The review below shows the passion this episode created and can still evoke. To argue that Nauman wasn't "fired" is rather disingenuous. The letter he received stated "The Governing Board of the Ocean Hill Brownsville Demonstration School District has voted to end your employment in the schools of this district." Sounds like a pink slip to me.

More importantly, as the reviewer below notes, is that "community control" was seen as as the last-ditch solution to the persistent problems faced by African-Americans in the school system. They were (and are) getting third-rate educations. The argument was (and is): why? "Cultural" reasons? Racism? If the African-American community ran its own schools, the argument went, black children would learn better. For various reasons, many of them political, it didn't turn out that way. The most important result was to divide the city by race--especially the Jews from the blacks.

One of the key points made by this book is that the Ocean Hill-Brownsville strike had the effect of making New York Jews "white" in the sense that they joined with their Italian and Irish outer-borough neighbors against the blacks. This seismic shift has largely remained intact.

You can easily get by with reading only chapters 1-3, 5-6.


Read this book if you have an interest in New York City history, politics of the "white backlash", and/or the rise of conservatism in the 1970s.