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At Robert Moses' Knee
Where Herman Badillo learned to remove Blacks and Latinos from CUNY

By Rob Wallace

In September 1999, CUNY Board of Trustees chair Herman Badillo addressed a Center for Education Innovation luncheon. Remarking on problems in education, particularly at CUNY, the Great Educator declared,

The problem is that in Mexico and Central America, there has never been a tradition of education... They're pure Indians: Incas and Mayans, who are about, you know, five feet tall, with straight hair. And when they speak about 'La Raza' they're not talking about the Spanish language, they're talking about the original Indian language. And therefore it's far more complicated problem than the problem that we're used to dealing with but nobody seems to want to face up to it.

But Badillo's remarks only capped his decade-long, and currently successful, campaign against open admissions and remediation at CUNY. According to CUNY Central's own studies, ending remediation classes without recourse would ultimately reduce both the Black and Latino student bodies by half.

Still, many were shocked that a Latino who had to struggle through language and race barriers for a City College degree in accounting would so viciously belittle other Latinos undergoing the same struggle.

Wasn't this Herman Badillo, the first Latino to run for New York's mayoralty? Protestant Puerto Rican, of Italian heritage, and married to a Jew, didn't Badillo in his 1969 mayoralty bid declare himself "a one-man integration ticket"? Isn't this the proud Badillo who told the New York Post that Puerto Ricans do not discriminate? And that, after all, "Blood is all the same color, and non-sectarian"?

What Shakespearean transformation turned Harlem's talented and dashing Prince Henry into the Upper East Side's bitter potty-mouth?

The problem with this dramatic sketch is that it isn't true. Badillo, like most politicians, was rotten pretty much from the start.

Badillo's Start

We can't understand the nature of Badillo without understanding the nature of New York. Badillo is truly a native son. We need then to establish context first.

In New York City, elected officials do not run the city. They are at best managers on the proverbial supermarket floor. They exert limited autonomy as they scamper about managing the store at the owners' bidding.

In New York City, the finance, insurance and real estate (FIRE) industries own the store. FIRE elites, with their multi-billion dollar portfolios and armies of lobbyists, command elected officials' political attentions like no other constituency. Pro-choice, pro-life, housing advocates, the PBA, Cardinal Eagan, DC 37, NIMBY community organizations-no interest group commands politicians like FIRE. FIRE contributes more money to political campaigns than all other interest groups combined. So FIRE shapes budgetary practices. FIRE, in the form of brokerage firms, controls the City's bond ratings. FIRE determines what's built and how and when serious money flows. Any major project in NYC needs FIRE fiscal backing.

Right from the start of his political career, the shrewd and ambitious Badillo understood this and sought to demonstrate his willingness to serve those elites. With the Civil Rights movement and the failures of Bull Connor-style repression, a market developed for minority vassals. Like many Black and Latino elected officials, Badillo earned the elites' backing by showing early on his penchant for betraying people of color, a talent Badillo has exercised ever since. His early betrayals won him the political access and financial capital he needed for later campaigns for the mayoralty.

We'll join Badillo in 1961. East Harlem, though majority Puerto Rican, is run by the Italian political machine. Badillo, a year after supporting JFK's successful bid for president, establishes the Democratic JFK Club for black and Latino voters there. The next year he supports Robert Wagner's successful reelection, but loses in the race for district leader by 75 votes.

As a reward for his support, Mayor Wagner appoints Badillo as deputy real estate commissioner. By the end of 1962, Badillo becomes the city's first Commissioner of Relocation, serving through 1965, only four years before his run for the mayoralty as, in his words, "the only liberal."

As Relocation Commissioner, "liberal" Badillo's job is to help remove thousands of working class people out of their neighborhoods and often against their will. The residents' homes are subsequently demolished by the city and highways and opera houses are built in their stead. Whole neighborhoods, with their own histories and emotional ties, are annihilated. Though Badillo supervises programs whose declared aim is to help residents move to comparable housing, thousands are left to their own devices.

Moses and the Expulsion of the Blacks

Badillo didn't start such "slum clearance." As Joel Schwartz has pointed out in The New York Approach: Robert Moses, Urban Liberals and the Development of the Inner City, Jacob Riis famously exposed slum conditions in How the Other Half Lives, not because he wanted ghettos helped out, but because he wished them razed as health hazards.

The most famous neighborhood annihilator was Robert Moses. With potent liberal backing, Moses spent a quarter of a century as a member of the permanent government, reshaping New York City's physical and social landscapes with unprecedented independence. Moses served as Park Commissioner, City Planning Commission member, and Construction Coordinator through three mayoral administrations-LaGuardia, O'Dwyer, and Wagner.

Accompanied by the city plutocracy, liberal civic organizations and developers, Moses used Title 1 of the federal Housing Act of 1949 and his Committee on Slum Clearance to clear-cut swaths of housing lived in by the poor. In their place pricey condos, university campuses, medical centers, arts complexes, and infrastructure projects were built. The evicted poor and working class, typically Black and Latino, were relocated to poorly constructed projects or left on their own.

With Title 1 and other tools, Moses and his allies built, among other projects, New York Coliseum, Cooper Square, Lincoln Center, the UN, Stuyvesant Town, Fordham University, parts of New York University, Mount Sinai Hospital, Pratt Institute, printing plants for the New York Times, and Morningside Gardens where I lived for 27 years. Robert Caro, in the Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, put the relocations that accompanied Moses projects at 250,000 New Yorkers for highways, and tens of thousands for other projects.
Appalled by Moses's racism and classism, Caro declared that Moses's actions "created new slums as fast as they were cleaning the old."

Badillo Learns

One such project was the Lower Manhattan Expressway. The 2.4-mile, eight-lane expressway was first proposed in 1927, endorsed by the City Planning Commission in 1941 and finally approved by the city's Board of Estimate in 1960. The expressway was to link the Holland Tunnel on the West Side and the Williamsburgh and Manhattan Bridges on the East Side. According to the plan, the expressway arteries were to weave through neighborhoods, turning New York, according to one critic, into an East Coast version of Los Angeles.

Mayor Wagner, a rabid proponent, emphasized how the federal government would cover 90% of the costs of the expressway, New York State the other 10%, with the City contributing a miniscule $220,000. He also cheered the construction jobs that would result. The president of the Downtown-Lower Manhattan Association, a booster group, declared the Expressway would "stimulate business activity, improve property values and bring increased tax revenues to the city." 

Important FIRE Priorities

But at what human cost? Two thousand families and 800 businesses employing 10,000 people would be forced out of the area.

In 1962, Mayor Wagner, burned by community protests during the development of Manhattantown on the Upper West Side, established the position of Relocation Commissioner and appointed Badillo with 200 employees and, by 1965, a budget of over $2 million. In June 1962, Wagner had Badillo begin a plan for relocating residents for the expressway project.

In December Badillo released the report, assuring adequate and affordable housing would be found for the 1,972 families the City would remove for the Expressway. Based on overly optimistic estimates of available housing in nearby areas, Badillo declared in the report that "On the basis of current relocation practices and procedures of the Department of Relocation, and in the light of studies just completed, I can report that the relocation load for this project could be taken in stages and suitably accomplished."

With a liberal veneer long a characteristic of forced removals in New York City, Badillo declared his intentions to found a "citizens relocation advisory board" and "to institute a full program of social services which will facilitate the process of relocation and at the same time render vital social casework to the families who will be so intimately affected by this procedure." In this language, fuzzy-wuzzy social services are provided to a population that, if left alone, would not need them to begin with. And a governmentally enforced relocation is presented as if it's an unavoidable natural disaster like a hurricane or flood.

Badillo admitted in his report the relocations wouldn't be without its problems. "This does not, of course, mean that the relocation for this project can be accomplished without pain or strain or some individual cases of hardship. Practically speaking, every major relocation involves some hardship for some. But in this case, I can report that with the cooperation already described, the job can be done," Badillo wrote.

The Human Cost

But for the people to be actually moved, the Expressway represented more than "some hardship." To a Times reporter, neighborhood residents cursed Wagner, others cried. The high relocation stipends and new low-cost housing were viewed by residents as little compensation for the loss of their neighborhood.

"A world is being destroyed, a way of life," declared Reverend Gerard LaMountain. "There are people here 80 years old who have never lived anywhere else. The neighborhood is everything for them," he continued.

"The expressway is a death blow to Little Italy," Anthony Dapolito, co-chair of the Citywide Organizations Against the Lower Manhattan Expressway, told the Times. The area to be demolished was, ironically, considering Badillo's background, characterized by a large Italian population and a growing Puerto Rican one. In a way, Badillo proved himself an advocate of his later declared creed-"Blood is all the same color, and non-sectarian"-and willing to sacrifice all neighborhoods, even his own people, for his private ambitions.

Fierce community opposition met the highway and relocation plans. Opponents cited the destruction of the neighborhood, the likely pollution that would result from the increased traffic, and the existence of non-disruptive alternatives for alleviating downtown traffic problems. An array of politicians, smelling electoral blood, piled on, including Representatives Ed Koch and John Lindsay, and Borough President Percy Sutton, all of whom would oppose Badillo in later mayoral elections.

Such sustained opposition spelled the death knell for the expressway. Lindsay, elected mayor in 1965, killed the project in 1969 in favor of a highway that looped about the perimeter of Manhattan Island.

Our point here is that Badillo's relocation plans for the Lower Manhattan Expressway exemplified what became his standard stock in trade. He has provided the FIRE elites the racial cover they've needed to remove minorities from where they live, where they work, where they go to school.

Others appreciated the work. Before the 1965 elections, Badillo resigned as Relocation Commissioner to join City Council President Paul Sorevaro's slate. Sorevaro, running for mayor, wanted Badillo to win him minority support. It didn't work: Sorevaro lost, but Badillo won the Bronx borough presidency he would use as a launch pad for his own run at the mayoralty in 1969.

Badillo's vehemence about and verve at removing Blacks and Latinos from CUNY are not just the result of an old man's political conversion. They are very much the outgrowth of skills developed over a career of four decades, right from his first appointment. Badillo appears very much, like all politicians, a man of his era, shaped by the political and economic terrain of the city and the private cancers of his heart.

Kim Williams-Guillen provided research assistance for this article.

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