"Many suburbs have worked hard to remain exclusionary, and they have done it by approving every kind of affordable housing that you can imagine -- for seniors, for moderate-income people -- everything except housing for the poor," O'Connor said.
Despite the obstacles placed in their way, Ethel Lawrence and her allies refused to give up. The town had grown in size since the lawsuit was filed, but it had created little, if any, housing for low-income people.
The activists battled numerous legal challenges and endured economic downturns, which limited funds for construction. Weeks before her death, Lawrence met with state officials at the site and begged them to fund the project.
About the same time, she asked her daughter to get involved.
Lawrence-Halley, a paralegal who lived nearby, had her own life to worry about. She had two children and a husband who later died of cancer. She did not want to revisit the past.
But she remembered evenings when her mother returned from meetings enraged, because neighbors spat obscenities in her face. She recalled the night a zoning official said low-cost apartments shouldn't be built in Mount Laurel because blacks used the bathroom more than whites. The sewage system, he said, would be overloaded.
She remembered her childhood, when white kids called her mother names.
"I had to continue this work, because this Mount Laurel battle had become a generational thing for us," she said. "For me, there was really no choice."
The Ethel Lawrence Homes were finally approved in 1997. Many hoped the issue had calmed down. Instead, tensions surfaced at final meetings.
"A woman who had been my Girl Scout troop leader years ago came up to me at one meeting and said she was disappointed in how I turned out, because of my work for the housing," Lawrence-Halley recalled. "It was so hurtful."
According to the transcript from the Mount Laurel Township Planning Board's final hearing in 1997, attorney and resident Steve Gershman charged that "middle- and upper-income people are being compelled to support this low-income housing project, and it is being rammed down the Township's throat."
When construction began on the $18-million project, the public acrimony began to die down. And then came moving day, three years ago, when the first tenants arrived.
"On that afternoon, when I saw little kids running from school buses to their moms in the new apartments, I cried," Lawrence-Halley said. "We had come so far."
