80 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biographyset the stage for the personal ruin of Mayor Lindsay, who had in effect turned over large parts of the
city to unelected and unaccountable Ford Foundation mindbenders. Here is an account of these
events from the point of view of City Hall which appeared in the New York Times obituary for
Mayor Lindsay in 2000:
Lindsay initiatives... were widely viewed as special concessions to black New Yorkers...
In 1968, Mr. Lindsay responded to black parents’ demands for more control and more black
teachers in their neighborhood schools by putting into effect, on an experimental basis, a school
decentralization plan in several black areas of the city, including Ocean Hill-Brownsville, in
Brooklyn.
Studies were cited that said integration was sputtering in New York, that schools had a poor
record educating black children, that it was psychologically harmful for blacks to attend schools
with mostly white teachers and administrators. The Ford Foundation, among others, had urged
the city to pursue decentralization, and the Legislature had agreed to finance the plan.
Challenging a white, largely Jewish school bureaucracy, whose authority was to be pared by
decentralization, Rhody McCoy, the administrator of Ocean Hill-Brownsville, transferred 13
teachers and 6 administrators, most of them Jewish, out of his district. In effect, he dismissed
them without pedagogic reasons, and it was said that their real offense was to oppose
decentralization.
The action was denounced as illegal by the United Federation of Teachers, which called a strike
that closed 85 percent of the city’s 900 schools for 55 days, putting a million children out of
classrooms and disrupting thousands of families. The strike’s bitterness was horrendous, with
threats of violence and diatribes laced with racism and anti-Semitism; Mr. Lindsay denounced
the slurs and ugly conduct as intolerable.
The strike ended when the state suspended Mr. McCoy and the Ocean Hill-Brownsville board
on grounds that it had violated valid union contracts by transferring the teachers and
administrators without cause. Later, the Legislature fashioned a compromise, decentralizing city
schools into 32 districts and giving locally elected boards power to run their elementary and
junior high schools, but adopting strong protections for teachers’ jobs. But the episode left a
legacy of tensions between blacks and Jews that went on for years, and Mr. Lindsay called it his
greatest regret.
The last six months of 1968 were “the worst of my public life,” Mr. Lindsay later said. The
schools were shut down, the police were engaged in a slowdown, firefighters were threatening
job actions, sanitation workers had struck for two weeks and the city was awash in garbage, and
racial and religious tensions were breaking to the surface.
The depth of feeling against Mr. Lindsay in the boroughs outside Manhattan was not widely
understood beyond New York. But it became apparent to the nation after a Feb. 9, 1969,
blizzard buried the city in 15 inches of snow. While major arteries were plowed quickly, side
streets in Queens were buried for days, and homeowners greeted the visiting mayor with boos,
jeers and curses. The scenes, captured on national television, conveyed a message that the
mayor of New York was indifferent to the middle class. (New York Times, Dec. 21, 2000)
In other words, Lindsay was widely seen as an arrogant elitist full of contempt for blue-collar
and middle-class New Yorkers; these harbingers of a possible Obama regime in Washington are too
obvious to require any further commentary.