When Tenants Claimed the City: The Struggle for Citizenship in New York City Housing

4. "Out of These Ghettos, People Who Would Fight": Claiming Power in the Sixties

4 “Out of These Ghettos, People Who Would Fight” Claiming Power in the Sixties On December 30, 1963, five Harlem tenants walked into Manhattan Civil Court, reached into their coats and handbags, and each pulled out a large dead rat. The judge barred the four-legged exhibits from the rent hearing that followed. But this bit of courtroom theater, captured on film by reporters, reached a larger audience and became an emblem of a new generation of confrontational black- and Latino-led tenant politics in New York. Rats were nothing new, of course; they had long enjoyed star billing in ghetto housing exposés. But in the past, tenants had invited investigators uptown to see the vermin. Now they were laying the problem at government’s doorstep and demanding a response. The rat routine called attention to a rent strike that ghetto residents had launched a few months before. Notice was given in August, when Harlem organizer Jesse Gray castigated city officials for condoning “flagrant housing violations”andurgeduptowntenantstoholdbacktheirrentsuntilrepairswere made. The statement received only brief mention in the Times. But alongside it ran a three-column story about an upcoming civil-rights march on Washington that was expected to draw more than 100,000 participants.1 The editor who paired these items showed insight. New York’s rent-strike movement was a local wave of the rising nationwide tide of civil-rights activity. Historians have been slower to connect those dots, but that project is now well under way. In place of an earlier generation of scholarship that presented a freedom play in two acts—a nonviolent and successful southern movement for integration in the late fifties and early sixties, followed by a nihilistic northern quest for black power—we now have an extensive literature on philosophically and tactically diverse justice struggles across regions and time periods.2 New York City’s rent rebellion adds to both the narrative continuity and the ideological messiness of this picture. Far from coming as a bolt from the blue, the sixties strikes bore discernible links to earlier characters and chapters in New York’s tenant, labor, and civil-rights history. Old Left veterans served as key organizers, and Depression-era legislation provided traction in court. Further, one of the strikes’ main achievements was to galvanize tenants throughout the city at a critical moment in the long-term fight over rent control, thus helping to extend that wartime policy into the postindustrial era. Ideologically, the strikes blur the line between civil-rights liberalism and black power. Rent strikers eschewed the liberal integrationist vision—moving out of the ghetto—that had animated the previous decade’s black housing struggles. Instead they sought to improve conditions and build power within the segregated neighborhoods where they, like most African Americans, actually lived. This shift prefigured two better-known rebuffs to liberal reformism in New York, which involved some of the same ideals and people: the 1964 Harlem riot and the late sixties campaign for community control of schools. Yet rent strikers also allied with liberal and left-leaning whites to demand that a putatively liberal city administration enforce, at long last, existing housing codes. In effect they offered liberal government a chance to redeem itself, to deliver on its promise of economic citizenship for all. Government did not jump at that chance. Strikers gained some repairs and tighter code enforcement, but their larger demand for sound housing throughout the city’s ghettos and barrios could be met only through massive public expenditure. Fearing white flight and a shrinking tax base, New York’s municipal and state agencies gave priority instead to building middle-class housing. They offered no program to replace or rehabilitate the mass of deteriorated low-rent stock. This inaction further eroded many blacks’ faith in liberal solutions and impelled some to seek new paths to empowerment. Critics have cast the strike as a failure and laid blame on its leaders and the strategies they embraced. Most famously, social-movement scholars Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward, who were involved in the strikes through their service organization, Mobilization for Youth, concluded that organizers erred fatally by leading tenants to work through the courts rather than disrupt state institutions.3 Historians have pointed as well to confusion among activists with differing notions of where the strikes should lead. Several observers have described Jesse Gray’s fondness for publicity as a liability in the long run.4 114 part ii [18.116.40.177] Project MUSE (2024-04...