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

Rutgers University history professor Hayes debuts with an immersive chronicle of the July 1964 uprising in New York City’s Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhoods over the police killing of a Black teenager. Hayes documents “the vast system of structural discrimination” faced by Black New Yorkers, and contends that concurrent advances by the national civil rights movement, which tended to focus on the South, led to “rising expectations during a time of declining fortunes.” He notes that Democrats and Republicans of the era espoused law and order rhetoric, and describes a Black population increasingly frustrated with the nonviolence ideology of the civil rights movement and more supportive of militant speakers. Hayes also delves into corruption in the NYPD, which participated in illegal activities such as sex trafficking, gambling, and drug dealing. The protests started “within minutes” of the shooting of 15-year-old James Powell by an off-duty police officer and continued for six days, resulting in nearly 500 arrests and the looting of hundreds of stores, and leading to a fierce political battle over demands for a panel of civilians to review citizens’ complaints against police. Hayes unpacks the causes and effects of the uprising in scrupulous detail, and makes salient connections to recent events. This scholarly history is a powerful reminder that it takes “great force” to bend the moral arc of the universe toward justice. (Oct.)