Jackson, M. I. (2006). Harlem’s Rent Strike and Rat War: Representation, Housing Access and Tenant Resistance in New York, 1958-1964. American Studies, 47(1), 53-79. https://doi.org/10.1353/amsj.v47i1.2942
by Mandi Isaacs Jackson
Gray unmistakably connected tenant activism to public housing discrimination by brandishing the symbol of tenement squalor to press the governor on issues of housing policy. Only The Amsterdam News, the city's largest circulation black newspaper, reported this particular motive behind the "Rats to Rockefeller" campaign, linking Harlem's access to public housing and the tenant movement blossoming in the slums. Governor Rockefeller all but ignored both the rent strike and the 52 rats (not 2000, he claimed) he received in the mail. In a gesture of what Michael Lipsky called "symbolic transfer," the governor sent one of the rubber rats back to Mayor Wagner. Back home in New York City, 13,000 rent strikers took to City Hall on "Rat Marches" of their own, wearing rubber rats around their necks or pinned to their lapels.
Those who waged war against the slumlords between 1958 and 1964 directed their protest at city agencies as well as property owners. Many lived in forgotten buildings, long abandoned by slumlords and neglected by the city. Through the strike, slum dwellers rendered themselves visible in a city that had walled them into a sometimes feared, and more often ignored ghetto. Although they struck against rats and neglect, their larger battle was against this invisibility, which they could only overcome by thrusting dead rats in front of cameras and courtrooms. That is why Gray embraced every opportunity to remind the public of the rat problem. He told the New Yorker in a 1964 interview, "You ought to talk to someone who's been bitten by a rat. The tenants are like rats now. Once the tenants feel their power, they stop running. They're not afraid anymore." Through the image of the rat, the rent strikers had finally achieved visibility.
As December 1964 approached, the CCH continued its efforts to turn the flickering rent strike into a political movement, toying with plans to run a can didate for mayor or city council. They cranked out handbills and press releases on housing-related issues that a Herald Tribune reporter called "militant in tone and arrantly racist." The word "militant" had become a buzzword in relation to any black mobilization for reform, especially in Harlem in the wake of 1964's violent rioting. Although the summer's unrest was depicted in the fiery hues of warfare and revolt in contrast to the orderly courtroom grays, blacks, and whites of the rent strike, both grew out of frustration with the same struggle for voice and visibility.
As Harlem tenants continued their weakening struggle to improve housing conditions, Roger Kahn of the Saturday Evening Post exploited a growing fear of black revolution when he warned "we had better look hard at Harlem which, for 50 years, has been looking hard at us." Kahn called Harlem an "alien, ugly, frightening place," where the swelling masses "buy barely edible chicken backs at 10 cents a pound, borrow friends' children to fool welfare inspectors into increasing relief checks, mug strangers in order to buy narcotics, beat rats away from cribs." The situation was "even worse than most whites suspected," Kahn proclaimed, and it went on to outline three reasons for the deplorable condi tions. The first was drugs, which "turned idlers into muggers." Second was the dreaded "Black Revolution" that drove away "deference" and propelled the ghetto further into a state of despair. The final reason, like the previous two, placed the responsibility for blight on the shoulders of the people who were forced to live in it. A degenerate population of "impoverished semi-literates," Kahn said, had taken over Harlem. It seemed Harlem's failings, illuminated by tenant unrest, were primarily because it was, to quote Kahn's words to his white, middle-class readership, "endlessly, overwhelmingly black."
Back in March of 1963, as Harlem tenants emerged from a cold winter and organized in church basements, Sam Castan of Look magazine told his similarly white and middle-class readership that Harlem was a "sour chunk of urban rot" where New York sticks people it "doesn't want to see." Most of the residents, Castan explained, were black or Hispanic, and most were on welfare—a "payment to stay out of sight." In January of 1964, former Manhattan Borough President Hulan Jack told a crowd of tenant organizers that "the people who live in New York City never come to Harlem. When they pass on the train through 125th Street and Park Avenue on their way to Connecticut," he declared, "they see the houses they built to keep you there." "Often you cannot tell from the outside whether a building is abandoned or inhabited," reported Kahn in the Saturday Evening Post s feature on "Harlem: The Black Jungle," suggesting the very literal invisibility of Harlem's slum dwellers.
The Community Council on Housing's 1964 "Rats to Rockefeller" cam paign and their subsequent plans for a "Rat March to Albany" directly responded to that frustrating invisibility. In late January, at a "conference on housing," CCH kicked off the sale of four-inch rubber rats, at 25 cents apiece, to its mem bers and other tenants and activists involved in the rent strike. Each rat was then stuffed in an envelope with a letter from a Harlem tenant that read, "There are rats (see enclosed), faulty plumbing, unsafe wiring, no hot water, no janitorial services, which are serious threats to the health of me and my family." At the conference, as tenants filled out their "rat letters" and shoved the rodents into envelopes, community leaders and clergy spoke of the need for more state and federal support for public housing. Father Browne, a Roman Catholic Priest, told the crowd that they must "fight the enemies of public housing—Southern senators, rednecks . . . and the real estate lobby, and wake up the friends of public housing who have fallen asleep!" Gray called on tenants to mail more than 2000 of the rubber rats directly to the Governor's mansion to demand more state public housing to replace the "substandard dwellings" in which they were forced to live.
The sale of the rubber rats would also fund a "Rat March on Albany" in the coming months. Planned in coordination with a labor-organized "$1.50 an hour Minimum Wage" march, the rent strikers called on other tenant activist groups to join them in Albany on March 10 to "remind Governor Rockefeller that Cen tral Harlem and other areas like it are part of the State of New York." As March 10 drew closer, Gray proclaimed, "We cannot get the governor to come down personally and look at housing conditions of rent strikers so we shall go to see him."
The day before the protest, the New York Times reported that more than 5000 people were expected to march on Albany. A chartered 7am train would carry 700 demonstrators from Grand Central Terminal to Albany, and rent strike organizations from throughout the city chartered 22 buses to shuttle tenants to the march. Along with minimum wage and housing demands, many marched for school desegregation and increased funding for education.68 The group hoped to bring their demands directly to Rockefeller, himself, in a 10am meeting which would include march leaders A. Philip Randolph of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, James Farmer of CORE, and Jesse Gray, representing the rent strikers. Gray's demand was "a state law legalizing rent strikes" and "appro priations for integrated housing for working people."
Despite freezing rain, snow, and slush, and despite weather delays on all of the chartered train cars and buses, more than 3000 protesters crowded the streets on March 10, 1964. The crowds were optimistic and energized despite the weather, but it seemed the meeting with the governor resulted in nothing but, in the words of one CORE organizer, "what we've always gotten—sympathy." At a press conference following the march, A. Philip Randolph told the press, "We do not believe that the governor was fully aware of the degree of suffering the Negro and Puerto Rican people are enduring . . . and I don't believe we were able to impress the governor with the emergency nature of this problem." In a frighteningly prescient statement, Norman Hill of CORE told the New York Times, "Only if we light fires all over the state, only if we disrupt and dislocate in a creative way, will we get what we want."
By October, as the weather grew colder and rent strike fury faded despite the persistence and intensification of the problems that had spurred it, Gray asked President Johnson to declare Harlem a disaster area. By doing so, the city would receive federal anti-poverty money and Red Cross aid for heating oil, blankets, and hot water.
Public imagination created a Harlem that was simultaneously invisible and horrifically vivid. The "urban wasteland" that the New York State Temporary State Housing Rent Commission feared, in 1960, would engulf the 35-block community of Morningside Heights, was defined by demography rather than geography. Those who lived in the slums were both victim and perpetrator in the city's decay. "Less than half the households," they found, "conform to the image of the normal household—a married couple (with or without children) in exclusive possession of their house or apartment."The downfall of the city, the commission feared, would be these "abnormal" households.
The landlords who found themselves in courtrooms and headlines during the rent strike blamed their tenants for the condition of tenement buildings and rat infestations. They often said tenants insisted on throwing trash out the win dows, refused to use trash cans instead of bags, and persisted in defacing the properties with graffiti or, in one case, carving their names into the wood with screwdrivers. Others, like Samuel Hawkins who managed rent-striking build ings at 16 and 18 E. 117th Street, claimed repairs and improvements were im possible because "drug addicts" ripped radiators out of the walls, stole pipes and faucets, and dismantled plumbing systems to sell for loose parts. These drug vandals, he claimed, scared off the supers and kept him from meeting health and building codes. He also noted that tenants were responsible for all of the "rubbish" inviting rat infestations. Tenants did often have to resort to toss ing their trash out the window—a practice that became known as "air mail"— because there was no trash collection or incineration. They were forced to use trash bags rather than cans because cans were not provided for them, and were considerably more expensive than bags. Drug addicts, Hawkins claimed, had made his buildings places where "police, fire inspectors, and repairmen were afraid to enter without escort," underscoring the isolation of the neighborhood, and begging the question of who might be expected to escort the police.
"Harlem's heatless, sub-human tenements," as described by the New York Post in January of 1964 during the height of the rent strike, were, in fact, the homes of millions of tenants. But as the rat came to represent the problems of the ghetto, the mainstream white press embraced the rodent as a metaphor for those who lived there. A 1964 New York Times Magazine feature by Fred Powledge entitled "One Hundred Million Rats Against Us" mused, "There is something about a rat that gives man an uncontrollable desire to kill him." The article's images and language in characterizing the city's vermin bear shocking resemblance to the manner in which similar journalistic endeavors portrayed the residents of Harlem, themselves—particularly families on welfare. Images of adamant rent strikers staging protests with rubber rats on their lapels, and photographs of tenants on courtroom steps dangling dead vermin by the tail shared newsstands with the New York Times in October of 1964 when Powledge wrote that New York's rats "will go anywhere, do anything, in order to get the three-quarters of an ounce of food . . . that he needs to make it from one day to the next, over the course of his lifetime, which is one year." "The average female rat," Powledge explained, "will wean about 29 babies and send them out into the world. She will also eat them if they are caught in a trap and she can find no other food."
This echoed Look magazine's expose on welfare families from the previ ous year, written by Julius Horowitz, a consultant on public welfare to the New York State Senate Majority Leader. Horowitz fixated on both the sheer multi plicity of children and the desperation with which mothers attempted to cheat welfare agents in order to get their hands on more than the 47 cents allotted each day for food. In Horowitz's welfare story the mother of the pregnant 14- year-old was, herself, pregnant with her sixteenth child. Both mother and daughter lived with four other children in a two-room apartment. In Horowitz's words, "Every girl in Mr. Sheck's building over the age of 13 was pregnant, or had delivered a baby, or was imminently in the process of initiation." The article, like many of its contemporaries in the white, mainstream press, portrayed Harlem residents as breeders and desperate victims. Horowitz further characterized welfare families in nonhuman terms when he described his encounter with an other 17-year-old mother in the building as he tried to explain some of the wel fare procedures to her. "She probably understood as many [words] as a well trained cocker spaniel," he wrote. Roger Kahn's Saturday Evening Post ex pose on Harlem's "black jungle" also perpetuated the themes of terrifying mul tiplicity and subhuman behavior in its description of a "street some 300 yards long inhabited by 4500 people" where they "make love in rooms without shades."
In his 1964 New York Times Magazine piece on rats, Powledge suggested that the four-legged and two-legged "vermin" impose similar drains on city re sources, saying that each of the city's 100 million rats eats three pounds of food a year, contaminates another $6 worth and destroys at least a dollar of property. This consumption of public resources harkens back to Look's shocking disclosure in 1963 that 360,000 New Yorkers were on public assistance, including 200,000 children. Each rat, Powledge claimed, dropped 25 to 150 pellets of "excrement" every day, 10 to 20 cubic centimeters of urine, and shed its hair all over the city. Similarly revolting descriptions of ghetto filth were commonplace in the white press, delineating numbers of pounds of trash tossed from win dows, the unsanitary conditions of bathrooms, or the offensive odor of the apartment buildings.
Powledge explained in his rat feature that a female tenant—a human—had been given a "brief lecture in sanitation" after a health official "found several scraps of food on the floor," like so many rat droppings. This "lecture" was part of a wider initiative to "educate" the urban poor about how to fend of rats by keeping a clean home. In fact, it was the responsibility of the landlord or the city to patch up rat holes and provide effective means of trash disposal.
The New York Times Magazine made its most explicit connection between rats and slum dwellers when Powledge explained, "the rat problem's really a human problem. You could put poison all over the place and still if you had a dirty apartment, you'd have rats." In fact, the city did put poison all over the place. The "anticoagulant poison" that the city's extermination teams sprinkled liberally throughout tenement apartments killed the rats by causing internal bleed
ing. The magazine matter-of-factly reported that the substance caused nausea, vomiting, and cramps in humans. The city exterminators scooped the substance into tiny cardboard boxes and placed them behind tenement sinks and refrigera tors, with little concern, it would seem, for contact with dishes, food, or children.
Where did these hundred million rats that were taking over the city and depleting its resources come from? Again suggesting that the rats in question were of the two- and not the four-legged variety, Powledge describes an infesta tion of the Jefferson Memorial caused when a large number of rats were "left homeless" by demolition for nearby renewal projects. Attempting a broader cultural analysis of "the rat" in American society, he inserted a characterization of the "friendly white rat," explaining "he alone is respected." "Some of your best friends are rats," proclaimed an ad for the American Cancer Society in the same issue of the magazine, stating that these "white and cuddly" rats deserved respect because they were useful as lab animals. In the context of the rat piece, it is not lost on the reader that they are also useful and deserving of respect because they are white.83 Also not lost on the reading audience was that New York's feared four-legged rats, like the families of two-legged threats for which they served as a thinly veiled metaphor, were naturally suited for the city's slums.
Conclusion
Living conditions in the crowded tenements, where humans were forced to live like vermin, perpetuated the stereotypes of the city's low-income, nonwhite population.84 These conditions could only be improved by increasing the avail ability of low-income housing, but racially motivated political opposition, fu eled in large part by the mainstream press' frightening and repulsive portrayal of the black community, stymied public housing programs. In March of 1963, as rent strikers began regular Wednesday night meetings in church basements and tenement boiler rooms to enforce their demand more public housing, the Congressional record reprinted an article by Stephen H. Marcus called "Crime in New York City's Public Housing." The article cited a "confidential report" in its characterization of public housing tenants as "degenerates and criminals," and fed on existing stereotypes of housing projects in order to undermine at tempts at gaining congressional support for more low-income public housing. Marcus asserted that crime rates in public housing were especially high, and that any funds towards the construction of more low-income units was money thrown into an irreparable abyss.
Marcus, a 19-year-old college sophomore, subsequently fielded much criti cism from both NYCHA chairman William Reid and Jack Stanley of the Brooklyn Eagle}5 The "confidential report" Marcus referenced, both men pointed out, was nothing more than the annual report from the director of NYCHA man agement. Its content, which was widely distributed, served only to disprove Marcus' own claims. Reid revealed that Marcus had neither contacted him nor visited the NYCHA offices or any NYCHA housing development. In fact, the records of the New York City Police Department showed that the arrest rate for NYCHA tenants was significantly lower than the rates for the city as a whole. According to 1961 records, NYCHA arrest rates were 3.8 per thousand, compared
to citywide rates of 6.3 per thousand. Juvenile delinquency and homicide rates were also lower in public housing than in surrounding neighborhoods. NYCHA chairman William Reid pointed out the political motivations be hind reprinting the Marcus article, most of which was a "rehashing" of "sensa tional stories" from the popular press depicting (and inflating) violent events. "A favorite device of those who oppose public housing," Reid explained, "is to assign to it responsibility for curing all the ills of our society and then berate it for failing to do so." The Brooklyn Eagle’s Jack Stanley suggested that Marcus needed to take a few courses in ethics and statistics before graduating from college. "We must assume Mr. Marcus believes it is preferable to have the un derprivileged citizens of our country continue to live in ramshackle, rat-infested, fire-trap, slum buildings that lack the fundamental amenities for decent living," wrote Stanley, "than to afford them an opportunity to live in public housing."88 Those ramshackle, rat-infested firetraps were the homes of the rent strikers, many of whom, contrary to public and historical perception, were working class black families. Denied an opportunity to live in public housing while priced out of and barred from the private market, their movement became as combus tible as the firetraps in which they were forced to live.
Nonetheless, the NYCHA persisted in its efforts to whiten public housing even as the need to house nonwhite families increased. These strategies did not go unnoticed by the black press. An examination of the black press during the NYCHA's "Open Occupancy" effort to bar black applicants from admission into public housing suggests that the authority was simultaneously doing all it could to rid the projects of the black tenants it already had. Between 1959, when the "Open Occupancy" program began, and into the early sixties, evictions of black tenants were common, and often no reason was given other than the label of "undesirable." This word seems to have become a crafty euphe mism for "black." Charles Taylor, a 24-year-old steelworker, lived in Brooklyn's Brownville Homes for more than four years with his wife and two young chil dren. A representative from his employer, Newark Steel Drum Company, called him a "steady, quiet, hard-working man who had never caused them any trouble and seldom missed being at work." The NYCHA called him an "undesirable tenant" and handed him eviction papers. "No one wants children, and we can't find a home," his young wife told the New York Amsterdam News in January of 1959, three months after the tenants review board—composed entirely of NYCHA representatives—ruled to evict the family of four.
Taylor's case was one of many chronicled in the black press between 1957 and the start of the rent strike in 1964 in which the City Housing Authority labeled black tenants "undesirable" and slid through eviction procedures, kept in check only by the protests of tenant advocacy groups.90 Occasionally, as in the case of the Taylor family, widespread press exposure led to public outcries and, buttressed by the support of civil rights organizations and community leaders, the NYCHA decisions were reversed. The Lower Harlem Tenants Council, the organizational backbone of the Harlem rent strike, often challenged NYCHA eviction procedures, laying the groundwork for subsequent organizing efforts within public housing for a "tenant bill of rights." As early as 1961, the ten ants' council at the Frederick Douglass Houses, a low-income project on the Upper West Side, started a petition drive to support a bill curbing NYCHA eviction powers. At that time no court review was necessary for an eviction, allowing the Housing Authority to evict at will. While section 1410 of the Civil Practice Act guaranteed New York residents the right to a hearing if evicted by a landlord, public housing tenants like Mr. Taylor had no avenue of redress, and the housing authority didn't even have to define "undesirable," much less prove that evicted tenants were.
When hundreds packed Mt. Cavalry Baptist Church on the evening of Janu ary 25,1960 for a "general mass protest rally" celebrating the twenty-first anni versary of the Harlem Tenants League, tenant selection in public housing took center stage. "Thousands of black tenants have been turned away as ineligible," reported the New York Amsterdam News in its announcement for the event.94 These were the same Harlem tenants who mobilized for the rent strike a few years later. They took up public housing access as a central issue, exposing the discriminatory tendencies of the NYCHA more than six months before its se cret program was revealed, and indicating the extent to which public housing denial sparked their mobilization.
Packed churches, crowded sidewalk protests, and courthouse steps crammed with protesters all reflect one difficult dimension of recording and remember ing community movements like the one surrounding the rent strike. As a social movement—and not merely a "strike"—it involved far more people than those who were actually in a financial, social, and emotional position to withhold rent. To do so effectively required the support of neighbors and family, and assumed a situation in which a landlord was taking an interest in the collection of said rent. In many buildings this was not the case. But all who joined in the rallies, attended the meetings, and held signs or donned rubber rats on the steps of the courthouse were participants in the rent strike, along with those who defended their actions in court.
History, like the contemporary media coverage and municipal response, frames the rent strike as an isolated slum struggle, effectively removing it from national housing desegregation discourse. However, strikers remained in those unlivable buildings largely because of the very discriminatory practices that
both excluded them from public housing and kept livable private rentals out of reach. Past examinations of the rent strike have been limited by their tendency to rely predominantly or solely on representations in the white press. An exami nation of mainstream black press coverage reveals that, in comparison, the main stream white press significantly downplayed both the broader civil rights aims of the strike and essential issues of housing access in favor of stories about the physical deterioration of tenement buildings. Such an examination also reveals the mainstream white press' tendency to favorably depict NYCHA initiatives and downplay the large-scale low-income housing shortage that excluded so many families from safe, affordable housing. While the rent strike, as a tactic, is conventionally viewed as an assertion of consumer power—the withholding of money for services like repairs and exterminations—the Harlem rent strike movement was, in many respects, a contestation over urban space in the wake of decades of urban renewal. Cultural analysis can be a slippery venture, and connecting elements of representation to the events, decisions, and actions that constitute "history" of ten feels like a trapeze act to both historian and reader. But the conceptual iso lation and dehumanization of Harlem by the white press paved the way for the "War on Rats" as an acceptable policy solution for the low-income housing dilemma. Rather than attack issues of housing access, unequal wages and affordability, and discriminatory practices in tenant selection, the characteriza tion of Harlem and its nonwhite residents as "alien" or as human "vermin" natu rally suited for victimization and squalor, allowed rats, chipped paint, and slum lords to become the enemy. In fact, structurally imbedded and mass-circulated racism was to blame.
The New York Times, Saturday Evening Post, Look, New York Post and Herald Tribune, characterized Harlem as "a blight," "a cancer," "a jungle," or "a wasteland." For those for whom the white press' slum stories served as the only window to Harlem life, the population appeared to be dominated by young, unemployed welfare mothers of six to eight hungry, lice-infested, unbathed, uncontrollable children whose father was in jail, on drugs, or—in the case of one 14-year-old mother profiled in a March 1963 issue of Look magazine— unknown other than the fact that he was the "super's helper" who lived in the building's basement.95 The Harlem of the black press—specifically the New York Amsterdam News, New York's largest circulation black newspaper, and Ebony magazine, a national black publication—was far more empowered, po litical, multi-layered, and engaged in a national struggle for basic freedoms and full citizenship. Moreover, these sources reveal that Harlem's average tenant
victim-activists who waged the rent strike were less often welfare mothers of six or seven and more often hard-working families whose path to middle-class life was blockaded by a racist wage and housing structure.
Through the manipulation of the rat symbol as public face of both rent strike and rent striker, the city had a symbolic displacement for racist policy, and the middle-class, white, reading public had a symbolic displacement for racist sentiments towards black welfare mothers. For both parties, discussions about people masqueraded as discussions about vermin and chipping paint. At the same time, the rent strikers, themselves, embraced the rat symbol as a convenient means of obtaining a highly visible—and visual—voice. Rat images garnered front-page coverage, horrified middle-class Ameri cans, and stirred local politicians.96 By 1963 when the image of an enormous dead rat dangling by the tail from the fingers of an enraged striking tenant had become permanently engraved on the front pages and mental canvases of hous ing discourse, the struggle for better housing conditions was not new. This was not the beginning, but rather a breaking point at which angry tenants, frustrated with lack of access to public housing and lack of low-income unit availability, set their sights on improving the livability of the structures to which they had been restricted. However, in the mainstream press, and in the halls of city gov ernment, the rent strike was represented on strictly slumlord-versus-tenant terms. This absolved the city of any responsibility to address larger housing access issues.
The NYCHA's discriminatory "Open Occupancy" program points to the difficulties and complexities of integration, or more accurately, the slow and arduous steps to correcting the inequalities caused by structural racism. Run ning concurrently with the "Open Housing" movement, which sought equality in the private housing market, the NYCHA opted for what seems like a particu larly disingenuous name choice. The agency saw a growing black population, rather than racist housing and wage structures, as the root of the city's low income housing shortage. Today, affordable housing remains scarce, wages re main unequal, and the walls erected by racism in the nation's largest northern metropolis remain intact.
More than forty years after the first tenants organized to withhold rent in November of 1963, many of the strikers are living somewhere in New York, walking epilogues to this incomplete story. My difficulty in locating former rent strikers reflects the very nature of their struggle. They fought for safe, secure, permanent housing, and despite legal victories and grassroots organizing, they ultimately lost. Writing of the strike's aftermath just six years after it disappeared from the headlines, Michael Lipsky reported that despite subsequent reforms in tenant law, Harlem's striking tenants were left right where they started. "Although the ceiling has been fixed and the kitchen faucet no longer comes off in their hands," he wrote, "they continue to live in the same apartments in the same buildings on the same streets."
Many of these tenants leave a broken trail, mired in evictions, disconnections, and dislocations, and muted by the confidentiality policies of the New York City Housing Authority. They also leave a network of tenant organizing that persists to this day, and from which others have since benefited. The tenant laws, advocacy groups, and legal aid services are as crucial today as they were for the rent strikers of the 1960s. Perhaps today these resources are even more important because that same persistent segregation masquerades as a problem for the history books, rather than a problem for the headlines.
Notes
1. Newsweek, January 13, 1964, 24-25.
2. New York Amsterdam News, January 4, 1964.
3. Interview with Bruce Gould, rent strike attorney, June 10, 2002. Additionally, Gould asserts, their court victories led to dramatic reforms in landlord and tenant law and public atten tion to code enforcement, while carving a new role for the city in addressing housing neglect in privately-owned buildings.
4. Juliet Z. Saltman, Open Housing as a Social Movement. (Lexington, MA: Heath Lex ington Books, 1971). Her extensive timeline skips directly from the summer 1962 demonstra tions at Harlem construction sites against discrimination in trade unions to Harlem protests against the opening of the Worlds' Fair in spring of 1964. Leonard Freedman, Public Housing: The Politics of Poverty (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1969); Michael Lipsky, Protest in City Politics: Rent Strikes, Housing, and the Power of the Poor (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1970); Ronald Lawson, The Tenant Movement in New York City, 1904-1984 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1986), Chrisopher Mele, Selling the Lower East Side: Culture, Real Estate, and Resistance in New York City (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000); August Meier and Elliot Rudwick, CORE: A Study in the Civil Rights Movement 1942-1968 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973).
5. See Daniel Jay Baum, Toward A Free Housing Movement (Coral Gabels, FL: Univer sity of Miami Press, 1971 ), Anders Corr, No Trespassing: Squatting, Rent Strikes, and Land Struggles Worldwide (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 1999), Freedman, Leonard, Public Housing, Lawson, The Tenant Movement.
6. New York Amsterdam News, February 1, 1964, 4.
7. New York State, Reports of the Task Force on Middle-Income Housing, 1959, 7. 8. Mele, Selling the Lower East Side, 132.
9. City-Wide Council for Better Housing, New York City's Slum Clearance Committee: A Critical Study (New York: 1957), 2.
10. City-Wide Council for Better Housing, New York City's Slum Clearance, 9. 11. New York Times, February 10, 1960, 1.
12. New York Times, March 5, 1960, 40.
13. New York Times, December 11, 1960, 1. Even the testimony of the city's "slumlords" shows the appalling injustices renewal and the low-income housing crunch imposed upon its victims. Slumlord "Mr. Sheck" (a pseudonym, according to the reporter) told Look magazine that "there's no place else to put the 150 babies" he had "urinating" in his halls" "I run a pigsty for the city of New York," he said. "We're partners." Mr. Sheck housed welfare families who had no place else to go. He, and others like him, Charged exorbitant rents for crowded, squalid apart ments and the welfare department paid the bill. (Look, March 26, 1963, 77). 14. New York Amsterdam News, January 23, 1960, 3.
15. New York Times, April 26, 1961. Page unknown—Metropolitan Council on Housing clipping file, Tamiment Library, New York University.
16. The mother of six would be among the hundreds who demonstrated outside the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development regional offices on Broadway on April 11, 1968. The MCH-organized protest addressed the lack of federal funding for low-rent public housing. Evidently, the pangs behind Wagner's 1961 appeal continued to be felt on the ground—in tents outside a city office building—seven years later. (News, MCH clipping file, Tamiment, April 11, 1968, 16).
17. For a comprehensive study of this program, see Joseph Kelley, "Racial Integration Poli cies of the NY City Housing Authority, 1958-1961," D.S.W. diss., Columbia University, 1963. Ann Arbor: University Microfilms, 64-2763.
18. Roscho, Bernard. "The Integration Problem and Public Housing," The New Leader. July 4-11, 1960, pp. 10-13.
19. Five years after the NYCHA's discriminatory practices were revealed, investigated, publicly criticized, and allegedly reformed, unexplained denials of eligible black applicants to low-income public housing persisted. MCH chair Jane Benedict wrote to William Reid, NYCHA Chairman in October of 1965, on behalf of Jennie Thomas, a welfare mother living with her "retarded, bed-ridden and epileptic" 28-year-old daughter and a "steadily employed" 19-year-old nephew. Ms. Thomas had applied for public housing out of "mortal fear" of a fire in her tenement building, since her daughter would not have been able to
This is another time that folks have forgoten