Congress of Racial Equality

Variant names
Dates:
Establishment 1942
Active 1962
Active 1966
Active 1941

History notes:

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.

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Subjects:

  • Education
  • African Americans
  • Teachers
  • Black nationalism
  • Black power
  • Civil disobedience
  • Civil rights
  • Civil rights demonstrations
  • Civil rights movement
  • Civil rights movements
  • Civil rights workers
  • Collective bargaining
  • De facto school segregation
  • Demonstrations
  • Discrimination in employment
  • Discrimination in employment
  • Discrimination in housing
  • Discrimination in public accommodation
  • Discrimination in public accommodations
  • Freedom of movement
  • Freedom rides
  • Fund raising
  • Government, Resistance to
  • March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, Washington, D.C., 1963
  • Minorities
  • Nonviolence
  • Passive resistance
  • Police
  • Police patrol
  • Prisons
  • Race discrimination
  • Reformatories for women
  • Reformatories for women
  • Rent strikes
  • Restaurants
  • Reunions
  • Riots
  • School integration
  • Social integration
  • Tenants' associations
  • Voter registration
  • Discrimination in employment
  • Reformatories for women

Occupations:

not available for this record

Places:

  • 00, US
  • Brooklyn (New York, N.Y.) (as recorded)
  • Minnesota (as recorded)
  • New York (N.Y.) (as recorded)
  • Minnesota--Minneapolis (as recorded)
  • Mississippi (as recorded)
  • United States (as recorded)
  • New York (N.Y.) |x History |v Archival resources (as recorded)
  • New York (as recorded)
  • New York (N.Y.) (as recorded)
  • Bedford-Stuyvesant (New York, N.Y.) (as recorded)
  • New York (as recorded)
  • Harlem (New York, N.Y.) (as recorded)
  • Mississippi (as recorded)
  • Brooklyn (New York, N.Y.) |x History |v Archival resources. (as recorded)
  • Baltimore (Md.) (as recorded)
  • New York (N.Y.) (as recorded)

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