9
Violence, the Second Ghetto, and the Logic of Urban Crisis

Of the many problems disrupting the present and threatening the future of this city, none is more critical than this growing concern and fear over the increase of fear and violence in the streets, the subways, the elevators and the parks of New York.
"New York City in Crisis," New York Herald-Tribune, 5 February 1965

This study describes a complex set of postindustrial transformations occurring in the city of fact and in the city of feeling from the late 1940s through the mid-1960s—an extended "crisis" defined as much by the problem of how to think and write about cities as by physical and social change in cities. But the term "the urban crisis," as used in popular and scholarly conversation, has a more limited meaning. The term usually describes a period of particularly violent social upheaval in inner cities, accompanied by appropriately extreme rhetorical habits, lasting from the mid-1960s to about 1970. Conventional accounts trace the sources of this urban crisis to a convergence of many factors. Some of them were aspects of the continuing postindustrial transformation of inner cities: black migration to the Northern inner city, largely white and middleclass exodus to the suburbs, the flight of capital and especially manufacturing jobs from urban neighborhoods. These structural changes formed the context for upheavals surrounding the civil rights movement, rising expectations of

urban blacks in tension with social and physical conditions in the second ghetto, and the inadequate or misdirected responses of the state to the continuing problems of racial conflict, poverty, inequities in housing and education, and increases in criminal violence. Urban riots, fear of muggers, and proliferation of the drug trade gave special significance to "crime," by which most people usually meant face-to-face violence and theft, in the litany of second ghetto ills. While it lasted, the urban crisis shared space at the top of the American agenda with the Vietnam War and the more vaguely defined problem of youth culture.

Although the list of contributing factors tends to be long and various, the widely recognized urban crisis of the 1960s—when the term itself came into general use—was and is constructed as fundamentally a matter of violent racial conflict. Its most compelling element was typically described as a "rising tide of violence" in the nation's black ghettos, which did not seem to be party to the general prosperity and economic growth the nation as a whole enjoyed in the 1950s and 1960s. As Robert Beauregard puts it in Voices of Decline,

What made the years between roughly 1960 and the recession of 1973-5 unique in the discourse on urban decline was the emergence of a single theme that unified its various fragments and turned urban decline into a society-wide problem. The theme was race, the problem was the concentration, misery, and rebellion of Negroes in central cities, and the reaction was one of fear and eventually panic.^[1]

The language of crisis achieved even greater compression in its foregrounding of criminal violence. In addition to commanding attention in its own right, explicitly racial violence (like the "race riot") and racially coded violence (in common usage after about 1960, the figure of "the mugger" is implicitly assumed to be black or Hispanic) became rubrics under which to reduce the complexity of urban transformation to sharply representable and narratable form. The widespread tendency to understand the relationship between whites and blacks in the postindustrial inner city as primarily a problem of too little law and order in the ghetto (or too much, as critics on the left argued) led to what Sharon Zukin has called "the institutionalization of urban fear" as a defining principle of urbanism during and after the urban crisis.^[2]

Urban America was in some ways a more violent place in the 1960s than it had been in the 1950s, and representations of the inner city reflected that change, but the period's cultural fixation on urban violence also marks a collective rude awakening to a gradual change of urban orders. The endless repetition and interpretation of images of "urban disorder"—riots, muggings, police and National Guard responses—chart the sudden shock of Americans' encounter with the slower, duller, more obscure disorder of shifting economic and social arrangements. The racial logic and violence that dominated the

canonical urban crisis gave Americans a way to think about, or not think about, historical processes like the emergence of postindustrial urbanism. One way to understand the urban crisis of the 1960s is to regard it as the period in which Americans—especially Americans who steered clear of the black inner citywere forced to confront that emergent urbanism. The "crisis" ended when they had developed routines for understanding and responding to it. They were used to it, settling into generic understandings of this once-new and strange prospect, by the time the riots petered out at the end of the 1960s.

The urban crisis, then, brought together two traditional sources of American social concern: disorienting urban change and the American dilemma of race flowed together, and the second ghetto—understood to be the point of confluence—moved to cultural center stage. As Beauregard puts it, "Urban decline eventually became fused to the Negro ghetto."^[3] The ghetto came to dominate consideration of American urbanism and of the still-emerging postindustrial city, and the Northern ghetto gradually eclipsed the rural and urban South as the principal representative terrain of what Warren Miller called "that separate world in which the American Negro has his being." The report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (the Kerner Commission), one of the canonical texts of the urban crisis, articulated and helped to reinforce the confluence of urban and racial discourses. "Our nation is moving toward two societies," the report's most famous sentence argues, "one black, one white—separate and unequal."^[4] Defining the urban crisis as it sought to explain the causes and implications of rioting in the inner city, the Kerner Commission report mapped those two separate societies as, in essence, the ghetto and the rest of the country.

Condensing the city into the ghetto and the ghetto into the problem of criminal violence, the Kerner Commission report demonstrates how the logic of urban crisis made analysis of violence in the streets a key to unearthing the racial sources of urban problems. In accounting for rioting in the ghetto, the report notes economic transformations leading to the decline of blue-collar employment opportunities for unskilled workers, and it recognizes that suburbanization may be more complex than simple white flight, but it nevertheless concludes that "white racism is essentially responsible for the explosive mixture which has been accumulating in our cities since the end of World War II."^[5] If other observers pursued other readings of the causes and meanings of urban riots, they tended to share with the Kerner Commission an acceptance of riots as somehow communicating the racial essence of what was wrong with American cities. For instance, Stokely Carmichael and Charles V Hamilton's Black Power, another widely read formulation of urban crisis (and an influence on the Kerner Commission), pursues a class-based analysis that nevertheless arrives at an almost identical assessment of the root problem: "The dynamite" in the ghettos "was placed there by white racism and it was ignited by white

racist indifference and unwillingness to act justly."^[6] The discourse of urban crisis rendered the complex and many-faceted postwar transformation of American cities as a simplified, divided landscape in which distinct "white" and "black" urbanisms produced violent sparks wherever they met.

Writing about one of the nation's most written-about ghettos in transition, Warren Miller and Claude Brown were advantageously positioned in the late 1950s and early 1960s to participate in the formulation of urban crisis. The pages that follow describe the world in which Miller's and Brown's characters move: the historical and rhetorical dimensions of diffuse urban change as it became sharply defined as urban crisis, the character of the crisis in New York, and, more specifically, the place in that crisis of Harlem, the exemplary ghetto. "After the uprising of 1964," writes James de Jongh in his history of Harlem's place in the American literary imagination, "the symbol of Harlem crystallized questions of racial being in America once again, and the Harlem motif was associated with the riot itself. In the decade after 1964, the fact of rioting in Harlem was a pervasive historical influence and a dominant metaphoric presence associated with the motif of black Harlem."^[7] The pages that follow also explore the crucial representational role played by figures of criminal violence in imagining Harlem in particular and the breakdown and emergence of urban orders in general. Violent delinquents like Miller's Duke Custis and Brown's autobiographical persona became lenses—often fantastically distortive lenses— through which to observe the changing inner city.

Postwar New York City in Transition

Americans, especially New Yorkers, tend to regard New York City as sui generis, citing its singular scale, complexity, and "world capital" status in support of the notion that New York is exceptional in all ways. In its general outlines, however, New York's postindustrial transformation recapitulates those of Chicago and Philadelphia. Although many observers did not register the decline of New York's manufacturing complex (the nation's largest, despite being anachronistically dominated by small businesses rather than steel mills or auto plants) and the parallel growth of its service industries until the city's fiscal crisis of the mid-1970s, the transformation was well under way by the mid-1960s. As John Mollenkopf argues, the recessions and fiscal crisis of the 1970s "accelerated and crystallized . . . secular trends" discernible throughout the postwar history of New York:

New York City's economy and society have undergone a profound and often painful transformation since the mid-1950s. At the end of World War II, New York was clearly a white, ethnic, blue collar, industrial city, despite the importance of its office sector. Today [in the late 1980s], high level business service

activities drive the city's economy and its industrial base suffers from seemingly endless decline.^[8]

The other principal elements of this story, familiar from the accounts of postwar Chicago and Philadelphia in parts 1 and 2, are a parallel set of physical reconfigurations and ethnic successions. Proliferating steel-and-glass towers in Manhattan, regional highways, housing projects, and the decay of the waterfront and other industrial-era building stock combined with the absolute and relative growth of black, Hispanic, and (later) Asian populations to remake the city's social landscape.

If in its physical, demographic, and economic arrangements "New York in 1940 appeared much as it had for more than a half-century," New York in the late 1960s was a very different place: a service city as much as a manufacturing center, with the balance shifting toward service industries; an increasingly black and Hispanic city; an increasingly postindustrial landscape in which postwar development and redevelopment (concentrating especially in the core) recast the prewar template.^[9] In the decade spanning the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s, this recasting began to make itself evident in partial and disorienting ways.

The city builder and neighborhood breaker Robert Moses has often served in popular and scholarly narrative as the personification of transformative forces acting upon "old" New York.^[10] Stories of the industrial city's decline single Moses out as the man who tore down a prewar New York distinguished (in the more rhapsodic versions) by the productive vitality of its white-ethnic urban villages, the cultural achievements of its black districts (especially jazz-age Harlem), the scrupulous respect accorded to female pedestrians at all hours and in all parts of the city, and the heroic excellence of its public schools and baseball teams. But Moses, for all his considerable power and vision, is a character symbolic of forces that extend far beyond the capacities of any individual. One can, on the one hand, find causes of postwar New York's transformation operating on the world-historical scale. Jason Epstein's essay "The Last Days of New York," an evocatively titled decline narrative and a classic account of the roots of New York's 1975 fiscal crisis, lists "a general crisis in capitalism; . . . the gradual westward shift of the American population; . . . new technologies and cheaper labor markets."^[11] One can, on the other hand, trace the sources of transformation in the machinations of blocs of political and economic players, especially New York's versions of an alliance we have encountered in both Chicago and Philadelphia: the redevelopment-oriented progrowth coalition of local, state, and federal political operatives in league with developers and planners, construction companies and trade unions, bankers and money managers—a large, interconnected interest group with which Moses did business. However one casts the relation between global and local engines driving the change, Epstein argues that

by the middle sixties you could see the city and its people changing all around you. New construction was going up everywhere, herding the old residents and their businesses into ever narrower enclaves, or driving them out of the city altogether. Meanwhile the expanding ghettos were overflowing with refugees driven here by the mechanization of Southern agriculture and by Southern welfare practices that made Northern cities seem deceptively generous by contrast. . . . Between 1960 and 1970 the proportion of blacks in the city had risen from 14 percent to 21 percent, most of them blacks trapped here by a city that didn't need their labor and that had, in fact, begun to export its menial and routine work to less costly labor markets, often to the same areas which these new arrivals had recently abandoned.^[12]

For Epstein, as for many others, the story of postwar New York lies in the reduction of the industrial city's residential, economic, physical, and cultural orders to a set of narrow enclaves squeezed among expanding suburbs, spreading ghettos, and a densely redeveloped core. As in the cases of Chicago and Philadelphia, postindustrial transformation and ethnic and racial succession play the leading roles in shaping the postwar city's history and social landscape. The New York City Planning Commission's Plan for New York City of 1969, researched and written during the urban crisis and bearing the marks of its historical moment, concurs with Epstein in its mapping of cleavages in the present and future social landscape: "Greatest of all is the problem of the slums. . . . The blacks and Puerto Ricans crowded in them have been finding the way blocked in a way groups before them did not."^[13] As Epstein points out, the ethnic succession of the 1960s coincided with the erosion of the traditional structure of economic opportunities offered by the industrial city, making for the specter of permanent central ghettos that even the plan of 1969—anything but a narrative of decline—identifies as the single most important urban problem.

The plan of 1969 respectfully acknowledges the "fear and hostility"of "blue-collar whites" and "middle class neighborhoods" threatened by the departure of industrial jobs and the expansion of black and Hispanic ghettos.^[14] These nervous taxpayers are service professionals and especially white ethnics: some entrenched in their inner-city enclaves "on the edge of" black and Hispanic ghettos (as the plan sees them), more in diasporic movement along the track of upward social mobility from the old European-immigrant slums to the periphery. They are headed for the outer neighborhoods of Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and Staten Island and beyond into a vast arc of suburbs encompassing Long Island, southern Connecticut, upstate New York, and New Jersey. ^[15] In the plan's view, these whites are responding with natural fear and doubt to a massive process of ethnic succession. New York City's non-Hispanic white population declined by about 2 million during the 1950s and 1960s, during which time whites in the city proper also tended to move toward its edges or concentrate in Manhattan below Ninety-sixth Street. At the same time, migration from the

South and from Puerto Rico helped to increase New York's black and Hispanic populations by about a million each, many of them concentrated around the core in areas that had once housed white-ethnic urban villages.^[16]

If the specter of permanent ghettoes was what was most importantly wrong with New York in the 1960s, however, the plan of 1969 hastened to point out "a great deal that is very right with New York City." First, the densely redeveloped core of New York remained an international capital in which were concentrated corporate headquarters, financial markets, communications, advertising, publishing, the arts, theater, and the fashion industry. Second, New York offered on an unrivaled scale the semi-intangible urban quality of "life—more different kinds of people, more specialized services, more stores, more galleries, more restaurants, more possibilities of the unexpected." This weighing of the problem of the ghetto against a set of strengths located in the core and enclaves has a particularly postindustrial ring to it. The plan's introductory list of the city's strengths makes no mention of manufacturing but locates "the engine" of future growth and prosperity in service industries, cultural life, and the "phenomenal" rate at which new office space was being constructed in midtown and downtown Manhattan.^[17] Glossing over a contracting but still vital industrial order, the plan stakes its rosy outlook on the service city's growth.

The central problem facing the plan's postindustrial city, the central problem of urbanism in transition as imagined by many of the urban intellectuals who together formulated the notion of urban crisis in the 1960s, was to manage the tension between the ghetto and the rest of the metropolis. As Fainstein, Fainstein, and Schwartz point out, the plan operated on the fundamental assumption that

New York could be redeveloped in an orderly fashion for the rising service industries of the 1970s, as long as its restive minority population did not destabilize the city. . . . The central concern of government [as opposed to private investors in partnership with it] was not so much creating economic development as eliminating slums, providing public infrastructure, and assisting the disadvantaged to receive their share of its benefits.^[18]

New York's planners drew a familiar map of complex urban transformations detailed in the first two parts of this study: the breakup, dispersal, and reduction to enclaves of the industrial neighborhood order; the emergence of a new social landscape centered on a densely redeveloped business core and complementary residential areas occupied by service-professional office workers; and the emergence of the second ghetto as the principal terrain of urban crisis, which threatened to destabilize the whole arrangement.

Harlem was, for most observers, the quintessential second ghetto. Although Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant and Brownsville districts, both of which had once been slums of opportunity for Jewish and other white-ethnic immigrants,

served as important examples of the ghetto in the 1960s, Harlem played the more important role in representations not only of New York's ghettos but of "black America" in crisis.

The Capital of Black America

The Plan for New York City of 1969 framed its consideration of Harlem with two assertions that help to explain Harlem's role as an exemplary ghetto: "Central Harlem is the capital of black America" and Harlem's "physical and social problems" are so " massive and deep-rooted" that "only a total commitment by government and the community can solve them." The plan provided a thumbnail history of Harlem's turnover from German, Irish, Jewish, and Italian to black during the first quarter of the twentieth century, gesturing in capsule form to the turnover from white ethnic to black that formed one cornerstone of inner-city narrative after midcentury. The artistic, intellectual, and political renaissance of the 1920S following the moment of black succession "Harlem's brightest period"—elevated Harlem to both representative and exceptional status among black urban communities. The plan understood Harlem to be in decline since the 1930s, attributing the decline to the exaggerated effect of the Great Depression on the employment and living conditions of blacks, overcrowding exacerbated by residential segregation, substantial migration from the South, and the community's increasing "frustration and disenchantment" (stock terms indicating rioting and other unrest) in the postwar years. ^[19]

Harlem in the 1960s had become, in the plan's formulation, a textbook second ghetto characterized by a definitive concentration of what were called "pathologies": high rates of poverty, unemployment, drug addiction, homicide, juvenile delinquency, maternal and infant mortality, venereal disease, and "family instability"; poor health conditions, deteriorating and blighted housing, and poor performance in schools; a weak business community dominated by "small stores in poor condition serving a local clientele," interspersed with abandoned and gutted retail space; and, of course, the isolation of blacks (and, in East Harlem, of Puerto Ricans) from the rest of the metropolis. The plan subscribed to the notion, popularized by Daniel Patrick Moynihan a few years before, of a "tangle of pathology" so knotty that only drastic intervention could break its grip on Harlemites. Accordingly, city, state, and federal governments had concentrated in Harlem a variety of ameliorative efforts—poverty programs, job training, expenditures on school buildings, and especially housing projects. Since World War II, large sections of Harlem's prewar landscape of brownstones and tenement residences interspersed with small businesses had been torn down and rebuilt in classic second ghetto form: high-rise apartment slabs, built in superblocks, set obliquely to the street. Harlem had the greatest concentration of public housing in the city, yet it was obvious that renovation of the

physical landscape (especially renovation that involved tearing down existing neighborhoods and local businesses) was not going to be sufficient to ensure social peace. The plan of 1969, a document designed to put the city's best foot forward during a period of extraordinary pessimism about the urban future, could only promise that "the City is firmly committed to physical and social renewal" in Harlem. But if Harlem was indeed the capital of black America, then even this most congenitally optimistic of urban analyses could not, in 1969, bring itself to foresee anything but the persistence of the ghetto's "massive and deep-rooted" problems as the central social fact of the urban future.^[20]

Although there were dissenting voices (like that of the novelist and critic Albert Murray, who will reappear in subsequent chapters) arguing that Harlem was neither typical nor a ghetto, the plan's formulation of Harlem as the core terrain of urban crisis went with the grain of Americans' representational habits in the 1960s.^[21] There were at least three reasons for Harlem's status as, in the words of one standard urban history, "the ghetto that in this period consistently seemed to stand for all others."^[22]

First, even though Harlem had not become a Black Metropolis until the 1920s, it had rapidly become in both popular culture and American letters an instantaneously "traditional" locus of black American urbanism. Because of Harlem, New York shared with Chicago and perhaps Detroit the status of housing a representative community of black Southerners come North to pursue the promise of steady work and social mobility extended by the industrial city to European peasants and other immigrants. Each of these cities was associated in the postwar period with a distinctive musical form identified as quintessentially black culture—New York with bebop, Chicago with blues, Detroit with Motown—but Harlem had since the Harlem Renaissance enjoyed a special status in American letters. A concentration of black writers, artists, and critics had aided Harlem's ascent to representative status by generating a body of work that encouraged black and white Americans to look to Harlem for authoritative black urban culture. After the war, Harlem continued to attract newcomers looking for work and intellectuals—black and white—looking for a vantage point from which to view the changes sweeping American inner cities.

Second, postwar Harlem remained a good position from which to enter into the national urban conversation, in which (for better or worse) New York City played a uniquely important role. In the 120 or so blocks south of Harlem's well-defined lower borders were concentrated disproportionate numbers of nationally accredited urban intellectuals, the nation's main publishing center for periodicals and books, one of two central headquarters for the entertainment and information industries, and a newspaper accepted by many readers across the nation and the world as the "paper of record." These various producers of urban literatures looked to Harlem, and only secondarily to Brooklyn, as the handiest avatar of black America, close by (perhaps too close for some) and yet

a world apart. Thus, a socially engaged writer with Miller's modest but established record had only to move uptown to the edge of Harlem to collect material for a nationally acclaimed novel of the inner city. An ex-delinquent with Claude Brown's impressive experiential credentials had a better chance to publish his writing because Ernst Papanek, director of an upstate reform school in which Brown had served time as a boy, moved in the same circles as the prominent New York intellectuals who edited the journal Dissent, where Brown published his first autobiographical piece on Harlem in 1961.^[23] Harlem in the 1960s (like South Central Los Angeles in 1992) had unique access to the national limelight by virtue of its position near the core of a city with outsize influence in discussions of American urbanism and by virtue of its proximity to sites where national culture was produced and disseminated.

Third, Harlem provided an object lesson in urban change. The bankruptcy of the promised land's promise could be read in the collapse of the Black Metropolis of the 1920s into the postwar second ghetto. Ralph Ellison tells a version of that story of generational disappointment in his essay "Harlem Is Nowhere," in which he visits Harlem's Lafargue Clinic, where Fredric Wertham specialized in psychiatric treatment of violent delinquents. The landscape around the clinic "is a ruin" of "crumbling buildings with littered areaways, illsmelling halls and vermin-invaded rooms," and in these details one can read "the cultural history of Negroes in the North." Their story "reads like the legend of some tragic people out of mythology, a people which aspired to escape from its own unhappy homeland to the apparent peace of a distant mountain; but which, in migrating, made some fatal error of judgment and fell into a great chasm of mazelike passages that promise ever to lead to the mountain but end over against a wall."^[24] Representations of Harlem could map the form and meanings of the bewildering, "mazelike" inner city by following the sensationalized bad behavior of the inheritors of this "fatal error," violent delinquent children of the postwar inner city like Duke Custis, Claude Brown, and Wertham's patients. Precisely because Harlem had enjoyed the status of America's most modern and sophisticated Black Metropolis, defined by its aspiration to cultural leadership, the casting of Harlem as one among many ghettos defined by its pathologies carried particular ironic or tragic force. Harlem thus suggested itself as a place to engage with the emergence of the postwar inner city by asking what had happened to "black America."

The cover of Manchild (fig. 10) posed that question as well. The hardback edition features a handsome cover photo of three young men at the intersection of Seventh Avenue with 125th Street, Harlem's main thoroughfare (and therefore a main thoroughfare of "black America"). Sporting variously skewed hats, hands stuffed into jacket pockets, striding in a loose, challenging row, they command the attention of an older man approaching them from the opposite direction. With his back to the camera, and therefore sharing the reader's per-

spective, he appears to turn his head a bit to eye them—with interest and perhaps apprehension—as they pass. These young men, successors to the postwar generation of what Ralph Ellison called "transitional boys," move through the heart of Harlem in transition. The young men's situation is marked in time by an advertisement for a televised boxing match between Cassius Clay and Sonny Liston. (Liston's top billing and the use of the name Clay, rather than Ali, identify it as probably the first of their two fights, held in February 1964.) Like the delinquent Malcolm Little's transformation into the political and religious leader Malcolm X, Cassius Clay's public transformation into Muhammad Ali registered his engagement with the political and cultural currents of the period that shaped Claude Brown and his cohorts (including Brown's friend Doug Jones, called "Turk" in Manchild, a heavyweight who lost a close decision to Clay in 1963). The young men's situation is marked in space by the split backdrop against which they move: to the right, a bustling crowd, an industrial-era building with the traditional (for New York City) fire escape running down its street facade, a movie theater, a liquor store, a bowling alley, bar, and restaurant; to the left, austere slab-style housing projects (the General Grant Houses, built in 1955) set at an angle to the street. If the right side of the frame evokes the traditional vigor and bustle of the past of the Black Metropolis, the left side seems to indicate an ominous, inscrutable future. The boys move through the world that hangs in the balance.

Claude Brown's cultural work, and Warren Miller's before him, was to figure and explain that world by using the eyes and voices of these young men to traverse the changing landscape of Harlem. Both addressed an initial reading audience steeped in the notion of urban violence as a sign of larger urban changes, an audience that avidly eyed the "transitional boys" with a mix of unease and fascination.

From the Delinquency Panic to the Urban Crisis

Claude Brown (born in 1937) and Cool World's narrating protagonist Duke Custis (born sometime around the end of World War II) offered themselves as representative members of the first generation to come of age in the postwar inner city, a generation in whose behavior observers sought to read the consequences of urban America's postwar transformation. Brown and Duke, born in Harlem and raised there by parents who migrated from the South, are part of what Brown called "the first Northern urban generation of Negroes," by which he meant the first generation of black Americans raised in the Northern inner city as the spatial and demographic center of "black America" shifted from the South to the urban North. Brown and Duke are also violent young male delinquents, a crucial aspect of their credentialing as actors on the urban stage who do the cultural work of representing their generation's leading role in the

remaking of urbanism.^[25] Changing images of violence offer us a way to read the continuities between the delinquency panic of the 1950s and the urban crisis of the 1960s, creating a single stream of violence that ran through representations of postindustrial urbanism as it emerged.

Duke is a juvenile delinquent first and a young black man second. Keeping to the conventions of teen gang formula, Cool World sits squarely in the generic mainstream of a vast literature of the 1950s that represented, exploited, and sought the meanings of juvenile delinquency. Written in the late 1950s, the novel considers race as an important factor underlying the geography of Duke's world and consciousness, but Miller's ultimate responsibility in Cool World is to rendering an account of Duke's membership in a gang as an existential condition. For Miller in the late 1950s, the problem of delinquency organized the dependent variable of race. Along with many other urban intellectuals, however, Miller in the 1960s reversed the relation between delinquency and race, making race the defining urban problem that drove consideration of previously independent problems like delinquency. By 1965, when Manchild in the Promised Land appeared, a large readership was prepared to receive Claude Brown, who claimed to speak for his generation of young inner-city blacks, as a writer who addressed the heart of urban concern and spoke for all black Americans. Brown undertook to map the second ghetto from the inside, to explain what it was like to be a black American by exploring the urban terrain on which that experience was understood to take shape. Brown, then, was black first and delinquent second, his delinquency (like Malcolm X's) serving as the most compelling of the ghetto pathologies that were seen to characterize life in "that separate world" of "black America."

Miller and Brown help to demonstrate how the problem of juvenile delinquency, which played such an important role in discussions of the inner city during the 1950s and early 1960s, was subsumed by the problem of race that defined the urban crisis during the 1960s. In the time between the publication of Cool World in 1959 and Manchild in the Promised Land in 1965, conventional representations of the problem of urban street crime and violence moved the focus from the figure of the street gang (composed of lower-class boys, and girls, of all races and ethnicities) to the figure of the young black man as mugger and rioter. The classic delinquent gang's odd combination of anarchic violence and pseudo-military posturings—at once "disorganized," in the Chicago School's sense of insufficient socialization, and too organized, in a manner that spoke darkly to some postwar observers of incipient fascism—gradually ceased to be an issue of national concern in the early 1960s.^[26] A more general concern with "youth culture," embracing both ghetto and campus, succeeded it.^[27] But the same paradoxical blend of under- and over-organization characterized the figure of the riot that captured the public imagination from 1964 through the end of the decade. The riot, like the gang, combined the threat of

random savagery embodied in the figures of the mugger and the rapist—young men unable or unwilling to control basic drives—with the threat of organized insurgency theatrically fostered by the paramilitary rhetoric and trappings of black "revolutionaries" and campus radicals. The conventions of the delinquency problem had flowed into both the problem of race and the national fascination with youth culture by the mid-1960s, tending to obscure the prior importance of juvenile delinquency, which had been in its own right an overarching national concern that intersected with discussion of the changing city and helped to guide it.

Before race became the urban subject in the mid-1960s, juvenile delinquency provided the images of violence in the streets used to represent the inner city in transition. A national concern with delinquency, originally linked to the familial dislocations occasioned by the war effort, gathered momentum during World War II and gradually built up to panic proportions in the mid- and late 1950s, becoming one of the period's defining subjects. The threat of a delinquent generation—a "shook-up generation," as the journalist Harrison Salisbury called it^[28] —condensed a whole range of anxieties about postwar America, from the power of mass culture to the erosion of traditional sources of authority to the psychic disruptions of the Cold War, but those anxieties also intersected in significant ways with the reordering of American urbanism. The booming suburban periphery, where traditional authorities succumbed to prosperity and mass culture, and the decaying inner city, where poor, undereducated black and Hispanic in-migrants came into violent contact with the contracting white-ethnic neighborhood order, served as the two principal terrains in which the drama of delinquency was enacted.

If delinquency was seen to be dispersed across the American landscape, it was also seen in important ways to proceed from the inner city. Middle-class teenagers in suburbs and small towns seemed to be adopting habits of mind and behavior associated with the urban lower classes. In addition, the inner city was home to the powerfully compelling figure of the violent teen gang. Portrayed in uniform—club jackets, zoot suits, or the more understated "conservative" styles—and given to acts of almost inexplicable cruelty and destructiveness, displaying no allegiance to family or country, opposed to school and other forms of socialization, the gang served as the principal icon of a separate juvenile order with intractably alien systems of value and belief. By examining the gang's behavior and motivations—quintessentially by investigating the violence of the gang's inner life as expressed in heinous criminal offenses perpetrated in public spaces—one could begin to understand the transformed urban world in which delinquency "grew" (as communism was supposed to "grow") like a weed, cancer, or contagion. The redevelopment-minded business leaders and planners of the Greater Philadelphia Movement, for instance, followed this logic in concluding that part of their duty in planning the future of downtown

Philadelphia involved providing funds for journalist Roul Tunley to visit several American cities, as well as Moscow, Bangkok, Tokyo, Tel Aviv, and Cairo, to prepare a report on delinquency and methods of controlling it (published later, in 1962, as Kids, Crime and Chaos ).

On the one hand, the delinquency panic can be seen as a response to a complex of metaphorical associations carried by the delinquent, including associations with urban change, rather than as a response to a genuine crime wave. In A Cycle of Outrage, James Gilbert calls the apparent rise in juvenile crime "an arithmetic observation" that "inspired geometric fears."^[29] There had been gangs, juvenile delinquents, and criminal violence in American inner cities before the 1950s, and it is not clear that the cultural prominence during the 1950s of the problem of delinquency was caused by an actual increase in serious crime. Gilbert points out that what looked like a juvenile crime wave might in fact have been a product of changes in the enforcement and definition of crime, combined with the mass entry of Americans below the age of consent into a set of market relations and cultural styles that make up "youth culture." The statistical increase in crime during the 1950s can be traced in part to a surge in status crimes, which involve young people behaving in ways traditionally reserved for adults (drinking, having sex, staying out late), rather than to a surge in violent crimes.^[30]

On the other hand, it may be that the proliferation of zip gun shootings, knifings, rumbles, and gang rapes that formed the backbone of delinquency as represented in movies, comic books, and newspaper accounts did actually refer to an increase in certain forms of urban violence. What matters here is that compressed into the subtext of these representations of violence were responses to social and cultural change on the grand scale—not only the flowering of mass culture and the rise of youth culture but also the processes of suburbanization, ghettoization, and ethnic succession that marked the decline of the industrial neighborhood order and the formation of new inner-city orders. Gangs of teenagers committing acts of violence in the streets presented a social problem, but the stock figures of such violence offered as well a repertoire of forms with which to consider and represent—among other complex, often indistinct processes—the transformation of the urban social landscape and the urbanisms it housed.

The language of the delinquency panic therefore had important resonances for urbanists. For instance, in The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), a profoundly influential attack on the conventional wisdoms of city planners and redevelopers, Jane Jacobs uses "the barbaric concept of Turf" to describe a destructive ethos of territorial aggressiveness associated with "hoodlum gangs" but shared by "developers of the rebuilt city"—progrowth coalitions. That is, she infuses "turf," one of the slang keywords of the delinquency literature, not only with the violent territoriality of the gang but also with the

territoriality of redevelopment. She concludes that "wherever the rebuilt city rises the barbaric concept of Turf must follow, because the rebuilt city has junked a basic function of the city street and with it, necessarily, the freedom of the city."^[31] For Jacobs, who was one of Robert Moses's most prominent antagonists, the city's vital functions (circulation of people, goods, capital) and defining qualities (density, flow between private and public spaces) depend on citizens' confidence in the safety of their streets. Violent juvenile delinquents destroy citizens' sense of freedom of movement in the street, but the delinquents' brand of street violence only expresses in visceral form a more powerful territorial logic. City planners, developers, and government officials destroy the intricately developed, life-giving tissue of urbanism by limiting "the freedom of the city" on the grand scale with housing projects, highways, and the bulldozing of neighborhoods.

Jacobs's use of violence in the street as a metaphor of the principles underlying urban transformation also offers a way to bridge the delinquency panic and the urban crisis. In the course of making her attack on the kind of city planning that was reshaping Chicago's Milwaukee Avenue corridor, Philadelphia's South Street and Center City, and old New York, Jacobs identifies what she calls "the drama of civilization versus barbarism in cities" as the most important story in which to read the content of urban crisis. Jacobs did not yet, in 1961, feel obliged to organize that content under the rubric of race. Writing in the late 1950s and 1960, Jacobs casts the physical threat on the street as a matter of "delinquency and crime," downplaying the role of racial and class differences in the way citizens formulate their city-killing sense of fear. Jacobs's notion of "barbarism" straddles the delinquency panic of the 1950s and the urban crisis of the 1960s, during which the racial ghetto became the conventional site of barbarous violence. Jacobs may, in fact, have believed that differences in race and class did not matter in the calculus of urban fear—she did not find it "illuminating to tag minority groups, or the poor, or the outcast with responsibility for city danger"—but others did find such explanatory categories illuminating. Jacobs herself points out that when we speak of one's sense of relative safety, believing makes it so: "Today barbarism has taken over many city streets, or people fear it has, which comes to much the same thing in the end."^[32] She was soon in the distinct minority in separating the "drama of civilization versus barbarism in the cities" from the ghetto-centered drama of racial succession and conflict.

"It all began in about 1963," writes James Q. Wilson in Thinking About Crime: "That was the year, to overdramatize a bit, that a decade began to fall apart." Wilson is describing an increase in crime rates, one "sign of social malaise," that helped to "shatter" the "mood of contentment and confidence in which the decade began."^[33] In more measured tones, Stuart Scheingold's The Politics of Law and Order offers a similar periodization: "Beginning in the mid-

1960s, crime, especially street crime, became a political issue of considerable importance at both the local and the national levels."^[34] Street crime became, as well, perhaps the most important source of compelling images in which to read and consider the meanings of the divided metropolis. Glossing the Kerner Commission, Wilson explains, "we were becoming two societies—one affluent and worried, the other pathological and predatory." For Wilson, whose addition of "predatory" plays up the fear of the ghetto that the Kerner Commission played down by emphasizing white racism, the latter of these two societies was, in essence, identical with the black inner city.^[35]

"Pathological and predatory" might also describe Americans' growing sense of themselves as a people in the 1960s. In the second half of the decade, especially, American culture became particularly obsessed with the idea of Americans' own exceptional, definitive, and racially inflected violence—not just as expressed in street crime, police brutality, and race rioting but also as expressed in the high-tech savagery of the Vietnam War, the assassination of political figures (John and Robert Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King), and a great deal of violent talk (and, occasionally, even violent behavior) on college campuses. President Johnson felt obliged to appoint a National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence to expand the Kerner Commission's investigation of urban riots into an effort to explain the larger problem of American violence, and the many studies overseen by the "Violence Commission" constituted one of the most comprehensive of the period's many efforts to read the meanings and provenance of Americans' exceptional barbarism.^[36] Johnson's appointment of the Violence Commission is one sign of a general recognition evident during the 1960s, registered across the political spectrum and in the highest reaches of government, of a need to grapple interpretively with violence (or to be seen doing so as a sign of responsiveness to national trauma). The problem of violence in the streets, giving dramatic expression to the many factors underlying the urban crisis, played a central part in the period's obsessive attention to American social violence.

Violence in the streets also played a crucial role in the formulation of urban crisis. In addition to expressing a general sense of violently sudden change in the inner cities, violence in the streets provided occasions to consider in particular the complex of racial successions and physical reconfigurations that shaped the postwar inner city's social landscape. Rioting and street crime, apparently boiling out from a permanent and increasingly immiserated second ghetto, served as the most visible sign of conflict and social cleavage attendant upon urban transformation. The round of ghetto riots that catalyzed the notion of urban crisis began in 1963; there was rioting in Harlem, among other places, in 1964; larger riots followed in Los Angeles, Detroit, Newark, Chicago, echoed by a variety of disorders in smaller and usually more placid cities, until the end of the decade. In the mid-1960s, also, a significant annual increase in

the urban crime rate, measured in the FBI's Uniform Crime Reports (UCR), began to figure prominently in the urban conversation as a "crime wave" centering on the ghetto. Newsweek explained in August 1965 that, according to the UCR, "every category of crime was on the increase" and that since 1958 "serious crime has spiraled upward at a rate of five times that of the population."^[37] The inner city appeared to be a more violent place than it had been in the past.

As in the case of the delinquency crisis of the 1950s, violent crime surged so dramatically into a leading place in public discourse in the 1960s that some observers questioned the basis of anxiety in hard facts. Even Newsweek's dramatic cover story in August 1965, which replicated and exploited the talk of a "rising tide" of "crime in the streets," paused to question the relation between violence in the city of fact and in the city of feeling ("How true is the impression?"), quoting dissenting experts who wanted to know how the statistical increases had been affected by changes in the reporting rather than the incidence of crime.^[38] But the UCR indexes of assault, robbery, rape, murder, and other face-to-face crime did rise alarmingly, especially in cities. Various experts and lay commentators traced the increase to a statistical bulge in the crimeprone population of young men in general and especially to the shaping influence on young black men of problems that were supposedly native to the second ghetto: the spread of heroin addiction, the increasing dissonance between general prosperity and the permanence of the ghetto, "the culture of poverty," bad schools, and a collapse of parental authority often discussed as the problem of "the Negro family." The same explanations were available to account for urban rioters, whose behavior became a national trauma endlessly rehearsed on television. Street crime and rioting, and the "wave" of both that suffused the news media during the urban crisis, did accelerate the dispersal of the middle class and capital to the suburbs, but one ought to bear in mind that such violence did not for the most part spill out of ghettos into the rest of the metropolis. Most of the damage and suffering took place in the ghettos themselves, largely involving black citizens and the police officers paid by society to contain the shocks of ghetto life. In certain ways, the inner city was more unsafe in the 1960s than it had been before (especially if one lived in the ghetto), but an increasingly suburbanized nation reacted as if the entire inner city had become a free-fire zone. Increases in certain highly charged and representable kinds of violence in the ghetto were received as a general increase in violence that was a fundamental component of American urbanism.^[39]

Whatever the relation between actual and perceived increases in urban violence, it is clear that in the early 1960s violent crime and the fear of it rose to the status of a defining urban problem, flowing as such into the racial logic of urban crisis. The second ghetto was widely regarded as the source of violent disorders—or, one might say, as a place in which to measure the traumatic emergence of new urban orders—that spread fear throughout the metropolis.

The conceptual condensations that made up the Negro-ghetto-violence equation, implicit in the subtexts of the word "ghetto" as it came to be used during the urban crisis, were in 1965 just ascending to received status, to be underscored in the next three years by the reports of the President's Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice, the Kerner Commission, and the Violence Commission. Like so many other previously independent sources of urban concern, crime and juvenile delinquency and other ways to consider the problem of violence in the streets found places within the organizing racial logic of the urban crisis.

Postwar Harlem was, of course, a logical place to look for meaningful violence during both the delinquency panic and the urban crisis. Fredric Wertham, perhaps the most important analyst of juvenile delinquency in the 1950s, did his research on the effects of mass culture on socialization at the Lafargue Clinic. He found that black and Hispanic children, who were more likely than whites to be poor and poorly educated, were particularly susceptible to the dehumanizing effects of comic-book reading. The peculiar cruelty of delinquents' violent behavior, and their insufficient remorse, was the centerpiece of Wertham's critique of mass culture as a root cause of delinquency. Like Wertham, Kenneth Clark conducted his profoundly influential research on "youth in the ghetto" in Harlem. The genesis of Clark's Dark Ghetto shows how during the urban crisis the problem of race subsumed delinquency. As Clark describes it, Dark Ghetto grew "directly from the two years which the author spent as chief project consultant and chairman of the board of directors of the planning stage of the Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited" (HARYOU), a group funded by the City of New York and, more important, by the President's Committee on Juvenile Delinquency. Clark's original report, Youth in the Ghetto, described "the conditions of youth in Harlem as background for a comprehensive program for these young people," but he drastically condensed and revised Youth in the Ghetto in preparing Dark Ghetto as "a book for the general public . . . broader and deeper in scope and purpose." Thus, while the original HARYOU report "emphasized the plight of youth in Harlem, the present book concentrates on the problems of ghetto communities everywhere and with all the inhabitants of the ghettos, not with youth alone."^[40] Youth flowed into race, delinquency flowed into the ghetto-centered urban crisis, urban intellectuals continued to model the relation between criminal violence and urban change and all these movements were plotted on the ground of postwar Harlem.

New York City in Crisis

Having established a series of historical frames-the emergence of postindustrial New York, the centrality of Harlem in discussions of urbanism in transition, the continuing importance of criminal violence in representing these

changes—I want to suggest how such matters found their way into cultural circulation. Complex urban change is in some ways hard to see (e.g., globalization of markets) and in other ways impossible to miss (e.g., police shooting at fleeing looters on television), and signs of it circulate in the coded form of compressed, formulaic, even ritual representations. To recover some of the texture of those signs and formulas, I will consider how a reader of the New York Herald-Tribune would have experienced them in 1965. Before turning in following chapters to the writing of Warren Miller and Claude Brown, which develops at book length the literary possibilities afforded by postwar urbanism in transition, let us establish one more frame for that inquiry by reading the daily newspaper.

On 25 January 1965, the Herald-Tribune began publishing a series of investigative stories collectively entitled "New York City in Crisis." The series, developed over several weeks and in dozens of stories flagged with a somber image of the New York skyline and harbor in shadow, painted a portrait of a city too weakly governed to survive the massive postwar transformations visible in every aspect of its life. Proceeding from a pair of assumptions typical of New Yorkers' examinations of their city—"New York is the greatest city in the world . . . and everything is wrong with it"—the Herald-Tribune series emphasized the damage done to New York by suburbanization, the decline of manufacturing, rising crime, intractable poverty, and the failures of urban renewal. Jane Jacobs and Kenneth Clark, urban intellectuals who rose to prominence through their treatment of these matters, offered pithy quotations that frame an introductory outline of the premises and agenda of the "New York City in Crisis" series in the 25 January issue. Jacobs, the critic of urban renewal and city planning, warns of popular discontent: "The people are being utterly disregarded." Clark, the expert on ghetto pathologies and youth, warns of impending catastrophe: "Time is running out for this city."^[41]

The investigation was, among other things, a political hatchet job. Relentlessly attacking Mayor Wagner, a Democrat, the liberal Republican Herald Tribune respectfully turned whenever possible to the opinions of Manhattan's liberal Republican congressman John Lindsay, who was later to become the paper's chosen candidate and, eventually, Wagner's successor in Gracie Mansion. Above Jacobs's and Clark's properly apocalyptic sentiments in the 25 January issue were juxtaposed two more framing quotations: a defensive sounding plea from Wagner ("I'm willing to listen to anybody") and a more dynamic line from Lindsay ("New York has lost its will power"). Barry Gottehrer, who headed the "New York City in Crisis" investigative team, later joined Lindsay's campaign staff and then became one of Mayor Lindsay's most important advisers, especially during periods of tension and upheaval in New York's ghettos.^[42] Gottehrer's Herald-Tribune series lost few chances to play up Lindsay as a reformist alternative to business as usual and to present Wagner's

administration as an obsolescent, corrupt pack of clubhouse regulars unequipped to face a developing urban crisis.

"New York City in Crisis," then, offers a narrative arguing for the decline of the prewar inner city and its orders—a manufacturing-based economy, a social landscape dominated by white-ethnic urban villages, and the regular Democratic coalition rooted in the fraying structure of the industrial neighborhood order. That narrative, intertwining with the rise to cultural prominence of the increasingly city-centered "Negro problem," helped the reporters and editors of the Herald-Tribune, as well as its readers (some of whom recorded their responses in letters to the editor), to define a historical moment.

Reading the Herald-Tribune as the investigation develops through January and February of 1965, one has the sense of passing in a rush through the postwar period. The inaugural article of the series squeezed continuing coverage of Winston Churchill's recent death to the margins of page I. His prominence as a hero of the Cold War notwithstanding, Churchill's name and the eulogies accorded him invoke associations with World War II and with FDR (and thus the Great Depression and New Deal) that seem to recede swiftly into the historical background as the War on Poverty and the Vietnam War rise up in the foreground. Throughout early 1965, "New York City in Crisis" shared the front page with news of America's deepening involvement in Vietnam—stories characterized by a Cold War blend of measured containment, high-tech annihilation, and ambiguous commitment that seems worlds apart from the language of the Good War.^[43] Next to the daily bulletins from the battle fronts of Vietnam and the inner cities, Churchill's war and FDR's America—the war in which even Frankie Machine fought, the prewar urban America in which Nelson Algren, Gwendolyn Brooks, Jack Dunphy, and William Gardner Smith grew up—become ancient history. By late February, the "New York City in Crisis" articles were also sharing the front page with another death: that of Malcolm X, who was as much a "political figure" as Churchill but in a particularly 1960s sense of the term. Malcolm X, an ex-delinquent turned urban intellectual whose public persona was grounded in the terrain of the second ghetto, had risen to prominence as the notion of urban crisis became a point of confluence for discussions of postwar urban change and racial conflict.

The Herald-Tribune suggests that confluence by juxtaposing Malcolm X's sensational death in Harlem with information on structural changes in urbanism. On 24 February 1965, page 1 of the Herald-Tribune featured a follow-up story on the assassination of Malcolm X, exploring the meaning of his political and cultural influence. A discussion of various theories about the motives of Malcolm X's killers leads to a consideration of black separatism or nationalism as responses to the ghettoization of blacks—that is, to their confinement in the most deteriorated, blighted parts of the city, where economic opportunity is least accessible and most rapidly diminished by deindustrialization. Economic

opportunity in decline was the subject of another story on page 1 that day, this one under the "New York City in Crisis" graphic. Under the headline "For N.Y., Another Grim Report," Barry Gottehrer detailed the findings of a "long-awaited" consultant's "study of the city's extreme industrial and manufacturing problems." The consultant's report outlines a set of economic conditions structuring the inner city and the urban crisis, as declines in manufacturing lead to erosion of the city's tax base and "increasing deterioration and blight."^[44] The logic of urban crisis incorporated both economic change and racial conflict and offered ways to read them together.

The stories resonate with one another, but a number-laden consultant's report did not carry the popular representational charge found in the bloody martyrdom of a controversial public figure. The consultant's report was dutifully noted and logged, but one can see the passion over Malcolm X in the tension between eulogies in the Herald-Tribune of 24 February: on the one hand, American and African political leaders call him a statesman, "the American Lumumba"; on the other hand, he is identified as a member of "the Negro fringe" whose death could lead to what columnist Jimmy Breslin calls "a tong war" among Black Muslims or to more generalized rioting in "potential trouble spots across the nation."^[45] Discrete, violent events like murder and riots lend themselves readily to American representational habits, traditions shared by those texts labeled "news" and those labeled "literature." When gunfire in Harlem took center stage, the complex of urban transformations described in the consultant's report on manufacturing became deep background to the story of Malcolm X's life and death. Complex change that over time had produced the second ghetto became terrifically compressed in the figure of Malcolm X, a character infused with the content of crisis. Warren Miller had argued, in his review of the delinquent memoir Out of the Burning a few years before, that "there is a need for stories like this . . . that present us with a life rather than with statistics (which are hard to read and easy to ignore)," but it is hard to recover the consultant's analysis in any depth in the analysis of a murder.^[46]

Malcolm X's violent death was one more episode confirming the widely received understanding of Harlem as a dangerous place full to bursting with well-armed and violently disaffected young black men. That death, and the perception that Malcolm X was responsible for fomenting racial violence, further elaborated the constantly repeated motif of street violence recurring in "New York City in Crisis." There had been a riot in Harlem in 1964, which Gottehrer's team interpreted as a response to worsening social conditions: "an already troubled Negro population learned last summer that City Hall could be made to listen."^[47] Street crime was also on the rise in Harlem as unemployed young men, casting around for ways to make money, hit upon the drug trade and muggings. (One of them, profiled by Gottehrer, had not worked since 1961, except "as an extra in the movie 'The Cool World' and as a porter at CCNY" for two

months.)^[48] Reporters, police experts, and other commentators worried that a tide of drug— and poverty-driven muggings was spilling out from the ghetto to change the character of urbanism throughout the metropolis. Several "New York City in Crisis" stories, and the letters to the editor they elicited, described a fear of leaving one's home after dark, especially in once-safe neighborhoods, as a novel and salient feature of urbanism in the 1960s.^[49] The Herald-Tribune offered a narrative of declining civility in which the quantity of violence increased and the spaces and times of citizens' vulnerability to violence expanded: "Today it is no longer only the slum streets and the darkened parks that create this fear. Increasingly, as major crimes of violence continue to rise, New Yorkers have become afraid everywhere in the city—in their streets, in their parks, in their subways, in their own homes, at night and during the day."^[50]

The Herald-Tribune printed a number of letters from readers who also understood this increase in fear of violent crime as significant and central to contemporary urbanism. The letters offered visions of "a city besieged" and wished for a return to civility in which women could "walk after dark without fear or molestation." One respondent, having moved to Valley Stream, Long Island, explained that his family had for many years "lived reasonably content in a mixed neighborhood on the edge of the Negro ghetto," accepting as normal an escalating fear of assault, robbery, and burglary. Finally, the "city fathers" had gone too far in declaring that "our children must attend school with slum dwellers"—even though "middle-class Negroes" had "long since fled our neighborhood" to protect their own children from "such a fate"—and the writer had joined the flow of middle-class whites moving from inner city to suburbs. "We have left New York City," the writer concluded. Sketching a generic narrative of what many called "white flight," he explained that the city had lost "one industrious, law-abiding, taxpaying family" as a result of its failure to control pathological ghetto types—"the drug addict, the thief, the prostitute, the sponger, the degenerate"—and the criminal threat they posed to the well-being and property of other urbanites.^[51]

Reported violent crime had, in fact, increased substantially during the late 1950s and early 1960s, as a "New York City in Crisis" article reported under the headline "New Figures on Crime: Up, Up, Up," but fear of violence also carried a powerful symbolic charge that extended far beyond a simple response to increases in some criminal activities.^[52] Powerfully evocative figures of violence offered ways to consider and respond to the emergence of a new set of urban orders. Riots, muggings, assassinations, and experts' talk of crisis trailed deep roots in processes like long-term economic and demographic change, corporate and governmental decision making, subtle but comprehensive reconfigurations of the city's social landscape. The Herald-Tribune's coverage of Malcolm X's violent death and the recurring language of urban violence and fear that runs through the "New York City in Crisis" series show how the motif of violent

crime served as a way to imagine the traumatic emergence of the second ghetto and other shocks presented by the advent of postindustrial urbanism.

"New York City in Crisis" is a period piece. Not only a portrait of one American metropolis in 1965, caught in motion, it is also an example of the logic and language of urban crisis, which was just then acquiring a canonical status it still enjoys. "New York City in Crisis" thus helps to create a frame of reference for the literature of urban crisis. A regular reader of the Herald-Tribune, having followed the series into the spring of 1965, would have a background in mind against which to read the excerpts of Manchild in the Promised Land the paper ran in July of that year. This hypothetical regular reader would, in particular, be encouraged by "New York City in Crisis" to desire entry into the subjective experience of a leading character in the urban drama, the violent black man represented not only by Brown but also by the delinquents and some Harlem secessionists in Warren Miller's novels. The Herald-Tribune's investigation spun out a bewildering complex of analytical lines in describing the extent of urban crisis, but the increase in criminal violence-which, like the growth of the inner city's black population, was just one aspect of urban change-enabled a powerful simplifying strategy by which the complexity could be condensed and made accessible. Thus, Gottehrer's investigative team could assert that "of the many problems disrupting the present and threatening the future of this city, none is more critical than this growing concern and fear over the increase of fear and violence in the streets, the subways, the elevators and the parks of New York."^[53]

Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1952), a novel built around a series of violent acts and culminating in a Harlem riot, considers the representational potentialities and limits of street violence in its opening episode. The Invisible Man, on a nighttime excursion from his cellar retreat just outside the border of Harlem ("on the edge of the Negro ghetto," as the letter by the Herald-Tribune's reader from Long Island would put it), runs afoul of a white man and ends up administering a savage beating to him. "The next day," the Invisible Man tells us, "I saw his picture in the Daily News, beneath a caption stating that he had been 'mugged.'"^[54]

In one sense, that brief news item makes the Invisible Man visible, or at least legible, by inserting him into a generic event. Although it is his victim who appears in the photograph, the Invisible Man assumes representable form as a stock figure, the mugger emerging from the ghetto to make the city's streets unsafe for pedestrians. In another sense, though, the newspaper story about a mugging renders the Invisible Man invisible once more by condensing to the point of illegibility a much larger story, his tour of midcentury America. His

participation in the black migration from the agrarian South to the Northern inner cities; his disastrous entry into the racially divided workplace; his survey of political responses to the American racial order, ranging from the assimilationism of his Southern college to the radical separatism of Ras the Exhorter; his cultural cartography, surveying the efforts of black Americans to "enter history" in their dress, music, and speech—all these encounters with larger movements and processes that shape the Invisible Man's experience, his inner life, and the postwar inner city move beneath the surface of the Daily News story. So far beneath the surface do these contents move, however, that the generic story of a mugging cannot hope to bring them to light. They become almost invisible to a reader of the Daily News at the same time as the Invisible Man becomes almost visible as a mugger.

Assaulting the white man in the novel's first episode, three paragraphs into the prologue, the Invisible Man inaugurates his encyclopedic narrative with an act of violence. He also makes possible yet another story in the paper about a mugging near the second ghetto, a fragmentary example of the language of fear and violence used to articulate the arrival of postwar urbanism. A growing anxiety about violence in the street joins the Invisible Man's urban world in transition of the 1940s and 1950s to the urban world in crisis of the 1960s. The dutiful reader of the Daily News would, in the early 1950s when the novel was published, have generically assumed that the mugger was one of Ellison's uprooted, zoot-suited, delinquent "transitional boys" who inherited the postwar inner city to which their parents migrated. That same reader in the mid-1960s would assume the mugger was driven by a different set of stock motivations identified by the Herald-Tribune's letter writer from Long Island—drug addiction, moral disorientation produced by ghetto pathologies and permissive governmental response to them, racial antipathy edged with political radicalism. This hypothetical reader would be responding to a portrait of postindustrial urbanism as it was gleaned from the daily papers—in bits and pieces, inflected by received wisdoms and ideological nuances, its meanings simultaneously articulated and garbled by generic formula.

Still, the Invisible Man's prodigious story and the brief, almost opaque item in the paper contain one another—just as the Invisible Man and the mugger contain one another. Although the Invisible Man protests that he is "a man of substance" and not "one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms," in his role as mugger he flows easily into a representational niche made available by institutions of culture—in this case the newspapers—and thus marks with violence his passage through the inner city and into history.^[55] The postwar generation of "transitional boys" like Duke Custis and Claude Brown likewise occupied a representational niche in violent, formulaic stories infused with the content of urban crisis.