the 1920s. “It is a city within a city, the greatest Negro city in the world.” But the energy of Harlem could not disguise the fact that it was also a ghetto, with all of the underlying social and economic problems that typically added fuel to the fires of outrage. Periodically, the community exploded, most notably in 1935 during the Great Depression and in 1943 during World War II, even as the same conditions persisted into the 1950s and 1960s. To appreciate what happened in 1964 it is important to understand the history of Harlem.3
After the Civil War, New York City underwent an urban revolution. New neighborhoods were needed as the population surpassed a million, and in 1873 Harlem was annexed. By 1881 the elevated railroad had reached 129th Street and a building boom soon followed, with row upon row of elegant brownstones and exclusive apartments constructed on broad and leafy streets in the next two decades. It was, predicted a magazine in 1893, inevitable that “the center of fashion, wealth, culture and intelligence must, in the near future, be found in the ancient and honorable village of Harlem.”4
The real estate speculators assumed that if they built it, wealthy whites would come to Harlem in search of fresh air and living space as well as an escape from the noise and congestion of the city. But not if they had to share the area with blacks, who were not welcome. So commercial banks were pressured not to offer mortgages to African Americans. Property owners were forced to sign restrictive covenants stating that they would rent or sell only to Caucasians. And neighborhood associations were formed to defend the color barrier. “We are approaching a crisis,” declared the founder of the Harlem Property Owners Improvement Corporation in 1913. “It is the question of whether the white man will rule Harlem or the Negro.”5
But by then it was too late. A wave of speculation in Harlem had swamped the housing market, causing it to collapse in 1905 amid a sea of unsold and unrented buildings. Meanwhile, black migrants from the South and immigrants from the Caribbean were flooding into other parts of the city, causing apartment shortages and rising rents. Tensions also festered between longtime residents and new arrivals, both the native- and foreign-born, which caused lasting divisions within the black community. At the same time, urban renewal and commercial expansion, such as the construction of the original and ornate Pennsylvania Station, were destroying affordable housing and dislocating black residents in Hell’s Kitchen on the West Side and in Midtown Manhattan.
Into the breach stepped entrepreneurs such as Philip Payton, founder of the Afro-Am Realty Company, which began to lease Harlem properties from white owners and then rent them to black tenants. Payton was a graduate of Livingston College in North Carolina who had moved to New York in 1899 to make his fortune. After working as a handyman, a barber (his father’s trade), and a janitor in a real estate office, he saw his chance and seized it. Another opportunist was Solomon Riley, a barrel-chested Barbados native with a Caucasian wife who followed the same strategy as Payton. “I decided to turn the sword’s edge the other way” was how he put it.6
The Interborough Rapid Transit (IRT) line along Lenox Avenue, completed in 1904, opened the floodgates to black families eager to enjoy the good life and spacious apartments in Harlem. Their ranks grew as the economic stimulus of World War I created job opportunities in northern factories and reinforced the Great Migration of African Americans from the rural South. In the decade after 1918, almost a hundred thousand blacks moved to Central Harlem, which by 1930 was home to almost two hundred thousand African Americans, more than 65 percent of New York’s black population and 12 percent of the city population.7
By the Jazz Age Central Harlem had become the place where African Americans could enjoy the “fundamental rights of American citizenship” according to Johnson, whose mother hailed from the Bahamas. “In return, the Negro loves New York and is proud of it, and contributes in his way to its greatness.” During the 1920s and 1930s, greatness was everywhere as the Harlem Renaissance attracted the most gifted and talented blacks from across the United States and the West Indies.8
Entertainers like Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, Florence Mills, Bert Williams, Bessie Smith, Duke Ellington, Fletcher Henderson, and Fats Waller graced the stages of the Apollo Theater, the Cotton Club, Small’s Paradise, and the Savoy Ballroom. Writers and poets like Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, Countee Cullen, and Zora Neale Hurston dazzled the literary world. And scholars like E. Franklin Frazier, a Howard University sociologist, and Alain Locke, the first African American Rhodes Scholar and author of The New Negro, produced important studies of black society.9
At the same time, institutions both sacred (such as the Abyssinian Baptist Church, which soon had the largest Protestant congregation in the country) and secular (such as the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture) enriched life in Harlem. It was also the center of African American political thought and hosted The Crisis, a magazine published by the NAACP and edited by W. E. B. Du Bois and Jessie Faucet; Opportunity, a journal published by the National Urban League and edited by Charles S. Johnson; and the Messenger, a monthly originally sponsored by the Socialist Party and edited by A. Philip Randolph and Chandler Owen.
But the glamour and sophistication of the Harlem Renaissance could not hide the fact that the community was not monolithic. On the contrary, it was diverse, with deep divisions between the “respectable” churchgoers and the “rebellious” street people, the middle class and the lower class, the native-born and the foreign-born, the light-skinned and the dark-skinned. In the 1920s, most blacks also could not escape the strains of everyday life in Harlem, where it was a constant struggle to make ends meet amid low incomes and high rents (whites continued to own the vast majority of properties and businesses). With crowding and congestion at extreme levels, death by violence and disease was rampant. Mothers in Harlem died in childbirth at twice the rate of mothers in other parts of the city; the infant mortality rate for blacks was almost twice as high as for whites. Rickets, a bone disorder caused by malnutrition, was common.10
No wonder that when the Great Depression arrived it “didn’t have the impact on the Negroes that it had on whites,” observed George S. Schuyler, a novelist, journalist, and skeptic of the Harlem Renaissance, because “Negroes had been in the Depression all the time.” He was essentially right, but by the early 1930s a bad situation had grown even worse. Across New York the homicide rate fell—but not in Central Harlem, where it rose significantly. Malnutrition among children was three times the rate of the rest of the city. And disease remained at epidemic levels—the rate of tuberculosis among blacks was four times the rate among whites, although mortality rates on the whole declined due to better health care and free medical clinics.11
Led by Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia, a liberal Republican with strong ties to the black community, New York offered relatively generous relief assistance. Federal aid also came from the New Deal of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, a liberal Democrat and former governor of New York who actively sought black votes. But although African Americans in Central Harlem enjoyed real benefits that prevented mass hunger and deprivation, in general they received less than their fair share of public welfare, often as a result of racism and discrimination. In response, private institutions like Abyssinian Baptist, headed by the influential minister Adam Clayton Powell, Sr. and his son Adam, the assistant pastor, tried to meet the growing need with soup kitchens, clothing drives, and homeless shelters.
Under the dynamic leadership of Powell Sr., who was named pastor in 1908, Abyssinian Baptist had a congregation of ten thousand and was the most prominent church in Harlem. Powell Jr. was an only son, the adored and pampered child of mixed-race parents. With straight hair and fair skin, he could pass as white, which he briefly chose to do while a student at Colgate University. After college he returned to Harlem in 1930, earned a master’s degree in religious education from Columbia University, and entered the ministry at his father’s side. Handsome and charismatic, he became a popular civil rights leader during the Great Depression, and in 1938 succeeded his father as pastor. Three years later, he was the first black elected to the city council; in 1944, he joined Congress as the first black representative from New York State.12
The root of the problem, Powell Jr. believed, was a lack of jobs. Last hired and first fired, blacks suffered from an unemployment rate at least several times that of whites. In Central Harlem, whites owned three-quarters