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`The Movement' for Equality

Polite protests come to an end as Long Island activists accelerate the drive to secure a range of civil rights

By Joye Brown | Staff Writer

One hundred years after Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves, a black man, also named Lincoln, walked to a podium at the Garden City Hotel. He was there, on the first day of January, 1963, the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation, to receive an award from the NAACP. Lincoln O. Lynch, clean cut and conservatively dressed, carried several handwritten sheets of notebook paper and placed them gently on the stand. When the polite applause died down, the recently appointed chairman of the Long Island branch of the Congress of Racial Equality looked out over the audience of almost 1,000, most of them black Long Islanders, and began to speak.

It was not what his audience expected.

"Here in Nassau County," Lynch began, "and indeed in the very Village of Garden City in which we now meet, racial discrimination and segregation cry out loud for correction.

"All over Nassau, from Inwood to Oyster Bay, from Glen Cove and Manhasset and Port Washington, on our supposedly fabulous North Shore, to Freeport and Farmingdale and Roosevelt and across the border into Amityville, there exists shameless evidence of undisguised discrimination . . . "

His conclusion left many in the audience stunned: "The largest portion of the blame for this situation must be laid, squarely, at the door of the Negro himself, especially so of those who claim to have achieved middle-class status." Black suburbanites, he said, were engaging in a "mad scramble to attain middle-class status and to acquire the trappings of false values dictated by the same society which holds him in contempt." Worse, he said, they seemed to have forgotten that "no Negro can attain freedom until all Negroes attain freedom."

Until then, polite protest had typified the civil rights movement on Long Island. Now Lynch was advocating direct action and defiance. He issued a call to arms, urging black Long Islanders to "prepare and finance lawsuits, badger elected officials for legislation, to picket or sit in or boycott, if necessary, to win equal rights."

In the next several months, many would heed his call. Lynch would become a catalyst, spurring on a coalition of individuals and organizations that crossed racial, economic and geographic lines. Across Long Island, CORE, the NAACP and a host of local activists would work together and separately, picketing and protesting, suing and negotiating for equal access to housing, jobs and schools.

"Before Lincoln, things were pretty quiet," Thomas A. Johnson, who was hired as Newsday's first black reporter a few months after the speech, said recently. "Lincoln brought things to the foreground."

With Lynch's call to activism, civil rights groups battled publicly and aggressively for school desegregation, good housing for migrant workers, an end to urban renewal's destruction of black neighborhoods, more jobs for blacks in banking, malls, insurance and other businesses, and integrated fire departments.

The effort came at a particularly crucial time, as whites were fleeing racially changing neighborhoods in New York City while increasing numbers of upwardly mobile blacks were seeking their place in suburbia as well. "As the African-American population grew on Long Island, the civil rights movement had to respond to new demands and greater pressures," said Charles F. Howlett of West Islip, a historian and specialist on the local civil rights movement.

That response was extraordinarily well organized, with activists schooled in everything from making protest signs and "testing" housing for discrimination to lodging effective complaints and staying calm under pressure. Still, their fight got ugly at times, with scuffles, arrests and even cross-burnings marking school integration efforts in Malverne and Amityville.

For a time, at least, the activists were successful at opening up government, jobs and a few neighborhoods for black residents. Their greatest success, however, was in focusing attention on racial discrimination in Nassau and Suffolk.

"We had hope; we had vision," said Annette Triquere of Westbury, one of many now in their 60s and 70s who were active in what they still proudly call "The Movement." "We changed people's lives," said Hazel Dukes of Roslyn, who walked a picket line at Suffolk County duck farms, protesting the conditions under which black migrants worked, long before she would become state conference president of the NAACP.

Certainly the activism did not end the quest for equal rights. "Things have changed," acknowledged Alan Singer, a professor at Hofstra University's school of education who has studied the era. "But to say they've changed is not to say that everything is solved. In some ways, Long Island today represents the inability of the civil rights movement to successfully build an equal, integrated community. It failed to break down the barriers."

Added Lynda R. Day, an assistant professor of Africana studies at Brooklyn College and author of a history of blacks on Long Island, "The problem was that no one understood how entrenched racism was."

Still, the activist period, which peaked roughly from 1963 through 1969, is significant, historians and activists agree, because for a stretch of time in Nassau and Suffolk, as it was across the United States, the civil rights movement spoke with one voice.

And that voice was powerful.

"What you had was a network of people on many different levels and in many different places who were organized, who were struggling on many fronts," Singer said. "So when it came to them getting what they wanted, there were no accidents."

Long before Lynch walked to that podium, African-Americans on Long Island had been working toward equal rights. Some sued for their freedom and property in the years of slavery. And, as their descendents settled down in segregated communities in Nassau and Suffolk, it was not uncommon to press for equal access to education. Charles Brewster's fight to get his son in a new, all-white school in Amityville in 1895, for example, led to a change in law that limited segregation in public schools.

With the founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1909, black Long Islanders continued to address grievances. The trend accelerated after World War II, as the Island's black population slowly began to grow -- despite racial covenants in many housing developments.