Forty years ago--on May 9, 1968--the local school board in Brooklyn's black ghetto of Ocean Hill-Brownsville sent telegrams to 19 unionized educators, informing them that their employment in the district was terminated. Eighteen were white. One black teacher was mistakenly included on the list, but reinstated almost immediately after the error was discovered. Liberals in New York were not sure how to react. When white people fired black people for no cause, liberals knew it was wrong. But what was one to think when black people were firing white people? The controversy unleashed a civil war within American liberalism, tearing apart groups that had hitherto been allies: black people and Jews, and civil-rights groups and organized labor. A camp of liberals, led by Albert Shanker, head of the United Federation of Teachers (UFT), reacted to the firings by voting to strike in the Ocean Hill-Brownsville district. In this article, the author recounts how the Ocean Hill-Brownsville strike revealed deep divisions among liberals regarding race and class. The author also discusses that Barack Obama's candidacy offers the possibility of resolving the difficult question raised in the Ocean Hill-Brownsville: how to remedy the history of discrimination in this country without creating new inequities and divisions.