In early July of 1959, picket lines blocked liquor stores on Harlem’s Lenox Avenue, Seventh and Eighth Avenues, and 126th Street.
James Hicks, who was the managing editor of the pioneering black Amsterdam News weekly, gleefully watched the protests from the newspaper’s nearby offices “in the heart of Harlem, where they drink everything from Ape Gravy to Soothing Syrup,” he wrote. He kept an eye on a corner liquor store, which was an “important address both to the high and the mighty, and the low and flighty.”
Few tried to cross the rows of smartly dressed protesters—men in suits and dapperly tilted fedoras, bouffanted women carrying purses with picket signs proclaiming “DON’T BUY HERE.” From his front-row seat, Hicks saw a man skirt the line, enter the store, and re-emerge with a bottle, only to be met with jeers.
“Nobody said anything to him. But everyone said a lot to everyone else. Nobody that is, except Willie the Wino, a man of action,” Hicks wrote. “He just walked up and slapped the other wino so hard in his teeth that the other wino dropped his precious bottle.”
Those rowdy, heckling onlookers made clear their sympathies with the NAACP’s cause that day: to make sure that black liquor salesmen could sell their wares anywhere in New York City.
In a stunning example of professional segregation, black salesmen were confined at the time to work only in predominantly African-American neighborhoods. White salesmen, on the other hand, could roam the city in search of clients and commissions even though they sold the same products, sometimes for the same company as black vendors. Not only did they get unfettered access to Manhattan’s bars and tourist dollars; they could also sell throughout Harlem, the city’s most lucrative market and the urban cultural center of black America.
Geography and race determined the boundaries of a salesman’s territory and, for black workers, stunted their earning potential. The minimum take-home of a black salesman was $85 per week, while estimates suggested his white counterpart could bring home up to $300 every seven days.
The right to sell was both racially discriminatory and dynastic. Sometimes, black liquor men would supply black-owned “package” shops on a block, but simultaneously not be allowed to work with a white (often Jewish-, Irish-, or Italian-owned) store just doors down on that same block. In the late 1950s, activists estimated that while there were more white-owned bars than black in Harlem, the neighborhood boasted 70 black-owned liquor stores, compared to 40-odd white-owned ones.