In the Heat of the Summer. Michael W. Flamm

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СКАЧАТЬ by the NAACP and edited by W. E. B. Du Bois and Jessie Faucet; Opportunity, a journal published by the National Urban League and edited by Charles S. Johnson; and the Messenger, a monthly originally sponsored by the Socialist Party and edited by A. Philip Randolph and Chandler Owen.

      But the glamour and sophistication of the Harlem Renaissance could not hide the fact that the community was not monolithic. On the contrary, it was diverse, with deep divisions between the “respectable” churchgoers and the “rebellious” street people, the middle class and the lower class, the native-born and the foreign-born, the light-skinned and the dark-skinned. In the 1920s, most blacks also could not escape the strains of everyday life in Harlem, where it was a constant struggle to make ends meet amid low incomes and high rents (whites continued to own the vast majority of properties and businesses). With crowding and congestion at extreme levels, death by violence and disease was rampant. Mothers in Harlem died in childbirth at twice the rate of mothers in other parts of the city; the infant mortality rate for blacks was almost twice as high as for whites. Rickets, a bone disorder caused by malnutrition, was common.¹⁰

      No wonder that when the Great Depression arrived it “didn’t have the impact on the Negroes that it had on whites,” observed George S. Schuyler, a novelist, journalist, and skeptic of the Harlem Renaissance, because “Negroes had been in the Depression all the time.” He was essentially right, but by the early 1930s a bad situation had grown even worse. Across New York the homicide rate fell—but not in Central Harlem, where it rose significantly. Malnutrition among children was three times the rate of the rest of the city. And disease remained at epidemic levels—the rate of tuberculosis among blacks was four times the rate among whites, although mortality rates on the whole declined due to better health care and free medical clinics.¹¹

      Led by Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia, a liberal Republican with strong ties to the black community, New York offered relatively generous relief assistance. Federal aid also came from the New Deal of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, a liberal Democrat and former governor of New York who actively sought black votes. But although African Americans in Central Harlem enjoyed real benefits that prevented mass hunger and deprivation, in general they received less than their fair share of public welfare, often as a result of racism and discrimination. In response, private institutions like Abyssinian Baptist, headed by the influential minister Adam Clayton Powell, Sr. and his son Adam, the assistant pastor, tried to meet the growing need with soup kitchens, clothing drives, and homeless shelters.

      Under the dynamic leadership of Powell Sr., who was named pastor in 1908, Abyssinian Baptist had a congregation of ten thousand and was the most prominent church in Harlem. Powell Jr. was an only son, the adored and pampered child of mixed-race parents. With straight hair and fair skin, he could pass as white, which he briefly chose to do while a student at Colgate University. After college he returned to Harlem in 1930, earned a master’s degree in religious education from Columbia University, and entered the ministry at his father’s side. Handsome and charismatic, he became a popular civil rights leader during the Great Depression, and in 1938 succeeded his father as pastor. Three years later, he was the first black elected to the city council; in 1944, he joined Congress as the first black representative from New York State.¹²

      The root of the problem, Powell Jr. believed, was a lack of jobs. Last hired and first fired, blacks suffered from an unemployment rate at least several times that of whites. In Central Harlem, whites owned three-quarters of the businesses including Blumstein’s, the largest department store on 125th Street. And only one-quarter of those businesses would hire blacks, even for entry-level positions. Frustrated, a broad and uneasy coalition of moderate, radical, religious, and nationalist organizations launched a “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work” campaign, which persuaded Blumstein’s to agree to hire fifteen black female clerks, all of them light-skinned and attractive.¹³

      But the department store reneged on promises to hire more black employees, other businesses followed suit, and in 1935 the campaign collapsed amid charges of corruption and anti-Semitism (a majority of white store owners in Harlem were Jewish). “I remember meeting no Negro in the years of my growing up, in my family or out of it,” recalled James Baldwin, the celebrated writer and Harlem native, “who would really ever trust a Jew and few who did not, indeed, exhibit for them the blackest contempt.”¹⁴ In the bitter climate of dashed expectations and mutual distrust, the stage was set for an explosion whose causes and aftermath were similar to the 1964 riot.

      On the cool afternoon of March 19, 1935, Lino Rivera walked into the Kress Five and Ten store on West 125th Street across from the Apollo Theater. Unemployed and broke, the sixteen-year-old Puerto Rican had spent the day looking for work in Brooklyn and catching a movie. As he strolled through the store around 3 P.M., he noticed a ten-cent penknife on a counter. “I wanted it and so I took it,” he later admitted. Two employees (both white) saw him and grabbed him, but Rivera bit one of them in the hand, drawing blood. They managed to restrain him and summon a police officer, who took the youth to the basement for questioning.¹⁵

      As a group of onlookers formed, a black woman screamed that they were going to beat or kill Rivera. After she was arrested and charged with disorderly conduct, the arrival of an ambulance—to treat the employee—added to the rumors flying through the crowd. Then the driver of a hearse stopped at the scene and another woman shouted, “There’s the hearse come to take the boy’s body out of the store.” In fact, Rivera was already on his way home—uninjured, he had left Kress through a rear exit after the manager had chosen not to file charges against him. The manager also tried to inform the bystanders, but many had dispersed and so word of the supposed brutality spread like wildfire throughout Central Harlem.¹⁶

      With counters overturned and merchandise scattered in the aisles, the police began to clear the Kress store and ordered it closed at 5:30 P.M. But as people returned from work and heard the rumors, a fresh crowd gathered. Between 6 and 7 P.M. two groups of young communists, black and white, arrived with newly painted placards and printed pamphlets alleging that Rivera was near death and that the police had broken the arms of the woman who was arrested (neither charge was true). The radicals also organized a picket line and made inflammatory speeches at street meetings. Suddenly, bottles or rocks shattered the large plate glass windows and hundreds of looters swarmed into the five-and-dime, grabbing whatever items they could reach. Thousands of others quickly joined the fray, smashing windows and robbing stores along 125th Street from Fifth to Eighth Avenue.¹⁷ The Harlem Riot of 1935 had begun.

      The rioters were not solely the “riffraff” or hoodlums as many blacks and whites later claimed—they were a mix of the poor, the provoked, and the prominent. “One of the most unusual was a Harlem playgirl and relative of one of the most conservative of Harlem’s ministers,” wrote Claude McKay, the gifted author and poet from Jamaica. “Under her coat she was carrying a bag full of bricks and was taxied from place to place hurling them through the plate glass.”¹⁸

      Sixteen years earlier, during the race riots that marked the “Red Summer” of 1919, McKay had composed “If We Must Die,” an anthem for the “New Negro” movement. “Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,” the poem declared, “pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!” Now McKay belittled the 1935 riot as little more than a “party.” Few whites were affected, he observed, and then “not nearly to the extent they might be during the celebration of a Joe Louis victory.”¹⁹ But as always, blacks who lived and worked in Harlem would pay for the party and suffer the hangover.

      After a desperate search, the police located Rivera and brought him back to the Kress store at 2 A.M. to demonstrate that he was unharmed. But they failed to make effective use of radio stations or sound trucks and by then the looting had spread south to 120th Street and north to 138th Street as owners rushed to post signs indicating that the business employed African Americans or was black-owned. In his classic novel Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison described the scene: “The crowd was working in and out of the stores like ants around spilled СКАЧАТЬ