Police Power and Race Riots. Cathy Lisa Schneider
Chapter 3 I pose the following question: why, when so many of the worst aspects of 1960s race relations remained in New York City between 1990 and 2001—a white mayor, impoverished and still mostly segregated black and Latino neighborhoods, racially coded law-and-order rhetoric, and violent racially biased policing—did neighborhoods not burn? I begin by analyzing the 1993 mayoral race and the way that campaign activated racial boundaries in New York. I then look at boundary activation from the perspective of the police officers whom I interviewed, including those who worked in the three neighborhoods, those who worked in the city at large, those of minority extraction, and those police officers and chiefs active in efforts to promote police reform nationally. From there I shift to neighborhood organizing efforts in the 1980s and 1990s, building on interviews I conducted with black and Puerto Rican activists and residents of Mott Haven, Williamsburg, and the Lower East Side and with leaders of anti-police-brutality organizations (many of whom were radical activists in the early 1970s and continue to live in these three neighborhoods). I conclude this chapter with the stories of four mothers and one father of young people killed by police (Nicholas Heyward, Amadou Diallo, Anthony Rosario, Malcolm Ferguson, and Timur Person) and their efforts to pursue justice for their children and to prevent others from suffering a similar fate.
In Chapter 4 I trace the processes and mechanisms that led Paris to burn for three consecutive weeks in November 2005. I use extensive interviews with French police, with the families of boys killed by police, and with residents of Sarcelles; Garges-lès-Gonesse; Villiers-le-Bel; Aubervilliers, Clichy-sous-Bois; and Cité des Bosquets, Montfermeil, to explore that dynamic. Lastly, I contrast the situation in Parisian banlieues with that in the impoverished neighborhoods of northern Marseille, where riots did not erupt.
In the Conclusion I discuss changes in policing politics in New York and Paris since 2005 and reexamine my main theoretical claims in light of the evidence of the two cases. Finally, I delve into the implications of this analysis for understanding more recent riots in Europe and elsewhere.
Chapter 1
Policing Racial Boundaries and Riots in New York (1920–1993)
The Great Migration, which began in 1916, brought half a million blacks north. The boll weevil had ruined the southern cotton harvest, wiped out white landowners, dried up credit, and forced black sharecroppers and tenant farmers into debt. The simultaneous decline of King Cotton and the advent of World War I freed blacks from coerced farm labor in the South. Puerto Ricans arrived around the same time. In 1917 the Jones Act had made Puerto Ricans U.S. citizens eligible for both the draft and stateside migration to escape rural poverty. New York labor scouts (anxious to fill war-time shortages) scoured the South and Puerto Rico, recruiting and transporting workers north “in consignments running high into the hundreds.”1 The new migrants found housing in the Lower East Side, Central Harlem, San Juan Hill, Hell’s Kitchen, and Greenwich Village.
In this chapter I track the history of New York City’s black and Puerto Rican neighborhoods, paying particular attention to the construction of ghettos, the policing of racial and spatial boundaries, and the relationship between racial polarization, police violence, and urban unrest in the riots of 1935, 1943, 1964, 1967, 1977, 1991, and 1992. I also introduce three New York City neighborhoods: Mott Haven in the South Bronx; Williamsburg in Brooklyn; and the Lower East Side of Manhattan. I conducted ethnographic field research in these neighborhoods between May 1993 and September 1996. I trace the development of these neighborhoods from the time of the Great Migration to the riots of the late 1960s. This is followed by a look at the radical organizing efforts of the early 1970s, the eruption of riots in 1977 after widespread power outages (called the “blackout riots”), and the decline of radical organizing efforts after 1977. By the 1990s, I argue, radical black and Puerto Rican activists had turned their energies to community organizing around neighborhood needs and against police brutality. Together they knit the frayed fabric of their communities and developed an established repertoire of contention that intentionally and unintentionally made riots less probable.
The Great Depression and Communist Cross-Racial Organizing in New York
Unlike in many cities where brutal mobs drove black residents into undesirable areas on the outskirts, black and Puerto Rican migrants found housing in inner-city New York. Harlem, in particular, was centrally located and a chosen destination for many migrants. In 1900, when blacks made up less than 2 percent of the city’s population, white race riots led them to concentrate in Harlem, where they could offer each other protection. Black migrants were attracted to the neighborhood’s vibrant artistic and intellectual life. Harlem even elected a black state assemblyman in 1917. Even in Harlem life for blacks was hard, as Langston Hughes observed: “[S]ome Harlemites thought the millennium had come. They thought the race problem had at last been solved…. I don’t know what made any Negroes think that—except that they were mostly intellectuals doing the thinking. The ordinary Negroes hadn’t heard of the Negro Renaissance. And if they had, it hadn’t raised their wages any.”2
Many World War I veterans expected some recognition or compensation for their war-time service. W. E. B. Du Bois had encouraged blacks to enlist, pointing out that black military service in the American Revolution, the War of 1812, the Civil War, and the Spanish-American War had been followed by emancipation, enfranchisement, and increased accumulation of wealth.3 But those who expected similar improvements after World War I were bitterly disappointed. The period following the war was characterized by “hysterical racism, the acceleration of lynchings, the revival of the clan, and more than twenty major riotous assaults by whites in Northern and border cities who rampaged in black neighborhoods, stoned blacks on beaches and attacked them on main thoroughfares and public transportation.”4 By the mid-1920s Ku Klux Klan membership was said to have reached five million, with more members outside the South than within.
Black and Puerto Rican migrants were ill prepared to weather the ravages of the Great Depression. They were four times as likely to be unemployed or on relief than whites and lived in unheated cold-water flats, often without food, and were vulnerable to vermin and disease. Some were unable to support their families and committed suicide. Others were forced into soup lines and slave markets, where they sold their services to the highest bidder. Some ten to twenty eviction cases a day were reported to the Urban League, and blacks were five times more likely to be left homeless than whites.5
The fledgling New York branch of the American Communist Party stepped up organizing efforts in Harlem and East Harlem during this period. They led protests against unemployment and in support of racial justice. They recruited heavily among black, Puerto Rican, and Jewish migrants. As Communists stepped up their cross-race appeals, the NYPD stepped up its attacks on blacks and Puerto Ricans spotted in white neighborhoods, forcibly separating interracial couples (claiming that prostitution was involved) and breaking into interracial meetings.6 Police violence unintentionally “reinforced black support for party-led organizing efforts” and, communist organizers discovered, could effectively be linked “to the larger racial and class struggle.”7 They increasingly attacked “the NYPD for its violent attempts to sunder the growing unity of black and white workers.”8 The harder Communists worked to build class coalitions across racial lines, the more violently the NYPD enforced those boundaries.
The First Ghetto Riot in New York City
On March 19, 1935, a white police officer arrested a black Puerto Rican boy, Lino Rivera, after the store manager caught him shoplifting a penknife in the Kress store on 125th Street. The police officer took the boy to the basement exit and then released him. A black female customer, seeing the police bring the boy to the basement, began shouting that the police had taken the boy to the basement to beat him, a not-uncommon scenario. Other customers, hearing her scream, began to overturn counters and toss merchandise to the floor. As rumors of a beating circulated, a full-scale street battle ensued. The violence spread throughout Harlem, ending