This article is a good example of a conflict story. Writer Amy Fox connects a conflict of the past to be present today in the same neighborhood. Conflict stories need both sides to the issue and this is difficult to do if it’s an issue from the 1950s. Fox succeeds in capturing voices from both platforms.

She uses the stories her mother gave her about her grandparents’ involvement in civil rights issues. The direct quotes she uses comes from old pamphlets her grandfather wrote in. She quotes public statements of the chairman of MetLife Insurance as well as other writings from the 1960s about the area and how black people had felt about the discrimination by MetLife. Fox dug up old surveys completed by residents about the “MetLife exclusionary policy,” and researched a lot about each committee member. With that research she was able to get in touch with Dr. Lee Lorch who, at his old age, could tell Fox about his experience at the time she was writing this article. The source of Lorch is particularly significant because he is a primary source that was there all those years ago.

Fox tries to get commentary from the Stuyvesant Town property spokesman and then she quotes a 30-year African American resident that has seen the more recent dwellings of Stuyvesant Town. He said that the number of “average, everyday African-Americans” are “static” and that excludes “celebrities, black immigrants and foreigners.” This quote connects the 1950s to modern day. Although the law has changed, integration did not sky rocket. She concludes the current residents’ section with how most residents didn’t know about the “complex’s troubled racial history.”

The arc of her story is that the racial tension is not dead all these years later. I think the nut graf is paragraph four that starts with “My grandfather had photographed the same plaque 50 years earlier…” It connects the two time periods and the arc of the story.