When the Urban Coalition was formed in 1967, there was great hope. For the first time, many of us thought, the full strength of the labor movement, the business community and the civil rights organizations would be used to reduce poverty, improve education and fight racial discrimination. A real coalition would have the power and influence to accomplish what could not be accomplished by any of the constituent groups alone. However, if the activities of the New York Urban Coalition in the field of education are typical of Urban Coalition activities in other fields, there is more justification for anger and bitterness than for hope. For instead of building an "urban coalition" it has fostered urban confrontation in education.
In 1968 an Urban Coalition education committee met with various city, school and union officials on the question of community control of schools. Instead of acting as a mediating influence to bring opposing forces together, the Urban Coalition group in its meetings with Ocean Hill-Brownsville officials encouraged the demonstration district to engage in the confrontation which brought New York to the brink of disaster.
Urban Coalition or Urban Confrontation?
Unfortunately this support of confrontation is not an isolated incident. For the last two years, the Urban Coalition has given funds to the Afro-American Teachers Association for the purpose of recruiting teachers for our city's schools. The Afro-American Teachers Association will be remembered for its publication of a violently anti-Semitic article in its official publication as well as for its leadership involvement in citywide student disorders and the violence at Franklin K. Lane High School. Even though the AATA continues on its confrontation course, the Coalition gives it funds.
While some isolated attempts to better the relationship with the professional staff are being made, the Coalition continues to fund confrontation. For example, another recipient of Urban Coalition moneys is the United Bronx Parents, led by Mrs. Evelina Antonetty, who is also co-chairman of the Coalition's Education Task Force. On November 10, 1970, United Bronx Parents used some of its funds to charter buses to send busloads of Bronx "parents" into Manhattan's troubled George Washington High School to break up a meeting of the parents association. The February issue of Coalition News features a two-page spread headlined "Built-In Discrimination Permeates City School System, " in which Mrs. Antonetty alleges bias in our school system because the percentage of minority group teachers and supervisors is less than the percentage of minority group children in the schools. This would appear to be an irrelevant point in view of the fact that professionals are ( as has been pointed out) not recruited from the ranks of children but from adult college graduates. (One wonders why Mrs. Antonetty has not used her position in the Urban Coalition to ask the executives of the giant corporations with whom she sits -- and who are helping finance confrontation - how many members of minority groups hold top positions in their corporations.)
The same issue of Coalition News carries a highly laudatory review of a new book written by Mrs. Antonetty's assistant in United Bronx Parents. The review describes the book as "a manual of practical confrontation." The book states: "We must destroy the (school) system before it destroys our children" and "We must do everything we can to fight it, restructure it, or destroy it."
In addition to financing these groups, the Urban Coalition has spent much on a vast advertising campaign in billboards and buses. One of its most prominent ads stated, "Non-white high school graduates earn less than white dropouts ... Give a Damn ... " While the ad writer may merely have been trying to make the point that there is widespread racial discrimination in our society, the obvious effect of the ad is to tell blacks that they might as well drop out of school and resort to other avenues of "making it."
The urban crisis deepens everyday. It can only be solved by a genuine coalition of political forces powerful enough to bring about major governmental commitment to a program like A Philip Randolph's Freedom Budget. That coalition has yet to be formed. Meanwhile, those who "give a damn" will have to look elsewhere if they're financial contributions are to promote solutions rather than add to our urban problems.