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This concluding chapter examines the choices Randolph faced in the Ocean Hill–Brownsville controversy, and how these issues were indicative of the larger, more divisive fissures within the civil rights movement, especially where race and gender collide as well as intersect. Randolph had had to choose between those in the civil rights movement who were advocating local control and race-centered solutions to the educational and community crises in New York City, and those who were committed to the teachers' union. In backing the latter, Randolph set himself apart and never regained the stature he once held among black freedom activists. His vision of a combined civil rights and labor rights movement no longer had much meaning in the final half of the twentieth century.

This chapter chronicles the growing conflict between the Black Power movement—an extension of the civil rights movement seeking the formation of black political and community institutions—and unionized public employees in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Beginning with the United Federation of Teachers strike in 1968 over community control in Ocean Hill-Brownsville (New York City), the chapter also shows how two teacher strikes in Newark (1970, 1971) drove apart the Black community and a majority white teacher union. A close examination of letters to the imprisoned President of the American Federation of Teachers shows that critics of both urban black populations and unionized teachers had begun to link the two groups together as “unproductive” threats to law and order and economic prosperity.

This chapter describes the philosophical transition from desegregation to “community control” as the driving force behind African-American urban struggles for educational opportunity and dignity in the late 1960s. Focusing on New York City, it outlines grassroots educational battles against substandard, segregated schools in Harlem and the Ocean Hill–Brownsville section of Brooklyn. It argues that political adaptation, as well as the shortcomings of the crusade for “quality integrated education,” reinvigorated black nationalist elements of African-American educational philosophy. It demonstrates how parents and activists mobilized theories of “black education” as part of their efforts to resist inferior public education and to imagine redemptive social alternatives.