Our pro-segregation progressives
From the fateful moment he agreed to lead the Montgomery bus boycott to the day a racist assassin’s bullet took his life, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. caused and courted trouble, upsetting comfortable social arrangements and disturbing the political and religious status quo of a society that was aching for change.
America laments King’s absence every day. New York, for one, could use a little disturbing.
Our city’s political leaders will freely throw King’s name around today, as they do around this time every year. They will solemnly inform audiences that continuing King’s legacy means pressing their popular pet causes, a grab bag of progressive stances that already enjoy the support of probably 80% or more of all New Yorkers.
It’s easy enough — and so convenient! — to conclude that King, if alive, would champion the rights of immigrants, side with labor unions and the LGBTQ community, and seek to boost the level of welfare grants and other assistance to the poor.
But today’s festival of liberal self-congratulation, in which members of New York’s establishment pat one another on the back, actually isn’t very King-like. To truly follow in the great man’s footsteps would mean summoning the courage to tackle the same issue he fought and died for — unraveling our city’s web of segregated housing and schools.
Honoring King would mean finally pressing for passage of a City Council bill, bottled up and ignored in past years, that would require boards of the city’s 300,000 cooperative apartments to abide by the fair-housing laws and provide applicants with the reason they were accepted or rejected.
At present, the co-ops get a pass on fairhousing law, allowing them to discriminate against applicants based on race, religion, nationality, sexual orientation or other criteria that would, in another context, be illegal. Years ago, Councilman Brad Lander introduced a simple bill that would have extended fair-housing requirements to co-ops and started a process of data collection to detect discriminatory patterns.
But the bill has never gained enough cosponsors to have a realistic chance at passage. The last two oh-so-progressive speakers, Christine Quinn and Melissa Mark-Viverito, did nothing to advance the issue.
Not only has the Council turned a blind eye to housing discrimination, members actively support the city’s existing segregation by insisting that lotteries to allocate affordable housing give preference to people who happen to live near a proposed development site. That ensures that new affordable housing built in (segregated) black neighborhoods will go to black New Yorkers, and the same will happen in white and Latino areas.
A citywide housing lottery that gave equal preference to people based on need rather than zip code would begin to break down the city’s segregated patterns. A lawsuit has been filed by the Anti-Discrimination Center, a civil rights organization, but the progressive de Blasio administration is fighting the case tooth and nail.
That same administration, when pressed about the city’s highly racially segregated schools, throws its hands up in the air and blames the phenomenon on . . . segregated neighborhoods!
That is not how King dealt with things. In his famous 7,000-word “Letter From Birmingham Jail,” authored during an epic 1963 civil rights confrontation, King explained why he submitted to arrest and imprisonment to break the back of discrimination in Alabama.
“Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and establish such creative tension that a community that has consistently refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue,” he wrote. “It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored.”
That is a world away from New York’s liberal establishment, which seems bent on ignoring the city’s segregation.
Truly progressive leaders would follow in the brave footsteps of people like Councilwoman Helen Rosenthal, who spent months painstakingly cajoling local leaders into rezoning 11 schools in Community School District 3 on Manhattan’s West Side. That worthy effort makes a new school and gifted-student program available to kids from the Amsterdam Houses development, and gives schools a more equal mix of low-income students. Rosenthal unquestionably did the right thing. For her efforts, she got a tough reelection challenge, which she beat back last fall.
More New York pols — especially Council members scheduled to depart in four years thanks to term limits — should consider walking the tough, challenging path pioneered by King. It might mean annoying one’s friends and neighbors. But as King’s life proves, the path to true change involves disruption and discomfort, not platitudes and a warm bath of applause.