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Outreach Journal: Brick by Brick

Published on November 6, 2001

Brick by Brick: Outreach Journal No.2

This is the second installment of the Brick by Brick outreach journal published here. Brick by Brick is a television documentary about civil rights and race in contemporary America. The film focuses on three families as they fight, work, and live through more than a decade of battle for fair housing and school desegregation in their hometown of Yonkers, NY. It is currently in its final months of post production.

A 1990 march for housing in Yonkers, NY

The film has been ten years in the making. It follows the progress of a bitter legal struggle, one that has pitted both the US Justice Department and local civil rights activists against the city government and homeowner groups. Over 40 years, the City had built a huge concentration of high rise public housing in one square mile of it's downtown area, and tightly drew its school district boundaries around that area. This created a highly segregated city and school system, with many areas that were virtually all white and others being majority African-American and Hispanic. In this sense, Yonkers is not atypical of many communities in America.

An order by the Federal courts in 1985 seemingly compelled Yonkers to both integrate its schools and to build some low-income and affordable housing outside the area in which it had built previous low-income units. In the film, we follow activists and local politicians on both sides of the struggle that ensued. Up to today, the resistance, defiance, and rear guard actions that still stand in the way of a solution sixteen years later are examined. The work investigates the role of governmental leadership and of citizen activism in this attempt to end the racial isolation in one community. In Brick by Brick, the current prevalence of housing segregation is contextualized within the history of the civil rights movement.

The New York courtroom of US District Court Judge Leonard Sand, who tried the Yonkers litigation

A major element in the outreach campaign for the film has been the web site (www.brick-by-brick.com). We've launched a site that includes a number of links to related readings, screenings, and sites for organizations. The site also includes a timeline history of the grassroots and legal campaigns to integrate housing and schools in Yonkers over the last quarter century. The timeline has been constructed to help further understanding of the duration of this struggle and the intensity of the resistance to it.

One unusual development in this part our outreach campaign is that the web site has led to a new conception of part of the documentary itself. Earlier this year, Doris Capello, one of the central participants in the Brick by Brick, decided to use the web site timeline in one of the social work classes she teaches at Kean University in New Jersey. Doris stripped the timeline history of any references to Yonkers, using the name "Anytown, USA" instead. When she presented the timeline to her students, many of them thought it was unrealistic as fiction. "This couldn't happen in a real city," was the general response. Students were stunned to know that it was in fact happening, not only in a real city, but one near their university, right in the New York City metropolitan area.

When Doris told me about this experience with her students, it struck me that the discussion mirrored one of the biggest outreach challenges we've had to face in getting the film out to the public. Many people hear that our story is about housing and school desegregation and think the subject is historical and distant. It's been difficult to get across that the issue is a current one, that it is a story that's playing out in communities throughout the US today. The fact that housing segregation has been on the rise in much of contemporary America is not commonly known or accepted.

I proposed to Doris that we film a class about the timeline. Students' thoughts and questions about race and access to equal opportunity can be incorporated into the film, perhaps even as the opening to the documentary. Doris is excited about the idea and we are working on setting up production now.

It's been an unexpected substantive benefit of the outreach efforts undertaken prior to the completion of the documentary. I'm often pleasantly surprised as a filmmaker that the outreach work on the film is helpful to the process of shaping the work effectively for the audience.

The web site has recently received a number of awards. Applied Arts Magazine has chosen the site as the best entry in two categories in its 2002 Annual. www.brick-by-brick.com was the winning entry in the Micro Web site Design category and for Web site Design in the Informative/Educational category. The site will also be featured in "Creativity 31", which will be published by the HBI division of HarperCollins in the summer of 2002.

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