Recognize Any Of These People.....

YONKERS VIDEO FLASHBACK: The 1988 Special Report "Yonkers Housing Desegregation" 

In 1960, the Census Bureau reported Yonkers's population as 95.8% white and 4.0% black.

The city's struggles with racial discrimination and segregation were highlighted in a decades-long federal lawsuit.

After a 1985 decision and an unsuccessful appeal, Yonkers's schools were integrated in 1988.

The federal judge, Leonard B. Sand ruled that Yonkers had engaged in institutional segregation in housing and school policies for over 40 years and tied the illegal concentration of public housing and private housing discrimination to the city's resistance to ending racial isolation in its public schools. In the 1980s and 1990s,

Yonkers developed a national reputation for racial tension, based on a long-term battle between the City of Yonkers and the NAACP over the building of subsidized low-income housing projects.

The city planned to use federal funding for urban renewal efforts within Downtown Yonkers exclusively; other groups, led by the NAACP, felt that the resulting concentration of low-income housing in traditionally poor neighborhoods perpetuated poverty.

Yonkers gained national/international attention during the summer of 1988, when it reneged on its previous agreement to build promised municipal public housing in the eastern portions of the city, an agreement it had made in a consent decree after losing an appeal in 1987.

After this reversal, the city was found in contempt of the federal courts, and United States district court Judge Leonard Sand imposed a fine on Yonkers which started at $1 and doubled every day until the city capitulated to the federally mandated plan.

Yonkers remained in contempt of the courts until September 9, 1988, when the City Council relented in the wake of library closures and sanitation cutbacks and while looking at massive city layoffs, which would have been required to continue its resistance to desegregation.

First-term mayor Nicholas C. Wasicsko fought to save the city from financial disaster and bring about unity. Yonkers's youngest mayor (elected at age 28),
Wasicsko was a lonely figure in city politics, which was scarred with the stigma of the "Balkanization of Yonkers".

He succeeded in helping to end the city's contempt of the courts, but was voted out of office as a result.

His story is the subject of a miniseries called Show Me a Hero that aired on HBO in 2015, which is based on the 1999 nonfiction book of the same name by former New York Times writer, Lisa Belkin.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/YonkersNewswire/permalink/1981374898786745/