The Best of I.F. Stone

by I. F. Stone

  To visit the black-controlled schools which have stirred such forebodings on both sides of the controversy is like waking from a nightmare. I spent Friday, October 25, in the Ocean Hill–Brownsville district, observing classes and talking with teachers and principals in JHS 271 and its intermediate school neighbor, IS 55, and the visit was therapeutic. It was a day without pickets and I saw only one policeman. The atmosphere was incredibly different from what I had been led to expect. I found black and white teachers, Jewish and gentile, working together not just peacefully but with zest and comradeship. The cleanliness and the neat clothing of the children reflected well on the homes from which they came. The classes were orderly. There was none of that screaming by teacher against pupil, and among the children, which is common in most New York schools. I felt at the end of the day that the racial and union issues were terribly overblown and that the real concern within the embattled district was simply to create effective schools. I saw no reason why this could not be reconciled with proper union standards and I felt it would be a tragedy if this experiment in community control were shut down.

  I watched Mrs. Naomi Levinson teach an English class full of eager black children. I read some of the touching poems and essays they had produced. “Its the first time in my eight years as a teacher,” she told us proudly, “that I have been allowed to use unconventional teaching methods.” I talked with another teacher, Leon Goodman, whose face lit up with pleasure when he explained the new methods of teaching science he was allowed to apply. “We get them to think rather than simply to copy down abstractions from the blackboard.” Both impatiently denied that they had encountered any anti-Semitism.* I sat in on a teacher-team conference of five English teachers, three black, two white, one of the whites a delicate-featured blonde WASP, the other an intense and dark-eyed Jew. The two whites were volunteers. One of them had brought a bongo drum into the classroom to use with the reading of Vachel Lindsay’s incomparably rhythmic “Congo” as a way to awaken the children to the wonders of poetry. The atmosphere of this mixed group was wholly devoid of any racial self-consciousness or tension. One felt their pleasure in working together. In the corner of one classroom we watched a young black teacher with a group of children who took turns at reading “The Prince and the Pauper.” On the blackboard was the assignment, “Write a story about something that went wrong in a person’s life” and next to it in a row there were the helpful hints, “No money. Sickness. No food. No light. No home. No friends. No job.” The words telescoped the familiar annals of the ghetto.

  The only racialism, if it can be called that, was in the evidence of efforts to awaken black pride. There were some vivid watercolors produced in a new painting class and exhibited in a hallway as “Soul on Paper.” Another hallway blackboard had “Black Is Beautiful” written not only in French and Spanish but in Greek, Hebrew, Punjabi, Swahili, Arabic and Esperanto. One room’s walls were covered with pictures and clippings variously headed “Religion, Statesmen, Musicians, Scientists, Inventors, Diplomats” showing black achievement in these fields.

  In the classroom where Leslie Campbell, an African gown over his normal clothes, teaches Afro-American Studies, there were posters showing “Our Homeland” and “Our Proud and Glorious Past.” They reminded me of Zionist posters in many Jewish Sabbath schools. There were also posters of “The Proud Look” and “Black Pictures of Christ.” Campbell after class was friendly and open. He described himself as a black nationalist revolutionary but said he found himself very much in a minority on the faculty. “Most of my black colleagues,” he said, “are simply educationists,” though they agree on African studies for its psychological value. The other teacher of Afro-American Studies at JHS 271, Alan Kellock, turned out to be a young white man who has studied in Egypt and Ghana and is finishing a doctorate in African history for the University of Wisconsin. He said he had encountered no racial prejudice in Ocean Hill–Brownsville. What purpose did he see in Afro-American history courses? “To get the black children to feel they are worthwhile people. To give them a sense of identity and dignity.” Kellock obtained his teaching license last summer. He feels JHS 271 is the most promising place to teach in the entire city.

  David Rogers, in his blockbuster of a new book, 110 Livingston Street: Politics and Bureaucracy in the New York City School System, quotes an authoritative earlier professional study of the city’s schools by Strayer and Yavner. “The greatest failing of the schools today,” they found as he did, “is the failure to use the creative ability of teachers.” When I read this afterwards, I understood the enthusiasm I had found in the two schools I visited. I had thought of community control as a kind of lesser evil, a way of appeasing black dissatisfaction. I did not realize what a dead hand the bureaucracy has fastened on the schools and how much could be done just by lifting it. “Not many teachers come into the system sour,” said Percy Jenkins, the Virginia-born Negro who is now principal of IS 55, “but they don’t stay long without becoming sour. The kids come in with lively minds but by the fourth grade they too have lost interest.” Jenkins himself, a graduate of West Virginia State College, had been in “the system” 15 years and risen to assistant principal before he was chosen to head IS 55 in this community-control experiment. “What you see here,” one white teacher explained later, “is a function of the principal, of the fresh directions he maps out and of the commitment brought to this experiment by young liberal arts college volunteers with new ideas.”

  I spoke with Rhody McCoy, the head of the district; with his assistant, Lloyd Hunter; with the principal of JHS 271, William H. Harris, and with his white assistant principal, John Mandracchia. I have never met a more devoted group of people. All of them are harassed and overworked but sustained by a combination of desperation and joy, desperation because they fear the experiment may soon be wiped out under union pressure, joy in a chance to demonstrate in the little time they have what community control could accomplish. They are enlightened men; one forgets all the nonsense of black and white in talking with them; color vanishes. They fear black extremism as much as white misunderstanding. And their focus is on the child.

  That cannot be said of their opponents. The child, whether black or white, seems to be the forgotten bystander in the teachers’ strike. The union’s rallying cry is “due process,” i.e., for teachers, and its concern is their tenure. Its alliance is not with the parents for better education but with the employing bureaucracy for the maintenance of their common privileges. The “due process” issue they have raised is a monumental bit of hypocrisy. The best analysis of it may be found in the report by the New York Civil Liberties Union, The Burden of Blame. The unsatisfactory teachers were transferred, not discharged, and transfers normally are made without hearing or charges; the teachers prefer it that way, to keep their records free from blemish.

  The real problem is how to keep teachers in ghetto schools. The Board of Education regulations are designed to discourage teachers from fleeing them. The contractual procedures between the Board and the union limit the teacher’s freedom to transfer. “Yet,” the civil liberties union reported, “in Ocean Hill–Brownsville, the UFT sought to ignore all these procedures and claimed the right for unlimited numbers of teachers to transfer out at will for the duration of the experiment, to abandon the experiment for as long as it continues and then to be free to return, presumably when ‘normal’ conditions had been reinstated. . . . Significant numbers of teachers did leave. . . . Months later, when the Ocean Hill–Brownsville Local Governing Board attempted to exercise a similar unilateral right of transfer, the UFT cried foul.”

  The Board of Education’s notions of “due process” are as one-sided. I have read the full text of the decision handed down by Judge Francis E. Rivers as trial examiner in the case of the transferred teachers. It is by no stretch of the imagination the vindication it appears to be in the headlines.

  The hearing, by screening out all but professional witnesses, and barring not only parent testimony but that o
f para-professional school aides, and by applying strict rules of evidence unsuited to administrative procedures, managed to acquit the teachers without any real exploration of the charges against them.

  The Board of Education is past master at manipulating regulations and procedures to achieve the ends it seeks. The Rogers book shows how hard it is even for teachers and principals to find out how it operates. Only a Kafka could do justice to the murk it generates. In a column on due process in the New York Post October 24, Murray Kempton provided an incisive glimpse of these operations in the proceedings now underway against four JHS 271 teachers accused of threats, or acts of terror, against attempts to reinstate the transferred teachers. Their attorneys were forbidden to see the reports on which the charges were based. When one attorney asked, “Do you proceed under any rules and regulations?” the reply was “We do not.” After all this talk about due process, Kempton commented, “we suddenly discover that in this system there is no protection for anybody except the conscience and good-will of the Superintendent.”

  All bureaucracies are secretive, none more so than the New York Board of Education. The Rogers book is an eye-opener, particularly in its account of how desegregation was sabotaged by the Board. It did not work, Rogers concludes, “because the bureaucracy and the staff made them fail.” It was out of the frustration created by the failure of integration that black and Puerto Rican parents turned to community control. This, too, is being sabotaged by the Board and by the union. They fear the loss of power and privilege if democracy is substituted for bureaucracy. They have the support of all the unions which do business with the educational system, a billion-dollar business. The New York trade union movement, like its educational establishment, has been a stronghold of white supremacy. This is where and how the racial issue arises, and the Jewish community is being enlisted because teaching has been a Jewish preserve in New York as it was once an Irish Catholic preserve. If community control is crushed, the racial struggle will take on more violent and hateful forms to the detriment of both the black and Jewish communities.

  The Jews, as the more favored and privileged group, owe the underprivileged a duty of patience, charity and compassion. It will not hurt us to swallow a few insults from overwrought blacks. It is as right to invoke the better Jewish tradition against Jewish bigotry as to invoke the better American tradition against white racism. The genocidal threat, if any, in this situation lies in the slow death and degradation to which so many blacks and Puerto Ricans are doomed in our slums. To wipe out the slums and help save their occupants would be the truest memorial to those who died in Auschwitz. When an idealistic young Mayor and the Rabbi who tried to defend him are howled down in a synagogue, it is time for the slap that can alone bring hysterics to their senses. Lindsay was saying “a Jewish philosopher—” when he was forced to leave. The philosopher he was about to quote was Spinoza. He, too, was thrown out of the synagogue in his time. We ought to have better sense today.

  * * *

  *About three-fourths of the non-striking teachers in Ocean Hill–Brownsville are white and about one half of these are Jewish.

  Part Five

  A PROMISED LAND?

  For the Jews—Life or Death?

  This article is an urgent appeal for help from the United States on behalf of the millions of Jews facing destruction in the Nazi death camps—an appeal that went tragically unanswered. What follows is the brief introductory note written when the article was first reprinted in the collection: The War Years, 1939–1945.

  At his press conference on June 2, after this article was written, the President indicated that he was considering the conversion of an army camp in this country into a “free port” for refugees. Unfortunately, as the New York Post has pointed out, “his statement was conditional, indefinite. The check is still on paper and we don’t even know what the amount is.” In these circumstances Mr. Stone’s analysis of the urgency of the situation and his plea for public pressure to secure action from the Administration are no less valid than they were before Mr. Roosevelt spoke.

  . . .

  June 10, 1944

  THIS LETTER, ADDRESSED SPECIFICALLY to fellow-newspapermen and to editors the country over, is an appeal for help. The establishment of temporary internment camps for refugees in the United States, vividly named “free ports” by Samuel Grafton of the New York Post, is in danger of bogging down. Every similar proposal here has bogged down until it was too late to save any lives. I have been over a mass of material, some of it confidential, dealing with the plight of the fast-disappearing Jews of Europe and with the fate of suggestions for aiding them, and it is a dreadful story.

  Anything newspapermen can write about this in their own papers will help. It will help to save lives, the lives of people like ourselves. I wish I were eloquent, I wish I could put down on paper the picture that comes to me from the restrained and diplomatic language of the documents. As I write, the morning papers carry a dispatch from Lisbon, reporting that the “deadline”—the idiom was never more literal—has passed for the Jews of Hungary. It is approaching for the Jews of Bulgaria, where the Nazis yesterday set up a puppet regime.

  I need not dwell upon the authenticated horrors of the Nazi internment camps and death chambers for Jews. That is not tragic but a kind of insane horror. It is our part in this which is tragic. The essence of tragedy is not the doing of evil by evil men but the doing of evil by good men, out of weakness, indecision, sloth, inability to act in accordance with what they know to be right. The tragic element in the fate of the Jews of Europe lies in the failure of their friends in the West to shake loose from customary ways and bureaucratic habit, to risk inexpediency and defy prejudice, to be wholehearted, to care as deeply and fight as hard for the big words we use, for justice and for humanity, as the fanatic Nazi does for his master race or the fanatic Jap for his Emperor. A reporter in Washington cannot help seeing this weakness all about him. We are half-hearted about what little we could do to help the Jews of Europe as we are half-hearted about our economic warfare, about blacklisting those who help our enemies, about almost everything in the war except the actual fighting.

  There is much we could have done to save the Jews of Europe before the war. There is much we could have done since the war began. There are still things we could do today which would give new lives to a few and hope to many. The hope that all is not black in the world for his children can be strong sustenance for a man starving in a camp or entering a gas chamber. But to feel that your friends and allies are wishy-washy folk who mean what they say but haven’t got the gumption to live up to it must brew a poisonous despair. When Mr. Roosevelt established the War Refugee Board in January, he said it was “the policy of this government to take all measures within its power . . . consistent with the successful prosecution of the war . . . to rescue the victims of enemy oppression.”

  The facts are simple. Thanks to the International Red Cross and those good folk the Quakers, thanks to courageous non-Jewish friends in the occupied countries themselves and to intrepid Jews who run a kind of underground railway under Nazi noses, something can still be done to alleviate the suffering of the Jews in Europe and some Jews can still be got out. Even under the White Paper there are still 22,000 immigration visas available for entry into Palestine. The main problem is to get Jews over the Turkish border without a passport for transit to Palestine. “Free ports” in Turkey are needed, but the Turks, irritated by other pressures from England and the United States, are unwilling to do for Jewish refugees what we ourselves are still unwilling to do, that is, give them a temporary haven. Only an executive order by the President establishing “free ports” in this country can prove to the Turks that we are dealing with them in a good faith; under present circumstances they cannot but feel contemptuous of our pleas. And the longer we delay the fewer Jews there will be left to rescue, the slimmer the chances to get them out. Between 4,000,000 and 5,000,000 European Jews have been killed since August, 1942, when the Nazi extermin
ation campaign began.

  There are people here who say the President cannot risk a move of this kind before election. I believe that an insult to the American public. I do not believe any but a few unworthy bigots would object to giving a few thousand refugees a temporary breathing spell in their flight from oppression. It is a question of Mr. Roosevelt’s courage and good faith. All he is called upon to do, after all, is what Franco did months ago, yes, Franco. Franco established “free ports,” internment camps, months ago for refugees who fled across his border, refugees, let us remember, from his own ally and patron, Hitler. Knowing the Führer’s maniacal hatred for Jews, that kindness on Franco’s part took considerably more courage than Mr. Roosevelt needs to face a few sneering editorials, perhaps, from the Chicago Tribune. I say “perhaps” because I do not know that even Colonel McCormick would in fact be hostile.

  Official Washington’s capacity for finding excuses for inaction is endless, and many people in the State and War departments who play a part in this matter can spend months sucking their legalistic thumbs over any problem. So many things that might have been done were attempted too late. A little more than a year ago Sweden offered to take 20,000 Jewish children from occupied Europe if Britain and the United States guaranteed their feeding and after the war their repatriation. The British were fairly rapid in this case, but it took three or four months to get these assurances from the American government, and by that time the situation had worsened to a point that seems to have blocked the whole project. In another case the Bulgarian government offered visas for 1,000 Jews if arrangements could be made within a certain time for their departure. A ship was obtained at once, but it took weeks for British officials to get clearance for the project from London, and by that time the time limit had been passed. The records, when they can be published, will show many similar incidents.