"This Case Is Bigger than Merely Prosecuting One Man": The Formation of Probationary Citizenship in Wartime Harlem

On August 1, 1943, some 3,000 New Yorkers took to Harlem’s streets in protest over the rumor that a white police officer killed a Black soldier. For the next two days, people targeted white-owned businesses and broke windows, dismembered display mannequins, and in many cases looted merchandise which culminated in 500 physical injuries, at least six deaths, a reported 5 million dollars in property damages, and 623 arrests. Adult women and older men actively led and participated in the theft and property destruction, which was very unusual for twentieth century riots. Police Commissioner Lewis Valentine immediately segregated offenders based on their gender and age, and in the margins of a memorandum he sent to Mayor La Guardia, wrote “438” to underscore the arrests of people over twenty-one years old. The 623 Black women and men arrested on August 1-2, 1943, more specifically the 438 adult women and men emphasized by Valentine, represented the ideal sample group to test “probationary citizenship,” which I define as the legal and social status of arrested Harlem demonstrators who forfeited due process rights to avoid imprisonment and experienced a new, more modern form of state surveillance and military-industrial training. The City of New York led by La Guardia’s liberal administration created a new juridical class of “probationary citizens,” in which lower-middle-class Black Americans had to recover their legal and political rights, prove their worthiness, and reassure officers of their value as productive citizens, soldiers, and mothers. By centering the political and gendered dimensions of the Harlem uprising of 1943, this paper invites the unprecedented examination of probationary citizenship as a critical component to our understanding of the changing terms of American citizenship experienced along racial and gendered lines and Harlem’s broader significance to wartime mobilization and U.S. political and criminal history.