Long Island CORE (part 5)

LI CORE vs. Vigilant Associates
During the first day, the group of two dozen LI CORE members were counter picketed by a group of about a dozen White teenagers. The next day the counter picketers were joined by a group of approximately forty adult spectators. Their comments to the CORE picketers, who were mostly White, included “Back to Africa” and “Niggers Stay Out of Hicksville”. The counter picketers signs stated, We Want White Rights”, “Save Our Neighborhood” and “Would You Want Your Daughter To Marry A Nigger?”.

On the third day, the counter picketers slightly outnumbered the CORE group and the crowd of spectators grew to approximately one hundred twenty five people. Police officers stepped in between members of the two groups of picketers when the White group marched into the middle of the CORE group to provoke a fight. At one point, the counter picketers surrounded the CORE group and yelled out to the spectators, ‘Let’s run ’em out of here’. About a half hour earlier, a bomb threat had been phoned into the Vigilant office which turned out to be fake. Lynch called off the picketing.

The next day the spectators grew to approximately a thousand people and the counter picketers got into a shoving match with the CORE group. The picketing went on for a week. Approximately twenty White Hicksville residents joined the CORE picket line. The demonstration only got worse. Referring to themselves as SPONGE, the Society for the Prevention of Niggers Getting Everything, and carrying signs such as “Keep Niggers Out, Support your Local KKK’ and “I think Niggers are great, everyone should own one’, three of the counter picketers were arrested for disorderly conduct.

Lynch called off the picketing once Vigilant Associates agreed to negotiate and comply with fair housing laws. The resulting agreement was seen as precedent setting in that it was the first time a LI real estate broker had agreed to take action on their own against housing discrimination.

SPONGE also demonstrated against CORE at the 1965 World’s Fair. Its leader was arrested in 1966 for possession of a stolen shotgun and jewelry.

New Directions in Housing
Lynch and LI CORE at first resisted CORE’s new directive to switch from protesting to community organizing in 1965. Picketing was already going on against an Arnold Constable department store in Hempstead because the store’s parent body, the Constable Corporation, would not allow the chapter to rent a nearby a storefront it owned. A buy in was done simultaneously at a Manhasset store that included paying for items with pennies, ordering items COD without accepting delivery, shopping extensively without buying anything, leaving items at the counter.

After weeks of testing, picketing and filing a complaint with the State Commission on Human Rights against the Hampshire House apartments in Hempsted, LI CORE was also able to obtain for a Black woman who was at first denied an even better apartment for approximately the same price. During the protests, five members were arrested for sitting in: Joyce Insolia, Gloria Weinnberg, Hope Evans, Maynard Brown, Samuel Anderson. All charges were later dropped.

LI CORE did eventually lose emphasis on demonstrations and focused on a 4 point program: politics, employment, housing and education. Its goals included more Black teachers in local schools, better housing in the ghetto and running its own candidates for town and village election. The focus was on assisting local people in organizing themselves and supporting actions without necessarily being in charge of the campaign.

In February in Long Island’s first rent strike, LI CORE worked with the tenants association of Park Lane apartments in Hempsted to protest a rent increase when basic promises for improvements not been met. Tenants refused to pay the added increase, only the basic rent. There was a march, a rally, and mayoral and political candidates were invited down for a tour of the building. The owners tried to evict the tenant association leaders and the partial rent strike expanded to a full rent strike. Both sides settled in June when owners made a concrete agreement to fix the apartments.

In Rockville Centre, conditions were similar to the duck farm in Riverhead. Blacks were living in ‘dilapidated houses under near primitive conditions’ in an area supposed to be under renewal. LI CORE again claimed the plan was really ‘Negro removal’ and the Nassau Human Rights Commission agreed. Tenants wanted to be guaranteed inclusion in the urban renewal housing that was to be put up.

LI CORE picketed with the local NAACP but mostly provided support for the tenants. In June, it set up a field office with thirty members in Rockville Center to concentrate the chapter’s efforts for that summer. LI CORE had been originally invited there by the tenants association which included such chapter members like Lunetta L. Miller (Black) and Joseph Kern. Both were arrested at one of the demonstrations and found guilty of disorderly conduct. Miller was arrested again the next year for accepting welfare money even though she had a job. Her work, though, was as a domestic servant. According to Newsday, one out of every three Black women in Rockville Centre worked as domestic servants for nearby Whites.

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