The UFT Has Made Sausages: an interview with Jerald Podair
In November 2020, the NYC United Federation of Teachers endorsed the Black Lives Matter in Schools campaign. About 90% of the union delegates voted for this. This was a stark contrast to previous years, when the UFT hierarchy plotted to filibuster or derail attempts to have the Delegate Assembly endorse this national campaign for liberation. And this is, unfortunately, a deeply rooted part of the UFT history, from its recent collaboration in ballooning school segregation, back to its battles in Ocean Hill-Brownsville strikes in 1968 and its cold shoulder to the largest student boycott in 1964.
In the following interview, I discuss the UFT’s history with Jerald Podair, the author of the book THE STRIKE THAT CHANGED NEW YORK, we cover topics from the 1968 UFT strike through present-day conflicts over NYC’s unequal schools, considered the most segregated in the country. The 1968 strike pitted Superintendent Rhody McCoy, the black superintendent of the local Brooklyn school board, against Al Shanker, the powerful president of the UFT (and later the American Federation of Teachers). McCoy insisted on his right to fire or at least reassign teachers who openly resisted his afrocentric, liberatory, and postcolonial pedagogical vision. Shanker refused with great zeal, sending the teachers union into a confrontation with the city lasting several months. The media tried to frame the event as a conflict between blacks (the community) and Jews (the teachers). The UFT ultimately was successful and became a stronger force in its role as co-manager of the NYC schools, but the reaction to the UFT’s principles and tactics during the strike has ranged from glowing adoration to harsh critique.
While Podair is ultimately pessimistic about the UFT’s capacity for embracing radical action for social change as a primary priority – and one can’t say he doesn’t have 60-plus years of history to back him up – the recent Delegate Assembly vote on BLM in Schools suggests the UFT may be ripe for a change in attitude and direction. Can the UFT break its 60+ years of following the business unionism model of Samuel Gompers? Can it put educator union power to work in a fight that many NYC communities are ready to join against material and racial inequality? These questions and more are discussed below.
Jerald Podair, professor, historian, and author of numerous books, including THE STRIKE THAT CHANGED NEW YORK. http://jeraldpodair.com/
How did you become interested in and research the Ocean Hill-Brownsville strike?
JP: The Ocean Hill-Brownsville strike was almost a part of my DNA because I lived through it as a high school student in the fall of 1968. I was in the New York public school system when the strike occurred, and at the time I didn’t pay all that much attention to it. My main concern was getting out of school, not having to go to school. Ocean Hill-Brownsville basically kept New York City public school students out for about 3 months. I wasn’t very political then. It struck me maybe 20-25 years later, when I was thinking of a dissertation topic, that it was really not only an important event in New York City education history, it was really an important event in New York history, general New York City history, and especially racial history. So I guess what I felt and heard and read and listened to during the strike sort of stuck in my DNA. or somehow got hardwired into me, because when I started thinking about a dissertation topic, I was a graduate student in history at Princeton, it’s really the first thing I thought up, and so I began researching it.
This was in the 1990s. It was not an easy topic to research, as you might imagine, because emotions were still so raw on each side, and not everybody I wanted to talk to was willing to talk to me. Albert Shanker never talked to me. As I understand it, I gave a presentation at the American historical association convention in the early nineties on Ocean Hill-Brownsville and he went to it. He was the president of the UFT and president of the AFT, at the time. He was in Washington, so he came and apparently he didn’t like what I had to say because he had promised to give me an interview. After he heard what I had to say, he didn’t want to talk to me. And that’s not the fault of Albert Shanker. He had his position.
It wasn’t the easiest topic to research and I found it much easier to just go through a newspaper run and I had to pretty much read every word of the New York Times, the New York Post and The New York Daily News for about a year to get quotes, to get reactions, to get information. Now newspapers are not always the easiest and most reliable sources, as you know. They are known as the first draft of history for a reason. But what I found is that they were more reliable than some of the people who would talk to me because I felt in many ways I was being spinned, again, by both sides, and I was always reminded as I did research of this of the great Japanese film Rashomon; basically people on both sides of the conflict were telling me things that were not necessarily true but we’re basically filtered through their own self-interest so just like a little Rashomon the characters were not necessarily lying out right but they were just shaping the truth to fit their own sensibilities and their own agendas and that’s what I found when I interviewed both, so for this dissertation I found relying on newspapers and at least what people were quoted as saying was my most reliable source. I went through the papers of the UFT at NYU and also the city board of education at Columbia.
So to make a long story, the PhD dissertation writing took me about 4 years but I had some road blocks along the way I got my notes stolen then it cost me about a year so I would say it took me 6 years to research and write it.
How did the notes get stolen?
JP: It’s become a family legend and a legend among my colleagues. We were living in Princeton at the time my wife and I and our daughter and we drove up to the Bronx to visit my parents who still live in the Bronx. I don’t know if you’ve ever been a graduate student or know graduate students but they get very obsessive about things. I took all my notes and I piled in the back of the trunk of the car because I thought I was going to look at them over the weekend, which was unrealistic, and I took basically everything, and the car got stolen and it was pretty horrific to go back to that parking space and not see it there. They found it in the South Bronx completely stripped and everything was gone and the notes were gone as well, so I basically had to start all over. I had to go back to Columbia. I mean it was easier the second time around because I knew where to look but it basically cost me a year and a half, maybe 2 years, of my life. I always heard it said you have to be a little crazy to be a graduate student and write a dissertation and that helped because the same person who would say that would have viewed that lost a dissertation notes as a sign from god and just quit. I didn’t.
Otherwise, why was the book hard to write? Basically just because it was hard to get access to people? Was Shanker the only one that didn’t give you access?
JP: There were plenty of people who didn’t give me access, or gave me only partial access, or they gave me access and didn’t really give me what I needed. So the second time, after all my notes were stolen I decided to sit down and go through the Daily News and all the New York City dailies for every day for 1968 and the beginning of 1969, as well as the Times, who’s the most accessible, to see what they said. I also feel that my own knowledge of Ocean Hill-Brownsville was so deep, right down to the ground level, and I certainly could tell whether somebody was stating the truth, so access was also complicated by the nature of the dispute. Usually there are heroes and villains in most historical stories – not in this one, because they were you know it was almost like everyone was right and everyone was wrong and I think it’s very difficult for historians even today to approach Ocean Hill-Brownsville because it’s so paradoxical and doesn’t really fit into any sort of a coherent narrative like that all whites are racist or these teachers were racist; it doesn’t fit into the narrative that they you know that all blacks were were unrealistic and anarchistic and violent. It fits into some of those categories but it doesn’t fit into all of them and so it’s not the easiest story to tell and I think what I had to do is sort of leave my own baggage at the door. We are all people, we have backgrounds: we have ethnic backgrounds, religious backgrounds, racial backgrounds. So I tried to leave all of that at the door and try to get into the heads of all of the participants in this, to get into Al Shanker’s, Superintendent McCoy’s, Mayor John Lindsay’s heads, and try to do that in a reasonably just passionate way. Hopefully I did a fair job. I think that’s a good thing because I think if I surprised and maybe even just made both blacks and whites can I get that meant I was doing a good job and trying at least to be if you want to do a fair job.
Can you explain just a little more why Shanker didn’t want to talk to you? Talk a little bit about why people thought you were black besides just the cover?
JP: Shanker was looking for an exoneration basically and endorsements of pretty much everything he and the union had done during the strike; in other words, journalists who would say this is not about race or the strike is not about race, it is only about due process for teachers who are unfairly fired. To deny that they were racial issues is completely unrealistic. You have to confront those issues in order to do a good job with it historically, so I think what Shanker was looking for and of course he’s not an academic historian. I know that many of my fellow historians would agree to disagree with me on that but I think you have to try to hold yourself outside of it, leave your baggage at the door, and try to be fair to both; historians have to criticize, I mean that’s our job, but you also have to have some sense of sympathy for a person who is in a position that you are not, in knowing much less than you know 20 or 30 or even 100 years down the line, so you have to both be critical but sympathetic. I understand he would want me to completely exonerate the UFT, but I couldn’t do that and I think that’s sort of what bothered him. He was emotionally invested in ocean hill Brownsville as much as anything in his entire career. That probably was the most emotionally draining situation that he had been in as the union leader. I can’t think of anything else that came close and he was so emotionally invested in it even 25 years later that wounds were still raw. To a lesser extent I got that from a lot of people that I tried to talk to about it: just too emotionally involved.
How do you see the UFT development since then?
JP: The UFT established itself as co-manager of the New York City public school system through the strike. Most of the strikes right now are about money but Ocean Hill Brownsville though was not about money it was about control. It was in 1968 that this strike established the UFT as a co-manager of the public school system which it was not before 1968. Before Shanker and the union leaders’ goal was to get money, but control in many ways was was more important than money; in other words, if Shanker had allowed Lindsay to buy him with money during this trial, if he allowed for everyone in the system to get a check but go back to work, Shanker would have turned that down, because he understood that that would have been a short term victory but the long term goal would have been lost: control.
The same caucus controls the union, the UNITY Caucus, since Shanker was in power.
JP: Really, wow. Didn’t realize that. So they’ve been around over 50 years?
Basically. And they filled a power vacuum left by government purges of “reds” and other socialist-leaning unionists. UNITY Caucus themselves were staunchly anti-communist when they were founded. The previous union, the Teacher’s Union (TU), was actually filled with many socialists and communists and the UFT, led by the UNITY Caucus, filled that void.
JP: You’re absolutely right. It’s really crucial to understanding the history of the UFT. They’re really tough anti-communists and they were one of several competing associations trying to get collective bargaining power for teachers.
What would it be like if the union had been less opposed to social justice and done less damage to community ties in the 60s in some of those neighborhoods? Is it possible for them to both win protections for the workers and also further social justice in terms of integrating schools and that type of thing and promoting black empowerment.
JP: My book shows how complicated that was for the UFT. First, Shanker and most of the UFT higher ups would say “we are for social justice” and what they would say is “you know we supported Martin Luther King and all of his campaigns. Martin Luther king is a personal friend.” He did address the U.F.T. On many occasions, he supported them when they were establishing their own union, and they supported him at the March on Washington and at Freedom Summer, so they thought they had the social justice bona fide. What what Shanker and other union higher ups would probably say in 1968 is “you don’t know what it was like to be a teacher in the New York City public schools in the forties and fifties, but we do and what we know is that teachers had no control, no power, no dignity.” So the UFT was founded to change that – did change that. As for social justice, at Ocean Hill-Brownsville they were asked to make a choice between the 2 and the UFT leaders ended up choosing the power of the union and the power of the teacher over ideals of more radical militants interested in social justice. In other words, they were for social justice but not at their own expense.
Albert Shanker, founder and president of the United Federation of Teachers 1964 to 1985 and president of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) from 1974 to 1997.
Wildcat teacher strikes in recent years in West Virginia, Oklahoma, and Oakland were fighting for higher wages, benefits, protections, and other working conditions. The LA strike and then the Chicago one in 2019 they were more fighting for expanding funding for the schools and increasing counselors and that type of stuff. Do you think that had Shanker had the union mobilized at that time that they would have fought for those issues? Because public schools in NYC were basically gutted in the 70s and 80s.
JP: Back when Samuel Gompers was the president of the AFL testifying before a congressional committee in the early 1900s and somebody said, “You know Mister Gompers, what does labor want?” and he just says, “More.” That’s it. “More.” And that’s what Shanker wanted. He wanted more. He wanted more counselors, he wanted more money to be spent on schools. He wanted it for two reasons: he wanted it because I think he was honestly committed to some form of social justice but also he wanted more jobs for his teachers and more power for the union. He did want all those things but what he didn’t want to do was cede control over education to a community group or community groups that he felt threatened his teachers and threatened their jobs. All the money in the world, he was very happy to have. The New York City government spent lots of money on teachers, or social justice, to fund counselors, special ed, everything. He wasn’t into allowing the community school board to fire one of his teachers. That he would not do, and that’s what caused the Ocean Hill-Brownsville strike. So you know in many ways as we look at it retrospectively: it didn’t have to happen, and that means that if both sides had compromised, it probably would not have happened. But we can’t go back. From the standpoint of community people and parents in the Ocean Hill-Brownsville community, they see that their children are not getting good education and even more specifically not getting the kind of education the kids in the white middle class areas of New York City are getting, who are getting the better teachers, better facilities. There’s something colloquially called combat pay in the 1960s, where teachers in poor neighborhoods get paid more money and also get a chance to transfer out after like a certain number of years.
There’s something in the most recent UFT contract where if you go to teach at struggling schools in the Bronx or Brooklyn you get higher pay.
JP: In the 1960s there was some sort of a provision where if you put a certain number of years and in those schools then you could leave and what happened in the sixties is that they were trying younger teachers, the beginning teachers (not veteran teachers) to the schools in communities like Ocean Hill-Brownsville, who could see that the education their kids were getting was not the same kind of education that that white middle class kids were getting and they were angry about that and I think justifiably angry about that, and of course Al Shanker would say, “I’m angry about that too and I want to do something about that and the way I want to do something because it is I want the school board to hire more teachers, more counselors, more administrators” and the community said, “well that’s that’s not really what we had in mind. We want control.” And that’s not what Shanker had in mind and he wouldn’t stand for that.
Now a big fight in New York City schools is over the screening process. Are you aware of this?
JP: I’m actually not really.
So kids take screening tests. The original schools like Bronx Science and Stuyvesant had to take tests to get in, but starting with Guiliani, then it was expanded during Bloomberg. Students take these tests at the end of middle school and there’s some schools – like the school where I teach – that are unscreened but there’s some schools that are screened, where you have to have a certain test score to get in and those schools are predominantly white and Asian and then you have schools that are unscreened that are predominantly black and brown students, so you really have a segregated school system, arguably the most segregated in the country.
JP: Well I was going to say that at least in the sixties you had the zoned school and Bronx Science, Stuyvesant, only a certain number of students.
So I guess my question, returning to social justice, but through the lens of focusing on teachers’ working conditions, and Weingarten and Mulgrew were Shanker’s successors, so I’m just kind of wondering how that fits into this?
JP: They really had the same agenda as Shanker. In other words, they’re all tough union bosses who put the interests of their membership above all. The conceit for the UFT all through the years is that the interests of their members coincide with the interests of social justice and you don’t have to make the choice between one or the other, but of course that’s not always the case as we saw in Ocean Hill-Brownsville. When push comes to shove they’re going to protect members; if they have a chance to get more money and more hiring but taxes go up and taxes go up for everybody including poor people they’re going to do it because that’s what comes first. The social justice component is important but when it collides with the interests of the union members, they come first and. I think most union leaders, even the public sector union leaders who say they’re for social justice, they’re going to make that calculation.
Do you think we still see some of the same forces at work in the contemporary struggles over education?
JP: From what you’ve just told me, in New York you have a school system that is more segregated than it may have been even in the 1960s and it’s pretty segregated in the 1960s and that was the basis of community control, the philosophical basis of it. African American parents in the mid 1960s basically gave up on the integration struggle because white parents had certainly given up on the integration struggle, and what black parents said is, “Well it looks like our schools are going to be segregated almost permanently and if that’s the case, we might as well control it.” They’re really being segregated by class, it seems to me, so that is that is going to be the issue going forward now. What is the UFT going to do with that? Well they may want to do something about it but I think again they are beholden to their members and their members may not have that will. Everyone in America says we want to be equal. But when you get into real life situations you sometimes wonder how many Americans really want to be equal, and take it to the UFT I would imagine that the majority of members view themselves as liberals or even on the left, and they vote for Democratic candidates, but when push comes to shove do they want to teach in an unscreened school or a screened school? Well a lot of them are going to make the choice to go to the screened school and they may give you all sorts of justifications that nothing to do with race, but it does come down at least to some extent to race and it also comes down to maybe something inside of them that does not want to be equal, that’s wants to be elite or special, and maybe that’s part of human nature but I don’t think the UFT itself is going to contribute to breaking down the system because I think in many ways the membership has an interest in perpetuating the system as it is.
You’re a labor historian. Can you think of an example of a union or labor movement that was both focused on working conditions for the workers in the union but then also focused as a primary concern on the community or in the society?
JP: The Wobblies was a union that focused not only on working conditions for their members but also wanted to change the entire economic and social structure of the United States.
Poster for the Industrial Workers of the World, or Wobblies, a trade union across industries that has fought for work protections and power as part of a larger campaign for social revolution. https://iww.org/assets/One-Big-Union.pdf
Similar to the Teachers Union (TU), the socialist and communist -oriented union that came before the UFT and was destroyed by the red scares in the 1940s and 50s.
JP: Yes, and former members of that formed a caucus that was against Shanker’s UNITY caucus in the UFT. They are trying to do that massive social change and that caucus within the UFT opposes the strike from the very beginning and they’re saying we have to align ourselves with the communities in which we teach so that we can change them for the better but in a sense they are making choices too. They’re unselfish in the sense that they would say well we’re willing to forgo raises to help the community, we’re willing to give the community control, in order to get equity and social justice in these neighborhoods. But I would argue that most teachers were not like that; they’re much more self interested, much less willing to sacrifice themselves. I think what distinguishes these teachers is they were truly selfless. Because the right has many problems of its own, which we know, but one of the major problems on the left is hypocrisy and the idea that they want other people to do what they themselves will not. You talk the talk, but you don’t walk the walk. Well these anti-strike teachers in 1968 in the UFT, they walked the walk. They were willing to make personal sacrifices, not have somebody else do it. Shanker opposed them and tried to destroy the caucus, but I think on some level he had to respect them.
Yeah the caucus I am in, the Movement of Rank and File Educators, is sort of the descendent of that caucus.
JP: The only UFT leader who spoke out at the time was John O’Neil. Also, George Altomare, one of the only living and remaining members of the UFT hierarchy, and I talked to him a couple of years ago and he’s the only really high ranking UFT who really tries to settle this and make a compromise and he got estranged from Shanker and the leadership over that. And Shanker basically just kept saying, “Fuck you, we want these teachers back in the classroom now” to the city and the media. And possibly the person who was floating a compromise of reassigning the teachers to other duties was George Altomare. He’s the last one left from Ocean Hill-Brownsville who’s actually alive as far as I know. He was sort of half in and half out and I think he was trying to be sort of a go between the community and the union hierarchy. Shanker was very absolutist over this and I think they had a falling out over that.
I also found it interesting that you said that your book doesn’t really fit comfortably in like a right wing or left wing historical narrative. I took it to show that the UFT failed to work with communities for funding and equality and instead had been focused on working conditions only. What would have happened if the UFT had worked more with communities on more systemic changes that could have been more mutually beneficial?
JP: You could make that argument. But based on my research, I think most city school teachers were and maybe are politically with the cops, the firemen, the sanitation workers. They’re just interested in “more”. They’re not politically active and what they’re worried about are their salaries and their jobs. So when you have a union that is mostly composed of people like that, there’s a limit to how far you’re going to be able to go in terms of social justice. Again the UFT always said, “We’re for integration.” Shanker said all the way through: “We are pro-integration”, but when Bayard Rustin (who I actually wrote a biography of) organized a student boycott and the UFT at least nominally supported that but they were not willing to go to bat for their members who boycotted that day. They said, “Take a sick day” or something like that, and didn’t necessarily confront the board of education directly over this. The organizers of the boycott were disappointed in the UFT hierarchy’s reaction to it. They didn’t oppose it but they didn’t use work stoppage. The UFT at that time was in favor of school integration. It’s not like they were ever, you know, against it. But again, there’s you know then idea skin in the game. And resources. I think the UFT was worried about that and the reason they’re worried is - it’s related to this idea of social justice clashing with the goals of union power – this is 1964: they’re not that powerful a union and they may not want to piss off the board of education with whom they’re trying to share power. They’re not necessarily a struggling union but they’re young, only like 4 years old, and they may not have wanted to throw in fully. Sometimes you have to to do what you have to do. When I wrote my biography of Rustin, I was struck by an incident in the late 1950s, where Rustin is a close adviser to Martin Luther King, and Rustin helped found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and probably was going to be the managing director of the SCLC. What happens is Rustin, who is gay, gets caught in rumors of this and they reach Martin Luther King, who cut off Rustin and they reunited for the March on Washington in about 3 years. He basically cut Rustin off, and they don’t have all that much contact. I think that King’s thinking here is, “I have enough problems with what I’m doing without also having a gay man as the director of the SCLC I’m already being called a communist. I’m already being called an anarchist, a revolutionary. King made a strategic decision and cut this guy off, and that’s how it works sometimes. In many ways, the UFT was generally thinking in 1964: “We’ve got enough problems with the Board of Education, establishing ourselves with the union, do we really, really want to go all in on this boycott and support every teacher? That’s probably going to hurt us down the road when it comes to bargaining with them.” There’s that saying that watching legislation get passed is like watching sausages get made. Well, King was making sausages, and so was the UFT.
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