Hazel and her first husband, Vincent Lawrence, moved to this country because they had been told it was a “paradise,” she said. “When I first came here and saw it raining, I turned to my husband and said, ‘I didn’t know it rained here!’”

They lived in Queens. After Vincent died, she married her second husband, Gregory Craig, in 1978. A few years later, the family moved to Central Islip.

The Craigs were the first black family in the neighborhood, and they did not receive a warm welcome. Hazel says she was regularly pulled over by the police for no reason. As a teenager, her son Everton Lawrence had a hose turned on him by a woman he had asked for directions to the nearest store.

The family was riding in their car once when a bottle hit it, thrown from another car. “My husband pulled over, and the kids wanted to fight him, and they were calling him names,” she said. “I called the cops, and one of the cops said to me, ‘Some of us are still not overcome,’ meaning that some people still can’t get used to … “ Her voiced trailed off.