In fact, Congressman Powell, whose district comprises Harlem, and his actress wife spend most of their time on Long Island. Powell, a light-skinned, but professional Negro and bleeding heart, and Mrs. Powell—Hazel Scott—ride in a chauffeur-driven Cadillac limousine. Miss Scott was cited as a left-winger by the Un-American Activities committee.
On his own statement, a 13-year-old Negro boy, who held up a white schoolteacher at gun point and was caught while fleeing, a clasp knife in his hand and his .32-calibre revolver in his belt, was a member of the Purple Cross gang, with a hangout at 114th Street and St. Nicholas Avenue.
He was ambitious to join the Turks, a gang of older boys. He was told he would have to prove he was tough enough. The Turk leaders gave him the gun and told him to pull a stick-up—"then come back and we'll see about taking you in."
One juvenile Harlem gang has another test—before a tyro can be accepted as a full member, he must commit a rape!
The Negroes took merciless punishment in the big depression. And the recovery was slow for them. By 1940 they were angry and sullen. Then hell broke loose, fomented by meddlesome agitators of both races. A bloody and paralyzing race riot exploded.
The police, suddenly allowed to wade in with night-sticks, finished it quickly. But the causes could not be clubbed down. The resentment and bitterness went underground, to emerge through influences described above, but with few flare-ups because the whites virtually quit going to Harlem.
For months, no taxi driver would take whites to Harlem destinations, and some even refused to drive through the district. Even today few white hackmen will take you to a Harlem number or answer a hail in that region.
The muggings and the stick-ups soon began to slop far over the borders and today the extent of Negro crime in all the boroughs scandalizes the decent elements of the race. White men have the money. And since they no longer come up to be taken, the goons spread to greener fields.
Lait and Mortimer have set up above only a camera-eye fragment of their long experience and what they learned first-hand in courts, police stations, and day and night contacts with every class and phase of New York's metropolitan manifestations.
They have eaten in Harlem hideaways and imbibed at Harlem's beehive bars. They have had the confidence of Negro detectives, who are too ashamed of the behavior of some of their people to gloss it over.