Over the past several weeks, Jacobin has published a series of articles on the 1968 Ocean Hill-Brownsville teachers strikes, edited by New York City public school teacher Mike Stivers, on the occasion of their fiftieth anniversary. The series of strikes pitted the United Federation of Teachers (UFT), the city’s mostly white teachers’ union, against poor and working-class parents of color who demanded “community control” of their schools. Historian Jerald Podair called the episode the “strike that changed New York,” creating such bad blood between parents of color and the teachers union that the two were unable to fight the onslaught of austerity in the city that decimated both in the decades to come.

The series has featured an introduction and broad overview of the conflict, a history of the refusal of New York’s teachers unions and Board of Education to fight racism, a reflection on how the UFT’s narrow craft-union consciousness and history of anticommunism led to the parent-teacher conflict, and an analysis of how the Ford Foundation allied with city elites to push “reform from above” on the neighborhoods’ parents.

Stivers held a conversation with historians Clarence Taylor, Karen Ferguson, and Dan Perlstein on how the relationship between teachers and parents became so toxic, how the coalition of strange bedfellows opposing the teachers came into being, and what lessons teachers unions today should take from Ocean Hill-Brownsville a half century later.