Commissioner's Message

This year marks the Commission’s 50th anniversary as an official City agency: 50 years of promoting and protecting the civil rights of all those who live, work, or visit this City; 50 years of enforcing the City Human Rights Law including the nation’s first fair housing law; and 50 years of bringing communities together and encouraging positive relations.

To celebrate the occasion, we held a large public conference entitled Race At Work: Realities of Race and Criminal Record in the NYC Job Market at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. How appropriate to have held this successful event in Harlem, where the Commission has such deep roots. Harlem is where the Commission was born - out of race riots in 1935 and 1943.

We were honored to have as speakers Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton, Ellis Cose, Professors Devah Pager and Bruce Western, Glenn Martin, Reverend C. Vernon Mason, and Dr. Edison O. Jackson, all leaders in their own respective fields. A packed auditorium during the fall’s first big snowstorm speaks volumes about our participants and an audience eager to be informed.

The event featured a study conducted by Princeton University Professors Devah Pager and Bruce Western – with assistance from the Commission and the JEHT Foundation - on the impact of race, ethnicity and criminal records on securing entry-level positions. Their disturbing findings revealed the uphill battle young minority men with or without criminal records face when seeking a job and how young white men with felony convictions do just as well, if not better than young minorities without records. This kind of important research and an event such as Race At Work raise people’s consciousness and strengthen this City’s unity. The Commission has called upon employers to review their hiring practices and eliminate discrimination. We have also been reaching New Yorkers and visitors to our City about the Commission and the City’s Human Rights Law through our One City public awareness campaign, by displaying posters throughout the City at bus shelters and telephone kiosks in all five boroughs from November through February. The campaign will also be back again in the spring. Nearly 5 million people view these large posters daily. We continue to move forward with the strongest civil rights law in the nation, aggressively enforcing the Human Rights Law and offering our service-based programs, especially those emphasizing public education.