Stirrings

How Activist New Yorkers Ignited a Movement for Food Justice

Lana Dee Povitz

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781469653013, 9781469653006
• eBook ISBN: 9781469653020
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

In the last three decades of the twentieth century, government cutbacks, stagnating wages, AIDS, and gentrification pushed ever more people into poverty, and hunger reached levels unseen since the Depression. In response, New Yorkers set the stage for a nationwide food justice movement. Whether organizing school lunch campaigns, establishing food co-ops, or lobbying city officials, citizen-activists made food a political issue, uniting communities across lines of difference. The charismatic, usually female leaders of these efforts were often products of earlier movements: American communism, civil rights activism, feminism, even Eastern mysticism. Situating food justice within these rich lineages, Lana Dee Povitz demonstrates how grassroots activism continued to thrive, even as it was transformed by unrelenting erosion of the country’s already fragile social safety net.

Using dozens of new oral histories and archives, Povitz reveals the colorful characters who worked behind the scenes to build and sustain the movement, and illuminates how people worked together to overturn hierarchies rooted in class and race, reorienting the history of food activism as a community-based response to austerity. The first book-length history of food activism in a major American city, Stirrings highlights the emotional, intimate, and interpersonal aspects of social movement culture.

1 A Taste of What It Takes

United Bronx Parents, School Lunch, and the Struggle for Community Control

Evelina Antonetty heard the women before she saw them, a euphony of Spanish-speaking voices drifting in through the partially opened window along with the metallic winter breeze. The voices grew louder, and within seconds, Laly was calling from downstairs to see if Antonetty could meet with the women right away. She barely had time to reply before the group bustled into the second-floor office on 791 Prospect Avenue. Looking out over her spectacles with serious, dark eyes, Antonetty quickly counted: ten women was a much larger group than the usual number of those who turned up at the office of United Bronx Parents. One of the women cleared her throat, and announced that they had come to discuss the conditions of lunch at P.S. 25, the elementary school two blocks away. The situation was appalling, they said. Something had to be done.¹

It was January 1969. Over the 1970s and 1980s, the South Bronx would burn, literally, as landlords torched dilapidated buildings to collect insurance money. For now, the neighborhood was aflame with activity and United Bronx Parents (UBP) was pouring the kerosene. This initial meeting between the mothers and UBP executive director Evelina Antonetty marked the start of a prolonged grassroots campaign that raised local parents’ expectations of school food in the South Bronx. Bolstered by UBP’s strong local reputation, its citywide connections, Antonetty’s own leadership, and contemporary social movements ranging from community control to welfare rights, the campaign transformed school lunches from a neglected federal program into a measure of the city’s investment in poor Puerto Rican and Black communities.² Though parents’ material gains proved frustratingly limited, UBP’s campaign helped unleash a momentum that mobilized and politically educated hundreds, if not thousands, of disenfranchised parents, at the same time casting into sharp relief the intransigence of New York City’s Board of Education when it came to the redistribution of power. The chain of events had far-reaching and long-term consequences for the city, the state, and arguably the nation itself.

By the time the Puerto Rican mothers approached UBP for help, the organization had already developed considerable local and citywide credibility through its outspoken support for community control over education and its parent leadership trainings. Forty-three-year-old Antonetty had founded UBP in 1965, after her five-year-old son was suspended from kindergarten over a trifle. Furious over the inequalities of the New York City school system, which overwhelmingly disadvantaged poor Black and Puerto Rican people, she began organizing parents into an all-volunteer organization. Antonetty was hardly new to grassroots organizing. Since the 1930s, she had been active within an array of left-wing efforts, ranging from working with the Young Communist League and for progressive politicians during the Great Depression, to labor organizing during the 1940s and 1950s, to coordinating local day cares in the early 1960s. In late 1966, UBP received a federally administered grant from the Office of Economic Opportunity to train parents to advocate for change in their children’s schools. By this time, the push to concentrate power in the hands of more responsive local community school boards had largely eclipsed the movement for racial integration of the 1950s and earlier part of the 1960s. In 1969, following the contentious 1968 teachers’ strike that had kept fifty thousand teachers and a million students out of class for nearly ten weeks, New York City passed a decentralization law that divided the school system into thirty-two locally elected community boards. While the law was often ambiguous, it allowed local boards a measure of determination over such areas as curriculum, hiring, and running school food programs.³ The community control movement provided fertile ground for the nonprofit’s beginnings, deeply influencing the political analysis, strategy, and tactics of parent food reformers.

Education and the Community Control Movement

For Puerto Ricans, in particular, the commitment to decentralized, culturally affirmative schools controlled by local communities was an expression of deepening nationalism, both in New York City and in Puerto Rico.⁴ In an open letter, Antonetty reminded Puerto Rican parents of New York City of the need to “keep our rich heritage alive and pass it on through our children.” But the ability to do this, she went on, depended upon the quality of public schools: “It is up to us as parents to demand and get the school authorities, the legislators and city officials to give our children the education which is rightfully ours. Our children can become the educators, doctors and leaders of tomorrow. Don’t let anyone tell us … that our children are ‘uneducable or mentally retarded.’ … We will not be satisfied with less.”⁵

Kathy Goldman was one of two women hired with the OEO grant in 1967 to coordinate parent organizing. Despite being something of an outlier as a middle-class white woman in a predominantly Puerto Rican and Black neighborhood, Goldman, born in 1932, had grown up down the street from the UBP office. Although she had since relocated to the West Bronx, a common move for Jewish people of Goldman’s demographic, her return to the neighborhood felt comfortable. Her ease in multiracial settings had been nurtured by antiracist work in the Communist-backed Labor Youth League and in attempts to desegregate housing during the 1950s. Goldman had also been active with EQUAL, a citywide group of militant white parents who supported school integration. Goldman recalled how the parents she met in the South Bronx tended to blame themselves for their children’s underachievement in school.⁶ One of UBP’s main goals therefore became to assure parents that this was a systemic rather than individual problem. As one pamphlet pointed out, “If only one or two children are failing in each class, there is probably something wrong with these children. But if two thirds of the children are failing, THERE IS SOMETHING WRONG WITH THE SCHOOL!”⁷ This structural critique was not immediately clear to newly immigrated parents, who, in Puerto Rico, were accustomed to treating teachers with respect and the principal with honor.⁸

Parents’ tendency to blame themselves was only part of the problem for would-be parent organizers. Their South Bronx community was faced with mutually reinforcing problems of poverty, unemployment, and low educational achievement. In the neighborhoods where UBP was organizing, including Melrose, Mott Haven, Morrisania, and the Concourse area, only 17 percent of Puerto Ricans over eighteen years old had completed four years of high school in 1970. The overall figure for New York City was just over 50 percent for all races. Economic prospects were bleak. Less than 5 percent of Puerto Ricans in the area held professional, managerial, or technical occupations, though citywide 23 percent of people did. The unemployment rate for male Puerto Ricans, owing largely to deindustrialization, was almost double that of the citywide average.⁹ Deindustrialization would dramatically worsen over the 1970s, with a loss of six hundred thousand jobs in the South Bronx over the decade, but it had already begun by the late 1960s.¹⁰

These inequalities reverberated throughout the school system. The Board of Education compiled a set of statistics expressing the racial distribution of school employees in 1967. As a UBP pamphlet analyzing these statistics pointed out, the board was “so racist that it doesn’t consider it important enough to distinguish between Black and Puerto Rican and Oriental employees but just lists Black and White.” Overwhelmingly, those in positions of power were white, and those working menial jobs were listed as “Black”: only 3.6 percent of all school superintendents were people of color, as were about 4 percent of elementary and junior high school principals. As of 1967 all high school principals and administrative assistants were white. In contrast, 49.2 percent of full-time lunchroom staff was nonwhite.¹¹ The most experienced teachers tended to teach at the whitest schools and were paid better salaries; meanwhile, the least experienced earned the least, and taught where there was a higher percentage of students of color.¹² While New York City at that time had a quarter million Puerto Rican pupils, only 350 out of 55,000 teachers and ten out of a thousand guidance counselors were Puerto Rican.¹³

Student achievement served as a similarly bleak indicator of structural racism. The two high schools with the lowest graduation rates (1.8 and 2.9 percent) also had, respectively, 92 and 96 percent nonwhite students. In sharp contrast, in the two high schools with the highest graduation rates (92.8 and 82.5 percent), only 7 percent were students of color.¹⁴ Although more than one-quarter of school students citywide were Puerto Rican, this group made up only 3 percent of students receiving high school diplomas.¹⁵ A report by EQUAL, the pro-integration group of militant white parents, found that a predominantly white district in Queens had more sixth graders who could read at a ninth grade level than ninth graders in the majority Black and Latino Central and East Harlem who could read at the ninth grade level.¹⁶

Statistical data of this kind played a tremendously important role in underscoring UBP’s larger point that the fault lay with the system. While present-day readers might be accustomed to such disparity, at the time these figures were not widely known and caused something of a scandal when they were broadcast before the public. In May 1966, Kathy Goldman and Ellen Lurie, who, prior to being recruited alongside Goldman by Antonetty as UBP’s other parent advocate trainer, was then EQUAL’s citywide chairwoman, obtained the school-by-school reading scores of all thirty districts and passed them along to the New York Times.¹⁷ “It was like a bombshell in New York,” Goldman recalled when the results were published. “The disparity in reading scores was so horrendous. We had serious segregation at the time. It’s worse now, but then it was really unadmitted to.” Goldman said that using facts to underscore a larger political message was “the hallmark of EQUAL. We did stuff like that and you couldn’t argue with it.… It was fabulous! Not just presenting an opinion but facts.”¹⁸ The materials Goldman and Lurie produced for UBP continued this practice of providing statistics to support opinions.

Facts provided crucial ammunition to a population that was also culturally disenfranchised by their schooling. Most crucially, Puerto Ricans across New York City wanted a bilingual school system and resented that their children were being treated as intellectually inferior because Spanish was their first language. Politicized Puerto Rican communities across the city considered it a necessity not only for children to be able to learn and communicate in Spanish, but for their teachers to do so as well.¹⁹ During the mid-1970s, Antonetty taught a course at Hunter College titled “The Puerto Rican Child in New York Schools.” She conserved some of her students’ work, which captures the ethnic nationalism of school reform efforts during this era. One student, Michael Capiello, insisted that Spanish was not a crutch but a sign of pride: “Puerto Ricans are citizens of the United States from birth [and] are no more obligated (for the purposes of governmental or social services) to give up their native language than the Southerner is expected to give up his native drawl.… By speaking Spanish, the child is in effect saying ‘I am not a stupid American who cannot speak English, but a proud, intelligent Puerto Rican–American who can speak one of the languages of my country very well.’ ”²⁰

Frank Siaca, another of Antonetty’s students, pointed to the enormous discrepancy between school and home life. Most Puerto Rican pupils faced some degree of poverty, and many were forced to live in overcrowded dwellings, where they lacked adequate study space, proper diets, and privacy.²¹ While teachers expected students to go home after school to do homework, it was not uncommon for Puerto Rican students, by their sophomore years, to be their family’s main breadwinner. Puerto Rican immigrants typically viewed the home as a social space, “a place for welcoming visitors and relatives. You cannot go into your apartment, close the door and study. It is not that simple.”²²

UBP promoted a very different idea of what the education system could look like—one that envisioned a “school without walls” where academic learning would be continuous with community concerns and domestic realities, and that insisted that “the parent is the professional when it comes to the education of their children.”²³ In other words, the experience of parenting created its own form of expertise that needed to be recognized, valued, and centered by school teachers and administrators. The organization also fought for accurate representation of Puerto Rican and Black history and culture, and for school structures in which students had a say over things like the color of new paint for cafeteria walls. UBP prized learning by doi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Illustration
• Abbreviations in the Text
• Introduction
• 1. A Taste of What It Takes: United Bronx Parents, School Lunch, and the Struggle for Community Control
• 2. Hunger Doesn’t Take a Vacation: United Bronx Parents and New York City’s First Free Summer Meals Program
• 3. Life Is with People: Community and Cooperation in the Park Slope Food Coop
• 4. Better to Light a Candle: Ganga Stone and the Joy of Service at God’s Love We Deliver
• 5. If You Know Somebody, Call Them Up: Food Advocacy and the Beginning of the Community Food Resource Center
• 6. Perhaps Our Brightness Blinds: Perhaps Our Brightness Blinds
• Epilogue
• Acknowledgments
• Methodological Note: On Deep Acquaintance
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index