Harlem riot of 1943
On Sunday, August 1, 1943, a white policeman attempted to arrest an African-American woman for disturbing the peace in the lobby of the Braddock Hotel.
[10][11] When Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia was informed of the situation at 9:00 p.m., he met with police and visited the riot district with Black authority figures such as Max Yergan and Hope Stevens.
During his radio address Max Yergan and Ferdinand Smith, both Black Harlem residents, parroted the Mayor's appeal for people to "please get off the streets, go home and go to bed.
[16] The Red Cross gave Harlemites lemonade and crullers, and the mayor organized various hospitals to handle an influx of injured patients.
[11] In a piece for the Berkeley Journal of Sociology, academic L. Alex Swan attributes the riot to a disparity between the promoted values of American democracy and the conditions of Black citizens, in both the North and the South.
He appointed the historian E. Franklin Frazier as head of the commission, who wrote that "economic and social forces created a state of emotional tension which sought release upon the slightest provocation".
[7] The report listed several "economic and social forces" that worked against Blacks, including discrimination in employment and city services, overcrowding in housing, and police brutality.
Publicly, Locke published an article in the Survey Graphic which blamed the 1935 riot on the state of affairs in New York that La Guardia inherited.
Economic problems became exacerbated under wartime conditions; new war and non-war industries and business continued to discriminate against Blacks.
African-American novelist James Baldwin wrote of the riot, which occurred on the same day as his father's funeral and his 19th birthday, in Notes of a Native Son.
[29] In a commentary piece for The New York Times, Langston Hughes called the essay "superb", and particularly quoted Baldwin's observation that "to smash something is the ghetto's chronic need".
According to Laurie Leach in her 2007 article published in Studies in the Literary Imagination, the poem "seems to honor rather than censure Polite for her role as a catalyst" .
[31] Ralph Ellison drew upon his experiences covering the riot for the New York Post as inspiration for the "theatrical climax" of Invisible Man, winner of the 1953 National Book Award.
According to critic Richard Powell, writing in 1991, after "[stripping them] of their melodramatic quality", Johnson "creates in their place a kind of expressive distortion and calculated rawness."
Powell notes that the central figure in Moon Over Harlem, an upside-down African American woman harassed by three officers, represents "an oppressed and debased community, whose frustrations and self-destruction prompted an authoritative abuse of power".
[34] The riot became a subject of art and literature: it inspired the "theatrical climax" of Ralph Ellison's novel Invisible Man, winner of the 1953 National Book Award, it frames the events recounted in James Baldwin's memoirs Notes of a Native Son, and it appears in artist William Johnson's painting Moon Over Harlem.
