Portside

Rioters in Harlem Win Concessions (1935)

MARCH 19 IS THE 90TH ANNIVERSARY of the start of a major riot in the middle of Harlem. Enraged by what turned out to be a false rumor that a cop had killed a young shoplifting suspect, thousands of rioters, most of them African-American, targeted hundreds of stores, where they smashed display windows and stole merchandise, causing more than a million dollars in damage over a day and a half. It was New York City’s biggest civil disturbance in nearly 35 years. 

Before the riot started, the residents of Harlem had been traumatized by more than five years of the Great Depression, which hit the Black population of the U.S. extraordinarily hard. The surprising thing about the outburst of violence was not that it happened, but that it had not happened months or years earlier. 

Wave after wave of lay-offs had produced an unemployment rate for New York City Blacks at least twice that of the white population. The squeeze caused by unemployment, lack of affordable housing and racial discrimination in the availability of welfare support payments was causing malnutrition that was literally killing Harlem residents, who were experiencing a death rate 65 percent higher than the city as a whole. Harlem was like a powder keg, and the rumor was the spark that set it off.

Part of New York’s establishment blamed the violence on Harlem residents and on radicals among them, who had been organizing in Harlem for years. Even before the violence was over, the district attorney announced, “My purpose is to let the Communists know that they cannot come into this country and upset our laws. From my information Communists distributed literature and took an active part in the riot.” 

But Fiorello La Guardia, New York’s New Deal-inspired mayor, had a more enlightened view of the unrest’s cause. He immediately set up a multi-racial Mayor’s Committee on Conditions in Harlem, headed by African-American sociologist E. Franklin Frazier and with members including Judge Hubert Thomas Delany, Countee Cullen, and labor leader A. Philip Randolph. The committee held extensive hearings during which it took testimony from a wide spectrum of New Yorkers and produced a 132-page report, “The Negro in Harlem: A Report on Social and Economic Conditions Responsible for the Outbreak of March 19, 1935”, which described the rioting as "spontaneous" with "no evidence of any program or leadership of the rioters". 

The report concluded that “this sudden breach of the public order . . . among the colored people of Harlem [was] due in large part to the nervous strain of years of unemployment and insecurity [and] their deep sense of wrong through discrimination against their employment in stores which live chiefly upon their purchases, discrimination against them in the school system and by the police, and all the evils due to dreadful overcrowding, unfair rentals and inadequate institutional care. It is probable that their justifiable pent-up feeling that they were and are the victims of gross injustice and prejudice would sooner or later have brought about an explosion.”

"It is a grave state of affairs,” the report stated, “when the inhabitants of a large section of the city have come to look upon the men in police uniforms as lawless oppressors who stop at no brutality or at the taking of human life. . . . The existence of intense hostility on the part of the law-abiding element among the colored people is proof positive that there is something seriously wrong in the attitude of the officers toward the people whom they are there to serve and to aid and not to browbeat of abuse.” It also noted that the rioters had focused almost all their attacks on property and not on individuals, white or Black. The report even congratulated Communists as deserving "more credit than any other element in Harlem for preventing a physical conflict between whites and blacks".

With the committee report in hand, La Guardia and his administration, as well as the state government, shifted a significant quantity of resources toward reducing many of the shockingly discriminatory aspects of the city’s employment, housing, healthcare, recreational, and educational policies that the report identified. https://isreview.org/issue/1/communist-party-and-black-liberation-1930s/index.html

A Big Win for White-Collar Strikers (2000) 

MARCH 20 IS THE 25TH ANNIVERSARY of the successful conclusion – after forty days on the picket-line – of one of the biggest-ever strikes by U.S. white-collar workers.

Some 15,000 members of Society of Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace which is also Local 2001 of International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers, won raises averaging 15 percent over three years and forced management to abandon a proposal to force the engineers to contribute to the cost of their health insurance. https://www.communistvoice.org/24cBoeing.html

Marking a Century of Classroom Censorship (1925)

MARCH 21 IS THE 100TH ANNIVERSARY of Tennessee enacting a law that declared it unlawful for any public school teacher “to teach any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals."

Four months later, in what had come to be known as the Scopes Monkey Trial, substitute teacher John Scopes was convicted of violating the law, which remained on the books until it was declared unconstitutional in 1968. https://www.aclu.org/documents/state-tennessee-v-scopes

Witch-Hunt Targets Get a Very Belated Apology (1980)

MARCH 24 IS THE 45TH ANNIVERSARY of the City University of New York’s Board of Trustees offering an apology to 18 former CUNY professors – including Vera Shlakman, Oscar Shaftel, Richard Austin, Joseph Bressler, Dudley Straus, Sarah Reidman Gustafson, and Bernard F. Riess – who had been fired from their teaching jobs for having refused to bow their knees to anti-communist witch hunters and “name names” in the early 1950s. According to the Trustees, "They were dismissed during and in the spirit of the shameful era of McCarthyism during which the freedoms traditionally associated with academic institutions were quashed." https://ccrjustice.org/home/press-center/press-releases/mccarthy-era-blacklist-victims-peace-groups-academics-and-media

The Long Road from Selma (1965) 

MARCH 25 IS THE 60TH ANNIVERSARY of the celebration at the successful end of the 54-mile march from Selma, Alabama, to the state capitol in Montgomery. The march was only allowed to take place under the protection of both a federal court order and the armed presence of hundreds of Alabama National Guard troops, who were acting under the command of the federal government. 

Martin Luther King, Jr., spoke from the steps of the Capitol: "Racial segregation as a way of life did not come about as a natural result of hatred between the races immediately after the Civil War. There were no laws segregating the races then. And as the noted historian, C. Vann Woodward, in his book, The Strange Career of Jim Crow, clearly points out, the segregation of the races was really a political stratagem employed by the emerging Bourbon interests in the South to keep the southern masses divided and southern labor the cheapest in the land.

"You see, it was a simple thing to keep the poor white masses working for near-starvation wages in the years that followed the Civil War. Why, if the poor white plantation or mill worker became dissatisfied with his low wages, the plantation or mill owner would merely threaten to fire him and hire former Negro slaves and pay him even less. Thus, the southern wage level was kept almost unbearably low." https://www.crmvet.org/tim/timhis65.htm

For more People's History, visit
https://www.facebook.com/jonathan.bennett.7771/