Police Power and Race Riots. Cathy Lisa Schneider
As a direct result of the riots, blacks’ representation in the police force of New York City was increased. In 1943 the NYPD had only 155 black police officers in a force of 600,000. This was only 22 more than it had in 1938. Moreover the number of black detectives had fallen from 10 to 5 during the same period. Now with the 1943 riots as an impetus, the city increased the number of black police from 155 to 600, but this was still a tiny fragment of the total in a city that grew increasingly black and Latino. It should also be noted that black policemen were not given any positions of power or decision-making. “For the most part, the NYPD viewed black police as ‘riot insurance’—a political concession to angry black communities which would hopefully help prevent and/or control future outbreaks of racial violence, just as the black deputies had done during the 1943 riot.”28
Little was done to address the more serious issue of police violence. Marilyn Johnson notes, “The false rumors of Bandy’s death also echoed those surrounding the Lino Rivera incident that sparked the 1935 Harlem Riots. In both versions an innocent black youth [in the first a black Puerto Rican youth] was killed by a repressive white policy system designed to protect whites or white business interests in Harlem. The symbolic significance of the victims, then, was key to the unleashing of violence.”29 Both the 1935 and 1943 riots predated other ghetto riots and prefigured the revolts that would erupt throughout the country in the late 1960s.30
Blacks and Puerto Rican Ghettos in Postwar New York
Between 1950 and 1970, 1.5 million blacks, or 1 in 7, left the South. As a result the black population of every northern city ballooned. It rose from 17 percent to 54 percent in Newark, from 14 percent to 34 percent in Chicago, and from 16 percent to 44 percent in Detroit. Migrants who had once moved from South Carolina to North Carolina or from North Carolina to Virginia now went to New York,31 while those from Texas and Louisiana traveled to Chicago or Los Angeles. Puerto Ricans fled desperate poverty and political repression on the island and also began to arrive in New York City in massive numbers. Forty thousand arrived in 1946; 58,000 arrived in 1952; and 75,000 arrived in 1953. As one Puerto Rican activist described his family’s experience in New York (1966): “[W]e arrived into a very different environment from the one we had left; we arrived onto streets without nature, into cold apartments and factories when we had been accustomed to tropical heat. Many died of TB and other illnesses caused by the cold.”
The design of most of the programs providing benefits to World War II veterans deliberately limited access for blacks and Puerto Ricans. The occupations in which African Americans and Puerto Ricans worked were excluded from labor regulations and minimum wage laws, and this combined with deliberately “racist patterns of administration [meant that] New Deal policies for Social Security, social welfare, and labor market programs restricted black prospects while providing positive economic reinforcements for the great majority of white citizens.”32 The GI Bill gave veterans access to federally guaranteed low-interest housing and student loans as well as job training and assistance in securing jobs in their fields, but few blacks could take advantage of these programs. The overwhelming majority of white colleges and universities excluded blacks from admissions, and black colleges and universities were few and starved for resources. Local job counselors without exception were white and often denied blacks access to skilled employment and training. Even in the North the United States Employment Service (USES), charged with administering the program, channeled black veterans into traditional black jobs, reinforcing “the existing division of labor by race.”33 Katznelson notes, “Because unemployment insurance was made available only to those who could demonstrate a willingness to take a suitable job, and because suitability was defined by USES, many blacks were compelled to take work far below their skill level. Carpenters became janitors; truck drivers became dishwashers; communications repair experts, porters.”34 Sixty-five percent of African Americans nationally were ineligible for Social Security.35
The Veterans Administration’s loan guarantees of the Serviceman’s Readjustment Act of 1944 and the 1949 Housing Act36 constructed formidable obstacles to integration: underwriting mortgages in white suburban areas, bankrolling white suburbanization through discriminatory housing subsidies, equating racial segregation with neighborhood stability, and requiring developers to sign covenants against black home buyers as a precondition for financing. “The completeness of racial segregation,” observes Sugrue, “made ghettoisation seem an inevitable, natural consequence of profound racial difference.”37 This was largely because “[t]he barriers that kept blacks confined to racially isolated deteriorating inner city neighborhoods were largely invisible to whites” (emphasis mine).38
Blacks and Puerto Ricans arrived just as the city shed working-class jobs. Between 1947 and 1976 five hundred thousand factory jobs were lost as industries left the city.39 However, deindustrialization is only half the story. Comparing the experiences of poor semiskilled white southerners to those of poor semiskilled southern blacks, Katz observes, reveals the extent and impact of racial discrimination: white southerners also “encountered hostility and some discrimination, but never on a scale that matched the racial discrimination and violence that confronted African Americans. White southerners melded into the urban fabric, living where they wanted, sometimes being given jobs over African Americans with more work experience.”40
“Racism closed the most promising doors,” notes Katz. “Exploitative work, bad pay, racism, and foreclosed opportunities amounted to a formula for poverty.”41 These factors also increased the susceptibility of African Americans and Puerto Ricans to the heroin trade. Heroin dealing offered one of the few employment opportunities available to black and Puerto Rican youths. Concentrated poverty, hopelessness, despair, and sheer boredom made it hard to resist the lure of the drug. By the late 1940s, 15 percent of the census tracks in New York City, home to 30 percent of the city’s youths, housed over 80 percent of its heroin users.42 Adolescents living near drug-selling locations were two to three times as likely to use drugs.43 The growth of the heroin trade and the new federal and state laws with their heavy penalties for drug use gave police one more justification for combing ghetto streets and assaulting black and Puerto Rican residents. Violent clashes between white police officers and young black and Puerto Rican men “accounted for a large percentage of interracial homicides.”44
In 1961 the Pittsburgh Courier called New York City a Jim Crow town “when police arrested and beat Guinea’s Deputy Ambassador to the United Nations after a routine traffic stop.”45 That same year police officers brutalized a prominent designing engineer who had recently been featured in a magazine article on the Emancipation Proclamation. He was attacked first in the street and then again in the station by the same officers when he attempted to file a complaint. The Amsterdam News covered the story in chilling detail: “We’ll give you something to complain about,” the identical four officers promised in the police station, “before taking him to the basement, beating him and charging him with resisting arrest.”46
In addition to police violence, the new migrants were forced to deal with white youth gangs. As the black and Puerto Rican population grew, so did white resistance. “To preserve existing boundaries,” Katz notes, “whites often turned to violence—a response documented with painful detail by many historians…. Civil violence erupted at the height of urban boundary challenges.”47 Eusebio Soto remembered Italian gangs attacking Puerto Rican youths in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and the violent spiral that led to the growth of Puerto Rican gangs (1996):
When I was 10 or 11 years old you see these gangs, man, drunk, coming down the street and hitting everyone…. all of a sudden [Puerto Rican] gangs come up … not gangs to hurt people, to protect the area, because you have gangs from up there Bushwick coming down, hitting everyone they saw….
We knew nothing about gangs. They resented the idea that we were moving in. So, they sought control over whatever we did and they went into our neighborhood and we didn’t even speak English. For us to see these guys come through and start beating on us for no reason at all, I say why do these people hate me, what for? And, I had to learn how to fight because I was Puerto Rican. It’s not because of anything else. I had to learn how to fight to defend the idea that I was Puerto