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16. Not Just a World Problem: Segregation, Police Brutality, and New Negro Politics in New York City
- University of Minnesota Press
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381 Not Just a World Problem: Segregation, Police Brutality, and New Negro Politics in New York City SHANNON KING 16 “The cosmopolitan atmosphere [of New York City] knows less of color prejudice than probably any other city in the United States,” optimistically opined George Edmund Haynes in 1921.1 Haynes, founder of the National Urban League, and the first black man to graduate from Columbia University with a PhD in the new discipline of sociology, envisioned Harlem as an exemplar of interracial comity. Gotham’s cosmopolitanism was predicated on blacks’ reported full integration into the city’s political life. This, Haynes believed, “indicate[d] a liberal feeling on the part of the white voters.” Accordingly, Haynes conceived of Harlem as a model of interracial relations that blacks of the United States and across the globe should follow. “For, both directly and indirectly,” opined Haynes, “the mental feeling, attitudes, and thoughts of the Negroes of the nation, as well as other parts of the world in their . . . relations with their white neighbors are influenced by the Negroes of New York as by those of no other city.”2 As far as race relations were concerned, New York was exceptional. White supremacy was, in response to W. E. B. Du Bois’s insights, a world problem, yes, but not a NewYork problem.3 By proffering Harlem as a panacea for all ills of white supremacy across the black world, Haynes deftly distinguished black New Yorkers’ experience of race as an anomaly to the threat of white supremacy repressing and subjugating blackoccupied spaces in the United States and around the globe. Black reformers and their depictions of NewYork and Harlem as exceptions challenged both scientific and popular charges of blacks people’s inherent criminality and intellectual inferiority .Yet this utopian version of Harlem—a sort of reactionary form of resistance, generally devoid of political conflict and, especially, violence—has overshadowed the black experience of racism, segregation, and violence that engulfed New York City at the height of the New Negro era. While faithfully acknowledging the notorious 1900 race riot that rocked Gotham, black reformers and civil rights leaders ignored the cycle of white mob attacks and police brutality that continued 382 SHANNON KING to rampage black neighborhoods around New York throughout the first three decades of the twentieth century. Yet since first settling in the white-ethnic communities around the city, blacks continued to wage defiant battles over territorial spaces where whites remained committed to delimiting black settlement. This chapter argues that black self-protection activity in Harlem operated as a rejection of “white definitions of black rights, opportunities, and sociability” in residential and public places. In these politicized urban spaces, New Negroes actively asserted their “claims to citizenship and equal civil and political rights with whites.”4 This chapter juxtaposes the trope of Harlem as the “Negro mecca” with the lived experiences of Harlemites waging physical battle over urban space in the first three decades of the twentieth century. The cojoined forces of racial violence and black self-protection practices allow us to further interrogate the still prevalent conceptualization of interwar Harlem as primarily a site of New Negro cultural and intellectual production and even as a model of racial comity. Most scholars of the period now even claim that the New Negro of Harlem marked a moment of black political decline, with an increased focus on culture.5 But in fact, self-protection activities powerfully demonstrate that the political radicalism of New Negro politics persisted throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Harlem was a site of white civilian and state-sanctioned violence, reflecting black New Yorkers’ shared condition with Africa and its diaspora.6 In this sense, this chapter “escapes from New York” by providing a more complicated and undeniably violent narrative of the city’s history before the Harlem riot of 1935. This essay broadens the range of political activities constituting the New Negro movement, foregrounding self-protection activity—specifically the individual and collective self-defense efforts posed against racial violence and residential containment—as a key generative force of New Negro politics.7 Whereas most studies frame the New Negro movement as a product of the Great War, I locate the initial stirrings of New Negro ferment before the war in interracial struggles over residential and public places, where blacks first demanded respect and equal treatment either through legal means or through violent and, sometimes, armed resistance. Throughout the period covered in this chapter, black leaders, radicals, and journalists persistently...