Abstract
During the mayoralty of one of New York City’s most liberal mayors, Robert F. Wagner (1954–66) the city faced a great deal of racial turmoil. Despite its reputation as a bastion of liberalism and the mayor’s efforts at making New York a place where harmonious race relations existed, Wagner found himself under siege by numerous racial protests. In 1963 a coalition of civil rights groups, including the Brooklyn chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and the Urban League of Greater New York initiated a sit-in at Mayor Wagner’s office demanding a halt to all construction sponsored by the city until all discriminatory hiring practices were “eliminated.” Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) also began demonstrating at construction sites throughout the city demanding that the state and city governments and the Building and Construction Trade Council hire African Americans. In July of 1963, CORE teamed up with a group of Brooklyn ministers and led a huge protest at the construction site of the Downstate Medical Center where over 700 people were arrested becoming, “jailbirds for freedom” in an attempt to force the state to hire blacks and Puerto Ricans construction workers.1
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Notes
Clarence Taylor, The Black Churches of Brooklyn (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994) 142–63.
Clarence Taylor, Knocking at Our Own Door: Milton A. Galamison and the Struggle to Integrate New York City Schools (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2001) xxviii–xxix.
Joshua Freeman, Working Class New York: Life and Labor Since World War II (New York: The New Press, 2000) 99.
Ibid., 101; Jerald Podiar, The Strike that Changed New York: Blacks, Whites and the Ocean Hill-Brownsville Crisis (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002) 13.
Wendell Prichett, Brownsville, Brooklyn: Blacks, Jews and the Changing Face of the Ghetto (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2002) 159–60.
Charles R. Morris, The Cost of Good Intentions: New York City and the Liberal Experiment, 1960–1975 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1980) 20–23.
Gerald Markowitz and David Rosner, Children, Race, and Power: Kenneth and Mami Clark’s Northside Center (New York: Routledge, 2000) 92
Martha Biondi, To Stand and Fight The Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York City (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003) 100–01.
Ibid., 95–96; Clarence Taylor, Knocking at Our Own Door: Milton A. Galamison and the Struggle to Integrate New York City Schools (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997) 52–53.
Clarence Taylor, Knocking at Our Own Door, 76; Barbara Ransby, Ella Baker & the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2003) 153–54.
Diane Ravitch, The Great School Wars: New York City, 180–1973 (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1974) 256.
Vincent J. Cannato, The Ungovernable City: John Lindsay and His Struggle to Save New York (New York: Basic Books, 2001) 33.
Gareth Davies, From Opportunity to Entitlement The Transformation and Decline of Great Society Liberalism (Lawrence, KA: University of Kansas Press, 1996) 13–16.
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© 2006 Gayle T. Tate and Lewis A. Randolph
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Taylor, C. (2006). Robert Wagner, Milton Galamison, and the Challenge to New York City Liberalism. In: The Black Urban Community. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-73572-3_18
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