Review: Christopher Hayes’s The Harlem Uprising: Segregation and Inequality in Postwar New York City

Reviewed by Joseph Kaplan 

In his final book before his life was taken by an assassin’s bullet, Martin Luther King Jr. reflected on the state of the Civil Rights Movement and the conditional allyship of whites. According to King, whites generally believed “that American society is essentially hospitable to fair play and to steady growth toward a middle-class Utopia embodying racial harmony.”[1] Emerging from a decade of unprecedented mobility in which a highly unionized white labor force entered the middle class en masse, many viewed the Civil Rights Movement as part of the unbroken march of progress. However, as Christopher Hayes demonstrates in The Harlem Uprising: Segregation and Inequality in Postwar New York City, during this same period Black Americans in Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant were experiencing the exact of opposite of progress. By 1964, Harlem was in steep decline from its wartime zenith as jobs, quality education, and affordable housing fled the inner boroughs and drugs poured in with the active sanction of the police. Hayes’ work focuses on this state of regression and deterioration, which created a social tinderbox that ignited when the police shooting of a young Black boy sparked the first of many urban uprisings in the 1960s.

The Harlem Uprising: Segregation and Inequality in Postwar New York City
By Christopher Hayes
Columbia University Press, 2021
352 pages

The structure of Hayes’ book grounds the events of 1964 in the postwar economic downturn in Harlem. The first five chapters detail how racial inequalities in housing, labor, unionization, education, and policing increased during the postwar period despite the presence of state anti-discrimination laws. The combined effect of these deeply embedded racial disparities produced an “ignored postwar depression” for Black families at the same time that middle class consumer culture turned white America into the “affluent society.” Hayes carefully details the systematic inequalities Black New Yorkers faced, their efforts to confront these issues, and the inability or unwillingness of elected leaders to improve conditions. His third chapter, “Union Work,” demonstrates these tensions particularly well.

Building on the work of historian Joshua Freeman, Hayes notes that the strength of unionized labor propelled the economic prosperity of the 1950s, and nowhere was organized labor more powerful than New York City. However, a combination of exclusionary federal policies and informal arrangements that bordered on nepotism kept Black New Yorkers largely locked out of this privileged sector of the working class, particularly in the building trades. This had important political and economic implications as New York experienced a boom in construction during a period of general capital flight. While union leadership paid lip service to the cause of Black liberation, their local chapters were often hostile to basic demands for integration.

Tensions between Black and white labor rose to the surface of City politics when forty-one white construction workers walked off the job site at Hunts Point Terminal Market after four non-white, ununionized workers attempted to integrate the project. Mayor Wagner framed the dispute as strictly an issue of labor, not civil rights, hoping to avoid alienating either of these constituencies that he relied on electorally. Ultimately, Local no. 2 succeeded in keeping the worksite unionized, which also kept it lily white. Wagner’s refusal to support the integration of a segregated union proved that white laborers had “an active ally and defender” in City Hall, “while the Black working class merely had a concerned ear.” As with all of the conditions Hayes examines, the discrepancy between liberals’ professed racial attitudes and their unwillingness to take concrete steps that would materially improve prospects in the Black community fostered a deep sense of skepticism toward the possibility of reform within the formal political system. 

Perhaps nothing better exemplified the sense of powerlessness and frustration Harlem residents felt during this period than their relationship to the NYPD. While the history of police brutality in New York is far from complete, scholars such as Paul Chevigny, Marilynn Johnson, and Clarence Taylor have written on the topic extensively. Hayes instead focuses on two neglected aspects of policing in 1960s New York, systematic corruption and political influence. Drawing heavily from the 1972 Knapp Commission report on police corruption as well as memoirs from former officers, Hayes makes a strong case that police involvement in gambling, sex trafficking, and especially the drug trade made Harlem appreciably less safe. With a force that was 95% white in 1965, officers shirked their responsibilities in Harlem, regularly sleeping on the job and viewing the community as a source of wealth extraction rather than an area worthy of protection. According to Hayes, it was the quotidian violence of graft and neglect that built up the reserves of anger that exploded after a stark incident of racial violence in 1964.

After laying a solid foundation in the economic and political marginalization of Black New Yorkers, Hayes painstakingly details the events of the Harlem Rebellion, with each of the six days of unrest receiving their own brief chapter. Ironically, the book is on weaker methodological footing in this section. Hayes does cite the intrepid reporting of Lez Edmond, the Black journalist, activist and scholar who was on the ground during the melee, but this section relies heavily on white press sources, who often got their information directly from the NYPD, and oral histories with mainstream Civil Rights leaders, whom Hayes acknowledges did not have much influence among the youth in the streets. However, Hayes does read his sources critically, using accounts from the press to emphasize the racial animus of whites and the police. Additionally, his well-paced narrative constitutes the most detailed study of the local political machinations sparked by the uprising. This sets up his most important chapters, which deal with “the most salient local outcome” of the rebellion, the push to reform the Civilian Complaint Review Board (CCRB).

Hayes rethinks the standard chronology of the fracturing of the City’s liberal civil rights coalition by tracing it not to the school decentralization battles of 1968, but to the reactionary campaign to prevent civilian oversight of the police department two years earlier. The final three chapters of the book detail a crucial aspect of policing that has not been fully accounted for in the extant literature, departments’ inordinate political power.[2] While previous studies such as Johanna Fernandez’s work on the Young Lords have alluded to the NYPD’s sophisticated campaign against the CCRB, Hayes provides the most detailed account to date.[3] Beginning with the election of John Lindsay, who campaigned on a pledge to revamp the board, police mobilized their significant political capital to stymy any semblance of community control. 

The NYPD and their political allies, which ranged from anti-integration parents’ groups and Conservative politicians to Neo-Nazis and outright fascists, waged an inflammatory campaign built on race and Red baiting to defeat a city-wide progressive ballot measure for the first time in decades. Tellingly, the chief support for the referendum to keep civilians off of the board came from a group of self-described “titans of industry” with former Police Commissioner Michael Murphy, derisively known as “Bull Murphy” among activists, serving as honorary president. Additionally, the Police Benevolent Association (PBA) devoted their $1.5 million war chest to propagandize against the measure. The PBA and their public relations expert Norman Frank, a former Madison Avenue advertising executive, ran a series of ads that played on racialized fears of crime and countersubversive fantasies about Communism. The ads spoke to racialized gender anxieties, often featuring lone white women in dystopian cityscapes and familial messages such as “(mothers) can’t take chances… not with our children.” Furthermore, police deployed a longstanding axiom within law enforcement circles that charges of police brutality were a tool of Communist subversion, a claim that fueled the conspiratorial, anti-Semitic abuse heaped on Lindsay’s choice to the head the board, liberal social critic Algernon Black. 

Black activists and their supporters had longed demanded community control over the police but generally viewed Lindsay’s proposals for a mixed board of police and civilian personnel as insufficient. A coalition of liberal groups represented by the Federated Associations for Impartial Review (FAIR) framed the measure as a Civil Rights issue, but had difficulty arousing support for what many assumed would be another half-hearted and ineffective response from City government. Furthermore, they were vastly outspent by a highly motivated and unified opposition. Although Hayes may overstate the extent to which the referendum split the Black-Jewish civil rights coalition, he leaves little doubt that it inflamed racial tensions in the City and at the very least influenced the dissolution of the coalition in the coming years.

While there is much to praise in Hayes’ detailed study of the economic conditions that fueled the Rebellion and the local political fallout in its wake, the book suffers somewhat from its shortened timeframe and resulting lack of engagement with Harlem’s Black Radical Tradition. A longer periodization would have allowed Hayes to drawn points of contrast with previous rebellions in Harlem in 1935 and 1943, both of which were sparked by police violence. By starting his narrative in World War II, at the height of Black prosperity, Hayes stresses the declining standards of living in Harlem that fueled the uprising but leaves questions about the most direct historical antecedents to 1964 unresolved.  Given the similar circumstances that led to each of the rebellions, this could have been an opportunity to consider the longer history of systemic racism in local policing that Hayes so painstakingly documents in the postwar period.

This longer history would also have given a fuller picture of the deep-seated radical tradition in a community that twice elected the Communist Benjamin Davis to City Council in the 1940s. Citing Matthew Countryman’s work on Philadelphia, Hayes argues that “Black Power was not the foil of civil rights but instead a progression of it that the failure of liberal political promises had drawn out.” However, at various points he correctly notes that political tendencies associated with Black Power, such as self-defense, anti-imperialism, and community control, predominated in Harlem long before the phrase entered the mainstream discourse. A deeper analysis of the radical political strains circulating in Harlem prior to the uprising would complicate the notion that militancy replaced a dominant liberal tradition in Harlem over the course of the decade. 

These critiques notwithstanding, The Harlem Uprising is a welcome contribution to the intertwined histories of liberalism, policing, and urban rebellions in New York and, more broadly, the urban North. While an extended timeline could have enriched his discussion of Harlem’s diverse political culture, Hayes ably shows that the declining conditions Black New Yorkers experienced during the postwar years profoundly influenced the tactics and goals of the City’s Black Liberation Movement. Perhaps most importantly, Hayes documents the political clout of the NYPD and their ability to mobilize, and conflate, whites’ latent anxieties around crime and Black militancy in order to split the City’s liberal governing coalition. This story adds important context to the ensuing conflict over community control of the educational system, exposing the growing fractures in the Black-Jewish alliance that shattered during the school decentralization conflict. Rather than a sudden break brought on by the supposedly excessive demands of Black militants, whites’ deeply held belief that Black progress came at the expense of white comfort and privilege came to the fore when Black New Yorkers demanded that their concerns take center stage in City politics. From this story of decline and fracture, Hayes draws a lesson for the present. Progress is not inevitable. It requires organizing, effort, and persistence from everyday people to bend the moral arc of the universe toward justice.

Joseph Kaplan is a doctoral candidate at Rutgers University. He studies the intersection of 20th century African American political radicalism and the growth of the postwar surveillance state. His forthcoming dissertation analyzes the NYPD's use of informer infiltration to monitor and disrupt Black radical organizations in 1960s New York City.

[1] Martin Luther King Jr., Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? (Boston: Beacon Press, 2010), 5.

[2] An important exception can be found in: Max Felker-Kanter, Policing Los Angeles: Race, Resistance, and the Rise of the LAPD (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020).

[3] See Johanna Fernandez, The Young Lords: A Radical History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020), 333.