Rent Strikes in New York

Mark Naison

Somerville, MA: New England Free Press, [ca. 1970]. Offset. Saddle-stapled in photo-illustrated wraps. 16 pp.

A superb essay on the New York rent strikes of 1963 and 1964, started in the winter of 1963 over housing conditions in Harlem and led by Jesse Gray, an activist who had been organizing uptown since 1953.

Supported by James Baldwin, John Lewis, William Fitts Ryan, Adam Clayton Powell, Huelan Jack, and Lloyd Dickens, the strike quickly spread to the Lower East Side and Brooklyn with backing from the Metropolitan Council on Housing, the Progressive Labor Party, the Mobilization for Youth, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), and the NAACP. The essay explores in detail the organizational successes, failures, and tensions of the strike - no doubt a helpful guide for the ongoing housing struggle.

Naison, born in Crown Heights in 1946, was an organizer throughout the 1960s and ‘70s, a member of CORE, the SDS, and briefly the Weather Underground. Today, he is a professor of history at Fordham University. This pamphlet was reprinted from an article originally published in Radical America.

“The people are much more conscious than ever of the slum conditions…[and] are ready to listen to an agitator who tells them not to be frightened by eviction notices.” - organizer Jesse Gray, later a New York State Assemblymember.

Eleven copies located in OCLC as of January 2021. Near fine.