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"It never seems to occur to them that Nigger Heaven is crowded, that there isn't another seat, that something has to be done. It doesn't seem to occur to them, either, that we sit above them, that we can drop things down on them and crush them, that we can swoop down from this Nigger Heaven and take their seats."
Fresh Inflow. In 1935 the coiled tension of Harlem lashed out in a riot that began when a 16-year-old boy was seized stealing a cheap penknife in a white-owned variety store. This was the height of the Depression, and for months Negroes had been mesmerized by the nationalistic "buy black" speeches of a Philadelphia Negro who called himself Sufi Abdul Hamid (real name: Eugene Brown). The rumor spread that the boy had been beaten to death, and though it was false, the mobs left four dead, 100 injured and $1,000,000 in property damage, largely to white stores.
Eight years later, a white policeman trying to arrest a woman for disorderly conduct shot and wounded a Negro G.I. for interfering. Rumors flashed through the ghetto that the soldier was dead, and this time the toll was five dead, 500 injured, $5,000,000 in damage.
During World War II still another inflow of blacks to New York began. In the last 20 years, the city's Negro population has increased 2½ times, now stands at 1,200,000, or 15% of the total. More than half the new arrivals spilled over into ghettos in the other boroughs, creating huge new Harlems: Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant, whose population has trebled since 1940 and is soon expected to pass Harlem itself; South Jamaica-St. Albans in Queens, where the Negro population has trebled in a single decade; Morrisania in the Southeast Bronx. Together with Harlem, the four ghettos house 80% of New York's Negroes.
Three Strikes. In the '50s, Harlem's population actually declined by 27,000 because of the construction of vast housing projects. The outflow relieved the ghetto's congestion somewhat, but it also damaged Harlem's future almost beyond repair, for 41,000 middle class Negroes in their 20s and 30s got out, making Harlem more of a slum than ever and leaving it with no core to build on.
Today, Harlem's three precincts, patrolled by 1,200 police, about 85% of them white, are the city's busiest. Narcotics is the top problem. Of New York's 30,000 junkies, 15,000 to 20,000 live in Harlem. "I was just born black, poor and uneducated, and you only need three strikes all over the world to be out, and I have nothing to live for but this shot of dope," says one addict. But the habit is costly: $1 for a marijuana "reefer," $3 for a "bag" (a single grain of heroin), $5 for a "deck" (three grains). A heavy user may need up to $75 a day, and that often means mugging people and sometimes killing them for the wherewithal.
"Numbers?" sneers a white police detective. "Hell, that's a game. Narcotics is something else. Me and my partner, we pick up junkies, and sometimes we even get a pusher. We want to go further, get to the wholesaler. Well, mister, we can't move one inch more. If I move in, I may get busted to patrolman. You push too hard in narcotics, you can get to be DOA, which is dead on arrival."