Malcolm X_ A Life of Reinvention - Manning Marable [36]
The commission’s report included recommendations for improving conditions, and the liberal LaGuardia administration sought to defuse the escalating racial tension by implementing many of them. From 1936 to 1941, the mayor’s administration backed the construction of two new schools, the Harlem River Houses public housing complex, and the Women’s Pavilion at Harlem Hospital. But LaGuardia’s concessions did little to alter the widespread residential segregation, poverty, and discontent among Harlem’s working class. When in 1938 the Supreme Court declared that public picketing of private business establishments over “racially based complaints” was constitutional, a new round of protests ensued. A “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work” coalition quickly won major concessions; within several years about one-third of all clerks and white-collar employees in Harlem were African Americans. In parallel efforts, blacks won concessions to work as telephone repairmen and operators, to drive buses for the Fifth Avenue and New York Omnibus companies, and to hold white-collar positions at Consolidated Edison.
Through these struggles Harlem established a dynamic model of social reform and urban protest that would be repeated across America. Mass agitation, mostly by grassroots associations, culminated in a series of well-publicized demonstrations, followed by urban insurrection. A liberal government, supported by white and black elites, subsequently granted major concessions in the form of hospitals, public housing, and expanded opportunities in both the public and private sectors. This in turn spawned new African-American victories within electoral politics, the courts, and government. These key tactics, which would become the protest strategy during the civil rights movement, were developed in Harlem a generation before.
The primary political beneficiary of these struggles and reforms was the Reverend Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., a man who would later become Malcolm’s ally and occasional rival. Born in 1908, he was the handsome son of the powerful pastor of Harlem’s Abyssinian Baptist Church, Adam Clayton Powell, Sr. The junior Powell followed his father into the ministry, but his interests were not chiefly spiritual. In 1931, he led a protest at New York City’s Board of Estimate that successfully halted the exclusion of five African-American physicians from Harlem Hospital. Seven years later, he helped launch the Greater New York Coordinating Committee for Employment, which used pickets and nonviolent protests to secure jobs. Succeeding his father as Abyssinian’s pastor in 1937, Powell possessed a strong religious constituency as well as a growing army of political supporters. Ideologically and politically, he was a pragmatic liberal, at the national level endorsing Roosevelt’s New Deal, while in Harlem working with the Communist Party and supporting LaGuardia’s reelection campaign in 1941. That same year, Powell started the People’s Committee, a Harlem-based organization of eighteen hundred campaign workers and eight offices dedicated to electing him to the city council. Powell’s challengers on his left and right, American Labor Party candidate Dr. Max Yergan and Republican candidate Channing Tobias, pulled out of the contest in his favor. LaGuardia endorsed him, and the two liberals campaigned together—and both won.
On the city council, Powell consistently fought for Harlem’s interests. When Yergan, a history instructor at the nearly all-white City College located in West Harlem, was not reappointed, Powell introduced a resolution that outlawed racial discrimination in academic appointments. In May 1942, his organization sponsored a mass rally at the Golden Gate Ballroom to protest against the NYPDʹs beating and killing of a black man, Wallace Armstrong. The next year, when the LaGuardia administration granted the navy permission to establish training facilities for the