Malcolm X_ A Life of Reinvention - Manning Marable [38]
Meanwhile, plans were afoot downtown for a major urban development project that was designed to exclude black New Yorkers entirely. Only weeks after the Savoy’s closing, the LaGuardia administration made public its agreement with Metropolitan Life Insurance Company to construct Stuyvesant Town, a semipublic housing complex located on the east side of Manhattan by Gramercy. Metropolitan Life had received generous tax exemptions, eminent domain authority, and control of tenant selection. When the company admitted that it would bar black tenants, blacks and many white liberals were outraged. Powell accused LaGuardia of once again capitulating to racism. His newspaper boldly editorialized, “Hitler won a victory in New York City.” At one rally attracting twenty thousand protesters, Powell demanded LaGuardia be impeached. Not until 1944 did LaGuardia broker a compromise. Stuyvesant Town was constructed under the original terms; however, the mayor signed Local Law No. 20, barring all racial discrimination in tenant selection in future housing projects constructed under the city’s authority.
In Detroit, the hub for Malcolm’s family, escalating racial tensions erupted in a massive riot on June 20, 1943. In only its first six hours, the toll from Detroit’s unrest was thirty-four deaths, seven hundred injured, and two million dollars worth of property damage. Five thousand federal troops had been sent in to patrol the streets; military vehicles were assigned to escort trolley cars and buses. New York City’s authorities should have recognized that the conditions for a similar insurrection were ripe in Harlem. The neighborhood’s turn duly came on August 1, when a policeman shot a black serviceman in uniform. Within minutes, rioting erupted; white-owned businesses were attacked throughout the neighborhood—along 125th Street and on Harlem’s major north-south boulevards, Lenox, Seventh, and Eighth avenues, north from Central Park up to 145th Street. Before midnight, 1,450 stores had been vandalized, 6 people killed, 189 injured, and more than 600 blacks arrested. Significantly, unlike the 1935 riot, eyewitness accounts described the rioters as both middle class and low income. Even one police report recognized that: “Those actually committing malicious acts of violence were irresponsible, ignorant individuals. [But] the probability is that many decent citizens were in various groups, who in the most instances are intelligent and law abiding, and while not actually taking part in the physical disturbances, aided and abetted indirectly.”
The afternoon of the riot, Malcolm was walking south on St. Nicholas Avenue when he encountered blacks running uptown “loaded down with armfuls of stuff.” Along West 125th Street, he discovered, “Negroes were smashing store windows, and taking everything they could grab and carry—furniture, food, jewelry, clothes, whisky.” Within an hour, the NYPD had dispatched what appeared to be “every New York City cop” into Harlem. Malcolm went on to describe the semicomic scene of NAACP leader Walter White accompanying Mayor LaGuardia, driving along 125th Street in a bright red fire car appealing to blacks to “please go home and stay inside.”
The real world finally intruded into Malcolm’s life in the spring of 1943: he was called up for duty in the U.S. Army.
While the majority of African Americans had patriotically pledged their services since the first days of war, there had always been a vocal minority who saw little reason to enter a segregated service to fight in a white man’s war. By 1943–44, dissent among blacks within the armed forces had escalated. Hundreds of black soldiers were simply going AWOL. When the military induction notice addressed to Malcolm arrived at Ella’s house in Boston, she informed the authorities that her half brother no longer resided there. Malcolm did eventually receive the notice, deciding that he would avoid service by any means necessary.
In his autobiography, he recalled with approval Shorty Jarvis’s attitude: “Whitey owns everything. He wants us to go