"The Bumpurs murder sparked a citywide movement to temporarily

Scan page 17

halt all evictions in N.Y...."

Community speak-out in Harlem 16 SOCIALIST ACTION APRIL 1987 of friends or families—or are left homeless. Some 200,000 residents are believed to be doubled up, while the number of homeless has risen to 60,000.

Blacks and Hispanics hardest hit Although Blacks and Hispanics are only 42 percent of the population of New York, they constitute around 70 percent of poor people living in the city. While Blacks make up only 26 percent of the renters in New York, nearly 54 percent of the tenants sued in Housing Court are Black.

The minorities' percentage of the homeless population is even higher. Of every five homeless families, three are Black and one is Hispanic.

In addition, gentrification and luxury developments have the effect of destroying communities through displacement. Tenant organizers and community activists often compare the situation developing in New York to that in South Africa. Manhattan is becoming an entirely rich, white bastion, while poor and working-class communities and all oppressed minorities are pushed further and further outside.

The Black community has not remained silent in the face of this deteriorating situation, but has begun organizing. The Bumpurs murder sparked a city-wide movement to temporarily halt all evictions in New York, as a first step in the fight to guarantee a right to housing.

A grassroots "eviction watch"

The Coalition for a Moratorium on Evictions is pushing for legislation which would prohibit evictions for any reason, pending a reorganization of the city's Housing Court and social-services system.

Not surprisingly, the Coalition is a grassroots network which has drawn its strongest support from those Black, Hispanic, and poor communities (in Harlem, the Bronx, and the Lower East Side of Manhattan) for whom the threat of forcible eviction and homelessness is most real.

The Coalition's tactics correspond to this reality. One of its primary undertakings has been to set up "eviction-watch" response systems in these neighborhoods. Community residents are organized to picket outside the apartment about to be taken, to sit in, or to confront the marshal and prevent the eviction of a neighbor.

So far, almost every scheduled eviction against which the eviction watch was NEW YORK-On March 7, about 750 people attended a forum on racially motivated violence. The event was hosted by Wadleigh Junior High School in Harlem.

The school's principal pointed out that the school building is falling apart and is threatened with being closed down. It was deteriorating and closed-down schools and hospitals in the Black community, high unemployment among Black youth, and dire poverty.

Attorney C. Vernon Mason reminded the audience of what Malcolm X once said: "We live in America, but we're not Americans. And America is a racist society throughout-its police departments, its social services, and its school departments."

Theodore Kirklin, a former police officer, pointed out to the meeting, "We thought in the '60s that if we got more Black policemen, judges, doctors, lawyers, teachers, things would be better. We did

----- pull-quotes -----

clearly understood that increased racial violence goes hand in hand with