Two Black Civil Rights Leaders Say Racism Behind Housing Controversy

Two prominent Black civil rights leaders have named racism as the prime motivating factor behind the bitter protests by residents of the predominantly Jewish Forest Hills section of Queens against a controversial low income housing project there. Articles on the controversy by Bayard Rustin, executive director of the A. Philip Randolph Institute of New York and Vernon E. Jordan, executive director of the National Urban League, were published in the latest issue of the Amsterdam News, the leading Negro newspaper in the US.

According to Jordan, the objections raised by Forest Hills residents that schools and transit facilities in the neighborhood would become hopelessly congested as a result of the project intended to house 840 families were openly a ruse to conceal their racism of which northern liberals are ashamed. “When it became easy to see through these false Issues, the hidden code words of racism came into play. There would be ‘crime in the streets,’ they howled,” Jordan wrote.

Rustin contended that “Of all the significant civil rights laws enacted in the 1960s, open housing met with the least enthusiasm, even from liberals.” Now, he continued, “We see another chapter in the history of society’s resistance to open housing acted out on the streets of Forest Hills.”

THOSE WHO MADE IT MUST MOVE OVER

Noting that the spokesman for the Forest Hills community insist that they are not opposed to the possible influx of Blacks but to the large scale of the project and its impact on neighborhood schools, transit and other services. Rustin stated: “But one must ask himself whether these issues alone are sufficient to have provoked the intense passions which the protestors have daily displayed at the project site? Indeed, would the structure’s aesthetics and size have brought about nightly picketing in sub-freezing temperatures had the project been slated for occupancy by upper income families.”

Jordan noted, “What people in the suburbs or in upper middle income neighborhoods like Forest Hills have to learn is that they can’t run anymore; they can no longer turn their backs on the cities and on the country’s social problems. Those who have made it in our society are going to have to move over and give some breathing room to those who are still on the way up.”

The two articles were published side-by-side under an overall caption, “Forest Hills: New Segregationist Symbol.” The articles were illustrated with photographs of Black and white picketers who support the Forest Hills project. A Black picketer was shown carrying a sign which red, “Slumlord Birbach Get Job You Racist Dog.” Jerry Birbach; a Jew, heads the Forest Hills Residents Association which has been in the forefront of the fight to halt construction of the project.