The Gangsters of Harlem is fantastic book about, guess what, the Gangsters of Harlem. It does a great job of going through al time periods of Harlem, New York, which helped a lot for the project I will be doing. The book started in the late 1890’s when Harlem was a primarily white neighborhood, all the way until the 1980’s when it was over two-thirds African American and the crack problem was considered an “epidemic” by the United States Government.
This novel covered many different gangsters, from all different time periods. Nicky Barnes, Frank Matthews, Frank Lucas, Dutch Shultz all being some of the familiar names. However, although it went into great detail about many gangsters, it wasn’t exactly what I was looking for.
The biggest help this book was is that it made me think more about crime, not necessarily Harlem. Most of us are aware of the blood and guts that inevitably come along with crime, but few of us have a real idea of how crime actually affects a community. Our class has been about community all year, and the way crime affects it is second to none. Even with Harlem starting out as a safe area in the late 1890’s, as soon as a couple mobsters came in and the real estate market collapsed in 1900, the entire neighborhood changed. The entire placed turned into a war zone. A war zone with a downward spiral that lead to an epidemic.
I liked this book because now I know that 1950’s Harlem, my topic, didn’t just happen because of 1950’s Harlem. It started decades before that, it was built upon a generation of crime and poverty. It created a new generation of crime and poverty that I cannot wait to read into after this project.
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