only 11 percent of eligible black males had fought in World War I, fully 70 percent of them, or 1.15 million, fought in World War II, the same percentage as that of whites (the number of Puerto Ricans who fought was not recorded). Sam, a black activist and former Communist and Black Panther, told me that his father had been proud to serve: “[H]e went to war and the army gave him education, travel—he saw the world—and some rank. Like many black men he continued to espouse [that] equality on the battlefield would lead to equal citizenship.” However, the army remained segregated.20 Katznelson notes,
In the midst of a war defined in a large measure as an epochal battle between liberal democracy and Nazi and Fascist totalitarianism, one that distinguished between people on the basis of blood and race, the U.S. military was not only engaged in sorting Americans by race but in policing the boundary separating white from black …. [T]he draft selected individuals to fill quotas to meet the test of a racially proportionate military and … they were assigned to units on the basis of a simple dual racial system…. The issue of classification proved particularly vexing in Puerto Rico where the population was so varied racially and where the country’s National Guard units had been integrated [emphasis mine].21
The black population of New York increased from 458,000 in 1940 to 547,000 in 1945 alone. As the nonwhite population grew, the city’s major newspaper chains, including the Times, the Daily News, the World Telegram, and all the Hearst papers, capitalized on white racial fears, publishing a series of sensational front-page stories accusing blacks and Puerto Ricans of “stabbing, raping, and mugging whites in Harlem and other black neighborhoods.”22 The term “mugging,” as Marilyn Johnson notes, “originated in New York, nearly always with reference to black-on-white crime. The press campaign peaked in the spring of 1943 when a so-called mugging outbreak prompted police to pull a thousand officers from clerical duty and assign them to plainclothes details in Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant.”23 Increased racially inflammatory media and renewed calls for law enforcement led to a massive increase in both vigilante and police violence targeted at both blacks and Puerto Ricans. The Harlem Charter denounced the crime smears to no avail. Adam Clayton Powell Sr. decried the increase in police violence, which he claimed epitomized the brutality of racial discrimination and led to anger “at every white policeman throughout the United States who had constantly beaten, wounded and often killed colored men and women without provocation.”24 Other local black leaders compared white police to Hitler’s Gestapo.
The Second 1943 Ghetto Riot
On August 1, 1943, a New York City policeman hit an African American woman while arresting her for disturbing the peace at the Braddock hotel (one of several black hotels targeted by the NYPD in its antivice campaign). Robert Bandy, a black active-duty soldier in the U.S. Army, jumped to her defense, trying to shield her from the officer’s blows, and the officer turned on the soldier and shot him. As the soldier was carried on a stretcher to an ambulance, an onlooker shouted out that the police officer had shot a black soldier, and Harlem residents took action. They threw “bricks and bottles, overturning cars, fighting with police, smashing windows and looting stores.”25 The riot lasted twenty-four hours and resulted in 6 deaths, 185 injuries, and over $250,000 in property damage. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) called the riot the result of “the fury shown of repeated unchecked, unpunished and often unreported shooting, maiming, and insulting [of] Negro troops.”26
Mayor LaGuardia immediately sent black military police (MPs) into Harlem and deputized more than 1,000 black MPs to help patrol the streets, which significantly reduced casualties, particularly in comparison to those resulting from the riots that broke out in Detroit the same year.27 As a direct result of the riots, blacks’ representation in the police force of New York City was increased. In 1943 the NYPD had only 155 black police officers in a force of 600,000. This was only 22 more than it had in 1938. Moreover the number of black detectives had fallen from 10 to 5 during the same period. Now with the 1943 riots as an impetus, the city increased the number of black police from 155 to 600, but this was still a tiny fragment of the total in a city that grew increasingly black and Latino. It should also be noted that black policemen were not given any positions of power or decision-making. “For the most part, the NYPD viewed black police as ‘riot insurance’—a political concession to angry black communities which would hopefully help prevent and/or control future outbreaks of racial violence, just as the black deputies had done during the 1943 riot.”28
Little was done to address the more serious issue of police violence. Marilyn Johnson notes, “The false rumors of Bandy’s death also echoed those surrounding the Lino Rivera incident that sparked the 1935 Harlem Riots. In both versions an innocent black youth [in the first a black Puerto Rican youth] was killed by a repressive white policy system designed to protect whites or white business interests in Harlem. The symbolic significance of the victims, then, was key to the unleashing of violence.”29 Both the 1935 and 1943 riots predated other ghetto riots and prefigured the revolts that would erupt throughout the country in the late 1960s.30
Blacks and Puerto Rican Ghettos in Postwar New York
Between 1950 and 1970, 1.5 million blacks, or 1 in 7, left the South. As a result the black population of every northern city ballooned. It rose from 17 percent to 54 percent in Newark, from 14 percent to 34 percent in Chicago, and from 16 percent to 44 percent in Detroit. Migrants who had once moved from South Carolina to North Carolina or from North Carolina to Virginia now went to New York,31 while those from Texas and Louisiana traveled to Chicago or Los Angeles. Puerto Ricans fled desperate poverty and political repression on the island and also began to arrive in New York City in massive numbers. Forty thousand arrived in 1946; 58,000 arrived in 1952; and 75,000 arrived in 1953. As one Puerto Rican activist described his family’s experience in New York (1966): “[W]e arrived into a very different environment from the one we had left; we arrived onto streets without nature, into cold apartments and factories when we had been accustomed to tropical heat. Many died of TB and other illnesses caused by the cold.”
The design of most of the programs providing benefits to World War II veterans deliberately limited access for blacks and Puerto Ricans. The occupations in which African Americans and Puerto Ricans worked were excluded from labor regulations and minimum wage laws, and this combined with deliberately “racist patterns of administration [meant that] New Deal policies for Social Security, social welfare, and labor market programs restricted black prospects while providing positive economic reinforcements for the great majority of white citizens.”32 The GI Bill gave veterans access to federally guaranteed low-interest housing and student loans as well as job training and assistance in securing jobs in their fields, but few blacks could take advantage of these programs. The overwhelming majority of white colleges and universities excluded blacks from admissions, and black colleges and universities were few and starved for resources. Local job counselors without exception were white and often denied blacks access to skilled employment and training. Even in the North the United States Employment Service (USES), charged with administering the program, channeled black veterans into traditional black jobs, reinforcing “the existing division of labor by race.”33 Katznelson notes, “Because unemployment insurance was made available only to those who could demonstrate a willingness to take a suitable job, and because suitability was defined by USES, many blacks were compelled to take work far below their skill level. Carpenters became janitors; truck drivers became dishwashers; communications repair experts, porters.”34 Sixty-five percent of African Americans nationally were ineligible for Social Security.35
The Veterans Administration’s loan guarantees of the Serviceman’s Readjustment Act of 1944 and the 1949 Housing Act36 constructed formidable obstacles to integration: underwriting mortgages in white suburban areas, bankrolling white suburbanization through discriminatory housing subsidies, equating racial segregation with neighborhood stability, and requiring developers to sign covenants against black home buyers as a precondition for financing.
