Abstract
African-Americans do not fit neatly into the standard history of the making of the working class in the United States. As Shannon King shows in Whose Harlem Is This, Anyway? black migrants to New York City in the first decades of the twentieth century faced a host of issues exacerbated by racism, including employment discrimination, segregation, artificially high rents, poor housing conditions, and the interrelated issues of crime, vice, and police brutality. Through this book, labor educators can explore the historical roots of present-day issues such as the racial wealth gap and the Black Lives Matter movement, and can examine how grassroots activism around community issues confronted racism.
Chapter 2 is particularly germane for labor educators. Here, King explains the challenges facing blacks in the labor market. Widespread discrimination put African-American strivings for upward mobility on a different track than their white, working-class counterparts. While European Americans fought for wage hikes and dignified conditions in the crucible of industrial labor, exclusionary hiring practices largely barred African-Americans from these jobs in New York City. Most could only find positions in the low-paying service sector. Residential segregation also hurt employment prospects, as white ethnics built neighborhood social capital and familiar faces got jobs. Industrial life was difficult for working-class New Yorkers, but marginalization was worse.
In response, activists wedded labor activism and community politics to increase opportunities for advancement. Yet, even labor activism included racial complications, as blacks had mixed success with trade unions. Some hidebound craft unions simply excluded blacks, while others invited them in only to avoid strikebreaking and refused to make black issues part of their agendas. The disappointment with cross-race organization convinced black leaders such as Frank Crosswaith and A. Philip Randolph to harness black community power instead, laying the groundwork for the Civil Rights Movement. White intransigence, in effect, pushed blacks out of the class struggle and into the race struggle.
While finding barriers in employment, blacks also strove to make Harlem livable. White neighbors often did not want them, and youth gangs drew racial lines through force. “Self-protection . . .,” King notes, “was part and parcel of blacks’ community consciousness and community identity” (p. 164). Self-defense was especially vital because black Harlemites could not turn to law enforcement for security. The police force routinely victimized black citizens, as white society sought to contain and control the African-American population. Black mistrust of the authorities was forged in experience as, “New Negroes saw the police as the coercive arm of the state, which neither protected blacks nor necessarily represented justice in black communities across the nation” (p. 169). Meanwhile, white-owned vice operations flourished in Harlem, abetted by graft and a semiofficial policy of pushing organized crime to black areas, challenging black claims on Harlem. Residents often protested but worried that a crackdown would lead to mass arrests of black men. The dilemma of dealing with crime in the face of law enforcement negligence and brutality festers even today, as black neighborhoods such as Harlem receive too little of the policing that does the most good and too much of the harmful kind.
African-Americans arrived in Harlem seeking the Promised Land, but their trials had only begun. As King argues, “Black people have always been fighting for Harlem,” and he emphasizes black agency while paying close attention to intraracial diversity in the community (p. 2). The book is a revision of King’s dissertation, and while the research is thorough, the narrative is too often overdetailed and meandering. When it regains focus, though, it serves as a primer of how a race became a people through community-based action.