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Long Island CORE (part 4)
Duck Rock
Most of LI CORE’s attention instead went to a duck
farm in Riverhead at the outer edge of Suffolk county. Black migrant workers
from the south had been living in houses that were described in the press
as shanties, under conditions and ‘comparable to the those of the
poorest Negroes in the South’. Fifteen people died in fires on the
Hollis Warner duck farm in the past five years. One house had caught fire
four times in just eighteen months. Two young girls had died that May.
Despite the many violations, town officials did nothing to hold the owner
of the property responsible.
LI CORE worked with Suffolk County CORE on what was dubbed Operation: Tinderbox. On June 20, in a move copied from Brooklyn CORE, thirty members of the two chapters dumped garbage at town hall in Riverhead. The garbage was made up of trash that had not been picked up from the farm for over a month. Lynch and special projects coordinator Michael Raskin were arrested with Suffolk County CORE chairman Henry G. Smith. Represented by Moe Tandler, they pled guilty, were fined $25, received a ten day suspended sentence and sixty days probation. The action succeeded in raising awareness and getting publicity. Regular collection started two days later.
Raskin, then a Hofstra University student, and David
Thompson became full time workers all summer at a field office set up
in a shack on the farm. Approximately three hundred people were living
on the farm, one hundred families in duck sheds. The campaign’s
goal was to get them out of there and into decent housing.
Suffolk county which owned the property said it was trying to relocate
people to make way for renewal of the area. LI CORE claimed residents
would only be put into similar housing but just off the property.
Suffolk county officials barred CORE from the property. A week after the trash dumping incident, Lynch and seventy others marched to the center of downtown Riverhead to protest town officials’ refusal to negotiate. Two CORE members, Harold Trent and Nicholas Freemont Smith, sat in at the main intersection of the street with six of the migrants and were arrested, later convicted and fined $25.
The next day, county officials showed up with a bulldozer and threatened to run over LI CORE’s shack office. After Lynch got into a screaming match with the assistant county attorney the bulldozer backed off. The Eastern Long Island branch of the NAACP ‘denounced and rejected the irresponsible actions of CORE’.
LI CORE helped residents form their own group, RACE, the Riverhead Action Committee for Equality. .A day after the announcement, Nick Smith and Raskin were arrested for trespassing. Raskin was arrested again the next day for the same thing, except this time he had with him an official from the State Commission on Human Rights who was there to investigate charges of discrimination.
Lynch went back three days later with several other members of LI and Suffolk County CORE and gave the executive director of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s antipoverty campaign a guided tour. ‘U.S. Aide Calls LI Slum Among Worst’ read the headline to an article in the next days’ edition of Newsday.
The day after that story came out, Lynch was arrested for trying to enter the property to give three local clergymen, including the monsignor of the LI Diocese, a tour. Lynch was charged with disorderly conduct and allegedly kicking a cop in the groin. The fact that the most serious charge of assaulting a policeman were dismissed suggest he never assaulted a cop in the first place. Lynch was convicted of disorderly conduct and fined $25, as were Raskin and Nick Smith. The convictions were successfully overturned by Moe Tandler.
To raise funds for Operation: Tinderbox, a concert was held featuring folk singer Pete Seeger and jazz artist Nina Simone . Another concert the next year featured the Duke Ellington Orchestra and singer Tony Bennett.
The resulting negative attention caused Suffolk county to step up efforts to relocate the migrants into nearby adequate housing. Several municipal and private groups also got involved in trying to relocate families, including the Suffolk Board of Supervisors, the Suffolk County Labor Department, the Salvation Army and the Catholic Diocese of Rockville Centre. Lynch continued to argue that those families that were being relocated were just being placed in other ghettos. After a month and a half of action, town officials finally gave in and negotiated.
While Raskin, Smith and Lynch were being arrested, the ‘long hot summer’ had officially started. Long Island was passed over. Within days, however, LI CORE engaged in another campaign which arguably exposed a White backlash. After using the CORE testing technique to establish Vigilant Associates, one of the largest realty concerns in LI, discriminated against Black home buyers, it filed a complaint with the State Commission on Human Rights. It also launched a demonstration against one of Vigilant’s branches.