The Harlem Uprising: Segregation and Inequality in Postwar New York City

Abstract

Two horrific deaths on the streets of New York, fifty years apart, illustrate the persistence of police brutality in the nation's largest city. On July 16, 1964, James Powell, a fifteen-year-old taking summer classes in Manhattan's Yorkville neighborhood, was shot by an off-duty police lieutenant across the street from his school. On July 17, 2014, Eric Garner was placed in a chokehold by a plainclothes officer while selling loose cigarettes on a sidewalk in Staten Island; Garner's dying words were “I can't breathe.” Both victims were Black. Both cops—Thomas Gilligan and Daniel Pantaleo—were white. Neither faced charges.Why was the New York Police Department (NYPD) allowed to act with such impunity for so long? A powerful new book by Christopher Hayes offers answers. The Harlem Uprising focuses on the six-day outpouring of rage and grief set off by Powell's death. Hayes illustrates how the uprising activated deep-seated racism in the city, and how subsequent efforts to increase civilian oversight of the NYPD stoked a ferocious backlash led by the Police Benevolent Association (PBA) and its conservative allies. In the years that followed, the PBA would wield its growing political clout against any and all attempts to rein in the police.The book's opening chapters explain, in meticulous detail, how racism was woven into the fabric of New York life. In the early 1960s, as the civil rights movement was cresting, most Black New Yorkers were living in deteriorating housing, attending failing schools, and facing dwindling job opportunities while being systematically marginalized by the city's labor unions. If America was an “affluent society,” Harlem and Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood were in the depths of an “ignored postwar depression” (33). Black communities were at once overpoliced and underpoliced, victims of both brutality and crime. Hayes reveals shocking corruption within the NYPD: officers saw Harlem as a “Gold Coast” where they could line their pockets by tapping into the heroin trade and numbers rackets. This sowed feelings of deep mistrust and powerlessness among Black New Yorkers.Those feelings erupted after Powell's killing. Drawing on contemporary newspaper reports, Hayes offers a vivid, hour-by-hour account of the protests, looting, and violence that gripped the city. Harlemites jeered, taunted, and lobbed bottles at NYPD units, who sometimes responded with bullets. Appeals for calm by old-guard civil rights leaders (Bayard Rustin, James Farmer) mostly fell on deaf ears. By July 20, rioting had spread across the East River to Bed-Stuy. When it was all over, one person had died, and the official toll also included 95 injured civilians, 50 injured police officers, 504 arrests, and 678 damaged businesses.Though it ignited the “long hot summers” of the 1960s, the Harlem uprising has until recently been overshadowed by deadlier sequels: Watts, Detroit, Newark. Hayes builds on a growing body of research about police brutality in New York, including studies by Marilynn Johnson and Clarence Taylor, as well as Michael Flamm's 2017 book In the Heat of the Summer, a sweeping account of the Harlem riot that ties events in New York to the rightward turn of the late 1960s. A welcome contribution of Hayes's work is his focus on local actors such as oft-overlooked Mayor Robert F. Wagner Jr., who served from 1954 to 1965. Hayes argues that Wagner, despite his progressive reputation and vocal support of civil rights, repeatedly set back racial progress by delaying necessary reforms. In 1964, Wagner emerged as an early avatar of Lyndon Johnson's War on Crime. On July 22, the mayor delivered a speech in which he compared Black rioters to the Ku Klux Klan and uttered the phrase “law and order” at least nine times. (By contrast, Barry Goldwater used the phrase only once in his speech accepting the Republican presidential nomination a week earlier.)Wagner's successor, John Lindsay, took office promising to reform the city's Civilian Complaint Review Board (CCRB). Since its founding in 1953, the CCRB had been run internally—and ineffectually—by the NYPD. In 1966, Lindsay restructured the board to include four civilians, who would serve alongside three NYPD appointees. Two of the new members were Black, one was Puerto Rican, and the chairman was Jewish. Though Police Commissioner Howard Leary backed the reforms, the PBA and its rank and file went on the offensive. Ahead of that November's election, the PBA proposed a ballot initiative that would undo Lindsay's reforms and amend the city's charter to restrict any future scrutiny of the NYPD, whether from the mayor, the city council, or municipal agencies. Supporting the initiative was a well-funded coalition of right-wing groups, from William F. Buckley's Conservative Party to neo-Nazi outfits. In a well-researched and evocative chapter, Hayes shows how this campaign crudely martialed anti-Black and anti-Semitic imagery to mobilize pro-cop sentiment. They succeeded: on election night, 63 percent of New Yorkers voted to dismantle the new CCRB.Hayes richly conveys the overpowering weight of racism in 1960s, yet he is occasionally guilty of oversimplification. Aiming to counteract the old canard that Black New Yorkers should have imitated “other” immigrant groups in pursuit of upward mobility, Hayes proclaims it “entirely unreasonable and, in fact, wrong to view Black New Yorkers, even Southern migrants, as immigrants, because they did not come from another country” (182). But many Black New Yorkers in the 1960s were, in fact, immigrants from the West Indies—some of whom felt culturally distinct from their neighbors with roots in the American South. Hayes also ventures onto uncertain terrain when writing about Bed-Stuy, which he describes as “a rootless place” with no effective community leadership prior to the mid-1960s. “There was little to identify with the area aside from segregation, poverty, and crime,” he states (19–20). These claims overlook a rich activist tradition in Black Brooklyn and efface Bed-Stuy's substantial population of middle-class homeowners, many of whom greeted the violence of July 1964 with their own version of “law and order” politics. Hayes's study might have been stronger if he had further explored these complex dynamics within New York's Black communities.Nonetheless, this is an important, timely book that draws a direct line from the events of the 1960s to the entrenched segregation that defines New York to this day. In closing, Hayes draws lessons for the post–George Floyd moment, poignantly reminding readers that progress is not inevitable. “Things can get better, but we have to try,” he writes (251).