Hate Grows in Brooklyn

Escorted by 200 policemen, the little band of frightened black and Puerto Rican seventh-graders last week walked slowly from their bus to the school door. "You ain't people, you're animals!" shouted someone in the crowd of 1,500 jeering, egg-throwing whites who were massed behind police barricades. "Go back to the zoo."

Thus, in a scene reminiscent of the worst Southern crises of years past, of Little Rock and New Orleans and Birmingham, forced school integration came to Brooklyn's Canarsie section.

The 80,000 people of Canarsie are 95% white, mostly Italians who started settling when this was still a marshland lit by the glow of municipal trash fires, and then Jews who moved in to escape the increasing number of blacks in adjoining Brownsville. They are mostly working and lower-middle class (college graduates: 6.6% ; average income: $12,303), proud of their neat brick houses. Canarsie, then, is typical of the defacto segregation in Northern cities (New York is 21% black, but some schools are 95% black or 95% white, depending on the area), and so it was in Canarsie that school officials decided to attack the problem.

They assigned 32 black and Puerto Rican children from the Brownsville ghetto to Canarsie's John Wilson Junior High School. The all-white local school board in Canarsie, however, voted 5 to 4 not to accept the Brownsville children. The 1,600 pupils in the Wilson School are already 32% nonwhite (because of two nearby housing projects), and white parents expressed fears that the admission of more minority children might start a white exodus.

In mid-October, School Chancellor Harvey B. Scribner insisted that the children go to Wilson. Some 200 white parents, most of them housewives, thereupon locked themselves into the building, forcing it to close. Equally adamant, the Brownsville parents rented a bus and took their children to class. For three days the whites occupied the school, sleeping on the gym floor. Outside, the black children sat aboard their bus throughout the class hours and then returned home for the night.

Threats of a court order routed out the parents, but soon Chancellor Scribner vacillated. Hoping to reduce hostilities, he reassigned the Brownsville children to nearby Isaac Bildersee Junior High School, which is 97% white. Within a week, Scribner was overruled by the city's central school board, which declared that the Brownsville children had "already been the victims of traumatic rejection," had had their educations interrupted for seven weeks, and should not serve as the "battering ram" to integrate Bildersee.

The ruling inflamed whites at Wilson all over again. "These children will never be welcome here," vowed Mrs. Judy Koretz, president of the Wilson School Parents' Association. White parents organized a boycott that shut down the neighborhood's eight schools, idling some 9,500 young people--many of whom spilled out into the streets and threatened one another with bats and chains. Police escorted the Brownsville children into Wilson, but the school was nearly empty, and after lunch they simply sat in an auditorium--watching a film on democracy.

At first, both sides seemed ready for a long siege. "They're tired of running, and we're tired of being pushed around," said the Rev. Wilbert B. Miller, a leader of the Brownsville parents. "And there you have an impasse." Nevertheless, school officials worked toward a compromise that would keep the children in Wilson, yet calm fears of a black invasion. "We don't want integration with these people," explained Thomas Duckett, 35, a Brownsville father of four boys, "we want quality education. If my kids can't make it on this level," he said, gesturing at the school, "what are they going to do when they reach my age?" Then he burst into tears.

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