NCJ Number
190453
Journal
Women & Criminal Justice Volume: 12 Issue: 4 Dated: 2001 Pages: 1-20
Date Published
2001
Length
20 pages
Annotation
This article compares Ann Petry's insights as a journalist and fiction writer ("In Darkness and Confusion") in portraying the frustrations and grievances of the residents of New York City regarding the police, city officials, and the segregated military with those of historians and sociologists who have studied the 1943 Harlem Riot and the other more destructive and deadly riots from the 1960's on.
Abstract
The real Harlem Riot of 1943 lasted for about 12 hours, cost six lives, and destroyed nearly 2 million dollars worth of property. Petry's story of the riot allows the reader to view the riot and the events leading up to it in an intensive, personal manner through William and Pink Jones. Unlike Mayor La Guardia, Petry saw the rioters as ordinary people pushed to their limits by long-term adversity and the wartime emergency. Having risen from the intense racism and economic deprivation of Southern sharecropping, the Jones family felt itself, or at least its most valued member, on the threshold of attaining the American dream of achievement and greater economic stability, if not comfort. The Jones family, seen as relatively strong and stable at the outset of the novella, weakens and then breaks under the weight of hardships, discrimination, violence, chance, and at least to some extent, personal choice. Although Petry describes much of pre-riot Harlem accurately, she does change the circumstances of the precipitating incident. In the actual riot, a police officer assigned to watch a hotel suspected of being a center of prostitution intervened in an argument between the desk clerk and a female patron. A Black soldier bringing his mother to the same hotel defended the patron. In the struggle between the soldier and the police officer, the officer's gun fired, wounding the soldier. When word of the incident spread, it was rumored that the soldier had been protecting his own mother and had died in the attempt. Petry captured the flavor of the real incident without copying it. Petry's novella, a valuable contribution to the understanding of riots, should not be neglected. 65 references