Hattie Carthan: she healed a broken Brooklyn one tree at a time Part One

Part one: When a community falls apart, it takes a woman like Hattie Carthan to help put it back together again. Today the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn is a thriving community.? Visit the neighborhood today and you will see vibrant art museums, theaters, historical and culture centers, shops, and beautiful homes along tree-lined streets.? It might be hard to believe, but long ago, a thirty-five-year-long battle against racism, litter, rats, devastating fires, poverty, crime, greed, disease, and despair occurred here. The battle was won, thanks to thousands of devoted Black and Brown people who refused to give up on their community. ?

A community in trouble is like an injured person entering the Emergency Room. When a seriously injured person arrives at the hospital, a medical team works quickly to discover the most serious injuries first.? The team then works together and creates a plan to stop those injuries from causing the injured person more problems.? After the patient has been saved from death, the medical team helps the patient heal, recover, and regain their strength.? Before leaving the hospital, the medical team works with the patient to find ways to avoid getting injured again. Back at home, the patient rebuilds their life, stronger than before, better able to avoid trouble, and able to quickly bounce back when trouble comes.??

This is roughly the approach that Black and Brown people living in Bedford-Stuyvesant used to save their community.? One of their leaders was Hattie Carthan. This is the story of how Hattie and her “medical team” put a broken community back together again.? She did not live quite long enough to see her community’s full recovery, but her example helped others to carry on the healing process.

What Broke Bedford-Stuyvesant?

Bedford-Stuyvesant in the 1940s was a community with a lot to be proud of, and a bright future to look forward to.? In 1941, community leaders like Anna Hedgeman, used overwhelming Black community pressure to force President Franklin Roosevelt to sign an executive order that made it illegal for factories to deny jobs to Black people.? Even better, Black leaders forced President Roosevelt to open the Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC) which had the power to fine factories that did not obey the law.? By 1943 the FEPC working together with Black leaders at the Brooklyn Urban League succeeded in helping many Black people get high-skilled, good-paying jobs in factories and offices throughout the city. People of all races worked side by side helping to make the military supplies needed to liberate people suffering under the harsh governments of Germany, Italy, and Japan during World War Two.? Thanks to Black community leader Ada B. Jackson, children in the community were also growing closer together. Because of her community activism, by 1948 boys and girls of all races learned together in newly built schools. She made sure that children played sports together on integrated teams at the YMCA and YWCA, and at the Police Athletic League after-school programs. By 1948 the people of Bedford-Stuyvesant had their first Black New York State Assemblyman, Bertrand Baker, representing them in State government.? At Brooklyn’s Ebbets Field, Black baseball players, Jackie Robinson, Don Newcombe, and Roy Campanella, made the Brooklyn Dodgers truly reflect every racial group in Brooklyn.?

?And then everything seemed to fall apart.? It was as if Bedford-Stuyvesant suffered injuries from a car accident while suffering from a long illness, both at the same time.?? The root of both problems was a combination of racism and dollars and cents.? When World War Two was won, many of the factories that had hired so many talented Black and white workers closed. ?With the war over, some of the factories left Brooklyn and moved to Long Island or New Jersey. Other factories remained open but replaced their Black workers with white soldiers returning from the war to their old jobs.? Women were particularly hit hard by the impact of returning soldiers.? They were told to leave work, get married, and have babies rather than deny a returning soldier his old job.

?White workers were able to move their families to places where new factories and businesses were opening.? Soon white workers left Bedford-Stuyvesant by the thousands to new neighborhoods being built in Queens and further east on Long Island and to the west in New Jersey.?? New homes, schools and shopping malls were built for families who owned cars for the first time.? Moving to one of these new communities required going to a bank and getting a loan which would help pay for one of the newly built homes. Banks also loaned money for brand-new cars and refrigerators, dishwashers, televisions and washing machines.? The federal government also provided free college to white veterans returning from the war, allowing them to get even better-paying jobs. ?Black families were not able to get these loans. Only a few were able to take advantage of free college. Even worse, many of the towns on Long Island along with the new homes and apartment buildings in Queens New York, did not allow Black people to live there.?

?Meanwhile, people of all races, who remained in Bedford-Stuyvesant were faced with yet another challenge. The city was beginning to finally build new parks, playgrounds and schools in Bedford Stuyvesant, but homes and businesses were literally falling apart.? Behind the tree-lined streets, behind the beautiful decorative stone and wood carvings on the front of each Bedford Stuyvesant home, were broken pipes, leaking roofs, sagging floors, and sparking wires. The homes had once been beautiful inside and out but now families needed bank loans to pay for the expensive repairs to restore their homes. Sadly, for the community, the Federal government had something to say about granting a loan to anyone with a home or business in Bedford-Stuyvesant.? About ten years before, the Federal government created loan maps for banks.? Outlined boldly in red on these maps were certain New York City neighborhoods where Italians, Black people and Jewish people lived.? Banks were not to loan money to anyone in “redlined” communities across the country. Government workers feared that banks would fail and then whole the United States economy would collapse if the people in these communities were given loans they could not repay. Italians, Black people and Jewish people were unfairly singled out to be a risk and denied loans.? While most Americans got home improvement loans, those who stayed in Bedford-Stuyvesant were forced to use their own savings to fix their homes and businesses. Many had no choice but to simply suffer as the neighborhood rusted and rotted away.?

?If these struggles were not harsh enough, a real estate practice called “Block Busting” arrived in Bedford-Stuyvesant.? Long-time resident Leon Simmons watched it happen: “When I first came to New York, I used to play in that park there. As a kid. And my grandmother was living on 315 Nostrand Avenue. Around, this neighborhood here, that block there, there was a tree in front of every house. That building right there, that was a nursing home. You understand.? And the only people living in that block was white people. No Black people lived on that block period, they lived around the corner on Greene Avenue.? But they didn’t live out there on Nostrand Avenue. You understand.? And when the first Black person moved over there in that neighborhood there, right on that block there, all of them [white people] moved out.”?? Leon was witnessing a classic case of “Block Busting.”?? Years before in the 1940’s Sumner Sirtl head of the Midtown Civic League dreamed of driving Black people out of Bedford Stuyvesant.?He planned to tear down their homes build a wall and construct new luxurious homes, only for white people.? Black community leaders put an end to his racist plan in the 1940s.? Now in the 1950s, white real estate developers had another plan, this time the goal was to drive out white homeowners and sell run-down homes at high prices to Black families.?

Here is how Block-Busting worked: In the 1950s some Black families were able to keep the good paying jobs at companies that first hired them in the 1940s.? With a decent income, these Black families saved up their money to buy one of the nicer homes in Bedford-Stuyvesant. Often these Black families would purchase a home from one of the white families leaving for a new life in New Jersey or Long Island.? Real estate developers then would begin to harass the other white families on the block.? They would tell them that the new Black family on the block were criminals and that the white families were no longer safe.? Sometimes the white developers would hire real criminals to come to the neighborhood and disturb the neighborhood late at night with yelling, fighting, and breaking windows.? The goal was to get the white families to sell their homes for low prices or to have them simply abandon their homes.?Elderly people were particularly targeted. The real estate developers then would get ownership of the homes and sell them to Black families at high prices.?

Many Bedford-Stuyvesant homes at the time were beautiful on the outside but old and broken inside. Many times the homes became so leaky and cold it became impossible to live inside.? Hundreds and hundreds of homes simply collapsed, spilling bricks, broken wood, and shards of glass all over the sidewalks and streets.? The streets grew empty.? With fewer taxpayers, the city could not afford to send in workers to clean up the trash or remove the broken buildings.? Rats began to spread everywhere.? In the old days, people used to water the street trees that shaded their homes during summer dry spells.? Now the trees along the streets withered and died. Visiting the beautiful streets of Bedford Stuyvesant today it is hard to imagine that at one time this neighborhood suffered horribly, but throughout the 1960's and 70's life grew worse.

?City workers recorded the tragic statistics of the dying neighborhood. By the 1970’s, twenty years into the battle to save Bedford-Stuyvesant, three out of every ten people in the neighborhood needed food assistance from the government to survive. Only two out of every ten people owned their own homes.? Crime was twice as likely in Bedford-Stuyvesant than in any other part of New York City.? Most children had difficulty reading.?? Lead paint chipping off of the walls of homes was making people sick and giving children serious learning problems.? There were no stores or shops open in the old shopping district, and 2,800 homes were empty.? Racist employment practices, redlining, and blockbusting caused many of Brooklyn's neighborhoods to begin a slow death spiral.

?Many people living in Bedford-Stuyvesant gave up hope that anything would ever get better. ?The New York Times writer Sheila Rule captured the despair of some living in Bedford-Stuyvesant in 1981: “Warming his gnarled hands over the dancing flames of a trash-can fire on Fulton Street in Brooklyn, Timothy Smiley spoke sadly about his community.

''Bed-Stuy? It's still the same raggedy old place, with all these broken-down buildings and such,'' said Mr. Smiley, a stub of a man with a defeated expression on his face. ''Ain't nothing changed for the better. If anything, things are getting worse, and the only people who stay are the ones who can't afford to go nowhere else.'' He turned his gaze from the flames to the afternoon street scene of clothing vendors, school-age children strolling along eating fast food chicken, and unemployed adults like himself just marking time.

?In 1955, Black newspaper opinion writer Buddy Franklin noticed: “Things have looked up for Brooklyn during the past few years.? We have more housing developments, though still not enough – more and better schools are helping to alleviate the crowded classrooms – more parks and playgrounds and recreation centers are giving kids an opportunity to get off the streets and in general things are better than they were.”? Even with these improvements, Buddy Franklin wondered, why were the streets of Bedford-Stuyvesant so crime-filled? ?He seemed aware of the outward signs of despair, but not the underlying causes.? Young people, he wrote were becoming involved in terrible crimes.? The adults on the streets were even more of a problem, “Our streets are constantly littered by an army of human derelicts who apparently have given up on life.” He writes that these people numb their minds by drinking alcohol.? “These winos are permitted to roam the streets of the community, sleep in doorways, on park benches, and in hallways and cellars and even in the streets…what must these sights mean to a youngster who has dreams and aspirations of growing up to be a credit to his race and his society?”? Buddy Franklin noticed an all-too-common trend, the police seemed unwilling or uninterested in stopping the crime occurring in front of them.

?Luscious McDaniel Jr. remembered that with fewer homeowners the city had less money to pay to maintain city parks.? The grass in Herbert Von King [Tompkins] Park grew as high as the trees.? In the trees hung the bodies of murdered gang members. “That’s the history of that park right there. During the time they was gang banging, you know.”

?For Ron Howell the grandson of Assemblyman Bertram Baker, living in Bedford-Stuyvesant was a jarring mixture of beauty and danger.? His family home was on a beautiful block of well-kept homes owned by Black “train conductors, salespersons, doctors and lawyers.”? His block was certainly not dying but he noticed that people called his neighborhood a slum and a ghetto. ?Ron Howell writes: Don't get me wrong. I don't mean to say that mine was the childhood of "Leave It to Beaver. " The scourge of gang warfare that took hold of the city in the late 1950s struck fearsomely in Bedford-Stuyvesant. When I was about 11, I listened intently with a group of friends as a skinny little teenager who lived a block from me regaled us with tales of battles with rival gangs. I wondered how much was fiction and how much fact. Within a year came the news he had been shot to death in a street fight several blocks away.? The violence committed by a few seemed to become a convenient excuse for the city's police, who appeared to write off communities like Bedford-Stuyvesant as…unworthy of protection. When I was about 9 years old, I saw a policeman from the 79th Precinct stand in a grocery store and observe coldly while an enraged black woman repeatedly swung a long kitchen knife at a black man. As a crowd gathered and tried to subdue the woman, the white grocer locked the glass door to his store. He and the officer stood and watched until the violence ended.”

One thing Bedford-Stuyvesant lacked in the 1950’s was the strong women who helped lead the community in the 1940’s.? Anna Hedgeman left for a job assisting the mayor of New York.? Ada B. Jackson was falsely accused of being a communist by people interested in stopping her community work.? Even though she denied the charge, she lost her ability to lead the community. City councilwoman Genevieve Earle and community worker Lidia Cleaveland had retired from neighborhood work. Only Maud B. Richardson remained influential leading the Central Brooklyn Coordinating Council. As Hattie Carthan once observed, her Bedford-Stuyvesant community members were effective problem solvers, but they first needed to be convinced that a cause was worth fighting for. Hattie was just the person who could find a worthy cause and get others excited about finding solutions.? It was Hattie and others like her who would join a community medical team in the 1960s focused on helping their injured patient, Bedford-Stuyvesant, back from near death and toward the healthy new life the community enjoys today. Part Two: How she did it!