Show Me a Hero, HBO's three-part six-hour miniseries from David Simon that debuted on Sunday is based on a true story. The battle over housing discrimination in Yonkers, New York that unfolded in the late 1980 made headline news across the country and is considered by historians to be one of the most important cases of the last fifty years.

Simon’s previous show, The Wire, was celebrated as the most realistic depiction of America’s drug problem and the problems of its cities ever seen on TV (so good it is used in college classes). The Hollywood Reporter asked two distinguished historians — Thomas Sugrue of New York University and Craig Steven Wilder of MIT to blog along with the series. Sugrue, who is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and taught at Penn for two decades before arriving at NYU this year, is the author of four books, including The Origins of the Urban Crisis and Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North. Wilder, who taught at Dartmouth before MIT, is the author of Ebony & Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities. He was also a consultant on Ken Burns’ documentary The Central Park Five and before becoming a professor was a community activist in Brooklyn. 

First up this week, Prof. Sugrue offers background on the case, pointing out that far from being unique, Yonkers was in many ways Everytown, USA. Prof Wilder echoes this by recalling howGeorge Wallace, the segregationist Alabama governor who tried to stop Martin Luther King, Jr. in Selma, drew 16,000 cheering New Yorkers to Madison Square Garden when he ran for president in 1968. 

Thomas Sugrue

In our cherished histories of civil rights, we learn about Birmingham, Montgomery and Selma, but seldom about places like Yonkers, where David Simon’s new mini-series, Show Me a Hero, takes place. A city of nearly 200,000 people, it lies along the Hudson River just north of the Bronx. In the early 1980s, when Judge Leonard Sand ordered the city to construct desegregated and affordable housing, more than eight in 10 Yonkers residents were white. Most of the city’s blacks lived in a square mile cluster near the Bronx border, most stuck in shabby public housing projects.

America’s maps are dotted with places like Yonkers. Think of Compton or Ferguson. Ironically, most of those places are not in those Southern states where rednecks waved their Confederate battle flags, pushed blacks to the back of the bus and donned their KKK hoods, but in the major metropolitan areas north of the Mason-Dixon line, places that have long prided themselves on their open-mindedness. Of the top 10 most segregated metropolitan areas with populations over a half million in the last census, none is in the South. They include old industrial centers like Milwaukee and Detroit (numbers 1 and 4), Barack Obama’s adopted hometown Chicago (number 3), and superficially cosmopolitan Los Angeles (number 10). The second most segregated place? America’s greatest megalopolis — New York — including beleaguered Yonkers....