Fighting Jim Crow in the County of Kings: The Congress of Racial Equality in Brooklyn

5. Operation Clean Sweep: The Movement to Create a “First-Class Bedford-Stuyvesant”

5 oPeration Clean sweeP The Movement to Create a “First-Class Bedford-Stuyvesant” Twelve years of neglect! That’s the story of Bedford-Stuyvesant. Years of allowing a good community to go to pot. —Robert Law and Oliver Leeds to Mayor Robert F. Wagner Jr., 1962 Brooklyn CORE members chose to address the issue of inadequate garbage collection because the excessive trash was such an odious part of people’s everyday life in Bedford-Stuyvesant, and, by late 1962, after their work on housing and employment discrimination, they understood that, to build a powerful local protest movement, they would have to develop campaigns that connected with the grass roots and with local organizations. The housing cases and Ebinger’s campaign created a sense of camaraderie and trust among Brooklyn CORE’s members. The group’s unique ethos, represented in its democratic culture and penchant for audacious protest tactics, gave its members strength to tackle entrenched structural inequality within an agency of city government such as the Department of Sanitation (DOS), which controlled garbage collection policies for neighborhoods throughout the city. The chapter also pressed borough-level politicians to advocate for better services in Bedford-Stuyvesant, which gained publicity for the cause. But because of the structure of city government, neither Borough President Abe Stark nor local representatives on the New York City Council had direct power to redress the situation. Brooklyn CORE also hoped that everyday people in Bedford-Stuyvesant might become emboldened by a communitywide effort that fought city hall for improvements in their quality of life and that demanded recognition and respect from the highest seats of city 130 • Fighting JiM Crow in the County oF Kings government. Chapter leaders imagined that mobilization spurred by the sanitation issue would spark a wider movement against local forms of racial discrimination. Dubbed Operation Clean Sweep, the campaign was a test of Brooklyn CORE’s ambition and creativity. The chapter’s efforts attracted black college students, working-class African Americans, middle-class black and white professionals, and interracial married couples, some of whom brought their own political ideologies to the organization. Sometimes these new members advocated ideas that did not always reflect CORE’s basic principles of interracialism and nonviolence. After Operation Clean Sweep ended, members of Brooklyn CORE, mostly younger black men, argued for a more black nationalist influence in the local, and even national, movement. Black nationalist sentiments were popular among black urban youth, even the college-educated ones attracted to Brooklyn CORE, early in the 1960s. Indeed, the critiques of interracialism that flourished in the national movement during the mid- to late 1960s were not new, nor did such criticisms begin to affect activists’ thinking until after 1966, when Stokely Carmichael popularized the black power slogan and ideology. In the urban North black activists involved in interracial, nonviolent, direct-action protest and community organizing articulated critiques of race and class inequality with black nationalist ideas and language much earlier than historians usually recognize. Young people in Brooklyn CORE wanted to put the needs of poor people at the center of the northern civil rights agenda, and they also wanted to transform civil rights leadership. In the early 1960s Brooklyn CORE’s democratic culture allowed these ideas to coexist with the national organization’s and some chapter members’ values of interracialism. The chapter did not dissolve over ideological battles that pitted black nationalism against interracialism . Instead, more people in Brooklyn used CORE to further their own protest agendas through the chapter’s innovative demonstrations and widespread interests. And Brooklyn CORE’s action-oriented cadre was eager to accommodate such new energies.1 During Operation Clean Sweep the chapter developed dramatic street theater tactics and skillfully employed the media, which forced the DOS to defend itself against charges of racial discrimination. Evidence also indicates that the city subsequently increased sanitation services in north-central Brooklyn. A small group of African Americans in their twenties was largely responsible for this small, much-delayed, but nonetheless important victory. Through editorials in Brooklyn CORE’s newsletter ,theNorthStar,namedafterFrederickDouglass’snineteenth-century abolitionist organ, Brooklyn CORE’s young black college students Operation Clean Sweep • 131 issued bold criticisms of the racial and class characteristics of national and local civil rights movement leaders and articulated their belief that the black poor, especially in cities, should be at the vanguard of the movement. Their militancy, which was often supported by whites such as Arnold Goldwag...