Harlem, 1940s

As the United States emerged from World War II, New York City found itself in a drastically different place than it was in before the war. Commercial activity brought on by the war reignited the city’s economy, lifting the city out of the Depression and into a period of prosperity. In fact, New York had become the world’s largest manufacturing center by the late 1940s, it was the world’s biggest port, and it was the world’s financial capital. Unfortunately, continued discrimination meant that many Black New Yorkers did not benefit as many were denied factory positions created by the war. While many Black Americans went off to fight for democracy overseas, injustices in America remained.

Still, the hope for these wartime jobs as America recovered from the Great Depression led to the second great migration, a period between 1940 and 1970 that saw more than 5 million African Americans leave the South and move to the Northeast, Midwest, and West. In the first two decades, half a million Black southerners migrated to New York State alone. Of the approximately 485,000 Black New Yorkers in the early 1940s, 300,000 lived in Harlem. Segregation, a housing shortage, and a struggling working class led to crowded conditions in the city.

Tensions boiled over in Harlem, resulting in a series of riots. The first, which took place in 1935 during the Great Depression, happened after a boy was accused of stealing and subsequently killed by the police. Three men died and 600 stores were looted. The summer of 1943 saw eruptions of racial disturbances in 47 cities across the country, including in Detroit; Mobile, Alabama; and Beaumont, Texas. In August of that year, a soldier intervened as a white police officer tried to arrest and struck a Black woman who was involved in an argument over an unsatisfactory hotel room. The soldier was shot by the police officer. For two days, angry residents poured into the streets, despite being faced with a force of 16,100 city police, military police, civil patrolmen, state guardsmen, and civilian volunteers brought in to end the violence. By the end, six people died, hundreds were injured, 500 were arrested, and more than 1,400 businesses were destroyed, damaged, or looted. The 1940s also saw Harlem enter into the political infrastructure. In 1941 Adam Clayton Powell Jr. was elected to the New York City Council. Three years later, after a congressional district was placed in Harlem, Powell became the first African-American from New York elected to congress, where he served until 1971.

Meanwhile, post-war New York was experiencing a cultural boom, with creators The Lenox and Fifth Avenue Tenants League demands fair housing conditions like Leonard Bernstein and tenant rights, 1949 and Jerome Robbins leading the way. In the Harlem nightclub, musicians like Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk were pioneering a new style of jazz called “Be-bop.” This period also saw dozens of modern artists, including Marcel Duchamp, Fernand Leger, and Wassily Kandinsky, move to New York amid the rise of fascism in Europe and the conflict that followed. In addition to their own work, these artists influenced a younger generation of artists, like Jackson Pollock. Where Paris had previously reigned as the center of the art world, post-World War II marked a shift of the art and culture world to the island of Manhattan.