Nation: No Place Like Home

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At the height of Harlem’s nighttime fury, a white police officer stood in the litter of glass and garbage that had come crashing down from the darkened rooftops and raised a bull horn to his mouth. “Go home,” he pleaded with the glowering Negro mobs that clustered along Seventh Avenue and atop the shabby tenements. “Go home. Go home.” From a man in the mob came a shout: “We are home, baby.”

There was both defiance and despair in that cry, for Central Harlem is no place like home. It occupies only a 3.5-sq.-mi. wedge of upper Manhattan, but 232,000 people are packed into it, 94% of them black. Its worst streets are so crowded that if the same density prevailed throughout New York City the entire population of the U.S. could be jammed into just three of its five boroughs. It seethes with life and frequently boils over in violence. Its drug addiction rate is ten times higher than New York City’s, twelve times higher than the nation’s. Its murder rate is six times higher than the city’s. “This is the jungle,” says a Harlem woman, “the very heart of it.”

Rats & Roaches. The jungle is, above all, inexorably and everlastingly dreary. There is no fun, no glamour here. There is little excitement even in the violence and sin. There are, of course, a few clearings. In the handsome residences up on Sugar Hill and the comfortable Riverton Apartments along the Harlem River, the black bourgeoisie live much as their middle-class white counterparts do. Dozens of such project apartment buildings rise above Harlem’s slums like so many monoliths, changing the section’s skyline as drastically as they have changed lower Manhattan’s.

But there are also the tenements where the mortar is so fatigued with age that hoodlums had merely to peel the bricks from crumbling chimneys last week for ammunition to heave at the cops. Half of Harlem’s buildings are officially classified as “deteriorating” or “dilapidated,” but no classification—official or otherwise—can adequately describe their garbage-strewn hallways and rotting, rickety staircases, their rat-infested rooms and grease-caked stoves where the roaches fight one another for space, their crumbling plaster and Swiss-cheese ceilings.

On some streets, men who cannot find jobs sit on stoops playing pinochle and coon can and Georgia skin, or drinking “Dirty Bird” wine at 60¢ a pint from bottles hidden in brown paper bags. Buzzing around them are children who frolic unsupervised far into the night, wearing latchkeys on strings around their necks because there is nobody at home to care for them. Half of Harlem’s children under 18 live with only one parent or none, and it is small wonder that the juvenile delinquency rate is more than double New York’s or that the venereal disease rate among Harlem’s youth is six times higher than in the rest of the city. Harlem is a mother lode of such statistics, but no footnoted chart on child neglect could reveal as much about the place as the story of the lost little girl of three who was not able to tell the police where she was from, and knew her mother only by the name she had heard around the house: “Bitch.”

C.P.T. Harlem, wrote Negro Novelist Ralph (The Invisible Man) Ellison in a 1948 essay, is “the scene and symbol of the Negro’s perpetual alienation in the land of his birth.” It is the archetypal Negro ghetto, and to some it is the black capital of the world. Says Wilt (“The Stilt”) Chamberlain, pro basketball star and part owner of Small’s Paradise, one of Harlem’s remaining handful of clubs with live entertainment: “A Negro here is different from a Negro in Philly or Frisco because he belongs.”

No walls surround the ghetto except the invisible ones that can be the hardest of all to surmount. Harlem’s Negroes have withdrawn behind the invisible walls, almost out of necessity, into a world of their own, complete with its own pride, its own lingo, and even its own time. In Harlem, C.P.T. means “Colored People’s Time,” and it runs one full hour behind white people’s time.

The nether border of the Negro’s world is Central Park. From just one block north, the fresh breezes and greenery seem a planet distant. Here is 111th Street, between Fifth and Madison Avenues, infested with prostitutes and dope addicts. Up a ways, at 118th and Lenox Avenue, is “junkie’s corner,” and at the New York Central overpass at 125th Street, over which suburban commuters ride every day between air-conditioned offices and well-kept homes, Negro prostitutes wait for white johns who know the spot and drive by in their cars.

“You Can’t Get No Place.” Harlem is three classes: middle, working and deprived. It is where the middle class, or what is left of it, joins the Jack and Jill Club to insulate its children, later sends them to prep schools and takes them on vacation to the Caribbean or Europe or Sag Harbor—but almost never to Miami. It is where the middle class disdains interracial marriage and bristles when a Harry Belafonte marries a white woman. “We’ve got all the colors in the rainbow,” said a doctor’s wife. “What do we need to marry them for?”

Harlem is where Negroes refer to one another as “nigger” and “brother,” “spook” and “hardhead,” but woe to the white man who uses the same expression. It is where the white man is no longer the “ofay” (pig Latin for foe), but “Mr. Charlie” or “the man,” and mostly “whitey,” derived from the Black Nationalist talk of “the blue-eyed white devil.” It is where a common laborer mutters to himself at a corner bar: “You don’t come up to Harlem and whip my head, white man. You can whip me somewhere else. But not here, white man.” It is where the Negro’s next-door neighbor, the Puerto Rican, is eyed with suspicion when he ventures over from his East Harlem slum.

Harlem is also composed of sharp merchants and peddlers hawking “icies,” cups of ice drenched with sickly sweet syrup. Its shops sell second-rate strawberries for half again as much as first-rate ones cost in Greenwich Village, and men can buy clothing for 9¢ to $1.99 in “dump shops.” Everywhere is the smell of cooking grease and the sizzle from all-night fry shops that sell porgie fish or pig’s knuckles or chitlins (hog intestines).

Black Times Square. Harlem is the noise of Congo drums from a dark window and a throbbing twist beat on a transistor radio. It is street-corner churches and spired temples, 400 in all, always going full blast under the guidance of Holy Rollers and thunder-voiced spiritualists, some of whom drive new Cadillacs and live in the suburbs. It is a woman complaining: “Whenever you have a lot of preachers jumping on their head and rolling on the floor like hogs, I tell you, you can’t get no place like that. You see people foaming, your women with their dresses up over their heads. My God, you can’t get no place like that.” But almost as numerous as the churches are the tawdry bars and the liquor stores, and you can’t get no place like that either.

Harlem is the corner of 125th Street and Seventh Avenue, the black Times Square, where orators on soapboxes or folding chairs harangue passersby to “buy black” or “get whitey.” In the shadow of the Theresa Hotel, where Fidel Castro plucked his chickens and Cassius Clay celebrated the feathering of his nest, Lewis Michaux composes Black Nationalist doggerel:

If you’re black get back If you’re red be afraid If you’re white you’re perfectly right.

This is Harlem’s heart, and 125th Street is its aorta. Here is Frank’s Restaurant, crowded with white merchants at lunchtime, but thronged at dinnertime with middle-class Negroes, who are served with unctuous concern by white waiters. Here is Blumstein’s, the only real department store in Harlem, but hardly a match for a midtown five and clime. And here is the Baby Grand, where Nipsey Russell’s successor, Comedian Ray Scott, folds his hands, raises his eyes and beseeches:

“Let Goldwater have a seven-car accident with a gasoline truck that’s been hit by a match wagon over the Grand Canyon. If he should survive, let the ambulance that’s taking him to the hospital have four flat tires and run into a brick wall that’s holding nuclear warheads and TNT. And if he should survive that, let him be thrown into a patch of wild dogs that’s suffering from flea-itis and may he scratch himself insane. When he gets to the hospital, let the doctor be a junkie with a gorilla on his back and an orangoutang in his room. Let the hospital catch on fire, and every fire hydrant from Nova Scotia to wherever he was born be froze up. Let muddy water run in his grave. Let lightning strike in his heart and make him so ugly that he’ll resemble a gorilla sucking hot Chinese mustard lying across a railroad track with freight trains running across his kneecaps. And if that’s not bad enough, let him wake up tomorrow morning—black like me.”

Happy Valley. Above all, Harlem is, as the man said, home. “You couldn’t pay me to live anywhere else,” says a Negro high school dropout. “A white man, he’s got a mark on him if he comes up here. I got a mark on me if I go down there.” Still some Negroes would live almost anywhere else just to get out of the ghetto. “I felt caged, like an animal,” said Writer James Baldwin, who fled to Greenwich Village and then to Europe. “I felt if I didn’t get out I would slowly strangle.” Poet Claude McKay put it another way 40-odd years ago when he described the Negro as feeling

Hunted and penned in an inglorious

spot

While round us bark the mad and

hungry dogs.

Making their mock at our accursed

lot.

Once this inglorious spot was one of the glories of New York, and a 19th century sightseer described it as a place of “little velvety islands and silvery rivers, sublimely picturesque in vernal bloom.” Established in 1658 by Peter Stuyvesant, Nieuw Haarlem lay in a lush bottomland dotted with farms like “Happy Valley” and “Quiet Vale.” At first it was connected to the rest of Manhattan by a single road built with Negro labor along an Indian footpath that is now part of Broadway.

When the elevated railway was extended to Harlem in 1880, land values boomed. It was obvious, said the Harlem Monthly Magazine in 1893, that “the center of fashion, wealth, culture and intelligence must, in the near future, be found in the ancient and honorable village of Harlem.”

A Bridge of Green. Harlem became a place of brownstone fronts and Saratoga trunks. Oscar Hammerstein built the Harlem Opera House: it now houses a bowling alley. William Waldorf Astor put up a $500,000 apartment house on Seventh Avenue. Commodore Vanderbilt showed off his trotters on Lenox Avenue. The rich flocked up to Harlem for the summer.

Then the Negroes began pressing to get in. After the bloody Civil War draft riots in New York, when rampaging whites lynched 18 Negroes, drowned five others, and burned down a Negro orphan asylum, the black colony began an exodus to remote uptown areas, first the upper West Side and after the turn of the century to Harlem. White real estate dealers formed “protective” associations to prevent blockbusting, hung “White Only” signs in windows.

But economics played a hand, perhaps proving the validity of the current cliché that ultimately the bridge between black and white will be green—the color of money. The land speculation collapsed. Apartments went empty, even after rent cuts. Finally, a group of Negroes got into a house on 134th Street. Later, the Equitable Life Assurance Society gave in and sold “Strivers’ Row,” a magnificent row of brownstones on 139th Street that had been designed by Stanford White. The houses had 14 rooms and two baths, French doors and hardwood floors, but Equitable unloaded them for $8,000 apiece.

“Let Me Off Uptown.” The Negro migration was on, and the Northern labor shortages created by World War I sharply accelerated it. From 1915 to 1925 more than 1,000,000 Southern Negroes moved North.

Harlem’s Golden Age began. “Meat was cheap and home brew was strong,” wrote Historian Lerone Bennett. “Duke Ellington was at the Cotton Club and Satchmo was at the Sunset, God was in heaven and Father Divine was in Harlem.” Those were the days of speakeasies with names like Glory Hole and Basement Brownie’s Coal Bed, of stompin’ at the Savoy and vaudeville at the Apollo, of “rent parties” where guests paid 50¢ or $1 to help the host pay his rent and got all the food and drink—and sometimes sex—that they could manage. It was the time when Jazz Singer Anita O’Day told her audiences:

If it’s pleasure you’re about,

And you feel like steppin’ out,

All you’ve got to do is shout:

Let me off Uptown.

But Uptown was growing more and more crowded, and lurking just beneath the throbbing, wild surface that white merrymakers saw on their Saturday night outings lay serious trouble. In Novelist Carl Van Vechten’s Nigger Heaven, a Negro character says of the New Yorkers who live below Harlem:

“It never seems to occur to them that Nigger Heaven is crowded, that there isn’t another seat, that something has to be done. It doesn’t seem to occur to them, either, that we sit above them, that we can drop things down on them and crush them, that we can swoop down from this Nigger Heaven and take their seats.”

Fresh Inflow. In 1935 the coiled tension of Harlem lashed out in a riot that began when a 16-year-old boy was seized stealing a cheap penknife in a white-owned variety store. This was the height of the Depression, and for months Negroes had been mesmerized by the nationalistic “buy black” speeches of a Philadelphia Negro who called himself Sufi Abdul Hamid (real name: Eugene Brown). The rumor spread that the boy had been beaten to death, and though it was false, the mobs left four dead, 100 injured and $1,000,000 in property damage, largely to white stores.

Eight years later, a white policeman trying to arrest a woman for disorderly conduct shot and wounded a Negro G.I. for interfering. Rumors flashed through the ghetto that the soldier was dead, and this time the toll was five dead, 500 injured, $5,000,000 in damage.

During World War II still another inflow of blacks to New York began. In the last 20 years, the city’s Negro population has increased 2½ times, now stands at 1,200,000, or 15% of the total. More than half the new arrivals spilled over into ghettos in the other boroughs, creating huge new Harlems: Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant, whose population has trebled since 1940 and is soon expected to pass Harlem itself; South Jamaica-St. Albans in Queens, where the Negro population has trebled in a single decade; Morrisania in the Southeast Bronx. Together with Harlem, the four ghettos house 80% of New York’s Negroes.

Three Strikes. In the ’50s, Harlem’s population actually declined by 27,000 because of the construction of vast housing projects. The outflow relieved the ghetto’s congestion somewhat, but it also damaged Harlem’s future almost beyond repair, for 41,000 middle class Negroes in their 20s and 30s got out, making Harlem more of a slum than ever and leaving it with no core to build on.

Today, Harlem’s three precincts, patrolled by 1,200 police, about 85% of them white, are the city’s busiest. Narcotics is the top problem. Of New York’s 30,000 junkies, 15,000 to 20,000 live in Harlem. “I was just born black, poor and uneducated, and you only need three strikes all over the world to be out, and I have nothing to live for but this shot of dope,” says one addict. But the habit is costly: $1 for a marijuana “reefer,” $3 for a “bag” (a single grain of heroin), $5 for a “deck” (three grains). A heavy user may need up to $75 a day, and that often means mugging people and sometimes killing them for the wherewithal.

“Numbers?” sneers a white police detective. “Hell, that’s a game. Narcotics is something else. Me and my partner, we pick up junkies, and sometimes we even get a pusher. We want to go further, get to the wholesaler. Well, mister, we can’t move one inch more. If I move in, I may get busted to patrolman. You push too hard in narcotics, you can get to be DOA, which is dead on arrival.”

Fast Payoff. “Numbers” is the poor Negroes’ reach for the pot of gold, and 100,000 of them slip nickels and dimes to “runners” each day in the hope that their three-digit number will come up for a 600-to-1 payoff. Otherwise known as the policy racket, the numbers game drains Harlem of $50 million a year, but it also provides a living for 15,000 runners and controllers. Negro stores abound with code books advising that if you have dreamed about the police you should bet the number 782; about cats, 578; about adultery, 900.

Once, Negroes controlled Harlem’s numbers racket. But, so the story goes, one Harlem policy banker was hit hard during the 1930s and went to Racketeer Dutch Schultz to borrow $5,000. So quickly did he pay it back that Schultz became interested, and before long the big-time mobsters moved in. Now Negroes complain that Italian and Jewish racketeers, protected by the police, control the game, and a Black Nationalist has drawn cheers by calling for “black control of the numbers.”

Most Harlemites are convinced that the cops turn their backs on such rackets for a price. And this conviction vastly complicates the problem of policing Harlem. What happened last week, said the Rev. Richard A. Hildebrand, head of New York’s N.A.A.C.P. chapter, was “the explosion of a total community resentment, deeply rooted in the absence of respect on the part of Harlem citizens for the cop on the beat, whom they see in far too many compromising situations.”

One of the major demands made by Negro leaders last week was for more Negro cops in Harlem—the ratio is 1 Negro policeman to 6 white. Ironically, the proportion of Negroes was once much higher, but civil rights leaders complained that if white police could patrol Harlem, Negro police ought to patrol white neighborhoods, and New York’s civil-righteously sensitive Democratic city fathers dutifully scattered the Negro cops around the city.

Unbreakable Cycle. The cops and the cloudy issue of “police brutality” were last week’s headline material, but Harlem’s problems go much deeper. “The most dangerous creation of any society is that man who has nothing to lose,” wrote James Baldwin in The Fire Next Time, and Harlem abounds with such men. They have neither jobs, nor homes worth living in, nor an education. The tragedy of Harlem is that yet another generation of such men is being bred because they cannot break out of the vicious cycle of the ghetto: poor schooling, leading to a low-paying job or no job at all, leading to housing in a rundown neighborhood, leading anew to poor schooling for the children.

There are 50,000 Negroes on New York City’s civil service rolls, and the city has one out of every nine working Negroes on its payroll. But Negro unemployment runs twice as high in Harlem as elsewhere, and most of the jobs that are open pay bare subsistence wages. “You go down to the employment agency, and you can’t get a job,” says one Negro. “They don’t have a job for you.” Automation heightened the problem, throwing thousands of elevator operators, ditchdiggers and countermen out of work.

Negro politicians stir passions when they point out that 80% of Harlem’s businesses are owned by whites who do not live there. Most of them are Jews, and here are the sparks of Harlem’s blazing antiSemitism. The fact is that some of Harlem’s most flourishing enterprises are run by black millionaires who don’t live there either, but at least they are black. “If we are unable to bring about an orderly transfer of business from whites to Negroes in Harlem, it will be done one way or the other,” thunders James Lawson, president of the United African Nationalist Movement, head of the Harlem Council for Economic Development and a thoroughgoing demagogue. What Lawson means is clear. Last April half a dozen Negro punks entered a husband-and-wife clothing store on 125th Street, got into an argument and stabbed the wife, Mrs. Magit Sugar, to death with a double-edged dirk. Lawson said that the store, once worth $5,000, could now be bought from disconsolate Frank Sugar, a Hungarian refugee, for $150. Similar “expropriations,” he predicts, will take place if whites do not sell out to Negroes.

Relief Pets. Anger over Harlem’s housing took concrete shape last fall, in rabble-rousing Jesse Gray’s “rent strike.” All told, Gray claimed that 4,500 tenants from 325 buildings refused to pay their rent because their landlords had failed to rout the rats, drain the swampy basements and plug the holes in the walls and ceilings. Mayor Wagner lent his support by ordering a new drive against “slumlords,” but the Buildings Department, with a backlog of 250,000 complaints, is still snowed under.

While the tenements steadily decay, Harlem’s housing situation is looking up in other ways. The city, hoping to reverse the middle-class exodus by offering more attractive quarters, has adopted a three-pronged program of municipal loans for rehabilitating existing houses, public projects and private developments. Under the rehabilitation program, it has handed out $1,000,000 in 20-year, 4% loans since the beginning of the year to help landlords to save whatever is worth saving, chiefly the solidly built brownstones scattered throughout the area. Another $5,000,000 will flow in the near future. “With these loans,” says Herbert B. Evans, Negro vice chairman of the city’s Housing and Redevelopment Board, “we can go into the lousiest damned area in the city and do something. Some of these landlords have just quit, and we’ve got to move in.”

Not Near Enough. In the last 15 years, some 25 public and private projects have been launched in Harlem at a cost of $370 million, providing space for 84,000 people. Some are in the planning stage, such as a $30 million development for 7,440 people on the site of the Polo Grounds, which started out as a playground for Manhattan’s horsy set and later became one for baseball’s horsehide set. But this is still nowhere near enough. For all the gripes by Negro intellectuals about the esthetic shortcomings of the projects, applications outnumber acceptances 9 to 1, and even in costlier developments like Lenox Terrace, a $40-a-room private venture, there is a long waiting list.

Critics complain that the projects wipe out small businessmen, leave slum dwellers with nowhere to go, and perpetuate the ghetto by “packaging” people in huge, blocky buildings. While there is something to their complaint, the fact is that the projects are the best hope of luring back the professional people, whose escape to the other boroughs and to the suburbs has robbed Harlem of its middle-class backbone. Says Evans: “Harlem must have middle-income housing to hold its productive people. Too many have left for other areas. But it needs good buildings to hold its people. We’ve got to put something back into Harlem.”

But that will take time, and the city’s short-range solution for the Negro who is snared in the ghetto cycle is public assistance. Nearly a fourth of Harlem’s people are on welfare, many under the Aid to Dependent Children program. Critics complain that the program encourages loose women to increase the monthly check by reproducing as often as possible. Whether this is true or not, there is certainly some chiseling. Some men leave home or are sent packing by their women so their families can qualify for ADC support.

Gang-Busters. New York City Welfare Commissioner James R. Dumpson, 52, a Philadelphia-born Negro, claims that only 275 cases of fraud were unearthed in 1963. Once, he said, welfare workers could not tell one Negro child from another and all the kids in the neighborhood ran from house to house, a few steps ahead of the social worker, to pad the rolls. But now his department workers demand birth certificates and school records.

Dumpson also uses what he calls the Early Morning Visit, in which investigators charge into a woman’s flat at 5 a.m. like gangbusters and, if a man is present, try to find out whether he is filching welfare money or dodging child support. Not surprisingly, some welfare workers object to the technique.

To many officials, the best hope of breaking the self-renewing jobs-housing-education cycle lies in the schools. By the time they reach sixth grade, Harlem’s children are nearly two full years behind their classmates downtown. The dropout rate is 55%, and the children often as not wind up on the streets, for the unemployment rate among Negro teen-agers is 40%. These youths are the despair of Harlem, for they are, in a sense, living proof of its failure. “Look at those damned kids,” snapped a Negro man as packs of teenagers ran wild last week. “They won’t listen to nobody. They won’t listen to no damned thing.”

Even so, says the Rev. Dr. M. Moran Weston, rector of St. Philip’s Episcopal Church in Harlem, “there are a lot of natural leaders out on those streets. Somebody just needs to help them.” Weston’s church, for one, is helping by offering basketball and music, field trips and job placement services to 500 children a day. Some 150 social services are also at work in Harlem, spending as much as $10 million a year.

Into the Honey Pot. The most ambitious project of all is the threeyear, $110 million HARYOU-ACT* program, partly supported with federal funds. It is the brainchild of Kenneth Clark, 50, a City College professor whose brief on the effects of discrimination helped shape the Supreme Court’s 1954 school desegregation decision. It envisions a network of community councils and organizations dedicated to fighting poverty and helping the ghetto’s youngsters by setting up half a dozen businesses that will be run by some 3,000 teenagers, after-school study centers for those with nowhere to go, job information and training centers handling 2,300 youths a year, preschool academies to get toddlers out of fetid tenements, and a crash remedial reading program for Harlem schools. “We’ve got to show them that hard work does pay off, ” says Clark, “even for Negroes.”

There is a lot of honey in the HARYOU-ACT pot, though, and the politicians are already buzzing around it like bumblebees. Buzzing loudest is Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, who threatens to hamstring the venture unless he is given veto power over the choice of its executive director. The issue remains to be settled, but even if the program is not pork-barreled dry, it will be a long time in producing tangible results.

Uncle Tom. Among its many calamities, one of Harlem’s severest is its politicians. “To get elected in Harlem,” said New York State Assembly Candidate Percy Sutton, 43, “you have to prove you can talk tougher with the downtown whites than your opponent does. And you got to holler ‘Uncle Tom’ and a lot of other things.” The result is a lot of noise and little of value to Harlem.

Where, for example, were Harlem’s leaders last week? Its hero, its Congressman, and pastor of its huge, 10,000-member Abyssinian Baptist Church, Adam Clayton Powell, was in Switzerland and Washington, but not Harlem. “There’s one good thing about Adam Clayton Powell,” says one Negro. “He seems to make the Caucasians very angry.” Harlem’s only city councilman, J. Raymond Jones, was fresh back from his Virgin Islands retreat, but he saw no reason to comment on the situation.

Fragmented Leadership. Even when they are on the scene, Harlem’s leaders are quarrelsome and grasping. A few weeks ago, the Rev. Robert M. Kinloch, head of a largely paper outfit called the Independent Community Improvement Association, turned up to picket a 125th Street cafeteria to protest “the lack of a black face behind the counter.” Suddenly the Rev. Nelson Dukes turned up to “mediate” in his capacity as head of the Blue Ribbon Organization for Equal Opportunity Now. The pickets shouted “Uncle Tom” at Dukes, and Kinloch complained, “This is my demonstration and my pickets.”

The Black Nationalists, too, are split every which way. Spiritual heirs of that flamboyant fake Marcus Garvey, the Jamaican Negro who paraded through Harlem under a banner with a black star in the 1920s calling for a return to Africa, scores of outfits exist. There are Elijah Muhammad’s Black Muslims and Malcolm X’s offshoot Organization of Afro-American Unity, the Ethiopia Coptic Orthodox Mission and the House of Common Sense and Home of Proper Propaganda, which displays a sign advertising the book The God Damn White Man. All told, they probably have no more than 5,000 members.

Knocking at the Door. In every way Harlem is a used community. It is used by its leaders. It is exhausted by its few pleasures and impoverished by its vices. Hustlers, black and white, catch its people coming and going.

Black slumlords shout about the iniquity of white slumlords, and nobody knows that they themselves own tenements. Black runners collect numbers for white bankers, and black pushers sell dope for white gangsters. Black nationalists preach “buy black,” then get drunk on whisky from a white man’s store. Black preachers damn Jewish shopkeepers for overcharging black customers, then milk the blacks dry over the collection plate. Black Communists weep over the Negro’s condition, then stir up riots in the hope that they will furnish a dead Negro martyr or two.

So it goes in Harlem, and so it will continue to go unless a stable and sensible leadership develops. There is justifiable fury in Harlem, but so many charlatans are scrambling to harness it to their own ends that it has become blurred and diffused. Should Harlem ever develop a selfless, home-grown leader, this much is certain: that fury will be aimed against whatever barriers of discrimination still exist, and it will take some costly resistance to keep them from falling. As a Negro patrolman on 125th Street put it, “You have to keep knocking on the door. If you don’t knock, they won’t hear you.” In the long, hot summer of 1964, the question for New York and for every U.S. city with a Harlem of its own was: How hard would Harlem knock next time?

* Standing for Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited and the Associated Community Teams, a sort of Peace Corps for Harlem.