In “Race and Community in Postwar Brooklyn: The Brownsville Neighborhood Council and the Politics of Urban Renewal” by Wendell E. Pritchett takes the reader through the history of Brownsville, Brooklyn.  Originally known as ‘Brooklyn’s Lower East Side,’ Brownsville served as the hope of an ideal integrated neighborhood.  The people of Brownsville, particularly the Brownsville Neighborhood Council hoped that Brownsville would serve as the model community, integrating both black and white families, both middle income and low income families.  

The Brownsville Neighborhood Council believed “that all people deserved a decent home, regardless of color” (449).  Their mission pushed them to consistently push for new housing projects, expecting that the blacks and whites would live together as models for interracial living.  Honestly, it seems as though the BNC had been expecting too much in such a short amount of time.  They wanted to make Brownsville into this utopia of their time.  They seemed too idealistic.  The BNC probably did not take into consideration that as the second and third generation of Jews began to attain higher educations and better jobs that they would want to get out of that neighborhood.  To get out of the slums in which they grew up in.  

  New York City is known as the melting pot where people from all different nationalities live within a close vicinity of one another peacefully.  To the outside world New Yorkers seem that way, yet in reality New Yorkers just tolerate one another.  Although New Yorkers pride themselves for its diversity, we really aren’t diverse at all.  Each neighborhood segregates itself with the same type of people, almost closing itself off to new visitors or ‘different’ people.