A series of unprecedented teachers’ strikes temporarily shut most of New York’s schools in the late 1960s, provoked by an ongoing dispute over whether parents could have a say in the running of their children’s schools.

‘Community control’ over the city’s schools was a divisive issue at the time, part of the civil rights and Black Power movement, in the USA.

Linda Mannheim spoke to Monifa Edwards, who was a pupil at a school in the district of Ocean Hill-Brownsville, a name that became synonymous with the struggle over who controlled the local schools: the communities or the mainly white city officials.

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(Photo: The Ocean Hill-Brownsville Governing Board and supporters march over the Brooklyn Bridge in March 1969. Credit: David Fenton)

1968 New York City teachers' strike

Witness History

1968 New York City teachers' strike