Yonkers, New York - a well-known community bordering The Bronx - houses the tale at the heart of the social activist documentary Brick by Brick: A Civil Rights Story. A city with a whopping 7,000 units of public housing, Yonkers suffered dramatically from myopic administrative policies that made the boundaries of one of its key public education sectors synonymous with those of the local residential projects. This inadvertently produced a landscape of de jure segregation, whereby many African American denizens found themselves confined, residentially and educationally, to one set area, and severed from the Caucasian populace. Brick by Brick follows three Yonkers families amid their aggressive and valiant attempts to change the status quo in this area. Their efforts (as the film denotes) eventually prompted a federal case, U.S. vs. Yonkers, though not without years of fruitless struggle and difficult navigation through the byzantine U.S. legal system. ~ Nathan Southern, All Movie Guide
