of 1776,” educator Nannie Burroughs outlined a broad and deep history of oppression and discrimination. “The causes of the Harlem Riot are not far to seek,” she asserted. “Day after day, year after year, decade after decade, black people have been robbed of their inalienable rights…. That ‘long train of abuses’ is a magazine of powder. An unknown boy was simply the match.”27
After the initial hysteria had subsided, La Guardia had second thoughts about the communist plot, alleged or otherwise, and convened a commission with E. Franklin Frazier as researcher to explore the underlying causes of the Harlem Riot of 1935. Chaired by Dr. Charles H. Roberts, a black dentist and city alderman, the commission held twenty-five hearings and interviewed 160 witnesses; ultimately, it concluded—as would the FBI report after the 1964 riot—that the “outburst was spontaneous and unpremeditated” with “no evidence of any program or leadership of the rioters.” At first looters targeted white stores, but soon “property itself became the object of their fury.”28
The report was highly critical of the NYPD in general and how it reacted on March 19 in particular. “The police practice aggressions and brutalities upon the Harlem citizens not only because they are Negroes but because they are poor and therefore defenseless,” the commission stated. “But these attacks upon the security of the homes and the persons of the citizens are doing more than anything else to create a disrespect for authority and to bring about mass resistance to the injustices suffered by the community.”29
The bulk of the 135-page report, however, focused on the social and economic ills of Harlem. Like the War on Poverty and Great Society programs of the 1960s, it touched on the pressing need for vastly improved public health, education, and housing. The report focused on widespread discrimination in employment and relief, public and private, at both the city and federal levels. And it offered a sweeping set of recommendations—so sweeping, in fact, that when finished a year later, La Guardia opted not to release the report, perhaps because it highlighted problems he could not solve and raised expectations he could not meet. Or perhaps the findings simply were, in the words of the Amsterdam News, which published the full document in July 1936, “too hot, too caustic, too critical, too unfavorable” to his administration.30
The report nevertheless inspired La Guardia to take a more direct interest in the community. “He was not prepared to place Harlem at the center of his agenda,” wrote his biographer, “but he did place it far higher on his list of priorities.” That summer, on his way to a concert, he heard the police broadcast news about a murder in the area and raced uptown to assume personal control and defuse the tense situation. And over the next four years he acted upon many, though by no means all, of the commission’s recommendations. He appointed the city’s first black magistrate, named African Americans to many other municipal posts, integrated the staffs of the city hospitals, built two new public schools, constructed the Harlem River Houses, and added a Women’s Pavilion to Harlem Hospital. For La Guardia, who would serve as mayor from 1934 to 1945, it was a start, albeit overdue and incomplete.31
Two years after the Harlem Riot of 1935, Bayard Rustin moved to New York, where he first lived with his aunt and then found an apartment of his own on St. Nicholas Avenue. The exact reason for his departure from Pennsylvania remains murky. It is possible that he had little choice: Rustin by then had accepted that he was gay and had begun to act upon his sexual desires. The West Chester police may even have caught him having sex in a public park with a prominent young white man and made it clear to him that he had no future in the small town. But it is also likely that he was attracted by the political and cultural opportunities presented by Harlem—not to mention the personal anonymity and social freedom it offered.32
Once Rustin arrived in the fall of 1937, he quickly embraced New York, where he would spend the rest of his life. With his polished tenor voice, he became a member of the Carolinians, a singing group that performed regularly at the Café Society Downtown, a popular club in Greenwich Village. He also joined the Young Communist League (YCL), which was dedicated to the struggle for racial equality and the defense of the Scottsboro Boys, nine black Alabama teenagers falsely accused of rape. In 1941, after Nazi Germany invaded Soviet Russia and Moscow insisted that the struggle against racism take a back seat to the fight against fascism, Rustin left the YCL. But he was not bitter because his experience as a Communist had given him—a man who never earned a college degree—a crash course in planning and organizing. “It taught me a great deal,” he readily admitted later, “and I presume that if I had to do it over again, I’d do the same thing.”33
Even when Rustin was an active Communist, he continued to sing in church choirs and attend Quaker meetings. So it was not surprising that in 1941, with war on the horizon, he joined the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), a Christian pacifist organization led by the socialist A. J. Muste. Like Rustin, Muste was a former Communist, and for a time he served as a sort of father figure to his gifted protégé. He also enabled Rustin to join the crusade of the man who would become his great mentor and patron: A. Philip Randolph, the head of the most important black union in the country, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, and the inspiration behind the 1941 March on Washington protest and movement.
As the United States mobilized for war under President Roosevelt, who had won an unprecedented third term in 1940, an economic boom began and the Great Depression at last came to end. Hopes rose in New York, where the black population had grown by another 150,000 since 1930. But prices and rents in Harlem remained high, while discrimination and segregation in training programs and war plants remained common—90 percent refused to hire African Americans, who represented less than half a percent of the workforce.34 In 1941, Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802, which had the strong support of La Guardia and banned racial discrimination in defense industries. The action came in response to Randolph’s threat of a mass demonstration in Washington, and it led to the creation of the Fair Employment Practices Commission, which had some effect. Eventually, African Americans received real benefits from war mobilization as jobs arrived and paychecks grew. But as with the New Deal, blacks again failed to receive their fair share of government programs and contracts.
Frustration and resentment mounted. In 1941, at the age of thirty-three, Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. was elected to the city council and became a harsh critic of La Guardia, who had failed to implement many of the recommendations in the 1935 report. “The Mayor is one of the most pathetic figures on the current American scene,” Powell wrote in 1942. “Now that his political future is finished, we are no longer potential votes for him. We are therefore ignored.”35
A year later, a race riot erupted in Detroit, where tensions between southern whites and blacks who had migrated north in search of jobs had reached a crisis level. On June 20, a hot Saturday evening, crowds clashed in Belle Isle as rumors swept the city that blacks had raped and murdered a white woman while whites had murdered a black woman and her child, then dumped the bodies in the Detroit River. Over the next three days, thirty-four people were killed, twenty-five of whom were black (seventeen were shot by white officers). Hundreds were injured. Only the arrival of the U.S. Army, ordered to Detroit by President Roosevelt, restored a fragile and bitter peace. The nation watched in shock and horror.
In New York, the fear was that Harlem was next. On June 24, Powell demanded that La Guardia meet with him and said at a city council meeting that if a riot erupted in New York “the blood of innocent people … would rest upon the hands” of the mayor and police commissioner.36 La Guardia refused, perhaps understandably, to meet with Powell, but conferred with other black leaders. In July he made plans in case of violence to close bars, divert traffic, place guards at stores that sold weapons, and protect passengers using public transit. The mayor also had the police commissioner emphasize that officers should demonstrate restraint by using tear gas and deadly force only as a last resort against physical harm.37
At the same time, La Guardia prodded the NYPD to promise to hire more blacks—of the roughly 19,000 officers on the force, only 140 were African American, with 130 stationed in Central Harlem or Bedford-Stuyvesant. Another twenty cadets (the largest group to date) were in the Police Academy. Among them was Robert Mangum, who in 1943 helped found the Guardians, an association of black officers, because the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association