School Colors Episode 3: "The Battle of Forest Hills"

Code Switch

NPR

Society & Culture

4.6 • 14.5K Ratings

🗓️ 20 May 2022

⏱️ 59 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In the early 1970s, Forest Hills, Queens, became a national symbol of white, middle class resistance to integration. Instead of public schools, this fight was over public housing. A fight that got so intense the press called it "The Battle of Forest Hills." How did a famously liberal neighborhood become a hotbed of reaction and backlash? And how did a small group of angry homeowners change housing policy for the entire country?

Transcript

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0:00.0	I needed a place to live, okay?
0:03.0	This is Blanca Isagiré.
0:05.0	My husband was a factory worker at the time, and I was working at Macy's.
0:11.0	And I was also going to college.
0:14.0	It was 1975. They had two teenage kids.
0:18.0	When she found out they'd been chosen for an apartment in a brand new building in Forest Hills Queens,
0:23.0	she felt like she'd won the lottery.
0:25.0	It was total excitement.
0:27.0	And I said right in the nick of time, because my landlady had passed away,
0:31.0	and the Hadootus who did not live in New York put the house up the sale.
0:34.0	So it happened in the nick of time.
0:36.0	We would have had to move into an expensive apartment,
0:38.0	and life would have been totally different for us.
0:41.0	Totally, totally different.
0:44.0	We met Blanca in front of the Forest Hills houses.
0:46.0	Three brick towers, 12 stories each.
0:49.0	She's one of the first people to move in, and she stayed for almost 50 years.
0:53.0	She loved this place from the first time she laid eyes on it.
0:56.0	I saw it. I said, man, this is nice. This is nice.
0:59.0	First of all, even though the apartment was not huge,
1:03.0	my kids had their own bedroom.
1:06.0	All this was park, playgrounds.
	...

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