Toni Richardson

Interview Description

Oral History Interview with Toni Richardson
Toni Richardson was born in Manhattan around 1951. Her mother was a Black American who was born in South Carolina and migrated to Brooklyn, and her father was also a descendent of Southern Black Americans. Her family lived in the Amsterdam Houses in the Upper West Side neighborhood of Manhattan until 1957, when her father got a job with the New York City Transit Authority and they moved to the Linden Houses in the East New York neighborhood of Brooklyn. Richardson attended PS 224, PS 190, and Thomas Jefferson High School. As a teenager, she was an active member of United Community Centers. She lived in Linden Houses until 1972, and her mother continued to live in the Houses until she passed many years later. She now lives in Ossining, New York, and has worked for IBM for much of her life.

In the interview, Toni Richardson discusses moving from the Amsterdam Houses to the Linden Houses in the East New York neighborhood of Brooklyn in 1957, growing up in the neighborhood and interracial friendships, race relations as a teenager, attending Thomas Jefferson High School, her involvement with United Community Centers, the decline of services in the Linden Houses as the residents shifted from predominantly White to Black, the poor quality of education in local schools, her career as a Black woman at IBM, and systemic racism and its effect on society. The interview was conducted by Sarita Daftary-Steel at Richardson's home in Ossining, 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

Richardson, Toni, Oral history interview conducted by Sarita Daftary-Steel, February 06, 2015, Sarita Daftary-Steel collection of East New York oral histories, 2015.011.18; Brooklyn Historical Society.