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Fast Payoff. "Numbers" is the poor Negroes' reach for the pot of gold, and 100,000 of them slip nickels and dimes to "runners" each day in the hope that their three-digit number will come up for a 600-to-1 payoff. Otherwise known as the policy racket, the numbers game drains Harlem of $50 million a year, but it also provides a living for 15,000 runners and controllers. Negro stores abound with code books advising that if you have dreamed about the police you should bet the number 782; about cats, 578; about adultery, 900.
Once, Negroes controlled Harlem's numbers racket. But, so the story goes, one Harlem policy banker was hit hard during the 1930s and went to Racketeer Dutch Schultz to borrow $5,000. So quickly did he pay it back that Schultz became interested, and before long the big-time mobsters moved in. Now Negroes complain that Italian and Jewish racketeers, protected by the police, control the game, and a Black Nationalist has drawn cheers by calling for "black control of the numbers."
Most Harlemites are convinced that the cops turn their backs on such rackets for a price. And this conviction vastly complicates the problem of policing Harlem. What happened last week, said the Rev. Richard A. Hildebrand, head of New York's N.A.A.C.P. chapter, was "the explosion of a total community resentment, deeply rooted in the absence of respect on the part of Harlem citizens for the cop on the beat, whom they see in far too many compromising situations."
One of the major demands made by Negro leaders last week was for more Negro cops in Harlem—the ratio is 1 Negro policeman to 6 white. Ironically, the proportion of Negroes was once much higher, but civil rights leaders complained that if white police could patrol Harlem, Negro police ought to patrol white neighborhoods, and New York's civil-righteously sensitive Democratic city fathers dutifully scattered the Negro cops around the city.
Unbreakable Cycle. The cops and the cloudy issue of "police brutality" were last week's headline material, but Harlem's problems go much deeper. "The most dangerous creation of any society is that man who has nothing to lose," wrote James Baldwin in The Fire Next Time, and Harlem abounds with such men. They have neither jobs, nor homes worth living in, nor an education. The tragedy of Harlem is that yet another generation of such men is being bred because they cannot break out of the vicious cycle of the ghetto: poor schooling, leading to a low-paying job or no job at all, leading to housing in a rundown neighborhood, leading anew to poor schooling for the children.
There are 50,000 Negroes on New York City's civil service rolls, and the city has one out of every nine working Negroes on its payroll. But Negro unemployment runs twice as high in Harlem as elsewhere, and most of the jobs that are open pay bare subsistence wages. "You go down to the employment agency, and you can't get a job," says one Negro. "They don't have a job for you." Automation heightened the problem, throwing thousands of elevator operators, ditchdiggers and countermen out of work.
Negro politicians stir passions when they point out that 80% of Harlem's businesses are owned by whites who do not live there. Most of them are Jews, and here are the sparks of