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Black Power part 4
The action was coordinated with Bronx CORE who simultaneously sat in for four hours at the UFT's main office. The Bronx CORE sit-in was much more peaceful. Members were served sandwiches and coffee even though they still did not get a meeting with Shankar. The two CORE chapters wanted Blacks and Puerto Ricans to have a part in the negotiations between the school boards and the UFT over the strike.
When BK CORE members came back to the BOE office the next day they were prevented from entering building by the police. Harlem CORE's Ralph Poynter had showed up with other teachers to the school he worked in, PS 175, that same morning and stated he was running the school.
On September 20, Bronx and BK CORE announced they would demand two community run schools be created, one in each borough, exclusively for the education of disruptive children. In their eyes, at issue was the fact most students deemed disruptive would be Black, a fact that over time has proven to be true. Within a few months, the BOE created 'Operation Return' which the CORE chapters saw as 'a bastardization and deliberate attempt to preclude establishment' of the program they originally proposed.
The demand by the two CORE chapters was in response to issues regarding the UFT's negotiations including that of community control over schools. The Ocean Hill-Brownsville school district in Brooklyn was then part of an experimental project in community control done in conjunction with the Ford Foundation. Critics of the UFT argued the union was against it because community control threatened its member's jobs.
The UFT's illegal two week strike, during which BK CORE members were among those keeping the schools open and running, was said to have crippled the city's schools. It also created a long lasting enmity between the mostly White union members and the non-White community residents.
Many were especially angry over arguably racist remarks made by Shankar. He had warned parents during the strike that volunteers in the schools may have had 'transmissible diseases', been sex perverts and criminals, which played to stereotypes of Blacks and Puerto Ricans as unwashed, dirty, unhygienic and uncivilized. Isaiah Lewis in talking about the teachers who had walked out in Brooklyn, warned Shankar at a meeting he 'better have somebody to guard those teachers in our neighborhood from now on'.
1968
In January of 1968, the superintendent for schools called for security guards to be placed in the city's public schools as a response to BK CORE's actions and its hostilities with the UFT. He specifically noted a physical attack on staff members at JHS 117. According to the New York Times, four men wearing 'Black Muslim symbols', after arguing with the principal knocked out him out, the head of the social studies department and then knocked down the assistant principal. The men were reportedly incensed that students were kept outside the building in subzero temperatures because they had showed up early for mid-term tests. Most students in the school were Black and Latino while the staff was mostly White.
While Ali Lamont, 29, was arrested for the assault, the parents organization of district 13 instead condemned the Board of Education, blaming it for the attack and 'implicitly defended' the four men.
BK CORE also defended the attack noting that it came after multiple complaints of students being struck and abused in general by teachers and school staff. Some of those incidents had been confirmed by BOE officials. In fact, within days of the announcement there was an incident at JHS 258 where a teacher was fired for assaulting a student.
This was the beginning of NYC public school security, 'the first time in history that guards have been placed inside all city school buildings'.
Two weeks later, Shankar of the UFT specifically named BK CORE when it complained in the press that 'a hoodlum element' had gained control over some of the city's schools, including IS 201.
BK CORE responded by throwing an event in which it honored Lamont, Les Campbell and Herman Ferguson of South Jamaica CORE. Campbell had originally been transferred to JHS 271 from his first school for taking students to a memorial for Malcolm X at I.S. 201. Ferguson, an assistant principal in Queens, had been a consultant for the governing board at IS 201 before he was falsely arrested for conspiracy to assassinate the heads of the NAACP and the Urban League.