Black Atlantic City residents fight to keep their homes from being torn down by casino project

Lillian W. Bryant of Atlantic City, NJ, is 86 years old and a widow and says she refuses to leave her home to make way for a new casino project.

"My husband was a fighter," Bryant says. "And he wouldn't have allowed this. We're not going anywhere," she declares.

At issue are plans by casino mogul Steve Wynn to build a roadway tunnel to a new casino that will knock down homes on the street, which is the only stable Black middle-class neighborhood left in Atlantic City.

The street, Horace J. Bryant Jr. Drive, is named after Mrs. Bryant's late husband who was New Jersey's first Black Cabinet member and served as commissioner of banking and insurance. He later became one of the first Black city commissioners in Atlantic City.

Also opposing the roadway project are Pierre Hollingsworth, the former president of the local NAACP chapter, and his wife, Soundra Usry Hollingsworth, member of the Miss America Organization's board of directors, who also live in the neighborhood.

"Not only is it disrupting the Black neighborhood, it is disrupting Black history," said Pierre Hollingsworth.

"There's no place to go that compares to where we live," he told JET.

New Jersey residents voted for casino gambling in 1976 with the hope that it would be a catalyst to revitalize the economically deprived resort city, which has scores of substandard housing units and a high double-digit unemployment rate. Today the Atlantic City casino industry pulls in billions of dollars annually, but very little, if any, is trickled down to the community, residents say.

"Black people have lost just about everything since casino gambling came to the city," notes Hollingsworth. "Casino gambling was supposed to rebuild the city for its people. But we've seen just the opposite, a decline in Black population. We've lost all of the major businesses in town, and we still have double digit unemployment,"he adds.

"All you have to do is look at Atlantic City and see very little housing has been put up, but a massive amount of houses have been torn down."

Some homeowners have accepted the casino developer's offer to tear down their home for $200,000, which is reportedly twice the market value of each home.

The group has filed a suit in federal court, alleging its civil rights were violated with the "destruction of a minority neighborhood," said Mrs. Bryant's daughter, Lillian E. Bryant, who is a former local politician.

Bryant's mother, a retired school teacher who suffers from high blood pressure and arthritis, is determined to keep her home. "How could I look for another place and start all over at my age?" she asks. " I'm too old for that."

COPYRIGHT 1997 Johnson Publishing Co.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning