78 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized BiographyCampbell, the radical head of the Afro-American Teachers Association, who organized his
school’s most violent students into an anti-Semitic combat force. According to education
scholar Diane Ravitch, McCoy had an understanding with racist thug Sonny Carson that
Carson’s “bodyguards” would intimidate white teachers until McCoy would diplomatically call
them off.’ (Heather Mac Donald)
Since the majority of the New York City teachers were Jewish leftists with radical New Deal
backgrounds, the most scurrilous anti-Semitic baiting was prescribed for all the Ford Foundation
operatives who wished to advance their careers:
Ford’s experimental school districts soon exploded with anti-Semitic black rage, as militants
argued that black and Puerto Rican children failed because Jewish teachers were waging
“mental genocide” on them. The day after Martin Luther King’s assassination, students at a
junior high school rampaged through the halls beating up white teachers, having been urged by
Les Campbell to “[s]end [whitey] to the graveyard” if he “taps you on the shoulder.”
...white teachers at one school found an anti-Semitic screed in their mailboxes, calling Jews
“Blood-sucking Exploiters and Murderers” and alleging that “the So-Called Liberal Jewish
Friend... is Really Our Enemy and He is Responsible For the Serious Educational Retardation
of Our Black Children.” McCoy refused to denounce the pamphlet or the anti-Semitism behind
it. Nor did Ford publicly denounce such tactics—or take responsibility after the fact. McGeorge
Bundy later sniffed self-righteously: “If private foundations cannot assist experiments, their
unique role will be impaired, to the detriment of American society.” But if the experiment goes
awry, the foundation can saunter off, leaving the community to pick up the pieces. (Heather
Mac Donald)
Another commentator noted, “Not the least of the political questions left dangling at the end of
the tragedy of the teachers’ strikes is the best way to make tax-exempt foundations responsible for
the consequences of their actions.” (Salandria) In reality, American society would be best served by
a policy of taxing these oligarchical parasites out of existence, and returning their ill-gotten loot to
the public treasury.
FORD OPERATIVES PROVOKE THE TEACHERS TO STRIKE
With the start of the new school year in September 1968, the great Ford Foundation experiment
in community control and social engineering exploded into chaos, a chaos which engulfed New
York City as a whole.
Everything the skeptics predicted – and more – came to pass in Ocean Hill-Brownsville, one of
the three experimental districts funded by Ford. Within weeks of the foundation’s $59,000
grant, the militant activists who made up the board in this forsaken Brooklyn ghetto found
themselves at odds with some dozen allegedly “incompetent” teachers charged by the board
with being disloyal to the decentralization experiment. (The board was largely black, the
teachers were white – and even a black judge who later investigated the dispute could find little
cause, apart from race, for the board’s dissatisfaction.) In May 1968, the offending teachers
were asked to leave their posts, and when the union rallied to their defense, the local board went
to war against the union. The union struck; the board resisted — by hiring several hundred
irregular teachers and organizing people from the ghetto to demonstrate at the schools. Then,
throughout the fall of 1968, the Ocean Hill-Brownsville schools were the scene of daily
violence. (Tamar Jacoby)