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Rights and Wreckage in Postwar Harlem

THE HISTORY OF POSTWAR HARLEM is an uneven one, a story of both spectacular triumph and astonishing turmoil. After the “New Negro” collapsed under the weight of the Great Depression, Harlemites stood tall. They persevered and fought. From the 1930s until the 1960s, the community had served as a key organizational node in the national civil rights activist network, and local leaders marshaled the civic resources of the nation’s black cultural capital to achieve important legal protections in New York State and secure a degree of economic progress. Yet these victories did not serve as a bulwark against broader structural transformations. Lingering residential segregation, exploitative and absentee landlords, and the increasing disappearance of work generated a variety of ills that undermined this historic community’s vibrancy, abraded its civic infrastructure, and frayed its social bonds. By the mid-1960s, Harlem was no longer in vogue. It had become, in the words of Kenneth Clark, a “dark ghetto.”1
Few things so poignantly and publicly captured the tone and pulse of Harlem’s postwar challenges as Dope, a play written by Maryat Lee in 1951 at the request of the East Harlem Protestant Parish. Sponsored by Jackie Robinson, Borough President Robert Wagner, a popular disk jockey named Dr. Jive, the famed African American comedian Nipsey Russell, and Willie Bryant, the “Mayor of Harlem,” the one-act play, performed in open lots on the streets of East Harlem, portrayed a day in the life of a heroin addict. Robinson introduced the play by saying, “The story tonight is about Louie. Louie grew up on a block like this. This is his home. He lives here. We all know guys like him. Some people say Louie’s no good. They think he had what was coming to him. Maybe that’s true, and maybe it’s not. But let’s see just what did happen on a certain evening, not long ago.” On that “certain evening” Louie’s relationship with Porse, his dealer, spirals out of control. Porse is a slick, unfeeling predator. Louie is the unwitting victim of his cruelty, though not of his merchandise. In fact, at the start of the play, Louie defends heroin during a conversation with Hum and Marc, two inquisitive eighteen-year-olds. When Marc mentions that he heard “junk” “takes ten years off ya life,” Louie asks, “Well, who wants ta live a hundr’d years ’round here?” He then tells the two curious youths, “It turns ya on. Everyday life is dull, oncet ya take it. Ya don’ know how dull it is. Ya feel great—free—free, yea, like a bird way up there—like a God damn kite in a cloud—yea, that’s what it is. No Troubles!”2
But the junk eventually brings trouble. After learning that Porse turned his sister Celee into a junkie, an angry Louie tries to quit and convince Porse to stop dealing to her. Porse reacts by taunting him with the drug. And Louie gives in. He gets high. But coming off the high, he gets sick, suffering withdrawal symptoms, guilt, and acute sadness, and once again tries to quit. Porse once again taunts him: “Louie, ya’re a junkie ’n’ ya sister is a junkie.” This time, however, Louie resists. They fight. Louie dies. The moral of the story is clear: just say no to drugs, for junkies find redemption only in death.3
Yet this tragic morality play is about more than saying no to drugs. It is also about Harlem, depicting the community in despairing terms: a place where ne’er-do-wells accost decent people and nefarious characters target innocent individuals. Porse preys on the weak and defenseless; he manipulates addicts like Louie into luring children at candy stores and schools into the drug life. Residents suffer the behavior of all manner of malcontents. At one point, a drunk even “stumbles across the stage.” Soon, the drunk returns and “assails an imaginary passerby or two, wanting some company.”4
The play also illuminates how some residents of the community interpreted these problems. A woman carrying “a sack of groceries” and Kareen, a little girl with her, walk by Louie. Seeing him, the woman sighs, “Things is jus’ gettin’ too bad.” After the little girl sees him, the woman says, “Kareen, come along, ya hear me!” and then yells, “Kareen! Get away from there!” The little girl tells the woman, “Mama, I jus’ wanta see if he’s sick.” To which the woman responds, “He sick all right. Now jus’ min’ ya own business.” After the little girl presses, “Mama, he sick,” the woman says, “What he done to himself? Jus might as well be dead—poor Jesus. C’mon, Kareen! Kareen!” Another woman is equally harsh. After Louie complains about being “trapped,” she says, “You should a thought a that a long time ago.” “Suddenly a little sad,” she tells him, “Boy, ya waited a long time to fin’ this out. It’s happened, honey. Ya cain’ pull away from junk. It’ll get ya. Ya been too long. You shoulda known better in the firs’ place.” Like these women, many people in Harlem ostracized people on the junk. They felt little sympathy for them. People like Louie were captives of their own sinfulness rather than unsuspecting casualties of society.5
Dope captivated Harlem. People flocked to the play. Lee recalled of opening night, “The street was blocked off and crowded, people jammed on fire escapes. About 2,000 people standing against each other, pushing around the stage so that the poor actors had to beat onto stage like it was a subway at rush hour.” One evening, audience members “got up on the stage to dance during a party scene” and “hissed at the hero when he started to take a fix,” and “an old woman junkie begged the hero not to take the drugs, telling him to look at her, see what dope had done to her.” Jet reported that, because of the play, “dope pushers went into brief hiding and narcotic sales declined,” and the “term ‘junkie’ became a term of derision among neighborhood youngsters.” “Dope was on the defensive,” the African American weekly pronounced. Much less sanguine, it also confessed, “Gradually, though, the dope salesmen regained their boldness and peddling resumed on the same scale.”6
Part of Harlem’s postwar history has already been told, but other stories still need to be heard. Gilbert Osofsky’s Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto and Kenneth B. Clark’s Dark Ghetto: Dilemmas of Social Power both provide canonical accounts of the wreckage, powerfully explicating the structural origins of the social problems represented in Dope. Yet there is also a story about newly won freedoms and how the beneficiaries of these triumphs made sense of the juxtaposition of rights and wreckage. Peering into the nooks and crannies of Harlem’s black public sphere from the 1920s until the late 1960s reveals how working-class and middle-class activists and residents framed and negotiated postwar prosperity and problems.7
During their sojourn to Harlem in the 1920s, wealthy whites discovered jazz. They heard the blues. They met the New Negro. The Harlem Renaissance was more than a cultural bacchanal for white and black artists and the city’s petit bourgeois. It was also political. With the white gaze in mind, African American activists and intellectuals sought to use art to expose the humanity of African Americans and champion the intellectual achievements and worth of the New Negro. Black Brahmins and bohemians fervently believed that notions of black inferiority represented the greatest impediment to racial equality, the most formidable constraint on their liberty. James Weldon Johnson, one of the architects of this movement, proclaimed, “The status of the Negro in the United States is more a question of national mental attitude toward the race than of actual conditions.” “And nothing,” Johnson insisted, “will do more to change that mental attitude and raise his status than a demonstration of intellectual parity through the production of literature and art.”8
For Harlem’s poor, actual conditions mattered as much as white respect and bonhomie. As Osofsky documents, this community needed urban renewal as much as a cultural renaissance. Racial segregation and economic exploitation cultivated a host of social problems, including disease, juvenile delinquency, and adult crime. “All of the ingredients for ghetto-making were in evidence in the 1920s,” the historian Nathan Huggins writes. “Yet, in those years few Harlem intellectuals addressed themselves to issues related to tenements, crime, violence, and poverty. Even Opportunity, the magazine of the Urban League and social work among Negroes, did not discuss urban problems as much as it announced the Negroes coming of age.” In 1940, Langston Hughes, Harlem’s great bard and one of the stars of the renaissance, reflected, “The ordinary Negroes hadn’t heard of the Negro Renaissance. And if they had, it hadn’t raised their wages any.” Even for those who thrived, the moment did not last. Hughes asked, “For how could a large and enthusiastic number of people be crazy about Negroes forever?” He added, “But some Harlemites thought the millennium had come. They thought the race problem had at last been solved through Art plus Gladys Bentley.” Moreover, the Great Depression devastated Harlem, exhausting the resources of white patrons and increasing economic insecurity for people already in desperate financial straits, and racism within the real estate market solidified the racial boundaries of this ghetto. Alain Locke, the movement’s “publicist,” lamented that the Harlem that emerged during the 1930s was “a nasty sordid corner into which black folk are herded.” He confessed, “There is no cure or saving magic in poetry and art for 
 precarious marginal employment, high mortality rates, civic neglect.”9
After the Great Depression, whites left Harlem, but the prepotency of their gaze persisted. Concern for white “mental attitudes” and indigenous values profoundly shaped how middle-class blacks responded to social problems caused by economic dislocation and racial segregation, especially crime. In early November 1941, a spate of crimes ranging from theft to murder, committed mostly by young black males in lower Harlem and the area immediately north of Central Park, caught the attention of white politicians and the media. The press labeled it a “crime wave.” A writer with the Daily News entitled an accusatory column “Listen, You Harlem Kids.” In an editorial entitled “Tragedy in Harlem,” the New York Times insisted, “We need more police protection in areas where such crimes occur. We may be appalled at the youth of the criminals, but they must be run down and placed where their viciousness will no longer endanger the public.” Contemplating potential questions about the structural context of the “young gangster,” the New York Times stated, “It is hard to reform a youth already hardened in criminal ways. Some youngsters may be so twisted mentally that they will never grow into good citizens.”10
Many middle-class African Americans took umbrage at the coverage, dismayed by “sensationalized” crime stories that relied on and perpetuated racial stereotypes and ignored the structural problems. The editorial office of the New York Age, the influential black newspaper, was “deluged with letters [about the ‘crime wave’] from readers in all walks of life and from both races.” One writer stated, “The present so-called ‘Harlem crime wave,’ or other localized manifestations of crime or vice, even regardless of their causes, are no more reflective of the Negro character than they are of any other racial or national group.” The New York Age maintained, “Work for all is the biggest need to curb juvenile delinquency in Harlem.” The title to a 1941 Claude McKay essay got straight to the point: “New Crime Wave Old Story to Harlemites: Poverty Brings Prostitution, ‘Muggings,’ Robberies.”11
The NAACP was incensed. In early November, Roy Wilkins, editor of the Crisis, wrote to the head of the organization, Walter White, “I feel that it might be a good thing if the board at its meeting this afternoon issued a statement on the ‘crime wave’ which the newspapers have created in Harlem.” Wilkins added, “I do not know how the Board will feel, but the performance of the New York Times on this topic constitutes some of the most shameless racial slander and incitement to distrust and hatred between the races that has been in any New York paper for many years.” The following day the NAACP board of directors released a statement acknowledging the problem and lambasted the coverage: “We condemn and deplore these crimes. But New York needs to wake up to the conditions that bring such gangs into being.” The organization highlighted employment:
First of these is jobs. Let those who may be indulging in smug condemnation of the Negro stop and ask themselves if they may not be partly responsible. The majority of defense and private industries in the New York area have slammed the door of employment in the face of Negroes. “Door key children,” so called because they go to school with the keys of their parents’ apartment tied on strings around their necks, roam the streets of Harlem after school hours while both parents work at poorly paid menial tasks in a desperate effort to pay the exorbitant rents and high prices for inferior goods which Negroes have to pay in Harlem.
Referencing the main character in Richard Wright’s Native Son, who is turned into a murderer by the poverty and racism of 1930s Chicago, the statement continued, “These are the children who are being made by society into desperate Bigger Thomases.” The following month, Crisis reported that blacks were angry because “newspapers have not concerned themselves with law-abiding citizens who hate crime, who want protection, and who want to do something about present conditions.” It also noted, “The people of Harlem, the respectable, hard-working, everyday citizens, want something done about discrimination in employment so that a father can support a family and rear children to be good citizens instead of hoodlums.”12
As Harlem’s crime problem persisted, the media kept the same narrative alive and middle-class African Americans in New York City and throughout the country kept rejecting it. In January 1943, a column in the Afro American, Baltimore’s popular black newspaper, observed, “One finds an unhealthy paradox in such respectable papers as the [New York Times], where splendid editorial attacks on [Jim Crow] appear in the same issue carrying hysterical front-page scareheads about a press-created ‘Negro crime wave.’ ” In late March, black and white clergy and law enforcement officials in New York City issued a statement after a closed meeting, saying, “There is no crime wave in Harlem.” At a press conference following the meeting, Rev. John Johnson, a black police chaplain, said, “I feel that Harlem crime has been overemphasized.” At a meeting of the Harlem committee of the Community Service Society, Edward S. Lewis, executive secretary of the New York Urban League, denounced “top-flight social work leaders” for not speaking out against “erroneous mugging stories appearing recently in newspapers.” In early April 1943, the New York Times published two crime stories side by side. One discussed the rape of a seventeen-year-old white woman by a theater manager and seven white youths; the other reported on two “22-year-old ‘muggers’ ” convicted of stealing $8.75 from a sixty-year-old man. African American activists complained that the paper devoted more attention to the “alleged ‘mugging.’ ” The NAACP charged that the venerable newspaper had “gone to fantastic lengths in an attempt to fasten a crime wave on the Negro community.” In mid-April, the Harlem Lawyers Association held a public forum at Mother African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Zion on t...