SEGREGATION, NORTHERN STYLE: A POLITICAL HISTORY OF NON - POLICY MAKING IN YONKERS, NEW YORK
Abstract
Thirty years after the 1954 Supreme Court's ruling in the case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, the city of Yonkers, New York found itself the first city ever to be accused and tried by the federal government for engaging in illegal and intentional segregation practices in both schools and housing. This landmark case marks the first instance in the history of the United States where the government has merged a school and housing case, and attempted to prove a link in segregation practices in the schools to patterns of housing segregation. Also, for the first time, both a municipality and its Board of Education have been named as co-defendants in the same case. This study is a political history of the City of Yonkers and the Yonkers Public Schools between 1954 and 1984. The study documents and interprets the reasons why the segregation patterns that exist in Yonkers resulted in a federal suit. Essentially, this is a study of nonpolicy making, the process by which interest groups thwart the political system and by default, in this case, produced a segregation policy to their liking. By using the historical data from the Yonkers case, the researcher developed a model that represents the situation of nonpolicy making, and uses the model throughout the study to focus on the strategies of control which prevented the voluntary elimination of housing and school segregation. The historical pattern of interrelationships and political positions by those decision-makers in the City who held monopoly power, as well as the maneuvering of the policy adoption process of the Board of Education by special interest groups, is compared and interpreted using "game analysis", in a manner similar to the one used by Eugene Bardach in his book, The Implementation Game.
Subject Area
Political science
Recommended Citation
SALERNO, RACHELLE MARY, "SEGREGATION, NORTHERN STYLE: A POLITICAL HISTORY OF NON - POLICY MAKING IN YONKERS, NEW YORK" (1985). ETD Collection for Fordham University. AAI8508130.
https://research.library.fordham.edu/dissertations/AAI8508130
