Police Power and Race Riots. Cathy Lisa Schneider
the police blamed the Communist Party for inciting the riot, during the hearings succeeding witnesses told stories of terrible police abuse, including charges of police intimidation of witnesses. They pointed to four brutal cases of police repression in particular, including that of Thomas Aiken, an unemployed man who had been “blinded by blows from a police officer while standing … in a Harlem Bread line.”10 In response, Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia formed an eleven-member biracial commission to study conditions in Harlem. In its scathing final report the Mayor’s Commission on Conditions in Harlem concluded that “the insecurity of the individual in Harlem against police aggression is one of the most potent causes for the existing hostility to authority…. Police aggressions and brutalities more than any other factor weld the people together for mass action.”11
The commission recommended the creation of a biracial committee of Harlem citizens to hear civilian complaints and act as a liaison with the NYPD, but the police commissioner forced the suppression of the report.12 He called the hearings “biased and dominated by Communist agitators” and stated that the police “were needed to fight the high crime rate.”13 The police had a good relationship with the black community, he insisted, and “any resentment which does exist is borne by the lawless elements because of the police activity directed against them.”14 Police violence in black and Puerto Rican neighborhoods continued unabated, helping the Communists expand their base in “networks spawned by the riot.”15 This would not be the last time that post-riot networks were the basis for future organizing efforts.
“Residential segregation,” Thomas Sugrue notes, was “the linchpin of racial division and separation.”16 In the 1920s nearly every residential development included covenants specifically precluding owners from renting to non-Caucasians. In the 1930s a series of federal housing reforms designed to forestall the wave of foreclosures during the Great Depression increased racial segregation in the city by reinforcing informal real estate practices and court-authorized covenants. The first of these acts created the Home Owners Loan Corporation in 1933 to provide loans to homeowners at risk of foreclosure. The second created the Federal Housing Authority (FHA) in 1934. These two institutions stalled the rate of foreclosures, but defining all but homogeneous white neighborhoods as high-risk investments increased racial and spatial segregation in the city. A single black family was enough to tip the status of a neighborhood from good (marked as A or B and colored green or blue) to “actuarially unsound”17 (such neighborhoods were marked as C and D and were ineligible for FHA-backed loans). An Association of Real Estate Developers (REALTOR) brochure justified this policy: “The prospective buyer might be a bootlegger who would cause considerable annoyance to his neighbors, a madam who had a number of call girls on the string, a gangster who wants a screen for his activities by living in a better neighborhood or a colored man of means who was giving his children a college education and thought they were entitled to live among whites.”18
The 1937 Wagner-Seagull Housing Act and the 1945 Veterans Administration Act would exacerbate these effects by underwriting mortgages only in stable (homogeneous) white neighborhoods. Other federal legislation aggravated the problem by giving local governments the authority to determine where public housing projects were to be located and who could live in each building. Public housing projects reserved for blacks and Puerto Ricans were almost always located in the least desirable locations. Slum-clearance programs intensified racial segregation, tearing down tenements and forcing blacks and Puerto Ricans into public projects in areas of concentrated poverty and unemployment and excluding racial minorities from access to housing in white districts. These acts will be discussed later, but from the beginning segregation encouraged rent gouging, reduced the availability of low-income housing, and created ghetto areas of concentrated poverty. In addition it encouraged racial profiling and police violence by allowing police to treat the residents of some neighborhoods differently from those of another and to situate blacks and Puerto Ricans spatially apart from whites.
As African Americans fled Manhattan in search of better or cheaper housing in Brooklyn, white residents there, as Thomas Kessner observes, “lobbied Mayor LaGuardia for greater police protection and even threatened to lead a vigilante movement against the criminals in the neighborhood in 1936. White demands for increased law enforcement encouraged a more aggressive style of policing that led to numerous complaints by black citizens.”19
World War II and the Erection of Ghetto Walls in New York
World War II and industrial labor shortages attracted a new wave of migrants to northern cities. While only 11 percent of eligible black males had fought in World War I, fully 70 percent of them, or 1.15 million, fought in World War II, the same percentage as that of whites (the number of Puerto Ricans who fought was not recorded). Sam, a black activist and former Communist and Black Panther, told me that his father had been proud to serve: “[H]e went to war and the army gave him education, travel—he saw the world—and some rank. Like many black men he continued to espouse [that] equality on the battlefield would lead to equal citizenship.” However, the army remained segregated.20 Katznelson notes,
In the midst of a war defined in a large measure as an epochal battle between liberal democracy and Nazi and Fascist totalitarianism, one that distinguished between people on the basis of blood and race, the U.S. military was not only engaged in sorting Americans by race but in policing the boundary separating white from black …. [T]he draft selected individuals to fill quotas to meet the test of a racially proportionate military and … they were assigned to units on the basis of a simple dual racial system…. The issue of classification proved particularly vexing in Puerto Rico where the population was so varied racially and where the country’s National Guard units had been integrated [emphasis mine].21
The black population of New York increased from 458,000 in 1940 to 547,000 in 1945 alone. As the nonwhite population grew, the city’s major newspaper chains, including the Times, the Daily News, the World Telegram, and all the Hearst papers, capitalized on white racial fears, publishing a series of sensational front-page stories accusing blacks and Puerto Ricans of “stabbing, raping, and mugging whites in Harlem and other black neighborhoods.”22 The term “mugging,” as Marilyn Johnson notes, “originated in New York, nearly always with reference to black-on-white crime. The press campaign peaked in the spring of 1943 when a so-called mugging outbreak prompted police to pull a thousand officers from clerical duty and assign them to plainclothes details in Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant.”23 Increased racially inflammatory media and renewed calls for law enforcement led to a massive increase in both vigilante and police violence targeted at both blacks and Puerto Ricans. The Harlem Charter denounced the crime smears to no avail. Adam Clayton Powell Sr. decried the increase in police violence, which he claimed epitomized the brutality of racial discrimination and led to anger “at every white policeman throughout the United States who had constantly beaten, wounded and often killed colored men and women without provocation.”24 Other local black leaders compared white police to Hitler’s Gestapo.
The Second 1943 Ghetto Riot
On August 1, 1943, a New York City policeman hit an African American woman while arresting her for disturbing the peace at the Braddock hotel (one of several black hotels targeted by the NYPD in its antivice campaign). Robert Bandy, a black active-duty soldier in the U.S. Army, jumped to her defense, trying to shield her from the officer’s blows, and the officer turned on the soldier and shot him. As the soldier was carried on a stretcher to an ambulance, an onlooker shouted out that the police officer had shot a black soldier, and Harlem residents took action. They threw “bricks and bottles, overturning cars, fighting with police, smashing windows and looting stores.”25 The riot lasted twenty-four hours and resulted in 6 deaths, 185 injuries, and over $250,000 in property damage. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) called the riot the result of “the fury shown of repeated unchecked, unpunished and often unreported shooting, maiming, and insulting [of] Negro troops.”26
Mayor LaGuardia immediately sent black military police (MPs) into Harlem and deputized more than 1,000 black MPs to help patrol the streets, which significantly reduced casualties, particularly