooklyn Movement Center on Thursday night, October 17, to discuss what you’ve heard so far. Write to contact@brooklyndeep.org to RSVP or just to tell us what you think of the show.

MAX: You can also support School Colors by leaving us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts, sharing on social media, or telling a friend. We’ll be back in two weeks. So keep your ears open for Episode 5 on Friday, October 25. Until then -- 

MARK: Peace.