Blacks, Jews and the Struggle to Integrate Brooklyn's Junior High School 258: A Cold War Story

ADINA BACK


IF YOU MENTION BROOKLYN, schools, blacks and Jews in one breath, the image that surfaces in the minds of many is the 1968 struggle for community control in the Ocean Hill-Brownsville school district. Like many highly publicized events, the Ocean Hill-Brownsville struggle has generally been presented by the media and some of the key players as having come out of nowhere, an explosion without a history. But the Ocean Hill-Brownsville struggle had its roots in an earlier and less well-publicized history of struggles for equal education for African- American schoolchildren. In the 1950s, many black parents redirected their energies from documenting discrimination to organizing for integration. In so doing, they exposed a segregated northern school system. Paradoxically, their campaign revealed both the possibility that existed during this period to create a truly integrated system, and the deep— ultimately intractable—resistance to that goal.