When I was around 11 years old, my family took a trip down South from New York City. We went as far as North Carolina, which is where I know today. At the time, while passing through Lumberton, I had my first upclose look at the final vestiges of the Jim Crow era, which had only come to an end with the transit of the Voting Rights Act of 1964.
But that didn't stop the sweet, and pretty, young cashier at the Howard Johnson's from calling the short black kid, who worked there, "nigger."I was so happy to hold seed from the North, where this character of thing did not occur. Or, at least that's what I thought.
I grew up in New York City, in the borough of Brooklyn, at a sentence when the whole area was undergoing a radical change in race relations. The TV was filled with images of police dogs being loosed upon non violent protesters; women and children included. I was proud of the fact that we were so unlike in our treatment of race issues in the North.
Of course, as I got older, I realised that the sole difference betwixt the Union and the South was the way in which we were racist. In the South, it was overt. In the North, it was covert, and swept under the rug, where no one could see it.
"The Cruel City" is a good, hard look at what was below that rug. And it's not a really pretty sight. Institutionalized racism was as rampant in the Union as it was in the South. The author, T.J. English, has granted us an insightful, and revealing look at the way things were done in New York City during the 1950's through the 1970's. And on the way he provides the historical background necessary to see both the differences, and the similarities, of both systems.
Using 3 individuals as examples, the author expertly weaves their lives, and their troubles, into a tapestry of officially sanctioned racism, as vapid and immorality as that of the South. Beginning with the social account of the large cause of blacks, and Puerto Ricans, to the North, looking for jobs during the Second World War, he traces the seeds of a different kind of racism, one that would eventually boil over in the hot summer months of the mid-sixties, leaving our cities burned and scarred for decades to come.
The book kicks off with the attempted murder of Martin Luther King in Blumstein's, a Harlem Department store where he had departed to raise his book "Stride Toward Freedom." A black woman plunged a letter opener into his chest, just missing his aorta. She had been stalking him for various years, believing that his turn in the Civil Rights Movement was Communist influenced. This incident exposed the divisions between the various African-American factions of the clock in regards to the expolsive issue of Civil Rights. Some idea we were moving too fast, while others believed that we were not moving fast enough.
Three individuals are explored in this book. First, and foremost, is the very victim, George Whitmore, Jr. a new dark man from Wildwood, New Jersey. He decides to give the junkyard where he grew up for the opportunities that he believes await him in Brooklyn. His decision will vary his life forever when he is falsely accused, and then confined for the notorious "Career Girls" murder in Manhattan, a crime which took place while he was yet surviving in New Jersey! Tried and convicted, he wins an appeal, only to be retried 2 more times for the same crime. Remember, this is happening in New York, not Alabama! He is also charged with 2 other crimes which he did not commit, just to be certain they "get him." Along the way, evidence is lost, destroyed and tampered with, all in the list of convicting Mr. Whitmore rather than admit to a slip on the office of the police.
The back story here is that of Police Detective Bill Phillips, one of the most infamous of the "crooked" cops who so brazenly extorted, and shook down, everyone in his path. His criminal activities eventually landed him support in uniform, pounding a beat, where his corrupt methods of law and order served as one of the openings for the Knapp Commision hearings in the late 1960's. His tale is one of avarice, greed and violence. The racism he adhered to was considered to be but a bit constituent of his job.
Dhoruba Bin Wahad was a kid from the Bronx, who was serving sentence for robbery when he became a Muslim. Released in time for the long hot summers of 1967 and 1968, he is stressful to release his life around during the social revolution sweeping the nation in the kind of Fatal Power, and the Black Panthers. In poor order, the streets of New York would be afloat in the line of slain officers. Some were shot while on patrol, ambushed with phony calls for police, while others were injured in the riot which scorched whole neighborhoods, leaving the urban landscape forever changed.
This is an unflinching look at the racial disparities, and attitudes, which combined to ruin our cities, and portions of African-American culture during the post-war days in New York. For a kid from Brooklyn, who grew up in the thick of all of this, the word is an eye opener to what was actually happening all about me in the city where I grew up.
Well written, historically accurate, and compelling in it's scope, this bible proves the old adage, that sometimes "you can't see the wood for the trees."
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