Uncivil Rights

Teachers, Unions, and Race in the Battle for School Equity

Jonna Perrillo

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780226660721, 9780226660714
• eBook ISBN: 9780226660738
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Almost fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education, a wealth of research shows that minority students continue to receive an unequal education. At the heart of this inequality is a complex and often conflicted relationship between teachers and civil rights activists, examined fully for the first time in Jonna Perrillo's Uncivil Rights, which traces the tensions between the two groups in New York City from the Great Depression to the present.

While movements for teachers' rights and civil rights were not always in conflict, Perrillo uncovers the ways they have become so, brought about both by teachers who have come to see civil rights efforts as detracting from or competing with their own goals and by civil rights activists whose aims have de-professionalized the role of the educator. Focusing in particular on unionized teachers, Perrillo finds a new vantage point from which to examine the relationship between school and community, showing how in this struggle, educators, activists, and especially our students have lost out. 

CHAPTER 1

Building a “New Social Order”

Teachers, Teacher Unions, and Equity in the Great Depression

On the afternoon of October 21, 1936, fourteen-year-old Robert Shelton was standing in a hallway of Harlem elementary school P.S. 5, sent by his parents to wait for his sister. While this much is certain, the events that followed are not. According to the school’s faculty, Robert was told by a teacher not to loiter in the hall, and when he began to cause a disturbance in response, the principal, Gustave Schoenchen, was called. Schoenchen brought Robert to his office, and when the boy picked up a ruler and threatened to hit him with it, the 250-pound, one-armed principal struggled to subdue him. According to Robert’s parents, their son was beaten without provocation, called “vile names” by the principal, and ordered to wash blood off of his face or Schoenchen would “beat [him] into unconsciousness.” Pictures of a shirtless, bespectacled Robert Shelton were published in the city’s black press, showing the boy with bandages on his head, abdomen, and arm. But the physician who had treated Robert at Harlem Hospital stated that he had not applied any of the bandages in the photograph, nor were they necessary. If the events at P.S. 5 were unclear, they nevertheless resonated with Harlem parents and some teachers, who knew that black children were often the victims of white hostility, including in the public schools they attended. By the time of Schoenchen’s trial, an organized delegation of Harlem parents, civic organizations, and New York City Teachers Union members had picketed the school for months, demanding the principal be fired and be replaced with someone “who has shown in practice an understanding of the needs of the people of Harlem.”¹ On the streets and in their union press, Teachers Unionists protested for three months that “Schoenchen must go. And with him must go the attitude that ‘anything is good enough for Harlem.’ ”² In January 1937, the Board of Education transferred the principal to a school in Queens. But the perceived attitude that Harlem schools deserved less than the city’s other schools remained.

This chapter begins with the Schoenchen episode because it serves as an illuminating moment in what this chapter and book are about: the critical role that race and race progress movements played in shaping teachers’ views of professionalism and professional rights in the nation’s largest school district. The case was important for what it signified to Harlem residents and to some liberal teachers: that public schools, which might have promised black students a respite from racial discrimination, often embraced and perpetuated it. This stark fact indelibly influenced the development of both New York City’s black civil rights movement and teachers’ professional movements in the 1930s, shaping their agendas and setting the course for school reform efforts for the remainder of the century. While both social movements predated the Depression, they grew and acquired a changed sense of consequence in the context of economic collapse. Black New Yorkers faced greater unemployment numbers than any other demographic group in the city, while teachers, who already faced deep salary cuts, were compelled by the Board of Education to contribute an additional 5 percent of their earnings to support needy children.³ In response to what the Depression had revealed about the nature of opportunity and exploitation in American society, black city residents and city teachers, independently from and collectively with each other, sought to create what Teachers College professor George Counts named in 1932 “a new social order.” Counts, along with his colleagues John Dewey, William Heard Kilpatrick, Harold Rugg, and others, named themselves the social reconstructionists. As a group, they argued that public schools were central to social reform and that in the process “teachers must abandon their easy optimism” and “deal more fundamentally, realistically, and positively with the American social situation than has been their habit in the past.” The reward for teachers in this effort, Counts explained, was not just ethical but political in character. If teachers “could increase sufficiently their stock of courage, intelligence and vision,” he estimated, they “might become a social force of some magnitude.”⁴

Nowhere in the city was the potential of teachers tested more than in what had become its segregated black schools, the majority of which were located in Harlem. Between 1920 and 1930, the black population in the city had more than doubled. “To assimilate the children of so large a Negro population into a city school system that would recognize no distinction of race or color is a problem of the first magnitude,” contended State Commissioner of Education Frank Pierrepont Graves in 1931. In fact, the “implication for the organization of school, for the recruiting and assigning of teachers,” he assessed, already produced “one of the most difficult problems the city face[d].”⁵ Graves concluded that the challenge of educating black youth stemmed from a growing black population, but many signs indicated that the situation was more complicated, made so in part by educators who frequently measured students by their race. Serving as a background to the Schoenchen story, and making it believable, if not familiar, to many Harlem residents were what had become the indisputable facts about the neighborhood’s public schools and the everyday inequities that affected all black children in Harlem. “After Schoenchen, what?” asked one New York Amsterdam News editorial; the principal, it reminded its readers, “was only the beginning.” Everyday, “less obvious evils” still existed in Harlem schools, including racial segregation, district gerrymandering, the tracking of black students into vocational schools and programs, and “the dumping of principals and teachers into Harlem as ‘punishment’ for their derelictions elsewhere.”⁶ Schoenchen was emblematic of many larger problems documented to exist in the Harlem schools, including a faculty who neither understood black children nor held interest in teaching them.

As much as the events at P.S. 5 revealed about the status of young black students, however, they also served as an important backdrop for a changing teacher union movement. Just one year earlier, New York City’s unionized teachers had divided into two distinct unions: the communist Teachers Union and the social democrat Teachers Guild. Many of the teachers who now belonged to the Guild had once helped to forge the Teachers Union, Local 5 of the American Federation of Teachers, under the leadership of John Dewey in 1916. The 1935 split has been described by historians as a product of political divisions between a younger, procommunist group of teachers who would remain Teachers Unionists and an older, more professionally established, anticommunist group of teachers who would form the Guild.⁷ Beneath the surface arguments about political orientation, however, existed a more complex difference in thinking about the most important professional rights for teachers and the best, most productive means by which to achieve those rights. Although a range of political factions had formed within the Teachers Union shortly after World War I, by the early 1930s, the differences were acute, and infighting consumed much of the union’s agenda, from its stand on salary differentials to its financial contributions to the Scottsboro defense. It was no longer possible to maintain, Teachers Union president Henry Linville lamented in 1933, that the Union could regain “the blessed state of harmony which many members have longed for.”⁸ In October 1935, after a failed attempt to persuade the American Federation of Teachers to expel communist teachers from the Teachers Union, Linville left with approximately eight hundred other members to form the Guild. Dewey, more politically moderate than Counts, transferred his allegiances to the Guild as well.

The Schoenchen case and a developing civil rights movement gave all of New York City’s unionized teachers an opportunity by which to more sharply define their agendas and their image, for themselves and for other interest groups whose favor they sought. In the fall of 1935, the Teachers Union had founded a Harlem committee. Committee members and other Teachers Unionists participated in the demonstrations against Schoenchen that took place for four months following the incident. This included a public trial of the Board of Education that the Teachers Union helped to stage in January 1937, with Reverend Adam Clayton Powell serving as judge. Robert Shelton, Teachers Union representative Bella Dodd, and neighborhood parents testified to the poor conditions of Harlem schools and the treatment of black students within them. The “jury,” which included Charles Huston of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Lester Granger of the Urban League, Frank Crosswaith of the Negro Labor Committee, and A. Philip Randolph of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, deliberated and found the Board guilty.⁹ As with the other parties represented at the trial, for the approximately three thousand Teachers Unionists, the Schoenchen episode was indicative of a second-class citizenship impressed on Harlem children and, in turn, the teachers who taught them. This sense of shared oppression led Teachers Unionists to build alliances with parent groups and civil rights organizations and to see its own success as dependent on collaboration with “the most prominent, intelligent, and reliable citizens of the communit[ies]” Harlem teachers served. The Union, members asserted, was one of more than fifty organizations that united in the protests.¹⁰ In its alliances with black students and parents, the Teachers Union, even if only representing a fraction of the city’s thirty-six thousand teachers, worked to make the quality of black schools a civic and civil rights issue and not solely a Harlem problem.

The Teachers Guild also reported on the Schoenchen case in their press, although not because its members took part in the protests. Instead, the Guild opposed the image that the Teachers Union’s actions put forth of city teachers. Guild Bulletin articles reported that “P.S. 5 was mass picketed for days. Demonstrations were conducted by white leaders, with a following of Negro children from the school. Speeches were made condemning the principal.” Rightfully, the Guild recounted, the police were called in response. Most important to the Guild was that the Teachers Union “identified itself with the elements that headed these demonstrations.” While the Guild disapproved of both the Teachers Union’s demonstrations and its partnership with activist elements, the episode offered the Union a means by which it could clearly distinguish its differing view of teacher activism and professionalism. The Guild did not condone the content of the accusations lodged against Schoenchen, but neither did it believe them to be true. The “process of orderly inquiry into all charges before the courts, as well as before the Board of Education” had revealed significant doubts about the Sheltons’ claims against the principal. Teachers, the Guild argued, should “defend the law [in Harlem] and everywhere” by responding rationally to what the inquiry revealed; they should not walk the streets with signs because the case conveniently supported their larger political platform.¹¹

While the Teachers Union trial appeared to Guild members to make due process into a spectacle, the Guild’s faith in the courts and the ability of democratic institutions to uphold civil rights were central to its own actions and its alliances. The union’s twelve hundred members “represent[ed] the constructive movement amongst New York City teachers with whom all teachers outside the [Teachers] Union can work,” Guild president Henry Linville explained in June 1937. Such a movement also depended on political partnerships, and Linville boasted of the Guild’s “friendship [with] the Board of Education, the Board of Superintendents, and the Board of Examiners.”¹² Just as the Teachers Union’s relationship with Harlem parents and civil rights groups signaled its beliefs in the connection between professionalism and social justice, so did the Guild’s relationship with the city’s education administrators convey a definition of professionalism in which teachers served as key players in the workings of a larger educational bureaucracy rather than as outsiders to it.

As the two unions’ outlooks suggest, central to the story of teacher professionalism and self-advocacy in the 1930s is black Americans’ contemporaneous identification of public schools as a site for civil rights struggles and advances. As Jacqueline Dowd Hall has convincingly argued, too often the civil rights movement is equated with “a single halcyon decade,” the 1960s, and “to limited, noneconomic objectives.” This equation frequently occludes what happened before World War II nationally, including the frequent exclusion of black Americans from New Deal reforms, municipal school zoning laws that promoted segregation, and bank redlining policies designed to do the same for housing—all developments that would come to irrevocably shape public education for urban minority students. Understanding black resistance to these discriminatory acts as a part of rather than anticipatory of a civil rights movement, Hall contends, affords us a “more robust, more progressive, and truer story,” one that can also offer a stronger context for the efforts of Harlem parents and activists in the 1930s.¹³ Black parents, whose children sat at the intersection of multiple forms of discriminatory practices that impacted the quality of their schooling, were forced to decide which forms of inequity were most important to contest and who would serve as their most important allies. For many Harlem activists, partnering with white unionized teachers offered the promise of school reform from the inside out.

The Teachers Union’s and Guild’s responses to the Schoenchen case illustrate how in an interwar embrace of a “new social order,” teachers and teacher unions discovered that their own burgeoning professional movements would need to contend with the state of black schools and the objectives of developing civil rights efforts to reform them. To be sure, the 1930s marked a critical decade for education politics in New York City for all of the reasons it was important nationwide, including the influence of the Depression on public school finance and the problems that an increasingly feminized profession faced at a time when many men were out of work. ¹⁴ But the decade also served as a pivotal moment in a lesser known story, one about teachers’ challenging of and contribution to an increasing disparity between white and black schools in the urban North. Just as the Schoenchen case played a part in black city residents’ larger movement for better schools, it also compelled city teachers—over 98 percent of whom were white in the interwar period—to articulate their responsibilities to the black students and communities they served in a way that they had not had to do previously. This was most true for unionized teachers, who possessed a public, organized voice. By the end of the Schoenchen case, the two unions were set on distinct courses for determining their role and participation in minority school reform and for advocating for their own profession. In response to the issues Harlem schools raised, city teachers would better define and articulate their sense of purpose and self-definition.

Harlem, Dixie

Even as Guild members doubted the veracity of the accounts lodged at Gustav Schoenchen, the larger problems at the heart of the case—including corporal punishment and the disaffection between white educators and black community members—were familiar to many Harlem residents. These classroom and school-bound problems took on even greater significance in the context of an urban school system that marginalized black students as a whole. Black leaders’ responses to the case echoed many parents’ frustrations with how minority schools had developed within a rapidly expanding urban public school system. Between 1900 and 1930, the New York City public high school student population had grown from 11,705 to 210,000.¹⁵ More students attended high school in New York City in 1920 than had in the entire nation in 1880; together, the city’s thirty-seven thousand teachers served more students in 1930 than did teachers in Los Angeles, Cleveland, St. Louis, Baltimore, Boston, Pittsburgh, San Francisco, and Milwaukee combined.¹⁶ This precipitous growth was caused by several factors, including an increased number of youth attending school for longer periods of time and a tremendous influx of immigrants and migrants into New York in the three decades preceding the Depression.¹⁷ Harlem felt the effects of this influx as much as any other part of the city. From 1900 to 1930, New York’s black population had grown from seventy-two thousand to 186,000 and would nearly double again by 1940; approximately two-thirds of the city’s black population lived in Harlem during the Depression.¹⁸ By 1930, only one in five black New Yorkers was born in the city. Half to two-thirds were born in the South and had...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Building a “New Social Order”: Teachers, Teacher Unions, and Equity in the Great Depression
• 2 Muscular Democracy: Teachers and the War on Prejudice, 1940 –1950
• 3 Organizing the Oppressed Teacher: Teachers’ Rights in the Cold War
• 4 “An Educator’s Commitment”: Professionalism and Civil Rights in the 1960s
• 5 From Teachers’ Rights to Teacher Power
• Conclusion: Moving beyond Rights?
• Abbreviations
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index