An Anti-Defamation League official has accused New York City school and police officials, and the Ford Foundation, of “abdicating their responsibilities” in allowing an “indecent ‘kill whitey’ and anti-Semitic performance” at a memorial meeting for a slain militant black leader at a public school in Harlem last Wednesday.
The charge was made by David A. Schulte, chairman of the New York board of the ADL. He referred to a performance at Intermediate School 201 where the City Board of Education is conducting an experiment, with Ford Foundation help, in decentralizing public school administration. The ADL official said that “what may be a valuable educational experiment” was being subverted by “those with authority giving tacit consent” to anarchy. The memorialized leader was Malcolm X.
He declared it was “shocking” that the Superintendent of Schools, with his “previous knowledge of the racist and anti-Semitic fulminations of Leroi Jones, the African-American Teachers Association and Herman B. Ferguson who is under indictment on a charge of conspiring to murder moderate Negro leaders, permitted use of the school building during school hours for spewing forth such venom.” He also denounced an assistant chief inspector of the City Police Department for allowing himself “to be barred” from the memorial meeting.
The ADL official added he was confident that the “kill whitey” theme and the “anti-Semitism of the program reflect the views of a minuscule segment of the Negro community.”
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