in
"persuading" white-owned stores in the heart of the ghettoes to hire
Negro employees. When the idea reached Harlem, it resulted in the
establishment of the Greater New York Coordinating Comittee. One of its
founders and organizers was the Rev. Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., and the
Comittee received considerable support from his church, the Abyssinian
Baptist Church.

It was Powell's claim that the Comittee was shunned by most "respectable"
Negroes but that its supporters included an unusually wide variety of
radicals. The group referred to its members as antebellum Negroes by
which, Powell said, they meant before Civil War II. Some of them, he
claimed, favored repatriation to Africa; others were for black
capitalism; still another group, including Powell himself, wanted the
Negro to achieve full dignity within the American system. In spite of the
variety of their objectives, all of them believed that the Afro-American
must first achieve economic security before any of these specific goals
could be attained.

It was on this primary tactical necessity that they were able to
coordinate their activities. They picketed white-owned stores on 125th
Street. They carried signs advocating, "Don't buy where you can't work,"
and Powell maintained that they were able almost to stop trade totally at
any target they chose to picket. He claimed to be able to call a meeting
with only forty-eight hours notice and have 10,000 persons in attendance.
The 125th Street stores soon negotiated and began employing Negro
employees. Next, the Comittee hit the city's utility companies. They
urged Negroes not to use electricity on specified days. They harassed the
telephone company by urging Negroes to demand that the operator place
their calls instead of their dialing the number and utilizing the
automatic exchanges. Both companies changed their employment patterns in
response. The Comittee also boycotted the bus company until it began
employing Negroes as drivers as well as on other levels of the company's
staff.

By 1935 Harlem had become a pressure cooker which was heated to the
boiling point by economic and racial frustrations. When a young Negro
stole a knife from a 125th Street store, it became the incident which
triggered a social explosion. Although he had escaped from the pursuing
officer a rumor spread around the community that he had been beaten to
death. A mob soon gathered and began to protest everything from the
discrimination pra