Pride Was Behind Lawsuit, Woman at the Heart of It Says

"More than anything else I wanted this suit to help families keep
some semblance of pride," she said. "Because you don't have a
place to live doesn't mean you shouldn't have dignity."

At first they called it McCain v. Koch. Over the next 20 years,
the legal name of the lawsuit filed on behalf of the city's
homeless families was changed three times as mayors came and
mayors went. Through it all, McCain, their silent steadfast
accuser, remained the same.
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By ANTHONY DePALMA - The New York Times - January 19, 2003

NYC, NY - She is Yvonne McCain, a woman whose spirit has been
assaulted repeatedly but never broken. When the suit was filed in
her name in 1983, she was a homeless mother of four young
children living in the fetid Martinique Hotel in Herald Square in
Manhattan. Now she is a 54-year-old grandmother, a college
student, a cancer survivor and a dreamer who lives in a
subsidized apartment building in Staten Island that she calls
heaven.

She was at work on Friday when Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg
announced that the city and the lawyers representing the homeless
had reached an agreement on what is now called McCain v.
Bloomberg. Until a reporter found her on Friday night at the
Bethel Community Church in New Brighton, where she was attending
a church meeting, she knew nothing about the establishment of a
special panel to oversee the city's homeless programs
temporarily.

"I thought we were going to get new mattresses and guardrails on
the windows and that's it," Ms. McCain said of the case bearing
her name. "I never imagined that this suit would end up being so
helpful to so many people."

Later, sitting on a comfortable sofa in her $660-a-month,
two-bedroom apartment, with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
and Nelson Mandela hovering in picture frames above her, Ms.
McCain hardly resembled the woman who was sent to a welfare hotel
20 years ago.

"I can still remember very clearly the feeling of desperation
that first night," she recalled. The singular image that repulses
her now as much as it did then is the mattress stained on both
sides with urine. The window of the 11th-floor apartment was
stuck open, frightening her so much that she stayed up the whole
night to make sure that none of her four children fell out.

She was so disgusted that when a lawyer from the Legal Aid
Society asked if she was willing to put her name on a lawsuit
challenging the city's shelter system, she said yes. She does not
pretend to understand the intricacies of the legal challenge, but
she knew then what she wanted the suit to accomplish.

"More than anything else I wanted this suit to help families keep
some semblance of pride," she said. "Because you don't have a
place to live doesn't mean you shouldn't have dignity."

As the lawsuit crawled through the court system, Ms. McCain
slowly made her way out of the welfare hotel and into a new life.
It was not easy. For a while she bounced from homeless shelter to
appalling city-supplied apartment and back. Her estranged husband
tracked her down, and when he found her, he took out his
frustration on her, once breaking her nose, she said.

She jumped at the chance to move to Staten Island, figuring that
getting far away from him, and from her past, would lead to a
better future. In 1996 she was able to move into a subsidized
middle-income apartment building with elevators and a security
desk.

Things were looking up for her. She enrolled at the Borough of
Manhattan Community College, taking courses toward the human
services degree she needs to become an advocate for the needy.
She got a clerical job in the college nurse's office. Her
daughter Tameika presented her with her first grandson, Justin,
now 2.

Then misfortune struck again. About a year ago Ms. McCain felt a
sore spot on her chest. The diagnosis was breast cancer. Surgery
and chemotherapy followed. Then, eager to return to school, she
fell in the street, shattering her ankle.

"She's been through a lot but she just keeps on going," said
Tameika McCain, 24. "She never gives up."

Over the decades her name has been linked with the landmark
lawsuit, Ms. McCain said, she has only been to court two or three
times. Her name may be well known to lawyers and city officials,
but she said she had told only a handful of close friends about
her role. For instance, nobody at the Bethel Community Church
with Ms. McCain on Friday night knew anything about the woman
behind the legal landmark.

"I'm glad that it happened, but I don't really feel like I should
show it off," she said. "I don't like to have the spotlight on me."

© Copyright The New York Times
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source page: http://tinyurl.com/4mcf

Special thanks to Jane Osborn, MSW - a grants consultant in Valdosta, GA
for submitting this article. Jane can be reached at osbo1933@...

© The Homeless News http://egroups.com/group/HomelessNews/