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

Abstract

Christopher Hayes shows in his aptly titled The Harlem Uprising that the unrest that swept through central Harlem and Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood during July 1964 emerged from a longer history of racial segregation, economic transformation, and political marginalization. The first five chapters detail the “vast system of structural discrimination” that became worse, not better, during the heyday of civil rights activism (p. 2). Duly attentive to the seemingly impersonal forces that bounded the promise of postwar prosperity, Hayes repeatedly and rightly emphasizes the role of policy choices and political calculation in stymying Black New Yorkers' efforts to secure access to housing, jobs, unions, schools, and policing. That confluence of “rising expectations” and “declining fortunes” was central to the six days of demonstrations that followed the July 16, 1964, shooting of fifteen-year-old James Powell (p. 5). In the book's most original contribution, the middle six chapters examine the response of a Black community that had already become rapidly disillusioned with nonviolence and racial integration. Reconstructing the week's developments in remarkable detail, Hayes recounts days filled with meetings between civil rights leaders who had little local credibility and city officials who had little desire to address the deeper roots of the crisis. While movement veterans such as James Farmer and Bayard Rustin pleaded for peace each evening, a growing number of Black Harlemites and Brooklynites turned to bottle throwing, window breaking, and store looting to protest both systematic abuses by the New York Police Department and a much broader range of grievances. After six days, the protests petered out and a superficial calm returned, but never again would Black New York invest the same faith in liberal politics.