Being Black in Brownsville

Being Black in Brownsville PDF Author: Lynn G. Bowman
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780578094069
Category : African Americans
Languages : en
Pages : 176

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Book Description

Being Black in Brownsville

Being Black in Brownsville PDF Author: Lynn G. Bowman
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780578094069
Category : African Americans
Languages : en
Pages : 176

Get Book Here

Book Description


Brownsville, Brooklyn

Brownsville, Brooklyn PDF Author: Wendell E. Pritchett
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226684466
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 346

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Book Description
From its founding in the late 1800s through the 1950s, Brownsville, a section of eastern Brooklyn, was a white, predominantly Jewish, working-class neighborhood. The famous New York district nurtured the aspirations of thousands of upwardly mobile Americans while the infamous gangsters of Murder, Incorporated controlled its streets. But during the 1960s, Brownsville was stigmatized as a black and Latino ghetto, a neighborhood with one of the city's highest crime rates. Home to the largest concentration of public housing units in the city, Brownsville came to be viewed as emblematic of urban decline. And yet, at the same time, the neighborhood still supported a wide variety of grass-roots movements for social change. The story of these two different, but in many ways similar, Brownsvilles is compellingly told in this probing new work. Focusing on the interaction of Brownsville residents with New York's political and institutional elites, Wendell Pritchett shows how the profound economic and social changes of post-World War II America affected the area. He covers a number of pivotal episodes in Brownsville's history as well: the rise and fall of interracial organizations, the struggles to deal with deteriorating housing, and the battles over local schools that culminated in the famous 1968 Teachers Strike. Far from just a cautionary tale of failed policies and institutional neglect, the story of Brownsville's transformation, he finds, is one of mutual struggle and frustrated cooperation among whites, blacks, and Latinos. Ultimately, Brownsville, Brooklyn reminds us how working-class neighborhoods have played, and continue to play, a central role in American history. It is a story that needs to be read by all those concerned with the many challenges facing America's cities today.

The Strike That Changed New York

The Strike That Changed New York PDF Author: Jerald E. Podair
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300109405
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
"This book revisits the Ocean Hill-Brownsville crisis - a watershed in modern New York City race relations. Jerald E. Podair connects the conflict with the sociocultural history of the city and explores its influence on city politics, economics, and culture. Podair shows how the crisis became a symbol of the vast perceptual chasm separating black and white New Yorkers. And the legacy of this critical moment, when blacks and whites spoke past each other like strangers, has ever since played a role in city issues ranging from mayoral elections to budget negotiations, disputes over police violence, and debates on welfare policy. The book is a powerful, sobering tale of racial misunderstanding and fear, a New York story with national implications."--Jacket.

Inside Ocean Hill–Brownsville

Inside Ocean Hill–Brownsville PDF Author: Charles S. Isaacs
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 1438452969
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
The story of an Ocean Hill–Brownsville teacher who crossed picket lines during the racially charged New York City teachers’ strike of 1968. In 1968 the conflict that erupted over community control of the New York City public schools was centered in the black and Puerto Rican community of Ocean Hill–Brownsville. It triggered what remains the longest teachers’ strike in US history. That clash, between the city’s communities of color and the white, predominantly Jewish teachers’ union, paralyzed the nation’s largest school system, undermined the city’s economy, and heightened racial tensions, ultimately transforming the national conversation about race relations. At age twenty-two, when the strike was imminent, Charles S. Isaacs abandoned his full scholarship to a prestigious law school to teach mathematics in Ocean Hill–Brownsville. Despite his Jewish background and pro-union leanings, Isaacs crossed picket lines manned by teachers who looked like him, and took the side of parents and children who did not. He now tells the story of this conflict, not only from inside the experimental, community-controlled Ocean Hill–Brownsville district, its focal point, but from within ground zero itself: Junior High School 271, which became the nation’s most famous, or infamous, public school. Isaacs brings to life the innovative teaching practices that community control made possible, and the relationships that developed in the district among its white teachers and its black and Puerto Rican parents, teachers, and community activists. “Inside Ocean Hill–Brownsville is one of the finest accounts of this turbulent time in America’s educational history. As a firsthand analysis of a teacher embroiled in the Ocean Hill–Brownsville community fight for educational justice, it has no peer. From its vantage point forty-five years after the conflict, we finally have a corrective to a plethora of secondhand analyses that have been written over the years. It is a candid picture that I recommend highly.” — Maurice R. Berube, coeditor of Confrontation at Ocean Hill–Brownsville “Inside Ocean Hill–Brownsville makes a vital contribution to a much-needed reinterpretation of the epochal struggles over community control of the New York City public schools in the 1960s, and the divisive UFT fall 1968 strikes in opposition to that community-based movement. Writing from the firsthand perspective of a young Jewish math teacher at JHS 271, Isaacs brings this important story vividly to life with insight, candor, and humor. He evokes the attitudes and actions of a rich array of ordinary teachers, administrators, students, and parents who fought to defend the community-control experiment in the face of the lies and distortions perpetrated by UFT officials and the mainstream press. A must read for anyone interested in creating successful public schools, this book helps us remember what democratic public education might look like.” — Stephen Brier, The Graduate Center, City University of New York “Charles Isaacs’s Inside Ocean Hill–Brownsville is a firsthand account of the dramatic events of New York City’s greatest school crisis. Isaacs debunks many of the popular myths of black militants waging assaults on teachers. Instead, he demonstrates that the episode in Ocean Hill–Brownsville was a case of black and Latino parents, with the support of a number of teachers at JHS 271, struggling for the education of their children and for a more democratically run educational system. These parents faced one of the most powerful unions in the city and a bureaucratic board of education that wanted to protect the status quo. There have been many books written on the 1968 teachers’ strike, but Isaacs’s well-written, detailed account is by far the best.” — Clarence Taylor, author of Knocking at Our Own Door: Milton A. Galamison and the Struggle to Integrate New York City Schools

New York City Public Schools from Brownsville to Bloomberg

New York City Public Schools from Brownsville to Bloomberg PDF Author: Heather Lewis
Publisher: Teachers College Press
ISBN: 0807772569
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 391

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Book Description
When New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg centralized control of the citys schools in 2002, he terminated the citys 32-year experiment with decentralized school control dubbed by the mayor and the media as the Bad Old Days. Decentralization grew out of the community control movement of the 1960s, which was itself a response to the bad old days of central control of a school system that was increasingly segregated and unequal. In this probing historical account, Heather Lewis draws on new archival sources and oral histories to argue that the community control movement did influence school improvement, in particular African American and Puerto Rican communities in the 1970s and 80s. Lewis shows how educators with unique insights into the relationships between the schools and the communities they served enabled meaningful change, with a focus on instructional improvement and equity that would be familiar to many observers of contemporary education reform. With a resurgence of local organizing and potential challenges to mayoral control, this informative history will be important reading for todays educational and community leaders.

The Long Shadow of Small Ghosts

The Long Shadow of Small Ghosts PDF Author: Laura Tillman
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1501104306
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
“A haunted, haunting examination of mental illness and murder in a more or less ordinary American city…Mature and thoughtful…A Helter Skelter for our time, though without a hint of sensationalism—unsettling in the extreme but written with confidence and deep empathy” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review). On March 11, 2003, in Brownsville, Texas—one of America’s poorest cities—John Allen Rubio and Angela Camacho murdered their three young children. The apartment building in which the brutal crimes took place was already run down, and in their aftermath a consensus developed in the community that it should be destroyed. In 2008, journalist Laura Tillman covered the story for The Brownsville Herald. The questions it raised haunted her and set her on a six-year inquiry into the larger significance of such acts, ones so difficult to imagine or explain that their perpetrators are often dismissed as monsters alien to humanity. Tillman spoke with the lawyers who tried the case, the family’s neighbors and relatives and teachers, even one of the murderers: John Allen Rubio himself, whom she corresponded with for years and ultimately met in person. Her investigation is “a dogged attempt to understand what happened, a review of the psychological, sociological and spiritual explanations for the crime…a meditation on the death penalty and on the city of Brownsville” Star Tribune (Minneapolis). The result is a brilliant exploration of some of our age’s most important social issues and a beautiful, profound meditation on the truly human forces that drive them. “This thought-provoking…book exemplifies provocative long-form journalism that does not settle for easy answers” (Publishers Weekly, starred review).

Black Soldiers in Jim Crow Texas, 1899-1917

Black Soldiers in Jim Crow Texas, 1899-1917 PDF Author: Garna L. Christian
Publisher: Texas A&M University Press
ISBN: 9780890966372
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
Chronicles the experiences of African-American soldiers serving in the United States Army in racially-segregated Texas from 1899 to 1914.

Haywood County, Tennessee

Haywood County, Tennessee PDF Author: Sharon Norris
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
ISBN: 9780738506050
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 140

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Book Description
Surviving slavery, Reconstruction, poverty, and the Civil Rights tensions of the twentieth century, Haywood County's black community has done much to shape the identity of this historic West Tennessee county. This volume, containing over 200 black-and-white images, highlights the county's settlement, the early slave culture, the legacy of its many soulful and talented musicians, such as Anna Mae Bullock (better known as Tina Turner), the hard-fought strides in bringing education to African-American citizens, the importance of church in molding the social and spiritual elements of life, and some of the county's most recognizable faces and names.

Taking on Theodore Roosevelt

Taking on Theodore Roosevelt PDF Author: Harry Lembeck
Publisher:
ISBN: 161614954X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 562

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Book Description
In August 1906, black soldiers stationed in Brownsville, Texas, were accused of going on a lawless rampage in which shots were fired, one man was killed, and another wounded. Because the perpetrators could never be positively identified, President Theodore Roosevelt took the highly unusual step of discharging without honor all one hundred sixty-seven members of the black battalion on duty the night of the shooting. This book investigates the controversial action of an otherwise much-lauded president, the challenge to his decision from a senator of his own party, and the way in which Roosevelt's uncompromising stance affected African American support of the party of Lincoln. Using primary sources to reconstruct the events, attorney Harry Lembeck begins at the end when Senator Joseph Foraker is honored by the black community in Washington, DC, for his efforts to reverse Roosevelt's decision. Lembeck highlights Foraker's courageous resistance to his own president. In addition, he examines the larger context of racism in the era of Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois, pointing out that Roosevelt treated discrimination against the Japanese in the West much differently. He also notes often-ignored evidence concerning the role of Roosevelt's illegitimate cousin in the president's decision, the possibility that Foraker and Roosevelt had discussed a compromise, and other hitherto overlooked facts about the case. Sixty-seven years after the event, President Richard Nixon finally undid Roosevelt's action by honorably discharging the men of the Brownsville Battalion. But, as this thoroughly researched and engrossing narrative shows, the damage done to both Roosevelt's reputation and black support for the Republican Party lingers to this day.

Brownsville

Brownsville PDF Author: Oscar Casares
Publisher: Back Bay Books
ISBN: 9780316146807
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
At the country's edge, on the Mexican border, Brownsville, Texas, is a town like many others. It is a place where people work hard to create better lives for their children, where people bear grudges against their neighbors, where love blossoms only to fade, and where the only real certainty is that life holds surprises.