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After the black local governing board ousted ten teachers accused of sabotaging the project, the U.F.T. stayed out of the schools for 36 days in three separate city-wide walkouts. What began as a contest for power ended in an exchange of racist epithets. Negro parents denounced the striking teachers as "Jew pigs." The teachers' union charged that Ocean Hill-Brownsville militants were "black Nazis"—and printed anti-Semitic materials that were supposedly being distributed in the area's schools.
Although the strike is over, tensions have not eased at all. Last week a special committee on racial and religious prejudice, appointed by Mayor John Lindsay and headed by former State Supreme Court Justice Bernard Botein, reported that "an appalling amount of racial prejudice—black and white—surfaced in and about the school controversy. The anti-white prejudice has a dangerous component of anti-Semitism." Similarly, the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith warned that "undisguised anti-Semitism is at a crisis level in New York City schools where, unchecked by public authority, it has been building for more than two years."
In an atmosphere of mutual antagonism, provocations have multiplied. Almost every week brings a new incident. Over radio station WBAI-FM, a Negro schoolteacher named Leslie Campbell recently read a poem dedicated to Albert Shanker, the Jewish president of the U.F.T. It began: "Hey, Jew boy, with that yarmulke on your head. /You pale-faced Jew boy—I wish you were dead." The teachers' union has filed a formal protest with the Federal Communications Commission.
More recently, civic tempers flared over the catalogue for the Metropolitan Museum of Art's new photographic exhibit called "Harlem on My Mind" (TIME, Jan. 24). The introduction, written by a 16-year-old Negro schoolgirl, reads in part: "Behind every hurdle that the Afro-American has yet to jump stands the Jew who has already cleared it, Jewish shopkeepers are the only remaining 'survivors' in the expanding black ghettos. The lack of competition allows the already exploited black to be further exploited by Jews." Mayor Lindsay quickly denounced the catalogue as another example of racism, and the embarrassed museum hastened to add an insert disclaiming bias.*