National
Journal Group
Learn more about our publications and sign up for a free trial.
E-Mail Alerts
Get notified the moment your favorite features are updated.
Need A Reprint?
Click here for details on reprints, permissions and back issues.
Advertise With Us
Details on advertising with National Journal Group -- both online and in print -- can be found in our online media kit.
Go Wireless
Get daily political updates on your handheld computer.
|
New York: Fifteenth District Rep. Charles Rangel (D) Last Updated June 10, 2003
Harlem, for many years America's most famous black ghetto, is now rebounding from decades of grim times. Harlem's development came relatively late in New York City's history. When Alexander Hamilton and Roger Morris built mansions in northern Manhattan, they were far out in the countryside. Early critics of Central Park questioned the necessity of setting aside open land when picnickers could always go to Harlem. By the late 19th century, Harlem had become a commuter neighborhood for Germans and then Jews and Italians. After the turn of the century, real-estate speculators began constructing blocks of impressive brownstones, hoping to capitalize on the impending arrival of the subway. But overbuilding led to high vacancy rates, and some landlords, in desperation, agreed to rent to African-Americans as long as they were willing to pay a premium. After generations of being shunted from one neighborhood to the next as the city developed, enough black residents were willing to do so that the neighborhood soon turned into the locus of New York City's African-American community. Harlem expanded from its nucleus around Lenox Avenue and 125th Street, while the Italian neighborhood to the east later known as Spanish Harlem grew outward from 116th Street and Pleasant Avenue. In northwest Harlem's Sugar Hill lived many of the greatest black Americans--W.E.B. DuBois, Thurgood Marshall, Ralph Ellison, Joe Louis. For a long moment Harlem was a wondrous place, a center of writers and professionals and entertainers; the rosters of the Apollo Theater on 125th Street in the 1920s and 1930s were filled with the names of great artists still remembered today. Back then, the WPA Guide described Harlem as "the spiritual capital of Black America." But starting with the summer 1964 riot, Harlem faced decades of deterioration. Hundreds of brownstones were abandoned or pulled down. As successful black families moved outward--to Springfield Gardens in Queens or Williamsbridge in the Bronx or to the Westchester or New Jersey suburbs--Harlem was increasingly left with welfare mothers and criminal gangs, and its population dropped by one-third between 1970 and 1990. Manufacturing jobs all but disappeared; the area's public schools declined; the Hotel Theresa closed; and antipoverty money was channeled to a tight group of successful politicians with few widespread results. But in the 1990s, things turned up. The federal government gave $300 million in investment capital, and the huge drop in crime under Mayor Rudolph Giuliani made Harlem real estate valuable again. Brownstones were renovated, vacant city buildings sold off; neighborhood schools upgraded; commercial frontage repaired; arts spaces opened. Younger African-Americans are returning, while visitors from overseas, especially Japan and Europe, flock to the area for historical tours, prompting a boomlet in niche hotels and guest houses. Community development corporations, often linked to churches, encouraged home ownership. Supermarkets have opened, there is a big shopping center on 125th Street, with the same stores found in suburban malls, chain drug stores have opened numerous branches. And in July 2001, Bill Clinton opened his post-presidential office at 55 West 125th Street. Politically, Harlem has been heavily Democratic ever since the 1930s, when black voters switched from the Republican party of Abraham Lincoln to the Democratic party of Franklin Roosevelt. Oddly, Harlem did not get its own congressional district until 1944; the lines, previously drawn in 1918, were based on the 1910 Census, when Harlem had far fewer people. The new congressman was Adam Clayton Powell Jr., minister at the Abyssinian Baptist Church and a brilliant orator who became the most famous (and infamous) black politician of his time: chairman of the Education and Labor Committee when it passed the Great Society programs in 1965, then excluded from Congress in 1967 (illegally, the Supreme Court ruled) for refusing to honor a New York decree in a libel case brought by a plaintiff he called a "bag woman." Today, the 15th Congressional District includes not just Harlem but all of northern Manhattan, down to 91st Street on the west side and 96th Street on the east side. On the west side, the district's southern reaches include portions of the white-liberal Upper West Side as well as the Morningside Heights precincts around Columbia University. On the east side, 96th Street is where the railroad comes out of the tunnel that runs under Park Avenue to Grand Central Station and where real estate agents have long drawn an invisible line. Spanish Harlem, just to the north, was once Italian (it was Fiorello LaGuardia's political base and Al Pacino was born there), and later heavily Puerto Rican; today, "El Barrio" has fewer Puerto Ricans and more Latinos with roots in other Latin countries. Still further north, the district includes Washington Heights, once mainly Jewish, and Inwood, once heavily Italian. Now both are heavily Latino, the center of Dominican life in New York as Dominicans replace Puerto Ricans as New York's most numerous Latino group. Washington Heights was hit especially hard by the crack epidemic in the late 1980s and early 1990s, but now it too is recovering thanks to reduced crime and immigrant vitality. Governor George Pataki in 2002 made a point of coming to shop on Dyckman Street, the boundary between Washington Heights and Inwood, and speaking to passers-by in his recently acquired Spanish. The district also includes imposing parts of New York's infrastructure--the huge Con Edison plant on the East River, Wards Island, home to the Triborough Bridge, and the city prison on Rikers Island: but there are no voters here. Overall, the district is 31% black and 48% Hispanic--figures that testify to decades of black flight from Harlem and the continuing inrush of immigrants from the Western Hemisphere. National Republicans seldom win as much as 10% of the vote here, but in 2002 Pataki ran much stronger in Latino neighborhoods. The congressman from the 15th District is Charles Rangel, first elected in 1970. Rangel is now the senior member of the New York delegation and ranking Democrat on Ways and Means. He grew up in Harlem and served in the Army in Korea, where he rescued 40 men from behind the lines in Kunu-ri and was awarded the Bronze Star; he returned to Korea in June 2000 for the 50th anniversary of the outbreak of the war. He graduated from New York University and St. John's University law school, served as legal counsel in several government agencies and was elected to the Assembly in 1966; he was part of a group of young black politicians, with state Senator Basil Paterson and Carl McCall and Assemblyman Percy Sutton, who for many years have dominated Harlem and greatly influenced New York politics. In 1970 Rangel challenged Powell in the Democratic primary and narrowly won. Like most Harlem politicians, he has long argued that government aid and racial preferences are needed to solve Harlem's problems. Yet much in his own career suggests otherwise. Rangel's main emphasis for a decade was denunciation of the drug trade. From 1983 until it was abolished in 1993 with the other House select committees, Rangel chaired the Select Committee on Narcotics Abuse and Control, and seldom missed a chance to relate other problems to drugs; after all, he has seen how they can destroy a community. On Ways and Means Rangel worked, with success, to protect state and local income tax deductibility in the 1986 tax reform and is an author of the Federal Empowerment Zone demonstration, the Low Income Housing tax credit and the Targeted Jobs tax credit. All those are aimed at turning around places like Harlem. Rangel combines political shrewdness with a winning personality, but when Republicans took control of the House he indulged in some extravagant rhetoric. When a bipartisan majority voted to end racial preferences in broadcasting in 1995, Rangel lashed out in a letter to Ways and Means Chairman Bill Archer: ''Mr. Chairman, in America we cannot afford to be colorblind. Just like under Hitler, people say they don't mean to blame any particular individuals and groups, but in the U.S. those groups always turn out to be minorities and immigrants.'' Archer refused to speak to Rangel except in public committee meetings and refused to meet with him in private until June 1999, when Archer and Rangel were working on Social Security. Rangel defended Bill Clinton against impeachment with great vigor, but he did not always get along with Clinton. He resented it when the administration negotiated directly with Republicans, leaving congressional Democrats out of the loop. For years he has tried to get more blacks and other minorities into the Foreign Service, sponsoring orientations for students at City College and the Charles Rangel International Affairs Program at Howard University. "As I got to Congress, I had a chance to visit foreign countries, and they would look at me as though I wasn't an American, and it was because they never had an opportunity to see diversity in this country." Since January 1997 Rangel has been ranking Democrat on Ways and Means; if Democrats win back a majority in 2004, he would be its first New York City chairman since Fernando Wood in 1877-81. Rangel remembered how he had been beaten for House whip in 1986 by Tony Coelho, a champion Democratic fundraiser, and decided for the first time to become a major fundraiser himself: of course it helped that with only a few more Democratic seats he would chair Ways and Means. In the 1997-98 cycle he raised more than $1.3 million for Democratic candidates, drawing on successful black entrepreneurs like Robert Johnson of Black Entertainment Television. In 1999-2000 he even more actively solicited contributions from and shared his views on issues with leading corporate and financial executives. In 1999 he raised $2.3 million for the campaign committee, more than anyone else except Minority Leader Dick Gephardt and committee Chairman Patrick Kennedy; he raised another $4 million in 2000 but only $1.7 million in 2002. Amid all this politicking, Rangel still found time for legislating. He worked hard for a bill to cut tariffs on apparel and other imports from sub-Saharan Africa, and also from the Caribbean and Central America. His chief partners in this were Republicans Ed Royce and Tom DeLay; it was opposed by unions and textile interests, and also by Jesse Jackson Jr. and other members of the Congressional Black Caucus. Jackson said it would help only multinational corporations and "African elites," but it passed the House 309-110 in May 2000. On PNTR with China, Rangel kept silent for many months, torn between union opponents and Clinton administration proponents. In May 2000 he finally came out in favor--the key vote to many observers. At that point, Tom DeLay said, "Okay, Mr. Future Chairman of Ways and Means, get the votes for passage." Rangel did: 73 Democrats joined 164 Republicans to pass it through what had been a very uncertain House. But he strongly opposed trade promotion authority in 2001 and 2002, and said that House Republican leaders' arm-twisting to get it passed was an "indictable offense." Rangel favors eliminating all sanctions on trade with Cuba; he favors allowing Haitian and Dominican immigrants into the United States on the same basis as refugees from Cuba. In early 2002 he traveled to Cuba and called Fidel Castro "a proud, brilliant man who has been able to use the U.S. trade embargo as an excuse for the failures of his socialist system. … Cuba continues to have one of the best and most sophisticated health care and medical research systems in the world." On the last day of 2002 he called for a revival of the military draft, contending that "a disproportionate number of the poor and members of minority groups make up the enlisted ranks of the military, while the most privileged Americans are underrepresented or absent." Ways and Means Chairman Bill Archer was crisp and to the point; Bill Thomas, who succeeded him in 2001, is acerbic and uncollegial, and has made few moves to bipartisanship. Rangel's frustration came out when he was asked in October 2002 about a Thomas tax proposal. "It's almost accepted now that all Thomas has to do is to talk to DeLay and Armey, and then his bills come to the floor. I am embarrassed that I would hear about [the tax proposal] from you, [but] it is not unusual." But Rangel has not been an easy man to be bipartisan with. Of the fall 2001 stimulus package he said, "This isn't an economic stimulus bill. This is a corporate welfare bill." In July 2002 he opposed Thomas's proposal to compensate corporations for the tax breaks they lost when the WTO ruled that Foreign Sales Corporations were illegal; at one point he crossed the aisle and joined with Philip Crane, who was passed over for the chairmanship, to propose a 1% cut in the corporate income tax instead. On Social Security, he said in May 2002: "We're going to wrap it around [the Republican party's] neck until they come to the floor and say they didn't mean what they said. Every time they say Social Security, we'll say privatization." He did have bipartisan success when in December 2001 the House passed a bill to stop the trade in "conflict diamonds," rough diamonds sold by terrorist governments in Liberia and Sierra Leone to finance their depredations. In October 2001 Rangel proposed that Congress hold a one-day session in New York. It was done in September 2002, only the second session of Congress held outside Washington since the federal government moved out of Philadelphia in 1800. Rangel is a major player in New York city and state politics. He strongly backed his old friend Carl McCall for governor, and in December 2001 said he would vote for George Pataki if the nomination went to McCall's rival, Andrew Cuomo. Cuomo's wife Kerry Kennedy Cuomo was furious, and chewed out Rangel ally David Dinkins in public; asked about her comments, Rangel said, "No one knows who she is." When Clinton and others tried to get Cuomo out of the race before the September primary, Cuomo's father Mario Cuomo called Rangel, who tried but failed to get McCall to appear at Cuomo's announcement. In October 2002 Rangel attacked the DNC for not backing McCall strongly enough; the DNC had put $240,000 and the RNC $1.5 million into New York. Rangel himself has been easily reelected. In 1994 he faced primary opposition from the son of his predecessor, the Puerto Rican-raised Adam Clayton Powell IV (Adam Clayton Powell III, another son, is a respected media expert). Rangel spent $1.4 million and won 61%-33%. Redistricting did not affect Rangel in any serious way: everyone involved understood that the demands of the Voting Rights Act and the importance of Rangel's position in the House made it mandatory to give him a district very much like his previous one. In July 2002, Conrad Muhammad, the dismissed head of the Nation of Islam's Mosque No. 7, started collecting signatures to run against Rangel in the September primary. But his energies were evidently directed elsewhere. Later that month, he walked into the Abyssinian Baptist Church and declared himself a Christian, and his name did not appear on the ballot.
Recent News Coverage
DC Office State Offices Committees
National Journal Group offers both print and electronic reprint services, as well as permissions for academic use, photocopying and republication. Click here to order, or call us at 877-394-7350. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
NEW FEATURE
[ Site Index | Staff | Privacy Policy | E-Mail Alerts ]
[ Reprints And Back Issues | Content Licensing ]
[ Make NationalJournal.com Your Homepage ]
[ About National Journal Group Inc. ]
[ Employment Opportunities ]
Copyright 2013 by National Journal Group Inc.
The Watergate · 600 New Hampshire Ave., NW
Washington, DC 20037
202-739-8400 · fax 202-833-8069
NationalJournal.com is an Atlantic Media publication.
