In the Heat of the Summer. Michael W. Flamm
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excluded from the skilled trades because labor unions and apprenticeship programs refused to accept them. Together, deindustrialization and discrimination ravaged Harlem. In 1962, Clark received a large grant from the President’s Committee on Juvenile Delinquency, which believed that black teens posed a significant threat to urban peace. The grant funded the Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited (HARYOU) project, which employed two hundred “associates” to conduct interviews and gather information about the community. Their research, which would become the statistical basis of Dark Ghetto, showed that most black families maintained a “marginal subsistence,” with a median income of $3,995 compared to $6,100 for white families.61
Compounding the inequity was the fact that blacks often paid more in rent than whites even though almost half the housing in Central Harlem was substandard compared to 15 percent in the city as a whole. Residential segregation led to higher rates of population density and left residents with fewer options about where to live. “Cruel in the extreme,” wrote Clark, is the landlord who, like the store owner who charges Negroes more for shoddy merchandise, exploits the powerlessness of the poor.”62
The perception of exploitation by white merchants—especially Jewish businessmen—was real and widespread. But whether it was accurate is more difficult to determine given that store owners of all races and religions had to operate in a “high-cost, high-crime, high-risk environment,” with narrow profit margins and limited returns on investment. Beyond debate, however, was the reality that African Americans owned or managed only 4 percent of Harlem businesses. By comparison, southern cities like Atlanta often had substantially greater numbers of black-owned businesses because of commercial segregation.63
Other measures of social distress were more obvious and less open to dispute by 1964. For example, the mortality rate for blacks as a whole remained 60 percent higher than for whites—73 percent for infants. Even the streets were, literally, less safe—in Central Harlem, a child was 61 percent more likely to get killed by a car than in other neighborhoods. And for black adults the unemployment rate was twice as high as for the rest of the city. Among young men eighteen to twenty-four, it was five times as high for blacks as for whites.64
The problem was likely to worsen, predicted Clark, as the number of teens rose and the number of jobs available to them fell. “The restless brooding young men without jobs who cluster in the bars in the winter and on stoops and corners in the summer are the stuff out of which riots are made,” he wrote. “The solution to riots is not better police protection (or even the claims of police brutality) or pleas from civil rights leaders for law and order. The solution lies in finding jobs for the unemployed and in raising the social and economic status of the entire community. Otherwise the ‘long hot summers’ will come every year.”65
“Brooding young men” on street corners were not new to Harlem. But in the two decades after World War II, the disappearance of jobs and, to a lesser extent, the departure of individuals like Clark weakened the social fabric of Harlem and contributed to the rise in social disorder. According to the NYPD, arrests of teenagers rose 60 percent between 1952 and 1957, with African Americans disproportionately implicated, although the statistics are open to interpretation and challenge.66 The figures nonetheless concerned the NAACP, which feared that conservatives might use them as proof of black criminality and evidence against racial integration. Executive secretary Roy Wilkins stated in 1959 that reducing youth crime was vital because “many of our enemies are using incidents of juvenile delinquency to buttress their fight against us and against desegregation of the schools.”67
Drugs—especially heroin—were a major cause of youth crime. In the 1950s, heroin claimed the lives of author Claude Brown’s brother and many of his friends. By the 1960s, “there were a lot more drugs than we ever saw in our life, a lot more burglaries, and a lot more assaults,” recalled Detective Sonny Grosso, a native of Harlem who also served there. “And that’s all tied to the addicts trying to get more money to pay for their drugs.” Dope pushing and gang banging—although the term was not yet invented—were rampant. According to a Harlem supervisor with the Youth Board, many leaders and members were heroin users, which led to internal conflict and gang disintegration as well as more crime and turf wars.68
At least half of New York’s thirty thousand addicts lived in Central Harlem, where narcotics arrests were more than ten times higher than in the rest of the city by 1964. “Property crimes skyrocketed to pay for habits, and then violent crimes followed, not only in the competition between dealers, but also in the disciplinary and debt-collecting functions of the gangs,” wrote a police historian. “Heroin created thousands of rich killers and millions of derelicts, whores, and thieves. In short, it created crime as we know it.”69
Dealing drugs was not, however, the only visible and profitable criminal activity in Harlem. Gambling was also widespread because “people were always looking for a way out,” recalled Detective Barney Cohen, who also served in Bed-Stuy. “The numbers game remains a community pastime; streetwalking still flourishes on 125th Street; and marijuana is easy to get,” Michael Harrington wrote in The Other America, his famous 1962 expose of urban and rural poverty. “These things are not, of course, natural’ to the Negro. They are by-products of a ghetto which has little money, much unemployment, and a life to be lived in the streets. Because of them, and because the white man is so ready to believe crime in the Negro, fear is basic to the ghetto.”70
Disillusionment and disenchantment were also pervasive according to a black journalist who testified before the state legislature in June 1963. “The mood of the Negro, particularly in New York City, is very, very bitter,” said Louis Lomax, who co-produced the documentary The Hate That Hate Produced about Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam. “He is losing faith. The Negro on the streets of Harlem is tired of platitudes from white liberals.” Adding to the impatience and frustration was a sense of invisibility and inadequacy, because while Harlem simmered and suffered in the shadows, the national media spotlight shone brightly on the civil rights struggle in the South.71
In the North, African Americans now felt mounting pressure to become more active and visible in the freedom struggle. “Southern Negroes have shown bravery and should shame the Northern Negro,” said the entertainer Sammy Davis, Jr. “They seem to have more spunk and backbone,” said a machinist in Harlem. The protests in Alabama were the turning point—the televised images had a searing impact, especially on urban teenagers. “For the black people of this nation,” wrote Rustin after a visit, “Birmingham became the moment of truth.” The civil rights movement, he believed, had reached a new stage. “The Negro masses are no longer prepared to wait for anybody,” he added. “They are going to move. Nothing can stop them.”72
With the civil rights bill facing an uncertain future in Congress, Rustin in July brought his idea for a march on Washington to the “Big Six” movement leaders—King, Randolph, Wilkins, Farmer, Whitney Young of the Urban League, and John Lewis of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). At a meeting in New York at the Roosevelt Hotel, Rustin called for a mass, nonviolent demonstration, which would require extensive planning and organization. But Wilkins immediately and strongly objected to him serving as director. “He’s got too many scars,” the NAACP leader said, citing Rustin’s flirtation with communism in the late 1930s, his prison term during World War II, and his arrest in Pasadena in 1953. “This march is of such importance that we must not put a person of his liabilities as the head.”73
Farmer, however, defended him, and after Randolph cleverly volunteered to serve as director (with Rustin as his assistant), Wilkins reluctantly agreed on the condition that Rustin remain in the background and avoid the limelight, which proved impossible. With less than two months to prepare, Rustin instantly set to work, hiring a staff, inventing policies, raising funds, and maintaining unity among the many organizations sponsoring the demonstration. It was the most intense period of his lengthy career, but he achieved a remarkable feat, earning forever after the title of “Mr. March” from his mentor, Randolph.
FIGURE 2. Bayard Rustin briefs reporters