Eric Moskowitz

<h1>When Hulan Jack won the Manhattan borough president’s race in 1953, newspapers across the country carried the news. It was the most powerful municipal office in the United States held by a black man — 10 years before Martin Luther King Jr.&amp;#x27;s March on Washington.</h1>

While most white news outlets ran the news as a brief item, the black press celebrated it as a watershed moment — an unquestionable sign of the African-American emergence on the political stage in the North, amid the rapid demographic change of the Great Migration and the first gains of the postwar civil rights movement.

Front pages across the country were effusive: “First in Big City History,” from The Baltimore Afro-American; “N.Y. Negro Wins Top Post,” in The Pittsburgh Courier; “It Happened in New York,” read The Philadelphia Tribune. And “Meet Hulan E. Jack, President of the ‘Capital of the World,'” exclaimed The Chicago Defender, calling him the “boss of Manhattan.”

It was a job that wielded serious clout at the time — not to mention a $25,000 salary (10 percent more than that of a United States congressman), a staff of some 1,300 and a voice in all major decisions in the city.

“He was a big shot,” said Charles B. Rangel, the 88-year-old former congressman from Harlem. Though Rangel, an uptown political fixture for more than 50 years, added that Jack “has a complex legacy.”

And that’s why Jack rarely gets mentioned today. While his election was a landmark, many of his higher achievements were eclipsed by the elections of subsequent black mayors and the waning power of the borough president’s office. In his lifetime, he was undone by remnants of old-line political machinery, a cynical version of identity politics, and the changing landscape of urban power — in addition to his own failures of judgment and the scandals that followed.

In 1953, New York City politics were in a flux. The Irish and Italian heavies of the Tammany Hall machine — who had run much of city politics for decades — still held considerable sway. At the same time, Tammany and the other halls of power in the city realized the black vote was ascendant. Between the 1920 and 1950 censuses, the black population of Manhattan went from 5 percent to 20 percent. And Jack found himself one of five candidates in a field of all black men.

Among his opponents were Elmer Carter, a Republican member of the state’s new Commission Against Discrimination, and Andronicus Jacobs, a longshoreman who had fought to secure equal pay and benefits for black dock workers and ran on the American Labor Party ticket.

Born in St. Lucia, Jack immigrated to the United States as a teenager in 1923. He started out sweeping floors in a box factory while taking night classes before going on to NYU. Along the way, he took an interest in politics, and began canvassing for the Democrats in Harlem.

As a dutiful Catholic and longtime party organizer, Jack was an apt choice as Tammany’s candidate by 1953. He also had a distinguished record as one of the first black lawmakers from Harlem elected to the state Assembly, starting in 1940. He voted along the Tammany line. But he also emerged as a consistent and cleareyed advocate for bills aimed at dismantling segregation and discrimination in housing, education and policing. In 1945, he helped pass a bill that made New York the first state to bar race and religious discrimination in employment.

Jack’s daily and long-term work in the borough office — whether turning vacant lots into playgrounds or supporting selective slum clearance instead of wholesale demolition — often focused on issues affecting working-class residents. He ultimately opposed Robert Moses’ ill-fated expressway across Lower Manhattan, which many now agree would have irretrievably altered the city. But he also helped facilitate Moses’ grand plan for Lincoln Center, insisting on a fairer timeline for relocating residents of the neighborhood.

He also kept a high profile amid national and international personalities: In photos from those years, he can be seen shoulder to shoulder with people like Moses, John F. Kennedy and Mayor Robert Wagner, and while in office he met with African leaders including the prime minister of Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah, and Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie. He became a symbol to the rest of the world that a black man could rise to such a station.

But the political guard was changing in Harlem, Jack’s home base. He would end up scorched in a failed attempt by Tammany to unseat the charismatic but politically unpredictable Rep. Adam Clayton Powell Jr., a beloved Harlem figure, after Powell endorsed Dwight D. Eisenhower for president in 1956. Though Jack smartly declined to run against Powell, he agreed to recruit and campaign for another black challenger, whom Powell proceeded to trounce, with the help of Harlem Democratic kingmaker J. Raymond Jones. Jack drew a hailstorm of brickbats and threats, harassed openly as an “Uncle Tom."

However, Harlem stood by Jack, at least initially, when prosecutors went after him on corruption charges in 1960 with particular tenacity, appealing a judge’s dismissal of the charges and taking the case to trial before a jury deadlocked. The state retried Jack successfully — for receiving roughly $5,000 in apartment renovations from a developer he had been friends with for years, who was also seeking city contracts — landing two misdemeanor convictions and a suspended sentence.

He remained active in the community and returned to Albany in a special election in 1968 — only to be indicted in 1970 and convicted two years later in a payola conspiracy involving the local grocery-workers union. Though he insisted he was ignorant of the scheme, he served three months in federal prison, emerging a broken man.

“Hulan Jack was really a relic of a time that had past,” said Hank Sheinkopf, a strategist involved in New York City politics since the 1960s. “He was in the crossfire of a political war. He was in the wrong place at the wrong time. And no one remembers him because there was no sex, there was no violence.”

Or as Rangel put it, more pointedly, “He got screwed. He went to Mass every morning, and Jesus left his ass holding the bag.”

Jack’s daughter, Julienne, now 64, remembers her father, once his political demise had begun, as dressing in a suit each morning, only to go sit alone in Central Park.

Though the offenses were too mundane and too hard to untangle to rate as anything more than a footnote in the overstuffed annals of political scandal, they were enough for Jack to be shunned in his day and forgotten soon afterward.

As his 1986 obituary in The New York Times put it, “Mr. Jack established a record as the untiring author of legislation for human rights and against racial discrimination of any type.”

But unlike many of his contemporaries and successors who have parks, schools and streets named after them — Adam Clayton Powell Jr., Percy Sutton, Shirley Chisholm, to name a few — there is no permanent record of Jack on the map of Manhattan.

Nor, as his daughter, Julienne Jack, points out, many other places. “He’s not in school curriculums,” she said. “He’s not in books, he’s been wiped from the political rolls.”

This article originally appeared in <a id="a7224e96-d01e-4cb4-830a-b70fe828db13" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/20/nyregion/the-complex-story-of-hulan-jack-the-first-black-boss-of-manhattan.html">The New York Times</a>.

The complex story of Hulan Jack, the first black 'Boss of Manhattan'

It was a job that wielded serious clout at the time — not to mention a $25,000 salary (10 percent more than that of a United States congressman), a staff of some 1,300 and a voice in all major decisions in the city.

<h1>Something is missing here, and it’s not just all the people, although their absence is unmistakable from a deserted Fifth Avenue, a vacant New York Stock Exchange and along the West Side Highway, which is empty of all but a few ominous figures in uniform.</h1>

In these New York Times photographs, taken during mandatory civil defense drills in the fervid early years of the Cold War, you can almost hear the absence of sound. All the rumbling, honking, chattering, clattering noise of everyday life has suddenly paused as the city goes into hiding — leaving the click-click-click of a traffic signal or the flutter of a pigeon at Penn Station audible now, in eerie relief.

But even in the photos that show New Yorkers scrambling for cover in the streets or peering up from the shelter of a subway station, the terror that they’re running from is missing, like King Kong erased from the frame. It’s the threat of atomic annihilation, nebulous and unseen.

It’s tempting to imagine this period of American history as one of perpetual anxiety, clenched fear and misplaced faith in the government, with people readily believing that ducking beneath a desk would save them from a hydrogen bomb.

But that may be a misreading of the era.

“These pictures are always interesting to me, because they always suggest a kind of unanimity or a cultural consensus around this fear, and when I was researching my book, I found deep ambivalence,” said Laura McEnaney, a professor at Whittier College and the author of “Civil Defense Begins at Home: Militarization Meets Everyday Life in the 1950s.”

Indeed, in November 1951 The Times noted “the apathy and indifference” of New Yorkers toward civil defense drills — although the streets were dutifully vacated two minutes after the blaring of air-raid sirens and remained so until the all-clear sounded eight minutes later.

By 1955, the federal government was coordinating drills nationwide, simulating a 61-city simultaneous Soviet strike — “designed to attack the lethargy that has clouded the Civil Defense problem both in Congress and the country at large,” The Times noted.

In trying to “historicize” all that “ambient emotion in the 1950s” — in other words, to meaningfully gauge how anxious, skeptical or indifferent Americans were at a particular moment in time — McEnaney mined government archives, news clippings and other sources that indicated federal officials were trying to figure out the same thing back then, coming at it like social scientists, military strategists and Madison Avenue admen all at once; even they couldn’t be sure.

“Their project was to convince Americans to be afraid enough that they would take action but not so afraid that they would be paralyzed,” McEnaney said. “They spent a great deal of time trying to puzzle over creating a national mood of receptiveness.” And although they might have been reluctant to admit failure, “they saw many signs that what they were trying to sell wasn’t being purchased by many Americans.”

Such drills and films fell under the auspices of a national civil defense arm — first the Federal Civil Defense Administration (1951-58), then a flurry of short-lived successors — although much of the on-the-ground preparations and funding came at the state and local levels.

And the frequency with which the D.C. agency had its name changed, got shuttled among Cabinet departments and came up short in congressional funding requests underscores civil defense’s status as “the unwanted stepchild of the national-security state,” said David F. Krugler, author of “This Is Only a Test: How Washington D.C. Prepared for Nuclear War.”

“It became important only during crises, and that’s why we see a parallel in our own time,” said Krugler, a University of Wisconsin-Platteville historian.

Those crisis moments included the surprise test of a nuclear weapon by the Soviets in August 1949, the start of the Korean War nearly a year later, and the failed Vienna summit between Kennedy and Khrushchev in 1961, after which the Soviets began erecting the Berlin Wall and constructing missile sites in Cuba, which triggered the Cuban Missile Crisis.

But even at the height of those tensions, only 5 percent of Americans reported to Gallup that they had built a basement shelter or made other home improvements with an eye to surviving nuclear war.

Americans eventually wearied of even the drills, with multiple scholars seeing 1959 as a tipping point. That year, a pair of young mothers who spontaneously refused to seek shelter — including 23-year-old Janice Smith, pictured in The Times with her two toddlers, “sick and tired of being forced underground like a desert rat” — helped expand the protest ranks from scattered old-left activists to throngs of clean-cut college students and young mothers.

The next year, protesters swarmed City Hall, singing “We Shall Overcome” and “We Shall Not Be Moved,” ignoring the sirens and the appeals of volunteer wardens and police. Among them was none other than Norman Mailer, who before the event said he would sign autographs and get arrested. It’s unclear whether he did the former, but he failed to do the latter.

“Politics is like sex,” Mailer said, according to “Bracing for Armageddon: Why Civil Defense Never Worked,” by the late Rutgers professor and peace activist Dee Garrison. “You have to go all the way.”

Losing control of the narrative, officials soon retired the drills.

This article originally appeared in <a id="6fc18353-23c1-4beb-9aca-3f0ce97870ea" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/23/nyregion/nuclear-anxiety-photos-new-york.html">The New York Times</a>.

Nuclear Anxiety, Empty Streets and Scenes of New York on High Alert

In these New York Times photographs, taken during mandatory civil defense drills in the fervid early years of the Cold War, you can almost hear the absence of sound.

Nuclear anxiety, empty streets and scenes of New York on high alert

Politics

Local

World

News

Celebrities

Music

Movies

Entertainment

Sports 

Fashion

Beauty & Health

Relationships & Weddings

Food & Travel

Lifestyle

Domestic

International 

Business

About

Highlights

Selection Criteria

Jury

Terms And Conditions

FAQs

Pulse Influencer Awards

Courses

Careers

Explore categories

Pulse Kenya is the most followed news and entertainment platform in Kenya. It informs and engages young Kenyans around the clock and provides updates by the hour.

Eric Moskowitz

Articles written by the author

The complex story of Hulan Jack, the first black 'Boss of Manhattan'

Nuclear anxiety, empty streets and scenes of New York on high alert