NYC NOW - March 18, 2024: Evening Roundup

Episode Date: March 18, 2024

New data in New Jersey shows that the number of residents legally carrying handguns has grown exponentially. Also, there’s a new project analyzing New York State’s historical involvement in the practice of lynching. WNYC’s Michael Hill speaks with the creator of the initiative, NYU Associate professor Rachel Swarns, and student journalist Samantha Dondelinger to learn more. Plus, New York City community groups have been raising money to buy apartment buildings and give tenants more control of where they live. Now, one Brooklyn organization is the first to actually do it. David Brand reports.

Welcome to NYC Now, your source for local news in and around New York City from WNYC. I'm Sean Carlson. Kicking off things in the Garden State, the number of New Jersey is legally carrying handguns is soaring exponentially. That's according to data released by the State's Attorney General's Office and analyzed in reports by the New Jersey Monitor and the Star Ledger. The significant jump in applications comes after the U.S. Supreme Court's 2022 decision to loosen some of New Jersey's strict gun safety laws. The number of permits granted jumped from just over 600 in 2021 to more than 19,000 last year.

The numbers come from gun permit application data that state attorney general Matt Plack and ordered police departments to hand over last year. W and Mycine Gothamist also obtained NYPD data last week that showed gun license and permit applications more than doubled in New York last year. But the NYPD did not say how many gun license and concealed carry permit applications

it's approved. Up next, while many believe Lynn The lynchings happened mostly in the South, a new initiative exposes New York's historical involvement in the practice. That and more after the break. The legacy of lynchings is deeply rooted in the history of southern states. But a new project at New York University hopes to change that narrative and remind people that this kind of violence happened everywhere, even in New York State. To learn more, my colleague Michael Hill spoke with Rachel Swarns, an associate professor of journalism at NYU, and leader of the new lynchings in the North Project.

Also joining them is Samantha Dondelinger, an undergraduate student working on the initiative. Rachel, would you lay out what this new initiative is trying to accomplish? Absolutely. And thank you so much for having us. You know, I think there is this narrative that we have in the United States. When we think about lynchings, you know, we think about the South. But racial violence and lynchings in particular happened here too. And I think it's really important for Americans to know that and to reckon with that history. What work has been done so far? Basically, this year I have students working on investigating some of these cases of lynchings in the north. In the fall, they looked at cases in Maryland and Pennsylvania, and this semester they're looking at Kansas and Illinois.

And the idea is to dive into archival records, newspapers, census records, and to write obituaries. to write about the lives of these people and in a broad and complete way and in a way that never happened when they were killed. Have any of these stories been written yet? They're working on them. One of the lynchings detailed in your project took place in Port Jervis, New York, right on the border with New Jersey, Delaware, and Pennsylvania. I gather your discovery of that lynching is what led you to this project. Rachel, tell us more about it. That's right.

You know, I was born and raised here in New York City, and I never knew that anyone had been lynched here. And I stumbled across this when I first started teaching at NYU. And I was kind of like lynching in New York. How did that happen? How didn't I know? And the man who was killed was killed in 1892 in Port Jervis, as you mentioned. He was accused of assaulting a white woman, a charge that he denied in the moments before his death. Samantha, you've been investigating a case in Kansas.

What have you found there? Yeah, great to be here. So I was investigating a case of Fred Alexander. He was lynched in 1901. And similar to the Port Germans case, he was accused of assaulting two white women and the father of one of the women. led the lynching mob, and he again denied the claims and defended his innocence until the lynching. Samantha, what does the process look like for learning more about one of these lynchings? To start, I begun just by Googling, you know, Fred Alexander and the date to see what popped up on Google Scholar.

There wasn't a lot, unfortunately. Uncovering the details was really quite difficult. So I started in Ancestry.com and started going through some records, started going through census data, military records. What I found was a lot of inconsistencies in how people were tracking the data. So when I was tracking the data, I found that his name was spelled incorrectly. And he was logged under Fred Alexandra and all of the other relatives and all the dates matched up under that name. And that's where I could find his military records and some of his census data that actually helped piece together. more of the more prominent details.

But if I hadn't found that inconsistency, I don't think I would have been able to write an obiturate based off of the information that was just under his legal name. Rachel, I got to ask about those roadblocks and those inconsistencies. Is that common because these were, for the most part, black people being lynched? Unfortunately, you're absolutely right. You know, when you're looking at these kinds of cases, you're really, piecing together snippets. We're looking at newspaper accounts, and often these accounts are pretty biased. They are assuming the guilt of the lynching victim. We uncover a lot of errors in the

reporting, and, you know, folks weren't written about, don't always appear in the records. And so I've charged my students with writing about these victims and their lives. And one of the things that they find is that that is not easy to do. And it speaks to how these folks were marginalized in life, too, right? What role did journalists, newspapers, and newspaper publishers play in creating the social climate for these lynchings? So, I mean, I think that's a really important part of the process that I want my journalism students to think about. You know, we're using these newspaper accounts as documents. as sources of information, but they see immediately the bias that appears in many of these accounts.

And I really want them to wrestle with the role that the media played, and northern media, too, in perpetuating stereotypes and sometimes even condoning this kind of violence. Is there any parallel to the kind of activity that took place in lynchings to what has happened in modern times in the last, even in last decade, the last few years? I'm not a historian, I'm a journalist, and so my interest in this history is not just for history's sake, it's for, you know, it's legacies and how we live with the legacies. So my students are, in addition to mining archival data, are reaching out to the communities, people in these communities right now to understand and see how these communities,

communities are grappling with it. Certainly, students in my classes have talked about, you know, the number of cases where, you know, black men and women have been killed at the hands of the police and finding parallels there. But these are questions that we wrestle with in class, because, again, this is not history that is long gone. And we wrestle with it because, you know, it lives with us in many ways now. That's my colleague Michael Hill in conversation with Rachel Swarns of the Lynchings and North Project and NYU student multimedia journalist Samantha Dundle. New York City community groups have been raising money to buy apartment buildings and give tenants more control of where they live. Now one Brooklyn organization is the first to actually do it.

WNIC's David Brand reports on their plan to help renters become co-op owners. Kathy Mercado is standing in the doorway of her first floor apartment in East New York. Her home has become an informal meeting spot for neighbors to discuss problems in their building on Arlington Avenue. Water leaks. Would you have any hot water or any heat most of the times? We were freezing. I had to buy space heaters, and I had the seniors come here and make some tea. But she says things are about to change.

A nearby nonprofit called East New York Community Land Trust bought the 20-unit rent-stabilized apartment building last month for just over $3 million. They're working with the residents on plans to renovate the four-story building and convert it to co-ops. Tenants will get a chance to buy their units and pay about the same as they do in rent, an average of around $1,200 a month. It's amazing. I mean, I wouldn't have a thought. I mean, I went knocking on many doors, and here we are. Here's how a community land trust works. The nonprofit owns the land, but residents own or lease their units in the building. residents sit on the board and help make key decisions. As part of the arrangement, they can't sell their homes for high prices down the road. That way, the units remain affordable to low and middle income residents forever.

The Brooklyn deal is a test to see if the model can grow in New York City. There's enormous pressure to expand and make more of this, right? But all that pressure, I think the most amount of pressure comes from ourselves. That's Boris Santos. He leads the East New York Community Land Trust. understanding that there's actually real lived experiences right in lives tied to this and that it could be changed. Santos says his organization raised the money from donations and low-interest loans. He adds, this kind of purchase is just the beginning.

New York City has a lot of buildings like this one, where investors are trying to sell rent-stabilized apartments because they're just not making enough money. It's not the end. It's scary, but we can do it. We can do it. Back at the apartment building on Arlington Ave in East New York, the tenants are now planning to put up a new gate and swap out the old oil-fired boiler in the basement. They say the goal is to convert to co-ops within three years. That's WNYC housing reporter David Brand. Thanks for listening to NYC now from WNMIC. Catch us every weekday, three times a day.

I'm Sean Carlson. We'll be back tomorrow.