How does democracy cope when what’s right isn’t what’s popular?
MINOT, N.D. — Last weekend, I got pulled into binge-watching an HBO show called “Show Me A Hero.”
I’m a sucker for an F. Scott Fitzgerald reference and pretty much anything David Simon is involved in. Once I started watching the series, I couldn’t look away.
I was under the misapprehension that it had been released recently because the subject matter is so apt to the politics of 2021, but it came out in 2015 (the book was published in 1999).
The focus is the political and legal battle to integrate housing in Yonkers, New York, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and specifically the efforts of young Mayor Nick Wasicsko. Yonkers had been using federal housing money to segregate people of color into slums away from white neighborhoods. The NAACP sued, and a federal judge found that the constitution had been violated, ordering Yonkers to approve a more geographically diverse housing plan.
