Draft:1963-1965 New York City rent strikes: Difference between revisions

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<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Jackson |first=Mandi Isaacs |date=2006 |title=Harlem’s Rent Strike and Rat War: Representation, Housing Access and Tenant Resistance in New York, 1958-1964 |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/40604898 |journal=American Studies |volume=47 |issue=1 |pages=53–79 |issn=0026-3079}}</ref>

<ref name=”:5″>{{Cite book |last=Lipsky |first=Michael |url=http://archive.org/details/protestincitypol0000lips |title=Protest in city politics : rent strikes, housing, and the power of the poor |date=1970 |publisher=Chicago : Rand McNally |others=Internet Archive}}</ref>{{Infobox civil conflict

| partof = [[Civil Rights Movement]]

| image = Crosses on our windows.jpg

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Jesse Gray would play a big role in the publicity of the rent strikes, often with a flair for the dramatic and stunts to keep it in the news, such as when he called the Red Cross to declare Lower Harlem a disaster area, needing coal and blankets for those without heat. On December 30, 1963 five tenants of the Harlem rent strike would walk into the Manhattan Civil Court and each pulled out a large dead rat, which received wide media coverage.<ref name=”:3″ />{{Reference page|location=Chapter 4}}

<ref name=”:5″ />{{Reference page|pages=53-80}}

<ref name=”:1″ />{{Reference page|pages=172-187}}

^[1]^[2]^[3]^[4]

^[5]

^[6]^: 53–80

Title I and ‘slum clearance’

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The first major attempts at broad Slum clearance initiatives in New York City would begin tentatively in the mid to late 1930s, with the passage of the 1937 Housing act and the New York state 1938 slum-clearance amendment, Robert Moses attempted to wrestle control of funds from the bill from Mayor La Guardia, but inevitably was blocked.^[1]^{: Chapter 2}

This would become the broad slum-clearance initiatives of the late 1940s to 50s, under the Housing Act of 1949’s Title I. The New York State 1943 Hampton-Mitchell bill would also legally open up the publicly funding of private housing developments, which author Martha Biondi observed constituted “an unprecedented transfer of state resources to a private entity with few strings attached.”^[1]^{: Chapter 2}

These actions of apartment razing would build into a more developed NYC tenant movement, in and outside of tenant union actions and rent strike. This included the burgeoning civil rights movement, protesting against the razing of integrated communities and then replacing them with segregated housing developments. Labor groups and political associations like the American Labor Party (ALP) also got involved. The tenants themselves also formed their own independent groups. Both those in the face of the razing of their homes, and in cases where that failed & the project was built, the new tenants formed anti-discrimination groups to circumvent & protest racial covenants and the racial segregation of the projects.^[1]^{: Chapter 2}

This would build into the New York State Committee Against Discrimination in Housing (NYSCDH) composed of a coalition of these groups.Which would lead to the passage of the Wicks-Austin Bull of 1950, which outlawed discrimination in future publicly subsidized housing.^[1]^{: Chapter 2} The Brown-Issac Law passed in 1958 would also outlaw racial discrimination in all tax-subsidized housing in NY, however it had no enforcement mechanism.^[1]^{: Chapter 2}^[7]

The reality however was that many of the places razed for ‘slum clearance’ were not by any traditional measure what could be considered a slum. Instead they were often racially integrated neighborhoods that while containing dense older housing, which Robert Moses, the chief architect of Title I funds in NYC, considered anathema to the ‘good living’ of the growing view of suburban life as the ideal. Many of the condemned area structure were in good condition and well maintained. As one resident, Jim Torain who lived previously in the Lower East side stated, “My neighborhood was condemned as a slum… and I was moved to a ghetto.”^[1]^{: Chapter 3; Urban VIllagers and Advocates}

The clearance also led to a growing low-income housing shortage, as the razed neighborhoods were replace with middle-income public-private housing.^[1]

Two core constituencies that would become major players in the housing movement against apartment razing would be veterans of the Old Left, such as Jesse Gray, and reformist liberals.^[1]^{: Chapter 3} Increasingly it would be the burgeoning civil rights movement advocates which would take up the cause-celebre of housing rights, being more prepared to then the the direct tenant associations or labor unions of the time were.^[1]^{: Chapter 2}

Open Letter to Mayor Wagner, Published by Metropolitan Council on Housing. 1959

One group formed in the crisis of the housing shortage would be the Metropolitan Council on Housing in 1959, who would actively rally against the razing done by the New City Administration.^[1]^{: Chapter 3}

Early attempts of Jesse Gray and the Civil Rights Movement

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Jesse Gray, a tenant organizer present in the movement since the early 1950s before he became the face of the 1963-65 rent strikes, had made several previous largely unsuccessful attempts to organize Harlem tenants towards a mass rent strike against conditions. A member of the American Labor Party, and leader of the Harlem Tenants Council, he had stage a protest against the eviction a disabled women in a wheelchair in 1954.^[8]

Later in 1959 led the organizing of housewives in a six-story apartment block nearby 116th street, through collaboration with the Stephen Foster Houses, in 1959. Where they picked four tenements,and handed out pamphlets of why they were “on strike” against rat infestation.^[8] The 1959 rent strike was successful in gaining it’s immediate demands, bringing improved conditions in the eight tenements, although it did not grow into a broader movement.^[1]^{: Chapter 4}

This pattern of work’s limited effectiveness would change in 1963, with the changing focus of the Civil Rights Movement which played the key role that shifted it from a movement of isolated disruption to a wave that would briefly rock the city. Harlem’s Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) would form a housing clinic in Harlem in December of 1962, and by mid-1963 started to help organize tenant unions, ready to confront landlords with pickets and rent strikes. In June 1963, the National CORE convention endorsed rent strikes against slum owners.^[8]

In July of 1963, the Rent and Rehabilitation Administration (RRA) would grant rent reductions of 33-50% to CORE organized tenants of the Lower East Side, after health violations were reported.^[9]^[1]^{: Chapter 4}

The fight over the potential state expiration of rent control in 1961 further fueled the movement. The actions of different tenant advocate groups ended in a law being passed by the state legislature, that gave rent control regulation control over to the city in 1962.^[1]^{: Chapter 4} After several attempts by CORE, the HTL, and other advocacy groups to push for decisive against rat infestation by the court and the city, which the city responded to with largely inaction with some exceptions, organizers and tenants focused further on organizing a rent strike as the primary strategy.^[8]

In September of 1963, the first of the rent strikes began. Granville Cherry, a unaffiliated Central Harlem tenant convinced others in his building to do withhold rent alongside him. He had been previously working with the Northern Student Movement (NSM), who had been able to set up a office in Central Harlem after winning a foundation grant, had raised funds for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).^[1]^{: Chapter 4}

The NSM had since been developing northern projects on the idea that ordinary people should learn to take action on their own. One NSM Staffer, Danny Schelter recalled of Granville Cherry, “He was articulate, he was committed, he was a hard worker, he was willing to take initiative, and distribute leaflets and talk to people. And he was also giving us, people in the Northern Student Movement, a kind of legitimacy, somebody in the neighborhood.” From this strike, the movement would then expand.^[1]^{: Chapter 4}

^[3]^{: 135–172}

The rent strike in Harlem would begin in September of 1963, against the inhabitable conditions of the flats. The NYT would note strikers “believe that troubles arise directly from the opportunity for exploitation that a racial ghetto affords white owners.”^[10]^[1]^{: Chapter 4}

In response to the strike, the RRA would publicly announce it would reduce the strikers rents to $1 a month (equivalent to $10 in 2024), however this would be the last time the RRA would grant such reductions during the following rent strikes.^[1]^{: Chapter 4}

Danny Schelter of the NSM, would end up meeting Jesse Gray that year and then connected the leader of the nascent rent strike, Granville Cherry, to Jesse Gray to further coordinate towards a broader strike.^[1] Similar cross-pollination between new organizers and experienced one occurred across the city. In Brooklyn, the Parkway-Stuyvesant Council, which was formed in response to the ‘slum razing’ and housing discrimination within the new housing projects, would join with Brooklyn CORE to start organizing rent strikes in the borough.^[1]^{: Chapter 3 & 4}

As part of the protest against the slum housing conditions, in August 1963 CORE’s NYU chapter would collect a truck-load of trash from a tenement block in the Puerto Rican section of the Lower East Side and dump it on the City Hall Plaza. With a large rat figure on their vehicle.^[6]^[1]^{: Chapter 4} Of that block, by early November 110 of the 120 families would be on rent strike, paying it into a escrow account. Jesse Gray would claim three buildings on strike in mid-November, then fifty in early December.^[1]^{: Chapter 4}