His life touched by racism

In 1992, his youngest son, Joseph, was found hanging from a tree outside a local mall. Officials ruled it a suicide. Mr. Cohen believes his son was murdered for dating a white woman.

"This is what I'm stewing in my brain for eight years now," he told The Evangelist, turning away to hide tears. "It helps me easily say to you that discrimination and hatred are still here, like it was back in 1960."

Race matters

"I first came up to Albany in '59," he began his story. A World War II and Korean War veteran, he left Albany to earn his degree from Brooklyn Law School but returned in 1963 to spend a quarter-century as an attorney for the New York State Department of Audit and Control.

"At that time, coming into Albany as a state worker, I still had concerns about where I was going to live, who was going to accept me," he remembered. Even in the supposedly "advanced" North, "there were still restaurants I couldn't go into, places where I couldn't live."

Jim Crow

"I could see that nothing was changing, regardless of what people were saying," he recalled. "There was a birth of awareness that racism was rampant; organizations popped up like mushrooms. They all claimed to be doing the same thing, but they weren't."

When he initially moved to a neighborhood near Albany's Memorial Hospital, Mr. Cohen found that "in the North, they didn't have to have [Jim Crow] laws. We were beaten by numbers. We didn't have the numbers to go to the polls and vote, to march down State Street."

Donating his skills as a lawyer, he joined the Urban League, the Albany branch of the NAACP and Albany County Opportunity (ACOY), serving as president of the last two. Remembering those days, a thought struck him: "When black organizations then talked about the need to get rid of discriminatory practices, they were talking about blacks only. It was many years before they started to see when you said `minority,' you were talking about a whole lot more than blacks: Latinos, Native Americans, women."

Choices

"They lived in that area, or they didn't live at all," he said. "If you were concerned about the future, you wanted to move out of there."

BY 1968, Mr. Cohen wanted to leave, as well. His oldest son, Lino, was ready to start school, and the Cohens didn't want to send him to Albany city schools, where they felt black students did not get the same treatment as white students.

"Guilderland fit the bill," Mr. Cohen concluded. "The question of minority or majority didn't exist, because there weren't that many" African-Americans in the town.

Accusations

"A lot of blacks began to accuse me of deserting: `You moved out of here,'" he said. "I recall one occasion; I was participating in a program for citizens of Arbor Hill, and I was counseling some teenagers on how to structure their lives. A young man came up and challenged me for even daring to be there, because I had moved out."

Since the Cohens attended Christ the King parish in Westmere, Mr. Cohen also dealt with criticism from African-Americans for not attending a "black church."

He shrugged off most of the remarks, saying that he wanted his sons to get a good education, and "I kept looking at the bigger picture, rather than just the minority picture."

New focus

"I claim no great advancement of blacks on my part," he noted. "I did it with [my sons' education] in mind."

In addition, "It took a long time to build the membership [of the NAACP], and they were more interested in the fundraising cocktails than pursuing the law and what it needed to help the people."

He always found the political side of the civil rights movement frustrating. "I was glad the changes were being made, but changes were being made at a much slower pace than should have been the case," he said. "Some changes were being made because politicians saw it as to their benefit for votes, rather than for the true feeling that minorities had been mistreated."

Current state

"I always thought that someday, this attitude toward blacks and minorities would dissipate," he said. "As I sit here and talk to you now, it hasn't. It is in the minds of the people."

Through several decades of volunteer work with dozens of organizations, Mr. Cohen has come to understand the need for Native American rights, as well as equality for other minorities.

"We're finally recognizing that the American Indian has been sorely and badly treated all of these years," he stated. "By and large, there is too much discrimination running afoul."

He noted that "in the South, there has been an easier cure, because what they needed to do was [eliminate] those laws that restricted people. In the North, it's in people's minds and hearts."

Personal tragedy

Mr. Cohen alleges that the lesson went too far, and the group hung Joseph. He told The Evangelist that within an hour of Joseph's death, officials had ruled it a suicide, even though Mr. Cohen protested that his son had just spoken to him and was excited about starting a business, not depressed.

"This is the other aspect of the discriminatory and hate practices that those organizations were supposed to have stopped," he said, his voice shaking.

Mr. Cohen hired a private detective who he said was blocked from finding answers to Joseph's death. He believes officials participated in a cover-up of the crime.

"I'm distrustful of the law, although I am a lawyer," he said. "I'm distrustful of the people we vote to enforce the laws -- the police force, the district attorney, the coroner."

Questions remain

"Someday, somebody will confess to it," he said of Joseph's death. "Someday, the answer will come. After that, I'm ready to go."

He pointed to Joseph's picture, frozen in time on the fireplace mantel: "I'm waiting for that answer."

(12-14-00) [[In-content Ad]]