Before her arrival in Arizona, Elinor was living in Harlem, at 508 West 142nd Street. Central Harlem had been overcrowded since the first wave of the Great Migration began during World War I, when blacks from the South sought better living conditions in the North, hoping to escape the persistent racism and domestic terrorism of their daily lives.2 In New York, they discovered a different form of discrimination that could be just as oppressive and degrading. The neighborhood had undergone a serious demographic transformation by the time Elinor arrived in the 1940s. In 1910, the black population in Central Harlem hovered around 10 percent, while the white population was 90 percent. By 1940 the numbers had reversed and African Americans accounted for 89 percent of Harlem’s residents, with whites only 10 percent of the neighborhood’s population.3 When World War II began, Central Harlem alone—which loosely spans from 155th Street to 110th Street north to south, and from Fifth Avenue to St. Nicholas Avenue east to west—was home to 221,900 residents, a small city squeezed into forty-five blocks.

Just a few months after Elinor graduated from nursing school, one particular incident between a white rookie cop and a black veteran triggered riots across Harlem. The episode involved a black woman named Marjorie Polite, who had checked into the Hotel Braddock on 126th Street and Eighth Avenue, not far from the Apollo Theater. A popular destination for black celebrities and musicians in the 1920s and 1930s, the hotel had since declined in stature and in the 1940s was better known for prostitution and was regularly patrolled.

On August 1, 1943, Polite allegedly requested a different room after she found the first one unsatisfactory. After the second one failed to meet her standards, she asked for a refund. As she was leaving, she asked the porter for the $1 tip she claimed to have given him upon checking in. He denied receiving a tip, and the two began to argue. A white police officer named James Collins reportedly intervened and grabbed Polite by the arm. As they struggled in the lobby, a black veteran named Robert Bandy, a guest at the hotel along with his mother, came downstairs and witnessed the altercation. One account of the incident described Bandy striking the officer and Collins shooting Bandy in the shoulder as he tried to flee.