Black Resistance, Liberal Law and Order, and the Harlem Riot of 1935

Days after Harlem’s first major riot on March 19, 1935, Gotham’s liberal mayor Fiorello H. LaGuardia put together a Biracial commission not only to explain the cause of the unrest but also to offer recommendations on how to prevent more. While scholars have written about the Harlem rebellion of 1935, about the roles of the Communist party during the Great Depression, and, more generally, about Black politics during the depression, historical examinations of police brutality and the politics around it remain peripheral. This paper contextualizes the politics around the mayor’s commission and centers the contradictions between police occupation and La Guardia liberalism. Throughout the year of the report, which was released not by the mayor but the Black newspaper the New York Amsterdam News. This paper is two-pronged. First, it centers the commission’s hearings as the battleground upon which citizens, the police, and representatives of organizations such as the Communist party and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People struggled to explain the riot. Second, it uses the commission’s hearings and report to highlight the nexus between calls for safety from White proprietors and liberal law and order, on the one hand, and Black resistance and the emergence of a nascent social movement against police violence, on the other.