Confessions of a Fair-Housing Agitator: How the Hahas Came to South Jersey

By Gwen Simon Gain

CONFESSIONS OF A FAIR-HOUSING AGITATOR relates the story of the first three months of the author's frustrating efforts in the fall of 1967 to enlist and organize her small group of volunteers into smoothly functioning testers. The use of black testers had been recently approved by the New Jersey Supreme Court as the only valid way to prove and successfully prosecute racial discrimination in real estate offices and apartment complexes. But the process of filing these complaints with the N. J. Division on Civil Rights was a legally complicated procedure, requiring some shadowy methods and requiring the trained skills of the HAHAs, the House And Apartment Hunters Anonymous.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jul 20, 2011
• ISBN: 9781456812591

Gwen Simon Gain

Born into a middle-class family at the beginning of the Great Depression, the author, a light-skinned Caucasion, had ample opportunity to witness the hurtful and insulting ways in which American Negroes were treated. She married a returning Navy sailor after World War Two, and over the decade of the fifties she produced four children. Finally In her thirties she was at last able to immerse herself in the Civil Rights Movement let by Martin Luther King. Now eighty-one, she is living in Central Florida and writing her memoirs.

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Copyright © 2011 by Gwen Simon Gain.

Library of Congress Control Number:       2010916729

ISBN:          Softcover                                 978-1-4568-1258-4

                   Ebook                                      978-1-4568-1259-1

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Contents

PART ONE:   The Passions And Actions Of One’s Time . . . .

PART TWO:   You’ve Got To Have A Dream . . . Or How You Gonna Have A Dream Come True?"

PART THREE:   Until Justice Rolls Down Like Water, And Righteousness Like A Mighty Stream . . . ."

PART FOUR:   The Arc Of The Moral Universe Is Long . . . But It Bends Toward Justice

PART FIVE:   If Slavery Is Not Wrong, Nothing Is Wrong . . . .

PART SIX:   We Do Not Own One Another . . . .

PART SEVEN:   The Content Of Their Character . . . .

PART EIGHT:   No Man Is An Island, Entyre Of Itself . . . . Therefore Never Send To Know For Whom The Bell Tolls. It Tolls For Thee!"

PART NINE:   If I Can Help Sombody As I Pass Along, Then My Living Will Not Be In Vain . . . .

EPILOGUE

For My Eight Special Sisters, Simons All:

Mary Jacqueline,

Jocelyn Alberty,

Marilyn Elizabeth,

Alice Caroline,

Helen Lynn,

Kathlyn Mary-Francis,

Dorothy Pauline,

Margaret Ellyn,

All of whom I seldom see since we grew up, but

Whom I carry around always in my heart, and in my telephone.

 . . . Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has and it never will. Find out just what people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress . . . .

Frederick Douglass,

Black Writer and Educator

In the Time of American Slavery.

August 4, 1857

I believe in property rights. I believe that normally the rights of property and humanity coincide; but sometimes they conflict, and where this is so I put human rights above property rights.

President Teddy Roosevelt, November 1913

All licensed real estate brokers, salesmen or their representatives, developers, corporations and other persons engaged in rental or sale of real property, and lending institutions, shall abide by the relevant housing provisions of the New Jersey Law Against Discrimination and the rules and regulations of the new Jersey Real Estate Commission.

Governor Richard Hughes,

Executive order No. 21

Article VI Housing

Governor’s Code of Fair Practices

June 1965

PART ONE:

A man must have a part in the passions and actions of his time, under penalty of being judged not to have lived.

—Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes

 "THE PASSIONS AND ACTIONS

OF ONE’S TIME . . . ."

There she comes now! Reverend Samuel Appel suddenly exclaimed from his seat behind the steering wheel of his parked sedan. And she’s right on time!

Where? I don’t see anyone! At first, because of the fogged glass in my side window, I could make out nothing from where I was sitting beside him in the front passenger seat. Peering through the window into the glistening darkness in the direction my friend the Reverend had indicated with a sweep of his pipe stem, I saw nothing through the pounding rain. Nothing but a shopping center lot half full of parked cars, most of them facing in neat rows in the same direction.

And then, suddenly, the glass cleared enough for the woman to come into my eyesight: a dark figure under an umbrella, rapidly approaching us from the well-lit row of stores behind her. The glow of the tall light stanchions to our rear at last revealed the outline of a female in a bulky rain coat and calf-high rain boots. Moving between the clusters of silent vehicles, and then, gaining the clear, the woman scurried through the downpour toward where the two of us sat waiting in the front seat of Sam’s Chevy. The macadam surface of the parking lot glittered, and water splashed in little sparkling jets ahead of her oncoming feet. I shivered as I watched her come on from far across the lot. My own coat was none too heavy, and with the heat turned off so as not to run down the car battery, the air inside the car was turning cold.

She’s right on time, too, Sam added, a hint of relief in his voice. He must have been worried about that, though he had said nothing. We both had other obligations to attend to later on in the evening, after this bit of business had been resolved. His scheduled meeting, I knew, was far more important than my own. He and the other two urban missioners with whom he worked were trying to help save the decaying City of Camden, New Jersey, directly across the Delaware River from Philadelphia. As for me, I had a more serious personal problem to confront before I could drive across that river and meet with the citizens’ group that had hired me to take on this job: my VW Beatle was nearly out of gas and there was no way I could put any more into its tank because the dented hood would not raise—and I was a good eight miles from home. I could only hope to make it back to Merchantville, where I lived, and use my husband’s VW van to get to my meeting in Philadelphia.

But first, the Reverend Appel and I had a promise to keep.

Changing the entrenched ways of the world was never easy, back in 1967. Perfecting your plans in a parked car, in the dark and the cold and the falling rain, made the challenge of doing it seem doubly difficult. Personal cell phones did not yet exist. You had to look for a telephone booth to send a message when you were away from home. You could not run your car’s heater or your radio for long without running down the battery. But no matter. I was just such an active idealist in the 1960’s and for several years beyond. And as far back as I could remember, I had yearned to help erase a certain hypocrisy that held my country and its citizens in its unrelenting grip.

Racial discrimination. It was ruining my country, and it was making me angry.

Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr. were my main heroes in those days, and still are. I was white-skinned, comparatively speaking, just as Lincoln had been. And privileged, also comparatively speaking. And I deeply believed in the old adages I had learned in a Baptist Sunday School during my childhood: those edicts from the New Testament of the Bible about being obliged to help those less fortunate than myself. I still clung to those ethics, though I had long since given up on what I considered the fairy-tales of the Christian religion. The fact that I was two years shy of forty years old, with a husband and four young children, made no difference. I was about to do this present deed as much for all of them as for me.

But now that a new opportunity to help someone who needed my help was almost upon me, all I could think about was my need to put gasoline in the tank of my wounded Volkswagen Beatle—which I had left across the lot at a considerable distance where I could not possibly see its newly crumpled fender and hood. I needed enough gasoline to drive home; home to my warm, dry, well-lit house and my family. In my segregated, self-righteous, all-white community of Merchantville, New Jersey, where as far as I knew, racial problems did not exist.

We would do our task quickly, Rev. Appel and I, and move on to our separate meetings.

It was the evening after Halloween, and my children’s trick-or-treating around the neighborhood was finished for another year. And there I sat, eight miles from the refuge of Merchantville, New Jersey, where I lived, getting chilled in the front passenger seat of my new friend Sam Appel’s car. The two of us had been plotting mischief in the wet blackness of night, though the witching season was now over as well.

I sat there without talking much, trying not to shiver noticeably, sucking on sugary sweet pieces of candy corn pilfered from my young son Ken’s inventoried treat bag on my way out the door at home. With luck, he wouldn’t notice that some of his treats were missing. Working against a six p.m. rendezvous time, I had not had much time to eat the supper I had prepared for my family. And then my pale-blue 1966 Volkswagen Beatle had skidded on the icy wet surface at an intersection on my way alone to meet Sam, and I had barely tapped the bumper of the big car ahead of me as I stopped for a red light.

No damage done to the fancy car ahead of mine. But the collision had had enough force to crumple in the front of my Beatle’s hood, and I began to shiver harder inside my wool coat in Sam’s cold car as I contemplated how disappointed my husband Bill would be when he saw the damage. It was the third time our little blue Volkswagen bug had taken a hit in the past six months, the first two times requiring expensive surgery. And now the hood would not go up. With the car’s unique design being what it was, there was no way to put more gas in the tank until the front dent was pulled out and the hood could be lifted once more.

Sam sat, of course, behind the steering wheel of his sedan, but he was not driving. The ignition was turned off and so, to my discomfort, was the heater. We were parked and waiting, just as I had promised the young Negro woman we would be, in the large lot of a shopping center on the Black Horse Pike, as close to one of the tall light poles as we could get. It was foggy and it was raining, a cold and insistent downpour; one that we sensed was likely to go on all night long. The slick macadam surface all around us was dotted with parked cars, all lined up in neat rows between painted lines. But Sam had stopped directly beneath the tall light away from the other vehicles and the line of stores, so his car would be plainly visible in the lamp’s arc of yellow. Just as I had earlier explained to our new client we would do.

The lot glistened eerily all around us with patches of subdued light bouncing off of puddles of water as more rain came down. Sam and I had said little to each other, for our simple plan of action had already been laid. We sat side by side in conspiratorial silence, for the most part, each absorbed in our own thoughts. We were both a little tired, as well as hungry, we had confessed to each other at the start. But we each had a separate meeting to go to afterward, both of them beginning at eight p. m.: Sam’s, in the City of Camden about running for the School Board in the upcoming November elections; mine, across the Delaware River in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania with the people who had hired me for this unique enterprise.

The evening is just getting started. Can’t think about letting down yet.

And then, still scurrying straight toward us through the pouring rain at five past six, came that slim figure in raincoat and boots. The young woman, whom we had not yet met but with whom I had spoken for the second day over the telephone two hours earlier, carried an open umbrella to keep the rain off her bouffant hairdo, protected also by a plastic head scarf. We would invite her into the protective darkness of our auto sanctuary, was the plan, and the three of us would sit for a few minutes while Sam and I revealed to her our strategy. Just like a trio of spies: This dark-skinned woman whose ancestors had been brought from Africa in chains. Who planned to be married before the end of the month but had as yet found no place to move into with her new husband.

And the other two conspirators were Rev. Appel and I; two privileged descendants of for the most part Western Europeans, two lighter-skinned do-gooders out to improve the world.

And then, after we three got acquainted after a quick rendezvous, we would drive in two cars—the young woman going first, followed by Sam and me in Sam’s car—straight to the rental office of the Hartford Arms apartment complex in Runnemede, a couple of miles further south down the Black Horse Pike. Once inside the rental office, Sam and I would pretend to be man-and-wife and ask if an apartment were available. thus demonstrating to this soon-to-be bride the ugly truth that would surely break her heart. And in the doing, Sam and I would become angrier and more committed than ever.

This damned job, I thought, feeling a little sick as I watched the woman splash toward us so determinedly through the puddles and the rain. Why did I take this crazy job? Why wasn’t I home with my husband Bill and my four innocent kids, minding my own business, not knowing or caring what was going on in America in this socially and politically chaotic year of 1967? And why did I always think it was up to me to fix every underdog’s problems? What did I—or Sam Appel, either, for that matter—know about fixing this one. We were still novices. Babes in the woods.

Masochistic idealists.

Mrs. Gain? the young woman sang softly but melodiously through the window I was in the process of rolling down. I hope I’m not late. Calvin is going to meet us there.

I rolled my window down all the way to talk to her. Simultaneously, she stooped to my eye-level to see me better, and from six inches away I got a good look at her in return. At her sweet brown features beneath the scarf and big hairdo, and her anxious black eyes shining in the lamplight. The eyes pleaded of me, Can I trust you?

But Yes! the eyes said to me immediately afterward, I have to, I have no choice!

A mist of cold rain blew into my face through the open window, bringing me back to my own firm resolve.

For matters to ever change for the better in this place where we all resided—in this three-county area, in this State of New Jersey, in this country I so loved—we had to show this person, along with the others who made up the bravest and brightest of her people, what was really going on. Make them angry enough to turn to the New Jersey Civil Rights law for relief that might never come. But we had to try. We had no choice either. There was no reasonable alternative for the likes of Rev. Appel and me, now that we knew what was going in.

Hi, Miss Whittington, I said, smiling back at her. And forcing my most optimistic tone of voice as I turned in the passenger seat to pull up the button and unlock the back door behind my seat, I said, Hop in, before we both get sopping wet. This is the Reverend Appel I told you about over the telephone last night, remember?—he’s the Chairman of Project F.R.E.E. We’re going to help you get into an apartment in time for your wedding.

But what if we cannot? whispered that small voice of doubt inside my head.

*     *     *

For years, that previous evening of October 31st stood out in my memory as one of the most successful Halloweens ever. As usual, my four kids had been excited about the holiday, about dressing up and going trick-or-treating in the neighborhood—except that Wendi and Kenny, my two oldest at seventeen and fifteen, chose to pretend they were not at all interested in that begging kind of thing at the neighbors’ front doors anymore. (The Halloween term trick or treat had not yet come into use.)

Julie, at eight my youngest, had worn her pink and white satin colonial girl costume to school that morning. I had made it for her the year before from the same Simplicity pattern I used to make one for Wendi many years ago, and lucky for me, it still fit Julie. Patty Mercer, a Negro child of twelve and our sometime daughter, was ecstatic; she took Wendi’s larger costume home with her Sunday evening so she could wear it to her own school in North Camden on Halloween morning.

Scotty went back to school at lunchtime dressed in what he called his civvies: his oldest, sloppiest play clothes, with gory make-up his brother Ken had helped him apply to his face to make him look like a version of the devil. He carried the lid of a cardboard shoe box he had prepared, with a hole in the middle covered with a layer of red-stained cotton in the bottom, through which he had inserted from below the two stubs of his truncated right-hand fingers. (He had lost the ends of them in November of 1963, in a tragic encounter with a mechanized trash truck on the Merchantville Elementary school grounds. )

His shoe box lid ought to still provoke a horrified scream from the girls in his fifth grade class, Scotty assured me with a cheerful grin. It had been a whole year since they had last seen his fingers. He pointed out to me that after his accident four years earlier, some of the kids in his class were afraid of his shortened fingers and had refused to come near him. He told me then that it was their problem, not his. He told them he had had nothing to do with the assassination of President Kennedy that had occurred that same week of 1963. And he went along his merry way. Scotty made us laugh, with the many silly things he thought up to do or say, not just on Halloween, but throughout the year. I hoped he would be able to keep his delightful sense of humor and tremendous self-confidence throughout his life.

That late afternoon of Halloween in 1967, I had driven in a hurry from my place of employment in Philadelphia and across the Delaware River bridge to Camden, first turning left into the huge North Camden ghetto area to pick up Patty Mercer,* the eleven-year-old Negro girl who for the past two years had been spending most weekends in Merchantville with us. We had also taken her with us on Bill’s two-weeks of vacation to the World’s Fair in Canada the previous July. Patty always fit right in to our family. That was why she was our sometime child.

Though Halloween fell on a Tuesday that last day of October in 1967, I had committed to bringing Patty to our house in the suburbs for trick-or-treating that evening, just as I had promised her and my daughter Julie I would do. But once at the Mercer house I learned, to my consternation, that Flo* Mercer, Patty’s sweet, sickly mother, had been in the hospital since the previous Saturday with near-pneumonia. Sunday evening my husband Bill and I had dropped Patty off at her front door but did not take the time to go in. Had the Mercers been able to afford a telephone, we would have learned this scary news much sooner.

I did learn from talking to Louise,* the eldest of the eight Mercer children, that Gaylord* Mercer, the father of the large Mercer family, was still institutionalized in nearby Lakeland Hospital for alcohol-induced dementia or some such, and had as yet no discharge date. And her mother Flo was not yet well enough to be discharged from Cooper Hospital. So Big Sister Louise was left in charge of everything and everyone of her siblings, except for Winston*, seventeen, who would take orders from no one and help with nothing. Poor little Cliffie* was still not in kindergarten, Louise told me when I asked. Her mother had finally been able to take him for his required shots—I had given her the money for the bus fare to the health clinic some time ago—but the impetigo sores all over his body were taking too long a time to dry up, so he had to wait to start school. These poverty-stricken Negroes living in the ghettoes, I reflected at this news, seemed to be caught in one trap after another, always and eternally.

Louise would not allow Clifford*, five, and Susie*, seven, to go trick-or-treating in their North Camden neighborhood that Halloween—too dangerous, she said. And anyway she could not leave little Nancy*, who was not yet two, in order to escort them. The other kids older than Patty, who was fifth in line after Louise*, Winston*, Claire*, and Lincoln*, had already gone out with their big paper bags around their own neighborhood, sticking together for safely. Louise was only eighteen, and trying so hard to be a good daughter and capable big sister. She reminded me of me, when I was her age; the third girl in my own family, I had only four sisters younger than me by the time I was eighteen; two more came along later. But I had learned, before I could even remember the words, the parental rule that oldest took care of all younger when our mother and father were absent.

Patty was nearly ready to go when I got to her house that late afternoon of Halloween. Her tiny-boned little sister Susie, who was seven, stood on the run-down front porch in the cheaply-made, dirty-white nurse’s costume she had gotten from somewhere. Clutching her paper bag to her chest, she looked to be on the verge of tears. I could see in the diminishing light from the sun that Cliffie’s scabs were fading away and barely visible. I hesitated only a moment, wondering what our dear, protected-from-all-adversity white neighbors in Merchantville would think if I showed up at their doors begging for Halloween candy, along with several little black kids who didn’t live in the town. But in the next instant I said to myself, what the heck! Who cares what they think? They call themselves Christians, don’t they?

All of you kids, get in the car, I said,beckoning to Patty and I arranged to take Cliffie and Susie, the two younger children, along with me too. Louise made no objection; she just looked relieved.

You kids be good; don’t you be evil; you do what Miss Gwinnie tell you, she ordered her three siblings.

By that time I had learned from Patty that evil in that context meant naughty behavior. I loaded all three children into the blue Volkswagen Beatle, trying to be patient with the three excited children because we were late, night was falling, and I had promised my daughter Wendi the use of the VW to go to a Halloween supper party that evening.

Patty was so excited by this unexpected turn of events she could hardly contain herself. Her little brother and sister, JoJo and Susie, were finally getting to go to Merchantville with her! To see where she spent most of her weekends! To see where Miss Guinnie livedl And as if that weren’t enough thrill for one day, Patty herself had won the prize for best costume in her entire elementary school that afternoon, wearing the pink-and-white satin colonial-lady costume I had made for Wendi so many years before; back in the days when staying home and mothering was the only role I could claim, or even envision for myself for eons to come.

And then—what a successful evening it had turned out to be! Wendi cheerfully ran up to the costume trunk in our second-floor closet and pulled out an old Daffy-Duck outfit for JoJo to wear. The six younger kids all set out for trick-or-treating together as soon as it got dark: Scotty and Julie; Patty and Susie and little Cliffie, whose pet name in the family was JoJo; and with my fifteen-year-old son Kenny carrying his father’s big flashlight to watch over the entire group.

Ken, abandoning his earlier pretense of not being interested in Halloween anymore and clutching his own large brown grocery bag in his other hand, had volunteered for the task. He seemed proud of his assignment and utterly oblivious to the possibility he might meet with hostility because of his three dark-skinned charges. However, I made no suggestion of such a thing—I just kept reminding him of my mother’s old maxim about there being safety in numbers—but I could not help feeling nervous until they got back after dark.

There was no moon that night. The weather was perfect, however, warm and pleasant with no rain clouds in sight; the take of sweets was good; and all six children, which included three of my own, seemed to have had a happy time, with no problems or slights reported. About seven-thirty, Wendi and I drove the happy but tired, candy-laden Mercer kids home to North Camden and declared the venture a big success.

On the other hand, my own evening back at home later on was frustrating. My husband Bill was held up at work by a meeting, and seventeen-year-old Wendi had left immediately for her Halloween party in Maple Shade. Ken had gone up to his room to inventory on a sheet of notepaper his various candy bars so he would have an exact count when he got home from school next day. Julie and Scotty set right to work, sampling their goodies and discussing each one.

In between answering the front doorbell to greet other, older trick-or-treaters, and admiring their costumes, and dropping a Tootsie-Pop into each paper bag, I had to keep answering the telephone in regard to the fair-housing seminar Sam Appel and I had held at his North Camden the previous weekend.

One call was from Janet Polk*, a single black woman schoolteacher who had pretended at my request to be Negro Carl Bishop’s* wife. Carl had gone out alone the previous Saturday to test a real estate office, as his own date did not show up. Janet went all by herself that afternoon of Halloween to look at the Moorestown house that Sam and I, pretending to be a married couple, had checked out on Sunday. She was treated fine, Janet reported—but at the last minute she caught her heel in the same rubber mat that I had, and caught off balance, had plunged all the way from the top of the second-floor steps to the bottom! How embarrassing!

‘I’m bruised but not bleeding, Janet said. No, I’m fine, I don’t need to go to the hospital.

She told me nothing was broken. She was a good soldier, she assured me when I could not stop expressing my horrified concern. She was merely sporting battle scars, she said! This was surely one of the perils of home shopping for a house with no intent to buy. The prospect of our Project FREE (For Real Estate Equality) testers really hurting themselves—or being hurt!—frightened me. But I didn’t know what to do about Janet. Would we have to worry about being sued?

Sallie Williams*, a white volunteer from the Unitarian/Universalist church Bill and I attended in

Cherry Hillillill, was next to call that Halloween evening. Stockton Real Estate*, The Cherry Hill realtor she and her Negro husband Fred Williams* went to visit the previous Saturday as a mixed-race couple—the agency who suddenly found a lost key after they went home and phoned to tell them so—was putting them off yet again. Lying to them, of course. (So aren’t we just meeting fire with fire, when we, in turn, lie to them? my aroused conscience demanded.) At any rate, Sallie, who was Caucasian and pregnant, promised to keep pushing the issue so as to get a tighter case against the Stockton agency if she could.

But it had happened much earlier in the evening that I got the most unsettling call of all. It came while I was pinning five-year-old JoJo Mercer into his Daffy-Duck costume that was three sizes too large for him, having been worn by both my Kenny and my Scotty when each was about eight.

The caIl came from a young Negro woman referred to me by my friend Robbie Robinson, dentist and President of the Camden City NAACP. At least, I assumed that Rochelle Whittington was black. I actually had to summon up the courage to ask her outright if she was, to be certain. Her speech over the telephone, excited but cultured, did not give her away.

Yes; she was a Negro, as was Calvin Ferguson, her fiance. And she told me the two of them were desperate to find an apartment before their marriage on November 18, less than three weeks away. They had been denied their rights, she felt certain, at five different apartment projects in Camden County, all of them nearly new, all located along the White Horse and Black Horse Pikes. But she and Calvin had no way to prove it. They were about to give up and accept that they would have to live with Calvin’s relatives in my home town of Woodbury, where I had grown up. But a friend had told her only that day about Rev Appel’s new volunteer group Project FREE, the initials of which stood For Real Estate Equality, and had given her my phone number.

It came to light, in the course of our conversation, that her fiance taught the white folks’ kids American History at the same Gloucester County junior high school that I had attended years before. The young woman told me that she worked as a secretary at a big corporation in Camden, and she and her groom-to be had hoped to rent a nice apartment in a fairly new development about halfway between the two communities of Camden and Woodbury, which is why the young couple had been looking along the two Pikes around Runnemede for months and months.

She, Rochelle Whittington, was pretty sure that they were being lied to by all the rental agents they visited. The young couple, who had been going apartment hunting for months, were constantly being told No. Sorry. No vacancies just now; try again next month. Or in January. Or next March? Her fiance Calvin Ferguson wasn’t as certain as she was, that all was on the up and up.

I keep telling Calvin they’re lying to us, Rochelle said. But he won’t believe it. And we can’t prove that they are.

We can find out if they are, I said, with more bravado than I felt inside. How many apartment complexes have you tried?

Rochelle said, Lots and lots. Maybe a dozen. But the one we like best is Hartford Arms Apartments, in Runnemede. It’s got all new carpeting. Brand-new appliances . . . Close to our jobs in both directions, you know?

I had begun seething inside but reminded myself to stay calm.

Without consulting with anyone, I assured Miss Whittington that my group, Project FREE, would help her, of course—It was my job, wasn’t it?—and that she should call me back as soon as she got off work the next evening so I could tell her what the plan would be. I’ll get it touch with Mr. Levin, I said. He’s Co-director of the New Jersey Division on Civil Rights up in Trenton. And with Reverend Sam Appel in Camden and Fred Clever in the suburbs. He’s Project FREE’s Co-Director, along with Sam. They’ll know what to do," I said.

I went to bed late that night wondering if I could really put my money where my mouth was. I resolved to call Myron Levin first thing in the morning, to get his advice. If only I didn’t still feel like such a novice!

*     *     *

The first day of November arrived, and Halloween of 1967 had been put away securely in the past. I had seen to my parental obligations and had given a fun time to at least six children, three of them my own. Now it was time for me move on. Yet how was it possible for me to be busier and busier each day without breaking down emotionally, I demanded of myself halfway through that first day of the new month. I had spent the morning at home, getting job-related papers in order, paying household bills, etc, all of that between talking at length on the phone with several different staff members of the New Jsersey Division on Civil Rights in Trenton, our State Capital sixty-some miles away.

I wanted to find out from them what I should do about the young woman who had called me the previous evening, desperate to rent an apartment before her marriage.

But what a disappointment! It developed that after all Director Myron Levin’s big talk of the previous weekend at our Project FREE seminar, the Division on Civil Rights lacked the staff to come down and conduct a test themselves so as to lodge an immediate complaint—at least, not with the haste that was required in a situation like this one involving Rochelle and Cal, a Negro couple, and the apartment complex of Hartford Arms in Runnemede.

And then, in order to persuade a Camden County judge to issue a document called a TRO, a Temporary Restraining Order, to hold a particular apartment, the young Negro couple would have to make the complaint themselves, and not Project FREE! Myron thought that Sam Appel and I had understood that. It seemed, according to the Director, that we lived in a much more conservative area than the Division, based in Trenton in the center of our State, was used to working in. Thus, Myron hinted, we were much less sophisticated than those pro volunteers in those active fair-housing groups up in North Jersey. We hadn’t been around long enough to know how to handle a case, he said.

To make the best possible legal case, Myron explained to me, we needed to send a white couple into the rental office immediately after the Negroes came out, in a test called a sandwich. What was more, the white couple needed to make a down payment on an available apartment and apply for a credit check.

I was floored.

Why don’t you go, Gwen, and get Rev. Appel to go with you? Myron suggested in all seriousness. You two seem to know more about this than anyone else. What a laugh! I’d been at this only a month! The people at the Division were the ones who were supposed to be the experts!

Semi-numb, my mind reeling with disgust because I had truly expected the Division on Civil Rights to come charging down to our end of the State like white knights to commandeer an apartment for Miss Whittington after hearing from me her story of humiliating rejection, I drove to the Point in North Camden to work with Sam on the results of Project FREE’s testing weekend, as we had scheduled. Still incensed and still perplexed, I told Sam what Myron Levin had said. He agreed we could not wait for the Division on Civil Rights to come through for us, and said he would make the test with me and Miss Whittington that same evening and the heck with all those procrastinating fellows up in Trenton. They were always such big talkers, he said.

Later that afternoon at the Point, the Presbyterian urban center based in North Camden, I met Sam Alper, a local builder and house rehabber, who had dropped by to talk to Rev. Appel and his other two team members, Rev. Dick Whitham and Rev. Larry Black. Mr. Alper and I had a lengthy conversation about rehabs, the fixing up and resale of run-down properties, and about the virtues of home ownership for Negroes as opposed to renting. He offered to drive me up to a State Rehab Conference in East Brunswick in Central Jersey that was scheduled for the next day, but wary of this man I had never heard of before, I told him I was too pinned down by my own schedule and turned down his offer. (And in light of what happened later that evening at Hartford Arms, it was a good thing I did!)

At five o’clock on the dot I heard from Rochelle Whittington again. She had left work early and gone to a phone booth to call me so as not to be overheard by her white co-workers. I arranged for her and her fiance Calvin Ferguson, the schoolteacher, to meet Sam and me at six o’clock that same evening at the Black Horse Pike Shopping Center near Runnemede. We would go on an apartment-renting excursion at Hartford Arms, I told her confidently, and find out exactly what was going on. With any luck, by the time we got through we’d have found an apartment to be legally held for them to move into.

Sam Appel and I drove south to the Black Horse Pike Shopping Center in separate cars that evening at six, since he had a late afternoon meeting scheduled and might be held up. It had been raining nearly all day by that time, and was getting colder and the roads were somewhat icy. My VW Beatle was running on its emergency gallon of gas—as usual, my daughter Wendi forgot to put gas in when she used the car the previous evening, even though I had given her the money for it.

Fearful I’d be late, I decided to wait and gas up on my way home. But on the way down the Pike at a stoplight, that was when I skidded with what I thought was a light tap into the rear end of a station wagon ahead of me and bent the front bumper of my small VW sedan inward, against the hood. No damage at all to the station wagon, thank goodness, but I wouldn’t be able to raise the hood of my car to put in gasoline! My heart would be in my throat all the way home, I knew.

Incredibly, this was the third minor injury to that little blue car in the six months we had owned it. I had no doubt that my husband would be absolutely sick when he heard about it—it would cost big bucks, he would immediately assume, to have it fixed—so I wasn’t going to mention the hood problem to him yet. I told myself I’d try to get it fixed next day before he got home from work. All I could tell Bill in my defense was that this was the first time I had been involved in an accident of any kind since I started driving twenty years before.

The evening’s later events were, for Sam and me, the truly traumatic ones. The minister arrived at the parking lot at six o’clock on the dot and I transferred from my car to his through the pouring rain. And then Rochelle Whittington showed up right on time at the Shopping Center, but without her fiance, Calvin Ferguson, who had had a late meeting at school but who had promised to meet us later at Hartford Arms, the fairly new apartment complex in which they most desired to reside.

Once we had gotten together, the three of us—Rochelle, Sam and I—sat in Sam’s car in the rain and plotted our strategy. It was quickly plain to Sam and me that this young person was determined to do whatever it took to claim her right to rent a nice apartment in the suburbs. I had seen by the overhead light of the car as she got into the