“They Don’t Care What Happens to the Colored People”: Black Criminality and the Politics of Safety in Interwar New York

“I had never before been so aware of policemen, on foot, on horseback, on corners, everywhere, always two by two,” remembered James Baldwin, Harlem native and novelist, describing his arrival home in 1943, a month before the passing of his father and two months before the Harlem Riot of 1943. In the aftermath of the Harlem Riot of 1935, race relations worsened. Despite Mayor Fiorello H. LaGuardia’s efforts to alleviate the relationship between the police and Harlem’s black community, police brutality persisted. Crimes of theft, physical assault, and rape by blacks against white people, especially youth and women, in areas bordering black and whites neighborhoods enraged the white community, precipitating a flood of white letter-writers to LaGuardia and Police Commissioner Valentine, as well as an army of white dailies, especially the New York Times, dubbing these series of crimes a “crime wave.”
This paper examines the roles of New Deal liberalism regarding crime policy and policing in New York City during the 1940s. After the murder of a white youth in Central Park, white New Yorkers demanded that Mayor LaGuardia augment police patrols in neighborhoods bordering black neighborhoods. Described by white dailies as a “crime wave,” this moral panic precipitated an “urban crisis” for the Mayor and black New York. Although the Police Department and the LaGuardia promptly responded to the demand of white New Yorkers, black citizens continued to fear for their lives. This essay centers black resistance in the mid-1940s against white dailies endeavors to criminalize the black community, as well as black efforts to curtail intra-racial crime among blacks (black-on-black crime). Following activism of black churches and the NAACP in Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant, I also highlight blacks efforts to secure safety and security from blacks committing crime, within the context of police occupation and rampant police brutality.