ELSIE RICHARDSON

Civil rights and community activist Elsie Richardson (1922-2012) undertook visionary organizing in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant beginning in the 1960s. Her work in creating the Bedford-Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation drew citywide and national attention to the consequences of poverty and urban neglect and helped inspire community development corporations across the country as a way to create investment in the economic future of neglected neighborhoods.

Richardson’s activism started early. The child of immigrants from the Caribbean island of Nevis, as a teenager in Harlem Richardson participated in civil rights campaigns. (Among these was a 1941 bus boycott led by Adam Clayton Powell Jr.) After World War II, Richardson and her husband moved into public housing in central Brooklyn, where she became active in tenant organizing and youth outreach through the neighborhood settlement house.

Richardson saw the roots of Bed-Stuy's woes as both political and economic. African-American residents of Bed-Stuy did not have access to the powerful clubhouses or established networks that controlled neighborhood politics. Along with other politically astute Bed-Stuy women, including her friend Shirley Chisholm (later the first black woman elected to the U.S. House of Representatives and in 1972 the first woman to run for the Democratic nomination for President), Richardson helped form the Central Brooklyn Coordinating Council (CBCC), an umbrella organization for groups seeking to create political pressure to address discrimination and lack of services in the neighborhood.

But by the middle of the decade, Richardson was frustrated by her lack of leverage with New York City clubhouse politics. She shifted her strategy, inviting New York’s U.S. Senators Robert Kennedy and Jacob Javitz to tour the neighborhood. As emissaries for the federal “War on Poverty,” the senators represented an opportunity to pressure Washington to address the problems of the "inner city." Senator Robert Kennedy accepted Richardson’s and the CBCC’s invitation to see what could be done about Bed-Stuy’s struggles with racial discrimination, lack of city funding, and worsening poverty. The senators toured the neighborhood in February of 1966 and met with longtime residents. Kennedy’s last stop was at the YMCA on Bedford Avenue, where Richardson chaired a meeting of local residents.

The senator proposed a study on the troubled neighborhood. Richardson’s memorable response was: “We’ve been studied to death, what we need is bricks and mortar!”

and that’s how Restoration Plaza, NOw On FULTON ST was born.

Read more at https://www.mcny.org/story/elsie-richardson-investing-bed-stuy