Becoming New York's Finest

Race, Gender, and the Integration of the NYPD, 1935-1980

A. Darien

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137321947
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

After excluding women and African Americans from its ranks for most of its history, the New York City Police Department undertook an aggressive campaign of integration following World War II. This is the first comprehensive account of how and why the NYPD came to see integration as a highly coveted political tool, indispensable to policing.

PART I

DESEGREGATION AND DOMESTICITY, 1935–1963

1

MERITOCRACY AND THE ILLUSION OF COLOR BLINDNESS

I remember as a kid in grammar school I would never pledge allegiance because I thought it was a lie. If I didn’t pledge in elementary school, why now? Sure, I wanted America to win the war. Why? Because I lived in America! That was a war [in which] I felt we were right, especially because the Japanese attacked us. [But] I have always had problems with the way blacks were treated. You will find that some blacks will say we’re fine now. But things should be much better. There are things we lost that we can never gain now. After the war we had Levittowns and black [soldiers] couldn’t buy these seven thousand dollar houses that are now worth one hundred and fifty thousand! That’s why we we’re in the projects. I lived in the projects as a cop! The government was already in the housing market. The [white] veterans had low mortgage rates, guaranteed loans. [The] government said we will not get involved in integration. [White] veterans got into college, but many blacks did not. Some people say things are better now. But for me, we have lost so much. Things have destroyed us. We can’t live like other folks. I’ve never been patriotic because I believe black folks have been treated poorly. It’s sad.

—James E. Frazier, US Army Veteran and Retired NYPD Sergeant¹

James Frazier’s bitter memory of lost opportunity stands in stark contrast to the euphoria many black soldiers, police officers, and other citizens experienced in the heady days of World War II. The Double V campaign had roused the hopes of African Americans that a victory over fascism abroad would be coupled with a similar one over racism at home.² If Americans were convinced of the horrors of Nazi racism, they reasoned, surely they would not tolerate racial discrimination in the United States. Black military service, as in every other major American war dating back to the American Revolution, became a crucial link between civil rights and nationalism.³ Americans long had revered the military as a model meritocracy that promoted individuals based on aptitude and effort rather than family background. That meritocratic principle had been fundamental to Americans’ self-conception, but its racial dimension was heightened in the domestic and international fight against Nazi racism. Black soldiers embraced the opportunity to demonstrate their competence, challenge old racial norms, and shore up their patriotic credentials. They hoped that this was the war in which they finally consummated their hard-fought rights.

As the nation mobilized to fight on behalf of democratic principles domestically and overseas, long-accepted racial practices came under attack. In New York, the police department found itself at the center of racial conflict as two massive riots rocked the city during the Depression and World War II. In 1935 and 1943, black citizens demonstrated against police harassment, economic inequality, housing discrimination, and political impotence. As residents of Harlem, Bedford-Stuyvesant, and other parts of the city stood their ground against a largely all-white police force, the NYPD brass appeared to change course. Police commissioners during and after the war opened their doors to African Americans, advanced a platform of racial harmony, and, in theory, promoted an ethic of professionalism, objectivity, and color blindness. And yet, despite such lofty ideals and aspirations, African American citizens and black cops in the postwar period remained embittered by the treatment they received at the hands of the NYPD.

In order to understand why so much promise resulted in so many dashed hopes, it is necessary to explore the difference between rhetoric and reality and the illusiveness of the concept of color blindness.⁴ After the riots, the NYPD brass found ways to manipulate the language of race neutrality to its public relations advantage. Promoting color-blind policies helped to cool off the protests, but did little to substantively change policing practices or the deployment of black cops. Management expected black cops to be politically neutral automatons who took orders from their superiors. It hired black citizens in response to rioting and civil rights protest, but used “color blindness” and “professionalism” to ensure that these hires eschewed racial advocacy.

At the same time that the brass appeared to reshape its policies in black communities, it fought bitter battles with the rank-and-file over pay, hours, benefits, and other aspects of patrol work. Police officers accused management of bargaining in bad faith and meddling in their political lives. In order to beat back criticisms from the Policemen’s Benevolent Association (PBA), NYPD management employed a strategy similar to the one they used to quash black cops who advocated on behalf of civil rights. Management held up the ideal of the officer as an apolitical professional whose objectivity and neutrality was central to his job. From this point of view, any kind of advocacy, even that as tame as improving wages and benefits, could be branded as destructively political. The PBA resisted such characterizations of its labor activism, but then used the same rhetoric to criticize black peers who put civil rights on the police agenda. Thus began a protracted postwar struggle among these three groups about the meaning of democracy, professionalism, and objectivity.

THE HARLEM RIOTS OF 1935 AND 1943

The strategic hiring of black police officers during Harlem’s riots and the postwar period had antecedents that went back to the late nineteenth century. Very few black citizens had served as policemen in New York since the 1890s. Police officials circumscribed their activity by assigning them to plainclothes, restricting their beats to black neighborhoods, barring them from carrying guns, and prohibiting them from arresting whites. The NYPD had hired its first black police officer in 1891 and placed almost every subsequent officer in Harlem’s 28th and 32nd precincts or Bedford-Stuyvesant’s 79th. Because white police officials viewed these precincts with disdain and often contributed little manpower and resources to them, black police officers understood that these were the least desirable posts. Black cops also knew that the department’s clustering of them in these three precincts meant fewer opportunities for promotion. The prime areas for advancement, such as the Detective’s Bureau and Police Headquarters, completely excluded black cops. ⁵

The NYPD had a pattern of hiring black citizens as tactical responses to racial crises, a strategy that sought to pacify white New Yorkers concerned about black crime and black New Yorkers threatened by brutal white officers. The NYPD hoped to contain black crime and ease tension between the black community and members of the police department by selectively assigning blacks to areas like Harlem. An Irish-dominated police management believed that it treated black cops like other ethnic groups. When NYPD Captain John Campbell hired New York’s first black police officer back in 1891, for example, he explained to the New York Times, “I have decided to place [Wiley] Overton on special duty in the colored district of which Hudson Avenue is a central point . . . there is nothing at all surprising in that, is there? If I had an Italian policeman, wouldn’t I naturally assign him to the Italian quarter?”⁶ Campbell was convinced that members of particular ethnic groups would make competent officers if they shared the same background as the citizens they policed. His belief rested on the assumption that there would be greater mutual trust between the patrol officer and the community. It did not, however, ensure that these officers would be any less corrupt or brutal than those who preceded them. It also mistakenly treated race and ethnicity as one and the same. The case of African Americans as a politically, economically, and socially marginalized group made their experience quite different from white ethnic groups.

When Harlem finally exploded in 1935 and 1943, the department responded by ratcheting up recruitment of black cops. The first uprising began on March 19 when Jackson Smith, a white southerner and the manager of a Harlem branch of the S. H. Kress store, spotted a 16-year-old black Puerto Rican boy by the name of Lino Rivera shoplifting a knife from his store. Smith grabbed Rivera and hauled him out in the street. During the ensuing scuffle, Rivera bit him. A white policeman named Donahue arrived on the scene and brought the youth back into the store. He asked Smith if he wanted Rivera arrested, but Smith declined to press charges. The events of the following 15 minutes are unclear. Donahue stated that he had taken the boy down to the basement, and later released him from a door that opened out to the back alley. Some residents began to yell that they took the boy in basement to beat him. Rumors spread that the boy had been killed. Some women tried to search the store for a corpse. Instead of explaining that the boy was safe, the store shut its doors and police began arresting onlookers for unlawful assemblage. This episode was followed by protest, demonstrations, arson, and destruction of property, later known as the Harlem Riot of 1935.⁷

Mayor La Guardia, a popular politician who fashioned himself a champion of New York’s dispossessed, appointed a commission to investigate the conditions in Harlem, a move that targeted the ghetto environment rather than its residents. The commission identified discrimination in municipal and private employment and the economic plight of black New Yorkers as major causes of the riot, but also pointed to other, potentially more determinative factors such as “insecurity of the individual in Harlem against police aggression.”⁸ African American New Yorkers perceived the NYPD and its commissioner, Lewis J. Valentine, to be indifferent to their complaints of police brutality. The commission concluded that police tactics and brutality had eroded civic virtue among black citizens who believed that “their lives, in the estimation of the police, were cheap.”⁹ It also contended that Valentine was “too busy, unsympathetic or uninterested to cooperate with community activists who sought to address the problem.”¹⁰ Valentine discounted such criticisms and offered his own interpretation of his department’s relationship with the black community. “Police courage, efficiency, and integrity had won the confidence of law-abiding citizens,” boasted Valentine, contending that it was “only hoodlums who resented the NYPD.”¹¹

Mayor La Guardia, who often had been more sensitive than most white politicians to the problem of police brutality, chose not to take a firm stand against the NYPD. He initially recommended that a biracial committee of Harlem citizens be organized to solicit complaints about police behavior. However, this idea never came to fruition because La Guardia decided that community control over the department would have demoralized the police force.¹² Between 1935 and 1943, La Guardia increasingly sided with Commissioner Valentine against Harlem’s forceful and outspoken congressman, Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. When Powell sponsored a rally at the Golden Gate Ballroom in 1942 to protest the police slaying of Wallace Armstrong, a mentally ill Harlem resident, La Guardia backed Commissioner Valentine, who warned that “this type of rabble rousing is dangerous and might result in serious disorder.”¹³ Many Harlem residents protested police actions by writing to the mayor, including one man who likened the murderers to “the Gestapo of Nazi Germany.”¹⁴ LaGuardia’s opposition to the rally and police surveillance diminished the protests’ militancy and public voice. This episode so permanently severed the La Guardia-Powell relationship that Powell later concluded, “the mayor is one of the most pathetic figures on the current American scene.”¹⁵ Black New Yorkers, divided by economic and social class, had mixed views of La Guardia, but few disputed Powell’s claim that white politicians remained indifferent to police violence in black communities.

Police surveillance and harassment of black citizens continued during wartime New York, despite a burgeoning ideology of patriotism, unity, and democracy. An incident at the Braddock Hotel in Harlem on August 1, 1943, ignited a second riot that demonstrated how the politics of race and gender easily disrupted New York’s fragile wartime unity. At...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• Part I   Desegregation and Domesticity, 1935–1963
• Part II   Civil Rights and Feminism, 1964–1972
• Part III   Blue-Collar Backlash, 1968–1980
• Notes
• Index