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Chapter 1

Policing Racial Boundaries and Riots in New York (1920–1993)

The Great Migration, which began in 1916, brought half a million blacks north. The boll weevil had ruined the southern cotton harvest, wiped out white landowners, dried up credit, and forced black sharecroppers and tenant farmers into debt. The simultaneous decline of King Cotton and the advent of World War I freed blacks from coerced farm labor in the South. Puerto Ricans arrived around the same time. In 1917 the Jones Act had made Puerto Ricans U.S. citizens eligible for both the draft and stateside migration to escape rural poverty. New York labor scouts (anxious to fill war-time shortages) scoured the South and Puerto Rico, recruiting and transporting workers north “in consignments running high into the hundreds.”¹ The new migrants found housing in the Lower East Side, Central Harlem, San Juan Hill, Hell’s Kitchen, and Greenwich Village.

In this chapter I track the history of New York City’s black and Puerto Rican neighborhoods, paying particular attention to the construction of ghettos, the policing of racial and spatial boundaries, and the relationship between racial polarization, police violence, and urban unrest in the riots of 1935, 1943, 1964, 1967, 1977, 1991, and 1992. I also introduce three New York City neighborhoods: Mott Haven in the South Bronx; Williamsburg in Brooklyn; and the Lower East Side of Manhattan. I conducted ethnographic field research in these neighborhoods between May 1993 and September 1996. I trace the development of these neighborhoods from the time of the Great Migration to the riots of the late 1960s. This is followed by a look at the radical organizing efforts of the early 1970s, the eruption of riots in 1977 after widespread power outages (called the “blackout riots”), and the decline of radical organizing efforts after 1977. By the 1990s, I argue, radical black and Puerto Rican activists had turned their energies to community organizing around neighborhood needs and against police brutality. Together they knit the frayed fabric of their communities and developed an established repertoire of contention that intentionally and unintentionally made riots less probable.

The Great Depression and Communist Cross-Racial Organizing in New York

Unlike in many cities where brutal mobs drove black residents into undesirable areas on the outskirts, black and Puerto Rican migrants found housing in inner-city New York. Harlem, in particular, was centrally located and a chosen destination for many migrants. In 1900, when blacks made up less than 2 percent of the city’s population, white race riots led them to concentrate in Harlem, where they could offer each other protection. Black migrants were attracted to the neighborhood’s vibrant artistic and intellectual life. Harlem even elected a black state assemblyman in 1917. Even in Harlem life for blacks was hard, as Langston Hughes observed: “[S]ome Harlemites thought the millennium had come. They thought the race problem had at last been solved…. I don’t know what made any Negroes think that—except that they were mostly intellectuals doing the thinking. The ordinary Negroes hadn’t heard of the Negro Renaissance. And if they had, it hadn’t raised their wages any.”²

Many World War I veterans expected some recognition or compensation for their war-time service. W. E. B. Du Bois had encouraged blacks to enlist, pointing out that black military service in the American Revolution, the War of 1812, the Civil War, and the Spanish-American War had been followed by emancipation, enfranchisement, and increased accumulation of wealth.³ But those who expected similar improvements after World War I were bitterly disappointed. The period following the war was characterized by “hysterical racism, the acceleration of lynchings, the revival of the clan, and more than twenty major riotous assaults by whites in Northern and border cities who rampaged in black neighborhoods, stoned blacks on beaches and attacked them on main thoroughfares and public transportation.”⁴ By the mid-1920s Ku Klux Klan membership was said to have reached five million, with more members outside the South than within.

Black and Puerto Rican migrants were ill prepared to weather the ravages of the Great Depression. They were four times as likely to be unemployed or on relief than whites and lived in unheated cold-water flats, often without food, and were vulnerable to vermin and disease. Some were unable to support their families and committed suicide. Others were forced into soup lines and slave markets, where they sold their services to the highest bidder. Some ten to twenty eviction cases a day were reported to the Urban League, and blacks were five times more likely to be left homeless than whites.⁵

The fledgling New York branch of the American Communist Party stepped up organizing efforts in Harlem and East Harlem during this period. They led protests against unemployment and in support of racial justice. They recruited heavily among black, Puerto Rican, and Jewish migrants. As Communists stepped up their cross-race appeals, the NYPD stepped up its attacks on blacks and Puerto Ricans spotted in white neighborhoods, forcibly separating interracial couples (claiming that prostitution was involved) and breaking into interracial meetings.⁶ Police violence unintentionally “reinforced black support for party-led organizing efforts” and, communist organizers discovered, could effectively be linked “to the larger racial and class struggle.”⁷ They increasingly attacked “the NYPD for its violent attempts to sunder the growing unity of black and white workers.”⁸ The harder Communists worked to build class coalitions across racial lines, the more violently the NYPD enforced those boundaries.

The First Ghetto Riot in New York City

On March 19, 1935, a white police officer arrested a black Puerto Rican boy, Lino Rivera, after the store manager caught him shoplifting a penknife in the Kress store on 125th Street. The police officer took the boy to the basement exit and then released him. A black female customer, seeing the police bring the boy to the basement, began shouting that the police had taken the boy to the basement to beat him, a not-uncommon scenario. Other customers, hearing her scream, began to overturn counters and toss merchandise to the floor. As rumors of a beating circulated, a full-scale street battle ensued. The violence spread throughout Harlem, ending with one dead, sixty-four injured, and seventy-five under arrest.⁹

Although the police blamed the Communist Party for inciting the riot, during the hearings succeeding witnesses told stories of terrible police abuse, including charges of police intimidation of witnesses. They pointed to four brutal cases of police repression in particular, including that of Thomas Aiken, an unemployed man who had been “blinded by blows from a police officer while standing … in a Harlem Bread line.”¹⁰ In response, Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia formed an eleven-member biracial commission to study conditions in Harlem. In its scathing final report the Mayor’s Commission on Conditions in Harlem concluded that “the insecurity of the individual in Harlem against police aggression is one of the most potent causes for the existing hostility to authority…. Police aggressions and brutalities more than any other factor weld the people together for mass action.”¹¹

The commission recommended the creation of a biracial committee of Harlem citizens to hear civilian complaints and act as a liaison with the NYPD, but the police commissioner forced the suppression of the report.¹² He called the hearings “biased and dominated by Communist agitators” and stated that the police “were needed to fight the high crime rate.”¹³ The police had a good relationship with the black community, he insisted, and “any resentment which does exist is borne by the lawless elements because of the police activity directed against them.”¹⁴ Police violence in black and Puerto Rican neighborhoods continued unabated, helping the Communists expand their base in “networks spawned by the riot.”¹⁵ This would not be the last time that post-riot networks were the basis for future organizing efforts.

“Residential segregation,” Thomas Sugrue notes, was “the linchpin of racial division and separation.”¹⁶ In the 1920s nearly every residential development included covenants specifically precluding owners from renting to non-Caucasians. In the 1930s a series of federal housing reforms designed to forestall the wave of foreclosures during the Great Depression increased racial segregation in the city by reinforcing informal real estate practices and court-authorized covenants. The first of these acts created the Home Owners Loan Corporation in 1933 to provide loans to homeowners at risk of foreclosure. The second created the Federal Housing Authority (FHA) in 1934. These two institutions stalled the rate of foreclosures, but defining all but homogeneous white neighborhoods as high-risk investments increased racial and spatial segregation in the city. A single black family was enough to tip the status of a neighborhood from good (marked as A or B and colored green or blue) to “actuarially unsound”¹⁷ (such neighborhoods were marked as C and D and were ineligible for FHA-backed loans). An Association of Real Estate Developers (REALTOR) brochure justified this policy: “The prospective buyer might be a bootlegger who would cause considerable annoyance to his neighbors, a madam who had a number of call girls on the string, a gangster who wants a screen for his activities by living in a better neighborhood or a colored man of means who was giving his children a college education and thought they were entitled to live among whites.”¹⁸

The 1937 Wagner-Seagull Housing Act and the 1945 Veterans Administration Act would exacerbate these effects by underwriting mortgages only in stable (homogeneous) white neighborhoods. Other federal legislation aggravated the problem by giving local governments the authority to determine where public housing projects were to be located and who could live in each building. Public housing projects reserved for blacks and Puerto Ricans were almost always located in the least desirable locations. Slum-clearance programs intensified racial segregation, tearing down tenements and forcing blacks and Puerto Ricans into public projects in areas of concentrated poverty and unemployment and excluding racial minorities from access to housing in white districts. These acts will be discussed later, but from the beginning segregation encouraged rent gouging, reduced the availability of low-income housing, and created ghetto areas of concentrated poverty. In addition it encouraged racial profiling and police violence by allowing police to treat the residents of some neighborhoods differently from those of another and to situate blacks and Puerto Ricans spatially apart from whites.

As African Americans fled Manhattan in search of better or cheaper housing in Brooklyn, white residents there, as Thomas Kessner observes, “lobbied Mayor LaGuardia for greater police protection and even threatened to lead a vigilante movement against the criminals in the neighborhood in 1936. White demands for increased law enforcement encouraged a more aggressive style of policing that led to numerous complaints by black citizens.”¹⁹

World War II and the Erection of Ghetto Walls in New York

World War II and industrial labor shortages attracted a new wave of migrants to northern cities. While only 11 percent of eligible black males had fought in World War I, fully 70 percent of them, or 1.15 million, fought in World War II, the same percentage as that of whites (the number of Puerto Ricans who fought was not recorded). Sam, a black activist and former Communist and Black Panther, told me that his father had been proud to serve: “[H]e went to war and the army gave him education, travel—he saw the world—and some rank. Like many black men he continued to espouse [that] equality on the battlefield would lead to equal citizenship.” However, the army remained segregated.²⁰ Katznelson notes,

In the midst of a war defined in a large measure as an epochal battle between liberal democracy and Nazi and Fascist totalitarianism, one that distinguished between people on the basis of blood and race, the U.S. military was not only engaged in sorting Americans by race but in policing the boundary separating white from black …. [T]he draft selected individuals to fill quotas to meet the test of a racially proportionate military and … they were assigned to units on the basis of a simple dual racial system…. The issue of classification proved particularly vexing in Puerto Rico where the population was so varied racially and where the country’s National Guard units had been integrated [emphasis mine].²¹

The black population of New York increased from 458,000 in 1940 to 547,000 in 1945 alone. As the nonwhite population grew, the city’s major newspaper chains, including the Times, the Daily News, the World Telegram, and all the Hearst papers, capitalized on white racial fears, publishing a series of sensational front-page stories accusing blacks and Puerto Ricans of “stabbing, raping, and mugging whites in Harlem and other black neighborhoods.”²² The term “mugging,” as Marilyn Johnson notes, “originated in New York, nearly always with reference to black-on-white crime. The press campaign peaked in the spring of 1943 when a so-called mugging outbreak prompted police to pull a thousand officers from clerical duty and assign them to plainclothes details in Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant.”²³ Increased racially inflammatory media and renewed calls for law enforcement led to a massive increase in both vigilante and police violence targeted at both blacks and Puerto Ricans. The Harlem Charter denounced the crime smears to no avail. Adam Clayton Powell Sr. decried the increase in police violence, which he claimed epitomized the brutality of racial discrimination and led to anger “at every white policeman throughout the United States who had constantly beaten, wounded and often killed colored men and women without provocation.”²⁴ Other local black leaders compared white police to Hitler’s Gestapo.

The Second 1943 Ghetto Riot

On August 1, 1943, a New York City policeman hit an African American woman while arresting her for disturbing the peace at the Braddock hotel (one of several black hotels targeted by the NYPD in its antivice campaign). Robert Bandy, a black active-duty soldier in the U.S. Army, jumped to her defense, trying to shield her from the officer’s blows, and the officer turned on the soldier and shot him. As the soldier was carried on a stretcher to an ambulance, an onlooker shouted out that the police officer had shot a black soldier, and Harlem residents took action. They threw “bricks and bottles, overturning cars, fighting with police, smashing windows and looting stores.”²⁵ The riot lasted twenty-four hours and resulted in 6 deaths, 185 injuries, and over $250,000 in property damage. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) called the riot the result of “the fury shown of repeated unchecked, unpunished and often unreported shooting, maiming, and insulting [of] Negro troops.”²⁶

Mayor LaGuardia immediately sent black military police (MPs) into Harlem and deputized more than 1,000 black MPs to help patrol the streets, which significantly reduced casualties, particularly in comparison to those resulting from the riots that broke out in Detroit the same year.²⁷ As a direct result of the riots, blacks’ representation in the police force of New York City was increased. In 1943 the NYPD had only 155 black police officers in a force of 600,000. This was only 22 more than it had in 1938. Moreover the number of black detectives had fallen from 10 to 5 during the same period. Now with the 1943 riots as an impetus, the city increased the number of black police from 155 to 600, but this was still a tiny fragment of the total in a city that grew increasingly black and Latino. It should also be noted that black policemen were not given any positions of power or decision-making. “For the most part, the NYPD viewed black police as ‘riot insurance’—a political concession to angry black communities which would hopefully help prevent and/or control future outbreaks of racial violence, just as the black deputies had done during the 1943 riot.”²⁸

Little was done to address the more serious issue of police violence. Marilyn Johnson notes, “The false rumors of Bandy’s death also echoed those surrounding the Lino Rivera incident that sparked the 1935 Harlem Riots. In both versions an innocent black youth [in the first a black Puerto Rican youth] was killed by a repressive white policy system designed to protect whites or white business interests in Harlem. The symbolic significance of the victims, then, was key to the unleashing of violence.”²⁹ Both the 1935 and 1943 riots predated other ghetto riots and prefigured the revolts that would erupt throughout the country in the late 1960s.³⁰

Blacks and Puerto Rican Ghettos in Postwar New York

Between 1950 and 1970, 1.5 million blacks, or 1 in 7, left the South. As a result the black population of every northern city ballooned. It rose from 17 percent to 54 percent in Newark, from 14 percent to 34 percent in Chicago, and from 16 percent to 44 percent in Detroit. Migrants who had once moved from South Carolina to North Carolina or from North Carolina to Virginia now went to New York,³¹ while those from Texas and Louisiana traveled to Chicago or Los Angeles. Puerto Ricans fled desperate poverty and political repression on the island and also began to arrive in New York City in massive numbers. Forty thousand arrived in 1946; 58,000 arrived in 1952; and 75,000 arrived in 1953. As one Puerto Rican activist described his family’s experience in New York (1966): “[W]e arrived into a very different environment from the one we had left; we arrived onto streets without nature, into cold apartments and factories when we had been accustomed to tropical heat. Many died of TB and other illnesses caused by the cold.”

The design of most of the programs providing benefits to World War II veterans deliberately limited access for blacks and Puerto Ricans. The occupations in which African Americans and Puerto Ricans worked were excluded from labor regulations and minimum wage laws, and this combined with deliberately “racist patterns of administration [meant that] New Deal policies for Social Security, social welfare, and labor market programs restricted black prospects while providing positive economic reinforcements for the great majority of white citizens.”³² The GI Bill gave veterans access to federally guaranteed low-interest housing and student loans as well as job training and assistance in securing jobs in their fields, but few blacks could take advantage of these programs. The overwhelming majority of white colleges and universities excluded blacks from admissions, and black colleges and universities were few and starved for resources. Local job counselors without exception were white and often denied blacks access to skilled employment and training. Even in the North the United States Employment Service (USES), charged with administering the program, channeled black veterans into traditional black jobs, reinforcing “the existing division of labor by race.”³³ Katznelson notes, “Because unemployment insurance was made available only to those who could demonstrate a willingness to take a suitable job, and because suitability was defined by USES, many blacks were compelled to take work far below their skill level. Carpenters became janitors; truck drivers became dishwashers; communications repair experts, porters.”³⁴ Sixty-five percent of African Americans nationally were ineligible for Social Security.³⁵

The Veterans Administration’s loan guarantees of the Serviceman’s Readjustment Act of 1944 and the 1949 Housing Act³⁶ constructed formidable obstacles to integration: underwriting mortgages in white suburban areas, bankrolling white suburbanization through discriminatory housing subsidies, equating racial segregation with neighborhood stability, and requiring developers to sign covenants against black home buyers as a precondition for financing. “The completeness of racial segregation,” observes Sugrue, “made ghettoisation seem an inevitable, natural consequence of profound racial difference.”³⁷ This was largely because “[t]he barriers that kept blacks confined to racially isolated deteriorating inner city neighborhoods were largely invisible to whites” (emphasis mine).³⁸

Blacks and Puerto Ricans arrived just as the city shed working-class jobs. Between 1947 and 1976 five hundred thousand factory jobs were lost as industries left the city.³⁹ However, deindustrialization is only half the story. Comparing the experiences of poor semiskilled white southerners to those of poor semiskilled southern blacks, Katz observes, reveals the extent and impact of racial discrimination: white southerners also “encountered hostility and some discrimination, but never on a scale that matched the racial discrimination and violence that confronted African Americans. White southerners melded into the urban fabric, living where they wanted, sometimes being given jobs over African Americans with more work experience.”⁴⁰

“Racism closed the most promising doors,” notes Katz. “Exploitative work, bad pay, racism, and foreclosed opportunities amounted to a formula for poverty.”⁴¹ These factors also increased the susceptibility of African Americans and Puerto Ricans to the heroin trade. Heroin dealing offered one of the few employment opportunities available to black and Puerto Rican youths. Concentrated poverty, hopelessness, despair, and sheer boredom made it hard to resist the lure of the drug. By the late 1940s, 15 percent of the census tracks in New York City, home to 30 percent of the city’s youths, housed over 80 percent of its heroin users.⁴² Adolescents living near drug-selling locations were two to three times as likely to use drugs.⁴³ The growth of the heroin trade and the new federal and state laws with their heavy penalties for drug use gave police one more justification for combing ghetto streets and assaulting black and Puerto Rican residents. Violent clashes between white police officers and young black and Puerto Rican men “accounted for a large percentage of interracial homicides.”⁴⁴

In 1961 the Pittsburgh Courier called New York City a Jim Crow town “when police arrested and beat Guinea’s Deputy Ambassador to the United Nations after a routine traffic stop.”⁴⁵ That same year police officers brutalized a prominent designing engineer who had recently been featured in a magazine article on the Emancipation Proclamation. He was attacked first in the street and then again in the station by the same officers when he attempted to file a complaint. The Amsterdam News covered the story in chilling detail: “We’ll give you something to complain about,” the identical four officers promised in the police station, “before taking him to the basement, beating him and charging him with resisting arrest.”⁴⁶

In addition to police violence, the new migrants were forced to deal with white youth gangs. As the black and Puerto Rican population grew, so did white resistance. “To preserve existing boundaries,” Katz notes, “whites often turned to violence—a response documented with painful detail by many historians…. Civil violence erupted at the height of urban boundary challenges.”⁴⁷ Eusebio Soto remembered Italian gangs attacking Puerto Rican youths in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and the violent spiral that led to the growth of Puerto Rican gangs (1996):

When I was 10 or 11 years old you see these gangs, man, drunk, coming down the street and hitting everyone…. all of a sudden [Puerto Rican] gangs come up … not gangs to hurt people, to protect the area, because you have gangs from up there Bushwick coming down, hitting everyone they saw….

We knew nothing about gangs. They resented the idea that we were moving in. So, they sought control over whatever we did and they went into our neighborhood and we didn’t even speak English. For us to see these guys come through and start beating on us for no reason at all, I say why do these people hate me, what for? And, I had to learn how to fight because I was Puerto Rican. It’s not because of anything else. I had to learn how to fight to defend the idea that I was Puerto Rican. And we fought. It was war. We all had to fight to get our respect and we got respected. We got it. People would say, “Those crazy Puerto Ricans, they’ll cut you. We would, ya know, ya had to do that—it wasn’t that we came here looking for trouble. We didn’t come from Puerto Rico in gangs. This was something that was introduced to us here. We didn’t know nothing about gangs—it was purely defensive action.

Some whites embraced law-and-order candidates who promised more policing of black and Puerto Rican ghettos. Others took advantage of low-interest federally insured GI loans (which allowed them to buy suburban homes) and the massive expanse of highways (which simultaneously destroyed their neighborhoods in the Bronx and Brooklyn and made commuting possible) to flee the city. Blacks and Puerto Ricans were locked out of these mortgages and suburban communities. New York landlords “cut down on maintenance, rented to welfare and problem families, induced tenant turnover, failed to pay taxes and then either walked away or sold the building to the city for another round of slum clearance.”⁴⁸ The Bronx had been a desirable location for working-class Jews, Irish, and Italians in the 1940s. By the time blacks and Puerto Ricans arrived, bulldozers had already razed the tight-knit neighborhoods to make way for highways and public housing towers. The destruction of the elevated train removed the last low-cost transit to downtown jobs.⁴⁹

Policing the Heroin Trade

In the 1950s Italian and Jewish mobsters controlled the heroin trade. Blacks and Puerto Ricans found employment at the lowest rungs, the most poorly paying and riskiest end of the business. By the mid-1960s two organizations controlled heroin wholesales in the city: the Lucchese crime family and the NYPD.⁵⁰ In one decade the special investigative unit of the NYPD put 180 million kilos or $32 million worth of heroin on the streets.⁵¹ The Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN) was no better. The bureau already had an illustrious history, as the son-in-law of the FBN bureau chief helped heroin importer Arnold Rothstein evade income tax in the 1920s. Now in the 1960s FBN agents sold the names of informants to the major crime families, with the result that fifty to sixty informants a month were murdered.⁵² According to an internal affairs report filed in 1968, one-fifth of FBN officers were involved in the trade. According to Eric Schneider, “The conclusion is inescapable, that the flow of heroin into users’ veins would have been impossible without the assistance of the city’s police forces and the New York offices of the FBN.”⁵³

The sheer duplicity of the NYPD in arresting and harassing poor users and street sellers while profiting from the wholesale distribution of heroin in their neighborhoods increased the frustration, helplessness, and anger of ghetto youths. Corruption and venality went hand in hand, as young people were shot in the back by drunken on-duty officers or pummeled in patrol cars and precinct houses. According to Schneider, “ ‘You get a cop [who] wants to know something’ said one youth explaining the use of the third degree ‘maybe some information from a guy and they smack you around so you can find out.’ Other times police picked a youth up and drove him around the neighborhood beating him in the back of the car without ever taking him to the precinct. Order and safety depended on self-reliance, on one’s reputation for toughness, and on connections to others who might exact revenge on one’s behalf, and not on the system of police and courts.”⁵⁴

One Puerto Rican former gang leader in the Bronx told me (March 1996) how police brutality had shaped his racial identity and feeling about the law: “Most families were into thinking the right way was the white way. My family had me comb my hair with coconut milk to straighten it. They listed me as white on my birth certificate. Then, I saw my father, who was always king in my house, tremble in front of a white policeman. It robbed him of his dignity. I lost respect for my father. I compensated for him by becoming more bold and more bad.”

Escalating Police Violence in Black and Puerto Rican Ghettos

By 1963 residents of black northern ghettos were on edge. “Complaints about the police reached crisis proportions,” notes Sugrue; “[m]uch to the surprise of members of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, which conducted hearings in northern cities between 1959 and 1961, black complaints about police conduct were as frequent as or more than those about unemployment, housing and education.”⁵⁵ Each incident of police violence added to racial tensions. On November 17, 1963, six hundred Puerto Ricans protested in front of a police station after a New York City police officer shot and killed two Puerto Rican youths. Leaders of the National Association for Puerto Rican Civil Rights charged the police with acting “like they were running a plantation.”⁵⁶

The situation grew increasingly dire in 1964, and by summer civil rights groups had put police brutality front and center. Yet despite ongoing protests and efforts by community groups to push the city to investigate incidents of police brutality or create a civilian review board, neither Mayor Wagner nor the city council budged. Daniel Monti observes that continued rebukes “spurred the NAACP, CORE, Puerto Rican Committee for Civil Rights and Workers Defense League to set up their own civilian review board in May of 1964. Relations between police and minority citizens had deteriorated to such an extent that any significant incident could have led to a serious outburst.”⁵⁷

On April 17, 1964, six boys were playing and pushing each other on the way home from school when one knocked over a fruit stand owned by Edward De Luca on the corner of 128th Street and Lenox. When a crate of grapefruit fell on the ground, the boys began playing ball with the fruit. De Luca blew a whistle to frighten the boys, but the local police heard the whistle and came charging after the boys with weapons drawn. Some had them aimed at the roofs, frightening residents, who withdrew from the windows. As the police caught the boys, they began beating them and then turned on two adult residents who tried to defend the children. The men were Frank Safford, a thirty-one-year-old black salesman, and Fecundo Acion, a forty-seven-year-old Puerto Rican man, both of whom the police cuffed, beat in the street, and continued beating in the precinct.

Safford told James Baldwin that about thirty-five officers beat him while in custody: they “came into the room and started beating, punching us in the jaw, in the stomach, in the chest, beating us with a padded club. They beat us across the head bad, pulls us on the floor, spit on us, call us niggers, dogs, animals when I don’t see why we are the animals the way they are beating us. Like they beat the other kids and the elderly fellow [Fecundo Acion]. They throw him almost through one of the radiators. I thought he was dead over there.”⁵⁸ Another witness told Baldwin, “Now here come an old man walking out a stoop and asked the cop ‘say, listen sir, what’s going on here?’ The cop turned around and smash him a couple of times in the head. He get that just for a question. No reason at all. Just for a question.”⁵⁹ No one was charged with a crime, but Safford lost an eye as a result of the beatings.

Several days later a white couple who owned a secondhand store in Harlem was attacked and stabbed several times. The woman died from her injuries. Within hours four of the six boys the police had identified at the fruit-stand “riot” were picked up and accused of the murder. The railroading of the Harlem six had a profound influence on James Baldwin, who wrote of the event in a scathing piece for the Nation. “This is why,” Baldwin notes, “those pious calls to ‘respect the law,’ always to be heard from prominent citizens each time the ghetto explodes, are so obscene…. They are dying there like flies: they are dying in the streets of all our Harlems far more hideously than flies…. Well they don’t need us for work no more. Where are they building the gas ovens?”⁶⁰ In a later article Baldwin reflects, “The only way to police a ghetto is oppressive. None of the Police Commissioner’s men, even with the best will in the world, have any way of understanding the lives led by the people: they swagger about in twos and threes patrolling. Their very presence is an insult, and it would be, even if they spent their entire day feeding gum drops to children.”⁶¹

The First Ghetto Riot of the 1960s

On July 16, 1964, Officer Thomas Gilligan shot and killed fifteen-year-old James Powell outside a schoolyard. The shooting followed an altercation between several black high school students and the white janitor of a neighboring building (as discussed in the Introduction). When the janitor turned his garden hose on the students, in a manner reminiscent of police attacks on protesters in Mississippi, as well as a barrage of racial insults, the youths responded in anger. The janitor retreated to his building with several boys on his heels. It was then that Officer Gilligan appeared. Gilligan saw the retreating janitor, turned, and shot James Powell dead. The high school students screamed in pain and outrage. In the evening hundreds of residents gathered at the police precinct, where they encountered a solid wall of police. The officers charged the protesters, and the crowd responded with rocks and bottles. The police then attempted to rope off Harlem from 125th Street and Third Avenue to Eighth Avenue, but residents resisted by hurling garbage, stones, and anything else they could find at police. Some residents began to overturn cars and set buildings aflame. Police opened fire with live ammunition. By nightfall mass looting had ensued, and riots spread from Central and East Harlem and to the Brooklyn neighborhoods of Bedford-Stuyvesant and Brownsville.

The next day civil rights groups led marches demanding that the city investigate and take action against the police department. When those efforts came to naught, the protests moved, as Sugrue notes:

from peaceful picketing to violent retaliation. On July 16 hundreds of “screaming youths” pelted police officers with bottles and cans in Manhattan’s Yorkville neighborhood. The following day two hundred teenagers took to the streets of Harlem looting, burning, and attacking police officers. Over the next week, roving bands of youths and police clashed throughout the city. The uprising followed a pattern that would become commonplace during the mid-1960s—beginning with a police incident and ending with angry crowds in the streets.⁶²

The protests continued for five days and nights.⁶³ Over five hundred people were seriously injured and (as described in the Introduction) one black man was shot dead by police. Activated racial boundaries, increasing police violence, and the police killing of a young unarmed youth were key ingredients. However, the first response to police violence was nonviolent. Only when the police responded to the nonviolent assembly with violence did the NAACP and CORE lose control of the crowds. As one journalist warned, “[I]t is not possible for even the most responsible Negro leaders to control the Negro masses once pent up anger and total despair are unleashed by a thoughtless or brutal act.”⁶⁴

The riots were an expression of rage, a refusal to remain cowed in the face of police violence, and a defensive response to the violent policing of racial boundaries. A white man whom I interviewed told me that two black adolescent boys, whom he often hired to help him with yard work, had pelted him with stones during the riot. After the riot the two boys came by the house again to ask for work. “You just pelted me with stones,” the man said. “We didn’t throw stones at you,” they responded. “Of course you did.I saw you and you were looking right at me,” he retorted. “No,” they said, “we weren’t throwing them at you; we were throwing stones at ‘the man.’” In contrast, a black man I spoke with told me it was one of the happiest moments in his life (2009). “The most peaceful I ever felt was in the middle of the riot. None of the damn rules applied. You were absolutely free from the law.”

In the aftermath of the riots, Mayor Wagner finally promised to investigate the shooting of Powell and others and to create a civilian review board. Yet again he did neither. By 1965 complaints of brutality had become more numerous than before.⁶⁵ Bertrand Russell stated, “[Harlem’s] inhabitants are brutalized at every moment of their lives by police, poverty and indignities.”⁶⁶ A journalist observed that Harlem had “rioted five times since 1935. Each time an incident with police lit the fuse, the police representing the face of the enemy, of economic and social repression” (emphasis mine).⁶⁷

The Harlem riot initiated a wave of riots that would spread first to cities connected to Harlem through family and friendship ties, and subject to similar levels of police violence and brutality, and then to distant cities throughout the country. Nestled within the national wave of riots were smaller incidents of riots diffused through towns geographically connected to the major city riots.⁶⁸ Riots first spread from New York to the nearby towns of Nyack in Rockland County, New York, and to Montclair, Patterson, Jersey City, Rahway, Livingston, East Orange, and Irvington in New Jersey—towns with a similar history of police violence. Then Rochester residents reacted following police repression of a peaceful demonstration outside a Kodak plant. Philadelphians followed with “three days of disorder after the arrest of a [black] driver and rumors that police had killed a pregnant woman.”⁶⁹ Riots in six other cities exploded in 1964 and more followed in 1965, including one in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, where thirty-four people died, thirty-one of them black and shot by police.⁷⁰

In 1966 new riots broke out in East New York, Brooklyn. They also broke out in Omaha, Baltimore, San Francisco, Jacksonville, and most fiercely in Cleveland and Chicago. “Nineteen sixty-seven was the most combustible with 163 uprisings, capped by deadly clashes between black residents of Newark and Detroit and the police, the National Guard and the U.S. Army. In Newark, thirty-four people died in a weeklong uprising that laid waste to large parts of the city’s central ward; in Detroit, forty-three people died in a weeklong uprising, three quarters of them rioters.”⁷¹ The year 1967 was the year of Latino riots—Puerto Ricans rioted in East Harlem, the South Bronx, and Chicago, Chicanos rioted in California and the Southwest.⁷²

The 1967 Puerto Rican Riots in East Harlem and South Bronx

As the decade progressed things grew steadily worse for Puerto Ricans in New York City. In the 1960s the city built inexpensive co-ops on the outskirts of the Bronx, which allowed working-class whites who could not afford to buy their own homes to buy apartments in these complexes. Few Blacks and Puerto Ricans could afford to buy co-ops. The construction of Co-op City in the northeastern Bronx, in particular, encouraged a mass exodus. Better-off whites fled to the suburbs, working-class whites moved to the northeastern Bronx co-ops. As the value of housing in the South Bronx declined, owners burned “their buildings once they had been milked of profitability and stripped of assets.”⁷³ Those who remained behind were left bereft.

The sheer extent of demographic change would have overwhelmed even the most effective social movement organizations, but those that had played key roles in the 1930s and early 1940s had been decimated by the actions of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and Senator Joseph McCarthy. As Roberto P. Rodriguez-Morazzani notes, “The virtual outlawing of the Communist Party USA, with the passage of the McCarran Act in 1950 and the decline of the American Labor Party, closed off two important avenues for radicalism amongst Puerto Ricans in the United States. Moreover, mainstream politics was not generally open to Puerto Ricans. Neither the Democratic nor Republican parties were very much interested in having Puerto Ricans participate in the political process. In fact, exclusion from the political process was the experience of Puerto Ricans.”⁷⁴

In 1967 the first major Puerto Rican riots broke out in New York City. They began after a police officer shot a Puerto Rican man he accused of wielding a knife. “For three nights, residents of East Harlem and the South Bronx attacked stores, looting and burning them. More than a thousand police, including many Tactical Patrol Force officers[,] were sent to contain the disorder but, according to news reports, this ‘only aggravated community resentment.’”⁷⁵ Once again the presence of the police, and particularly the new Tactical Patrol Force, prompted black and Latino radicals to equate the police with an occupying army.⁷⁶

The precipitating incident occurred at noon. At 1:35 P.M. the police barricaded the block. At 8:30 the first bottles crashed over the crowd. Looting started around 10:00. At midnight one group of Puerto Ricans carrying a Puerto Rican flag tried to march to the 103rd Street precinct but was blocked by police. Others tried marching to city hall and were also blocked. The police grabbed one youth carrying a Puerto Rican flag. They grabbed another they claimed had thrown a Molotov cocktail.⁷⁷ In Mott Haven, South Bronx, “throngs of Puerto Ricans ran through the streets and broke some windows.”⁷⁸ Shortly after midnight, police herded a crowd into a housing project in East Harlem, and as the hostages tried to break free, the police charged at them with clubs. The police came under sniper fire on 112th Street between Second and Third, some papers reported, and a Puerto Rican youth’s neck was broken after the cease-fire. At Third and 110th Street someone drew a chalk line and scrawled “Puerto Rican border. Do not cross, flatfoot.” Media sources warned that some blacks from Harlem were also seen in the area (though it is difficult to know how they made that identification). More than one hundred residents offered to go with the police in an attempt to cool the crowds, and several Latino leaders spoke to the crowds and urged them to remain calm.

Desperate to avoid further conflagration, city officials reached out to Puerto Rican and community leaders. Forty East Harlem residents met with the police inspector and hammered out the following: 1) the appointment of a Puerto Rican as a deputy police commissioner for community relations; 2) the appointment of one or two Puerto Rican professors at the police academy to educate police to the problems of the Puerto Rican community; 3) the appointment of a Puerto Rican precinct captain in East Harlem; 4) a departmental investigation of racial bigotry among the police.

The Great Society and Black and Puerto Rican Power: 1969–1973

The Presidential Commission on Civil Disorders (popularly called the Kerner Commission) concluded its investigation into the cause of the pre-1967 race riots by warning of the ramifications of ongoing police violence: “To many Negroes police have come to symbolize white power, white racism, and white repression.”⁷⁹ Similarly a New York City journalist noted that “neither New York nor any [other] American city is normal as long as thousands of black people are penned in, developing the prisoner’s mentality of hate for his keepers.”⁸⁰ Yet in the South where police violence was even more brazen, riots were rare. Strong social movement organizations channeled anger into established repertoires of nonviolent action. Only after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., the leader of the nonviolent movement, did riots erupt in southern cities.

In the years that followed the great race riots intense organizing efforts by both the left and the right changed the complexion of northern and western cities and the way black and Latino residents would respond to police violence in the future. Conservative groups used racial fears to win over a newly detachable sector of the electorate and gain ascendency in the Republican Party to challenge the bipartisan consensus that had existed since the New Deal. As Joe Soss and his coauthors note,

Racial conservatives, galvanized by the civil rights victories, began to pursue a “law and order” campaign that identified social protest, civil disobedience, urban riots, street crime, and deviant behaviors in poor neighborhoods as related parts of a single problem: the breakdown of social order. Together, these groups formed a powerful coalition, pushing an agenda rooted in order, discipline, personal responsibility, and a moral state. As conservative and business interests mobilized, they sought more than immediate policy victories. Adopting a longer view, they invested in efforts to transform the intellectual and organizational landscape of American politics.⁸¹

These groups used racially coded appeals for law and order (as will be discussed later in this chapter), linking the civil rights movement to riots and crime. The onslaught would eventually pay big dividends for the conservative movement. Yet the first attempt of a conservative Republican (Barry Goldwater) to use the civil rights movement to win election to national office was unsuccessful. Lyndon Johnson beat him by a landslide. Although Johnson rejected the findings of the report he himself had commissioned, he adopted a number of the commission’s recommendations, most notably the War on Poverty and the Great Society. Johnson made millions of dollars in federal aid available to cities for community-based organizations in conflict-ridden communities. The aim, notes Katznelson, was “to take the radical impulse away from the politics of race by the creation of mechanisms of participation at the community level that had the capability to limit conflicts to a community orientation, to separate issues from each other, and to stress a politics of distribution—in short, to reduce race to ethnicity in the traditional community bound sense…. [As popular power] movements absorbed the energies of insurgents [they] also transformed their protests and rendered them harmless.”⁸² Similarly Sugrue notes, “The irony of the War on Poverty was that the federal government did not, for the most part, address the economic problems that were the root cause of poverty…. But, unexpectedly, the federal government allied itself with local activists…. The Johnson administration unleashed and legitimated an insurgent movement for ‘community control’ that dovetailed with the growing demand for black power…. The long-term consequence was to wholly recast the terrain of debate over race, rights and equality in the United States from the federal to the local.”⁸³

In New York, Mayor John Lindsay used the money to hire black and Puerto Rican activists and neighborhood youths as peacekeepers. In the 1970s these young people employed their new organizing skills to create radical black and Puerto Rican power organizations. In the 1980s these radical activists, most of whom had cut their teeth on the 1960s riots, forged community-based organizations, some of which were dedicated to fighting police brutality. Groups such as the Black Panthers, the Nation of Islam, the Real Great Society, the Young Lords, and the Revolutionary Communist Party gave birth in the 1980s to the NYC Coalition Against Police Brutality, the Justice Committee, Make the Road New York, the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, the National Hip Hop Political Convention, the Audre Lorde Project, the Immigrant Justice Solidarity Project, and Stolen Lives. Individual activists such as Charles Barron, a former Black Panther, became an anti-police-brutality activist and councilman; Richie Perez, a former Young Lord, founded the Justice Project; Vincente Alba, a former Young Lord, now leads the Coalition against Police Brutality; Armando Perez, a Real Great Society founder, was elected district leader; Margarita Lopez, formerly of the Puerto Rican Socialist Party, was elected councilwoman; David Santiago, a Puerto Rican Socialist and Young Lord, play critical organizing roles in the 1980s and 1990s.

My research was conducted in predominantly Puerto Rican neighborhoods, where the Real Great Society, the Young Lords, and the Puerto Rican Socialist Party were the most important community-based organizations. The Real Great Society (RGS) operated principally on the Lower East Side. When the RGS extended organizing efforts to East Harlem, two of its leaders influenced several young people who would later form the Young Lords Party of New York.⁸⁴ The Young Lords were most active in and had their most profound impact on East Harlem and Mott Haven, South Bronx. The Puerto Rican Socialist Party was strongest in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. In all these areas, over time, participation in grassroots organizing efforts increased residents’ confidence in their own collective capacity.

While the focus here is on Puerto Rican organizing efforts, there is a thread that ties the Puerto Rican experience to that of blacks. First, migration to the city occurred in similar waves. Second, both groups of migrants fled rural poverty and political repression only to encounter racial discrimination in New York. Both were confined to the lowest wage labor market, the poorest housing, and inferior schools. Police viewed them in similar ways, enforcing ghetto boundaries, targeting them for drug arrests, and using high levels of violence and brutality. Black and Puerto Rican neighborhoods exploded in the 1960s. Riots erupted in black neighborhoods in 1964 but spread to Puerto Rican neighborhoods too. The reverse was true of the Puerto Rican riots of 1967. Similarly, the evolution of radical Puerto Rican organizations paralleled that of black organizations in the city. The following section is based on ethnographic field research conducted in three predominantly Puerto Rican neighborhoods. A parallel process, I argue, was taking place in black neighborhoods in the city.

The Real Great Society and Puerto Rican Organizing on the Lower East Side

The Lower East Side had long been a cauldron of movement activity. Puerto Ricans in cigar factories and Jews in the textile industry were early and active participants in labor, immigrant, communist, and socialist organizing efforts. In 1966 a local street gang called the Assassin Lords formed a political organization they called the University of the Streets (as mentioned earlier). Armando explained (in the first of many conversations we had between 1992 and 1999, the year Armando was murdered⁸⁵):

I was in the “Assassin Lords,” another was in the “Dragons.” … The gangs were mostly about having something to do. We would get into a gang and fight each other…. We came to the realization that it didn’t make any sense for Puerto Ricans to be fighting each other. We decided to give something back to the community…. In the Lower East Side there was a huge need for day care centers. So, we applied for different grants and foundations and got funding for a day care center called “visiting mothers.” It was run out of a storefront. Then we got funding for other projects, and somewhere between 1966 and 1967 we received a fairly large grant. From there we started an organization called “University of the Streets.” It is still located on East 7th and has a karate program, drama, theater, art, and reading[s].

After the 1967 riots, Armando and Chino Garcia formed the Real Great Society (RGS), named after President Johnson’s Great Society initiative. Armando credited Johnson with providing an alternative for ghetto youths. “We have never seen anything like that since, not in [the] past 30 years,” Armando insisted. “To me Johnson was the greatest president we ever had for social problems.”

In 1966 Life magazine reviewed The Gang and the Political Establishment, written by a Columbia University professor about the Real Great Society. Afterward gang leaders from around the country began to contact them. “This gave us the opportunity to travel all over the country,” Armando said. “We discovered we all had similar problems, especially regarding education and housing. We noted a pattern. We realized it was not just a problem on the Lower East Side. We had a very big struggle on our hands…. We got serious. We began to educate ourselves.”

The 1968 Teachers Strike and the Network of Organizations in Williamsburg, Brooklyn

Unlike the South Bronx or Harlem, Williamsburg was still a large working-class neighborhood during the 1960s. In 1969 one-quarter of all industrial jobs in New York were in Brooklyn and over 50 percent of those were in Greenpoint-Williamsburg and Newton Creek. The largest employers were the American Sugar Company, E. M. Schaefer Brewing Company, Lumber Exchange terminal, and, until its closure in 1966, the Brooklyn Navy Yards. In 1968 the first major political mobilization in Williamsburg emerged in response to the 1968 United Federation of Teachers citywide strike (which was launched in opposition to community control of school boards). At Eastern District High School the teacher strike prompted a student uprising. Puerto Rican high school students, radical clergy, and VISTA volunteers all participated. They forced the school principal to resign. Manny Maldonado, president of the ASPIRA club (an organization designed to help and encourage Puerto Rican high school students to succeed), emerged as one of five or six student movement leaders. Martin Needleman, who worked with ASPIRA and VISTA at the time and directed Brooklyn Legal Services during the 1990s, recalled, in 1992, “A lot of what’s happening in current efforts goes back to these school struggles…. Community activists’ contacts were made then. It turned out to be an investment in our future—this community networking.” Eusebio Cuso shared similar remembrances (1996):

Little by little we got to do a lot of things together…. Manny [Maldonado] used to come up to David’s [Santiago] house and I used to live with David…. They started calling us the Socialist building—they said we were all Socialists…. Everybody who lived in that building was into some struggle or another. So they called us the revolutionaries, the politicos, the politicians, and all that good shit…. The whole building was into whatever it took to better the neighborhood. Habitantes Unidos.

Out of their organizing efforts the Los Sures community housing organization was born, named for the area of Williamsburg (the South Side) where most Puerto Ricans lived. “We held meetings in buildings to form tenants associations and then began going out to the buildings trying to organize the tenants association to become a citywide community management program. As more landlords abandoned the apartments we began doing rehabilitation. We also began working with the tenant interim lease (TIL) program,⁸⁶ helping the tenants make contracts with the city to run their own buildings,” noted Barbara Shliff (1993). The same network of activists she had known from the time she was a VISTA volunteer in 1968 led most of the organizing efforts.

The first board of Los Sures included most of the leaders of the 1968 school strike. Los Sures, Schliff told me, “was a voluntary organization that grew out of community needs, and then got funding. [It was an outgrowth of] the network of organizations and people that had been involved a long time; it was the hallmark of the struggle for the people’s community school board.” Luis Olmeda was the first chair of Los Sures. “Olmeda stressed Puerto Rican Pride and identity,” noted David Santiago, when I interviewed him in 1994: “He opened up the political struggle here. In the 1970s, he led the occupation of the Kraus housing projects, and put garbage in the street to protest the lack of sanitation in the neighborhood.” David Lopez, later an organizer for Musica Against Drugs (an organization founded by Manny Maldonado to help fight drug abuse and AIDS), and Carmen Calderon, from the South Side Mission, were also members of the first board of Los Sures. Williamsburg organizing efforts will be discussed later in the chapter.

The Young Lords and the Emergence of New Yorican Social Movements in East Harlem and South Bronx

East Harlem had been the setting of the largest Puerto Rican riot in the city, and Mayor Lindsay invested the most resources there. In so doing, he unintentionally spurred the creation of a network of skilled grassroots activists. These activists would play leading roles in channeling anger at police violence into organized forms of nonviolent protest in decades to come. By 1968 East Harlem was a cauldron of organizing activity. Miguel “Mickey” Melendez had participated in the riots. The city hired him as a “peacemaker.” Melendez commuted in from Mott Haven, South Bronx. Armando Perez came in from the Lower East Side. Armando introduced Melendez to University of the Streets. Luis Gonzalez, another organizer in East Harlem, introduced Melendez to his cousin Juan Gonzalez, the leader of the 1969 student strike at Columbia University.

In the summer of 1969, Mayor Lindsay tried to cut funding to some of the new community-based organizations. The activists used their newly honed organizational skills to fight back. Melendez called Juan Gonzalez, currently leading the student movement at Columbia, and Felipe Luciano, leading the black student movement at Queens, and told them that Puerto Ricans in East Harlem needed their help. They arrived “with a bunch of radical compañeros from Columbia,” Melendez told Ramon Gonzalez, my research assistant in 1993. They “blockaded the East River drive, and the city surrendered.” Melendez, Luciano, and Gonzalez then formed a Puerto Rican student group called Sociedad Albizpo Campos. Melendez transferred to Old Westbury, a radical and experimental new college interested in the concept of University of the Streets, and became a recruiter. On a recruiting trip to Chicago, he attended a meeting of the Chicago Young Lords where they discussed the recent takeover of Clemente High School. At the end of the meeting, Melendez was introduced to “this redheaded guy with a purple beret who is named Cha Cha Jimenez [founder of the Young Lords]. Cha Cha introduces me to David Perez [one of the student leaders].” They spoke at length about the problem of “police brutality in our barrios.”⁸⁷ The following year David transferred to Old Westbury, and the New York branch of the Young Lords was born.

On July 26, 1969, Felipe Luciano announced the creation of the New York branch of the Young Lords before a crowd celebrating the anniversary of the Cuban revolution in the Lower East Side’s Tompkins Square Park. Soon afterward they began walking around 110th Street “with the memory of the riots that had erupted the week before on those same streets,” Melendez said. They were now asking people what it was they wanted. “They said basura (garbage),” Gonzales told me in 1993: “So every Sunday we would sweep the streets. More and more people kept joining. We put the garbage in the middle of 3rd Avenue, and we blocked traffic with it.” Gonzalez decided to call this action the first East Harlem garbage offensive. Once they had the garbage in the middle of the street, they set it aflame:

I did not count the people but in my recollection there could have been five hundred or five thousand neighborhoods taking part in the garbage protests. Every single Young Lord threw a match. Every single person in the community who helped threw matches…. Flames went up spectacularly and people started to scream with joy. In my mind the people—timid mothers, grandmothers, everyone—were showing their support of the Young Lords’ action. This new sight brought to mind the 1967 riots … but this time the protest was flawlessly executed.⁸⁸ (emphasis mine)

Finally the city sent sanitation trucks to the neighborhood and agreed to keep the area clean. The Young Lords then initiated clothing drives and breakfast programs. When a conservative pastor called the police, Gonzalez said, “We kidnapped the church. We occupied the Methodist church in order to run a breakfast program for needy children. [The message was that] this will happen to any institution in a poor community that does not respond to the needs of the people. We initiated the ‘people’s church.’ That was the high point of the Young Lords.”

One-quarter of the membership of the Young Lords was African American, and many of the group’s leaders were Afro–Puerto Ricans. “We began talking about anti-black prejudice in our culture,” Gonzalez recalled. The salsa musician Eddie Palmeri wrote the hit song “Justicia” about them, and Ray Barretto spoke of them admiringly in the lyrics to his salsa songs as well.

The action with the most important long-term consequence, however, was the Young Lords’ successful fight against lead poisoning. They did their own testing and showed that over 80 percent of residents in East Harlem were suffering from high levels of lead. As a result legislation was passed banning lead-based paint and forcing landlords to remove existing paint.

Organizing in Mott Haven, South Bronx

In 1970 the Young Lords launched a major offensive in Mott Haven. They focused their effort on Lincoln Hospital, the worst hospital in the city. The hospital had an active group of workers and radical doctors who had graduated from medical school in 1969 and 1970. “The doctors supported us,” Armando Perez (from RGS, now active in planning the Lincoln takeover) told me. “We met at an apartment at midnight in the Upper West Side, for a surprise party. When everyone arrived we said, ‘surprise, we’re taking over Lincoln hospital.’” They drove a truck up the ramp to the emergency room. “We heard the guards say, you can’t do it. Willie [a member of the group] went to the back of the truck, opened it up, and we occupied the building…. It was a public relations action—we occupied it for a day to demand that they raise the minimum wage of health care workers, worker control, and a new building.”

Vincente “Panama” Alba, director of the Coalition against Police Brutality, learned his activist skills with the Young Lords. He told me in 1993, in the first of many conversations, “We adopted the most militant approach—direct confrontation. We needed health care, so we took over a hospital. We worked according to a four-year plan. In four years we’ll be free, in jail, or dead. We built the hospital. The older workers say, ‘this hospital was built by the Young Lords.’” Later they invited everyone who was into drugs to eat free in the hospital cafeteria, initiating a long-term commitment to “harm reduction” (treating drug abuse as a health issue, focusing on reducing the harm associated with it). They enlisted the help of St. Ann’s Episcopal Church, the only church receptive to their demands, in clothing drives, liberation schools, welfare rights, and tenant organizations. Some Young Lords began to do prisoner support, supporting in particular the prisoners in Attica during and following the uprising. Others moved to Puerto Rico and began to do work promoting independence there.

Police and FBI agents infiltrated the Young Lords as part of their Counter Intelligence Program, known more commonly by its acronym, COINTEL. Then terrorist cells began to emerge. “It was so depressing,” Alba noted. “When the Young Lords arose in 1969–70, a lot of other things were happening,” Armando observed. “There were sharp racial tensions, and it was the middle of the Vietnam War…. The country was in an upheaval with Americans trying to figure out ‘is this worth it?’ It was a different time. People felt you had to do something. There was a sense of life and death that you don’t have now. The methods of social control were different.”

The Decline of Black and Puerto Rican Power

By the 1970s the Panthers, the Young Lords, and other organizations were in disarray. Personal disputes and ideological divisions, poor strategic choices, and the COINTEL infiltration all did damage. Not all 1970s radicals dedicated their lives to improving their communities. Some used their organizing skills to amass personal wealth and power. In Williamsburg, Luis Olmedo used his position as chair of Los Sures to run for council in 1973. “Olmedo was a nationalist,” noted local activist Saul Nieves (1996), and as such “able to take advantage. The nationalists supported anyone who supported independence. When he ran for council in 1973, he swept.” He won by large margins until he was indicted for corruption. Meanwhile the neighborhood fell into disrepair.

By 1978 both Schaefer Brewing Company and Rheingold Brewing Company had abandoned the city. Unemployment in Williamsburg reached 12.1 percent, up from 5.8 percent in 1970. The loss of jobs and the deterioration of housing left the community crumbling and threatened by street gangs, drugs, and arson. Street gangs, which had provided an alternative status and identity for young people since the 1950s, gradually became involved in drug trafficking. As Cuso, the local activist and former gang member, told me in 1994, “In the 1950s the gangs were huge…. When they flooded the neighborhood with drugs all the gang members became drug addicts. The presidents of the gangs became drug dealers.” Cuso, Maldonado, and other activists became addicted to heroin. Many later contracted H.I.V. “Poverty is the major reason for drug abuse,” Maldonado said. “You have to offer people something—something to aim for. Drugs are the major economic resource in this neighborhood. There are kids out here with big bankrolls, fancy cars. It is attractive. When I grew up there was a lot of peer pressure—in the 1960s it was what was happening. A lot of kids in this neighborhood got involved—winded up using drugs, getting addicted.”

In Mott Haven, Ramon Velez used his seat on the city council to win millions of dollars in federal antipoverty monies for his own community organizations. After he came under major city and state investigations in 1977, he successfully maneuvered to get his cohorts on the board of directors of the new Lincoln Hospital. He opened a multiservice center that received large city contracts and subcontracted services from other service agencies and businesses connected to the machine, allowing him and his cronies to “load their pocketbooks and enrich their bank accounts,” claimed one local activist. “As the machine grew,” noted another, “it undermined real movements from coming out in the Bronx.”

By 1976 Mott Haven was one of the poorest congressional districts in the United States. City policy encouraged opportunistic arson. “The lag between when the landlord stopped paying taxes, providing services, and collecting rent and when the city acquired, demolished, and finally wiped the structure from its books varied from years to overnight. At each stage of the process landlords, tenants, and squatters could and often did burn their buildings.”⁸⁹ Poverty, joblessness, and a desolate landscape led to desperation and spiraling crime rates, which were then blamed on and generalized to all black and Puerto Rican residents in the popular press and imagination.⁹⁰ As Evelyn Gonzalez pointedly notes, “Without the social constraints and community sanctions engendered by such networks [community ties] delinquency, alcoholism, drug abuse and violent behavior increased…. Once stability and safety were gone, the neighborhoods of Mott Haven, Melrose, Morrisania-Claremont, and Hunts Point-Croton Park East disappeared and the blighted area of the South Bronx grew…. Without neighborhoods, the older stock of the South Bronx disappeared.”⁹¹

Harry DeRienzo, founder of Banana Kelly and later Consumer Farmer, two grassroots housing organizations active in the 1980s and 1990s, recalled, “People were [literally] burned out. Fires affected especially community boards 2 and 3. The area lost about 70 percent of its population. Everyone who could leave did.” Another neighborhood activist bitterly observed, “We had politicians parceling out power…. Tracts of land in the community were deliberately allowed to fall apart, to pave the way for further development” and personal gain.

In the Lower East Side “the combination of private capital flight and the absence of government response made portions [of the neighborhood] … virtually uninhabitable. Blocks dotted with decrepit or abandoned buildings provided havens for drug users or sellers, with shooting galleries and stash houses.”⁹² “Social disorganization, violence and ethnic strife marked the East Village…. runaways slept in abandoned buildings, in doorways, in phone booths, or on rooftops, supporting themselves through begging, street selling, dope dealing, petty thievery and prostitution.”⁹³ The Lower East Side “surpassed even Harlem as a retail drug market … as its proximity to transportation routes and landscapes of devastation stimulate ever larger numbers of drug users and traders.”⁹⁴ Alphabet City, “an area approximately fifty square blocks located near the major tunnels and bridges into Manhattan[,] was in the words of the police, ‘the retail drug capital of the world.’”⁹⁵

The 1977 Blackout Riots

The 1977 blackout riots accelerated this trend. Unlike with the riots of the 1960s, the triggering incident was not police abuse but rather opportunity. The spatial pattern, repertoire, and characteristics of the riot differed in striking ways from those of the earlier wave.⁹⁶ As Wohlenberg notes, “[T]he first riot of the decade occurred in Harlem in 1964 and the riot syndrome—the innovation—spread outward from the initial occurrence to other cities and attained widespread adoption by 1968.”⁹⁷ The blackout riots hit all neighborhoods in the city simultaneously, which made them extremely hard to police. Riots that begin in one neighborhood can often be contained if a police commissioner chooses to concentrate his forces there. Riots that explode everywhere at once are far more difficult to control. For this reason alone, the 1977 blackout riots were particularly combustible.

Another defining feature of the blackout riots was that most of those arrested on the first day had established criminal records. It was only in the later hours that residents without any previous criminal record participated in the looting (what Spike Lee remembers ruefully as “Christmas in July”⁹⁸). During the 1960s, riots had followed the opposite course, with the first wave of arrests being individuals previously unknown to police. Moreover, the 1960s rioters had avoided looting stores owned by local blacks or Latinos. The 1977 rioters did not make such distinctions: all stores were hit at the same rate. Lacking insurance for anything but fire, many vulnerable storeowners set their own shops aflame, escalating the destruction of neighborhoods.

The blackout that triggered the 1977 riots struck during an unusually severe heat wave. The extra energy being used to cool commercial buildings and apartments taxed the poorly maintained circuit breakers, steam units, and service remote controls, none of which had been upgraded or replaced in years. When a bolt of lightning hit the Buchanan South generator, those outside the plant were unable to regulate the distribution of electricity across the units, and the employee ordered to operate the load-dumping equipment turned the master switch the wrong way or “didn’t lift the protective cover from the console before trying to depress the buttons.”⁹⁹ All at once, millions of New Yorkers were without lights and air-conditioning. They took to the streets, fleeing the heat and darkness of their apartments. Some thousand began looting, and others joined in.

The Bronx and Brooklyn were hit especially hard. A total of 473 stores in the Bronx were damaged and 961 looters arrested. When Mayor Abraham Beame issued the call for policemen to return to duty, he told them to report to whichever precinct was closest. That left the Bronx virtually without police. The Bronx precinct reported a total of 38 officers. “Ten times that number would have been necessary to cope with the spontaneous incidents of looting, fires and attacks on police officers,” the precinct head told Jonathan Mahler.¹⁰⁰

It was worse in Brooklyn, where a five-mile stretch from Sunset Park through Williamsburg, Bushwick, Brownsville, and Flatbush became the scene of massive looting. “Seven hundred Brooklyn stores were plundered; 1,088 people were arrested.”¹⁰¹ One of the worst-hit neighborhoods was Bushwick, bordering Williamsburg. A decade earlier Bushwick had been a working-class Italian neighborhood. When the Navy Yard closed, a white exodus began. While some Brooklyn neighborhoods received “Model City” status, allowing them to qualify for antipoverty funds, the government had relied on six-year-old census figures marking Bushwick as too rich to qualify. As bulldozers cleared tracts and destroyed tenement housing in East New York, Brownsville, and Williamsburg to make way for new low-income housing projects—many of which were never built—displaced residents found their way to Bushwick. The closing of the beer industry after the Navy Yard accelerated the process of urban decay. Racial tensions between Italians and Puerto Ricans, in particular, sometimes boiled over, as Cuso recalled. In 1977 the Eighty-third police precinct was overwhelmingly white, but those officers policed a neighborhood that was “overwhelmingly black and Hispanic with a narrow strip of Italians along its western edge. ‘Our job was about arresting minorities,’” a police officer from the Eighty-third told Mahler.¹⁰²