Push for Malverne street name change inches forward

More than 130 Malverne residents submitted potential new names for Lindner Place, the village street that community members are organizing to rename due to its connection to Paul Lindner, a major figure in the early history of Malverne and a 1920s-era leader of the Ku Klux Klan in Nassau County.

Voting on the top three to five potential new names took place between Feb. 9-16, and was open to all Malverne and Lakeview residents. The Lindner Place Renaming Committee, a group comprising 33 individuals and organizations, which was counting the votes, had also compiled the history of the street and its namesake, and garnered the support of its 11 residents.

The group plans to draft a proposal for a name change and introduce it to the village board at its next meeting in March.

“For the past two years, I’ve been reviewing news articles and photographs from that time period,” Jamie Bellamy, a member of the renaming committee, said at a village board meeting on Feb. 2, “which not only confirm Lindner’s leadership role in the KKK, but also his violent and hateful participation in the group.”

At the meeting, Mayor Keith Corbett pledged to work with residents and village trustees to come up with a new name for the street. “We’re looking forward to working together to see this through,” Corbett said.

Bellamy’s research, she said, revealed that Lindner took part in “cross burnings and hateful speech designed to intimidate those who the KKK and Lindner deemed as ‘less than’ and unworthy of being an American.”

Nearly two years after lifelong Malverne resident T.J. Magno created an online petition in July 2020 calling for Lindner Place’s renaming, it has garnered more than 5,650 signatures.

The debate over the name was reignited after the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis that May 2020 and the subsequent protests around the country, including in Malverne and Lakeview. The protests brought renewed focus on statues and streets honoring those known to have held racist views.

When the Malverne School District became the first New York school district ordered to desegregate in 1966, it had three elementary schools, Woodfield Road, Davison Avenue and Lindner Place.

The Lindner Place school was later renamed the Maurice W. Downing Primary School when Lindner’s connections to the KKK were unearthed in the late 20th century.

A book written by Richard Winsche, an author who detailed the history of Nassau County in numerous works, claims that Lindner, who bore the title of Exalted Cyclops of the Nassau County chapter of the KKK, spoke at a gathering of 10,000 Klan members in Freeport on Sept. 22, 1924.

Winsche also writes that Lindner held the title of Great Titan of the New York State Klan. A New York Times article published in September 1924 identified him as the leader of a Klan procession at a funeral.

Demonstrations and activities he led attracted thousands of Long Islanders when the organization worked to spread fear among the populations it targeted, much like its southern counterparts.

Born to German immigrants in 1877, Lindner also played a large role in the village’s development. He ran a successful farm, and owned the land where Grace Lutheran Church is today as well as other acreage. He sold most of the land that was purchased by the Amsterdam Development Co. to create what would become the Village of Malverne.

He also served as president of the Malverne Bank from 1926 to 1931, becoming a respected figure in the community despite his open affiliation with the KKK. “People wanted him to run for what was the equivalent of mayor at the time,” Village Historian David Weinstein said in a previous Herald story. “He donated a lot to the village.”

While many community members support renaming Lindner Place, others have expressed concerns about taking this step. The June 2020 petition acknowledges that some residents fear “renaming would erase the contributions Lindner made to the community.”

Lori Lang, a member of the renaming committee who ran for mayor in 2019, said that the street-renaming effort is a stand-alone issue and not part of “cancel culture” or a larger effort to erase the history of Malverne.

Lang, a lifelong resident, stressed that she never witnessed racism in the village, and said that the renaming is an effort to show that residents do not tolerate hate. She previously told the Herald that a strong case for renaming the street includes what is nearby.

“This street name is even more egregious because an elementary school sits on it — a school that educates kindergarten through second-graders each and every day,” Lang said of the Downing School.

And of the March village board meeting, speaking on behalf of the renaming committee, she added, “We are currently asking all residents who support the effort to attend, and if they are unable to, to send the mayor an email in support of the effort.”

For further information, visit the “I Love Malverne…” Facebook group.