Congress of Racial Equality

Downtown CORE (Congress of Racial Equality), a chapter of the CORE national organization, was formed in March 1963 and remained active until the end 1966. Based on Manhattan's Lower East Side, it was one of nearly a dozen New York City local chapters organized in the early 1960s. Its founders included Rita and Michael Schwerner (the latter one of the group of three civil rights workers murdered in Philadelphia, Mississippi in 1964), and its members included radical pacifist Igal Rodenko, anarchist activist and theorist Murray Bookchin, and writer Bell Gale Chevigny.

While the chapter focused much of its energy on tenant organizing and combatting racial discrimination in housing, its first local action, in July and August of 1963, was organizing demonstrations protesting discrimination in hiring of workers building Rutgers Houses (a public housing development then under construction on the Lower East Side), as part of a national CORE campaign against all-white building trades unions. A dozen and half Downtown members were arrested on disorderly conduct charges during these demonstrations and sentenced to five days in prison or paying a $25 fine. Three of them, including Helena Lewis (sometimes also known as Helena Levine), an administrative assistant at New York University and a Downtown CORE officer, refused to pay their fines and served their time at New York City's Women's House of Detention, in October 1964. Appalled by what they saw and experienced there, they mounted a campaign, in concert with others, to protest and focus public attention on conditions at the prison. This campaign included sending letters to editors of newspapers and confidential memoranda to New York City and State public officials, and testifying to a grand jury convened (possibly in part because of their actions) to investigate complaints against state of affairs at the jail, as well as to the New York State legislature's Joint Committee on Penal Institutions.