“Housing is a human rights issue,” said Nellie Bailey, summarizing hours of testimony from leading activists during the first Harlem Anti-Gentrification Conference at St. Ambrose Church on Friday, June 1.

Bailey, director of the Harlem Tenants Council, has been a relentless foe of the increasing spread of gentrification. He has assembled several leading authorities on the issue to help make her case.

During the opening panel of the two-day conference, Bailey had to stifle potential dissent when a member of the audience expressed concern over the fact that only white men were on the panel.

“I’ve invited others, including Black men and women,” Bailey said. “They are just late arriving.”

Even so, Bailey continued, “This is not about who’s Black and who’s white, it’s about analysis: How we got in this situation and how we get out of it.”

Professor Neil Smith, one of the leading authorities on gentrification, lived up to Bailey’s charge, quickly asserting his mantra: “Gentrification is the housing policy of the United States,” adding that it was not an accident, “and not just about the displacement of African-Americans.”

Smith, director of the Center for Place, Culture &Politics at the CUNY Graduate Center and author of “The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification &Revanchist City,” focused some of his remarks on West Harlem and Columbia University’s plan to develop the area.

“Columbia is a multinational corporation with a $6 billion endowment, which is larger than the [gross national product] of many countries,” he said.

His comments were in marked contrast to a recent op-ed piece in the New York Times by former Mayor David Dinkins who praised the project and explained how it would substantially improve the district. While Smith didn’t directly address Dinkins’ article, he gave several examples of ways in which an aroused community can “win this struggle.”

Judge Fern Fisher was asked to speak about the problems that senior citizens faced in the landlord and tenants’ court and the success of her two-year-old program to assist the elderly and indigent.

“We are doing a good job trying to develop programs to prevent the evictions of senior citizens from their homes,” she said.

Fisher, former deputy director of Harlem Legal Services, was appointed administrative judge in charge of the New York Civil Court, which includes the Small Claims and Housing Courts. She stressed a number of innovative programs under her watch, including making sure indigent claimants had the right to counsel. Still, there was much to be done, she added, particularly after Bailey observed there was an incestuous relationship between judges, entrenching bias against tenants.

Broadcaster Gil Noble, the event’s moderator whose television show, “Like It Is,” has often been a popular forum for discussions about gentrification, said, “I love Harlem. Harlem is my home, and I don’t want it taken away from me.”

He then invited his friend Sikhulu Shange to join the panelists.

Shange, owner of the Record Shack, won recently a temporary victory upon being served an eviction notice by his landlord. “We are no longer allowed to operate in the community where we live, and it bothers me that more of our residents are not outraged by this. It is time for us to mobilize,” he said.

He evoked the loudest response from the audience when he declared, “We are not going to be moved like rocks. Our lives are on the line.”

During his wide-ranging comments, Robert Fitch keyed his critique on Goldman Sachs and the extent to which it controls real estate in New York City. In his general excoriation of Goldman Sachs, he made some unclear insinuations about a certain church that has paved the way for white capital investments in Harlem. Was he referring to the Abyssinian Development Corporation and its ties to Goldman Sachs? He was, however, very clear about his position on the disappearance of public housing in Harlem and elsewhere.

There is, perhaps, a better analysis of Harlem in his book, “The Assassination of New York” (Verso, 1993), wherein he argues that the poor are being displaced in urban areas and replaced by the middle class. It would be helpful to know the extent to which the Black middle class are part of this gentrification and would thus make gentrification much more than a white invasion, but a class question.

Some of these questions were raised and answered by Professor Bill Sales of Seton Hall University who has been an activist in Harlem for many years.

“Gentrification is an integral part of the development of the capitalist system,” he said, beginning a brief, but informative, history of Blacks in New York City, as they were pushed from one neighborhood to another.

“Malcolm X saw the future,” Sales asserted. “He saw that institutional racism was on the agenda. There has been a retrenchment of social services, and the social contract has been renegotiated. Much of this occurred during the reign of Reaganism.”

Sales also said that it is possible for Harlem to be gentrified by Blacks and not be Harlem.

“What we are trying to do is to save Harlem for those who built it, not for those who have no experience in fighting against white supremacy.” The words drew a thunderous response.

The audience was also quite attentive to Dr. Mindy Fullilove, a psychologist who has worked in the heart of the Black and Hispanic community for more than 15 years. The psychology of space was her subject and “place is like a second mother,” she explained. She said that heartbreak, the catastrophe of being torn from a familiar and comforting place, was devastating to a person. “You don’t need the counter intelligence program, just break some hearts.”

Daniel Goldstein’s message from Brooklyn was no less disturbing as he explained the forces on each side of the Atlantic Yards struggle. He said that what it boils down “is the subversion of democracy and who will have a say in what happens to a neighborhood.”

If the voices assembled by Bailey last Friday evening – and the following day promised more of the same with James Haughton, Komozi Woodward, Tony Monteiro and Mae Jackson among the scheduled speakers – have anything to say about what happens with the future of gentrification, then the commercial and residential change will not occur without a vigorous struggle.