Summer of '69: Lamar Cox

Lamar Cox, 76, of Washington D.C., owner of a security company and former chairman of the Long Island Congress of Racial Equality in 1969.

Woodstock wasn't a black thing. Protesting the war - very few black folks were involved in that kind of activity. Minorities and underprivileged were more concerned about basic rights.

In 1969 we had school district activities where [African-American] students were doing protests, and there had been some violence in a couple of schools. We had a meeting with representatives of a number of school districts . . . Hempstead, Oyster Bay, Westbury, Uniondale, Malverne and Roosevelt.

I'm not sure what was really accomplished. To change the thinking and the culture of any place it takes awhile, but certainly it was a beginning to have gotten together with the superintendents to highlight the need for change in the schools and the need to listen to students, who were primarily concerned that they were undereducated.

There were skirmishes in a couple of the schools. There were no injuries. In some cases I think there was a gun involved. It was just unrest, as I saw, that was pretty much a result of what occurred in the year before. We had the riots the year before, following Martin Luther King's death.

There was a lack of quality education, and the young people were beginning to recognize it, how far behind the minority school districts were in their testing. It was pretty much what we called the 'black belt' at that time, that went from a portion of Long Beach to Freeport and Hempstead and all the way up to Glen Cove. That's where minorities were confined to living at that time. Of course, it skipped places like Garden City. If you were a Jew, a black, a Hispanic, you couldn't live in Garden City because Garden City had an unwritten covenant that you couldn't live there. It was not permitted, and it was pretty well known. Folks knew it.

Some of these young people were for the first time awakened to the problems of minorities. And it impacted these youngsters. In recognition of that, we started a program in five school districts called Operation Get Ahead.

The project still exists today. We went into the schools to support the students. It was therapeutic, it was educational and it was inspiring.