(See Cover)
At the height of Harlem's nighttime fury, a white police officer stood in the litter of glass and garbage that had come crashing down from the darkened rooftops and raised a bull horn to his mouth. "Go home," he pleaded with the glowering Negro mobs that clustered along Seventh Avenue and atop the shabby tenements. "Go home. Go home." From a man in the mob came a shout: "We are home, baby."
There was both defiance and despair in that cry, for Central Harlem is no place like home. It occupies only a 3.5-sq.-mi. wedge of upper Manhattan, but 232,000 people are packed into it, 94% of them black. Its worst streets are so crowded that if the same density prevailed throughout New York City the entire population of the U.S. could be jammed into just three of its five boroughs. It seethes with life and frequently boils over in violence. Its drug addiction rate is ten times higher than New York City's, twelve times higher than the nation's. Its murder rate is six times higher than the city's. "This is the jungle," says a Harlem woman, "the very heart of it."
Rats & Roaches. The jungle is, above all, inexorably and everlastingly dreary. There is no fun, no glamour here. There is little excitement even in the violence and sin. There are, of course, a few clearings. In the handsome residences up on Sugar Hill and the comfortable Riverton Apartments along the Harlem River, the black bourgeoisie live much as their middle-class white counterparts do. Dozens of such project apartment buildings rise above Harlem's slums like so many monoliths, changing the section's skyline as drastically as they have changed lower Manhattan's.
But there are also the tenements where the mortar is so fatigued with age that hoodlums had merely to peel the bricks from crumbling chimneys last week for ammunition to heave at the cops. Half of Harlem's buildings are officially classified as "deteriorating" or "dilapidated," but no classification—official or otherwise—can adequately describe their garbage-strewn hallways and rotting, rickety staircases, their rat-infested rooms and grease-caked stoves where the roaches fight one another for space, their crumbling plaster and Swiss-cheese ceilings.
On some streets, men who cannot find jobs sit on stoops playing pinochle and coon can and Georgia skin, or drinking "Dirty Bird" wine at 60¢ a pint from bottles hidden in brown paper bags. Buzzing around them are children who frolic unsupervised far into the night, wearing latchkeys on strings around their necks because there is nobody at home to care for them. Half of Harlem's children under 18 live with only one parent or none, and it is small wonder that the juvenile delinquency rate is more than double New York's or that the venereal disease rate among Harlem's youth is six times higher than in the rest of the city. Harlem is a mother lode of such statistics, but no footnoted chart on child neglect could reveal as much about the place as the story of the lost little girl of three who was not able to tell the police where she was from, and knew her mother only by the name she had heard around the house: "Bitch."
C.P.T. Harlem, wrote Negro Novelist Ralph (The Invisible Man) Ellison in a 1948 essay, is "the scene and