Malcolm X_ A Life of Reinvention - Manning Marable [69]
The challenges were more complicated than he was willing to admit. The postwar economic boom had left much of African America behind. The conditions of Harlem’s tenements had deteriorated significantly from the neighborhood’s more glorious times in the 1920s. Many buildings were vermin- and rat-infested; it was not unusual even along major thoroughfares for disgruntled tenants to throw their garbage into the streets. Asthma, drug addiction, venereal disease, and tuberculosis were rampant. In 1952, for example, central Harlem’s tuberculosis mortality rate was nearly fifteen times that for nearly all-white Flushing, Queens.
Despite these problems, in the decade after World War II Harlem had also developed a small, status-conscious black middle class that was wealthier and politically more influential than during the depression. New York City’s farther suburbs were still largely segregated, but slowly middle-class blacks began to move to the outer boroughs of the Bronx, Queens, and Brooklyn. The number of black professionals grew, but many were still only beginning to escape from the ghettos of Harlem and Brooklyn.
The heavy concentration of black voters in Manhattan also led to expanding political power. The 1953 election of Harlem resident Hulan Jack as the first black president of the borough of Manhattan symbolized that growing clout. Constantly pushing Harlem’s political agenda was of course Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., who by the time of Malcolm’s return had been in Congress for a decade. In March 1955, Powell called for a boycott of Harlem savings banks that “practice ‘Jim Crow-ism’ and ‘economic lynching.’” He urged Abyssinian Baptist Church’s fifteen thousand members to withdraw their funds from white-owned banks and transfer them to either the black-owned Carver Federal Savings in Harlem or the black-owned Tri-State Bank in Memphis, Tennessee. At the national level, he disrupted the Democratic Party’s presidential campaign for Adlai Stevenson by his surprise endorsement of Dwight Eisenhower, who in the election that November received nearly 40 percent of the African-American vote nationally. Powell’s justification was the domination of Southern “Dixiecrats” who controlled the Democratic Party in Congress. He explained, “This does not necessarily mean a shift to the Republican party. It does mean that the Negro people are standing up as American men and women, thinking for themselves and voting as independents.” Malcolm probably admired the black congressman’s feisty independence from the Tammany Hall Democratic Party machine. Powell’s model of political independence, as a black man who could not be dominated by whites, would influence how Malcolm defined independent politics after his departure from the Nation of Islam.
Harlem was also a common site for many civil rights protests. One of the largest, soon after Malcolm’s arrival, occurred on September 25, 1955. More than ten thousand people gathered at the Williams Institutional Church on Seventh Avenue at West 132nd Street to denounce the acquittal by an all-white jury of two white men accused of murdering Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old black boy in Mississippi. The rally demanded that President Eisenhower “convene a special session of Congress and . . . recommend the immediate passage of a Federal anti-lynching bill.” Abyssinian’s associate pastor, the Reverend David N. Licorish, who represented Powell, called upon blacks to protest in Washington, D.C. The NAACP leader, Roy Wilkins, urged black New Yorkers to address racial discrimination