Looking back at the work of Newsday columnist Les Payne

March 23, 1980

‘Steering." It is such an easy-gliding, harmless-sounding, mechanical kind of word. In American house-shopping though, racial steering is as standard as multiple listings.

Like most of this country’s subtle improvements on de jure segregation, steering exists in that fog between what is legal and what is right. And nowhere has steering become such high art as on Long Island and in the tri-state area of New York, Connecticut, and New Jersey. The Regional Plan Association recently found that fair housing attempts in this area have totally failed. According to the group’s study, two-thirds of all Black families in the tri-state region are effectively restricted to 1.5 percent of the residential land by discriminatory land-use policies and zoning, racial steering and ineffective enforcement of fair housing laws.

Little has changed since I was steered to my house in Huntington 10 years ago. With a down payment of $10,000 from my years in the Army, my wife and I shopped at the mercy of a squad of real estate agents who all showed us the same dozen houses. There were stops in Wyandanch, Central Islip, North Amityville, Greenlawn and Huntington Station, all predominantly Black neighborhoods.

One East Northport agent had one book for houses under $35,000 and another for those above. Privately, within those books, he kept two indexes, one for whites and a much smaller, coded section for Blacks. Once, while driving to our regular stop in Greenlawn, my wife and I confronted the agent about the racial indexing we had discovered while thumbing through his book when he was away from his desk. The agent pulled to the side of Broadway and nervously explained that it would be very difficult for us to buy a house in a white neighborhood on Long Island.

Steering, on Long Island as elsewhere, is as effective as it is sinister. For in this "post-segregation" era, only 10 per cent of American neighborhoods are desegregated, according to sociologist Dorothy K. Newman in her book, "Protest, Politics and Prosperity." Newman also found that Black homeowners, all other things being equal, are charged from 3 to 20 per cent more for their dwellings.

The prospects for change in the area of housing are dimmed by the even more powerful and ominous weapons of blockbusting and bank redlining.

As universal as racial steering is in this country, the practice, curiously, is almost universally denied, except by those who are its victims. To deny that steering is widely practiced is like denying that Mayor Ed Koch has a bald head. But every day it is denied, and during an upcoming steering suit against a Nassau County real estate agency, the charge will, no doubt, be denied for the judicial record.

Long Island is not the only place where racial steering is practiced. For every Black man, woman, and child in this country knows that it exists and many have had first-hand experiences. My first personal encounter with steering occurred one day in Indianapolis, in 1967.

Sunshine and a cold drizzle had alternately relieved each other throughout that September day. The Vietnam War stood in my life like a giant grizzly, upright and menacing. I was 25, and a newly minted Army captain. For two years I had commanded an air-defense battery, shooting down drones with Nike Ajax missiles in the desert of New Mexico. LBJ had stepped up the war and I was retained on active duty, against my will. And since the Viet Cong had no planes to be shot down, I had been ordered to Saigon to write messages and run the newspaper for Gen. William Westmoreland.

But first, I had to stop at Ft. Benjamin Harrison, Ind., for nine weeks to learn, from the Department of Defense, the craft of journalism. By day, I roamed the creaky, olive-drab halls of the post Information School, learning to write headlines and photo captions. My wife, Violet, and I lived in a small room off post, which cost us $110 a week, a sum no captain could sustain for more than a week without drawing the attention of the vice squad and the IRS. We wanted to spend our last days together before I flew off to the uncertainty of Saigon.

Violet was seven months pregnant with our daughter, Tamara. It was a hard pregnancy, made harder by the soot and grime of Indianapolis and the bloody stories about body counts coming out of Vietnam. Daily she shopped for apartments. Over the telephone we got invitations to visit vacant flats, but upon showing up minutes later, we were told that the apartments had just been rented.

The army gave us a list of apartments whose landlords had forsworn housing discrimination. At the top of the list was an aging apartment in the center of town, which had stood vacant for weeks, a flat where the furnace wheezed noisily but gave up little heat. My wife visited the apartment during the day, and had been greeted warmly by the landlady, a pear-shaped, powder-white woman with eyes as flat and cold as a trout. She mistook Violet for a Eurasian with the good sense to have married a white. Violet rented the apartment with a $50 deposit.

After class, we sped through the night’s drizzle and bounced up the stairs to the landlady’s flat. When she opened the door I saw the look that I have seen often on the face of my white countrymen. It was the look of rejection, hatred, scorn, dread, contempt, pale ire, even fear. There was no mistaking it. It started in the eyes, flared at the nostrils and worked its way down to her dime-thin lips.

"I’m sorry, the place is rented," she said. "You can have your deposit back."

Violet broke down and cried uncontrollably. I moved up to that threshold where Billy Budd stood just before he struck out at Claggert. I looked deep into the fish eyes of this sad, little old white woman and saw terror lurking there. And at that moment, for the first time, I understood that to be Black in America is to be given back your deposit.

October 29, 1989

That great preserver of Americana, the Smithsonian Institution, is likely once again to whitewash a national treasure before displaying it for the ages.

The classic Levittown house, built for veterans returning from World War II, is the target of a Smithsonian exhibit for its National Museum of American History. The institution is looking for someone to donate one of the original 17,447 single-family frame ranches constructed in Levittown, Long Island, starting in 1947.

"There are a lot of social and cultural stories played out in Levittown," Bill Yeingst, historian at the institution's domestic life division, was quoted as saying. "We're interested in the houses from a technological standpoint; we're interested in the construction methods . . . And we're interested in what it tells us about American family life."

Well, one of the important "social stories" played out in Levittown is that this uniquely American postwar development excluded veterans who were Black.

This piece of apartheid may be of no moment to the Smithsonian or to most whites on Long Island and elsewhere. But to African-Americans, who met their obligations of citizenship by fighting and dying in foreign wars, this is another painful reminder of how they have been denied the benefits of citizenship.

The Smithsonian would only compound this racial injustice by failing to detail — for the sake of history — this aspect of what Levittown "tells us about American family life."

Levittown steadfastly refused to sell its houses to Black families, no matter what their station in life. One of the ironies of apartheid is that it does not discriminate among members of the targeted group. Neither a Black millionaire nor a desperate Black U.S. army veteran of the liberation of Auschwitz could have plunked down enough money to buy the $7,990 houses that William J. Levitt sold.

Levitt explained his segregation practices back then in an article in The Saturday Evening Post. "If we sell one house to a Negro family, then 90 to 95 percent of our white customers will not buy into the community. That is their attitude, not ours. We did not create it and cannot cure it. As a company, our position is simply this: we can solve a housing problem or we can try to solve a racial problem. But we cannot combine the two."

So the great success that is Levittown is a postwar America coming to grips with its white housing shortage. The Smithsonian should so record it.

Levittown, of course, was not alone in enforcing and perpetuating segregated housing. It was the policy of the day, North and South.

Many houses, including some of those in Levittown, were sold with clauses in the contract forbidding resale to African-Americans. In neighborhood after neighborhood, northern white residents banded together and signed covenants that they would sell, rent or lease their property only to members of the "Caucasian race."

The existence of such covenants came to light again in 1986 when it was discovered that Justice William H. Rehnquist had similar agreements on the contracts of his properties in Arizona and Vermont. At his confirmation hearing as chief justice, Rehnquist brushed aside the covenants on his real estate as being unenforceable. They are nowadays, but that wasn't always the case.

The racist policy of restrictive housing agreements first went to the courts on Jan. 30, 1945. Benjamin Sipes challenged a Black Detroit family's rights to live in a house with a restrictive covenant.

Ordered to vacate their property within 90 days, the family of Reginald H. McGhee appealed to the Michigan Supreme Court, citing their right to equal protection under the law in accordance with the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. They lost.

With NAACP attorney Thurgood Marshall, a future justice of the high court, arguing the case for the plaintiffs, McGhee vs. Sipes went to the Supreme Court. Coupling it with a Missouri case, Shelley vs. Kraemer, the Supreme Court ruled that covenants barring Blacks and other racial groups from owning real estate were unenforceable.

The illegallity of racist covenants notwithstanding, housing agents continue to enforce a segregated housing policy as effectively as Levittown at its inception. Most of suburbia is rigidly segregated in every way, and these upscale areas stand as examples of housing segregation sans covenants.

To avoid telling only the white side of the Levittown story, the Smithsonian should also detail that community's policy of racial exclusion. Future generations must know that housing segregation was the rule then - and that it is the rule at this very hour.

April 22, 1990

There are days, today is one of them, when, with the sun in bloom and the air just right, I am moved to fill this space with nothing more serious or confrontational than an elegiac verse or a song in praise of the wonderment of life.

On other loose occasions, I am moved to toy with a significant but not essential misdeed of government, or take a potshot at targets criticized by all the other brave columnists. Quayle, for instance, or Bush himself, Gadhafi, Thatcher, Trump, Steinbrenner, List or the hundreds of other fair-game humans spoiling the earth.

On this day, I pulled up to the sentence processor with nothing on my mind save peace, joy and the brotherhood of man. Ever dance with the devil in the pale moonlight, as the Joker said in the Batman movie?

It was — once again — not to be.

The news, local, regional and abroad, is spiked with incidents of people victimized because — and simply because — they were born Black.

Last week, a Suffolk Community College professor told her class that Blacks are her least desired students, publicly confirming a bias present in every whitecontrolled school district on Long Island. "If I could only know one thing about a student, and I got to pick my students, I could only know race or ethnic background, I'd choose Jews first and Blacks last," Jan Parker, a former chairperson of the college's scholarship committee, was quoted as saying by a student, Robert Craine, in an article in The Western Student Press.

The slander here is as great against Jews as against Blacks. However, Ms. Parker won't hear many charges of anti-Semitism about her statement. To single out a group of people by race for attributes, positive or negative, having nothing to do with race is a singular act of bias.

Ms. Parker's statement, which has been labeled dumb, irresponsible and foul, also reflects school policy. The profound damage is that Long Island school systems, for the precise reason Parker states, hold lower expectations for Blacks and employ all their awesome power to realize the prophecy.

I have never met a single Black achiever who has not encountered a system charged to educate him or her that did not work mightily to ensure low performance, if not failure. The problem is not with what the simpleminded Parkers of the world say about Black potential but what, by manipulating rewards and punishment, the white society does to ensure that it's never realized.

Hardly had I completed reading about the Parker incident before facing the bloody slaying of a Black New Jersey teenager by a cowardly white policeman. There are questions remaining about the weapon the victim allegedly held. But there is apparently no question that the cop shot the youth in the back as he pleaded for his life with his hands raised.

It is incidents like these and the following that lead parents to conclude that their African-American males are an endangered species.

Yusuf Hawkins' great teenage sin was walking the streets of Bensonhurst with the skin God wrapped him with at birth. The punishment for him was death, without appeal. It is a sin from which no Black parent in America, myself included, can protect his son. Given this country's history, one would expect an uproar from the broad society, but all we hear is a murmur.

Hawkins and his buddies had innocently walked into a tribal frenzy whipped up by a white rat pack bent on keeping African-Americans out of their neighborhood. A local teenager, horror of horrors, had dared invite Black and Hispanic friends to her 18th birthday party in Bensonhurst. Armed to disinvite anyone darker than they were, the lynching party swarmed over Hawkins, who, clutching a candy bar, was shopping for a used car.

Newspaper columnists write about this lynching, true enough, but not with the passion they seem able to summon only when the victim is white.

During the current trial of his bat-wielding killers, it emerged that the gunman had blasted Hawkins' heart apart. The grisly lynching scene was run out in detail by, among others, the emergency medical service technician who presided over young Hawkins' demise.

"The surgeon opened up his chest," the EMS technician said. "There was a large amount of blood that came out. When they opened the ribs, they took out the heart. I noticed a hole in it. When he turned it over, the left . . . ventricle was missing."

June 10, 1990

It is all the rage to kick Donald Trump now that the assumed zillionaire appears to owe almost as much as he owns. Over-reaching, a lifelong trait of his, appears to be his chief problem.

However, during some months, the aggressively rich, like many of us, may not have enough cash for the phone bills. Rare is the day such folks can afford to pay all of their debts. Trump's problem, the experts say, is that, debts aside, he is unable to pay the interest.

The newspaper charts on his multimilliondollar ordeals are so clear that even economists agree on their meaning. The Plaza Hotel, for which he reportedly paid $403 million, turns an attractive annual profit of about $20 million. Problem is, the yearly interest on the hotel note is $40 million.

And this, Trump boasts, is the jewel of his empire.

Some jewel, the experts say belatedly. Some empire.

Those who once marveled at Trump's flamboyant dealing are now yukking at his tailspin. The $1.1 billion Taj Mahal was judged as decadent as it was unnecessary. So, too, the $29-million yacht and the bigger one to replace it. These toys, it turns out, were mere props to create the illusion of collateral needed to buy other toys.

Running down the inventory, one thumbs past the $400 million shuttle — up for sale. The same with other Trump trinkets, provided a buyer can be found.

One could ask: If the financial picture is so clear this week, why was it not clear six months ago? There were warning signs, of course; there always are. However, lateness at detection is not quite the problem here.

Several of Trump's more public enemies have tactfully refrained from kicking him while he appears to be heading down. However, the media have called forth his own brash words with which to beat him.

"I am a very rich and powerful person in this town and there is a reason I got that way," he was quoted in one revealing passage.

His breast-beating aside, I was always puzzled by the millionaire's apparent need to stoop to demagoguery. In the wake of the tragic attack on the Central Park jogger last year, he attacked broadly. Thousands of his borrowed dollars went to buy full-page newspaper ads that came frightfully close to indicting all Black teenagers for what was the work of a small band.

With the victim under wraps, the case has remained under a fog that may not lift even during the upcoming series of trials.

At any rate, under the headline "Bring Back the Death Penalty," Trump waded into the sketchy evidence with a hangman's noose and bad syntax.

"I want to hate these murderers {rape was the crime under discussion} and I always will," he thundered with the fervor of a man lathering up a lynch mob. "I am not looking to psychoanalyze them or understand them, I am looking to punish them . . . I recently watched a newscast trying to explain the `anger in these young men.' I no longer want to understand their anger. I want them to understand our anger. I want them to be afraid."

So shocked by Trump's tirade was the Rev. Timothy P. Mitchell that he scraped together the dollars needed to print a full-page counter-ad. After opening with a prayer for the "continued recovery of the young woman who was assaulted and raped in Central Park," the Black clergyman stated his concerns about Trump's "thinly veiled racist polemic."

"His resolve is to hate," Mitchell's ad stated. "And his solution is the reintroduction of the death penalty and the shoring up of OUR police force. The police force is not OUR police force, Mr. Trump. Go ask the relatives of Eleanor Bumpurs and Michael Stewart {two Blacks killed by New York City policemen}.

"You may have been on your yacht when the `wolf pack' — or was it `group of teenagers' — ran Michael Griffith to his death {in Howard Beach}. Where was your page of outrage then?

"We also take umbrage with your cry, `I want to hate THESE muggers and murderers.' It violates what we were taught by our contemporary prophet, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Dr. King had his house bombed. He preached at the funeral of four young Black girls, blown literally to bits by a bomb in a Black church. Those who did those deeds drink from the same trough of hate that you so easily sate your thirst for vengeance.

"You may well ask who are we — poor African-American preachers — to challenge a white billionaire's hatred and fear?

"We belong to a tradition that will not be bullied into silence by the pronouncements of those who see themselves as self-appointed arbiters of justice.

"The crime committed by those young boys was wicked and abominable. In due course they will get what they deserve. But we will broach no indictment of us as a race over one incident. And we will not offer our youth up as sacrifice to appease false gods like Mr. Trump."

May 19, 1991

An African-American teenager walked past a "Now Hiring" sign into a well-known ice cream parlor on Long Island last week and inquired about a job.

The surprised manager's mouth froze, then cracked open in contempt.

"Ahh, we're not hiring right now," she said. Unwise to the parlance of white employers, the college sophomore home for the summer persisted in filling out an application anyway.

"We'll get back to you," the manager said with the finality of a slammed door.

This teenager I happen to know quite well. In all of Long Island, there is not a single young man better suited for this summer job of customer contact. He is clean, honest, hard-working, patient, sure with money and pleasant with strangers. He has worked cash registers long hours to high praise, almost never coming up more than a penny or two short.

The store manager, too, I know well. Not personally, but well. She is the latest model of a wage-worker conditioned to hold the line of defense against Black hires, expecially males.

This rejection — dormant until the need arises — is the single trait this species of white clerk has been conditioned, nay bred, to execute over hundreds of years in this republic.

Her peers work selected shops and boutiques in every shopping mall in America. The more highly skilled guardians man the gates to the crafts, the corporations, the professions.

As the first line of defense, the manager under question's key trick is to utter the rejection reflexively. No thought. No hesitation. No wondering about qualifications. Be firm!

So refined is the process that it leaves the gatekeeper with no sense of wrongdoing. Even after a full day of turning away Black job-seekers, the manager must still feel herself to be a caring mother, intelligent, well-groomed, a good bowler. And yet — in the service of her institution — she functions as an immunized bigot.

When the system worked perfectly in the old days, Blacks were discouraged from applying. Nowadays, with the advent of affirmative action, the trick is to discourage them from reapplying.

Merit, mind you, has nothing to do with this.

This point was confirmed recently in Washington, D.C., and Chicago by the Urban Institute. The study by the nonprofit research group found that young Black males applying for entry-level jobs were rejected three times more often than comparable white males.

The pioneering study last summer fielded 10 two-man biracial teams of college students, paired closely in terms of experience, age, size and communicative skills. The only significant difference was race.

Responding to 1,052 jobs randomly chosen from classified ads in the Washington Post and the Chicago Tribune, the pairs met remarkably different receptions from perspective employers. Client-contact jobs such as hotel sales, restaurants and retail, especially white-collar positions, produced the most racial discrimination.

Although about 15 percent of the white applicants were offered jobs outright, fewer than 5 percent of their Black comparables received offers, with some being steered to less desirable — and lower-paying — positions. Even when jobs were not offered, whites advanced further in the hiring process than their darker-skinned counterparts.

The institute's report, entitled "Opportunities Denied, Opportunities Diminished," concluded that job discrimination against equally qualified African-Americans is "widespread and pervasive."

The results came as no surprise to the Black teenager who applied for the Long Island restaurant job. Eighteen years on Long Island had brought him into contact with only a few whites in positions of influence who were not racially bigoted.

This high honor will likely stand as America's greatest achievement, long after the last Stealth bomber and MX missile have been vaporized.