Anita Faulding

Interview Description

Oral History Interview with Anita Faulding
Anita (Fisher) Faulding was born in the Bronx, New York in 1950 into a Jewish family. Her family moved to the Linden Houses in the East New York neighborhood of Brooklyn in 1957. She became a member of United Community Centers, a local integrationist organization, as a teenager. Faulding attended PS 213, George Gershwin Junior High School, Thomas Jefferson High School, and Brooklyn College. After graduating college she moved to Fairfield Towers, and then later to Starrett City. She taught pre-school and elementary school in East New York until 2013. Anita married a Black man, Steve Faulding, and they moved with their children to Baldwin, New York (Long Island) in 1991.

In the interview, Anita Faulding discusses living her life in the East New York neighborhood of Brooklyn, especially her experiences with United Community Centers (UCC). She describes how she became involved with UCC as a teenager protesting against school segregation and how she later worked at the organization's integrated day care center. She also discusses living in public housing (Linden Houses and Fairfield Towers), White flight, and eventually leaving East New York for Long Island. Finally, she also speaks on public education, specifically on the effects of segregation and charter schools on students today. The interview was conducted by Sarita Daftary-Steel at Faulding's home in Baldwin, New York.

The collection consists of twenty oral history interviews (with nineteen narrators) conducted by Sarita Daftary-Steel with residents (past and present) of the East New York neighborhood of Brooklyn. The interviews were conducted between January 2014 and February 2015. The project was designed to capture the experiences of East New York residents who lived in the neighborhood during the period when families of color (African American, West Indian, and Puerto Rican) moved in and White families moved out, and the resulting decline of services and quality of life that followed. This process began as early as the 1950s and continued through the rest of the twentieth century. Sarita Daftary-Steel is a community organizer who worked for United Community Centers from 2003 to 2013, most of those years as the East New York Farms! Project Director.

Citation

Faulding, Anita, Oral history interview conducted by Sarita Daftary-Steel, March 13, 2014, Sarita Daftary-Steel collection of East New York oral histories, 2015.011.06; Brooklyn Historical Society.