pitch. Old-timers told me that Harlem had never been the same since the 1935 riot, when millions
of dollars worth of damage was done by thousands of Negroes, infuriated chiefly by the white
merchants in Harlem refusing to hire a Negro even as their stores raked in Harlem's money.
During World War II, Mayor LaGuardia officially closed the Savoy Ballroom. Harlem said the real
reason was to stop Negroes from dancing with white women. Harlem said that no one dragged
the white women in there. Adam Clayton Powell made it a big fight. He had successfully fought
ConsolidatedEdison and the New York Telephone Company until they had hired Negroes. Then
he had helped to battle the U.S. Navy and the U.S. Army about their segregating of uniformed
Negroes. But Powell couldn't win this battle. City Hall kept the Savoy closed for a long time. It was
just another one of the "liberal North" actions that didn't help Harlem to love the white man any.
Finally, rumor flashed that in the Braddock Hotel, white cops had shot a Negro soldier. I was
walking down St. Nicholas Avenue; I saw all of these Negroes hollering and running north from
125th Street. Some of them were loaded down with armfuls of stuff. I remember it was the
bandleader Fletcher Henderson's nephew "Shorty" Henderson who told me what had happened.
Negroes were smashing store windows, and taking everything they could grab and carry-
furniture, food, jewelry, clothes, whisky. Within an hour, every New York City cop seemed to be in
Harlem. Mayor LaGuardia and the NAACP's then Secretary, the famed late Walter White, were in
a red firecar, riding around pleading over a loudspeaker to all of those shouting, muling, angry
Negroes to please go home and stay inside.
Just recently I ran into Shorty Henderson on Seventh Avenue. We were laughing about a fellow
whom the riot had left with the nickname of "Left Feet." In a scramble in a women's shoe store,
somehow he'd grabbed five shoes, all of them for left feet! And we laughed about the scared little
Chinese whose restaurant didn't have a hand laid on it, because the rioters just about convulsed
laughing when they saw the sign the Chinese had hastily stuck on his front door: "Me Colored
Too."
After the riot, things got very tight in Harlem. It was terrible for the night-life people, and for those
hustlers whose main income had been the white man's money. The 1935 riot had left only a
relative trickle of the money which had poured into Harlem during the 1920's. And now this new
riot ended even that trickle.
Today the white people who visit Harlem, and this mostly on weekend nights, are hardly more
than a few dozen who do the twist, the frug, the Watusi, and all the rest of the current dance
crazes in Small's Paradise, owned now by the great basketball champion "Wilt the Stilt"
Chamberlain, who draws crowds with his big, clean, All-American-athlete image. Most white
people today are physically afraid to come to Harlem-and it's for good reasons, too. Even for
Negroes, Harlem night life is about finished. Most of the Negroes who have money to spend are
spending it downtown somewhere in this hypocritical "integration," in places where previously the
police would have been called to haul off any Negro insane enough to try and get in. The already
Croesus-rich white man can't get another skyscraper hotel finished and opened before all these
integration-mad Negroes, who themselves don't own a tool shed, are booking the swanky new
hotel for "cotillions" and "conventions." Those rich whites could afford it when they used to throw
away their money in Harlem. But Negroes can't afford to be taking their money downtown to the
white man.
Sammy and I, on a robbery job, got a bad scare, a very close call.
Things had grown so tight in Harlem that some hustlers had been forced to go to work. Even
some prostitutes had gotten jobs as domestics, and cleaning office buildings at night. The
pimping was so poor, Sammy had gone on the job with me. We had selected one of those
situations considered "impossible." But wherever people think that, the guards will unconsciously
grow gradually more relaxed, until sometimes those can be the easiest jobs of all.