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48 5. Cooper versus Power On February 4, 1966, senator Robert F. Kennedy of New York walked some Bedford-Stuyvesant streets with local activists. With an estimated 450,000 residents, the Brooklyn neighborhood was a more populous black community than storied Harlem; 84 percent of its people were black,and 12 percent Puerto Rican. Bedford-Stuyvesant was a bigger ghetto than uptown, and it was comparable in size to Chicago’s South Side,sometimes called the Black Metropolis.1 Central Brooklyn had its assets. Unlike Harlem, a land of tenements where only 2 percent of the occupants owned their homes, in BedfordStuyvesant , the land of brownstones, 15 percent of the neighbors were homeowners.The Coopers of Decatur Street were among those one in every seven central Brooklyn homeowners. Yet residents of the Brooklyn ghetto were more depressed and impaired than the uptown blacks in Harlem. There were fewer unified families, more unemployment, declining incomes, and less job history, a New York University study reported.2 There was more misery in Brooklyn, yet less federal antipoverty aid compared to Harlem.3 Activists who escorted Kennedy needled him about their suffering. “I’m weary of study, senator,” Thomas Russell Jones, a judge, former assemblyman , and Unity Democratic Club leader, told Kennedy.“Weary of speeches, weary of promises that aren’t kept....The Negro people are angry[,] senator, and judge that I am, I’m angry too. No one is helping us.”4 The activists’ frustration and cynicism bruised Kennedy, but he rose effectively to their challenge.5 Kennedy introduced legislation in Congress that allowed the creation of local development corporations. Kennedy’s initiative was supported by Jacob Javits,the senior U.S.senator from NewYork. By the end of 1966, the federal government selected Bedford-Stuyvesant as the first slum area to participate in the new program. Two corporations were set up to work together, Bedford-Stuyvesant Renewal and Rehabilitation Corporation—a community group led by judge Tom Jones—plus the Development and Services Corporation, the business group that included William Paley of CBS, Thomas Watson of IBM, President Kennedy–era treasury secretary Douglas Dillon, and private capital experts.6 By April 1967, Jones stepped down, and the slum clearance effort picked up a new name:the Bedford-Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation.7 NewYork Cooper versus Power 49 City deputy police commissioner Franklin A. Thomas, a Negro, resigned to become president of the new corporation. Between fiscal years 1968 and 1973, Restoration received one-third of $90 million the federal government dispensed for the national Special Impact Program, a public-private partnership. Restoration Corp. became the “largest and . . . most technically sophisticated” community development program.8 Restoration established its headquarters at the former Sheffield Milk bottling site on Fulton Street, where years before, Andrew Cooper had led demonstrators who picketed for fair employment.9 In 1966,New York State prepared to hold a constitutional convention,a process by which the state’s governing document could be amended. New York had adopted constitutions in 1777, 1821, 1846, 1894, and 1938. In 1915 voters rejected proposed amendments.10 Warren Bunn, leader of the Brooklyn branch of the NAACP, and Andy Cooper were nominated by their peers to serve as convention delegates. Reginald Butts, a fellow UDC member and neighbor, enthusiastically supported Cooper’s candidacy. At the time, Butts was teaching at New York University. He resigned his teaching position to head the operation. Butts also borrowed $25,000 to pay for the effort, but he did not confer with his wife Bobbye. Butts thought his spouse would hand his head to him, but she went along with the investment. The couple was committed to supporting a successful campaign.11 Bunn and Cooper were not representatives of the Brooklyn Democratic Party. Varying news accounts labeled Cooper a “reform” or “insurgent” delegate candidate.12 By June, ten months had passed since the federal Voting Rights Act became law.The law could be assumed to be the antidote to overt tactics in southern states that prevented blacks from voting, whether the methods were violent in Mississippi,Alabama,and Georgia or arcane inVirginia and Maryland through the use of poll taxes and literacy tests. Did the enforcement of voting rights for all citizens apply in northern states too? Cooper and several friends decided it was time to test the new law. On June 23,1966,Andrew W.Cooper sued New York political leaders in U.S. District Court (Eastern) in Brooklyn. This was to prevent an election in black Brooklyn...

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