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Filmmaker Inspired by Stuyvesant Town Integration Battle

By Patrick Hedlund

DNAinfo News Editor

STUYVESANT TOWN — An NYU filmmaker is hoping to make a movie out of the dramatic but little-known struggle to allow blacks into Stuyvesant Town during the early years of the sprawling apartment complex.

Amy Fox, a teacher in New York University's graduate film and television program, penned a screenplay about a group of determined group of white tenants who fought to allow black families into the East Side middle-class enclave in the late 1940s and early '50s.

The courageous story has special significance for Fox. Her grandparents were among the handful of families that pushed management to integrate the complex — risking their homes and personal safety in the process.

"I just remembered always feeling kind of proud and thinking that my grandparents were involved in civil rights," said Fox, 35, of Brooklyn. "And that made my family kind of special."

"At some point I just remember thinking it sounded like a movie to me," said Fox, whose film credits include the 2005 "Heights," starring Glenn Close.

Stuyvesant Town, which includes more than 11,000 apartments spread over 80 acres, was built for veterans returning from World War II. The former landlord, MetLife, argued that admitting African Americans into the complex  would hurt the development's profitability.

In the era before the civil rights movement, the segregation policy was upheld in state Supreme Court despite lawsuits from black veterans.

In response, a group of white tenants banded together to fight to end the color barrier at Stuyvesant Town. One tenant, Lee Lorch, agreed to allow a black family to temporarily take over his apartment.

When other tenants stood guard outside the apartment, racist neighbors tried to drive out the black family by tossing rocks through with the windows.

As a result of the conflict, families who were part of the pro-integration tenant committee were served eviction notices. Nineteen of them, Fox's grandparents included, refusing to leave.

"It started with this small-scale, grassroots thing among the tenants, but by the end of it there were citywide protests and they were lobbying the mayor," Fox said.

Soon, there were large protests that ended with MetLife dropping the eviction proceedings only hours before city marshals were set to throw the families' belongings into the street. Ultimately, this led the landlord to agree to admit blacks into Stuyvesant Town.

"[The activists] felt that they had come back from fighting fascism overseas, and their entire motivation for fighting World War II was to make the world a better place," Fox said. "They came back to this backward form of thinking."

Fox noted that her grandfather never understood the discrminatory practice, after a black soldier saved his life in the war.

"This man saved my life in war," she remembered him saying. "Who am I to say [a black man] can't live next to me?"

Fox's mother, a young girl at the time, became friends with the son of the first black family to move in, the Hendrixes, and they often played and went to school together.

The filmmaker's grandparents took pride in their activism, even framing the eviction notice that remained hanging in their Stuyvesant Town apartment until they died in the '90s.

Fox took some creative liberties in her screenplay, but for the most part the historical details provided plenty of drama.

"Every time somebody read the script, they said this just isn't believable," noted Fox, who has shopped the screenplay around but doesn't have any takers yet.

"The idea of putting the greater good before yourself is so foreign to people who read the screenplay, which of course made me more passionate to do the movie," she said.

The story was important enough for local Councilman Dan Garodnick, a lifelong tenant of the complex, to ask Fox to testify at City Hall during hearings on the property's sale in 2006.

And although she started working on the script in 2004, Fox is not necessarily in a  rush to get it made.

"With this project, I have a kind of core belief in it… I just sort of trust that someone will believe in this as much as I do," she said.

The story also might help spur a new wave of idealists to stand up for their beliefs, Fox added.

"My generation was really out of touch with that kind of activism," she said. "I wanted it to be something that really inspired people and showed them what was possible."