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28 3. Political Awakening On December 5, 1957, New York became the first city in the United States to legislate against racial or religious discrimination in the housing market by adopting the Fair Housing Practices Law.1 New York was becoming more racially segregated. Harlem was the black ghetto, and in little more than a decade, predominantly white yet integrated Bedford-Stuyvesant was manufactured into a black ghetto through discriminatory housing practices by banks and government officials. In November 1958, Republican Nelson A. Rockefeller was elected governor in a surprise win, upsetting the Democratic incumbent W. Averell Harriman. Meanwhile another liberal Republican, Jacob Javits, won a U.S. Senate seat. In an article in Esquire, Javits made a bold prediction about race relations: In about fifty years, he said, America would elect its first black president.2 November 1958 also saw the midterm congressional elections . Incumbent Republican Dwight Eisenhower had to share power with Democratic majorities in the Senate and House of Representatives. Fifteen newly elected senators gave the Democrats a 64–34 advantage and a vetoproof majority. Democrats also gained 64 seats in the House of Representatives and, now holding 283 of the seats, a decisive majority.3 Many of these newcomers were conservative southerners who supported American apartheid in the South. That status quo, however, was under challenge by civil rights groups. That fall in Brooklyn, Andy Cooper followed his routine of overnight work at the Schaefer brewery. Jocelyn was a homemaker, and the Coopers ’ daughter was attending the neighborhood elementary school. Jocelyn turned thirty in January 1959. She was restless. In the fall, she enrolled in Brooklyn College but soon dropped out because she could not afford the tuition. Jocelyn searched for ways to make additional money for the household . She tried to sell Vesta fire alarms as a home business, but the attempt failed: she was not able to sell a single alarm. Jocelyn was aware that blacks were underrepresented politically in Bedford -Stuyvesant. Thomas Russell Jones, a black candidate, ran for the state assembly district seat and lost by 187 votes to incumbent Samuel I. Berman. Political Awakening 29 Jocelyn Cooper was remorseful about Jones’s loss.“Why didn’t I help him?” she asked herself.4 T. R. Jones was born in Brooklyn in 1913 and was the son of immigrants from Barbados. He attended public school and earned undergraduate and law degrees from St. John’s University. Jones was admitted to the bar in 1938. At that time,many Americans stood anxiously on the sidelines and watched Hitler’s Germany occupy one European nation at a time, while in Spain fascist Francisco Franco waged a civil war.As a young lawyer,Jones was elected chairman of the New York Youth Congress, an antifascist group supported by First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt.He joined the U.S.Army in 1941.In December 1942, Jones married Bertha Kantor, a Jewish woman who was involved with Jones in the youth congress. Jones was a first lieutenant when he took part in the Normandy invasion of 1944. Because he was a lawyer, Jones was placed on a courts martial board. Often he successfully represented black GIs who were falsely accused of rape and murder of white women. When Jones came home from the war in the early 1950s, he visited the Democratic Party office on Kingston Avenue at St. Marks Place. He was told to go to the office of Sixth Assembly District member Bert Baker, the lone black state representative in Brooklyn. Jones found the instructions odd because he resided in the Seventeenth Assembly District, represented by Stan Steingut. The Seventeenth was getting blacker, and those new residents were virtually neglected by their white representatives. Jones challenged the status quo. In 1955,Jones defended three Chinese workers who sent money home to relatives and friends and were thus convicted of aiding communist China.5 When Jones made a 1958 run for state assembly, he partnered with Joseph K. Rowe, a Jewish resident and member of the Nostrand Democratic Club, who ran for committeeman.6 In 1958, Jacqueline McMickens moved with her family to New York City from Birmingham, Alabama. McMickens admired the black-owned Birmingham World newspaper because of its courageous editor, Emory O. Jackson.7 Jackson turned fifty that year and had been with the newspaper for sixteen years, since 1942. Jackson was noteworthy because he confronted white segregationist authority in the pages of the World,deep in the heart of Dixie.His courage was remarkable...

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