Mapping Black Households in 1950 Greenburgh: A Study of Suburban Segregation

Several years ago, I wrote a blog post mapping Greenburgh's African American home ownership using data from the 1940 U.S. Census.  My purpose then was to investigate whether Black homeownership patterns in mid-20th century Greenburgh gave evidence of housing segregation.  I concluded that essay writing that  the cumulative impact of examples I offered of segregation practices, such as the widespread use of restrictive covenants in Westchester, the practice of steering, changes to zoning codes, and incidents of neighborhood intolerance highly suggested that the ownership patterns illustrated by that 1940 map did not result from freely made housing choices by Black home buyers.  

Now that the 1950 US Census has been released, we can reexamine that question a decade further on. 

I. Where did Black people live in 1950 Greenburgh?

Sources: https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/decennial/1950/population-volume-1/vol-01-35.pdf ;   https://www.ancestry.com/ ; https://www.familysearch.org/en/.  [Note: on both familysearch.org and ancestry.com, the 1950 US Census transcriptions are replete with errors and should be confirmed before cited],  

TOV (unincorporated Greenburgh):  
Black population in Census Enumeration Districts 117 (Parkway Gardens/north east Greenburgh) and 119 & 120 (Fairview):    2,101                                                                                                              Black population in remaining TOV (Hartsdale, Edgemont, Ardsley TOV, North Elmsford):     232.  This number includes 102 residents of the Fulton Park apartment buildings.   Of the remaining 130 TOV Black residents, 86 are domestic employees living in white households (including a few country club employees living on premises). 

While Black people comprised just over 6% of the Town of Greenburgh in 1950, 91% of Black residents lived in one of four neighborhoods, as follows:

1.  Tarrytown Village downtown:  nearly the entire Tarrytown Black population lived west of Broadway and north of what is now 87/287, with the focus being "downtown" Tarrytown centered on Wildey St. and Mechanics Ave.  
2.  Elmsford Village north/east of Main St./ Tarrytown Road.  It is startling that the 1950 Census shows no Black people living in the half of Elmsford Village south  of this line.  
3.  North-east Greenburgh: the Presidents streets neighborhood of Parkway Gardens and also Parkway Homes, partially in the Valhalla School District. 
4.  "Fairview"the square (about 2/3 of a miles on each side) strictly defined by Knollwood Ave on the west,  Prospect Ave and the Metropolis Country Club on the south, Hillside Ave on the east, and Old Tarrytown Road on the north.  In 1950, 1,958 -  2/3 of Greenburgh's Black residents - live in this compact area.  

II.  Charting Black "Households" in 1950 Greenburgh. 

Now that the 1950 census has been released and is indexed, we have the opportunity to measure changes, if any, over the interim decade. An exact comparison is impossible, however, because the 1950 US Census, unlike the 1940 Census, does not identify home ownership.  

When looking through the 1950 Census population lists, there is the quandary of domestic workers.  About 111 Black people in Greenburgh living outside the green shaded areas were domestic employees living in white households or sometimes at country clubs.   It would be misleading to include the residences of these domestic employees - typically in the wealthiest white neighborhoods -  in a study of segregation patterns.  In response to this problem, I decided to map "heads of households." 

For each residence, the 1950 Census identifies a "head."  The head of a household could be a home owner living with a family in single family house, or one person living alone in an apartment.  

Black heads of households in the Town of Greenburgh, 1950

The green-shaded areas are the four neighborhoods with large concentrations of Black residents that I listed above.  The figure in each green area is the number of Black heads of households in the particular area.  The red dots represent Black "heads of households" located outside of the four green-shaded neighborhoods. The largest red dot (on the east-side edge of the map) is the Fulton Park apartments with twenty-two households comprised of 102 Black residents. 

In 1950, 94% of Black-led households in the Town of Greenburgh were located in the green-shaded neighborhoods.

When examining these households more closely we see de facto segregation in operation on the ground level, specifically its impact on  the town's school districts.   It is startling to see that no school-age Black children live in Ardsley and Irvington villages in 1950. In fact,  the Census identifies no Black residents in Ardsley village in 1950.  A Black 18 year old woman lives in Dobbs Ferry in an apartment on Broadway with her 25 year old sister and another woman -the only Black headed household in Dobbs Ferry -  but the census does not indicate if Evelyn Davis still attended school.  The other six Black residents in Dobbs Ferry village are domestic employees living in white households. In Irvington village has one Black household consisting of the three Patterson siblings - each 55 years or older. The remaining 14 Black residents in Irvington in 1950 are adult, domestic employees  living in white households.  

The village of Hastings, however, is somewhat of an exception with all 21 Black residents of the village living in one of three households headed by Black men.  Interestingly all three of these Black men who are heads of households are immigrants.  Dr. Albion Chase and Dr. Cyril Dolly, both born in the Caribbean, lived with their families in adjacent single family homes on Pinecrest Rd. The third household is headed by a Brazilian married to a woman (and a stepson) listed as from Puerto Rico and who are not listed as Black by the census taker, but instead as Philipino which was probably the census taker's stand in for "Latin,"  It is not known if children from these three families attended the Hastings public schools.

While 1950 shows minimal integration improvement over 1940 in household locations, the segregation patterns along school district lines suggested in 1940 is well-established in 1950.  There were no Black children residing in what would have then been the Hartsdale Schools District or the large portion of the Ardsley school district located in unincorporated Greenburgh, and there was one four-year-old child in the Edgemont School district in 1950.  While there were 622 Black children of 18 years or younger in unincorporated Greenburgh in 1950, if it unclear if any - and certainly not more than a two or three Black students - attended the Hartsdale, Edgemont and Ardsley school districts where about one-half of the TOV population resided.  Anecdotes support this perception: the Hartsdale School District was described by the New York Times on April 21, 1966, as having 850 enrolled but only one Black student.  A memoir of growing-up in Edgemont recalls the late 1950s appearance of a black transfer student from Yonkers as notable and novel.  Ardsley schools were only "integrated" in 1965 when a teenager from South Carolina was brought north to live with a white Ardsley family as part of an educational program.   https://patch.com/new-york/tarrytown/first-african-american-integrate-school-1965.  

Greenburgh will undergo enormous growth (from 47,527 in 1950 to 76,213 in 1960), but to map the impact on Black residential choices,  we'll have to wait until 2030 for the release of the 1960 US Census.  

Joseph A. Riker: The Story of a Black solider from Hastings, NY in the Civil War

On February 5, 1885, the following notice appeared in the [Washington DC] National Tribune.  

Ten months later, this plaintive notice appeared in the Fort Scott (Kansas) Monitor:  

Mrs. Mary Ann Riker of Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, then eighty-five years old, was searching for her son, Joseph who had disappeared years before somewhere in the West. Joseph served in the Union army in the Civil War and Mary, who had been widowed for decades, sought confirmation of Joseph's death to support her application for a military pension available to her as her son's financial dependent. 

The Riker family (sometimes spelled Ryker) lived in Greenburgh dating back at least to 1840. That year, Peter and an unnamed adult female headed a household the included four young males and three young females.  The 1850 census listed Peter (60 years old) and Mary Ann (49) with children Golden (19), Oman (16), Mary (13), Joseph (11) and Sidney (9).  All are listed as "black" by the census taker and Peter, Golden and Oman are described as laborers.  Significantly, Peter was a property owner.   In light of their ages, it is quite possible, although unknown, if Peter and Mary were born into slavery, which was abolished in New York through a gradual process ending finally in 1827. Peter died on Jan. 19, 1851 at the age of 68; Mary Ann never remarried. After Peter's death, the family stayed intact in Greenburgh (post office Tarrytown). In 1860, an oldest son, Alexander (32) was listed in the Riker household and described as a sailor.  Golden, now aged 25, remained with the family, along with Mary (20), Joseph (19)  and Sidney (17).  Indeed, the ages do not match up among the various censuses, but  military records consistently show that Joseph was born in 1839.    

As the secession crisis of 1860 escalated, Westchester County showed the same tendency toward Southern sympathies as New York City.  In the November 1860 presidential election,the county voted for Stephen Douglas and the Democrat-Fusion ticket (54%) over Republican candidate Abraham Lincoln (46%). The county's newspapers, led by Edmund Sutherland of White Plains' Eastern State Journal remained stridently anti-Lincoln, and supported the South and slavery.  While Greenburgh and other towns did fulfill their military service quotas, anti-war agitation persisted as seen in the July 1863 Draft Riots which spread to Westchester County through attacks on military draft offices, including in Tarrytown, and threats against government officials in White Plains, although the county did not see violence against Black residents as in New York City.    

Many Northern Blacks were initially skeptical about the war effort as they were not eager to defend a union that preserved slavery.  That reluctance, however, rapidly changed after Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation which explicitly made freedom for the enslaved a fundamental war goal along with restoration of the Union.  With Black recruitment into the United States army authorized beginning in January 1863, Massachusetts led the way in forming Black regiments, first organizing the famous 54th (immortalized in the movie Glory) and 55th Massachusetts Infantry regiments, followed by the 5th Massachusetts Cavalry. Rhode Island and Connecticut recruited Black regiments of their own with the 29th Connecticut Infantry and the 14th Rhode Island Heavy Artillery. New York, however, with a Democratic governor, dragged its feet and it was not until late in 1863 when the Union League club sponsored the 20th United States Colored Troops that the first New York Black regiment formed.  Two more New York USCT regiments- the 26th and 31st - would follow.  In the fall and winter of 1863, however, many young Black New York men, impatient to serve, traveled to New England to enlist in the first Black regiments. In her study of Black soliders from The Hills neighborhood of the West Harrison/ White Plains, Dr Edythe Quinn wrote that these men volunteered to fight to "destory slavery; to demonstrate their manhood; and to secure their civil rights, especially the right to vote."  Most men from The Hills joined the 29th Connecticut and 14th Rhode Island Heavy Artillery. [Quinn, Freedom Journey, pp. 29; 70-71]. So far, I've found only five or six Black men from the Town of Greenburgh who enlisted in the Civil War army and Joseph Riker is the only soldier I've identified from the village of Hastings.

Joseph A. Riker was one of these young men eager to fight against the Confederate enslavers and secure rights for his family and people. Mary A. Riker's pension application and newspaper ads state that Joseph first served in the Harris Light Cavalry (2nd New York Cavalry, regiment, named for New York's Senator Ira Harris) as early as 1862. I cannot verify Riker's service in this regiment. He may have had some affiliation with this unit although almost certainly not as an enlisted trooper.  His enlistment and subsequent service in the 5th Massachusetts Cavalry, however, is well documented.

Joseph traveled to Newton, Massachusetts where he enlisted on January 6, 1864, in Company B of the 5th Massachusetts Cavalry regiment for a three year term.  His enlistment papers describe him as 5' 5.5" tall with black hair and black eyes and the occupation of "horseman."  The 5th Mass Cavalry was a "colored" regiment although the commissioned officers were entirely white.   The regiment's first companies (each "company" within a regiment was typically 100 men) assembled late in January and Riker must have impressed the officers as he was given the rank of quarter master sergeant and then promoted to first sergeant for Company B on March 31, 1864.  [Note: much of this account of the 5th Massachusetts Cavalry is drawn from Steven M. Labarre, The Fifth Massachusetts Colored Cavalry in the Civil War (2016) and also, Massachusetts in the Civil War.] The regiment trained for several months near Boston as volunteers filled out its twelve companies.  The colonel of the 5th Mass Cavalry, Henry Sturgis Russell, was a cousin and Harvard classmate of Robert Gould Shaw, who had fallen the previous July leading the 54th Mass in the charge featured in Glory. Riker's comrades in Company B included Sergeant Charles Douglass, the son of Frederick Douglass, who had previously joined the 54th Mass but left that unit because of illness before enlisting in the 5th Mass Cavalry.  

Serg. Charles R. Douglass - Co. B 5th Mass Cav.

(source: Frederick Douglass National Historic Site Facebook page)

Another Company B soldier, Franklin Jennings, was the son of Paul Jennings who, as a boy, was a personal servant to President James Madison in the White House, and later wrote a memoir of his experiences. [Labarre, p. 62].  The 5th Mass. Cav. found another presidential connection when Charles Francis Adams, Jr., grandson of Pres. John Quincy Adams (and great-grandson of Pres. John Adams), joined the regiment as an officer and later replaced Col. Russell as the unit's commander.  Finally, filling its roster with 37 officers and 893 troopers divided into twelve companies, the 5th Mass Cavalry departed Boston for Washington DC in May 1864. 

Col. Henry Sturgis Russell,

first commander of the 5th Mass. Cav. from Jan. 1864 to Feb. 1865

(source: https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/167978081/henry-sturgis-russell)

Col. Charles Francis Adams, Jr.

commander of the 5th Mass Cav. from Feb. 1865

Joseph Riker's military record is uneventful as he was present at all roll calls, and never recorded as wounded or absent on sick leave. He must have been an ideal solider and respected non-commissioned officer.  We must rely on  the chronicle of the movements and campaigns of the 5th Mass Cavalry to tell the story of Riker's Civil War experience in which, as first sergeant, he was, in rank, the senior Black enlisted man in Company B.   

To the extreme dissatisfaction of all the men, the regiment had been "dismounted" from their horses after leaving Boston and were then trained briefly as infantry. After a stop in Washington DC, the regiment was sent to the Union army transit hud at City Point, Virginia on the James River and assigned to picket and guard duty which required extreme vigilence.  On June 15, 1864, the 5th Mass Cav engaged in its first and most significant combat when the 18th Corps - comprised of Union colored troops - attacked a Confederate position blocking the road to Petersburg, Virgina.  After intial confusion, the Black Union soldiers triumphed by seizing the Confederate position and sending their foes in retreat.  

Baylor Farm was a minor clash and Union troops subsequently failed to capitalize on the Black soldiers' achievement but the battle proved significant as the first offensive carried out by Black soldiers in the Civil War's eastern theater.  The performance of the 5th Mass Cavalry at Baylor Farm was debated then and now.  The cavalry regiment was insufficiently trained as infantry and, consequently, 18th Corps commanders were hesitant to rely on the 5th in combat. The 5th was placed in reserve initially but then did engage in fighting, before being returned to a reserve position after the Baylor Farm defenses were captured. The 5th Mass Cavalry. suffered 3 men killed and 19 wounded at Baylor Farm.  

The soldiers depicted in this image of the capture of a Confederate cannon at Baylor Farm may very well have been from the 5th Mass Cavalry.

(source: https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015046806710&view=1up&seq=279)

At the end of June, the regiment was assigned to guard Confederate prisoners at Point Lookout, Maryland, where it was stationed for the remaining six months of 1864. To the regiment's great joy, they received horses and were returned to cavalry service during this time. The regiment was sent back to the Petersburg front in late March 1865 in time for the last onslaught on Petersburg. On April 3, 1865, the 5th Mass Cavalry took part in perhaps the most triumphant moment in American history when they joined the first Union troops to enter and capture Richmond. Riker and his comrades would always remember the jubilation of their newly emancipated brethren who shouted "God bless you: We have been waiting for you and looking for you a long time," and cheered the Black troopers as they rode through the liberated capital. The next day, April 4, the regiment had the privilege of escorting and guarding President Lincoln when he came to tour the fallen city and received a liberator's welcome from the city's Black residents. As first sergeant of Company B, Joseph Riker would have had a significant role in all these historic events. [Labarre, p. 130-5]. 

Even as the war ended, the 5th Mass Cavalry remained in service.  As tensions rose with Mexico, the regiment was sent to Texas in June 1865 along with several other regiments, mostly Black, to guard the border. The conditions were appalling and all the regiments suffered greatly with many more men succumbing to illness on the border than had fallen in battle during the war.  Finally, at the end of October, the regiment, along with Riker, boarded ships for Boston where the men were paid and discharged from the army. Some men stayed in Boston long enough to enjoy a triumphant parade in December and deliver their regimental flag to the Massachusetts state house where it remains to this day.

Flag of the 5th Massachusetts Cavalry regiment 

 

It is unclear what happened to Joseph A. Riker after his discharge from service. His mother wrote that the family lost contact with him after 1868.  Mary Ann Riker believed that her son had migrated to Kansas, Perhaps like other veterans, including comrades from the 5th Mass. Cav., Joseph sought to claim homestead act land out West. Like many settlers in the West, however, he disappeared, with his mother never learning of his fate or the location of his grave to mourn him. 

1867 map showing the location of Mrs. Riker's home along Farragut Ave. near what is now Ravensdale Road. The Saw Mill River is on the right.  The Riker house bordered a quarry and was close to a small pond that still exists.  Source: Hastings Historical Society and https://www.hastingsgreen.org/protect-our-woods/restoration-hastings/boutilliers-brook

Joseph's mother, Mary Ann, never remarried after becoming a widow in 1851. Beginning in 1885, Mary Riker, then 85 years old, began applying to the federal government for a pension. Mary's application claimed that Joseph was wounded in the head, and contracted dyspepsia and pleurisy during his service at Richmond in 1864. Mary asserted that Joseph's death in Kansas in 1884 to 1885 resulted from illnesses contracted during military service. The War Department, however, responded that Joseph's military records showed no record of any wounds or diseases during his time in the army.  Certainly, Joseph's complied service record show him present for duty at all recorded roll calls.  The much needed pension was never awarded.

Source:  National Archives, Joseph A. Riker Pension File. 

The Riker family continued to own property in Hastings for several decades.  In 1893, the Rikers lost a home and lot near the corner of Ravensdale and Farragut to a tax foreclosure. The Riker family appeared to have held property in Hastings, primarily in the Ravensdale Road neighborhood, until at least 1940 when the the Riker landholdings were subject to tax foreclosures by the Town of Greenburgh and Village of Hastings-on-Hudson.

Background:

For the story of the families of Black Civil War soldiers in the North and their fight for justice during and after the Civil War, see, Holly A. Pinheiro, Jr. The Families Civil War: Black Soldiers and the Fight for Racial Justice (2022)

For the story of the Westchester County Black experience during the Civil War with a focus on The Hills community, see. Edythe Ann Quinn, Freedom Journey: Black Civil War Soldiers and The Hills Community, Westchester County, New York (2015)

For an excellent book-length account of the career of the 5th Massachusetts Cavalry along with profiles of many of its officers and troopers, see: Steven M. LaBarre The Fifth Massachusetts Colored Cavalry in the Civil War (2016)

75 years ago: mapping Greenburgh's African American home ownership using the tools of the 1940 census

When I researched racist violence perpetrated against African Americans in the Florida Panhandle for my book on the Reconstruction Era, one snide Southerner asked why I bothered traveling so far to dig up stories of racial injustice. The questioner’s intent was diversion, but he did have a point.  While my Northern suburban home of thirteen years is not shamed by a history of Jim Crow oppression and the accompanying violence that plagued the Deep South, we Yankees remain stubbornly oblivious to the legacy of segregation and bigotry that surrounds us. 

I’ve lived in Hartsdale in the Town of Greenburgh for thirteen years. I don’t remember any public discussion about the racial patterns and conditions that exist in the town today. Greenburgh appears to have historically identified African American neighborhoods, yet it's not obvious as to why the Fairview neighborhood  - today, bifurcated by a highway - became the home of the majority of Greenburgh’s black residents well before World War II and continues to be so today. The corollary question to housing patterns is school enrollment: why do 3 of Greenburgh’s 10 school districts have a substantial black enrollment while the rest have few black students?  

Other than relying on anecdotes, how do we research the reasons for these historic and entrenched patterns?  Before starting such research, however, we should skeptically investigate the validity of the insinuated premise: that the black population in Greenburgh was historically subjected to segregated housing restrictions which, facilitated the establishment and preservation of nearly exclusively white neighborhoods and schools. And if such segregation did exist, was it imposed, the result of freely-made housing preferences, or some combination? 

To test the premise of segregation, we can map housing data that tracks race.  What is a good starting point?  African Americans have always lived in Greenburgh: census records from the 18th century record dozens of individuals, both free and enslaved.  The pre-20^th century populations, however, were quite small. The choice is arbitrary, but I find that the 1940 US Census, which recorded information about race, origin, housing, occupation, and other categories, is an excellent resource to test the segregation premise (and even better, it’s accessible for free at www.ancestry.com).   

According to the 1940 census, Greenburgh’s population total was 40,145, with the majority (27,587) living in the incorporated villages.  The unincorporated areas (mostly the eastern half of the town) had just started experiencing increased development following construction of the Bronx River and Saw Mill River parkways (the unincorporated population more than doubled in the 1950s).  The town-wide African American (the Census used the term “Negro”) population was 2,754, or 6.9% of the total. I estimate that almost three-quarters of Greenburgh’s black population lived in the unincorporated area, making up about 16% of the total.

The 1940 Census offers abundant information about this community.  For example, Greenburgh's African American population consisted mainly of migrants to the area, with only one-third born in New York State. The native New Yorkers, logically, were heavily weighted toward children.  Much of Greenburgh’s 1940 adult black population spoke in a Southern accent. Of 1,757 African American adults in Greenburgh (those over twenty years old in 1940), only 15% were born in New York State, with the majority having arrived from Southern states plagued by Jim Crow. The largest state of origin was Virginia with 519 adults, followed by North Carolina (395) and South Carolina (278).  Clearly, the early/mid twentieth century "Great Migration" of black people from the oppressive Jim Crow South had a profound impact on Greenburgh, New York.  

Now, let’s dive into the 1940 census data on housing and the question of segregation. Using the search parameters at ancestry.com, we can cull from the 1940 Census all households led by an African American. Greenburgh had 586 such households which mostly rented but also included 160 home owners.  The residential patterns of black renters and tenants in Greenburgh largely follow the map of black home ownership but not entirely.  Much of the discrepancy is accounted for by the then common phenomenon of black domestic employees (maids, chauffeurs, cooks, butlers, etc.) living in or adjacent to the homes of their white employers.  For example, it is surprising to find more than 800 African Americans living in Scarsdale in 1940 – triple the number that reside there today.  With the exception of a handful of households, mostly an extended family on Saxon Woods Road, Scarsdale’s 1940 black residents were almost entirely domestic employees affiliated with white households. Consequently, in 1940 Westchester, black tenancy outside of neighborhoods of concentrated black ownership does not necessarily indicate any particular acceptance of blacks as neighbors or deviation from segregation.  Instead, in my estimation, black home ownership is the more realistic barometer of racial residential tolerance.     

MAP: African American home ownership in Greenburgh (1940) superimposed over contemporary map. While three times more black households rented than owned homes in 1940, the renters' residential patterns were consistent with the ownership locations mapped above.  In addition to the neighborhoods plotted on this map, several African American adults lived as domestics in white households in area otherwise lacking black residents (Map compiled using www.multiplottr.com)

The map of black owned homes in 1940 Greenburgh shows three distinct clusters and lots of blank space.  In the village of Tarrytown, fifteen blacks owned houses mostly clustered in the downtown area formed by the “T” of Wildey and Mechanics avenues.  In nearby Elmsford, a larger group of thirty homeowners lived along a series of north-south avenues (Goodwin, Evarts, Winthrop, Sears, Cabot) in the village’s north east corner.  (While Fairview was scarred by the construction of Rte 287, the Elmsford black neighborhood later suffered the double indignity of bifurcation by the Cross Westchester Expressway (287) in 1960 and then the extension of the Sprain Brook Parkway along its east border in 1969).

The large majority of black homeowners in 1940 Greenburgh, however, lived in the unincorporated community of Fairview.  The limits of black ownership in Fairview is strictly delineated by Hillside Avenue in the east, Old Tarrytown Road in the North, Knollwood/W. Hartsdale Ave on the west, and Tarrytown/Dobbs Ferry roads on the south.  Fairview contained more than 100 black owned homes as well as several hundred black occupied rental properties.  As of 1940, only six blacks had purchased homes in the Parkway homes neighborhood along South Road and its presidential-named side streets to the immediate north-east of Fairview’s confines.  The semi-circular, hill-side streets of Parkway Gardens, soon to be recognized as a community for middle class black families, had not yet been constructed. Interestingly, in 1940, even Fairview was not an exclusively black neighborhood: many whites still lived there, particularly Italian immigrants and Italian-Americans as both homeowners and renters.  The racial mix of Fairview would change with the advent of the “urban renewal” program in the late 1950s.  In a future essay, we'll examine the notoriously deplorable housing conditions that plagued early/mid 20th century Fairview and the policies such as redlining that exacerbated that situation.  

The integration patterns that existed in Fairview in 1940 and, to a lesser extent, in Tarrytown and Elmsford villages, did not extend to the villages of Irvington, Dobbs Ferry, Hastings or Ardsley, which had no black homeowners.  Nor were there black homeowners in the unincorporated area’s Hartsdale neighborhoods adjacent and to the south of Fairview. Only a few blacks rented in these communities with most claiming residences as domestics employees of white families. Edgemont (or Greenville as it was known then), however, claimed one small black-owned house on Central Avenue and also Captain Joshua Cockburn’s Fort Hill Road tudor-style house, which was the most expensive and impressive of all black owned homes in Greenburgh (stately Villa Lewaro in Irvington had passed out of the hands of the Walker family in 1931).

The map establishes the premise of segregated housing patterns.  But we still have the question of whether the patterns of black home ownership – almost exclusively restricted to three neighborhoods toward the northern edge of the town – are the result of freely-made housing choices or the reflection of community enforced restrictions.  In other words, in pre-World War II Greenburgh, could blacks buy and live whereever they chose and could afford housing but preferred these three areas, or were they constrained to limited confines for home ownership by segregation?   

In Northern communities, there did not tend to be “smoking guns” of legislation or local zoning codes explicitly excluding black ownership from certain areas.  Instead, racial residential patterns arose through the interlocking operation of a series of independent trends that cumulatively created segregation over time.

One of the most powerful factors in creating segregation in the suburbs was restrictive covenants that real estate developers drafted to prevent sales of homes in housing developments to blacks, Jews and other minorities. A study of late 1930s and 1940s housing developments in the suburbs surrounding New York City found race restrictive covenants in one-half of subdivisions of 20 or more homes, and five-sixths of developments with 75 or more homes.  Conversely, few homes in developments of fewer than twenty houses had such covenants, although, the study’s author surmised, “existing social pressures” in such small developments could “be depended upon as an adequate barrier against Negroes.” In all, 56% of all homes surveyed were barred to blacks by such covenants.  This study also found race covenants correlated directly with Federal Housing Authority (FHA) financing.  In other words, federal government housing policy promoted segregation. [John P. Dean, “Only Caucasian: A Study of Race Covenants,” The Journal of Land & Public Utility Economics, vol. 12, No. 4 (Nov. 1947), pp. 428-32].

Courts could be relied on to enforce restrictive covenants until they were prohibited by the US Supreme Court in Shelley v. Kramer (1948).  In the late 1930s, Edgemont was the site of one of the nation’s most notorious proceedings when a white resident neighbor sought to enforce the racially restrictive covenant of the “Edgemont Hills” development and force the eviction of the Cockburn family from the stately tudor they had built on Fort Hill Road.  The Cockburns lost the suit in New York State court but the eviction was not enforced before they lost the house as the result of an unrelated financial matter a decade later.  The Cockburn house, distinguished by an anchor mounted on a rock, stands in Edgemont today and the Cockburn story is told in detail at www.thomas-quirk.com.    

In addition to restrictive covenants, federal loan administrators, bank officials and home insurers, as well as collusion among real estate agents and home owners, would effectively steer potential black home owners from certain communities and direct them to black neighborhoods, particularly in the era after restrictive covenants were barred.  In his autobiography, progressive home builder Alan Carnoy reveals how such steering was practiced.  In the early 1950s, Carnoy became concerned that the northern Hillside Avenue area in Greenburgh was gaining a reputation as a black neighborhood, thereby deterring potential white buyers of the homes Carnoy planned to build. Carnoy adopted a dubious tactic to keep this neighborhood from turning primarily black.  Carnoy instructed his sales staff “to gently explain [to prospective black home buyers] that the Home Owners’ Association would have to pass on every application, as we had put aside two acres for a playground in the development. At that time, the idea of segregation was so deeply implanted in people’s minds, that the Negroes turned away without taking offense, the implication of the playground being completely clear in their minds. After the white people became convinced that the development would be all white, our sales became very easy.”  [Alan Carnoy, Democracia Si! (1962), p. 76.]

 In other situations, the enforcement scheme was even less subtle. A newspaper from 1957 reported an incident in Hartsdale Lawn (now, Poet’s Corner) where a group of white homeowners collected funds to purchase a home to prevent its sale to a black New York City judge.  [Atlanta Daily World, Oct. 17, 1957] Municipal and local zoning for mandatory lot and house sizes were also understood as aimed at maintaining the “character” (i.e., whiteness) of neighborhoods. Insinuations were raised in connection with the Greenburgh Town Council’s 1950 “move directed at protecting the ‘recognized character’ of home development in the Greenville section of the town” by prohibiting “the erection of houses under 20,000 cubic feet in volume in the area and to prevent ‘cracker box’ and ‘overnight’ houses.” [Irvington Gazette, Dec. 1, 1965]. 

While these anecdotes are not dispositive proof that Greenburgh housing patterns resulted from deliberate segregation, the cumulative impact of these examples – the widespread use of restrictive covenants in Westchester, the practice of steering, zoning codes, neighborhood intolerance – highly suggest that the ownership housing patterns illustrated by the above map did not result from freely made housing choices by black home buyers during the first half of the twentieth century.

This conclusion, while patently obvious, relies on logic and not objective proof.  I do not have evidence of widespread restrictive covenants in Greenburgh and only anecdotal examples of housing prejudice on which the theory is constructed. Confirmation would require digging into deeds and real property records.   

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