Mark Twain on The 51st State, excerpt 1
Date: 1974
Caption: A local news program reported on Coney Island’s Mark Twain Junior High School in 1974. The program provides a brief history of the creation of segregated white and Black neighborhoods in the area.
In this video excerpt, reporter Richard Kotuk attempts to explain how what he calls “central Coney Island” has become predominantly “poor, Puerto Rican, and black.”
The changes in Coney Island’s residential population that Kotuk describes - from majority white to majority Black and Puerto Rican, with nearly half of the residents living in poverty - were common in many city neighborhoods in the US in the 1960s. Several policies - including home loans, highway construction, and tax breaks - made it easier for white families to leave for the suburbs. And with these options, and relatively more wealth and economic opportunity, few white people chose to live in public housing projects. Many public housing projects became Black and Puerto Rican segregated spaces whose residents had less access to other neighborhoods.1
These changes in who was living in the area were one reason, but definitely not the only reason, why Mark Twain Junior High School’s student population changed from majority white to majority Black and Latinx in the 1960s.
You can continue watching beyond the clip here to hear how one white Coney Island resident describes her neighborhood and how she thinks it changed. See “The 51st State”, minutes 5:42-7:11.
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Mark Lopez and Richard Rothstein, Segregation by Design, accessed May 10, 2024,https://www.segregatedbydesign.com/. ↩︎
Categories: Brooklyn, K-12 organizing
Tags: racist segregation, Black people, white people, Latinx people, housing
This item is part of "Housing Policies and Patterns" in "How Did New York City Segregate its Schools?"
Item Details
Date: 1974
Creator: WNET/Channel 13: The 51st State
Source: Richard Kotuk’s YouTube Channel
Copyright: Under copyright. Used with permission.
How to cite: “Mark Twain on The 51st State, excerpt 1,” “WNET/Channel 13: The 51st State”, in New York City Civil Rights History Project, Accessed: [Month Day, Year], https://nyccivilrightshistory.org/gallery/mark-twain-on-51st-state-1.
Questions to Consider
- The reporter explains that many white families have left the neighborhood because they “no longer want to live in the area.” What government policies helped white families move to new apartments within the city or to the suburbs?
- Review the HOLC redlining maps for Coney Island. In your opinion, how are the decisions about where to build public housing connected to this map and the area description?
- Based on other documents related to housing in Coney Island, including the HOLC redlining maps for Coney Island and the FHA’s Underwriting Manual, does the reporter offer a clear explanation or how and why Coney Island’s population changed in this time? How would you edit or improve his explanation?
References
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