Apartheid. USA 1988

July 31, 1987:

Tensions run high between neighboring home-owners and merchants and the residents of a one-time lakefront resort that Suffolk County is using as an emergency shelter for the homeless near Lake Ronkonkoma on Long Island. Racial overtones permeate the issue. Five people were injured and two black residents of the shelter, the former Ronkonkoma Inn, were arrested in a recent melee with whites at a Brookhaven town beach a short distance from the inn. Also, two white teenagers were picked up by police for throwing stones at the shelter. ‘They imported here all the coloreds from all over because some do-gooders thought it'd be a good idea,’ said Richard Scola (46) a postal worker here. ‘This race mixing will never work,’ he added. ‘Ours are. not basically a racist people,’ said the Reverend Charles Kohli, pastor of St Joseph's Roman Catholic Church,

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whose soup kitchen feeds many of the hotel's residents. ‘It's a serious problem and should not become a racial confrontation. It's a question of economic justice and that's where emergency housing belongs,’ he added. Yet, the county police have added extra patrols in the area. Racial incidents have already rocked other Suffolk shelters. In February, there was a cross burning at the Hampton Bays emergency shelter.

Like many communities in the US, Suffolk County faces a severe shortage of emergency housing for a rapidly growing number of homeless people. Last year, Suffolk placed 2 230 families in emergency housing, and is 22 percent ahead of that pace this year. The County also placed 3 950 individuals in shelters last year, and is 13 percent ahead of that rate this year. ‘We are beyond the limits of the resources available,’ said John Sheahan, a spokesman for the County Department of Social Services.

Hotel residents, who typically stay in the rambling, three-story building say motorists routinely yell racial slurs from their cars or stop to hurl rocks at the inn from the street. ‘They yell, “Nigger, you are going to die, you're going to burn in hell”,’ said Mary Windfield (34) and a mother of five who has lived for two months in the inn now.^134.

134. The New York Times, from a report by Eric Schmitt