Topical Guide 577
Mark Dorset
Segregation, Racial
Where Do You Stop? Chapter 6:
I discovered to my surprise that the kids of Babbington came in a far broader range of shades of beige and brown than I had previously realized. I had known birches—and ashes and oaks—but now, in that instant when I came through the front door of the new building, the range was extended to include boys and girls of teak and mahogany and walnut. Here was a bunch of my contemporaries whom I’d never seen before. Where had these browner boys and girls been all this time? I think I realized—I think we all realized, at some level below words—what this surprising broadening meant: there was more to Babbington than we knew.
Roger De Chavez, “When will Long Island end housing segregation?” LI Advocate:
More than half a century after Jim Crow laws were abolished with passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, many Long Island communities remain segregated today because of systemic racism, experts say.
Dr. Alan J. Singer, author of “New York and Slavery: Time to Teach the Truth” and director of social studies education at Hofstra University, said, “African-American and now Latino families and Asian families have moved from the city out to the suburbs, but the tendency has been, as communities have become more diverse, they then re-segregate, as white families with children don’t move into those communities.”
Singer based his conclusions on research that he conducted for a piece for George Washington University’s History News Network, in which he discussed how certain Long Island villages still face racial segregation in schools.
Singer said he believes current Long Island segregation stems from real estate redlining practices that date back to the post-World War II era. Back then, bank lenders used red marks to outline communities of color that they intended to keep racially segregated.
Those patterns of segregation “were set in the ’50s and ’60s,” Singer emphasized, and they continue today.
Olivia Winslow, “Dividing Lines, Visible and Invisible,” Newsday
As one of the most segregated suburbs in America, Long Island is crisscrossed by racial barriers. Some, like the Meadowbrook [Parkway], are visible. Some are the invisible product of historical forces including zoning regulations, mortgage redlining, the boundaries of 124 school districts, housing prices, and racial steering and blockbusting — a tactic used by real estate agents to drive up sales, and commissions, by inducing blacks to move into a white neighborhood and then warning whites that property values were about to plummet. […]
The divides are taken for granted even in places where they dictate that black and Hispanic children will learn only with black and Hispanic children, and white children will learn only with white children, in elementary schools a mile apart. […]
Segregation was built into Long Island from its mid-20th century birth as an iconic American suburb. […]
The Great Migration of blacks from the South to the North seeking greater opportunity brought an influx of black people to the Island in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s, well before enactment of fair-housing laws in an era “when segregation was considered to be very legitimate,” Logan said.
Many left the Jim Crow South hoping to find a better life, only to find segregation in the North as well.
Perhaps most notoriously, William J. Levitt, visionary creator of affordable suburban tracts, marketed the prefabricated, concrete-slab homes that would become Levittown with restrictive covenants barring leasing and sales to blacks.
“The tenant agrees not to permit the premises to be used or occupied by any person other than members of the Caucasian race,” one such covenant read. “But the employment and maintenance of other than Caucasian domestic servants shall be permitted.”
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