[[link removed]]

TRUMP ATTACKS DIVERSITY, BUT A FELLOW NEW YORKER − US REP. VITO
MARCANTONIO − WORKED TO REPRESENT ALL AMERICANS IN A MULTIRACIAL
DEMOCRACY  
[[link removed]]


 

Sandhya Shukla
December 6, 2024
The Conversation
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ Marcantonio, like other notable Harlem figures such as writers
Langston Hughes and Claude McKay, practiced what I call “living in
difference,” or deeply engaging with those who are unlike you for a
shared project. _

Vito Marcantonio appears in front of his office on First Avenue in
New York City in 1948., The New York Public Library Digital
Collections

 

Donald Trump’s successful presidential campaign
[[link removed]]
presented a dark vision
[[link removed]]
of America
[[link removed]]
that painted migrants as threats to the nation.

Yet his hometown, New York City, is also the birthplace of an
alternative political story – one of compassion for ethnic, racial
and class differences. And this history offers important lessons for
the contemporary United States.

Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, Italian-American U.S. Rep. Vito
Marcantonio of New York worked to serve all his constituents in the
ethnically and racially diverse section of the northern Manhattan
district he represented. He pushed for civil rights
[[link removed]]
for Black Americans and sought to ease immigration restrictions to
enable a wide variety of people to enter the U.S. He also called for
better working conditions and wages
[[link removed]]
for all.

Marcantonio’s cross-cultural inclinations were about more than mere
tolerance or electoral strategy. In my recent book
[[link removed]], I
explain [[link removed]] how
Marcantonio, like other notable Harlem figures such as writers
Langston Hughes and Claude McKay, practiced what I call “living in
difference,” or deeply engaging with those who are unlike you for a
shared project.

Living in difference is never free of friction. But it nonetheless
models the kind of solidarity that is essential for a multiracial
democracy.

Dilemmas of multicultural politics

Marcantonio represented East Harlem for 14 years, from 1934 to 1936
and 1938 to 1950. During his career, he was a nominee of the
Republican, Democratic and American Labor parties. And he acted on
behalf of an ever-changing mix of Black, Latino and white people.

Marcantonio was always linked with the enclave of Italian Harlem,
where he was born in 1902 and lived and worked for all of his 52
years.

But like any urban neighborhood, Italian Harlem was situated in
diversely populated environs. Beyond the Italians who began settling
in East Harlem
[[link removed]]
in the 1880s and built the era’s largest Italian American community
in the U.S., the wider neighborhood contained Jews, Irish, African
Americans and West Indians. In the 1940s, when Italians and Jews had
already been moving out, Puerto Ricans arrived in large numbers. By
1950, East Harlem would be largely African American and Puerto Rican.

Across Harlem in the early to mid-1900s, there were tensions related
to race and ethnicity
[[link removed]].
Economic
[[link removed]]
and political divides
[[link removed]] also
characterized the period.

The arrival of Puerto Ricans in large numbers
[[link removed]]
into Marcantonio’s East Harlem district provoked tensions.

“They had to get Italians out, so they brought in the Puerto Ricans
from Puerto Rico,” a longtime Catholic priest from the neighborhood
told me years later.

He didn’t specify who “they” were. But such language and
sentiments recall contemporary resentments in today’s multiracial
landscape. For people with different languages and citizenship status,
sharing space has never been uncontroversial.

Global events sometimes triggered local conflicts in Harlem. In the
1930s, after Italy invaded Ethiopia
[[link removed]],
fights broke out between Italian Americans and Black residents who
protested the invasion in part with a boycott of local Italian
businesses
[[link removed]].

Children were not exempt from the social forces swirling around them.
At Benjamin Franklin High School in East Harlem, efforts at
integration had led to a tense atmosphere. In 1945, Marcantonio and
the school’s principal, social reformer Leonard Covello, invited
Frank Sinatra [[link removed]] to sing
for students.

The jazz musician Sonny Rollins, then a student at the school, vividly
remembered the concert and often spoke about it
[[link removed]].
Sinatra encouraged understanding and exchange among Black, Italian,
Puerto Rican and Jewish students. Soon, the high school had become an
example of interracial cooperation for all New York City.

With this complicated backdrop, Marcantonio managed to advocate for
everyone in his district.

He communicated in Italian, Yiddish and Spanish
[[link removed]].
He focused on wages, housing, education and welfare assistance −
issues that were as relevant to immigrants as they were to white and
Black Americans.

[Multicultural voters form a long line outside a polling station.]
[[link removed]]

Voters in East Harlem line up outside a polling place on Fifth Avenue
to cast their votes on Nov. 2, 1948. AP Photo/Anthony Camerano
[[link removed]]

Cross-cultural politics

Sure, there were electoral reasons for broadly appealing to multiple
populations. Marcantonio could not win in a diverse district any other
way.

But his ecumenical and ethical politics did more than garner votes. It
helped create productive dialogues during a period of strained
relations among different social groups.

Marcantonio did all this without eschewing his own Italianness. He
maintained deep personal connections with those from his community –
Marcantonio’s Italian barber spoke at his memorial service – and
he closely associated with left-wing Italians in labor unions and
other organizations throughout his lifetime.

He also launched public defenses against anti-Italian sentiment
[[link removed]],
which was rampant. Even in that work, though, Marcantonio never
accentuated or mentioned his own whiteness.

Today, with postelectoral analysis so focused on how Democrats lost
rural America
[[link removed]]
or fixated on whether racism drove the “white working class” vote
[[link removed]],
Marcantonio’s career provides another insight: that working-class
people and their interests are variegated.

[Two public figures flank Vito Marcantonio.]
[[link removed]]

U.S. Rep. Vito Marcantonio in 1949 with Henry Wallace, left, and Paul
Robeson, right, two leftist leaders in U.S. politics. Bettmann via
Getty Images

Social justice

Some of Marcantonio’s most sustained political efforts were for
civil rights, both at home in New York and nationwide.

He worked tirelessly, if unsuccessfully, to pass bills in Congress
prohibiting discrimination in government defense industries. But those
struggles helped lead to a 1941 executive order, issued by Franklin
Delano Roosevelt, establishing the Fair Employment Practices Committee
[[link removed]],
which would enforce equality in business hiring.

He worked with Adam Clayton Powell Jr., a fellow congressional
colleague from Harlem, to ban the poll taxes
[[link removed]] that disenfranchised
many Black voters across the South and challenged the segregation of
Washington, D.C., public schools
[[link removed]].

Marcantonio also joined New York legislators and Communist Party
activists in critiquing racism in baseball
[[link removed]].
When Marcantonio demanded the Commerce Department investigate
complaints about the league’s discrimination in hiring, some of his
white constituents reacted with vicious disapproval. But Marcantonio
persisted, and that battle facilitated Jackie Robinson’s entry into
Major League Baseball
[[link removed]].

In addition to supporting the Puerto Rican residents of his Harlem
district, Marcantonio was an unflinching supporter of Puerto Ricans on
the island, too. Puerto Rico struggled throughout the 20th century
[[link removed]]
to obtain basic rights and secure political autonomy. Marcantonio
publicly backed that fight, and even supported Puerto Rican
independence.

Progressive paths to the future

Marcantonio never disavowed his sympathies for Communist
Party-supported causes, even at the height of the Cold War, when
paranoia about the threat of communism in the U.S.
[[link removed]] ran
rampant. And, ultimately, Marcantonio was driven out of office
[[link removed]]
in 1950 by U.S. Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s persecution of communists and
other governmental figures associated in any way with left-wing
causes.

Marcantonio’s fate is a reminder that progressive projects for
greater equality in the U.S. often bump up against dangerous forces of
retrenchment.

During Marcantonio’s last years in office, the advances in labor
rights he had championed through the 1930s and 1940s were undone. In
1947, Congress passed the Taft-Hartley Act
[[link removed]],
which significantly limited the power and influence of unions.

Though Marcantonio has not become a household name, his legacy lives
on in many realms. The “separate but equal” segregation
[[link removed]] he fought
against was outlawed in the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of
Education decision [[link removed]], just
months before he died. And poll taxes were prohibited in the Voting
Rights Act of 1965.

Marcantonio envisioned a progressive path to a more expansive version
of America – a country that embraced the rich experience of its
heterogeneity. Promoting openness among diversity is not easy, but he
spent a lifetime demonstrating why he believed it was a future worth
fighting for.[The Conversation]

Sandhya Shukla
[[link removed]],
Associate Professor of English and American Studies, _University of
Virginia
[[link removed]]_

This article is republished from The Conversation
[[link removed]] under a Creative Commons license. Read
the original article
[[link removed]].

* republicans
[[link removed]]
* Democrats
[[link removed]]
* Immigrants
[[link removed]]
* Communism
[[link removed]]
* Immigration
[[link removed]]
* Latino community
[[link removed]]
* African Americans
[[link removed]]
* Harlem
[[link removed]]
* McCarthyism
[[link removed]]
* Jackie Robinson
[[link removed]]
* Racism
[[link removed]]
* US Democracy
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]
Manage subscription
[[link removed]]
Visit xxxxxx.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]