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March 26, 2006
Battle in Black and White
By AMY FOX
WHEN I was a kid, we visited my grandparents in Stuyvesant Town nearly every
year. The apartment where my mother had grown up was filled with towers of
books and foreign treasures, including a Torah scroll rescued from the
Holocaust. I used to fall asleep on a sagging cot listening to footsteps and
voices passing underneath my window, something impossible in the quiet
Boulder, Colo., neighborhood where I lived. When I dreamed of city life, I
saw those red brick structures, the tiled kitchen where my grandmother made
meatloaf, the paved circle where we used to wait for my grandfather to pull
up in his powder-blue Dodge Dart.
It was hard to imagine my respectable grandma, Diana Miller, her
waist-length hair piled on top of her head, or my grandpa, Leo, with his
dignified vests, barricading themselves in those same buildings to avoid
being put out on the street. But that is what happened in the winter of
1952, when my grandparents were among those white tenants who stood at the
forefront of the battle to integrate the housing complex where they lived.
Walking through the brick towers and grassy lawns of Stuyvesant Town three
years ago, I stopped in the center of the complex to photograph a plaque,
dated 1947, honoring Stuyvesant Town's creator, Frederick Ecker, who "with
the vision of experience and the energy of youth conceived and brought into
being this project, and others like it, that families of moderate means
might live in health, comfort and dignity in parklike communities, and that
a pattern might be set of private enterprise productively devoted to public
service."
My grandfather had photographed the same plaque 50 years earlier. But
neither of us could take its words too seriously. We both knew that for a
family to be offered "health, comfort and dignity," the family had to be
white.
My grandparents were among 200,000 applicants for the new residential
project built in 1947 on the far East Side of Manhattan to offer World War
II veterans affordable housing at a monthly rent of $14 to $17 a room. Five
years later, they were among 35 families who were nearly evicted from their
apartments after fighting their landlord - Metropolitan Life Insurance -
over its official policy of rejecting the applications of black veterans.
When my grandparents managed to renew their lease, they proudly hung their
pale green eviction notice on the wall, with a tiny slip of paper in a
corner of the frame bearing the words: "Without Struggle There Is No
Progress - Frederick Douglass."
The eviction notice impressed me. Many of my friends were embarrassed by
their grandparents' racist attitudes, and I was pleased that mine had fought
for civil rights. Unfortunately, I was more proud than curious. I never
asked for the whole story, and a few years ago, when I began working on a
screenplay about the events, my grandparents were no longer alive.
I was left with my mother's spotty memories of events that happened when she
was 5. She remembers walking to school with a black child whose family had
moved into Stuyvesant Town. She remembers her father joining other former
servicemen standing guard outside the black family's door, ready if
necessary to defend the apartment against the landlord. She remembers that
when the situation got ugly, she and her baby brother, named Frederick
Douglass Miller, in honor of the great abolitionist leader, were sent to
their aunt's house on Long Island.
In the cavernous reading room at the New York Public Library, I began slowly
filling in the gaps. I learned that my grandparents had been members of the
Tenants Committee to End Discrimination in Stuyvesant Town, a grass-roots
organization formed in 1948. Stuyvesant Town and the adjacent Peter Cooper
Village had been built as part of an ambitious slum-clearance project in
which bulldozers tore through 18 blocks south of East 23rd Street to create
a solution to the city's postwar housing shortage. But MetLife refused to
consider the applications of three black veterans who sought apartments.
When these veterans sued the company, a group of Stuyvesant Town residents,
including my grandparents, united to support their cause.
Frederick Ecker, chairman of Metropolitan Life Insurance, maintained that as
a private landlord, he had the right to define his own criteria for
selecting tenants. But although Stuyvesant Town was owned by a private
corporation, the city had given MetLife significant tax breaks and financial
support. Thus black New Yorkers were paying taxes to support a housing
complex they were not allowed to live in.
In public statements, Mr. Ecker described his motives as economic; he said
he feared that integrating the complex would lower its value and its appeal
to investors. He also said that black applicants could live in Riverton, a
MetLife housing complex a few miles to the north on the Harlem River Drive.
But Riverton was hardly Stuyvesant Town. While MetLife advertised Stuyvesant
Town, with nearly 9,000 apartments, as a "suburb in the city," James
Baldwin, writing about Riverton a decade later, called Harlem's housing
projects as "cheerless as a prison." In Esquire in 1960, he wrote that
blacks hated Riverton "long before the builders arrived."
"They began hating it," he wrote, "at about the time people began moving out
of their condemned houses to make room for this additional proof of how
thoroughly the white world despised them."
The Stuyvesant Town tenants committee, with 1,800 members, was made up of
the families of veterans who believed that after fighting a war for justice
overseas, they could not ignore injustice at home. "The courage and
sharpshooting of a Negro machine gunner saved my life with a dozen other
white G.I.'s," my grandfather had written in a pamphlet issued by the
committee. "Can any one of us say he can't be my neighbor? I can't." Surveys
of residents conducted by the tenants committee showed that two-thirds of
Stuyvesant Town's 25,000 tenants opposed MetLife's exclusionary policy.
In August 1949, the committee invited a black family, the Hendrixes, to move
from their overpriced, rat-infested apartment in Harlem into the Stuyvesant
Town apartment of Jesse Kessler while Mr. Kessler was on vacation. When he
returned, the Hendrixes were moved to another Stuyvesant Town apartment,
this one the home of Lee Lorch, a vice chairman of the tenants committee and
a mathematics professor who was leaving the city to accept a teaching
position at Pennsylvania State College.
The previous April, Dr. Lorch had been abruptly dismissed, without
explanation, from his job at City College of New York, and many colleagues,
neighbors and journalists believed that the firing was linked to his
leadership on the tenants committee.
Hardine Hendrix, an art student who worked by day in a warehouse, along with
his wife, Raphael, and their 6-year-old son, Hardine Jr., stayed in these
apartments as guests. The young couple did not pay the $76 monthly rent
because it was illegal for Stuyvesant Town tenants to sublet. Although the
Hendrixes encountered hostile remarks and threatening telephone calls from
some neighbors, others were welcoming; one woman apparently introduced them
to gefilte fish.
A Landlord Versus the People
While my mother and Hardine Jr. were traipsing through the 12 Stuyvesant
Town playgrounds, the battle continued to play out in the courtroom. The
black veterans suing MetLife were backed by 29 civic organizations,
including the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and
the American Civil Liberties Union. But Justice Felix C. Bevenga of the New
York Supreme Court ruled for MetLife, remarking that "housing accommodation
is not a recognized civil right." Appeals did not succeed, and in June 1950,
the United
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/s/supreme
_court/index.html?inline=nyt-org> States Supreme Court declined to review
the case.
The controversy also spilled into City Hall. Councilmen Ben Davis and
Stanley Isaacs introduced a bill that would make discrimination on the basis
of race illegal in housing projects financially supported by the city. The
bill, which would have applied retroactively, was intended to take aim at
Stuyvesant Town.
Working behind the scenes, Mayor William O'Dwyer tried to delay action on
the legislation, offering instead to facilitate direct negotiations with Mr.
Ecker. But although MetLife eventually offered to admit a few token black
families, the company refused to change its tenant selection policy. The
company also informed 35 families who belonged to the tenants committee, my
grandparents among them, that their leases would not be renewed. Dr. Lorch's
6-year-old daughter, Alice, even received an individual notice with her name
on it.
Nineteen of the families decided to fight to keep their apartments. They
printed a flier whose cover bore the words "a landlord vs. the people" over
a black-and-white photograph of the 19; the picture showed my grandfather
with his arm around my mother, Betty, a child standing proudly in her short
plaid coat. "For the first time in American history," the flier proclaimed,
"a landlord has tried to evict citizens from their homes for their social
beliefs."
My grandfather kept the flier, along with a typewritten "list of evictees"
compiled by the tenants committee. The names of couples are listed with
their addresses, and next to each one, my grandfather had scrawled the words
"stay" or "go." Next to his own name, he had written the word "stay."
The city marshal ordered the targeted tenants to be out of their apartments
by 9 o'clock on the morning of Jan. 17, 1952, and hired a moving company to
drag their furniture onto the street. In response, the families barricaded
their doors. They sent their children to stay with relatives and passed
baskets of food from window to window with ropes.
As word of the evictions spread, civic groups and labor unions called for a
demonstration of support for the tenants. Hundreds of New Yorkers picketed
at the complex, at City Hall and outside MetLife's headquarters at 1 Madison
Avenue, where protesters held a round-the-clock vigil that lasted three
days.
Fifteen hours before the city marshal's deadline, MetLife announced that it
would postpone the evictions and agreed to negotiate. There followed three
days of intense talks, and on the night of Jan. 20, MetLife agreed to drop
the eviction proceedings. Several families who were regarded as especially
problematic, including Dr. Lorch's, agreed to leave "voluntarily." In
return, MetLife rented an apartment to the Hendrixes.
Black and Red
A photo of Hardine Jr. and my mother, holding hands and grinning, lay in a
jumble of other grainy photos under glass on my grandparents' coffee table.
My mother saved it, her only souvenir from her childhood friendship. Hardine
Jr. was killed in a car accident, years before his parents died, according
to Dr. Lorch, who stayed in touch with the family.
I first contacted Dr. Lorch, now 90 and on the faculty of York University in
Toronto, three years ago. Oh, yes, he assured me, he remembered my
grandparents.
When I asked what had happened to him after he left the Hendrixes in his
apartment and accepted the position at Penn State, he referred me to the
front page of The New York Times of April 10, 1950, which reported that the
college's officials had declined to renew his appointment, explaining that
his decision to let the Hendrixes live in his apartment was "extreme,
illegal and immoral and damaging to the public relations of the college."
Dr. Lorch also told me that Albert
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/e/albert_einstei
n/index.html?inline=nyt-per> Einstein, whom he did not know personally, had
written to Penn State, "supporting the position I had taken and calling upon
them to reinstate me."
Dr. Lorch's political activism continued to hurt his career, he said. After
being repeatedly blacklisted by universities and having dynamite placed in
his garage, he moved to Canada.
During our conversation, he recalled that one Penn State official asked him
directly if he was a Communist. It was not an unexpected question. Many
members of the tenants committee were, in fact, Communists, and Councilman
Davis, a sponsor of the anti-discrimination bill, was the council's
Communist Party representative.
The Cold War was brewing during the Stuyvesant Town controversy, and tenants
faced more anti-Communist sentiment than blatant racism. Linking the
protesting tenants to Communism was a way to discredit them. Or, as Dr.
Lorch remembered an N.A.A.C.P. official commenting wryly, "It's bad enough
being black without being Red."
A World They Believed In
The eviction controversy had dragged out over two years. During that time
the City Council housing bill making discrimination illegal in Stuyvesant
Town was reintroduced. Although the bill passed, in February 1951,
Stuyvesant Town did not integrate quickly or completely. In the following
decades, potential black tenants did not necessarily feel welcome there.
MetLife declined to provide statistics on the number of black tenants
currently holding leases. Richard Shea, a spokesman for the Stuyvesant Town
property, said he had no comment on the matter.
"My perception," said Leo Stevens, an African-American who has lived in
Stuyvesant Town for 33 years and raised five children there, "is that
excluding celebrities and black immigrants or foreigners, the number of
'average, everyday African-Americans' has been relatively static over the
last 30 years. Our sparse number, spread out over this huge complex, makes
it difficult to be accurate."
Mr. Stevens, a retired health care executive, does not attribute this
situation to the kind of blatant discrimination practiced at Stuyvesant Town
by MetLife in the past. Until recently, the complex's mostly rent-stabilized
apartments experienced little turnover.
These days, the community is being transformed by MetLife's decision five
years ago to renovate newly vacated apartments into luxury units with
granite countertops and Kohler faucets, and rent them at market rates: about
$3,000 for a two-bedroom apartment.
"With rent stabilization, ethnic and class integration was possible if there
was ever the will," Mr. Stevens said. "But now I don't see any hope for
meaningful integration."
Most current Stuyvesant Town residents I've interviewed know almost nothing
of the complex's troubled racial history. The plaque my grandfather and I
photographed was removed from the grounds in the last year or so. As a
friend who lives in Stuyvesant Town dryly points out, a market-rate housing
complex can't advertise itself as a place for "families of moderate means."
My grandfather would shake his head.
When I walk around Stuyvesant Town these days, it is a place soaked in
imagination and memory. I wandered these paths with my grandparents 20 years
ago, and since then I have wandered them again in my mind, tracking elusive
fictional characters from my screenplay whom I have come to know as well as
I know my own family. Here are the cold metal monkey bars where I played as
a kid, where my 5-year-old mom and the real-life Hardine Jr. played. Here is
the daffodil-lined fountain where all of us tossed pennies and wishes.
Though my grandfather, a published author, was a fan of the ice-skating epic
I wrote at the age of 11, he did not live to see my more mature work. I
don't know what he and my grandmother would have thought of my dramatizing
the Stuyvesant Town story. My characters are not directly based on my
grandparents, although their memory and spirit were never far away as I
wrote.
Recently my family was viewing eight-millimeter movies my grandfather had
taken, waxing nostalgic about my mother's childhood. Suddenly the footage
shifted to a group of black and white children playing together on the
Stuyvesant Town monkey bars as their parents looked on.
On the movie screen, it's just a few minutes of flickering film showing
children in a playground, a glimpse of possibility. Then a card appears on
the screen, with the date, 10-52, and fat letters my grandfather had drawn
in red pen: "As It Should Be."
Amy Fox, a writer whose works include the script for the 2005 movie
"Heights," is writing a screenplay about the integration of Stuyvesant Town.
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