Abstract
On Staten Island in the spring of 1945, a small group of white politicians, business owners, and residents began complaining about a “crime wave” that they attributed to black soldiers stationed at the Fox Hills Army facility. Most of these complaints stemmed from vague references to rumors of crimes rather than actual incidents. Black journalists and members of the NAACP refuted these accusations and argued that the real issue was discrimination against the soldiers and racism on the part of white Staten Islanders. These accusations launched a months-long debate about racism, crime, and policing on Staten Island during the war. Ultimately, the mayor and military authorities responded by intensifying policing and surveillance of the soldiers. This article uses the conflicts around policing in wartime Staten Island as a lens to consider the impact of the war on black New Yorkers and black soldiers stationed in New York City.
In the spring of 1945, the “largest concentration of police in the history of Staten Island,” in the words of the New York Herald-Tribune, descended on the Island’s eastern shore. 1 The police formed part of a “small army” according to the Island’s daily paper, the Staten Island Advance, comprised of “police, detectives and MPs [military police] imported from Manhattan—more than 200 in all—[who] patrolled a three-mile square area.” 2 This ecumenical surveillance force had been called to Gotham’s most removed borough to monitor black soldiers stationed at the U.S. Army’s Fox Hills cantonment in the neighborhood of Stapleton. While the New York City Police Department (NAACP) and military police patrolled the Stapleton streets outside, enlisted men inside the camp were barred weekend passes and had their persons searched for knives up to three times a night. 3 Soldiers stationed at Fox Hills told an investigator for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NYPD) that they felt like “prisoners of war.” 4 And indeed, in the minds of some white Staten Islanders, violence loomed on the horizon. One influential white pastor declared that only the removal of the Army camp would prevent “some soldier from being lynched by the civilian population and then having the soldiers break into the arsenal at the camp, seize guns and slaughter the civilian population.” 5
The events that culminated in this frenzy of surveillance and racist hysteria began in February 1945. A small group of white business owners and residents, led by Staten Island District Attorney Farrell M. Kane, began complaining about a “wave” of crimes that they attributed to the black soldiers stationed at Fox Hills. The city’s white press elevated these complaints, most of which stemmed from vague references to rumors of crimes, and regularly covered Kane’s version of supposed incidents in salacious detail. In response, black activists in the NAACP and journalists writing for the city’s black press refuted the accusations. These activists and journalists constructed a counter-narrative of the conflicts on Staten Island which centered black soldiers’ experiences of racism and discrimination at Fox Hills and in the surrounding neighborhoods. Regardless of the spuriousness of the accusations, Kane and his supporters initiated a months-long controversy about racism, crime, and policing on Staten Island during the war.
Drawing on military records, newspaper coverage, the papers of the NAACP, and the records of a committee created by New York City’s Mayor Fiorello La Guardia to deter mass civil rights protests and uprisings, this article explores how the political environment of wartime New York City facilitated the criminalization, policing, and punishment of black New Yorkers and black soldiers stationed in the city. The complaints about crime around the Army facility in Staten Island reveal much about how the system of racial hierarchy that Brian Purnell, Jeanne Theoharis, and Komozi Woodard have dubbed “the Jim Crow North” functioned in New York City in this particular historical moment. 6 First, these debates illustrate the central role that purportedly “color-blind” complaints about crime and disorder played in justifying opposition to even temporary racial integration in housing and leisure. Black journalists and activists consistently unmasked the racism at the center of these accusations, arguing that the real issue was the racist hostility of some members of the white Stapleton community toward the soldiers at Fox Hills and politicians’ efforts to capitalize on this animosity. Second, we see that complaints about crime carried heightened influence across the political spectrum during the war. Liberals like Mayor La Guardia worried that disorder, crime, or racial conflict might disrupt wartime production and transportation. Protests demanding civil rights, urban uprisings, or racist attacks could pose further problems for La Guardia’s administration by discrediting the city and the nation in the midst of its war against fascism and racism. In this context, particularly after the uprising in Harlem in 1943, the mayor worked to prevent both mass demonstrations for racial equality and racist attacks in the service of maintaining the city’s existing racial hierarchy during the war. On Staten Island, Democratic politicians who opposed desegregation saw the intensified popular and municipal worry over disorder as an opportunity. They wove together racist accusations of crime and stories of the sacrifices made by white Staten Islanders for the war effort into an argument about the privileges of white wartime citizenship. 7 Finally, examining the narratives voiced by Stapletonians and the response that these complaints elicited from city officials and critics also provides an avenue to recover the relationships between residents, city administrators, soldiers, military officials, and activists in Gotham’s most under-studied borough. 8
These arguments expand on and complicate existing interpretations of the impact of World War II on the black freedom movement. World War II has long been seen as a turning point in popular and academic narratives about the development of the civil rights movement. Activists living through the war and historians analyzing its impact decades later noted that, as David Lucander states, World War II “presented a unique opportunity for reformers to compare unfavorable American race relations with those of Nazi Germany.” 9 Clarence Lang has further argued that “wartime tumult created new opportunities for black working-class struggle.” 10 Black activists capitalized on this ideological opportunity through the rhetoric of the Double V campaign and won significant material and symbolic gains through the March on Washington Movement. Growing international attention to Jim Crow, increased wages for black Americans, and massive internal migration created the impetus for new organizing and gave strength to preexisting campaigns. But the war’s impact on racial equality was not uniformly positive. In New York City, militarism and nationalism created new justifications for surveillance, policing, and maintaining order that politicians mobilized against black New Yorkers and used to deflect criticism of the city’s racialized order.
A number of historians have remarked on the effects of this shift on different actors but have not explored how the war presented opportunities for the constriction of civil rights in New York City. Cheryl Lynn Greenberg has argued that black New Yorkers lost white support and won fewer gains during the war than in preceding years because to city leaders and white residents, “victory against Hitlerism abroad seemed far more important . . . than victories against racism at home.” 11 Clarence Taylor contends that activists changed their approach during the war, particularly after the Harlem uprising of 1943, blunting their demands and criticism of the NYPD in deference to “the wartime focus on maintaining national unity in order to help defeat the Axis power.” Taylor argues that in this context, “achieving unity meant that racial strife was downplayed.” 12 Shannon King documents a similar dynamic during World War I, when NYPD higher-ups “used blacks’ appeals to citizenship in the time of war to pressure [Black community leaders] to silence the array of immigrant and leftist radicals who as street orators openly embraced a seemingly anti-American political perspective.” 13 King also finds that in the 1930s and 1940s, “police violence against black New Yorkers was uninterrupted,” but that after the uprising of 1943, police harassment and punishment intensified. 14 This article contends that the effects of the war on the rights of black New Yorkers extended beyond distracting white supporters or inspiring activists to be more cautious. It argues that the disruptions of the war rendered Mayor La Guardia more committed to preserving the city’s existing racial hierarchy in an effort to deter further change or destabilization. In this environment, racists found an opportunity to make claims about security, crime, and white wartime citizenship. Opponents of desegregation invoked the war in their arguments that Stapletonians deserved an all-white neighborhood, and La Guardia’s commitment to wartime order over equity provided a useful justification for maintaining the city’s systems of racialized policing, punishment, and segregation. The debates about crime at Fox Hills, therefore, can be seen as a localized example of the ways the war provided openings for those who were hostile to black equality.
The complaints lodged by white politicians and residents in Stapleton formed part of an ongoing nationwide landscape of protest and conflict connected to patterns of black migration. White opposition to the presence of black soldiers in the urban north and west during the war was one manifestation of the broader dynamic of white hostility toward black migrants. Black communities in New York City and other northern urban centers had a long history that predated twentieth-century migration and included defenses against racist violence. Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, however, white residents of neighborhoods and cities with increasing black populations mobilized vigorously against their new neighbors, often through discourses of criminality. Criminality became a justification for racist violence, unequal distribution of city resources, and segregation in housing, education, and leisure, as well as for racially targeted policing and punishment. Furthermore, though black migrants arriving in northern cities joined other recent arrivals including poor and working-class immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, the former were excluded from many of the political and economic levers of power and mobility available to the latter. 15
Within this larger context, black soldiers occupied significant symbolic and material positions, and attacks against them, rhetorical and physical, carried particular weight for both white racists and black activists. Examining the racial violence of 1919-1921, David Krugler finds that black veterans emerged as leaders in self-defense campaigns against white mob attacks, which racists launched in response to the growing postwar challenges to white supremacy. 16 Although the landscape of racial oppression and protest had changed between World Wars I and II, many of the complex material and symbolic meanings embraced by and ascribed to black soldiers in the context of the First World War continued to carry resonance in the World War II years. Chad L. Williams has argued that in the World War I era, black soldiers and supporters often viewed serving in the military as a means of laying claim to masculine citizenship, while white Americans perceived black soldiers as “a distinct threat to prevailing social hierarchies and white supremacist visions of American democracy.” 17 During World War II, black soldiers again occupied central places in protests, conflicts, and debates over the rights of black Americans across the country and around the world. While commentators frequently highlighted the particular threats and horrors that faced black soldiers stationed in the South during the war, African Americans in and out of the armed forces experienced and combated racial violence, hierarchy, and segregation across the country during the war. Enlisted men protested the racial policies of the military and the communities in which they were stationed through varied avenues, including writing letters to newspapers and civil rights organizations like the NAACP, disobeying racial regulations, and participating in “riots and melees,” as historian Kimberley L. Phillips notes. 18
White racists living near military establishments housing black soldiers also voiced their positions in individual and collective actions. From California to Chicago to Staten Island, white politicians, business owners, and homeowners drafted a flurry of complaints and petitions objecting to these settlements. 19 A 1944 memo for the Commanding General of the Army Service Forces acknowledged this opposition and named fourteen cities across the Northern, Midwestern, and Western areas of the U.S. “high racial tension areas.” 20 In New York City, complaints about “crime,” “disorder,” and “racial tension” became the language through which white residents and politicians advocated for segregation in housing and leisure. Gotham’s systems of policing and punishment then served as a means for the enforcement of the city’s system of racial hierarchy.
In World War II-era Gotham these arguments gained salience as the city’s mayor, Fiorello La Guardia, and police commissioner, Lewis Valentine, contended that disorder or unrest in the city could threaten the national war mobilization. “The maintenance of law and order in our large cities,” La Guardia declared in the fall of 1940, “is one of the most important functions of our National Defense Program.” 21 During the war years, New Yorkers around the city raised concerns about crime and disorder, particularly juvenile delinquency, “mugging”—a term almost exclusively associated with black and Puerto Rican youth, prostitution, and gambling. Often, though not always, these complaints came from white New Yorkers living in neighborhoods that were growing increasingly interracial partly as a result of wartime migration. The project of maintaining order in the city took on increased significance for the mayor after Harlem residents took to the streets in August 1943. That uprising followed a conflict between a black woman and a police officer, who then shot a black soldier seeking to intervene. In the aftermath of the uprising, La Guardia formed a Committee on Unity whose core mandate was to preserve order in the city. The committee supported gradual policies to ameliorate life for minority New Yorkers, with the goal of deterring mass protests or uprisings. 22 The political orientation of the mayor and his Committee on Unity fit within a larger paradigm that historian Karen Miller has described as “Northern racial liberalism.” 23 La Guardia was opposed to discrimination against individuals based on race, but viewed racial inequality primarily as a product of personal sentiments and cultural differences. 24 As part of this larger framework, the mayor perceived integration as a catalyst of conflict, a perspective that his committee shared. As Mayor La Guardia remarked in testimony in 1943 before a Brooklyn Grand Jury investigating accusations of criminality in interracial neighborhoods in Bedford-Stuyvesant, “when a neighborhood changes its complexion that way there is bound to be trouble.” 25
Staten Island in the 1940s
The additional NYPD officers sent to address the “trouble” around Fox Hills in the Spring of 1945 arrived in a borough that was whiter and less densely populated than the city as a whole. 26 Despite multiple aborted efforts at building a rapid transit connection between the Island and Brooklyn, one of which La Guardia supported in his 1933 mayoral campaign, Staten Island lacked a tunnel or bridge connection to the other boroughs until 1964. 27 Due in large part to this limited accessibility, the Island’s residential patterns differed from Gotham’s other boroughs. Daniel Kramer and Richard Flanagan described Staten Island of the 1930s as a “small town” with most of its population centers concentrated around the St. George Ferry terminal at the northeast tip of the Island, roughly two and a half miles north of the Fox Hills facility. 28 In 1941, the Staten Island Chamber of Commerce celebrated that the Island “gives its residents all the advantages of life in a big city, yet preserves for them the pleasanter pace of living in a typical American community.” 29 In the spring of 1945, District Attorney Kane and his supporters would demonstrate that the “advantages of life in a big city” included access to NYPD officers stationed across Gotham’s other boroughs.
For many white Staten Islanders, a “typical American community” was likely an all-white neighborhood in a nonurban setting. In the 1940 census, the Island, whose landmass contained an area almost as large as Manhattan and the Bronx combined, was recorded as home to 174,441 people of primarily Scandinavian, Irish, German, Italian, and English, and a black population that comprised roughly 2 percent of Islanders. 30 West New Brighton, an area about three miles south of St. George Ferry Terminal and two neighborhoods west of Stapleton, had been the Island’s main black neighborhood throughout the first third of the twentieth century. A reporter in the Amsterdam News argued that, by 1945, black Staten Islanders had begun to migrate outside of West Brighton and many also continued to reside in the neighborhood. 31
Staten Islanders elected Joseph Palma borough president in 1933 and he brought the politics of racial liberalism to the office throughout the war. He ran as a republican fusionist with La Guardia’s support and was, according to Kramer and Flanagan, “the first Island politician to pay much attention to the African American community.” 32 He established an interracial anti-racist organization, the Council for Democracy, which organized against racial discrimination in housing and brought the accusations against the Fox Hills soldiers to the attention of the citywide Mayor’s Committee on Unity in the Spring of 1945. 33
Palma’s outlook reflected the demands and campaigns of black Staten Islanders, who fought racial discrimination in housing, policing, and employment before and during the war. The NAACP, the Women’s Civic and Political Union, and the International Workers Order Lodge 706 were all active in fighting the discrimination that rendered Staten Island, in the words of one black resident, a “white man’s town.” 34 Discrimination and segregation in housing constituted the “biggest problem” for black Staten Islanders in the late 1930s, according to the NAACP’s borough chapter president, though protesters also targeted white-owned taverns and restaurants that barred or overcharged black patrons. 35 In early 1944, West Brighton residents held a “huge mass meeting” at a community hall to discuss issues affecting residents of the neighborhood. Sara R. Burke, who covered Staten Island for the People’s Voice and the Amsterdam News before founding the Island’s first black-owned real estate office, documented the meeting and the demands of West Brighton residents. Burke argued that youth in the neighborhood needed a recreation center, and that the police presence in West Brighton was “as thick as flies around molasses.” 36 Although activists had some successes, the soldiers stationed at Fox Hills still found themselves entering a segregated and hostile community.
In the spring of 1944, between two thousand and three thousand black soldiers arrived at the Fox Hills Army housing facility in the white neighborhood of Stapleton, Staten Island. 37 These soldiers, who hailed predominantly from the south, worked as stevedores and porters, loading ships at the nearby Staten Island Terminal before shipping out around the world. They labored alongside higher paid civilian members of the American Federation of Labor as well as Italian prisoners of war working in Italian Service Units. In interviews with the Harlem-based New York Amsterdam News, soldiers stationed at Fox Hills expressed frustration with “being used as laborers when they are capable of doing other things.” Interviewees also resented the “Jim Crow” eating arrangements in the terminal’s dining facilities where laborers ate in racially segregated mess halls. Journalist Carl Dunbar Lawrence noted that some restaurants surrounding the base in Stapleton also followed this practice, leading to “many a quarrel [which was] stopped just in time.” 38 At the end of their day, a military police officer accompanied the soldiers on a march back to the Fox Hills facility. The Italian prisoners of war, in contrast, received rides to and from their detail. 39 During the course of the soldiers’ marches, which reminded some men of chain gangs of imprisoned black workers in the South, white civilians from the surrounding neighborhoods gathered on the sidewalks to heckle and jeer at the passing soldiers. 40 Despite being stationed in New York City, far from the battlefronts in Germany and Japan or the terrorism of the American south, the soldiers were still in dangerous territory.
A Manufactured Crime Wave Crests on Staten Island’s Eastern Shore
Some white Staten Islanders saw the simmering racial animosity toward Fox Hills soldiers as a political opportunity. “A wave of petty crime along the East Shore must be stopped,” StatenIsland District Attorney Farrell M. Kane declared to the press in February 1945. Kane, who was a Democrat, contended that residents were “flooding” his office with complaints of soldiers stealing money from passing pedestrians. 41 He organized and publicized a meeting with military authorities to tackle the issue. Although the District Attorney stressed his desire to defer to military authorities, he assured the press that he was ready to step in “if they fail to correct the condition.” 42 Kane’s public declaration created an opening for a wave of accusations and complaints directed against servicemen stationed at Fox Hills. Before the facility’s opening in 1944, some residents had petitioned the Army not to site the facility in the neighborhood at all. 43 The authors of this petition cannot be determined from the extant records. Its existence, however, illustrates that hostility toward the soldiers at Fox Hills predated their arrival on the Island and was not solely a response to their conduct. In the wake of Kane’s public remarks, a group of white Stapletonians, led in part by the Stapleton Business Association, seized on accusations of criminality, often articulated through a “color-blind” language, as a vehicle through which to express their opposition to living near and interacting with black soldiers.
Kane’s claims surged through the city’s presses. The New York Times, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, the Daily News, and the Herald-Tribune all covered the “crime wave” regularly and salaciously. 44 The city’s most widely read black paper, the New York Amsterdam News, and the more left-wing People’s Voice conducted their own investigations and determined the concern about crime around Fox Hills to be untrue and racially motivated. The more conservative black paper The New York Age also wrote frequently about the accusations, but with a different analytical bent. Age journalists contended that “no doubt there are some Negro soldiers on Staten Island who are ‘rotten apples,’” but argued that the group of soldiers should not be punished as a result. 45 The persistent attention to accusations of crime around Fox Hills in the citywide press kept the issue on the minds of city officials, activists, and Staten Island residents.
On Staten Island throughout March and April of 1945, residents could read write-ups of Kane’s campaign and the situation around Fox Hills in almost every issue of the Staten Island Advance, the borough’s most widely circulated paper. 46 In the 1920s and early 1930s, the Advance had been known for publishing what a journalist for the Amsterdam News described as “cheap little assaults” against black Staten Islanders. 47 By the late 1930s, the paper had changed its approach and adopted a policy of omitting racial designations when writing about black New Yorkers. This racial neutrality was an attempt to avoid accusations of racism in the paper’s coverage and gained approval from the Amsterdam News. 48 Even stripped of the racial designations, however, the Advance’s coverage of the Fox Hills campaign contributed to the criminalization of black soldiers. Editors at the Advance ran relentless coverage of the enlisted men’s “rowdyism,” reporting on rumors as well as complaints about particular incidents. 49 Journalists writing for the paper reported supposed attacks uncritically even in instances in which no witnesses or police report existed. 50 This style of reporting elevated Kane’s version of events, popularized concern about the behavior of the soldiers, and criminalized the soldiers without explicitly invoking their race.
The obsessive attention in the white press and from Kane’s supporters to the behavior of the soldiers increased their risks of being targeted for conflict, violence, or arrest. Soldiers were significantly more constricted in their opportunities for protest than their civilian counterparts. Even “talking too much” to parties outside the military could earn a soldier a court martial. 51 Some spoke with an NAACP investigator despite the risks, however, and shared their analyses of the environment around Fox Hills. Alfred Anderson from Richmond, Virginia, told the investigator that after the accusations of the past couple of months, many men had little interest in “braving the cold stares of many white people who resent the Negro in uniform.” 52 Private John Wilson of Orangeburg, South Carolina, said conditions at the camp were “demoralizing and discouraging.” He told the investigator that soldiers went to bed early to avoid the risk of “incurring white displeasure in the form of [a] street fight or [a] public fracas.” 53 Another group of soldiers told Owens that white people in Staten Island “do not like the colored people,” and implied that this situation had worsened in recent weeks. 54
Black soldiers who could not avoid a street fight or fracas faced processing in a highly racialized and contentious public environment. About a week after Kane’s declaration against petty crime, the District Attorney and his supporters seized on a fight allegedly involving two black soldiers to demand a larger police presence. On March 3, 1945, a conflict broke out between Sherman Ivory, a black Staten Islander, and two African American soldiers. An off-duty white patrolman, Stephen Crowe, also took part in the scuffle. 55 Ivory later testified that the two soldiers attacked him “without provocation,” and Crowe contended that when he tried to intervene, one of the soldiers took his gun and fired on the patrolman. 56 Privates Curtis Williams and Haywood Arrington were arrested for participating in the fight, though both denied involvement. Williams argued that his arrest was a case of “mistaken identity,” and Arrington stated that he “made [a] mistake in picking up [the] gun.” 57 Months later at trial, five witnesses would corroborate the men’s statements of not participating in the fight. 58 In March, however, the two privates awaited trial in jail without representation, while Kane and his supporters carried on.
Business and homeowners’ associations worked with Kane to spread a narrative that framed their animosity toward the soldiers through both a race-neutral rhetoric of criminality and a timely threat of racial conflict. The Stapleton Businessmen’s Association shared their concern about crime with the press and floated suggestions that businesses close early for the protection of owners and patrons. 59 The association held and publicized meetings with the commander of Fox Hills to discuss how they could “further guard” against the criminal activity of soldiers. 60 On March 13, 250 residents and business owners signed a petition asking for additional police protection to “end hoodlumism” among troops stationed at Fox Hills. The petition demanded that law-enforcement authorities “bring these hoodlums to justice.” Authors informed authorities that “the situation seems to be getting out of hand . . . [and] unless such action is taken at once, serious race disorders may result.” 61 Rather than explicitly stating their opposition to living near black soldiers, signatories relied on racially coded language of criminality and invoked “hoodlumism” and “race disorders.” The threat of such “disorders” loomed large in the minds of Mayor La Guardia and Police Commissioner Lewis Valentine after the unrest in Detroit and uprising in Harlem in 1943. Avoiding any similar conflicts, more so than ensuring civil rights, was a wartime priority for the municipal leaders.
As in the case of the Harlem uprising, gender politics played a role in the rumors white Staten Islanders spread about Fox Hills. The theme of imperiled white femininity ran through many of the stories white residents and journalists shared about the soldiers. The New York Times described the “crime wave” as consisting of “robberies, mugging, and molesting of women.” 62 Other rumors circulated of white women fleeing in terror after suspecting that black soldiers were following them on the street. These stories, which did not include any interactions between the women and soldiers, served to reinforce the perception that the presence of black soldiers posed a threat to white women and girls in Stapleton. 63
The “crime wave” accusations and calls to protect white women became louder throughout mid-March when a white woman and her neighbors stated that she had been raped by a black man in an Army uniform. A New York Times story on the incident ran under the headline “Staten Island Widow of Hero Is Attacked” and described the woman as the “widow of a soldier killed in Europe,” though she was later found to be the wife of a deceased civilian. By emphasizing the woman’s relationship to an enlisted man, the author situated the story within a larger narrative that Kane and his supporters were constructing in which patriotic white citizens in Staten Island were sacrificing for the war and having their security undermined by criminal black soldiers. Staten Island’s representative on the City Council, Frederick Schick, would later seek to elevate this argument through a resolution before the Council. 64
Journalists writing for the city’s black newspapers combated this narrative and argued that the accusations against black soldiers were an expression of racism that predated the soldiers’ arrival. As Clarence Taylor has argued, the black press and particularly the left-wing People’s Voice served as a key advocate and organizing tool for campaigns against police harassment and brutality during these years. Taylor notes that Voice reporters, led by journalist and photographer Llewellyn Ransom who often wrote on policing for the paper, regularly challenged the police narratives of events. 65 This strategy proved effective in their reporting on Stapleton. Journalists called into question the details of the assaults and elevated inconsistencies that had been reported by the police or the military. Llewellyn Ransom challenged the woman’s description of her attacker in his reporting. She claimed to have bitten the thumb of her assailant during the attack, and Ransom remarked that, though all soldiers at the facility were forced to undergo thumb examinations, inspectors “never caught up with the bitten thumb.” Ransom also commented that it was the opinion of “some” that “Negro troops were never wanted in this area by prejudiced elements in the population.” 66 Carl Dunbar Lawrence, writing in the Amsterdam News, declared “there is no crime wave on Staten Island . . . but there is rumor, vicious innuendo and false reports that Negro soldiers are morally unfit for service.” Lawrence also pointed out the flaws in the case of another supposed crime reported by city employee Edward Conroy, who claimed he had been accosted by three black soldiers. 67 Police investigators found Conroy’s explanation of events “rather confusing,” and he later admitted that he had gotten into a conflict with friends. 68 Some residents believed that Conroy had actually lost the money in a craps game and that the District Attorney knew these details but had publicized Conroy’s supposed assault anyway. 69 Despite this reporting and the inconsistencies in many of the accounts, the calls for a heavier police presence from Kane’s supporters persisted.
Following the accusation of rape, Staten Islanders became increasingly attuned to the possibility of conflict between white residents and Fox Hills soldiers. While some believed that mass interracial violence was imminent, others sought to avoid conflict. The Council for Democracy, Borough President Palma’s organization for racial tolerance, contacted the citywide mayor’s Committee on Unity for “advice on how to meet the situation.” 70 The Committee on Unity quickly decided that the request fit within their responsibilities of “making investigations and recommending action to help resolve tense neighborhood situations.” 71 Members of the interracial committee looked into the cases of Williams and Arrington, who were being held without representation, and made note of “widespread apprehension in the Negro communities of the city that the legal rights of these men would not be adequately protected.” Lawyers affiliated with the committee volunteered to represent the men in an effort to “safeguard this situation,” and the group began its own quiet investigation of the accusations against the soldiers. 72
In the days that followed, the Army, the NYPD, and Mayor La Guardia accepted the reports of increased crime and responded with a show of force. The mayor announced that he was working with the Army to “prevent conflicts of violence between civilians and servicemen” and that he supported sending extra police officers to “guard the section.” 73 Army officials and NYPD commissioner Lewis Valentine agreed and dramatically increased their surveillance of the soldiers stationed at Fox Hills. Soldiers were searched before leaving the grounds, and heavily policed once they exited the facility. The Army added over 120 officers from both the Second Service Command and the Staten Island Terminal to monitor the area. 74 More than 200 officers in the NYPD and the military police patrolled the neighborhood surrounding the camp. 75 In addition to this band of patrolmen, the NYPD also called in supervising officers from Manhattan and Queens to assist in overseeing and organizing the force on the Island. 76 In response to the criminalization campaign led by Kane, both military and municipal officials chose to increase the surveillance of black soldiers near Fox Hills in an effort to maintain the area’s preexisting racial hierarchy.
Responses from Black Activists, the Military, and the Mayor’s Committee on Unity
Black activists in the NAACP and journalists writing for the People’s Voice and the Amsterdam News challenged the version of events popularized by Kane and the city’s white papers. Critics of the racialized narrative worked to refute it in public and to influence the mayor behind closed doors. Not all activists, however, took the same approach in their response to the criminalization of the soldiers. Some more conservative commentators agreed that crime was a problem among a small group of soldiers, while proponents of a more radical critique contended that the entire discourse of crime was a distraction and cover from the real threat of racism and racial inequality.
Exponents of both approaches emerged within the NAACP, and the organization’s response to the attacks revealed divisions between its Staten Island and national branches. The Staten Island branch of the NAACP does not seem to have devoted much energy to the accusations of Kane and his supporters. The branch’s president, Clarence De Hart, made public statements remarking that crimes were being “committed by a small irresponsible group” of soldiers, but that the men should not be targeted indiscriminately. 77 Little extant evidence beyond these comments exists to document the position of the S.I. branch toward the accusations against the Fox Hills soldiers, which suggests the chapter was not very active around the issue. The annual report of the branch’s activities for 1945 includes no mention of the soldiers or the supposed “crime wave.” Although the branch did show the film “The Negro G.I. in World War II” at a meeting, much of their organizing work focused on housing and employment. 78 De Hart served as both the president of the NAACP branch and the director of the Booker T. Washington USO Center in Stapleton, which provided recreational activities for the Fox Hills soldiers. De Hart may have viewed his work at the United Service Organizations Center as a way of preventing conflicts from breaking out between the soldiers and white Staten Islanders in other leisure establishments. 79
The National Acting Secretary of the NAACP, Roy Wilkins, who worked out of the organization’s Manhattan-based office, took issue with De Hart’s approach and adopted a different tack himself. Wilkins felt that the NAACP “did not come out so well” in De Hart’s statements and determined to find out “just what the situation is” around Fox Hills. He hired white investigator A. B. Owens to interview Staten Islanders. 80 The acting secretary also wrote to La Guardia about the treatment of the soldiers in Stapleton. “Negro citizens protest this smear campaign against a whole race and call upon you to require the police of the city to have no part in it,” Wilkins proclaimed to the mayor. 81
Wilkins commissioned Owens’s investigation through the National Office with seemingly no input from the Staten Island branch. There is no record of direct communication between De Hart and Wilkins about Fox Hills and no reference to the S.I. branch of the NAACP in Owens’s investigative notes. Owens, in fact, knew so little about the organization’s activities on Staten Island that he seemed unaware that De Hart, whom he met during the course of his investigation, was the branch president. Owens referenced a conversation with “a Mr. De Hart” who remarked that “if he knew to whom he was talking he could have plenty to say.” Owens did not reveal himself and De Hart declined to speak with the investigator, illustrating the degree to which Owens’s work was directed independently by the NAACP’s National Office. 82 Wilkins’s disapproval of De Hart’s approach occurred within a larger context of fraught relations between the NAACP’s national office and branches. As Jacqueline A. McLeod notes, this tension erupted in conflicts in New York between city and national officers and democratic versus centralist conceptions of the organization’s functionality. 83
While Wilkins worked through official channels and behind the scenes, journalists writing in the city’s black newspapers publicly criticized Kane and his supporters. When a grand jury convened to assess the validity of Kane’s accusations, the People’s Voice described its proceedings as “District Attorney Kane’s attempt to certify false rumors of a crime wave, with an eye to political capital.” 84 In the Amsterdam News, Carl Dunbar Lawrence castigated the grand jury and argued that the problem was racism on the part of white Staten Islanders, not the behavior of the Fox Hills soldiers. Lawrence contended that the rumors about enlisted men on Staten Island were “actually a conspiracy to make it appear that our boys in uniform are primarily concerned about white women, cheap liquor, and gambling.” 85 Llewellyn Ransom put the accusations in the context of the racial politics of policing on Staten Island. “Although Staten Island is a Port of Embarkation where countless numbers of troops leave for foreign ports,” Ransom wrote, “every notorious incident is laid to the Negro labor troops.” Ransom noted that no public attention had been devoted to reports of attacks on African American women and servicemen, but all black servicemen were treated as under suspicion and subjected to regular searches before leaving the camp, pointing to the ways the city’s policing practices left black residents over-policed and under-protected. 86 The journalist accused Kane of making “political capital of the so-called crime wave, and argued that most Staten Islanders did not share the DA’s concerns about crime.” 87
The Army and the mayor’s Committee on Unity each sent their own investigator to Stapleton in March of 1945 to parse truth from rumor in the hysteria surrounding Fox Hills. The Army assigned Joseph Leonard, Deputy Chief of Staff for the Second Service Command at Governors Island to Stapleton on March 17, 18, and 19. The mayor’s Committee on Unity sent member Marcus Collins to produce a report on Fox Hills for the mayor shortly thereafter. The reports from these two investigators and that of Owens acting on behalf of the NAACP all suggested that local politicians, particularly District Attorney Kane and Staten Island City Councilman Frederick Schick, were seeking to capitalize on wartime racism for their own political advancement.
All three investigators found evidence of racism among white residents but believed that the “crime wave” rumors had spread from borough politicians down rather than from residents up. Each of the three reports named District Attorney Kane as a leader in generating the rumors and some also suggested that Staten Island City Councilman Frederick Schick played a role. “There is considerable fear among the citizens of Stapleton of the Negro soldiers,” Leonard concluded in his report for the Army’s Chief of Transportation, which he attributed to “rumors” and “inflammatory articles.” Leonard suggested that “these rumors are being spread by people whose interests would be furthered by the removal of these soldiers from this community.” 88 Owens concluded that the “lack of contact heretofore with large numbers of colored people [and] a fear built up before the colored troops arrived” ranked as the first two causes of the rumors. He also cited “politicians trying to please followers.” In “one final thought about the whole matter,” Owens mentioned “Kane the District Attorney of Staten Island” and noted that “from this office has come all the loud noise that has resulted in much rumor and gossip prevalent on Staten Island.” 89 The Executive Director of the Committee on Unity made a similar comment in a thinly veiled criticism of Kane in a 1946 issue of the Journal of Educational Sociology. “It seemed possible,” the director wrote, “that local law-enforcement officials might be inclined to use the incident for political purposes.” 90 Although the reports differed in their analyses and recommendations, all three investigators found the claims of widespread criminal activity among the soldiers to be false or exaggerated.
The Committee on Unity approached its investigation with a goal of preventing mass protests or uprisings in the city and an assumption that the presence of a large group of black soldiers in a white neighborhood threatened this goal. Unlike the author of the Army’s report, the committee placed “segregation within the Army itself” at the top of their list of “underlying causes.” Committee members expanded on the ways segregation and racially discriminatory hierarchies in the military affected enlisted black men, but they were also concerned with where the black units created by these policies would be stationed. Second on their list of causes was the fact that the camp “is located in what is practically an all-white community removed by at least an hour’s ride from the Harlem neighborhood.” The inclusion of this statement as a “cause” suggests that, for members of the Committee on Unity, part of the problem presented by segregation in the Army was that the policy created the opportunity for large groups of black soldiers to be stationed in white communities. In this framework, it was the integration of the community, not the spreading of rumors by Kane and other Staten Islanders, that necessitated the increased police presence around Fox Hills.
All three groups were interested in keeping their investigations quiet, and none openly shared their report with the press. The Army and mayor’s committee both labeled their reports “confidential,” and Owens did not divulge his affiliation with the NAACP to his interviewees. The secrecy of the military and the mayor’s committee was likely informed by both groups’ investments in deterring protests. Roy Wilkins’s motivations in keeping Owens’s report quiet are less clear. NAACP officers investigated racial terror and discrimination in the South Pacific and in a select number of U.S. Army camps in 1944 and 1945. The organization used the materials produced through these visits to pressure the War Department and the president to change their policies toward black troops. 91 In Staten Island, Wilkins may have felt that the situation had died down by the time he received Owens’s report in early April. Llewellyn Ransom had publicized a similar analysis to Owens’s in his columns in the People’s Voice, so sharing the report’s findings may have seemed unnecessary. Alternatively, devoting more energy to the accusations at Fox Hills may have been a low priority for the national office at a busy time. The organization was struggling to incorporate its recent vast increase in membership and simmering disagreements among leadership were coming to a head. 92 Regardless of the motivations, the findings in the reports were not widely disseminated.
While the Army, the mayor’s committee, and the NAACP worked on the undercover investigations, Kane and his allies sought to keep their version of events in the public eye. They constructed an argument that emphasized the wartime sacrifice of white Staten Islanders and framed their criticism of black soldiers as part of their rights of citizenship. On March 21, Staten Island Councilman Frederick Schick, of whom The New Yorker wrote in fall 1944 “in his four terms in the council [he] has not opened his mouth except to yawn or incert [sic] a cigar,” raised the issue of crime on Staten Island before the city council. 93 The councilman introduced a resolution demanding that “adequate steps” be taken by police and the military to address the supposed crime wave in Stapleton. Schick’s resolution described Staten Island as “a community of law-abiding citizens, consisting of families whose sons are fighting in foreign lands for the preservation of peace throughout the world.” 94 In this rhetoric, the councilman implicitly invoked criminality in the service of claiming that it was Staten Island’s white residents who were performing the duties of citizenship, rather than the black enlisted soldiers stationed at Fox Hills.
Although Schick had not been featured regularly in the “crime wave” publicity, some residents suspected that he had worked with Kane to spread the rumors about Fox Hills. Joseph Siegel, a grocer who lived on Vanderbilt Avenue, argued that Schick was using the rumors to generate support for his upcoming reelection campaign. Siegel contended that the councilman “was concerned with making an issue, as issues are hard to find in Fox Hills.” Siegel shared his concerns about Schick with City Councilman Ben Davis. 95 Davis, an African American Councilman from Harlem and a leading member of the Communist Party, objected to Schick’s resolution, which was then scheduled for consideration at a later date. 96
Aftermath and Conclusion
Army officials took the complaints and the presentment seriously. They responded by transferring over one thousand soldiers off of the Island and requesting funds from the War Department to build a new guardhouse, a service club inside the facilities, and a fence to enclose the perimeter of the camp, all of which would further separate soldiers from the S.I. community. 97 The War Department approved US$143,000 to meet these requests. 98 The service club was an expansion of the recreational spaces for enlisted men inside the camp and likely a welcome addition. The fence, however, should be seen as a more ominous reflection of white Staten Islanders’ demands for racial segregation around the camp. Although officials claimed the fence proved necessary to prevent trespassers from entering the camp, given the circumstances, it seems far more likely that they were concerned with keeping black servicemen from exiting.
For Farrell Kane and Frederick Schick, the “crime wave” was politically profitable. Kane continued to serve as DA until August 1947 when he went on to win election as a city court justice on a joint Democratic and Liberal party ticket. 99 Schick won his reelection in 1945 and used his position to introduce bills to allow police officers to gain raises more quickly and to oppose tax increases. 100 For Haywood Arrington and Curtis Williams, however, there were costs. Both plead not guilty and had the support of other service members stationed at Fox Hills at their trials. Five witnesses, including two black women in the Women’s Army Corps, corroborated the men’s statements of not participating in the fight. 101 Regardless of this testimony, Judge Thomas J. Walsh of Richmond County Court at St. George sentenced Arrington and Williams to two and a half to five years and twelve and a half to twenty-five years, respectively, at Sing Sing prison. 102
The campaign against soldiers like Arrington and Williams elucidates connections between Staten Island and the rest of the city. Stapleton may have seemed a world away from Harlem, but the Harlem uprising of 1943 shaped the city’s response to Kane’s 1945 campaign. It was after the unrest of 1943 that the mayor formed his Committee on Unity, which then structured much of the city’s response to the complaints about crime in Stapleton. Furthermore, though the Island’s suburban residency patterns and geography allowed it to accommodate thousands of soldiers, New Yorkers across boroughs still viewed the enclave as part of the city. Journalists in the Harlem-based Amsterdam News and People’s Voice covered soldiers’ experiences in Stapleton regularly in the Spring of 1945, as did the Times and the Herald-Tribune. When Wilkins wired La Guardia about the complaints against the soldiers, the acting secretary emphasized repeatedly that it was the “police of the city of New York” who were being mobilized to enact racialized surveillance in Stapleton and called upon the mayor to withhold his support. 103 Police Commissioner Lewis Valentine’s quick decision to pull NYPD members from across the boroughs to monitor servicemen and patrol the streets of S.I.’s eastern shore demonstrated the city’s investment in maintaining racial order even in its most removed borough.
The experiences of Arrington, Williams, and other enlisted men stationed on Staten Island revealed the inner workings of the Jim Crow system in wartime New York City and the ways proponents of this system found opportunities to bolster it during the war. Although many horror stories documented the racial terrorism that met black northerners stationed throughout the South during the war, the environment of harassment, policing, and punishment around Fox Hills illustrates the system of racial hierarchy that black southerners faced in the North. This system relied on purportedly race-neutral accusations of crime and profited from a commitment to maintaining order that became increasingly salient during the war. Enlisted men, black journalists, and activists contested Kane and Schick’s version of events, pointing out the racism hidden in these rumors and complaints. The mayors’ Committee on Unity’s own report acknowledged that “distortion” was involved in the reporting of crimes. Ultimately, despite the convictions of Williams and Arrington, committee members considered their involvement in the accusations a victory, believing that they helped deter protests on the part of black activists or large-scale interracial violence. 104 La Guardia and his Committee on Unity’s response to the “crime wave” hysteria demonstrated the city’s commitment to upholding racist practices in policing, housing, and leisure, which became increasingly rigid during the war. Although the war years have often been framed as an opening for activists challenging Jim Crow, the Fox Hills episode suggests an alternative reading of the effects of militarism and nationalism on democracy and racial equality. In the attacks on the rights of black soldiers stationed in Staten Island, wartime New York City appears not as a site of opportunity defined predominantly by advances in civil rights but as a landscape in which black activists and journalists combated intensified police and military surveillance and a strengthened wartime commitment to quashing challenges to the city’s racialized social order.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The author wishes to thank Arinn Amer, Jeanne Gutierrez, Paul Heideman, David Nasaw, Sarah Litvin, and Katie Uva for their feedback on earlier versions of this article. The anonymous manuscript reviewers at the Journal of Urban History also provided generous and thoughtful comments. Additionally, the author would like to thank the archivists at the Center for Jewish History, the Library of Congress, the National Archives, and Gabrielle Leone at the Staten Island Museum for their assistance.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
