Bigotry Condoned

New York City's public-school corridors have never been zones of quiet. In the past three years, they have been even noisier because of a dowdy little Brooklyn civics teacher named May Quinn. The hot-tempered debate about her simmered up out of the public schools, splashed down over the Manhattan press. The consensus: May Quinn was not fit to teach civics to anybody.

In noisy, prolonged hearings before the Board of Education, Miss Quinn's fellow teachers and several of her pupils testified that she had sneered at Italian-Americans as "greasy foreigners," had declared tolerance "bunk," and said that "democracy would never succeed in America." The principal charge: that Miss Quinn had written on the blackboard six sentences out of a Jew-baiting leaflet, The First Americans. These sentences overgenerously credited Irish-Americans with killing the first Jap, sinking the first battleship, carrying out the first FT raid, bagging the first Jap plane, capturing the first German spy, winning the first presidential citation. She left out the anti-Semitic punch line, but her critics said the inference was obvious. She was suspended on charges of intolerance and un-Americanism.

In her defense, May Quinn, a teacher for 27 years, insisted that some of her best friends were Italians and Jews. She also said that it had never entered her head that all the names on the board--Michael Murphy, Colin Kelly, John O'Hara--were Irish. She wouldn't be surprised, she testified, to meet a Greek named O'Hara, or a Russian named Kelly, what with "intermarriages and changing of names."

Last week, New York City's Board of Education, by a 5-to-1 vote, dismissed all charges against May Quinn except a general one of "dereliction of duty" in writing the offending sentences on the board. For this she was fined two months' salary ($650).

In a 31-page dissent, uncompromising James Marshall, Republican lawyer and former board president, called the majority decision "little less than condoning . . . bigotry. . . ." Said he: May Quinn should have been fired. The New York Herald Tribune seconded him: "So mild a rebuke for such an arrant affront to the cause of mutual self-respect constitutes a grave setback to the cause of tolerance in our public schools."

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