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A Murder in Central Park
Racial Violence and the Crime Wave in New York during the 1930s and 1940s
Shannon King
âI had never before been so aware of policemen, on foot, on horseback, on corners, everywhere,â remembered James Baldwin, Harlem native, describing his arrival home in early June of 1943. Police presence had increased since the winter of 1941 after a series of robberies and assaults by blacks upon whites inspired white newspapers to define the illegal acts a âcrime wave.â White New Yorkers sent a flood of angry letters to Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia and Police Commissioner Lewis J. Valentine. Thus, during the spring of 1942, the confluence of the crime-scare stories and whitesâ demands for safety had transformed Harlem into a zone of police violence.
Home to attend his fatherâs funeral, Baldwin could not have known that less than ten years after the Harlem Riot of 1935, the area would explode again. But that happened in August 1943 when Harlem experienced its second racial uprising. This outpouring of anger occurred on August 1 and 2 after a white police officer, James Collins, shot and wounded Robert Bandy, a soldier on leave. Even twenty years later, after Harlem experienced yet another paroxysm of racial violence, Baldwin bore witness to the communityâs unrelenting occurrences of police brutality. His argument in 1943 proved even truer in 1966: âHarlem is policed like occupied territory.â1
This chapter explores black New Yorkersâ encounters with violence between the Harlem riots of 1935 and 1943, and their demands for equitable policing. Black peopleâs criticisms of their experiences of underprotection and overpolicing at the hands of law enforcement brings to light their efforts to challenge Jim Crow practices that defined the New York Police Department (NYPD), but often remained hidden in plain sight. Race riots have preoccupied historians who focus on this period of the Jim Crow Northâs history, but attention on those subjects, I argue, has blinded us to blacks who demanded safety as a pivotal aspect of their citizenship and community rights.2
The NYPD, as law enforcement and therefore agents of the state, both overpoliced and underprotected black New Yorkers. Black citizens understood policing as a civil right. By centering Harlemitesâ demands for safety, this chapter illuminates blacksâ vulnerabilities to state-sponsored violence as conditions of Jim Crow policing in New York City. The story of police underprotection of black New Yorkers likely echoes across the entire Jim Crow North.
In the aftermath of the Harlem rebellion of March 19, 1935, triggered by the rumor that Lino Rivera, an AfroâPuerto Rican Harlemite, had been killed by the police, La Guardia commissioned an investigation into the uprisingâs causes. The investigationâs controversial report evidenced a pattern of institutionalized racism in five areas: relief, housing, youth services (education and recreation), health care (and hospital services), and criminal justice (crime and police). The mayor concealed the report from the public because he feared it would damage his administrationâs reputation. On matters of racial equality, convenience and expedience, more than justice and democracy, motivated even the most liberal northerners.
La Guardia was not alone among northern liberals in prioritizing his own political or personal interests at the expense of black peopleâs civil rights. Newspapers in New York City provided sensational portrayals of black criminality, but buried mundane stories about blacks who demanded safety from crime and police brutality. Thus, as black New Yorkers initiated their own anticrime drives to make up for police underprotection, they checked white dailiesâ stories of âcrime wavesâ and âNegro thugs,â and they argued that La Guardiaâs failure to remedy Jim Crow conditions outlined in the report perpetuated inequities.
White dailiesâ racist narratives during the 1930s and 1940s served as ideological forebears of the âculture of povertyâ thesis.3 They interpreted crimes committed by blacks as social problems associated with poverty, not inveterate conditions of the Negro race. White dailiesâ crime-laden narratives about blacks and white citizensâ fears drove the NYPDâs Jim Crow policies of overpolicing through brutality and underpolicing through neglect. The way liberals policed black neighborhoods in Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant revealed less about black criminal behavior and more about the methods, and failures, of white liberal governance. White New Yorkers and the white dailies constructed blacks as criminals and leveraged their political power to punish black citizens as threats to white security. Whether blacks were actual criminals or their criminality was just a figment of white imaginations, newspaper stories about crime and blackness contributed to a widespread NYPD practice that rendered black citizens unworthy of protection and subject to suppression.
Words became black peopleâs weapons against these malpractices. In the late 1930s, black New Yorkers initiated a letter-writing campaign, and the black press published a series of editorials, urging Mayor La Guardia and Commissioner Valentine to protect black people from rape, petty theft, and burglary. Black New Yorkers expressed fear of, and anger against, intraracial crimes, especially against black women and children. They argued that racism explained the NYPDâs underprotection of black citizens. Framing safety and police protection as a civil right, they criticized the police for âJim Crow policing.â These policies and practices promoted unequal protection and punishment of black citizens for no other reasons than the neighborhoods where they lived and the color of their skin.4
As blacks spotlighted police negligence, crimes against whites precipitated a law-and-order campaign. To halt the movement of blacks to Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, in the late 1930s, the Midtown Civic League (MCL) claimed that black crime constituted a âcrime wave.â Black Brooklynites condemned MCLâs racist allegations. After three blacks killed a white youth in Central Park in 1941, white dailies apprised readers of the outbreak of âmuggings.â By singling out and publicizing crimes committed by blacks on whites, and dubbing them âcrime waves,â white news media manufactured racial panic. Such stories rendered invisible black citizens who required adequate police protection. They crowded out the black pressâs standing demands for adequate police protection. These exaggerated media-driven narratives, depicting black areas as crime zones, triggered a letter-writing campaign by white New Yorkers, who demanded that La Guardia protect them from ânegro thugs.â Others insisted that La Guardia favored blacks because of their political support in the 1941 mayoral election, and that the mayor failed to punish black criminals. Motivated by white dailies and white complaints, Police Commissioner Valentine assigned more patrolmen to target areas to protect white people. Police violence and harassment against blacks increased.5
Aghast at the mayorâs instant protection of white citizens, the black community mobilized to expose the color-conscious policing practices of the NYPD, the media-manufactured âcrime wave,â and police neglect and brutality. Black New Yorkers explained juvenile delinquency as a symptom of poverty and unequal access to municipal sources. They framed Valentineâs law-and-order campaign as a proxy for La Guardiaâs failure to enact recommendations detailed in the earlier report on the causes of the Harlem race riot. They demanded protection and experienced punishment. This pattern became a defining characteristic of policing practices and politics in the Jim Crow North.
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In New York City, racism became manifest through police brutality, especially during Prohibition and the Great Depression, when political and cultural discussions of urban crime served as coded language for the class and race differences that blackness connoted.6 Harlem, once the cultural hub of black America, became ground zero for two race riots. After the first riot in 1935, Mayor La Guardia commissioned a group of white and black leaders and social scientists, such as labor leader A. Philip Randolph, poet Countee Cullen, and Howard Universityâs E. Franklin Frazier, to investigate the cause of the riot. While they researched, the number of police officers in Harlem increased. The NYPD detailed five hundred policemen to guard the district.7
The report, Mayor La Guardiaâs Commission on the Harlem Riot of March 19, 1935, not only pinpointed racism among white civilians, but in each of the five areas, it also argued that the general neglect to serve black citizens caused the uprising. The Pittsburgh black daily, the Courier, noted that âthe report . . . holds Mayor La Guardia personally responsible for the jim crow conditions in the city.â Wary about exposing the culpability of his administration, La Guardia never released the report. Yet in July 1936, the New York Amsterdam News, a black weekly, secured a copy and printed sections.8 Thereafter, a committee of twenty-seven leaders of the community, including the Reverend William Lloyd Imes of St. James Presbyterian Church, Mrs. Mabel K. Staupers of the National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses, and Mr. James E. Allen of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), met the mayor on July 22 and, making a reference to the increased police presence since the riot, asked for the âwithdrawal of the âpolice army of occupation in Harlem.ââ9 While La Guardia claimed he âwould not tolerate police brutality in Harlem nor in any other section of Manhattan,â he also claimed no power over the police force, and that Police Commissioner Valentine was âa responsible commissioner.â The mayor offered Harlemâs leadership little in the way of implementing the reportâs recommendations. He acknowledged the economic plight of Harlemites, but explained there was nothing he could do about it.10
After the initial meeting, La Guardia requested the committee to form a delegation of five that would meet periodically with him to discuss the reportâs recommendations. Throughout the remainder of the 1930s, Harlemites complained about police brutality. In 1937, the New York Amsterdam News charged, âPolice terror in New York City must go.â The newspaper stated that police brutality should not happen in ââa land of the free and the home of the brave.â But it can, and does, happen here, even two years after the Harlem rioting and the more recent revelations of the Mayorâs Commission on Conditions in Harlem.â11 Mayor La Guardia proved more capable of meeting to discuss social problems in Harlem than of doing anything substantive to alleviate those problems.
âThe Spirit of Fascismâ and the 1930s Crime Waves
During the late 1930s, southern black migrants and Afro-Caribbean immigrants, as well as black New Yorkers, moved to Brooklyn. Affordable housing and less congested living spaces drew them to the Bedford-Stuyvesant section. Between 1930 and the 1950s, Brooklynâs black population tripled; Bedford-Stuyvesant became, according to the New York Times, âBrooklynâs Harlem.â12 In July of 1937, the Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church endeavored to purchase the âwhite debt-riddenâ Grace Congregational Church, at Stuyvesant and Jefferson Avenues in Bedford-Stuyvesant. Sumner Sirtl, the leader of the Midtown Civic League (MCL), protested black settlement in that section, and especially Bethel AMEâs attempts to purchase the white-owned church. According to Sirtl, â[C]ertain white realtors have the habit of renting houses to colored people without making any repairs thereby depreciating the value of property.â Denying racial discrimination, he charged that blacks neglected to request repairs to their homes. âNow, white people demand repairs on the houses they rent from realtors. As a rule, colored families donât. Therefore, the houses run down. Slum conditions start. Whites move out. All because the colored people donât demand their repairs. They should!â13
Throughout the remainder of the year and the decade, Sirtl and the MCL tried to incite f...