Synopsis

The illustrated excerpt of Standoff on Fairview Avenue now online tells the beginning of a much longer story. Here in brief is the full arc:

In 1924, an African-American married couple, postal worker Samuel A. Browne and public-school teacher Catherine Browne, bought the two-story, wood-frame house at 167 Fairview from a white owner. They moved in along with their four young children, becoming the first Black homeowners in a neighborhood then known as Castleton Hill.

Soon after the Brownes took occupancy, they started receiving offers to buy the house for more than they had paid for it – a transparently racist effort to keep them out of the area. When the couple refused to sell and moved into the property, they were targeted with death threats (including at least one from the Ku Klux Klan), vandalism, insurance cancellation and other pressures to vacate. On two occasions, a racist mob physically attacked the house in the middle of the night, terrorizing the Brownes.

These intimidation tactics persisted for two years, but the couple stood their ground. They sued their tormenters for damages with support from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, including its top leaders in the 1920s, James Weldon Johnson and Walter F. White, and other key civil-rights figures. Remarkably, the Staten Island district attorney also filed criminal charges against the mob's ringleaders.

In the end, the white vigilantes were compelled to cease and desist. Samuel and Catherine prevailed, living in the house for the rest of their long lives. They died within a year of each other in the early 1970s.