> > But I do think it's high time that the South pull its head out of its ass
> > and get on with the business of being civilized.
> >
> > Carl
>
>What -- like the rest of the country?
>
>Carl, you should take a drive with me through parts of Michigan, which is,
>if you don't know, well above the Mason-Dixon line.
Maybe he should take a drive down the street:
Henry Conyers can’t escape racism. As a six-year-old, his family moved from Summerton, South Carolina to Long Island, New York. Theirs had been a segregated South devoid of equal opportunity for black people. “My dad wanted to get away from the racism,” says Conyers, “But Nassau County, now, is the same as the South was in the 1950s.”
Conyers lives in Hempstead, Long Island, a town with failing schools and a predominately black and Latino population. The affluent, lush, and glaringly white Garden City is adjacent to Conyers’s home (according to the last census, Garden City’s population is 94 percent Caucasian). Usually, Conyers steers clear of Garden City proper. It’s an unwelcoming placesigns in the parks read: “Garden City Residents Only.” But one day he decided to alter his jogging route. Running from Meadow Street to Clinton, he ventured into the wealthy suburb. A police officer approached him and, according to Conyers, said: “Can you find somewhere else to run?” Conyers was floored. “I was running on the sidewalk,” he says.
Similar tales abound. In response, a year and a half ago, the community organization Long Island ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) embarked on a campaign to integrate Long Island’s suburbs. ACORN memberslargely people of colorhad long complained of racism in real estate offices: cold shoulders, the steering to poor, predominately black neighborhoods, and rude treatment.
Ann Sullivan, the group’s organizer, recruited over 150 volunteers to go undercover in Nassau County real estate offices. She paired blacks and Latinos with white people, matching their salaries, apartment preferences, and price rangeseverything that should matter to real estate agents. Sullivan’s research yielded disturbing results. Agents offered to show whites apartments twice as often as blacks and Latinos; a third of the African Americans and Latinos were steered to poor areas.
ACORN published their results in a study called “Whites Only.” “Racial discrimination is part and parcel of the affordable housing problem,” reads the study, “and it has had much the same effectspushing African Americans and other minority groups into traditionally low-income neighborhoods and serving as a barrier to the integration of African Americans and Latinos into neigh- borhoods with good schools.”
“Whites Only” makes specific recommendations for an affordable housing plan in Nassau County. Twenty percent of all new growth in Garden City, the study suggests, should be affordable. County officials scoffed at ACORN’s demands. “Garden City is not the place for affordable housing,” said Nassau County Executive Thomas Suozzi. “I don’t want to start World War III.”
It seems that Suozzi doesn’t even want poor people visiting the ivory suburb. He’s selling off 25 acres of land in the center of Garden City, the current site of the county’s social services building. Suozzi plans to move social services (and its accompanying indigent clientele) to an out-of-the-way location in Uniondale. Suozzi rezoned the 25 acres for “residential use,” particularly large single-family homes.
On August 7, over 200 activists organized by ACORN marched through Garden City to demand affordable housing. A multi-ethnic crowd of activists gathered around Nassau County’s social services building.
Diane Coleman, president of the Hempstead chapter of the New York-based Working Families Party, expressed her frustration over the interminable battle for equality. “We’ve been dealing with this for 40 years,” she said. “I don’t think that Nassau County should sell this land for expensive housing. We own this. We have to develop a vision for Long Island that includes the poor and the black. Garden City is just the tip of the iceberg.”
An African American chanted: “It’s a shame and a pity, poor people can’t live in Garden City.” The crowd joined in and then they marched through town. Garden City’s main street is made of cobblestones. Stores with gold-embossed signs line the street and people sip iced tea in outdoor cafes. Needless to say, locals had never seen anything like this on their streets. Most people stopped in their tracks, awestruck; some were more vocal. “Hey,” yelled a white woman, “I wish my housing was more affordable, too.”
The march ended on the well-groomed lawn of a Garden City public park. Lauren Adams, a 16-year-old ACORN member, told the crowd that her Hempstead school provides out-of-date textbooks, doesn’t offer AP classes, and affords few after-school activities. She feels cheated. “We all deserve the opportunity to live and work in a decent neighborhood and go to a good school,” she said. “We all need the opportunity to break the chain. We should be mad because we’re still separated and unequal. That ain’t right.”
The Lewis Mumford Center, which documents segregation in the U.S., estimates that black and Latino children, on average, are sent to schools where two-thirds of the children are at or near the poverty line. Poor kidsdue to the link between property taxes and education fundingusually attend sub-par schools. “I would never,” says Henry Conyers, “send my kids to Hempstead schools.” He tightened the family’s purse strings and paid for private education.
Conyers’s kids have already graduated, but he’s still fighting for parity. He and several other ACORN members attended a meeting with Garden City Mayor Barbara K. Miller two weeks after the rally to discuss the paucity of workforce housing. Miller acknowledged the problem, but wouldn’t commit to a plan of action. “Everything takes time,” said Miller.
“Everything does take time,” retorted Conyers, “but this is 2004.” He’s not giving up the fight any time soon. Conyers plans on organizing a boycott of Garden City businesses and generally wreaking havoc until Garden City enacts a plan for affordable housing. He’ll have ACORN and its allies on his side.
One of those allies, the chair of Long Island’s NAACP Housing Committee, A. Supreme Mathematics, is determined to integrate Garden City. Mathematics is convinced that integrating this town will pave the way for equity everywhere. “I think that Garden City is the first place we should build affordable housing,” he says. “You can’t live and work in Garden City unless you work six jobs. That’s racist.”
Recently, a man at the Garden City Village Board Meeting made the notorious comment: “If Garden City makes available affordable housing, what you’re gonna get is a bunch of negroes.” Mathematics uses this incident as a rallying point. “They say, ‘No negroes in Garden City’,” he says. “Let’s show them how wrong they are.”
---------- Erin Sabra Fuchs is a writer living in Brooklyn.
http://zmagsite.zmag.org/Oct2004/fuchspr1004.html