In the Heat of the Summer. Michael W. Flamm

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СКАЧАТЬ violence, its crumbling buildings with littered area-ways, ill-smelling halls and vermin-invaded rooms) are indistinguishable from the distorted images that appear in dreams, and which, like muggers haunting a lonely hall, quiver in the waking mind with hidden and threatening significance.”⁵⁵

      Dr. Kenneth Clark offered a similar assessment in Dark Ghetto, his classic study of Harlem. “The most concrete fact of the ghetto is its physical ugliness—the dirt, the filth, the neglect,” he wrote. “The parks are seedy with lack of care. The streets are crowded with the people and refuse. In all of Harlem there is no museum, no art gallery, no art school, no sustained ‘little theater’ group; despite the stereotype of the Negro as artist, there are only five libraries—but hundreds of bars, hundreds of churches, and scores of fortune tellers. Everywhere there are signs of fantasy, decay, abandonment, and defeat.” Like Ellison, Clark saw a psychological dimension to the physical deterioration. “The only constant characteristic is a sense of inadequacy,” Clark observed of Harlem. “People seem to have given up in the little things that are so often the symbol of the larger things.”⁵⁶

      Here Clark’s analysis was not entirely fair or correct. Plenty of residents had not given up—on the contrary, they often engaged in political activism and mobilized against racial discrimination and segregation where they lived, worked, and went to school. In the 1930s, blacks in Harlem had participated in “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work” demonstrations. In the 1940s, they had enthusiastically supported the successful campaigns of Powell for Congress and Benjamin Davis, a Harvard Law School graduate and staunch member of the Communist Party, for city council. They also picketed against Stuyvesant Town, a middle-class apartment complex that refused to rent to blacks despite the fact that the developer, Met Life, had received tax exemptions from the city. In the 1950s, a group of African American mothers who became known as the “Little Rock Nine of Harlem” pulled their children from three junior high schools as a protest against segregation.⁵⁷

      As overcrowding intensified, resentment over segregation deepened. In Harlem, where the number of residents had doubled since 1940, the number of apartments had not increased despite the construction of the Riverton Houses, a large middle-income housing development created by Met Life in response to the protests over Stuyvesant Town. White store owners, observed Jesse B. Semple (the Harlem character created by Langston Hughes), “take my money over the counter, then go on downtown to Stuyvesant Town where I can’t live, or out to them pretty suburbs, and leave me in Harlem holding the bag.” By 1952 blacks had finally won, after an unrelenting fight by a coalition of political and religious organizations, the right to live in the apartment complex—but only after it was fully occupied. Eight years later, when Lieutenant Gilligan was a resident, only a tiny handful of his neighbors were black.⁵⁸

      During the 1950s, the population of Harlem fell by 10 percent, mainly because poor blacks were moving to other ghettos like Bed-Stuy in Brooklyn. But a few middle-class black professionals were also starting to take advantage of the opportunity to relocate to the suburbs, among them Clark, who moved his family to Westchester in 1950 because it had better public schools than Harlem. “My children have only one life,” Clark said. “I can’t risk that.” It was, nevertheless, a difficult decision for the distinguished psychologist who with his wife produced the famous “doll study,” which documented the harmful effects of school segregation and influenced the landmark Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. “More than forty years of my life had been lived in Harlem,” Clark wrote. “I started school in the Harlem public schools. I first learned about people, about love, about cruelty, about sacrifice, about cowardice, about courage, about bombast in Harlem.”⁵⁹

      The departure of middle-class professionals like Clark coincided with the loss of decent-paying jobs for working-class residents. During the 1950s, deindustrialization came to New York as factories began to relocate to the South. Automation also invaded the service sector, leading to fewer opportunities for those with poor English or dark skin, little experience or limited skills. The first Latino borough president and member of Congress, Herman Badillo, arrived in New York from Puerto Rico with his mother in 1941. In the early 1950s, he was able to attend City College and law school by working as a pin boy in a bowling alley and as an elevator operator in an apartment building—both jobs threatened or eliminated by technology.⁶⁰

      Coincidentally, when Harlem erupted in 1964, both Mayor Robert Wagner and Congressman Powell were in Europe to attend a conference in Geneva on the impact of automation on cities. Meanwhile, blacks remained largely excluded from the skilled trades because labor unions and apprenticeship programs refused to accept them. Together, deindustrialization and discrimination ravaged Harlem. In 1962, Clark received a large grant from the President’s Committee on Juvenile Delinquency, which believed that black teens posed a significant threat to urban peace. The grant funded the Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited (HARYOU) project, which employed two hundred “associates” to conduct interviews and gather information about the community. Their research, which would become the statistical basis of Dark Ghetto, showed that most black families maintained a “marginal subsistence,” with a median income of $3,995 compared to $6,100 for white families.⁶¹

      Compounding the inequity was the fact that blacks often paid more in rent than whites even though almost half the housing in Central Harlem was substandard compared to 15 percent in the city as a whole. Residential segregation led to higher rates of population density and left residents with fewer options about where to live. “Cruel in the extreme,” wrote Clark, is the landlord who, like the store owner who charges Negroes more for shoddy merchandise, exploits the powerlessness of the poor.”⁶²

      The perception of exploitation by white merchants—especially Jewish businessmen—was real and widespread. But whether it was accurate is more difficult to determine given that store owners of all races and religions had to operate in a “high-cost, high-crime, high-risk environment,” with narrow profit margins and limited returns on investment. Beyond debate, however, was the reality that African Americans owned or managed only 4 percent of Harlem businesses. By comparison, southern cities like Atlanta often had substantially greater numbers of black-owned businesses because of commercial segregation.⁶³

      Other measures of social distress were more obvious and less open to dispute by 1964. For example, the mortality rate for blacks as a whole remained 60 percent higher than for whites—73 percent for infants. Even the streets were, literally, less safe—in Central Harlem, a child was 61 percent more likely to get killed by a car than in other neighborhoods. And for black adults the unemployment rate was twice as high as for the rest of the city. Among young men eighteen to twenty-four, it was five times as high for blacks as for whites.⁶⁴

      The problem was likely to worsen, predicted Clark, as the number of teens rose and the number of jobs available to them fell. “The restless brooding young men without jobs who cluster in the bars in the winter and on stoops and corners in the summer are the stuff out of which riots are made,” he wrote. “The solution to riots is not better police protection (or even the claims of police brutality) or pleas from civil rights leaders for law and order. The solution lies in finding jobs for the unemployed and in raising the social and economic status of the entire community. Otherwise the ‘long hot summers’ will come every year.”⁶⁵

      “Brooding young men” on street corners were not new to Harlem. But in the two decades after World War II, the disappearance of jobs and, to a lesser extent, the departure of individuals like Clark weakened the social fabric of Harlem and contributed to the rise in social disorder. According to the NYPD, arrests of teenagers rose 60 percent between 1952 and 1957, with African Americans disproportionately implicated, although the statistics are open to interpretation and challenge.⁶⁶ The figures nonetheless concerned the NAACP, which feared that conservatives might use them as proof of black criminality and evidence against racial integration. Executive secretary Roy Wilkins stated in 1959 that reducing youth crime was vital because “many of our enemies are using incidents of juvenile delinquency СКАЧАТЬ