In the Heat of the Summer. Michael W. Flamm

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СКАЧАТЬ of the time it is the members of the ghetto who smash each other, and themselves. But as long as the ghetto walls are standing there will always come a moment when these outlets do not work.” For his part, Ellison saw the riot as “the poorer element’s way of blowing off steam.”⁴⁴

      At 9:50 A.M. La Guardia, exhausted, went on the air for the third time. “Shame has come to our city and sorrow to the large number of our fellow citizens, decent, law-abiding citizens, who live in the Harlem section,” he said. “The situation is under control. I want to make it clear that this was not a race riot, for the thoughtless hoodlums had no one to fight with and gave vent to their activity by breaking windows [and] looting many of these stores belonging to the people who live in Harlem.” He also had praise for the police, who were “most efficient and exercised a great deal of restraint.” And he informed the people of Harlem that he expected “full and complete cooperation” while pledging that he would maintain law and order in the city.⁴⁵

      To ensure he would keep his promise, La Guardia had fifteen hundred volunteers, most of whom were African Americans, and six thousand police (civilian and military) patrol the riot zone. In reserve and on standby at several armories were eight thousand New York state guardsmen, including a black regiment. They were not needed, for the rioters were also exhausted. Over the next week life slowly returned to normal as the mayor lifted the liquor and traffic bans and city workers began a cleanup campaign. But the toll was costly. At least six persons, all black, were dead. Almost seven hundred were injured and nearly six hundred were arrested (most of whom were young adult males from a broad range of backgrounds), with property damage as high as $5 million.⁴⁶

      In the aftermath, the Amsterdam News echoed La Guardia when it declared that “we take our stand on the side of law and order, firmly asserting that those persons who violate the law ought to be arrested and punished.” Yet many officers routinely employed excessive force and expressed contemptuous attitudes. “Policemen can be efficient without being brutal!” it editorialized. Officers who were “efficient and understanding” would find the community supportive and sympathetic. But “Harlem will not be bullied, brow-beaten, or bull-dozed,” warned the newspaper.⁴⁷

      Langston Hughes also offered an ode to the woman whose arrest had led to the riot. In “The Ballad of Margie Polite,” he celebrated her refusal to accept her fate as a victim or go gently into the night. “If Margie Polite had of been white, she might not’ve cussed out the cop that night,” wrote Hughes. “In the lobby of the Braddock Hotel, she might not’ve felt the urge to raise hell.” But she was black and she had resisted arrest. In the process, she had become more than a footnote to history. “Margie warn’t nobody important before,” the poem continued. “But she ain’t just nobody now no more.”⁴⁸

      From a comparative perspective, the Harlem riots of 1935 and 1943 had similar roots and outcomes. In the words of Robert M. Fogelson, a noted urban historian, both were “spontaneous, unorganized, and precipitated by police actions.” Both featured looting aimed at property rather than people (unlike in Detroit). And both were, according to Fogelson, “so completely confined to the ghetto that life was normal for whites and blacks elsewhere in the city.” Even if the riots were a form of political protest, the prompt actions of black leaders and city officials effectively contained the violence and damage. “Nevertheless,” wrote Fogelson, who praised the “virtuoso performance” of La Guardia, “these efforts (and the riots themselves) indicated the inability of the moderate black leaders to channel rank-and-file discontent into legitimate channels and when necessary to restrain the rioters.” Thus the clashes of 1935 and 1943 were, in a sense, the “direct precursors” to the Harlem Riot of 1964.⁴⁹

      But for now what was more critical was how little had changed in the aftermath of the upheaval of 1943. More than three hundred thousand African Americans continued to face “obscene living conditions” as they crowded into substandard housing intended for seventy-five thousand. Harlem was still, asserted an article in Collier’s, “very inflammable, dynamically race conscious, emotionally on the hair trigger, doggedly resentful of its Jim Crow estate.”⁵⁰ It remained ready to explode—all it would take was another spark.

      Bayard Rustin was not in Harlem when it erupted in August 1943. At the time, he was on the road, tirelessly moving from city to city organizing and recruiting for Muste and Randolph. He was also working as a trainer for the newly formed Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), which fellow FOR field secretary James Farmer had launched in an effort to promote racial justice through nonviolent resistance. Then in November Rustin received his draft notice and was arrested when he refused to report for civilian public service. He spent the next two years in federal prison, where he protested against segregated dining facilities, studied the ideas of Gandhi, and endured hunger strikes. He also faced homosexual misconduct charges, which delayed his release until 1946.⁵¹

      The following year, Rustin and CORE executive secretary George Houser organized the Journey of Reconciliation, the first Freedom Ride to protest segregation in interstate travel. As a participant, Rustin was sentenced to a chain gang in North Carolina. But the arrest that shattered his life came in 1953, when he was taken into custody in Pasadena, California, and charged with lewd vagrancy for performing oral sex on two white men in the backseat of a car. It was not his first arrest for illegal sex, but it brought his homosexuality to public notice. After pleading guilty to a single charge of “sex perversion” (the official term for consensual sodomy at the time), he was fired from his position as director of race relations with FOR after twelve years of dedicated service.⁵²

      Feeling abandoned and adrift, Rustin struggled to make himself again acceptable and respectable in the eyes of the friends and allies he had once had. For the rest of his career, his sexual orientation would shadow him even more than his communist background. In 1953, he joined the War Resisters League (over the objections of Muste) and soon became executive director; four years later, Rustin was instrumental in persuading King to form the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. But in 1960 Congressman Powell (a board member and social conservative) forced Rustin to resign by threatening to expose his sexual orientation on the floor of Congress and feed false allegations to the press that he and King were lovers.⁵³

      While Rustin fought to restore his reputation, demographic change swept across many neighborhoods in New York in the 1950s, generating racial tension and conflict. Segregation, especially in housing and education, remained a serious problem. Economic factors—especially deindustrialization, automation, and discrimination—affected the workplace and job market, which in turn contributed to the depressed social conditions experienced by a large majority of African Americans in Central Harlem. And youth crime, often connected to the drug trade, was a growing concern of many residents.

      The black migration to the North from the South, where the mechanization of cotton farming led to an exodus of millions of sharecroppers from rural areas, continued unabated after World War II. By 1950 more than one million African Americans lived in New York—a 30 percent increase since 1948. During the 1950s, almost half a million more blacks arrived, only to discover that the federal government and local banks preserved residential segregation by “redlining” neighborhoods and restricting loans. Meanwhile, more than a million whites departed for the suburbs of New Jersey, Long Island, and Westchester County, where blacks were usually not welcome. Even more whites might have left if not for the Lyons Law, which required city residency for municipal employees. But in 1960 the state legislature added a loophole for police officers, which enabled many of them to relocate and reinforced the sense in Harlem and Bed-Stuy that the NYPD was an outside force of occupation and oppression.⁵⁴

      The inflow of blacks and the outflow of whites changed the complexion of neighborhoods and boroughs. It also increased the pressure on housing as conditions worsened, especially in Harlem, where almost half of the buildings predated 1900. In an unpublished article on the first mental health institution in the area, the Lafargue Psychiatric Clinic, Ellison provided an almost hallucinogenic description СКАЧАТЬ