Revolution in the Bronx

By Raanan Geberer
Originally published in "Soundings" magazine, City Island, N.Y.

For weeks, something had been building up at the Bronx High School of Science. The various organizations – the High School Student Union, the Radial Student Union, the underground newspaper crew, the moderate Vietnam Moratorium committee and the militant New Mobilization – were constantly agitated. At least once a day, someone interrupted classes, yelling, "There’s a meeting going on in the auditorium!" the majority of students, kids like myself who weren’t affiliated with anything except maybe the school yearbook, the biology club, the handball team or the lunchroom squad, waited anxiously to see what happened The leaders of the official students government were waiting too. As for the supporters of the Vietnam War, or President Nixon, they could be counted on one hand.

So when the news of Cambodia and Kent State reached the school, the organizers were ready. Someone captured the bell system and rang bells at random, interrupting classes. In front of the school, long-haired kids handed out leaflets announcing a student strike for the next day, with a meeting in the auditorium called for 3:30. And the strike wouldn’t be limited to Science either – the goal was to shut down every high school in the North Bronx.

As the day progressed, kids talked to each other. Even the most traditional kids, jocks like Astoria Steve or Washington Heights Glen, who just went to school to attend classes and went right back to their neighborhoods to play basketball at the local Y, even they were persuaded to stick around for the big meeting.

In the auditorium the crowd was overflowing, with some of the sympathetic younger teachers attending too. Underground newspapers and leaflets of every description circulated, including the High School Student Union’s "10 Non-Negotiable Demands" and the Black Student Union’s own demand. Most of the Black students were conspicuously separate, sitting in the very back of the room, chanting, "Beep Beep, Bang Bang, Ungawa, Black Power!"

"Why don’t you join us here!" yelled one of the representatives o of the Steering Committee on stage. "We don’t trust you," one of the Black student yelled back. Nevertheless, they finally agreed to join in the action.

The big day came. We met in front of the school, then marched to DeWitt Clinton, yelling, "ON STRIKE, SHUT IT DOWN!" Normally I was afraid of the tough DeWitt Clinton kids, who were known to attack Science students who ventured too close to their all-male academy. But this time the Clintonians, except for a few Irish kids who mumbled maliciously about "the faggots," greeted us enthusiastically. They yelled, "ON STRIKE, SHUT IT DOWN," and rushed out of the school. The same scene was repeated at Walton, at Evander Childs, at Columbus. Accustomed to being constantly bossed around by parents and teachers, we jammed the streets in ecstasy, not quite believing in our own power. I thought this might be a good time to talk to girls, but as always, I didn’t know how to begin. The extraordinary events still wouldn’t’ cure my shyness.

At the head of the crowed, big-breasted, red-haired Betty Feinstein was making a fiery speech about "the power structure" and how you couldn’t trust cops and reporters, even if a few happened to be nice guys. I idolized her, wrote secret songs about her, but I knew that my chances of getting involved with her were zero, even after three years of sitting in the same classes with her. She was always surrounded by that haughty Manhattan clique with their talk about the Museum of Modern Art and Fellini films and Herbert Marcuse. And for some reason, these kids were always the most radical ones in the school. Maybe because they didn’t have to worry about their parents constantly yelling about heir coming home after 10 o’clock or playing loud music; their parents were off skiing in the Alps or sitting in their box seats at Lincoln Center.

"Let’s go to the recruiting station!" The crew spread through the youthful crowed. The Army and Navy recruiting stations, on opposite sites of Fordham Road, just across form Alexander’s, had been a fixture for as long as anyone could remember. Nobody cared about them one way or the other, except for those unlucky souls who allowed themselves to be recruited. Now, however, these nondescript concrete pillboxes took on a new meaning. They were symbols of THE MILITARY, THE ESTABLISHMENT, THE STATE! People turned around and headed toward Fordham.

"I’m tired," Mario DellaFortuna, a tall kid in my English class, told me. A fellow West Bronxite, Mario was the class clown – he actually had run for treasurer on the slogan, "The Money in the School Treasury Should Give Me a Nice Trip to California."

"Wanna take a bus?" I asked. "Whoever heard of revolutionaries taking a bus?" he retorted. We both laughed.

As we walked down pastoral Pelham Parkway, Betty Feinstein yelled, "Down With Spiro and Dick!’

"What’s the matter, babe?" A Columbus greaser type piped up. "Don’t you like dick?"

"That’s a sexist remark!" she yelled, marching resolutely onward. A group toward the rear of the demonstration started chanting, "One, two , three, four, we don’t want your fucking’ war!" I winced. I considered myself part of the youth culture. But at the same time, I was too terrified of my puritanical parents to be totally comfortable with this type of language. At home, if I even said "god damn it!" to my mother, my father would grab me by the lapels and throw me across the room.

A smaller group, closer to the fore, singsonged, "Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, the NLF is going to win!" This, too, made m uncomfortable. Opposing U.S. government policy was one thing, openly supporting a communist movement, one that once in power would most certainly establish what Mr. Harrison in Social Studies called a "totalitarian dictatorship," was something else. The fact that I considered myself a vague type of democratic socialist always made things difficult for me in that many of those who called themselves "socialists," to my way of thinking, didn’t believe in democracy. Finally someone started yelling, "Stop the War Now" Here at last was a slogan that I, and everyone else, could support. One by one, all the marchers took up the chant, "Stop the War Now!"

At the recruiting stations the police surprisingly let us demonstrate on the plaza as long as we let the employees enter and exit unimpeded. After most of the adult passers-by ignored us in favor of whatever was on sale at Alexanders’, and the uniformed recruiters kept working at their desks, many of us became confused. The demonstration began to break up. A number of us, including Mario DellaFortuna and I, marched down to NYU’s Bronx campus, but the students there had already left to join their compatriots at the downtown campus.

Kids started walking to the subway, but I went into an old-fashioned candy store on Burnside Avenue to order a vanilla egg cream. I sat down on one of the movable stools between a cab driver going over the day’s receipts and an elderly Jewish man reading the Tug-Morgen Journal. As I waited for the egg cream, I absentmindedly spun myself around in a circle.

"Hey," the bald guy behind the counter asked the cab driver. "How do you like them demonstrators?"

"Fuhgedaboudit!" the cab driver answered. "I was stuck in my cab a half hour on the FDR Drive because of those kids. If they think Nixon and Kissinger are gonna listen to them, they must be crazy!"

"Yeah," the bald guy answered, nodding his head in agreement. "Them guys should be doin’ their homework. Hey, whaddya think about Seaver starring for the Mets against Los Angeles tomorrow. Wonder what does to the point spread?’

I felt a rush of affection for these people. As a local history buff, I felt it was extremely important to save the rapidly disappearing old ethnic neighborhoods, especially the old Jewish neighborhoods, in the Bronx and their way of life. But how could you have both this and the hippie thing too? Back at school, the radicals, most of them Jews like myself, only seemed to care about the Blacks and Puerto Ricans in the ghettoes and the oppressed peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America. They consigned everyone else to the status of oppressors. But weren’t people like the ones in this store part of the working class, too? Or did the radical leaders even know or care that people like this existed?

After the demonstrations died down, there was some talk in the newspapers that the Board of Ed would have to postpone graduation a month or more. But somehow the teachers made up the lost time, the Regents exams were given and graduations were held on schedule. Outside the Loew’s Paradise Theater, more than a thousand kids, at least the student body, wore black armbands, and I was one of them. About 10 or so members of a Maoist group wore red armbands, and a few anarchists, my goddess Betty Feinstein among them, sported some symbol I didn’t’ recognize. Mario carried a false big nose and moustache in his pocket, planning to slip it on when his name was called, but an alert teacher noticed it an confiscated it.

After thet ceremonies and speeches, the giving out of awards, none of which I or anyone I knew won, and the popping of flash bulbs, the new graduates and their families walked to the local restaurants, to Jahn’s, to Krum’s and to Deli City, where Mario and I ventured. The parents vied with each other to order to the fanciest, most expensive dishes on the menu. Then Mario cracked everyone up by saying," I think I’ll get 10 hot dogs!"

And so, I graduated from the Bronx High School of Science, confident att within 10 years marijuana would be perfectly legal, nobody would wear suits and ties to work, all required courses in high schools and colleges would be abolished, and 16-year-olds would be able to vote. I’m still waiting.