In the Heat of the Summer. Michael W. Flamm

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СКАЧАТЬ because his experience as a Communist had given him—a man who never earned a college degree—a crash course in planning and organizing. “It taught me a great deal,” he readily admitted later, “and I presume that if I had to do it over again, I’d do the same thing.”³³

      Even when Rustin was an active Communist, he continued to sing in church choirs and attend Quaker meetings. So it was not surprising that in 1941, with war on the horizon, he joined the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), a Christian pacifist organization led by the socialist A. J. Muste. Like Rustin, Muste was a former Communist, and for a time he served as a sort of father figure to his gifted protégé. He also enabled Rustin to join the crusade of the man who would become his great mentor and patron: A. Philip Randolph, the head of the most important black union in the country, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, and the inspiration behind the 1941 March on Washington protest and movement.

      As the United States mobilized for war under President Roosevelt, who had won an unprecedented third term in 1940, an economic boom began and the Great Depression at last came to end. Hopes rose in New York, where the black population had grown by another 150,000 since 1930. But prices and rents in Harlem remained high, while discrimination and segregation in training programs and war plants remained common—90 percent refused to hire African Americans, who represented less than half a percent of the workforce.³⁴ In 1941, Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802, which had the strong support of La Guardia and banned racial discrimination in defense industries. The action came in response to Randolph’s threat of a mass demonstration in Washington, and it led to the creation of the Fair Employment Practices Commission, which had some effect. Eventually, African Americans received real benefits from war mobilization as jobs arrived and paychecks grew. But as with the New Deal, blacks again failed to receive their fair share of government programs and contracts.

      Frustration and resentment mounted. In 1941, at the age of thirty-three, Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. was elected to the city council and became a harsh critic of La Guardia, who had failed to implement many of the recommendations in the 1935 report. “The Mayor is one of the most pathetic figures on the current American scene,” Powell wrote in 1942. “Now that his political future is finished, we are no longer potential votes for him. We are therefore ignored.”³⁵

      A year later, a race riot erupted in Detroit, where tensions between southern whites and blacks who had migrated north in search of jobs had reached a crisis level. On June 20, a hot Saturday evening, crowds clashed in Belle Isle as rumors swept the city that blacks had raped and murdered a white woman while whites had murdered a black woman and her child, then dumped the bodies in the Detroit River. Over the next three days, thirty-four people were killed, twenty-five of whom were black (seventeen were shot by white officers). Hundreds were injured. Only the arrival of the U.S. Army, ordered to Detroit by President Roosevelt, restored a fragile and bitter peace. The nation watched in shock and horror.

      In New York, the fear was that Harlem was next. On June 24, Powell demanded that La Guardia meet with him and said at a city council meeting that if a riot erupted in New York “the blood of innocent people … would rest upon the hands” of the mayor and police commissioner.³⁶ La Guardia refused, perhaps understandably, to meet with Powell, but conferred with other black leaders. In July he made plans in case of violence to close bars, divert traffic, place guards at stores that sold weapons, and protect passengers using public transit. The mayor also had the police commissioner emphasize that officers should demonstrate restraint by using tear gas and deadly force only as a last resort against physical harm.³⁷

      At the same time, La Guardia prodded the NYPD to promise to hire more blacks—of the roughly 19,000 officers on the force, only 140 were African American, with 130 stationed in Central Harlem or Bedford-Stuyvesant. Another twenty cadets (the largest group to date) were in the Police Academy. Among them was Robert Mangum, who in 1943 helped found the Guardians, an association of black officers, because the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association (PBA) refused to accept them. At first the Guardians had to meet secretly at the Harlem YMCA because of opposition from supervisors. Not until 1949—with the support of Powell, who in 1944 had joined the U.S. House of Representatives—would the Guardians receive a charter of recognition from the city.³⁸ It would take far longer for them to gain respect from their fellow white officers.

      La Guardia’s efforts in the summer of 1943 were in vain, although they may have limited the bloodshed to come. On August 1, a hot Sunday evening, everyone in Harlem was outdoors, trying to beat the heat in the absence of air conditioning. At 7 P.M. Marjorie Polite registered at the Hotel Braddock on West 126th Street, which was under surveillance for prostitution. Unhappy with her room, she demanded a refund and then got into an argument with the elevator operator, who refused to return a dollar tip that she had allegedly given him. Patrolman James Collins, who was on duty inside the hotel, first tried to calm Polite and then ordered her to leave. When she refused and began to curse at him, he arrested her for disorderly conduct.³⁹

      In the hotel lobby was a Connecticut woman, Florine Roberts, who was meeting her son Robert Bandy, an Army private on leave from the 703rd Military Police Battalion in Jersey City. Together, they demanded that Collins release Polite. He refused. What happened next was a matter of dispute. According to Collins, he was attacked for no reason by Roberts and Bandy, who seized his nightstick and began to strike the officer in the head, forcing Collins to use his revolver when the soldier fled and refused to halt. According to Bandy, he objected and intervened only when Collins shoved Polite; the officer then threw his nightstick at Bandy, who caught it and was shot in the shoulder when he was slow to return it.⁴⁰

      Fortunately, the injuries of both men were not serious. Unfortunately, word quickly spread that a white officer had killed a black soldier attempting to protect his mother. The police tried to correct the false rumors, but by 8 P.M. a crowd estimated at three thousand was gathered outside the 28th Precinct, threatening to take revenge against the officer responsible for the alleged atrocity. At 9 P.M. La Guardia rushed to the station house, which was already surrounded by army infantry and military police, and conferred with the police and fire commissioners. With almost manic energy, La Guardia began to give orders and speak to the crowd, urging people to go home. He also took a tour of the riot area, accompanied by local black leaders. Meanwhile, efforts were made to recruit volunteers from the community and bring in reinforcements by keeping all patrolmen on duty when their shifts ended at midnight. Soon Central Harlem was flooded with five thousand police officers and contingency plans went into effect.⁴¹

      But it was to no avail. At 10:30 P.M. the sound of breaking glass rang through the streets. Claude Brown, author of the memoir Manchild in the Promised Land, was six at the time and thought Harlem was under attack from German or Japanese bombers. He asked his father, a sharecropper from South Carolina, where the sirens were. “This ain’t no air raid—just a whole lotta niggers gone fool,” he replied. But the noise kept Brown scared and awake in his bed for hours.⁴²

      Soon looters were rampaging the streets from 110th to 145th, Lenox to Eighth Avenue, filling the air with screams and laughter, although there was a deep undercurrent of anger. “Do not attempt to fuck with me,” a young man told the Amsterdam News. Author Ralph Ellison again found himself in the middle of a riot when he exited the 137th Street subway station after dinner with friends. In the New York Post, he wrote that he sensed shame in some looters like “the woman with her arms loaded who passed me muttering ‘Forgive me, Jesus. Have mercy, Lord.’” Still others seemed filled with self-disgust when “faced with an embarrassment of riches and took only useless objects.”⁴³

      By Monday morning Harlem was calm even if 125th Street, the epicenter of the riot, was littered with shattered windows and scattered debris from ransacked businesses. “It would have been better to have left the plate glass as it had been and the goods lying in the stores,” commented novelist James Baldwin, who was in New York to attend the funeral of his estranged father and celebrate his nineteenth birthday. “It would have been better, but it also would СКАЧАТЬ