Integration Then & Now

Executive Director Nancy Gagnier gave the presentation at the 2011 Report to the Community:

Welcome! We’re celebrating 15 years.  Tonight you will hear from our volunteer committees about what they’ve been working on and what they are planning for the future in support of our mission to be a stably integrated and truly inclusive community and a model for other communities.  Before they get to that, I want to give you some sense of how long and in what ways these towns have been committed to integration and inclusion.

I suspect affirmative community organizing predates even the early 1960’s in Maplewood and South Orange, but I’m going to begin there.  When I first began as ED, I got a call from a man named Joe Kruskal who wanted to share his folder of information.  He was in his 80’s and wanted to be sure that someone had a record of the work done beginning in 1963 on behalf of Fair Housing.  In 1963 a large group of residents formed the Fair Housing Council of Maplewood and South Orange.  In their literature they stated “We believe that discrimination in selling or renting homes and apartments because of race, religion or national origin is contrary to religious, moral and democratic principles, that no one should be denied the opportunity to dwell anywhere in the community because of race, religion, or nationality, and that the long-range interests of our community will be best served by fair and open housing.” 

At one point, they got nearly 2,000 people to sign on to this pledge and they boldly put all the names in the newspaper.  Joe told me that it wasn’t an easy thing to do—not everyone in town liked this idea and there was some anger expressed toward those who signed the pledge.  Nonetheless, our community was on record as a place that was working at being welcoming to all people.  Their informational pamphlet addressed the same fears held by people over 30 years later: If I sell or rent to a minority family, will my property values go down?  Will my neighbors hate me? Will there be unruly demonstrations?  They not only appealed to people’s sense of right, they appealed to their economic sense with factual assessments about the likelihood of property values remaining strong: they quoted a study by Henry R. Luce that showed that in 85% of cases, values rose or remained stable. 

Beyond getting the word out about the importance and rightness of fair housing, the Council had working committees: Education and Research; Real Estate; Neighborhood Relations; Government & Civic Liaisons; Religious Liaisons; Publicity.

To those of you who know the Coalition, this is all starting to sound familiar.  They did all that back then?  Yes.  And we’re still doing it today.  The question is: Why?

The Fair Housing Council later added “and Equal Opportunities Council” to its name, merged with a similar council in Millburn/Short Hills, and expanded its outreach to Newark in an attempt to highlight the connection between the social, economic and political health of Newark and the well-being of its suburbs.  By 1970, the group was looking into setting up a loan fund for prospective home-buyers, land use and Municipal construction issues, and building and supporting community centers in Newark.

These were laudable social action efforts.  But the fact is that the number of families of color living in our suburbs during this period was very, very small.  It was also the case that homebuyers moved to relatively homogeneous neighborhoods: Jews lived here, White Protestants there, working class Italian and Polish families, somewhere else. 

I’m going to jump ahead to the 1980’s.  There was an active SO Community Relations Committee and a group in Maplewood called Maplewood Friends.  In 1983 those groups, working with the Clergy Association, PTAs, town leaders, Seton Hall, the National Conference of Christians and Jews, and some neighborhood associations, convened to deal with bias issues that were cropping up in rather overt ways—graffiti, property damage, racial slurs, anti-Semitism.  Out of this grew more neighborhood associations, efforts to increase minority representation in police and fire departments, efforts to get town leaders to be vocal about the problems, and ultimately the hope was to create a coalition of all these groups working together.

Now jump to the mid 1990’s.  The towns witness swift demographic change—more people of color move here than ever before.  And, just like in the 1960’s, fears about property values and stability arise. Out of these concerns, the Racial Balance Task Force was convened in 1996 to “foster community pride and goodwill”… and “to promote enhanced and sustained racial balance in the community’s living patterns and housing market…”  This is the group that ultimately became the Community Coalition on Race with its mission of intentional integration as the means to build a racially integrated community with strong property values, good schools, and a high quality community life for all residents.

I asked earlier, why are we still doing this?  NJ is the 3^rd, 4^th, or 5^th (depending on the source) most segregated state in the country.   Our towns are anomalies—integrated suburbs in a racially segregated region.  We are suburbs of an urban center that is majority African American.  We have suburban neighbors that are majority white.  And, Hispanic and Asian populations continue to grow in Essex County and across the state.  It takes focus and work to improve what we have here—we can see that from the nearly 50 years of work it has taken to get us here.  And, we can’t do it in splendid isolation from our neighbors.  In addition to nurturing our stably integrated suburb, we need to consider one of the main social action efforts of that nearly 50 year-old Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity Council: develop relationships with surrounding communities, engage our urban and suburban neighbors in dialogue about the issues that concern us all—jobs, good schools, infrastructures, safety, property values, cross-cultural understanding, and more.

And now I turn to the ways in which we have been and will continue to nurture integration.  It all comes from volunteer committee work.  I want to introduce the Coalition’s Program Director Audrey Rowe who will lead us into the ‘what are we doing now’ portion of the report.