1943. At the time, he was on the road, tirelessly moving from city to city organizing and recruiting for Muste and Randolph. He was also working as a trainer for the newly formed Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), which fellow FOR field secretary James Farmer had launched in an effort to promote racial justice through nonviolent resistance. Then in November Rustin received his draft notice and was arrested when he refused to report for civilian public service. He spent the next two years in federal prison, where he protested against segregated dining facilities, studied the ideas of Gandhi, and endured hunger strikes. He also faced homosexual misconduct charges, which delayed his release until 1946.51
The following year, Rustin and CORE executive secretary George Houser organized the Journey of Reconciliation, the first Freedom Ride to protest segregation in interstate travel. As a participant, Rustin was sentenced to a chain gang in North Carolina. But the arrest that shattered his life came in 1953, when he was taken into custody in Pasadena, California, and charged with lewd vagrancy for performing oral sex on two white men in the backseat of a car. It was not his first arrest for illegal sex, but it brought his homosexuality to public notice. After pleading guilty to a single charge of “sex perversion” (the official term for consensual sodomy at the time), he was fired from his position as director of race relations with FOR after twelve years of dedicated service.52
Feeling abandoned and adrift, Rustin struggled to make himself again acceptable and respectable in the eyes of the friends and allies he had once had. For the rest of his career, his sexual orientation would shadow him even more than his communist background. In 1953, he joined the War Resisters League (over the objections of Muste) and soon became executive director; four years later, Rustin was instrumental in persuading King to form the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. But in 1960 Congressman Powell (a board member and social conservative) forced Rustin to resign by threatening to expose his sexual orientation on the floor of Congress and feed false allegations to the press that he and King were lovers.53
While Rustin fought to restore his reputation, demographic change swept across many neighborhoods in New York in the 1950s, generating racial tension and conflict. Segregation, especially in housing and education, remained a serious problem. Economic factors—especially deindustrialization, automation, and discrimination—affected the workplace and job market, which in turn contributed to the depressed social conditions experienced by a large majority of African Americans in Central Harlem. And youth crime, often connected to the drug trade, was a growing concern of many residents.
The black migration to the North from the South, where the mechanization of cotton farming led to an exodus of millions of sharecroppers from rural areas, continued unabated after World War II. By 1950 more than one million African Americans lived in New York—a 30 percent increase since 1948. During the 1950s, almost half a million more blacks arrived, only to discover that the federal government and local banks preserved residential segregation by “redlining” neighborhoods and restricting loans. Meanwhile, more than a million whites departed for the suburbs of New Jersey, Long Island, and Westchester County, where blacks were usually not welcome. Even more whites might have left if not for the Lyons Law, which required city residency for municipal employees. But in 1960 the state legislature added a loophole for police officers, which enabled many of them to relocate and reinforced the sense in Harlem and Bed-Stuy that the NYPD was an outside force of occupation and oppression.54
The inflow of blacks and the outflow of whites changed the complexion of neighborhoods and boroughs. It also increased the pressure on housing as conditions worsened, especially in Harlem, where almost half of the buildings predated 1900. In an unpublished article on the first mental health institution in the area, the Lafargue Psychiatric Clinic, Ellison provided an almost hallucinogenic description of the plight of the community. “Harlem is a ruin,” he wrote, “[and] many of its ordinary aspects (its crimes, its casual violence, its crumbling buildings with littered area-ways, ill-smelling halls and vermin-invaded rooms) are indistinguishable from the distorted images that appear in dreams, and which, like muggers haunting a lonely hall, quiver in the waking mind with hidden and threatening significance.”55
Dr. Kenneth Clark offered a similar assessment in Dark Ghetto, his classic study of Harlem. “The most concrete fact of the ghetto is its physical ugliness—the dirt, the filth, the neglect,” he wrote. “The parks are seedy with lack of care. The streets are crowded with the people and refuse. In all of Harlem there is no museum, no art gallery, no art school, no sustained ‘little theater’ group; despite the stereotype of the Negro as artist, there are only five libraries—but hundreds of bars, hundreds of churches, and scores of fortune tellers. Everywhere there are signs of fantasy, decay, abandonment, and defeat.” Like Ellison, Clark saw a psychological dimension to the physical deterioration. “The only constant characteristic is a sense of inadequacy,” Clark observed of Harlem. “People seem to have given up in the little things that are so often the symbol of the larger things.”56
Here Clark’s analysis was not entirely fair or correct. Plenty of residents had not given up—on the contrary, they often engaged in political activism and mobilized against racial discrimination and segregation where they lived, worked, and went to school. In the 1930s, blacks in Harlem had participated in “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work” demonstrations. In the 1940s, they had enthusiastically supported the successful campaigns of Powell for Congress and Benjamin Davis, a Harvard Law School graduate and staunch member of the Communist Party, for city council. They also picketed against Stuyvesant Town, a middle-class apartment complex that refused to rent to blacks despite the fact that the developer, Met Life, had received tax exemptions from the city. In the 1950s, a group of African American mothers who became known as the “Little Rock Nine of Harlem” pulled their children from three junior high schools as a protest against segregation.57
As overcrowding intensified, resentment over segregation deepened. In Harlem, where the number of residents had doubled since 1940, the number of apartments had not increased despite the construction of the Riverton Houses, a large middle-income housing development created by Met Life in response to the protests over Stuyvesant Town. White store owners, observed Jesse B. Semple (the Harlem character created by Langston Hughes), “take my money over the counter, then go on downtown to Stuyvesant Town where I can’t live, or out to them pretty suburbs, and leave me in Harlem holding the bag.” By 1952 blacks had finally won, after an unrelenting fight by a coalition of political and religious organizations, the right to live in the apartment complex—but only after it was fully occupied. Eight years later, when Lieutenant Gilligan was a resident, only a tiny handful of his neighbors were black.58
During the 1950s, the population of Harlem fell by 10 percent, mainly because poor blacks were moving to other ghettos like Bed-Stuy in Brooklyn. But a few middle-class black professionals were also starting to take advantage of the opportunity to relocate to the suburbs, among them Clark, who moved his family to Westchester in 1950 because it had better public schools than Harlem. “My children have only one life,” Clark said. “I can’t risk that.” It was, nevertheless, a difficult decision for the distinguished psychologist who with his wife produced the famous “doll study,” which documented the harmful effects of school segregation and influenced the landmark Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. “More than forty years of my life had been lived in Harlem,” Clark wrote. “I started school in the Harlem public schools. I first learned about people, about love, about cruelty, about sacrifice, about cowardice, about courage, about bombast in Harlem.”59
The departure of middle-class professionals like Clark coincided with the loss of decent-paying jobs for working-class residents. During the 1950s, deindustrialization came to New York as factories began to relocate to the South. Automation also invaded the service sector, leading to fewer opportunities for those with poor English or dark skin, little experience or limited skills. The first Latino borough president and member of Congress, Herman Badillo, arrived in New York from Puerto Rico with his mother in 1941. In the early 1950s, he was able to attend City College and law school by working as a pin boy in a bowling alley and as an elevator operator in an apartment building—both jobs threatened or eliminated by technology.60
Coincidentally, when Harlem erupted in 1964, both Mayor Robert