inflamed local residents and the local NAACP branch. When accused of creating a prisonlike structure for minority children, school administrators replied tersely that it was a sensible solution to avoid the constant repair of broken windows.
In response to pressure, the state legislature in 1968 passed a decentralization law that set up experimental boards in East Harlem and the mostly black Ocean Hill–Brownsville section of Brooklyn, as well as the relatively integrated Two Bridges section of Lower Manhattan. Under the new law, locally elected governing boards took over many of the central board’s functions for the day-to-day management of certain schools, including IS 201, as well as for the elementary schools from which they drew their student bodies.
Both the IS 201 and Ocean Hill–Brownsville community boards and their newly hired administrators quickly moved to rid their schools of teachers they believed had little interest in teaching their children. In doing so they followed the logic of Dr. Kenneth Clark, who had been the influential expert in the 1954 Brown case. In his book Dark Ghetto, Clark emphasized that one of the main reasons why ghetto children did so poorly was that too often the middle-class administrators and teachers who taught them held the opinion that they could not learn.
When the new community boards tried to transfer ineffectual teachers out of their schools, the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) resisted, denouncing the move as a breach of the union’s contract and claiming that the move was racism against whites. Even after the community boards pointed to the many white teachers they had kept, the claims of racism mounted. Accusations of anti-Semitism also filled the air, as many white teachers were Jews. Nor did their young, enthusiastic replacements, many of whom were also Jews, quiet the charges.
Calling a strike, UFT president Albert Shanker closed down the system with the exception of the three experimental school districts. After two months the central board capitulated and ordered the community boards to take the “underperforming” teachers back. When the boards, with strong parental support, refused, the central board obtained court orders prohibiting further opposition, and forced the matter. A massive police presence both inside and outside the schools enforced the central board’s edicts. If parents entered the school, they were subject to arrest.
NAACP branches in Harlem and Brooklyn asked Bob to send lawyers to defend the local leadership, and he assigned the job to me. But the state court judges who heard our cases were in no mood to listen to anything our side had to say. Despite my requests for hearings, one judge after another refused to allow the local community boards to call witnesses in defense of their position regarding the staff they had dismissed from their schools. To many in the black communities, and to me as well, it was a classic example of white man’s justice.
Meanwhile, in September, I finished the Supreme Court article, and it was accepted for publication in the New York Times Magazine. I was ecstatic. Tormented by the indifference of judges and overwhelmed by my own feelings of ineffectiveness, I was now about to unleash a thunderbolt at the myth that the judiciary—especially the Warren Court—had remained a great liberal bastion and a patron of black advancement.
Bob was pleased. When the advance copy arrived from the Times, set in type and ready to go, he made arrangements with Henry Moon to run off thousands of copies of my article so that he could publicize the militancy of his legal staff.
On Sunday, October 13, 1968, the New York Times Magazine published my article. The editors titled it “Nine Men in Black Who Think White.” The title worried me a little, because they had lumped Thurgood Marshall with the other justices, and I assumed that might anger him. But it certainly was eye-catching.
The next day I went to work proud as a peacock. Bob met me for lunch, after returning from court where he had defended a group of black Columbia University students arrested during an antiwar sit-in. He left to go to a NAACP semiannual board of directors meeting at the Hilton Hotel, and I returned to the office.
There was a note on my chair when I arrived. It was from a colleague, and it said I had been fired for writing the Times article. I thought it was a joke. Then Bob called.
“I know you’re not going to believe this,” he said, “but the board fired you.
“Don’t worry,” Bob reassured me. “I’ll get them to reconsider and this