Police Power and Race Riots: Urban Unrest in Paris and New York

Chapter 1. Policing Racial Boundaries and Riots in New York (1920–1993)

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 42 Chapter 1 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. Racial Boundaries and Riots in New York 43 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...