Mendel Letters 107 — The Back-up Plan
December 10, 2022
Dear Mendel,
When I was at City College as a history major in the late 1960s and “manning the barricades,” you asked me what I was going to do for a living after college. I was making pretty good money as a part-time taxi driver and figured I could continue to do that while we plotted the upcoming revolution. You thought I needed a back-up plan, just in case the revolution didn’t happen. I ended up getting my certification as a social studies teacher, a back-up plan that eventually directed my life. When the revolution didn’t happen, it allowed me to combine work with activism.
New York State social studies standards call for preparing students to be active citizens in a democratic society and they also support project-based learning. I don’t think the people who wrote the standards envisioned the way I would implement them.
At Charles Evan Hughes High School in the late 1970s and early 1980s, my students in economics and government classes studied the municipal budget process and then organized the Forum Club as an official school group to lobby for more funding for education. When I moved to Franklin K. Lane High School in 1982, the idea of the Forum Club really took off as activism and education merged.
The Forum Club was a way of responding to student concerns raised in history and government classes about what was taking place in the United States. Students chartered their club with the student government and met in my classroom during lunch periods to discuss issues and plan strategies. Lane was not far from the United Community Centers in East New York, Brooklyn, so I was able to directly connect the student group with community activists and progressive elected officials, especially Major Owens, the local Congressional Representative. Owens had a close working relationship with the community center and was a leading opponent of the Reagan administration’s foreign policy, especially its support for military regimes in Central America and efforts to overthrow left-leaning governments in Grenada and Nicaragua. Congressman Owens was also active in the campaign challenging apartheid in South Africa.
The Lane Forum Club attended community meetings sponsored by Congressman Owens and the community center and small groups participated in anti-apartheid and anti-interventionist rallies in Washington DC. The group’s involvement in these activities earned them coverage in community newspapers, which helped mitigate concerns about the program by school administrators. In the school, the club launched voter registration campaigns, another activity that won the support of the school administration, and after attending meetings with Congressman Owens, organized student forums.
Two of the earlier forums were particularly interesting. Brooklyn peace activists had a sister city relationship with a small town in Nicaragua and organized a visit by the town’s mayor to raise money to build a water supply system for the town. The Forum Club invited the mayor to speak with students about what was happening in Nicaragua. They co-sponsored the event with the school’s bilingual education program and it was conducted in both English and Spanish with students acting as translators. Before the forum, school administrators questioned its academic legitimacy and whether it provided a propaganda opportunity for opponents of United States policies in Latin America. The club met with administrators and agreed to write and distribute statements explaining conflicting positions on U.S. policy toward Nicaragua.
As the anti-apartheid campaign in the United States grew, the Forum Club invited representatives of South Africa’s African National Congress delegation to the United Nations to speak at the school. School administrators again asked the club to prepare statements, this time pro and con on apartheid, however, after meeting, club members decided as with slavery and genocide, there were no legitimate pro-Apartheid position. Instead, they prepared a timeline of the history of South Africa and of Apartheid with a biography of anti-Apartheid leader Nelson Mandela.
As a result of the meeting with representatives of the African National Congress and attending community forums organized by Major Owens and the community center, Forum Club members strongly identified as anti-Apartheid activists. In June 1990, after his release from prison, Nelson Mandela visited the United States to speak about the struggle for democracy and majority rule in South Africa. A mass rally was scheduled for Yankee Stadium and club members wanted to attend. They painted a thirty-foot long four-foot high “Franklin K. Lane Forum Club Opposes Apartheid” canvas banner. The group felt they had a role in Mandela’s release and wanted to greet him. I borrowed a school bus from the United Community Center, I still had a bus driver’s license, and the evening of the rally drove up one long street and down another near the school picking up thirty Lane students who had twenty dollars for admission to the stadium and a signed parental consent form. The club never got close to Mandela, but they got to parade through the grandstands with their banner.
Funny thing about “manning the barricades.” Most of the people on the front lines I’ve worked with since City College including high school students have been women and as a historian I know that the leading role of women in social movements was true in the past as well. We definitely need a new phrase.
Your son
Hard copies of these typed letters were discovered in an old camp trunk in the basement storage facility of one of the few buildings that remain standing in this Brooklyn neighborhood. The building is quite decrepit and is scheduled for demolition. The letters were found in November 2048 by a teenager who believes they were written by his great-grandfather. The letters are addressed to Mendel, the letter writer’s father, who appears to have been dead for at least six years when his son, whose name we are unsure of, started to write him. The son appears very agitated in some of the letters. With permission from the family, we are publishing them on the date they were written, only 28 years later.
