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Long Island CORE
Black power part 4
The school uprisings lead to a number of meetings between LI CORE and various school superintendents to discuss and negotiate, another step towards Blacks eventually becoming members of the school local school boards and attaining real power in the schools. They also led to a White backlash from both White students and parents that led to several more incidents of racial violence.
John Howard Davis of Glen Cove CORE was arrested at Glen Cove H.S. as he expressed a need to go into the school to physically protect Black students from such incidents. The mayor of Glen Cove ‘blamed some of the unrest’ on a group of ‘local Blacks centered around CORE’. LI CORE in response to Davis’ arrest ‘declared political war’ on the mayor who was then campaigning for County Executive, Nassau’s highest ranking office. That same week, the Glen Cove school board created a non-White advisory committee to represent minority residents. While the committee gave them a voice, it had no real power.
It should be noted that there were a number of White students that supported these boycotts. A group of White students at Lawrence H.S. joined in the walkout while White students at Freeport HS formed the All-White Action for Racial Equality to work independently in support of the Black student’s demands.
Strong Island, Where I Got'em Wildin'
LI CORE also faced a backlash on other fronts. In a coordinated
attack, unlit Molotov cocktails were thrown at the homes of Mel Jackson
and a local NAACP leader who also lived in Hempsted that April. Cox stated
they were meant as a warning and believed ‘Black gangster elements’
were responsible. National CORE made clear it was ‘prepared to use
force to retaliate against attacks’ on LI CORE. Heads of other existing
CORE chapters like Harlem CORE were brought in for a show of strength
and fly the flag.
A week after the incident, a member of the Council of Concerned Grassroots People, a small group of approximately two dozen militants, was shot in the face. The violence was a result of the Council’s attempt to take control of the Employment Opportunity Corporation (EOC) which was run by members of the local NAACP and LI CORE such as Jackson, then president of the EOC. The situation was resolved before things got further out of hand.
LI CORE was still battling with Gruman over discrimination against Blacks in hiring and promotion. Claiming Gruman was stalling since the agreement made during LI CORE’s initial 1964 campaign, it began working with Big Brothers, an organization representing minority employees at Gruman. Some of the BLTS graduates were members of Big Brothers and other members of LI CORE such as Dan Hester worked at Gruman.
LI CORE’s suit against Gruman that fall claimed it violated the 1964 Civil Rights Act which requiring firms to be non-discriminatory. LI CORE’s work threatened Gruman’s government contracts. Another complaint later stated Black managers at Gruman threatened Black workers with lay offs if they cooperated with LI CORE in its suit.
The suit led to an investigation by the Suffolk County Human Relations Commission, the U.S. Department of Labor and the U.S. Defense Department which stated while it found no overt discrimination there was ‘room for improvement’. LI CORE may not have succeeded in achieving its immediate goals but it had an effect on local corporations such as Gruman in that it forced them to create programs to ‘correct racial imbalance in their employment’.
Move On uP
By mid 1970, Dan Hester had become chairman of LI CORE.
His vice chairmen were Larry Dais and Lorenzo Merritt. Other officers
included Elle Miller and Maggie Brown. The chapter focused on helping
to establish control of schools where there were a higher percentage of
Blacks, on hiring more Black teachers and helping Blacks become members
of local school boards.
Herman Washington from Roosevelt CORE had unsuccessfully run for his local school board twice. Suffolk County CORE’s Irwin Quintyne, who had previously charged the entire Amityville school board with racism, also ran for a school board seat in May 1970. Lamar Cox, however, was elected to Hofstra’s Board of Trustees in March 1970, the second Black person to do so.
LI CORE members had more success finding leading positions within the various anti-poverty agencies and social programs that came about as a direct result of CORE’s earlier work on Long Island. Westbury CORE chairman Harold Russell was the coordinator of Nassau’s four youth centers in Westbury, Hempsted, Roosevelt and Rockville Centre. His vice chairman James Sobers ran the one in Westbury, the MLK Youth Center.
Van Dyke Johnson, who had been an employment chairman for LI CORE and part of the BLTS, became a program manager for the Rural Housing and Economic Development Project in Riverhead. Also working in Riverhead was Clayton Chesson of Brookhaven CORE who had been a director and then chairman of the board at the Farm Workers Service Center. These were both efforts to continue helping the migrant workers LI CORE had defended back in 1964.
Perhaps most interesting was Harold Trent of LI CORE who in 1970 was chairman of the board and one of the founders, of Vanguard National Bank which was set up specifically to help minorities.