From a Harlem School

From a Harlem School

For some time now I have been teaching in a Harlem elementary school and trying to understand the attitudes shown by the parents toward the school. Last September, the teachers’ strike forced me to speculate on how the hostilities of a minority and the passivity of the majority fit together.

After Labor Day, the season was on for community protest meetings. One night I found myself among a hundred Negro and Puerto Rican women on Manhattan’s West Side. I was torn between sympathetic admiration at their determination to do “something” and irritation at the perversity of that “something.” Vengefulness and suspicious fury had dulled their ability to distinguish targets. Anything said against schools was guaranteed to produce enthusiastic anger. Speaker after speaker expanded on how the teachers destroyed children, and the audience cheered, stomped and shouted “You tell ’em!”

At one point, a white mother rose and suggested that she also was bitter about the school system, but she could not, as many speakers had suggested, scab on the teachers. The teachers’ demands were of a kind parents had always favored and besides, she said, in the long run weren’t teachers needed to rebuild a good system and wouldn’t their cooperation be important in any community decentralization? Would we really be any better off if the union were destroyed? At which point one woman shouted out: “No teachers allowed here! We don’t want no teachers!”