A Teacher and Activist: Janice Gilbert
Rachel Smalle
1960s NYC Revisited
Introduction:
My name is Janice Gilbert. When I was 22 years old, in 1962, I graduated from Hunter College with a degree in Teaching. Hunter is one of the only colleges that have historically only accepted women. Indeed, they did start accepting men until 1964, 2 years after I had graduated.[1] Having lived during the Second World War, with my father a soldier in the European theater, my parents both worshipped the Roosevelts, and as Eleanor was a main contributor to the school when I was a child, it was never a question that I, their only child, would attend.[2] More and more women were going to college at this time, more than in my parents’ generation.[3] I graduated with high hopes, the hopes of my parents.
Background and Family:
Both my parents were children of German immigrants from Karlesruhe in Baden-Wuttenburg. My mother, Sarah (Sally) Kaplan, born in 1902, had never been encouraged to go to college, or to even seen it as an option. The youngest of three children, with one sister and one brother, she was told that a woman should never be more educated than her husband. Her brother went to City College, and eventually became a doctor, which my grandparents could much more easily afford given that their two daughters did not go (and were certainly never encouraged) to college. My mother did not express the jealousy as I might have, whatever hopes she had had for college dashed. Nor, however, was it ever a question that I would, at the very least, go to college and be able to support myself on my own. Her own father worked for a small German Newspaper: The New York Staats-Zeitung.[4] My mother too worked in journalism, as a typist for the New York Herald Tribune, though her name never made it into any articles. She did her work, and even managed to support herself for a time in her own apartment near Columbia College. She told me she had been content to do her work for the rest of her life, in (despite her parents’ best efforts) an unusual position of independence. She nearly managed to do just that, until my father, born in 1912, stumbled into her life when she was 28 and he was 18. She had accompanied a reporter who interviewed him for a story concerning the Garment Workers Strike at a factory he was working in at the time.[5] They became friends quickly, and according to my father (only my father), it was love at first site. My mother had different ideas, likely because of the age difference, and they were not married for another decade. Her parents approved of the match, as they never saw any real future for my mother other than marriage. Though neither set of parents were particularly happy about the 10 year age difference between the couple, no one put a stop to it. My mother found herself pushed out of the job she loved, and lost the independence she prided herself on. She never expressed any regret over this decision, but then I cannot image she would tell me if she did.
At 28, my father, Jerry Gilbert, never seemed to find their age difference to be as much of an obstacle as outsiders, and even my mother herself, seemed to. My father, born just before the First World War, like his father before him, was a factory worker. Or, he had been until he got a desk-job at the Brooklyn Navy Yard before I was born.[6] College had never been an option for him any more than my mother, and he had not graduated high school. He could, however, read, write, and do sums, which was enough. When I was a baby, my father volunteered for the Navy before Pearl Harbor. He would claim, later, that he felt the way the wind was blowing, and was eager to prove his loyalty (and that of his wife and daughter) to the Untied States, rather than Germany. Given his heritage, and the period he grew up in, his anxiety was understandable.
In 1945, after proving his loyalty to the country during the Second World War, he could hardly afford to go to college with a five year old and a recently laid off wife to support. He worked at the Brooklyn Navy Yard until just before I graduated, when he was laid off. Many people were in the sixties, when businesses and factories began to leave the city. By the time I was an adult, he was the one in need of support. My parents had savings, social security, and the support of my wealthy, doctor, uncle if they needed it. Thankfully, I had found employment soon after graduating at a local public school. This is a story about that decision, and all I experienced living in New York City during the 1960s.
Childhood:
I was born in Melrose, a historically German immigrant neighborhood and homes to both sides of grandparents while they lived.[7] We moved to Bushwick in 1940, when I was born, also historically German, but Italian by the time we got there, and increasingly black and Puerto-Rican during my childhood.[8] In addition, more and more black people were moving into Brooklyn as a result of the Great Migration [9]
My neighborhood changed, like a lot of New York. It used to be, according to my parents, that Brooklyn was largely a safe place. People lived their middle class lives with relative ease. By the time I graduated, there was job loss. My own father was laid off.[10] People I had grown up with had left for a “better,” “safer” life in the suburbs. The mayor said people like this needed to stay in the city, but they could hardly afford to. My parents own their home, but others cannot pay the rent or for groceries, or for the cost of private school education.[11]
That brings me to my next point. I had a great desire to teach in the public schools, which by all accounts were not being given the kind of investment that they needed, not all of the schools anyway. At this time, for every 1,000 pupils, there were only 45 teachers. The suburbs, out in New Jersey and Long Island had at least 70! I felt the need to get into this fight to make something better.[12] At this time of course, the schools were divided racially. This was not de-jur segregation, but defacto. I can now see that such segregation occurred because of historical policies that favored white families over black, but at the time I simply knew that those black neighborhoods were not receiving the investment that they needed. Schools that were predominantly black and Puerto Rican were labeled inferior.[13] Some students bussed to white schools, but many did not have the opportunity. By 1962, I was in charge of my own life, and I knew what I wanted to do with it.
Harlem Riot 1964
I started working right after graduation, and was employed at a local public school in Brownsville. The conditions were less than desired, and far less than the private schools my fellow graduates had found work at. White families fled to the private catholic schools, catholic or not. And who wanted to pay for a public education when they were already paying for private tuition? The poorer the community, the more in need of a good school they were, and yet the worse their school was. I was unusual for having voluntarily decided to work in Brownsville, and a minority among my fellow teachers and students.
I did not work in Harlem, but I did witness the frustrations of the black community of New York City. The Harlem Riot of 1964 was way this boiled over. It was a “race” riot, but of course anything involving blacks was a “race riot.” Whites just got “riots,” or “protests.”[14] Being black in New York, I had come to learn –if only vicariously- meant you could never lose this “race” label, you were raced from the day you were born, if not by name then by your home, your school, your job. You were raced by the opportunities made- or not made- available to you. Even the poorest white could climb the ladder to the top if he had the ability, the brains, the opportunity. However, even more well off blacks –and especially the poor- faced the precarious situation of a ladder with few rungs at all, and what rungs there were, they were rotted and dangerous.[15]
It started when James Powell was killed by police officers.[16] Little has changed, that is hardly different from today. The recent protests over Eric Garner, Trey von Martin, Michael Brown, and so many more, has reminded me of this truth. At least in this day and age, there is the possibility of an indictment (there is an attempt anyway). Not back then, not even close. My boyfriend at the time –now my husband- got caught up in the riot. He did not mean to get caught up in it all. He wanted to keep everything peaceful, but with all that anger and powerlessness, peace is difficult, especially when even peaceful protests are watched closely by the very same police who kill them.[17]
Ken told me what that day way like, and how close he had come to a bullet an a pair of handcuffs himself. He was not there when Powell was shot, but then these things did not erupt until later. Ken was there to witness the demand for justice with the CORE members, which was not until two days later. The police, he explained, expected things to get out of hand, and so they got out of hand. The treated the protesters like criminals. There were so many ways it could have been handled better, but the police shot themselves in the foot.[18]
Ken marched with the group to 123rd street, the precinct. The trouble began when protesters threw some bottles, and policeman responded with guns and batons.[19] Ken himself was knocked out with one and did not wake up until hours later, which might have saved him. There was looting, and violence committed against white people nearby, Ken admitted, but most people were just angry. They knew they were not going to get justice because it was not a white man killed who was a killed or a black man who had shot him. A white police officer shot a black teenager, and that was that. Case closed. The police pushed the protest into a riot because it is easier to dismiss the concerns of violent rioters than peaceful protesters.
Teaching and the Strikes
The Teaching Strikes was another way these tensions boiled over. I saw the reasons for this first hand. My classes of fifth graders tended to be overcrowded, with a total of thirty students. It was difficult to reach all my students with such a large class. Supplies were limited as well. I had to invest in my own chalk, my own book, or pencils for students that did not have them. Still, I only worked in Brownsville for 8 years, until 1970. In all of that time, I never actually lived there. I commuted from home, taking a bus or the L in every morning, spending a half hour writing up lesson plans or grading homework. I worked with my students, talked with my fellow teachers, complained about what was happening at the school and in the neighborhood. Then I got to go home.
It was for this reason that I found myself in a strange position in 1968 during the time that the UFT faced off against the Brownsville community over the conditions of the schools. Racially decisive would have been an understatement. Having been a teacher at the (fictional) PS 219 for 6 years at that point, I had seen how ineffective the UFT was at providing for this community.[20] I understood the need for the Brownsville community to make their own decisions. Individual teachers aside, the UFT had not shown themselves to be invested in the Brownsville community, and so the community got involved in it themselves. I did not live in Brownsville, but I could feel the frustration brewing.
In 1968, I was not among those who were dismissed, though some of my friends were. I was, as I said, in a curiously difficult position.[21] That the UFT protested this decision and held as ransom the education of my students (I was instructed not to attend work), did not exactly warm me against the cause. So I did not join in with the protests. I stayed with my students and supported the administration’s- the community’s- decision. I was an activist by nature, but I could not stand for a cause that I did not believe in. I was quite relieved when it was all over.
Local Activism
If I did not obviously take a side during the UFT protests in 1968 nor attend the Harlem riots in 1964, I had spent most of the 1960s trying to help the community I worked in against the forces that would keep them in poverty or fear. I participated in the New York City 1964 Boycott for Integration of Public Schools. Though integration (or rather, a lack of legal segregation) had been law for decades, schools remained segregated through de-facto racism. White parents did not respond to these demands positively, and responded with their own protests. I also participated in the protests and activism of Jane Jacobs. Though I did not live in Greenwich village, I knew all too well that the next neighborhood he knocked down could be her own. Indeed, he tried and failed to build a Bushwick Expressway in 1964.[22]
JFK Assassination
There was good reason for activism in the 1960s. So much happened before that strike, in terms of race relations, working conditions, and integration, that really the strike hardly fazed me. No sooner was I out of the house than the 60s really started up in all of their glory. 1962 was quiet compared with 1963 and all of the years of that decade that followed: Strikes, riots, assassinations, war. Ask anyone, and they will tell you it started with Kennedy. People were willing to stand by for most things, (not civil rights, but most things) as long as Camelot was in the White House. The change-makers were young, and they felt assured that the Kennedy Administration shared in their desire for change. Everything really built up after Kennedy’s death, because with him died a hope for the future that he had represented. I had voted for him myself.
Months earlier in June, when Medgar Evers had also been killed. It had been during the summer and I was home with my family.
“Well,” my father said “That is what happens to black men in the South. He should have known that.”
I very much doubted when I got home today my father would say “Well, that is just what happens when Presidents ride convertibles in Texas. He should have known that.”
We did not have school the next day, after the Kennedy assassination, it was the weekend. Monday morning, my students looked at me for some kind of explanation, which of course I did not have. They would give me the same look when Martin Luther King was killed, when someone’s brother or cousin died in Vietnam (because who was better to draft than poor black kids?). I never seemed to have the words to explain why bad things happened in the world, but I did my best to fight against them, and it seemed like there was more to fight against after Kennedy died.
Assassination of Martin Luther King Junior
Years later, after the assassination of Martin Luther King, I looked back on the state of mourning the country entered when JFK was assassinated. Much had changed since then, with the war, Johnson, and civil rights. That was the year that the protests against the war began due to that photo with the Vietcong officer being killed.[23] There was the sanitation strike as well, and Mai Lay.[24] Of course, that was also the year of the teacher’s strike, as I mentioned.
When King was murdered, Lindsay just about avoided a riot, barely. [25] I did not work in Harlem, I worked in Brownsville, though my parents were convinced someone would throw a brick at me during that week. No one did of course. But I guess there’s the difference between 1963 and 1968. In 1963, we comforted each other and looked at each other for explanation. In 1968, we feared and expected the worst from each other. How can anyone be surprised then, when the worst was what they got?
The Women’s Movement
Between the two assassinations, it was said things got “really bad” in New York City. It was after the Kitty Genovese murder that my parents left New York City, just as so many of my friends had. The property value of their home in Bushwick had declined significantly.[26] They were worried about crime, they claimed, and they asked me to move with them to a suburb in New Jersey. There were plenty of jobs for an educated girl like me, they said. I did not of course. I would have been cut off from everything out there! In New York City, I may have had to share my apartment with two other women, once I moved out of my parents’ place. I may have had to watch myself at night (but was it different anywhere else?) But things were interesting in New York City. At any rate, the Kitty Genovese murder represented something other than rising crime in the city. It was an act of violence against women, and that was something to fight against.
Later on, in the 1970s, I found myself involved with the women’s movement. I had seen too many of my fellow teachers dismissed because they had gotten married or their pregnancy had begun to show. The very same had happened with my mother. What is more, I knew that women were paid less as teachers, and less likely to get promotions or move into administration. None of it seemed right to us, even then. We may have been vilified as bra burners and made fun of today, but at the time it was groundbreaking. We were talking about issues men had never let us talk about before. We were talking about the things that mattered to us, not just children and family, which is what we all seemed to get lumped together with.
To say I was inspired by Betty Freidan’s The Feminine Mystique and, later, Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch is an understatement. They wrote things that inspired us, that shed light on what we had all gone through, how we had all been raised. Betty Freidan shed light on these issues for us. She pointed to how the problems of Freundian thought, made for Victorian era Austrian women, and flawed even then, had watered women down into jealous creatures constantly trying to fulfill their most based desires. Freud did not understand women, he had been unable to see them as anything other than a pale reflection of men. He saw them as little more than children. And so, even into my generation, we were treated as such. Greer built upon this awareness. She shed light on what this meant for women sexually, how they were forever on unequal terms with men. Rather than being allowed to have identities of their own, they were not men. Women were reduced in the eyes of men in this way.
I can remember how women were portrayed on television back then, and in the 1950s. We were the housewives, the side characters, and problem creators. We were rarely characters in our own right. We were not comedians, but secretaries. We were part of men’s story lines, but never the center of our story lines ourselves. It was, we realized, just as Freidan and Greer had written of. I preferred those shows that sought to question society at the time, like The Twilight Zone. If I really needed to relax from teaching and all of the tension that there was at the time, I would turn on the radio or put on a Janice Joplin or Patti Smith record. I even saw Brother and the Holding Company a few times. They played in NYC after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated.
Conclusion and Return
We did not know then the history we were making, the history we were becoming a part of. It is difficult to believe now that I played the small hand I did in some events, and was a witness to others. All I ever did was try to fight for the city, and the country, that I wanted to live in. New York as it exists today is not as I imagined it would be. There is still more work to do clearly, but for other, younger, activists.
I moved out of the city in 1980, when my mother died. My father had a hard time taking care of himself. By then Ken and I had 2 children, and we thought it would benefit them to be closer to their only living grandparent. Drugs had become a problem like never before in New York City, and while single I might have stayed, I did not think the kids got any benefit of seeing additcts and dealers on the street corners. There was still much to fight for in the city, but I left that to my younger, stronger, counterparts. I did move to New Jersey in the end, it seems. While caring for my ailing father, I did manage to go back to school and get my Masters degree. In the 1990s, when the children had all moved out, I moved back to the city and began to work in the administration at the Board of Education. From there, I fought for the change I thought was necessary. Though I am now retired, I feel managed to effect more change for the children of New York City at the Board of Education than I ever did as a teacher.
[1] Christopher Gray, “The Vestige of What Might Have Been,” The New York Times, April 20th 2008. “http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/20/realestate/20scap.html?_r=0
[2] “Mission,” Roosevelt House: Public Policy Institute at Hunter College http://www.roosevelthouse.hunter.cuny.edu/mission/
[3] “THE 1960S-70S AMERICAN FEMINIST MOVEMENT: BREAKING DOWN BARRIERS FOR WOMEN” https://tavaana.org/en/content/1960s-70s-american-feminist-movement-breaking-down-barriers-women
[4] “About Wochenblatt der New-Yorker Staats-Zeitung. (New York [N.Y.]) 1854-1920,” Library of Congress. http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn85026480/
[5] “Governor Hears Garment Strike Factions Today,” New York Herald Tribune. Feb 7, 1930. http://search.proquest.com.i.ezproxy.nypl.org/hnpnewyorktribunefull/docview/1113129786/2E24A65F2D884C9FPQ/15?accountid=35635 (Will be uploaded to website too)
[6] “The Brooklyn Navy Yard during the Hoover Administration, 1929 – 1933,” Columbia.edu http://www.columbia.edu/~jrs9/BNY-Hist-Hoover.html
[7] Nancy Beth Jackson. “LIVING IN/Melrose Commons, the Bronx; The Sound of Construction,” The New York Times. March 6, 2005. https://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9807E5DA103DF935A35750C0A9639C8B63&pagewanted=all
[8] Gary Pierre Pierre, “NEIGHBORHOOD REPORT: BUSHWICK; New Wave of Immigrants Changes a Once-Italian Bastion,” The New York Times, September 18th, 1994. http://www.nytimes.com/1994/09/18/nyregion/neighborhood-report-bushwick-new-wave-immigrants-changes-once-italian-bastion.html
[9] Class
[10] Jerome Krase, Draft. “Class and Gentrification in Brooklyn: A View from the Street, Lexington,” 2016
[11] Barry Gottehrer, “Middle Class on the Run”
[12] Diane Ravitch, The Great School Wars, Johns Hopkins University Press: Baltimore: 2000, 266.
[13] Ravitch, Wars, 268.
[14] As was said in class
[15] I wrote this based on what I have learned about structural racism in my “Place, Race, and Racism” class taught by Peter Kabachnik, and my “Future of New York City,” Macaulay class taught by Michael Paris
[16] “New York City (NYC) Harlem Riots of 1964,” Baruch College, http://www.baruch.cuny.edu/nycdata/disasters/riots-harlem_1964.html
[17] Report on the National Advisory Commission of Civil Disorders.
[18] “Harlem Riots of 1964”
[19] “Harlem Riots of 1964”
[20] “The Strike That Changed New York: Blacks, Whites and the Ocean Hill-Brownsville Crisis,” http://sdonline.org/34/the-strike-that-changed-new-york-blacks-whites-and-the-ocean-hill-brownsville-crisis/
[21] “Strike That Changed New York.”
[22] http://www.nycroads.com/roads/bushwick/
[23] “Jen Carlson. Here’s What NYC Looked Like In 1968, The Current Year In Mad Men,” The Gothamist. http://gothamist.com/2013/04/08/mad_men_1968.php
[24] Carlson, “NYC in 1968,”
[25] Clay Risen. “The Night New York Avoided a Riot,” The Morning News. https://themorningnews.org/article/the-night-new-york-avoided-a-riot
[26] https://www.city-journal.org/html/death-and-life-bushwick-13083.html
