Mendel Letters 118 — Big Shits
March 11, 2023
Dear Mendel,
One of my stepmother’s favorite lines was, “So you think you’re such a ‘Big Shit’”?
As a teacher, I learned to listen to and learn from my students and that I wasn’t such a “Big Shit” after all. In the late 1980s, as an activist, I was involved in the international anti-Apartheid movement and addressing racial tension in New York City. But students in the Franklin K. Lane High School Forum Club students wanted the group to focus on abortion rights and teen access to birth control, issues they felt directly impacted on them.
During the spring 1989 semester my United States history classes discussed major Supreme Court decisions including Roe v. Wade. A group of five young women asked if the Forum Club could sponsor a trip to a pro-choice rally in Washington DC. They met with club leadership who agreed to sponsor the trip and the group traveled to Washington with a contingent from Queens College. After the rally, the young women discussed with the Forum Club how they could raise the issues of reproductive freedom and choice, especially for teenagers, so that other students would think about them. In the fall, the Forum Club decided to sponsor an “Abortion Debate” and invited speakers on opposing sides, circulated petitions for and against reproductive choice, and to rented a bus so the entire club membership could participate in a Washington DC rally on November 12, 1989.
The Forum Club’s abortion debate was held the last period of the school day on two consecutive Tuesdays in October. The week before the first session, the club met to go over its format. The debate would be held in a large room with seating for approximately 150 people. The student chair of the club would open both sessions by introducing the Forum Club, the club’s positions on reproductive rights, and the speaker. Other club members would staff an information table at the entrance to the room where they would sell pro-choice buttons, recruit for the Washington trip, have petitions available for signing, and distribute the club’s statement on abortion rights and literature provided by the speakers.
The first week the speaker was Sharon Long of Birthright and the New York State Right to Life Party. The second week the speaker was Kay Lee Davis of the National Organization for Women. The club organized them to come on different days so their conversation would be with Lane students and teachers, rather than with each other.
After introductions, Long and Davis spoke for twenty minutes and then the floor was thrown open for discussion and questions. The chair called on people to speak with students given priority. People who remained after discussion were able to talk with the speakers individually.
Eighty students and staff members attended the first session of the debate. Sharon Long emphasized adoption as an alternative to abortion and promised that her organization would provide counseling and support for women who chose to give birth to an unwanted child. She explained that her organization’s belief was that abortion was the murder of a living human being and should not be legal. During discussion that followed, students asked a number of pointed questions. One club member challenged Long. “You say that a fetus has a soul. That’s your religious belief. You have a right to believe it. But don’t I have the same right to religious freedom for my beliefs? Why must all American women follow your religion?” Another denied that adoption was a real alternative. She told the assembly that if she was pregnant and her parents found out, “they would kill me.”
The second week the debate followed the same format, however this time the audience was over 100 people. A Forum Club member who opposed abortion rights was selected to open discussion. At the end of the session, the club chair announced the results of the Forum Club’s petition campaign. Over two thousand people had signed the pro-choice petition, while a combined total of only 500 people signed petitions to restrict or prevent abortions. After the meeting, club members caucused and decided to send the results of the petition campaign to the National Organization for Women.
The petition drive and abortion debate gave club members a tremendous sense of accomplishment and guaranteed that all forty-nine seats on the bus to Washington were sold. A video of the sessions was shown in “Participation in Government” classes, extending discussion of the abortion debate throughout the school. The group received a further lift when the National Organization for Women invited club members to attend a press conference at a Manhattan hotel with Molly Yard, the President of NOW and Elizabeth Holtzman, the Brooklyn District Attorney. On the first day of school that September, twelve students attended the Forum Club’s organizational meeting. On November 1, forty club members attended the press conference.
Money from selling buttons and other fund-raising efforts allowed the club to rent and fill a bus to go to the November pro-choice rally. A last hitch was when a school administrator “unofficially” asked me not to run the trip to Washington as an official school trip and not to rent the bus through the student government. When I asked for the request in writing, the administrator said they wouldn’t put it is writing because they feared I would go to the press. My response was “Make sure they know that.” In the end the trip was approved and an assistant principal was assigned to accompany the club.
The rally was everything that club members expected. They paraded from the Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial chanting “Choice Now” and holding a 30-foot long banner that identified the group and said “Freedom=Choice.” During the rally students took turns with a video camera interviewing each other about why they were there.
As a follow-up to the Washington trip, club members launched campaigns for a full-service public health clinic for Lane High School and to make condoms available to students in New York City high schools. They started petition drives, conducted a “health clinic” poster contest (the posters were hung in the school lobby), wrote speeches for Board of Education hearings, organized a parent and community support committee, and were guests on the cable television program, “What’s Up Doctor Ruth,” with Ruth Westheimer. In a pre-broadcast warm-up session, an MC pressed the students to discuss their own sexual histories. The club chair stood up and responded to his prodding, “You misunderstand. We are not here to discuss our sexual activity. We are here as political activists.”
Sometimes activism captures the wave of historical change and makes a contribution to new directions. The next year Lane was one of six New York City high schools that received a full-service public health clinic and the Board of Education, by a narrow majority, following presentations by the Forum Club and students from other high schools that they helped organize, voted for condom availability in high schools.
These kids really were the “Big Shits.”
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.
