By Ethel A. Lawrence-Halley

Ethel Lawrence not only taught, but made a model of her life in order to instill in her children, as her mother had in her, that you do not traverse this earth alone and that the plight of your neighbor could someday be your own. It has been said that Ethel R. Lawrence is the “Rosa Parks” of affordable housing. 

Ethel was the second of eight children born to Mary and Leslie Robinson. At the time, Mount Laurel, in Burlington County, was a rural enclave of farms. Most residents were white, but there was a small black population. Ethel Lawrence was among them. The family resided in Mount Laurel for over six generations.

Ethel's mother, Mary Gaines Robinson, was a religious and civic minded woman who instilled in her daughter high morals and principles. At the urging of her mother, sixteen year old Ethel demanded, with other teens to be seated in the "whites only" section of a movie theater in Mt. Holly. The owners of the theater yielded to this determined young woman and the premises were desegregated. This stand was merely the first of many Ethel would embark on in her lifetime.

Ethel met and married Thomas Lawrence, and in 1955 they purchased their own home in Mount Laurel. She was a schoolteacher and mother of nine children. Ethel always advocated the importance of getting a good education to the youth that she touched.

In the early 1960’s suburbanization reached the rural community of Mount Laurel. Plans for major commercial, residential and industrial development did not include any affordable housing. Severe zoning restrictions were placed on housing development, such as bedroom sizes, to limit the number of children.

The effect of the zoning was to make it nearly impossible for lower-income people to purchase new homes or to find affordable rental units in Mount Laurel. Mrs. Lawrence saw family, neighbors, friends and other people of modest means who had lived in the community for many generations, being displaced for lack of affordable housing. Her own daughter lived in a converted chicken coop.

Mrs. Lawrence organized a multi-racial group of Mount Laurel residents in 1968 and developed an alternative plan to provide low- and moderate-income housing. However, in 1969 the Township Zoning Board denied the variance that would be needed to construct rental apartments in Mount Laurel.

Shortly thereafter, a Mount Laurel Township committeeman visited Mrs. Lawrence and her group at Jacobs Chapel Church, one of the oldest black churches in the state. He informed them that the township would not permit the construction of 36 garden apartments, declaring “If you folks can’t afford to live here, then you’ll just have to leave.” Mrs. Lawrence feared that without zoning for apartment buildings, her extended family could not afford to continue to live there.

Attorneys involved in Mrs. Lawrence’s undertaking enlisted the help of the Burlington County Chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which sued Mount Laurel for using restrictive zoning and land-use ordinances that excluded homes for low- and moderate-income residents.

The injustice and disregard for human dignity that Mrs. Lawrence observed in her beloved Mount Laurel triggered a court battle that was waged for over a quarter of a century to open Mount Laurel and other suburban communities to low- and moderate-income residents.

The court battles in Mount Laurel I (filed May 1, 1971) and Mount Laurel II were bitter. Mrs. Lawrence was severely harassed, received death threats and had to explain to her children why they were being called names and harassed at school. Yet she still took on the fight against the “exclusionary zoning” practice of Mount Laurel and many other suburban communities.

The landmark lawsuit Mount Laurel rulings are among the most celebrated in United States legal history. The court ruled that the poor may not be excluded from New Jersey’s municipalities by local zoning ordinances that make housing too expensive for them to rent or own.

Click to read Bloomberg news story on Ethel Lawrence