of profound racial difference.”37 This was largely because “[t]he barriers that kept blacks confined to racially isolated deteriorating inner city neighborhoods were largely invisible to whites” (emphasis mine).38
Blacks and Puerto Ricans arrived just as the city shed working-class jobs. Between 1947 and 1976 five hundred thousand factory jobs were lost as industries left the city.39 However, deindustrialization is only half the story. Comparing the experiences of poor semiskilled white southerners to those of poor semiskilled southern blacks, Katz observes, reveals the extent and impact of racial discrimination: white southerners also “encountered hostility and some discrimination, but never on a scale that matched the racial discrimination and violence that confronted African Americans. White southerners melded into the urban fabric, living where they wanted, sometimes being given jobs over African Americans with more work experience.”40
“Racism closed the most promising doors,” notes Katz. “Exploitative work, bad pay, racism, and foreclosed opportunities amounted to a formula for poverty.”41 These factors also increased the susceptibility of African Americans and Puerto Ricans to the heroin trade. Heroin dealing offered one of the few employment opportunities available to black and Puerto Rican youths. Concentrated poverty, hopelessness, despair, and sheer boredom made it hard to resist the lure of the drug. By the late 1940s, 15 percent of the census tracks in New York City, home to 30 percent of the city’s youths, housed over 80 percent of its heroin users.42 Adolescents living near drug-selling locations were two to three times as likely to use drugs.43 The growth of the heroin trade and the new federal and state laws with their heavy penalties for drug use gave police one more justification for combing ghetto streets and assaulting black and Puerto Rican residents. Violent clashes between white police officers and young black and Puerto Rican men “accounted for a large percentage of interracial homicides.”44
In 1961 the Pittsburgh Courier called New York City a Jim Crow town “when police arrested and beat Guinea’s Deputy Ambassador to the United Nations after a routine traffic stop.”45 That same year police officers brutalized a prominent designing engineer who had recently been featured in a magazine article on the Emancipation Proclamation. He was attacked first in the street and then again in the station by the same officers when he attempted to file a complaint. The Amsterdam News covered the story in chilling detail: “We’ll give you something to complain about,” the identical four officers promised in the police station, “before taking him to the basement, beating him and charging him with resisting arrest.”46
In addition to police violence, the new migrants were forced to deal with white youth gangs. As the black and Puerto Rican population grew, so did white resistance. “To preserve existing boundaries,” Katz notes, “whites often turned to violence—a response documented with painful detail by many historians…. Civil violence erupted at the height of urban boundary challenges.”47 Eusebio Soto remembered Italian gangs attacking Puerto Rican youths in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and the violent spiral that led to the growth of Puerto Rican gangs (1996):
When I was 10 or 11 years old you see these gangs, man, drunk, coming down the street and hitting everyone…. all of a sudden [Puerto Rican] gangs come up … not gangs to hurt people, to protect the area, because you have gangs from up there Bushwick coming down, hitting everyone they saw….
We knew nothing about gangs. They resented the idea that we were moving in. So, they sought control over whatever we did and they went into our neighborhood and we didn’t even speak English. For us to see these guys come through and start beating on us for no reason at all, I say why do these people hate me, what for? And, I had to learn how to fight because I was Puerto Rican. It’s not because of anything else. I had to learn how to fight to defend the idea that I was Puerto Rican. And we fought. It was war. We all had to fight to get our respect and we got respected. We got it. People would say, “Those crazy Puerto Ricans, they’ll cut you. We would, ya know, ya had to do that—it wasn’t that we came here looking for trouble. We didn’t come from Puerto Rico in gangs. This was something that was introduced to us here. We didn’t know nothing about gangs—it was purely defensive action.
Some whites embraced law-and-order candidates who promised more policing of black and Puerto Rican ghettos. Others took advantage of low-interest federally insured GI loans (which allowed them to buy suburban homes) and the massive expanse of highways (which simultaneously destroyed their neighborhoods in the Bronx and Brooklyn and made commuting possible) to flee the city. Blacks and Puerto Ricans were locked out of these mortgages and suburban communities. New York landlords “cut down on maintenance, rented to welfare and problem families, induced tenant turnover, failed to pay taxes and then either walked away or sold the building to the city for another round of slum clearance.”48 The Bronx had been a desirable location for working-class Jews, Irish, and Italians in the 1940s. By the time blacks and Puerto Ricans arrived, bulldozers had already razed the tight-knit neighborhoods to make way for highways and public housing towers. The destruction of the elevated train removed the last low-cost transit to downtown jobs.49
Policing the Heroin Trade
In the 1950s Italian and Jewish mobsters controlled the heroin trade. Blacks and Puerto Ricans found employment at the lowest rungs, the most poorly paying and riskiest end of the business. By the mid-1960s two organizations controlled heroin wholesales in the city: the Lucchese crime family and the NYPD.50 In one decade the special investigative unit of the NYPD put 180 million kilos or $32 million worth of heroin on the streets.51 The Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN) was no better. The bureau already had an illustrious history, as the son-in-law of the FBN bureau chief helped heroin importer Arnold Rothstein evade income tax in the 1920s. Now in the 1960s FBN agents sold the names of informants to the major crime families, with the result that fifty to sixty informants a month were murdered.52 According to an internal affairs report filed in 1968, one-fifth of FBN officers were involved in the trade. According to Eric Schneider, “The conclusion is inescapable, that the flow of heroin into users’ veins would have been impossible without the assistance of the city’s police forces and the New York offices of the FBN.”53
The sheer duplicity of the NYPD in arresting and harassing poor users and street sellers while profiting from the wholesale distribution of heroin in their neighborhoods increased the frustration, helplessness, and anger of ghetto youths. Corruption and venality went hand in hand, as young people were shot in the back by drunken on-duty officers or pummeled in patrol cars and precinct houses. According to Schneider, “ ‘You get a cop [who] wants to know something’ said one youth explaining the use of the third degree ‘maybe some information from a guy and they smack you around so you can find out.’ Other times police picked a youth up and drove him around the neighborhood beating him in the back of the car without ever taking him to the precinct. Order and safety depended on self-reliance, on one’s reputation for toughness, and on connections to others who might exact revenge on one’s behalf, and not on the system of police and courts.”54
One Puerto Rican former gang leader in the Bronx told me (March 1996) how police brutality had shaped his racial identity and feeling about the law: “Most families were into thinking the right way was the white way. My family had me comb my hair with coconut milk to straighten it. They listed me as white on my birth certificate. Then, I saw my father, who was always king in my house, tremble in front of a white policeman. It robbed him of his dignity. I lost respect for my father. I compensated for him by becoming more bold and more bad.”
Escalating Police Violence in Black and Puerto Rican Ghettos
By 1963 residents of black northern ghettos were on edge. “Complaints about the police reached crisis proportions,” notes Sugrue; “[m]uch to the surprise of members of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, which conducted hearings in northern cities between 1959 and 1961, black complaints
