Power, Protest, and the Public Schools: Jewish and African American Struggles in New York City

3. Resource Equalization and Citizenship Rights

72 Resource Equalization and Citizenship Rights For over 80% of U.S. history, its laws declared most of the world’s population to be ineligible for full American citizenship solely because of their race, original nationality or gender. For at least two-thirds of American history, the majority of the domestic adult population was also ineligible for full citizenship for the same reasons. —Rogers M. Smith, “Beyond Tocquevilles, Myrdal, and Hartz: The Multiple Traditions in America,” 1993 3 America’s public schools have consistently embraced some students while marginalizing immigrant and minority children as racial others. Vocational classes, discriminatory teachers, and poor resources relegated minority children , who were consequentially unable to compete for college acceptance and white-collar professions, to second-class citizenship. NYC’s Board of Education relegated Jews and African Americans to the worst schools, with the meagerest resources, and the most discriminatory teachers and curriculum. Jewish children experienced an intensifying decline of resources in the schools, which replicated their position on the lower rungs of the economic ladder, coupled with citizenship training to strip them of their culture. Schools subjected African American children to systematic educational disenfranchisement. Denied quality education, the state limited these groups’ equal participation in the American democracy. Rather than allowing for upward mobility and equal citizenship , schools institutionalized power relations, resource inequalities, class differences, and racial identities, all of which were inextricably interconnected. In doing so, the schools reinforced the whiteness of citizenship by excluding racialized Jews and African Americans, inhibiting them from social, political, and economic success.1 Neither Jews, as recent immigrants, nor African Americans, as members of a historically oppressed group, were considered members of the larger American political community during these eras. Yet both groups sought membership in this community through the expansion of educational rights and resources. EQUALIZATION AND RIGHTS 73 Arguing on behalf of their children, activists used inclusive language that spoke to the general idea that all children, including their own, should be treated equally through a politics of semblance. However, particular histories of oppression necessitated a politics of difference to realize fully social justice and equality. Group narratives articulated during each protest reveal how Jews and African Americans conceived of their own identities.2 Schools for Citizenship Both Jews and African Americans believed in the schools’ potential for accessing citizenship rights. When considering rights as resources, attempts to acquire them amounts to efforts to realign social relationships to include Jewish and African Americans within the folds of citizenship. Parents hoped the schools would fulfill their duty as “citadels for good citizenship” and a “bulwark of democracy, the fashioner and the inspirer of civic and national unity.” In a legal brief, Paul Zuber summed up Jewish and African American parents’ attitudes toward education: Today, education is perhaps the most important function of state and local governments. Compulsory school attendance laws and the great expenditures for education both demonstrate our recognition of the importance of education to our democratic society. It is required in the performance of our most basic public responsibilities. . . . It is the very foundation of good citizenship. Today it is the principal instrument in awakening the child to cultural values, in preparing him for later professional training, and in helping him to adjust normally to his environment. In these days, it is doubtful that any child may reasonably be expected to succeed in life if he is denied the opportunity of an education. Such an opportunity, where the state has undertaken to provide it, is a right which must be made available to all on equal terms. Weaving ideas of democracy, equal opportunity, and citizenship together, the Harlem 9 and Jewish activists articulated clear understandings of the centrality of a quality education to success in America and, as citizens, their entitlement to this resource. Parents hoped to overcome structural barriers to educational success and thus realize social equality.3 Participatory Citizenship: Taxpayer Entitlement and Power Using a universalist discourse appealing for equal, rather than special, treatment , Jews and African Americans expressed their beliefs that, as citizens of POWER, PROTEST, AND THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS 74 America who paid taxes (which paid the mayor’s and Board of Education’s salaries), owned property, and voted, the Board of Education and the City of New York were accountable to them and their children. This mobilizing frame is consistent with broad civil rights rhetoric used by a wide variety of marginalized groups throughout American history...