neighborhood’s vibrant artistic and intellectual life. Harlem even elected a black state assemblyman in 1917. Even in Harlem life for blacks was hard, as Langston Hughes observed: “[S]ome Harlemites thought the millennium had come. They thought the race problem had at last been solved…. I don’t know what made any Negroes think that—except that they were mostly intellectuals doing the thinking. The ordinary Negroes hadn’t heard of the Negro Renaissance. And if they had, it hadn’t raised their wages any.”2
Many World War I veterans expected some recognition or compensation for their war-time service. W. E. B. Du Bois had encouraged blacks to enlist, pointing out that black military service in the American Revolution, the War of 1812, the Civil War, and the Spanish-American War had been followed by emancipation, enfranchisement, and increased accumulation of wealth.3 But those who expected similar improvements after World War I were bitterly disappointed. The period following the war was characterized by “hysterical racism, the acceleration of lynchings, the revival of the clan, and more than twenty major riotous assaults by whites in Northern and border cities who rampaged in black neighborhoods, stoned blacks on beaches and attacked them on main thoroughfares and public transportation.”4 By the mid-1920s Ku Klux Klan membership was said to have reached five million, with more members outside the South than within.
Black and Puerto Rican migrants were ill prepared to weather the ravages of the Great Depression. They were four times as likely to be unemployed or on relief than whites and lived in unheated cold-water flats, often without food, and were vulnerable to vermin and disease. Some were unable to support their families and committed suicide. Others were forced into soup lines and slave markets, where they sold their services to the highest bidder. Some ten to twenty eviction cases a day were reported to the Urban League, and blacks were five times more likely to be left homeless than whites.5
The fledgling New York branch of the American Communist Party stepped up organizing efforts in Harlem and East Harlem during this period. They led protests against unemployment and in support of racial justice. They recruited heavily among black, Puerto Rican, and Jewish migrants. As Communists stepped up their cross-race appeals, the NYPD stepped up its attacks on blacks and Puerto Ricans spotted in white neighborhoods, forcibly separating interracial couples (claiming that prostitution was involved) and breaking into interracial meetings.6 Police violence unintentionally “reinforced black support for party-led organizing efforts” and, communist organizers discovered, could effectively be linked “to the larger racial and class struggle.”7 They increasingly attacked “the NYPD for its violent attempts to sunder the growing unity of black and white workers.”8 The harder Communists worked to build class coalitions across racial lines, the more violently the NYPD enforced those boundaries.
The First Ghetto Riot in New York City
On March 19, 1935, a white police officer arrested a black Puerto Rican boy, Lino Rivera, after the store manager caught him shoplifting a penknife in the Kress store on 125th Street. The police officer took the boy to the basement exit and then released him. A black female customer, seeing the police bring the boy to the basement, began shouting that the police had taken the boy to the basement to beat him, a not-uncommon scenario. Other customers, hearing her scream, began to overturn counters and toss merchandise to the floor. As rumors of a beating circulated, a full-scale street battle ensued. The violence spread throughout Harlem, ending with one dead, sixty-four injured, and seventy-five under arrest.9
Although the police blamed the Communist Party for inciting the riot, during the hearings succeeding witnesses told stories of terrible police abuse, including charges of police intimidation of witnesses. They pointed to four brutal cases of police repression in particular, including that of Thomas Aiken, an unemployed man who had been “blinded by blows from a police officer while standing … in a Harlem Bread line.”10 In response, Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia formed an eleven-member biracial commission to study conditions in Harlem. In its scathing final report the Mayor’s Commission on Conditions in Harlem concluded that “the insecurity of the individual in Harlem against police aggression is one of the most potent causes for the existing hostility to authority…. Police aggressions and brutalities more than any other factor weld the people together for mass action.”11
The commission recommended the creation of a biracial committee of Harlem citizens to hear civilian complaints and act as a liaison with the NYPD, but the police commissioner forced the suppression of the report.12 He called the hearings “biased and dominated by Communist agitators” and stated that the police “were needed to fight the high crime rate.”13 The police had a good relationship with the black community, he insisted, and “any resentment which does exist is borne by the lawless elements because of the police activity directed against them.”14 Police violence in black and Puerto Rican neighborhoods continued unabated, helping the Communists expand their base in “networks spawned by the riot.”15 This would not be the last time that post-riot networks were the basis for future organizing efforts.
“Residential segregation,” Thomas Sugrue notes, was “the linchpin of racial division and separation.”16 In the 1920s nearly every residential development included covenants specifically precluding owners from renting to non-Caucasians. In the 1930s a series of federal housing reforms designed to forestall the wave of foreclosures during the Great Depression increased racial segregation in the city by reinforcing informal real estate practices and court-authorized covenants. The first of these acts created the Home Owners Loan Corporation in 1933 to provide loans to homeowners at risk of foreclosure. The second created the Federal Housing Authority (FHA) in 1934. These two institutions stalled the rate of foreclosures, but defining all but homogeneous white neighborhoods as high-risk investments increased racial and spatial segregation in the city. A single black family was enough to tip the status of a neighborhood from good (marked as A or B and colored green or blue) to “actuarially unsound”17 (such neighborhoods were marked as C and D and were ineligible for FHA-backed loans). An Association of Real Estate Developers (REALTOR) brochure justified this policy: “The prospective buyer might be a bootlegger who would cause considerable annoyance to his neighbors, a madam who had a number of call girls on the string, a gangster who wants a screen for his activities by living in a better neighborhood or a colored man of means who was giving his children a college education and thought they were entitled to live among whites.”18
The 1937 Wagner-Seagull Housing Act and the 1945 Veterans Administration Act would exacerbate these effects by underwriting mortgages only in stable (homogeneous) white neighborhoods. Other federal legislation aggravated the problem by giving local governments the authority to determine where public housing projects were to be located and who could live in each building. Public housing projects reserved for blacks and Puerto Ricans were almost always located in the least desirable locations. Slum-clearance programs intensified racial segregation, tearing down tenements and forcing blacks and Puerto Ricans into public projects in areas of concentrated poverty and unemployment and excluding racial minorities from access to housing in white districts. These acts will be discussed later, but from the beginning segregation encouraged rent gouging, reduced the availability of low-income housing, and created ghetto areas of concentrated poverty. In addition it encouraged racial profiling and police violence by allowing police to treat the residents of some neighborhoods differently from those of another and to situate blacks and Puerto Ricans spatially apart from whites.
As African Americans fled Manhattan in search of better or cheaper housing in Brooklyn, white residents there, as Thomas Kessner observes, “lobbied Mayor LaGuardia for greater police protection and even threatened to lead a vigilante movement against the criminals in the neighborhood in 1936. White demands for increased law enforcement encouraged a more aggressive style of policing that led to numerous complaints by black citizens.”19
World War II and the Erection of Ghetto Walls in New York
World War II
