This book documents the history of Brooklyn CORE from 1960-1964. The everyday, internal dynamics of this interracial chapter, and its relationship with National CORE and the wider movement, take center stage in this drama of how women and men in the urban North built one of the country’s most notable protest organizations of the early 1960s. Brooklyn CORE’s campaigns to open housing and job opportunities for African Americans and Puerto Ricans, and its efforts to improve local public education and environmental conditions, are the main topics of this book. Focusing on Brooklyn CORE’s protest c ... More

This book documents the history of Brooklyn CORE from 1960-1964. The everyday, internal dynamics of this interracial chapter, and its relationship with National CORE and the wider movement, take center stage in this drama of how women and men in the urban North built one of the country’s most notable protest organizations of the early 1960s. Brooklyn CORE’s campaigns to open housing and job opportunities for African Americans and Puerto Ricans, and its efforts to improve local public education and environmental conditions, are the main topics of this book. Focusing on Brooklyn CORE’s protest campaigns shows how difficult it was for activists in northern cities to bring about permanent economic and social change through non-violent, dramatic, direct action protests. Frustrated in its attempts to move the system through “acceptable” means, Brooklyn CORE resorted to desperate measures, such as a threatened stall-in at the 1964 World’s Fair. The reaction of politicians and media sources revealed the power of those in control to define the bounds of legitimate protest. Despite the chapter’s disintegration in the mid-1960s, which had little to do with the movement’s ideological shift toward Black Power and Black Nationalism, one of the purposes of this book is to find Brooklyn CORE’s lasting influence even in its apparent defeats. Most important, an examination of Brooklyn CORE’s history reveals how the northern movement’s goals to eliminate racial discrimination and class inequality in American cities have remained largely unfulfilled because of structural forces far beyond a single organization’s power to change.