The Young Landlords

Throughout The Young Landlords, the young friends who make up the Action Group must contend not only with the challenges of running an apartment building while they are still in high school, but also with obstacles arising from systemic injustice. The Captain first makes this clear in Chapter 1, as he exhorts Gloria to work toward making the world a better place while she is young: “What I do comes from not being able to do nothing better. What you do is ‘cause you don’t want to do better” (6). The Captain’s work, running an illegal neighborhood lottery, requires business acumen, mathematical acuity, and organizational skill—qualities that might serve him well in the corporate world if he could access that world. A complex patchwork of systemic injustices—job discrimination, disinvestment in this Black neighborhood, underfunded public schools, and more—has made it so that this talented individual can succeed only by working outside the law. He doesn’t want to see the same thing happen to Gloria and her friends, and he tells her that if she wants a better life, she has to start working for it now.

The police in the novel—with their combination of aggressiveness and apathy—embody the societal racism that confronts the central characters. Their first appearance comes when they swiftly move in to arrest Paul, Dean, and Gloria when the teens go through the building introducing themselves as the tenants’ new landlords. While the police accuse the teens of belonging to the Spanish Lords gang and of stealing the pocketbook of a young woman, they do not listen as Gloria desperately tries to explain that she and her friends are the new owners of the Stratford Arms. Paul encounters the police again when they burst into the Captain’s office while he interviews Bubba for a position as a numbers runner. Paul eventually judges, from the timing and behavior of the police, that the Captain himself orchestrated their arrival—implying that the police have a working relationship with this illegal lottery owner. When Paul and Dean go to the police station to explain why they entered the darkened warehouse—where someone shot at them—the detective condemns their behavior and threatens them, with no mention of the fact that—as Paul knows—the warehouse is full of stolen goods. When Paul and his father solve the crime of stolen stereos, the peace officer he reports this to explains that it will take days before the police respond, and then only if he goes through the proper channels. Meanwhile, their initial arrest of Chris shows a willingness to disregard due process when under pressure to make arrests. Posing as civilians, they ask him where they can find cheap stereo equipment. One officer winks at Chris, and when a confused Chris winks back out of politeness, this is enough to justify his arrest.

Myers does not offer a clear, affirming pathway for dealing with systemic injustice. Rather, the book’s implicit argument aligns with the Captain’s lesson to Gloria in Chapter 1: A better world is possible if people work persistently and together. The teens form an organization with the explicit goal of making their world more just. Initially, their aim is to address the problems of the whole world, writing letters to heads of state arguing for world peace, but soon they realize that their efforts must begin in their own neighborhood. As their community grows, they become more effective. They enlist their recalcitrant tenants in the work of raising money for the Stratford Arms. They learn the habits of the police and carefully plan out events so that the police must take proper action at the proper moment. All the problems of systemic racism in Harlem are not solved by the end of the book, but the Action Group has a sustainable plan in place to make the future better than the past.