another three nights. In both communities, the rioting and looting were intense, although the vast majority of black residents, regardless of their sympathies or beliefs, never ventured from their homes or apartments.5
The Harlem Riot, as most whites called it, was accompanied by hundreds of injuries and arrests as well as at least one death. In both neighborhoods, the business districts were devastated, with white-owned and black-owned stores vandalized and ransacked. Soon the rebellion or uprising, as some blacks described it, spread to other cities such as Rochester, New York, and sent shockwaves across the country.6 The first “long, hot summer” of the decade had arrived—and with it a new racial dynamic that would drive a wedge between the civil rights movement and many white liberals who had supported it in the early 1960s. The image of the black rioter now joined the symbol of the black criminal, which had deep roots in American history; together, they served as both the real and imagined basis of white anxiety.7
MAP 1. Central Harlem
MAP 2. Bedford-Stuyvesant
Goldwater had predicted the outbreak of civil disorder and blamed it on the doctrine of civil disobedience preached and practiced by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and his followers. The Republican nominee also successfully conflated the disparate threats of crime and riots as he borrowed the issue of law and order from Democrats in Dixie, modified it, and propelled “domestic violence” from the margins to the mainstream of presidential politics. For decades southern whites had opposed civil rights in part by claiming that integration would lead to a sharp increase in racial crime and unrest, which conservatives attributed to black immorality. Now growing numbers of northern whites—even those in favor of racial equality—likewise feared that integration would harm public safety.8
The conservative appeal to law and order posed a serious threat to the liberal dreams of President Lyndon Johnson, who responded to the political pressure with a dual strategy. As the campaign for the White House reached a climax in the fall of 1964, he promised with extravagant rhetoric that the War on Poverty would combat the social conditions—rising unemployment, failing schools, and poor housing—that plagued urban ghettos and generated racial violence. With broad and bipartisan support from both liberals and conservatives, the president in the spring of 1965 also declared a War on Crime in the optimistic belief that it would raise the level of police professionalism and lessen the incidence or perception of police brutality—another source of black anger and frustration.
Johnson hoped and thought that better policing combined with social programs and a national commitment to civil rights would reduce black crime and unrest, which liberals attributed to white racism. But the War on Crime had limited impact, although it substantially widened the door to federal intervention in local policing. Within three years it had evolved into an anti-riot program in the wake of the unrest that Harlem had foretold—Watts in 1965, Newark and Detroit in 1967, Washington and more than a hundred other cities after the assassination of King in 1968. By then Johnson had decided not to run for another term and the War on Poverty was also in retreat, denounced and defunded by white conservatives who contended that it had encouraged and rewarded black rioters.9
After Republican President Richard Nixon moved into the White House, he recast the War on Crime as a War on Drugs, with the addict and dealer now joining the criminal and rioter as public enemies. Building on the political consensus in favor of a larger federal role in law enforcement and appealing to the public demand for law and order, Nixon in the 1970s targeted heroin as a major threat to American society, especially to middle-class suburbs where white youths were portrayed as the innocent victims of the drug trade. As cocaine became a growing menace, Republican President Ronald Reagan escalated the War on Drugs in the 1980s and Democratic President Bill Clinton expanded it even more in the 1990s. During these decades, conservatives and liberals in Congress, white and black, were consistently supportive.10
The bipartisan War on Drugs has cost tens of billions of dollars to date. It has also harmed minority families and communities across the nation. In 2014, fifty years after the Harlem Riot, the United States had more prisoners behind bars by a wide margin than any other country in the world—most of them poor young men of color convicted of nonviolent crimes. And it had a rate of incarceration between five and ten times as high as in Western Europe and other democracies. Although on the decline, the rate remained historically high in comparison to incarceration levels in the United States from the mid-1920s to the early 1970s.11
In recent years, public attention has also focused on the militarization of policing—a collective legacy of the 1960s riots—and the deaths of unarmed blacks at the hands of armed whites. Sometimes they result from civilian actions—as when Trayvon Martin was shot in Florida by a neighborhood watch volunteer in 2012. Often the killings are a consequence of police actions, justified or not, which have caused sadness and anger in black communities across the nation. And on occasion they have led to renewed outbursts of civil unrest, as in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014 and Baltimore, Maryland, in 2015.12
Today James Powell is forgotten by politicians, policymakers, and even participants in the Black Lives Matter movement. But his death was a catalyst for the Harlem Riot, which holds historical significance because it foreshadowed the disorders of the decade and helped set the stage for the politics of crime and policing, which has affected the lives of millions of minorities for more than half a century.
No one to date has written an in-depth history of the racial unrest in New York City in July 1964.13 This day-to-day, street-level narrative is intended to recapture that story and, in the process, provide some historical background for our current predicament. It is important to understand how the riots in Harlem and Brooklyn, although not the direct cause of the prison crisis, influenced the political context in which the crime and drug policies of recent decades have unfolded. In the Heat of the Summer—the title comes from a song by the folk artist Phil Ochs—shines a spotlight on the extraordinary drama of a single week when peaceful protests and violent unrest intersected, law and order moved to the forefront of presidential politics, the freedom struggle reached a crossroads, and the War on Crime was set in motion.
Why no complete account of this critical moment exists is a mystery. The Harlem Riot typically gets only a couple of paragraphs or pages in the standard versions of urban unrest. Even the Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (better known as the Kerner Commission) largely ignored it. Although New York was not the worst riot, it was the first major civil disorder of the 1960s. It also erupted in the media capital of the United States and presaged unrest to come. Yet a comparative silence surrounds the clashes in Central Harlem and Bed-Stuy—an odd oversight given the way the national media have commemorated the racial fires that transformed other cities.14
Watts, Detroit, and Washington have all generated important books. Even a smaller city like Rochester—which had a riot the weekend after Harlem—has become the subject of July ’64, an award-winning documentary film. Perhaps the violent events in New York, which attracted national and international coverage at the time, failed to fit the conventional narrative, which presents 1964 as a year of tragedy and suffering—symbolized by the disappearance and murder of three civil rights workers in the South—that led to triumph and redemption in the form of the Civil Rights Act. Possibly the unrest in Harlem and Brooklyn was simply overshadowed by the far deadlier and more destructive disorders that began in 1965. In the end, it is hard to know exactly why the largest riot of “Freedom Summer” has not received the attention it merits.15
To correct this omission and tell the story as accurately as possible, I have supplemented new discoveries from historical archives with personal interviews I conducted with dozens of Harlem residents, police officers, political activists, city officials, and print journalists, black and white. Few of my interviewees had ever spoken for the record of their experiences in July 1964. For many it was difficult, even painful, to reconstruct the past. Yet their memories and observations provided me with insights that I could not have gained elsewhere.