Fighting the Good Fight

Mary McKinney grew up in the rural town of Rich Square, North Carolina during the 1950's. She vividly recalls the segregated South where she was raised. "We had to go to a special 'colored only' room in the library," she explains. During the civil rights movement, she and her classmates took buses to join the protests in "struggle states" like Georgia and Alabama. She remembers a "very young" Jessie Jackson and Martin Luther King in those days. When she was 17 ½, McKinney left the South and moved to the Bronx. Now more than four decades later, she is still fighting for what she believes in and standing up for the less fortunate.

Mary McKinney moved to the Bronx in hope of a better life. She knew that if she wanted to go to college and make a life for herself, New York was the place to be. After living in the middle class neighborhood of Riverdale for a number of years, she moved to her current home in Soundview, in Southeastern Bronx, in 1981. For forty years, she worked as an assistant administrator at New York Presbyterian Hospital, remaining active in her community and serving on several Boards including the New York chapter of the Lupus Foundation. Accustomed to representing the needs of others, McKinney helped form the Concerned Residents Organization of Soundview to provide a voice to local residents.

Among her significant pursuits, for over five years, McKinney has been leading a fight to draw attention to and seek clean up for a contaminated manufacturing site surrounding her community. The former site of Loral Electronics Systems was abandoned in 1996 and then turned into a parking lot where a city-employed West Nile pesticide company parked its trucks. Despite the site's history, the New York City School Construction Authority (SCA) decided to enter into a 20-year, $1 million leasing deal with the property owner in 2003. When the high school opened a year later, students were attending classes on a site that - according to an independent review commissioned by the SCA - contained dangerous levels of carcinogens like arsenic, barium, cadmium, and chromium, along with lead and mercury, which can cause neurological damage.

In 2001, Mary McKinney, like many others in her community, was diagnosed with both cancer and asthma. After years of legal wrangling over the fate of the high school, the city's Department of Education (DOE) agreed in 2005 to re-test for toxins inside the school and to form a task force to help address the problem. However, working closely with Community Board 9, local politicians, and the New York Lawyers for the Public Interest, McKinney continues to fight to do more - to clean up of the contaminated site. Meanwhile, she has emerged as a go-to person for individuals in need within her community. On a typical morning, McKinney calls and visits local seniors in the community to see if they received their medications and if they are having any problems. She lobbies for critical social services like health facilities, banks and reliable transportation that have been largely absent from her community. "For four years," McKinney says, "we didn't have a grocery store - not a single one."

In June 2006, McKinney learned about Grassroots Initiative's work during a Community Board presentation and decided to run for office. With Grassroots Initiative's help, she was able to fight off two technical challenges to her candidacy in the New York Supreme Court. On September 12, 2006, she was elected to the Bronx County Democratic Committee, becoming the first elected member of her family. A realist at heart, McKinney has often witnessed political corruption and greed getting in the way of valuable and needed community services but won't let that stop her. "You have to fight for what you want; you can't just sit there and expect it to come your way," she says.p

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