Summary

“The Harlem Ghetto” is Baldwin’s journalistic account of conditions in Harlem in the 1950s. Baldwin opens with a paragraph about worsening conditions in Harlem; overcrowding is increasing, rents are going up, and wages are going down, Baldwin says.

In spite of this, white visitors to the ghetto fail to perceive how bad things really are because of a strange casual air in Harlem that covers the violence waiting to erupt just beneath the surface.

Baldwin calls the Negro press sensationalist and indiscriminate in its reporting. He says the black press is simply mimicking the white press in both style and content. Baldwin spends a fair amount of time picking apart the shortcomings of particular newspapers, but the main idea here is though the Negro press is inadequate, the founders of the white press had no more foresight and black journalists should...