Policing Black Harlem and Black Marxism: Race, Radicalism, and State Power in Harlem, 1919-1943

This thesis examines the suppression of Black radicalism in Harlem between 1919 and 1943, focusing on the jurisdictional shift in anticommunist policing from local authorities to the federal government. While existing scholarship often focuses on street-level police brutality or federal counterintelligence separately, this study argues that these two levels of policing should be understood in tandem with each other. The interwar period witnessed a critical transfer of power from a local monopoly held by the NYPD's "Red Squad" (1924–1936) to a federal monopoly exercised by J. Edgar Hoover's FBI after 1936 with the NYPD in a subordinate position. This transformation fundamentally altered the stakes of political dissent. The NYPD's brutal, yet ultimately ineffective, tactics of nightsticks and disorderly conduct arrests gave way to federal indictments for conspiracy and sedition, carrying the threat of long-term imprisonment. By analyzing the state's response to Black Marxism from both the federal and local vantage points—from the first Red Scare against Black radicalism after World War I to the fallout from the Harlem Riot of 1935 and the eventual prosecution of leaders like Benjamin J. Davis Jr. in the 1940s—this thesis reveals how the expansion of the national security state and a change in jurisdiction from local to federal anticommunism during the New Deal era sealed the fate of the Black Old Left.