In the Heat of the Summer. Michael W. Flamm
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until 1949—with the support of Powell, who in 1944 had joined the U.S. House of Representatives—would the Guardians receive a charter of recognition from the city.38 It would take far longer for them to gain respect from their fellow white officers.
La Guardia’s efforts in the summer of 1943 were in vain, although they may have limited the bloodshed to come. On August 1, a hot Sunday evening, everyone in Harlem was outdoors, trying to beat the heat in the absence of air conditioning. At 7 P.M. Marjorie Polite registered at the Hotel Braddock on West 126th Street, which was under surveillance for prostitution. Unhappy with her room, she demanded a refund and then got into an argument with the elevator operator, who refused to return a dollar tip that she had allegedly given him. Patrolman James Collins, who was on duty inside the hotel, first tried to calm Polite and then ordered her to leave. When she refused and began to curse at him, he arrested her for disorderly conduct.39
In the hotel lobby was a Connecticut woman, Florine Roberts, who was meeting her son Robert Bandy, an Army private on leave from the 703rd Military Police Battalion in Jersey City. Together, they demanded that Collins release Polite. He refused. What happened next was a matter of dispute. According to Collins, he was attacked for no reason by Roberts and Bandy, who seized his nightstick and began to strike the officer in the head, forcing Collins to use his revolver when the soldier fled and refused to halt. According to Bandy, he objected and intervened only when Collins shoved Polite; the officer then threw his nightstick at Bandy, who caught it and was shot in the shoulder when he was slow to return it.40
Fortunately, the injuries of both men were not serious. Unfortunately, word quickly spread that a white officer had killed a black soldier attempting to protect his mother. The police tried to correct the false rumors, but by 8 P.M. a crowd estimated at three thousand was gathered outside the 28th Precinct, threatening to take revenge against the officer responsible for the alleged atrocity. At 9 P.M. La Guardia rushed to the station house, which was already surrounded by army infantry and military police, and conferred with the police and fire commissioners. With almost manic energy, La Guardia began to give orders and speak to the crowd, urging people to go home. He also took a tour of the riot area, accompanied by local black leaders. Meanwhile, efforts were made to recruit volunteers from the community and bring in reinforcements by keeping all patrolmen on duty when their shifts ended at midnight. Soon Central Harlem was flooded with five thousand police officers and contingency plans went into effect.41
But it was to no avail. At 10:30 P.M. the sound of breaking glass rang through the streets. Claude Brown, author of the memoir Manchild in the Promised Land, was six at the time and thought Harlem was under attack from German or Japanese bombers. He asked his father, a sharecropper from South Carolina, where the sirens were. “This ain’t no air raid—just a whole lotta niggers gone fool,” he replied. But the noise kept Brown scared and awake in his bed for hours.42
Soon looters were rampaging the streets from 110th to 145th, Lenox to Eighth Avenue, filling the air with screams and laughter, although there was a deep undercurrent of anger. “Do not attempt to fuck with me,” a young man told the Amsterdam News. Author Ralph Ellison again found himself in the middle of a riot when he exited the 137th Street subway station after dinner with friends. In the New York Post, he wrote that he sensed shame in some looters like “the woman with her arms loaded who passed me muttering ‘Forgive me, Jesus. Have mercy, Lord.’” Still others seemed filled with self-disgust when “faced with an embarrassment of riches and took only useless objects.”43
By Monday morning Harlem was calm even if 125th Street, the epicenter of the riot, was littered with shattered windows and scattered debris from ransacked businesses. “It would have been better to have left the plate glass as it had been and the goods lying in the stores,” commented novelist James Baldwin, who was in New York to attend the funeral of his estranged father and celebrate his nineteenth birthday. “It would have been better, but it also would have been intolerable, for Harlem had needed something to smash. To smash something is the ghetto’s chronic need. Most of the time it is the members of the ghetto who smash each other, and themselves. But as long as the ghetto walls are standing there will always come a moment when these outlets do not work.” For his part, Ellison saw the riot as “the poorer element’s way of blowing off steam.”44
At 9:50 A.M. La Guardia, exhausted, went on the air for the third time. “Shame has come to our city and sorrow to the large number of our fellow citizens, decent, law-abiding citizens, who live in the Harlem section,” he said. “The situation is under control. I want to make it clear that this was not a race riot, for the thoughtless hoodlums had no one to fight with and gave vent to their activity by breaking windows [and] looting many of these stores belonging to the people who live in Harlem.” He also had praise for the police, who were “most efficient and exercised a great deal of restraint.” And he informed the people of Harlem that he expected “full and complete cooperation” while pledging that he would maintain law and order in the city.45
To ensure he would keep his promise, La Guardia had fifteen hundred volunteers, most of whom were African Americans, and six thousand police (civilian and military) patrol the riot zone. In reserve and on standby at several armories were eight thousand New York state guardsmen, including a black regiment. They were not needed, for the rioters were also exhausted. Over the next week life slowly returned to normal as the mayor lifted the liquor and traffic bans and city workers began a cleanup campaign. But the toll was costly. At least six persons, all black, were dead. Almost seven hundred were injured and nearly six hundred were arrested (most of whom were young adult males from a broad range of backgrounds), with property damage as high as $5 million.46
In the aftermath, the Amsterdam News echoed La Guardia when it declared that “we take our stand on the side of law and order, firmly asserting that those persons who violate the law ought to be arrested and punished.” Yet many officers routinely employed excessive force and expressed contemptuous attitudes. “Policemen can be efficient without being brutal!” it editorialized. Officers who were “efficient and understanding” would find the community supportive and sympathetic. But “Harlem will not be bullied, brow-beaten, or bull-dozed,” warned the newspaper.47
Langston Hughes also offered an ode to the woman whose arrest had led to the riot. In “The Ballad of Margie Polite,” he celebrated her refusal to accept her fate as a victim or go gently into the night. “If Margie Polite had of been white, she might not’ve cussed out the cop that night,” wrote Hughes. “In the lobby of the Braddock Hotel, she might not’ve felt the urge to raise hell.” But she was black and she had resisted arrest. In the process, she had become more than a footnote to history. “Margie warn’t nobody important before,” the poem continued. “But she ain’t just nobody now no more.”48
From a comparative perspective, the Harlem riots of 1935 and 1943 had similar roots and outcomes. In the words of Robert M. Fogelson, a noted urban historian, both were “spontaneous, unorganized, and precipitated by police actions.” Both featured looting aimed at property rather than people (unlike in Detroit). And both were, according to Fogelson, “so completely confined to the ghetto that life was normal for whites and blacks elsewhere in the city.” Even if the riots were a form of political protest, the prompt actions of black leaders and city officials effectively contained the violence and damage. “Nevertheless,” wrote Fogelson, who praised the “virtuoso performance” of La Guardia, “these efforts (and the riots themselves) indicated the inability of the moderate black leaders to channel rank-and-file discontent into legitimate channels and when necessary to restrain the rioters.” Thus the clashes of 1935 and 1943 were, in a sense, the “direct precursors” to the Harlem Riot of 1964.49
But for now what was more critical was how little had changed in the aftermath of the upheaval of 1943. More than three hundred thousand African Americans continued to face “obscene living conditions” as they crowded into substandard housing intended for seventy-five thousand. Harlem was still, asserted an article in Collier’s, “very inflammable, dynamically race conscious, emotionally on the hair trigger, doggedly resentful of its Jim Crow estate.”50 It remained ready to explode—all it would take was another spark.