Collective Bargaining Through Education

Our neighborhood school, P.S. 29, is 75 per cent Negro and Puerto Rican, mostly Puerto Rican. The kids are a tough lot, coming from the tenements off Columbia Street, which runs south from Atlantic Avenue along Brooklyn’s waterfront into Red Hook. Bill Pyles is one of three men out of a total staff of 35 teachers. The three men were the only teachers in the school to respond when the United Federation of Teachers struck the New York school system in 1960 and again in 1962.

Some m...