flopped about his shoulders, and now as he came toward us I saw that he wore a pair of gleaming new rubber hip boots. His pockets bulged and over his shoulder he carried a cloth sack that swung heavily behind him.”20
More than five hundred officers raced to Harlem and flooded the area. In the streets, squads of mounted and foot patrolmen waded into the crowds, which had grown to around three thousand, using their night sticks and gun butts on rioters. On the rooftops, police combed tenement buildings in an effort to arrest snipers and halt the fusillade of “Irish confetti” (bricks, bottles, and bats) that rained down on their fellow officers below. Emergency units and prisoner wagons occupied strategic positions throughout Central Harlem while radio cars cruised the blocks and tried to coordinate operations. The next morning order was restored, but not before one male was dead (two more would die later) and more than a hundred (including seven officers) were wounded. Another 125 were arrested (mostly black youths charged with disorderly conduct or inciting to riot), and more than two hundred stores were vandalized if not looted.21
The overwhelming majority of police were white, which aggravated the confrontation. Before the riot began, several black residents politely asked officers in the Kress store about the condition of Rivera. It was, they were gruffly informed, “none of their business.” An older woman made another plea: “Can’t you tell us what happened?” She was warned to move on “if you know what’s good for you.” Once the looting was under way, witnesses asserted that one of the victims, a high school student coming home from a movie with his brother, was shot and mortally wounded by a white policeman who never fired a warning shot or told the black youth to halt when he ran from the officer as part of a crowd outside an auto supply store.22 More black police, testified the ranking African American officer in the NYPD at the first public hearing of the mayor’s commission to investigate the riot, could have made a difference because they were better suited to handle trouble in Harlem.23
In the debate over who caused the explosion, Mayor La Guardia and city officials immediately cast blame on the communists, who in their view had sought to exploit the racial unrest for political gain. “We have evidence,” charged Manhattan District Attorney William Dodge, “that two hours after the boy stole that knife the Reds had placed inflammatory leaflets on the streets.” He announced that he would convene a grand jury “to let the Communists know that they cannot come into this country and upset our laws.”24
Black conservatives were careful to finger white radicals and agitators. “The peace of Harlem was disrupted by people from other places last night,” stated Fred R. Moore, editor of the New York Age (an African American newspaper) and a former alderman. “These people were dissatisfied with the place they came from and they are dissatisfied with American ways. They were determined to incite irresponsible people to revolt against law and order.… We are a peace-loving people who never subscribe to so-called ‘red’ notions.” An elderly waiter called white communists the “prime instigators,” and a window washer concurred.25
Black radicals in turn initially pointed to the white police, whose “brutality and provocation against the Negro people” had triggered the “race riots” according to James Ford, executive secretary of the Harlem section of the Communist Party.26 But most African Americans—including the communists in time—placed primary responsibility on the economic pressures in Central Harlem.
“Continued exploitation of the Negro is at the bottom of all the trouble, exploitation as regards wages, jobs, and working conditions,” contended the younger Powell. A porter stated that the “rioting was due to economics” and a barber agreed. “The Communists are only responsible for setting off the fuse; the situation already existed,” he told a reporter for the Amsterdam News. In “Declaration of 1776,” educator Nannie Burroughs outlined a broad and deep history of oppression and discrimination. “The causes of the Harlem Riot are not far to seek,” she asserted. “Day after day, year after year, decade after decade, black people have been robbed of their inalienable rights…. That ‘long train of abuses’ is a magazine of powder. An unknown boy was simply the match.”27
After the initial hysteria had subsided, La Guardia had second thoughts about the communist plot, alleged or otherwise, and convened a commission with E. Franklin Frazier as researcher to explore the underlying causes of the Harlem Riot of 1935. Chaired by Dr. Charles H. Roberts, a black dentist and city alderman, the commission held twenty-five hearings and interviewed 160 witnesses; ultimately, it concluded—as would the FBI report after the 1964 riot—that the “outburst was spontaneous and unpremeditated” with “no evidence of any program or leadership of the rioters.” At first looters targeted white stores, but soon “property itself became the object of their fury.”28
The report was highly critical of the NYPD in general and how it reacted on March 19 in particular. “The police practice aggressions and brutalities upon the Harlem citizens not only because they are Negroes but because they are poor and therefore defenseless,” the commission stated. “But these attacks upon the security of the homes and the persons of the citizens are doing more than anything else to create a disrespect for authority and to bring about mass resistance to the injustices suffered by the community.”29
The bulk of the 135-page report, however, focused on the social and economic ills of Harlem. Like the War on Poverty and Great Society programs of the 1960s, it touched on the pressing need for vastly improved public health, education, and housing. The report focused on widespread discrimination in employment and relief, public and private, at both the city and federal levels. And it offered a sweeping set of recommendations—so sweeping, in fact, that when finished a year later, La Guardia opted not to release the report, perhaps because it highlighted problems he could not solve and raised expectations he could not meet. Or perhaps the findings simply were, in the words of the Amsterdam News, which published the full document in July 1936, “too hot, too caustic, too critical, too unfavorable” to his administration.30
The report nevertheless inspired La Guardia to take a more direct interest in the community. “He was not prepared to place Harlem at the center of his agenda,” wrote his biographer, “but he did place it far higher on his list of priorities.” That summer, on his way to a concert, he heard the police broadcast news about a murder in the area and raced uptown to assume personal control and defuse the tense situation. And over the next four years he acted upon many, though by no means all, of the commission’s recommendations. He appointed the city’s first black magistrate, named African Americans to many other municipal posts, integrated the staffs of the city hospitals, built two new public schools, constructed the Harlem River Houses, and added a Women’s Pavilion to Harlem Hospital. For La Guardia, who would serve as mayor from 1934 to 1945, it was a start, albeit overdue and incomplete.31
Two years after the Harlem Riot of 1935, Bayard Rustin moved to New York, where he first lived with his aunt and then found an apartment of his own on St. Nicholas Avenue. The exact reason for his departure from Pennsylvania remains murky. It is possible that he had little choice: Rustin by then had accepted that he was gay and had begun to act upon his sexual desires. The West Chester police may even have caught him having sex in a public park with a prominent young white man and made it clear to him that he had no future in the small town. But it is also likely that he was attracted by the political and cultural opportunities presented by Harlem—not to mention the personal anonymity and social freedom it offered.32
Once Rustin arrived in the fall of 1937, he quickly embraced New York, where he would spend the rest of his life. With his polished tenor voice, he became a member of the Carolinians, a singing group that performed regularly at the Café Society Downtown, a popular club in Greenwich Village. He also joined the Young Communist League (YCL), which was dedicated to the struggle for racial equality and the defense of the Scottsboro Boys, nine black Alabama teenagers falsely accused of rape. In 1941, after Nazi Germany invaded Soviet Russia and Moscow insisted that the struggle against racism take a back
