Yonkers, NY: A House Divided

In the long struggle against racial discrimination in America, progress has been vast, if uneven and too slow. Barriers against equal access to public accommodations have fallen, voting rights of all citizens have been guaranteed, and blacks have assumed impressive political power in cities and state legislatures. Job opportunities have opened, and the once violent outcry against school desegregation has been muted. But the more intimate, elemental question of whether blacks can live beside whites has remained volatile, pitting neighbors against neighbors, the courts against communities, and a sense of social fairness against the besieged mentality of those who fear change.

The sad fact is that two decades after the Kerner Commission warned that the U.S. was "moving toward two societies, one black, one white -- separate and unequal," the nation remains dismayingly segregated in its housing patterns. A recent study by the Urban Institute, a Washington think tank, found that 57% of American whites live in census tracts that are more than 99% white and nearly a third of all blacks live in neighborhoods that are more than 90% black. The federal Department of Housing and Urban Development estimates that 2 million people encounter racial discrimination in housing every year. Last week the Senate passed a new, tougher Fair Housing Act that will finally make it easier for the Federal Government to assist victims of discrimination in suing landlords and real estate agents who block their access to housing.

Nowhere has the shifting frontier of the civil rights struggle been more apparent than in Yonkers, a racially divided blue-collar suburb of New York City. Last week Leonard Sand, a soft-spoken, patient federal judge, got fed up with that city's refusal over three years to carry out his orders to place public housing in its white neighborhoods. Gazing down sternly from his bench in Manhattan at four Yonkers councilmen, the jurist delivered a tongue- lashing. "What we're clearly confronted with is a total breakdown of any sense of responsibility," he charged. "What we have here is a competition to see . . . who can be the biggest political martyr. There does have to come a moment of truth, a moment when the city of Yonkers seeks not to become a national symbol of defiance to civil rights."

With that, Judge Sand declared Yonkers in contempt of court for refusing to obey his order to help private developers build 800 units of moderate-income housing. The judge began levying fines that doubled daily against the city and would leave it bankrupt later this month. Yonkers promptly lost its already poor bond rating, rendering it unable to borrow. Fines of $500 a day were imposed on the recalcitrant councilmen.