'RANGEL? WHO'S RANGEL?'
LEONE, VIVIEN
'RANGEL? WHO'S RANGEL?' VIVIEN LEONE "It is a known fact that the narcotics racket could not exist in Harlem without the aid and consent of some members of the New York Police Department." When...
...He operates on four cylinders instead of eight, otherwise, with the bunch he's got behind him, he'd blow the whole machine...
...Attaboy...
...Of the two, the four-letter word is the deadlier, since the crook inspires admiration in direct proportion to how much he is able to get away with, but nobody appreciates a hack...
...I am charging my Government with complicity in the drug traffic, and the press is responsible for not making that clear...
...But he never got one...
...The first Rangel bill reached the House scarcely a month after Rangel took office...
...Instead, I found my own people there—all the kids I used to take to Albany by the busload...
...But shortly thereafter, in a precedent-breaking gesture of recognition, President Nixon telephoned Rangel to announce that Turkey had agreed to eliminate production of opium poppies within one year...
...Although he had a strong ally in Manhattan Borough President Percy E. Sutton and a good power base in the Martin Luther King Democratic Club, his voter appeal was intermittent...
...Because I saw my son get what he wanted, in Washington, D.C...
...Vivien Leone is an editor of Aphra, the feminist quarterly, and previously was a contributing editor to The Manhattan Tribune...
...He got to know the Harlem district leaders because his grandfather was always sending him on errands to ask favors of them...
...Attorney General Robert Kennedy appointed him an Assistant U.S...
...By 1966 he was on his way to Albany as assemblyman from Central Harlem...
...Something of a generational tug-of-war went on in that elevator, for the old man had grown up in the South watching more of his people lynched, burned, tortured, and disenfranchised than in any other period in U.S...
...After that, my father took us in, and I got work in a factory...
...Rangel's Hot Line was ringing an average of 100 times a day...
...Times were bad, but I joined the ILGWU and stayed with it for twenty-five years, so I have a pension now and a nice apartment...
...He has shown initiative and compiled a superior voting record by our standards...
...When asked about Rangel, he shrugged...
...As a Catholic, even a lackadaisical one, he did not belong to the black Protestant majority...
...The Citizens Union called him "an energetic and progressive legislator who was one of the most intelligently active in the struggle to produce a workable school decentralization bill...
...He was neither a charmer nor an outstanding athlete...
...A characteristic call went something like this: "Y'know Clackety-Clack's Bar & Grill...
...They say the Irish are always looking to round up their own kind, and, well, aren't we all...
...It was at the Afro-American Day Parade in September of 1969...
...This is a new day in black politics," he went on...
...Most of all, in the days before Martin Luther King had begun to popularize the connection between war and racism, a soldier could get the idea he might have some abilities, that he might hope to become an unNobody...
...And a Bronze Star, and two Presidential citations...
...Doris Innis offered one of those simple explanations that few can swallow: "When the Times was against Adam, Harlem was for him...
...What the Caucus members are saying is that they, amazingly, believe in The System that until now has wanted no part of them...
...Listen, I like politics...
...He was a freshman at DeWitt Clinton High School, and there was little about him to suggest he might one day inherit the cloak of Adam Clayton Powell...
...Time and again, "honest" is the word chosen to describe him, but the praise comes out sounding faint, for if "honest" comes, can "hack" be far behind...
...The Harlem voter will still go for the candidate who looks the least like him...
...In texture, Sutton is to Rangel as satin is to burlap...
...The National Director of the Congress of Racial Equality guffawed...
...A reporter for a radical weekly remembers a fund-raising party at which the guests were told to relax, their lives were safe, because no Panthers had been invited...
...I watched him give the Power salute, and I didn't hear any resounding applause...
...All my children are educated, and they did it on their own...
...A hard-knocks politician for fourteen years before becoming Borough President in 1965, Sutton has developed into New York City's best-known black official...
...But when the same Rangel made the same charge three years later at his first press conference as the new Harlem Congressman from the Black Capital of America, his pleasingly plump face was projected across the national television networks...
...And how many 'absolutely last' concert tours did Zimka Milanov give...
...Yet the last embers of him could be felt in the overly boisterous responses of his former constituents to even the mildest of Rangel's comments: "When new business comes into my neighborhood, I like to know who's managing it, and nobody at the mid-management level looks like us...
...This was where he proudly carried his grandson up and down when Rangel was a volunteer law assistant in his student days...
...It authorized the President to cut aid to any country that failed to "take steps" to control drug traffic...
...a relic...
...Former Dropout Makes Good is the way they put it, when the really important angle is that the school system is so lousy, it can turn even a potentially ambitious kid into a dropout...
...For fourteen years, he was in and out, and then one day he never came back...
...High school bored him, and nobody in his family had ever gone to college...
...Congress, where a dozen legislators (an increase of three over last year, and all Democrats) represent some twenty-five million black Americans...
...There were seven mayoralty slates competing that spring, and it was so like a circus that few remember Rangel was a candidate...
...And when the long-time-a-borning Black Caucus finally became a functioning reality, Rangel was the only first-termer to be elected as one of its officers...
...The power is here, not in Congress, where it takes twenty years to build it up...
...It would have severed military and economic aid to countries refusing to halt the production of opium, ninety-five per cent of which is grown in Turkey and processed in France...
...A coincidence...
...Government...
...I used to be afraid to go blind, but now I don't care so much...
...But I think the real power today is in the media...
...In terms of long-range analysis, I couldn't support Charlie, even though he is my friend," Innis told me...
...Just before graduation, he dropped out...
...Maybe they figure they can get me to call some cat a 'bag man' and do me like they did Adam...
...The tour was a bomb...
...Rangel was popular in Albany, where he was one of eleven black assemblymen...
...then came Charlie, he always wanted to be a criminal lawyer...
...To jump from that city campaign to the main event the following year—the taking on of Powell—was a giant leap that will probably never be accounted for to the satisfaction of all...
...He is faithful to his friends, flexible with his enemies, and useful to his district...
...I made blouses and artificial flowers and shoulder pads...
...Attorney...
...This is my fortieth year of touring," he said...
...Even the location of his Capitol Hill office bears overtones of special contrivance...
...The next morning, Harlem superdealer Hastell Harris was nailed in a $1.5 million heroin bust...
...As soon as my term is up in 1973, I'll be moving on into communications...
...he also opposed Broderick's stand on "law and order"—and he had never even met Scheuer before being tapped for the ticket...
...Geriatrics is her field, and the subject can move her husband to sudden anger: "That's one area where you don't find much discrimination," he snaps, "because nobody gives a damn about old people...
...Then there was the matter of the special committee that deals with drug abuse—the Select Committee on Crime, for which he had long before set his cap, and on which no seats were available...
...The morning after her son was sworn into office in the House of Representatives, Blanche Rangel leaned on his arm as he walked her to the shuttle at National Airport...
...It is not, like those of most freshmen, located in the oldest of the three buildings, the Longworth, but in the Cannon Building—a step upward in comfort and prestige...
...The next day, two patrolmen sauntered into a Harlem "grocery" and closed down a numbers game, saying, "Rangel sent us...
...Grandpa Wharton was, for nearly all his working life, an elevator operator in the Criminal Courts building where the District Attorney's offices are located...
...when the Times let up, Harlemites were able to say, 'o.k., Adam, you're not doing your job.' " Rangel's campaign manager was Hilton Clark, the brilliant law-student son of the psychologists Mamie Phipps and Kenneth B. Clark, but it was a rare voter who did not attribute the management to Percy Sutton...
...Blanche Rangel is an outgoing woman of sixty-seven who talks about her life with candor: "I married Ralph Rangel when I was eighteen...
...It's the best dress I ever had...
...Of these last two, the female admits rather sadly that the news caused her mother "some disappointment," while the male remains bewildered at "how nice everybody is to me...
...He was yet another functionary making routine remarks before yet another board of inquiry...
...On the ramp, they paused...
...Because Charlie's way of being practical is being shortsighted...
...Remember," he says when asked for an explanation, "that for me it was all over when Adam lost the primary...
...but at that time the least boring place a dropout could go was Korea...
...His constituency had prospered and moved to the suburbs...
...Not only had most of the downtown press corps never laid eyes on the fellow, they could not even pronounce his name...
...She squinted up at him...
...When I talk about pay-offs, I don't mean the numbers game because, in Harlem, 'numbers' are a way of life, but drugs are a way of death...
...I never really had any intention of going into private practice," he says, and he scarcely had time to...
...Charlie Fried was a Jewish man," she adds, "but to us he was just like a colored man...
...What can I say about him...
...I was marching about 100 feet behind Adam...
...It took me three years to do it...
...My son bought this dress," she said...
...Fried had a hardware store in the neighborhood, where regularly, after the old man went on pension, a mixed group would gather...
...The ratio is rather less meticulous in the U.S...
...My only trouble is, I have glaucoma in my right eye," Rangel's mother continued...
...Although his performance would be hard to fault, it was not flashy...
...I must have loved him, or I wouldn't have had three children by him...
...You know when I knew the time had come to make our move...
...An education seemed to him something not only to get, but to get through...
...During the 1950s she was a correspondent in Rome for International^ ews Service...
...Man," he says of that period, "was I scared to get married...
...Describing Sutton without calling him "suave" is a challenge few writers have met...
...Who is he to come up to Harlem and dispense Congressional endorsements...
...Until the day the old grandfather died in 1960, at eighty-three, he continued to believe the surest way to a long life was never to forget to call a white man "sir...
...Bill Epton is the former chairman of the Progressive Labor Party...
...Who's Rangel...
...A bit more than a bit, as it happened...
...For the black who is dismissed as a hack the situation is even more unfortunate, in that the fancy he has failed to capture is twice-removed: He is called a hack because his style is out of step with what the packagers happen to be buying that season in the way of black leaders...
...John's Law School on a full scholarship, and although he was on the dean's list all the way, his heart belonged to his volunteer work in the D.A.'s office...
...What we need is a national black news network, and that's what I'm working on now...
...asked the proprietor blankly...
...The leaders had one thing in common: They were all lawyers...
...John's...
...Then one night at a dance he met a marriage-minded social worker named Alma Carter, from Panama City, Florida...
...The press likes that," he says, "but the emphasis is all wrong...
...It is furnished in mahogany, excellent foil for an exhibition of paintings (valued at $150,000) from the local Barnett Aden Gallery, one of the world's largest Afro-American art collections...
...Our communities are still being portrayed as exotic outposts where we spend our time eating chitterlings and being picturesque...
...Each represents a constituency just beginning to awaken to the potential of suffrage, just beginning to suspect that a Representative in Congress might conceivably turn out to be at least as useful as a charismatic preacher...
...We've got beyond the politics of Style and Image, and this is absolutely beyond the comprehension of a Charlie Rangel...
...I began going to Washington right away, so I had six months' lead on the other guys...
...He worked as a stock boy for the Adler shoe chain...
...So he also "got through" St...
...Rangel...
...With that little statement of years ago, Rangel permanently endeared himself to Doris Innis, a former Publishers' Weekly editor now compiling "the definitive" black literary anthology (three volumes) for Random House...
...Neither in flesh nor in spirit was Adam Clayton Powell on the premises...
...A high destiny was not indicated either by his family background or by his achievements up to that point...
...He came on strong...
...Rangel had been a bona fide Congressman for only eight days when he invited the press up to 125th Street for the official opening of the first Congressional District office Harlem has ever had...
...A hack observes all the rules...
...He became the first black in history ever to be appointed to either the Public Works or the Science and Astronautics Committees...
...My father loved that man...
...To Innis, a self-described separatist, City Hall is rarely a laughing matter...
...Among them was Blanche Rangel, focusing with all the strength remaining in her good left eye upon her son, who was playing with his son, three-year old Steven, at the very center of...
...It took Rangel five years to make it into electoral politics...
...He sponsored sensible bills that did not attract the attention of the general public...
...What's needed now is the ability to plan, scheme, program, plot...
...It's an evolutionary process...
...By the time Rangel was discharged in 1952, with the rank of staff sergeant, he had resolved to get an education...
...The Lind-say-Sutton machinery represents the most clear and present danger to black folks in our time...
...Estimations of Rangel as a shrewd and gifted player of the serious game of politics he loves so well are borne out by several other aspects of his first months in office that broke precedents...
...It's the old mulatto aristocracy all over again...
...I never meant to get involved in a name-calling contest with the chief of police, because my aim is a lot higher than that...
...After soliciting a few desultory credos on the existence of corruption during the course of a three-block stroll along ancient tar streets polka-dotted with beer can rings, Rangel had had it...
...When Nixon talks about a volunteer army, he means a poor army, and that's us...
...an unconscious front for the status-quo pros" and "a 1941 Negro . . . who is, by the way, a sweet guy...
...She claimed they were one of only half a dozen families in America whose ancestry could be traced to the English aristocracy...
...I wanted an appointment as an Assistant D.A...
...This reasoning is viewed with skepticism on the Left, at least, where the episode represents his most serious blemish...
...A good indication of how little is still known about Rangel is that Newsweek, in a cover story on black politicians which appeared a full year after his victory over the legendary Powell, dismissed him as "a wealthy lawyer...
...He was no longer a part of our time, with his medallion hanging on his turtleneck sweater...
...I converted Catholic for him...
...Informed she might appear in Ebony or Jet, Blanche Rangel stood up and smiled...
...seven are black, three Puerto Rican, and two white...
...a junior politico...
...Even if he had the desire to do it, he couldn't...
...Charlie may be in the wrong camp—the Lindsay-Sutton camp—but he's certainly one of the more refreshing people on the Harlem political scene, and one of the few who is honest...
...Not once during the conference that morning did the name come up—the tripartite one that had complicated the political aspirations of every child in the Harlem community for more than a quarter of a century...
...But the recruiters were glad to get me, and it looked as though I'd get to see a bit of action...
...Mama," he laughed, hugging her, "do you know what I am...
...They're all married now...
...Tell 'em, Boss...
...When New York State Assemblyman Charles B. Rangel made that statement in 1968, no hands were wrung, no handsprings sprung...
...He is diligent, punctual, neat, and polite, but he fails to capture anybody's fancy...
...in the worst way," Rangel recalls, "so I could show Grandpa that the time for tipping our caps was over...
...Rangel was sitting right there," she recalls, "and I'll never forget his silence—or forgive it...
...Four years later they had Steven, and as soon as he was two, Alma went back to work...
...Except Charlie Fried," says Rangel's mother Blanche...
...With his $133,000 staff allotment, Rangel chose to hire twelve persons, five for Washington and seven for New York, who constitute a near-perfect representation of his district: six males and six females...
...On another occasion, during the 1969 Democratic mayoralty primary, the mystery was not his defeat, but why Rangel ran for City Council President with Bronx Congressman James H. Scheuer (for Mayor) and former Police Chief Vincent L. Broderick (for Controller) on what was widely viewed as a "backlash" ticket...
...His most mysterious defeat was for district leader in the 1968 primary...
...Lindsay thinks he's Lawrence of Arabia...
...Crook" and "hack" are the favorite monosyllabic pejoratives for any elected official...
...The revised version of this bill that was approved six months later had not been modified by Rangel...
...Rangel was talking about another kind of apathy the weekend morning he led a group of forty on a walking tour of the "Drug Capital of North America," when he told them that "black kids dying just don't choke up the majority of Americans...
...After that came the journeyman years, during which he was legal counsel to this one, and associate counsel to that one, and general counsel to another...
...They say there was a lot of integrating going on down in Accomac," says Rangel...
...I'll believe it," said Roy Innis, "when I see it...
...She says the women's movement "galvanized" her into "a reactivation of premarital aspirations," and articles by her will soon appear in The Village Voice and Mademoiselle...
...To support himself, he worked as a desk clerk at the Hotel Theresa...
...Rangel grins: "Well, he was looking for a black, and he asked around, but, yes, of course, he called up Dean [Harold] McNiece at St...
...With Powell, we dropped the yellow, so the next step had to be the brown, and that's Charlie...
...Well, ain't no bar, and ain't no grill...
...Go to any function in this town, and you'll find Congressmen sitting at tables, while the Borough President is up on the dais...
...It seems to have been a matter not of special considerations being given to him as a result of his special qualifications, but of strategic craftsmanship behind the scenes...
...A seat was added for him...
...the U.S...
...The idea of showcasing a cultural treasury of such magnitude in a Congressional office is unique, and typical of its originator, H. Patrick Swygert, the elegant young attorney who is Rangel's administrative assistant...
...The keen, tough-minded analysis of blacks like Conyers and Dellums [Michigan and California Democratic Congressmen] who take the larger view, who see the revolutionary writing on the wall...
...It might have amused him, had he known of the pronouncement once made about the Whartons by Edith, the distinguished novelist...
...Legislators for a Day, we called them...
...I always knew you would be a criminal lawyer," she said...
...He has often heard that his name is Spanish, or Anglo-Saxon, and that there might be some German and French in his background as well, but tracing his ancestry is "one of those luxuries a black man just can't afford...
...A Papist plot...
...As an advocate of community control in the school-strike issue, Rangel opposed Scheuer's support of the position taken by the United Federation of Teachers against such control...
...There's a lot I could say about my husband, but the truth is, he could have been a better father...
...I'm not supposed to talk about it, all I'm supposed to say is my husband died of cancer in 1952...
...Charles Bernard Rangel (as in Spangle like the banner with the stars on it) is just about the most deeply rooted New Yorker anybody is ever likely to meet...
...Percy quitting...
...For not only does the freshman Congressman still live in the brownstone house at 74 West 132nd Street where he was born June 11, 1930, but that house has had Rangels in it for half a century...
...When I joined the Army," he recalls, "I didn't even know where Korea was...
...and the youngest is Frances, a registered nurse...
...He was the sole loser—nobody knew why—on a ticket he shared with Sutton, and with Adam Clayton Powell, for whose reinstatement in Congress Rangel had persistently labored, and who went on to rack up a record eighty-six per cent of the vote...
...In those early days of 1971, before the Knapp Commission hearings had made police corruption a household fact of life, it was almost as though the honor of the Police Commissioner's mother, rather than that of certain of New York City's 30,000 "finest," had been impugned...
...Twice he ran for, and lost, the District Democratic leadership...
...The official swearing-in ceremony took one solemn minute...
...Sutton recalls...
...And now they were saying 'Hi' to Adam, but it was my autograph they were asking for...
...He stayed with the shoe chain for awhile, then tried the garment district...
...Around the turn of the century, Wharton arrived in Harlem from Accomac, Virginia...
...And besides," he adds, flashing his luminous teeth, "I wanted the job...
...Nobody up here talks electoral politics anymore, we got pressing problems just trying to survive...
...And two weeks later, there was Operation Flanker, the biggest Federal heroin bust in history...
...At the opening of the Ninety-second Congress, most of the freshmen shared their new House seats with their brightly-dressed children, as relatives beamed from the galleries...
...It's the same old story...
...A previous ceremonial minute for Harlem had occurred during the opening of the Seventy-ninth Congress, in 1944, when Charles Rangel was fourteen years old...
...Rangel, until that victory, had hardly been able to meet the mortgage payments on the house he inherited from his grandfather, Charles Bernard Wharton...
...Anybody coming after Powell has to show a militant face," he said, "but there's nothing Rangel can do for the community...
...but we haven't gotten to the black yet...
...Coming late on the scene, the black legislator is striving, as Rangel puts it, "to stretch out that very thin line of credibility from Washington to our people...
...The first was named after him—Ralph, he works in an office...
...Charlie was only six, and sometimes I think he'll never forgive his dad for walking out...
...Who cares...
...Rueful laughter) Rangel spoke that morning of the cynicism of certain boys in blue, who suck green bounty out of the gray lives of black people, of the arrogance of those downtown cops who sought his influence for transfers to the more lucrative Harlem precincts, of the Hot Line he was setting up to encourage fearful residents to phone in abuses, and of how the Federal Government itself, by failing to take action against the growth and importation of heroin, was reaching down into the hometown and slaughtering its children...
...It was while he was getting through the School of Commerce at New York University on the GI Bill that he first became attracted to politics...
...In 1961, less than a year after being admitted to the New York bar, he got his first break...
...That's when I said to Charlie, 'Adam can be taken, and you can take him.' "Adam fought me because he thought Charlie was my puppet, that I was the one who was after his power...
...Not only did he lack an eminent father, he was virtually fatherless...
...That is just about what happened to Rangel during his four years in the Assembly...
...A black might not have been able to get a white-collar job, but he could get a Purple Heart...
...history...
...According to Rangel, "the point was that if three such divergent people could get together, they'd really represent a wide constituency...
...Adam walked off in anger, which was unusual for him...
...A former poverty-program official called Rangel "a latter-day Powell without Powell's looks...
...Maurice Sorrell of Johnson Publications took pictures...
...But it won't work, because I happen to be a lawyer, not a preacher...
...In the ruckus over the Black Caucus, and the year it took to achieve Presidential recognition, a significant irony was all but overlooked: that these twelve have opened the door into mainstream politics at the very time when the disenchanted young are walking out the same door...
Vol. 36 • May 1972 • No. 5
