Tomorrow-Land

by Joseph Tirella

  As 1963 ended, both politicians were preoccupied with matters other than racial justice: Wagner was more concerned with purging New York streets of gays, poetry-loving beatniks, and any book or film that religious authorities deemed obscene; while the governor was—once again—seeking the White House. And both had one eye on Queens, where after five long years, Robert Moses was overseeing hundreds of construction workers putting the finishing touches on scores of World’s Fair pavilions in Flushing Meadow Park.

  The Fair was expected to enrich city and state coffers and would surely be the greatest in history, Moses and his public relations staff repeatedly reminded New Yorkers. Wagner and Rockefeller could only hope so; there was a lot riding on the two-year exhibition. Regardless of the mayor’s and governor’s tense personal relationship with the Master Builder, each man gave him free rein to do as he wished with the Fair. The pressure was on: Not only would portions of the opening ceremonies be televised, but the White House also informed Moses just a couple weeks before opening day that President Lyndon Johnson would attend the festivities to deliver the keynote address after all. New York’s political leadership would be in the spotlight, which could be particularly beneficial to Rockefeller, who hoped to challenge Johnson at the polls in November.

  While New York and its leaders prepared for the influx of tourists anxious to see the Fair’s gleaming space-age pavilions, life in the ghettos of Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant went unchanged: crumbling tenements, violent crime, joblessness, rundown public schools, and police brutality, which often went unpunished and unreported (with the notable exception of the black press, which covered such cases extensively; without police brutality incidents, noted Louis E. Lomax, “Negro newspapers would have considerable blank space”). Young activists, many of whom hailed from such neighborhoods, grew more militant as disillusionment set in. “They don’t want us on the streets because the World’s Fair and all their friends are coming!” complained one young Harlemite.

  The movement’s long-cherished dream of racial integration was beginning to seem as far-fetched to many black Americans as the futuristic predictions of the Fair. And perhaps more disconcerting to leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. (who was once heckled in Harlem as “Martin Loser King”) and CORE national chairman James L. Farmer Jr. the Gandhian principles these men cherished were becoming passé; the notion of meeting the “physical force” of hatred with the “soul force” of nonviolence—as King exhorted activists to do during the March on Washington—was anathema to many activists who were now working for the cause.

  In Washington, President Johnson was utilizing every trick in his political playbook to get the civil rights bill through the Senate and signed into law. But all along there were some black Americans, including many in the urban North, who had been asking themselves if maybe a separation of the races wasn’t the better solution to America’s racial nightmare. “The people in the black community who didn’t want integration were never given a voice,” Malcolm X claimed in 1962. “[They were] never given a platform. [They] were never given an opportunity to shout out the fact that integration would never solve the problem.” That same year, James Baldwin asked pointedly in The New Yorker (later reprinted in The Fire Next Time): “Do I really want to be integrated into a burning house?”

  There was no simple answer to Baldwin’s question, and mainstream civil rights leaders knew it. “Deep in the heart of every black adult, lives some of Malcolm X and some of Martin Luther King, side by side,” noted Farmer, whose organization, CORE, seemed to embody the schizophrenic feelings of the movement in 1964. And nowhere were those feelings more conflicted than among the radical members of CORE’s Brooklyn chapter.

  The turning point for these young activists, who were mostly under thirty, had been the disappointing campaign at Brooklyn’s Downstate Medical Center, which they had helped organize with local religious leaders. Construction jobs for members of the largely black community where the center was being built seemed like a reasonable and fair request for a taxpayer-funded public works project—hardly revolutionary by any standard. After weeks of protests, nearly seven hundred arrests, and a near-riot, Governor Rockefeller and Mayor Wagner had met with activists and union leaders. Goodwill expressed all around; committees formed; promises made; and then nothing. “[We have] used every means at our disposal to awaken the City Fathers of New York to the crying needs of their city,” Isaiah Brunson, the twenty-two-year-old former auto mechanic who eventually became the chairman of the Brooklyn chapter, explained months later. “We have picketed, boycotted, sat-in, lied-in, etc. All of our efforts have been in vain.” Up until this juncture, Brooklyn CORE had mostly gone along with the direction of the organization’s national leadership—they marched, they protested, they wrote letters. But the lack of results militarized the organization.

  One of the chapter’s most active and strident members was public relations officer Arnold Goldwag, who often acted a provocateur, particularly when writing to the nation’s leaders. In March 1963, after the Ku Klux Klan attacked civil rights workers in Greenwood, Mississippi, Goldwag repeatedly sent telegrams to Attorney General Robert Kennedy, demanding he order federal troops to protect them:

  Attempted murder; organized genocide; klan terrorism in Greenwood, Mississippi and yet you wait. The German people waited too—until Hitler became a Frankenstein. What are you waiting for till Greenwood becomes Auschwitz?

  This wasn’t how King and Farmer—frequent guests in the Kennedy White House—usually addressed the attorney general or his brother, the president. But Goldwag didn’t care: He called out Kennedy for being soft on the KKK, just as Kennedy’s father, Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. had been soft on the Nazis while serving as Roosevelt’s Ambassador to the United Kingdom (a historical fact that the Jewish Goldwag was probably keenly aware of). A few months later, when President Kennedy made his landmark civil rights speech, Goldwag struck a more conciliatory tone, congratulating the president’s stand: “Carry on the good fight,” he encouraged the president, “and we’ll all be free in ’63!”

  Goldwag had a knack for provocative commentary. He would generate significant media attention for Brooklyn CORE (and a slew of press clippings for his collection). In December 1963, when Baldwin and actors/activists Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis called for a ban on Christmas gift buying in memory of the four young victims of the Birmingham Church bombings, Goldwag explained their position to the media: “And to those who talk about traditions—and who live by the credo of ‘Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus’—we say No Santa Claus because there is a Virginia, there is a Mississippi and there is a Birmingham!”

  A short man with a round baby face and deep-set, intense eyes, Goldwag was a college dropout from Williamsburg, Brooklyn, raised in a religious Jewish family and expected to become a rabbi like his older brother. Against his parents’ wishes, he got involved with the civil rights movement after learning about it while attending the Jacob Joseph Yeshiva on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. “That’s when I first learned about democracy,” he said. He joined the local chapter of CORE in 1961 and became a regular fixture at their office on Nostrand Avenue in Bedford-Stuyvesant, even sleeping in the cramped quarters.

  By 1964 Goldwag, who smoked four packs of cigarettes a day, slept only four hours a night, and whose diet consisted of cake and black coffee, had been arrested nearly thirty times in various campaigns, including at the Downstate Medical Center protests, where he and several other protestors climbed on top of a construction crane; a photograph of the scene—with Goldwag front and center—was featured in the New York Times.

  It was clear to Goldwag and the members of Brooklyn CORE that a new kind of direct action, a new form of protest, was needed to address the city’s racial problems. Other radical New York activists, such as the outspoken Reverend Milton A. Galamison of Bedford-Stuyvesant’s Siloam Presbyterian Church, had come to the same conclusion. National leaders of CORE, the NAACP, and the Urban L
eague organized a February 3, 1964, school boycott to desegregate the New York Public School System. By all accounts it was a success—nearly half of the city’s students skipped school that day. Unfortunately for the proponents of integration, their solidarity was met with stony silence from the New York City Board of Education.

  Reverend Galamison, who had supported the boycott, now declared the city’s public education system beyond redemption, claiming it should be “destroyed.” His militant and violent rhetoric—a radical departure from mainstream civil rights groups—wasn’t necessarily meant to get results, but it did grab attention from politicians, the media, and white New Yorkers, especially those with school-age children.

  Allying itself with Reverend Galamison, the Harlem chapter of CORE organized a blockade of the Triborough Bridge—built by Moses in 1936—linking themselves arm-in-arm and dumping bags of garbage on the road, grinding traffic to a standstill. Although their action was nonviolent, it was deliberately provocative, and drew no distinction between ordinary citizens and those elected (or unelected) officials who promoted—or did nothing to change—New York’s discriminatory practices. Yet this protest that was meant to draw attention to the poor quality of Harlem schools really only resulted in numerous arrests, considerable anger from the public, and condemnation from editorialists (the Times claimed the protests did “a disservice to civil rights”). It also drew a line across the city, as distinct as Fifth Avenue: On one side was a new style of civil rights activists; on the other was everyone else. When Galamison called for a second school boycott, city officials braced themselves for anything.

  Senator Hubert H. Humphrey, one of the most passionate supporters of civil rights in either political party—he wrote the Democrats’ 1948 civil rights plank that Johnson had called “a farce and a sham”—chimed in, afraid that the events in New York would derail the struggling civil rights bill. Along with Senator Thomas Kuchel, a Republican from California, the senators lectured the New York activists that “civil wrongs do not bring civil rights.”

  It was in this atmosphere that members of Brooklyn CORE continued with their plans of a grand gesture, one immense act of civil disobedience that would command the attention of not only Mayor Wagner, Governor Rockefeller, and Moses, but also of the media and all of New York City. If their gesture were grand enough—and yes, theatrical enough—it would grab the attention of the president and Congress, indeed the entire political establishment of the nation, the very people who had so egregiously ignored the demand for racial justice for so long.

  Lomax had first raised the notion of a World’s Fair stall-in back in July 1963, during a speech at Queens College. He called for five hundred drivers to make their way to the Fair in their automobiles and, by running out of gas or simply stopping on the way there, create a traffic jam of historical proportions. Moses’ beloved network of newly renovated highways would be used as a roadblock, preventing tens of thousands from attending his Fair. Brooklyn CORE now seized on Lomax’s suggestion: the World’s Fair would be their target.

  Zenlike in its simplicity, the plan also brought the World’s Fair full circle: Twenty-five years earlier at the 1939 World’s Fair, GM’s Futurama exhibit mesmerized millions with its vision of the World of Tomorrow—a world of automobiles and highways; an imaginary Tomorrow-Land that Moses had spent his life making a reality; a world that, he bragged shortly after taking charge of the World’s Fair, “was already in the process of being realized.” Now, in 1964, civil rights activists would transform the automobile and the highway—those two potent symbols of the Modern Age—into weapons of mass disruption. From the protesters’ point of view, the timing couldn’t be better: World leaders would be at the Fair, and some seventy-five television cameras would be positioned around the Fairgrounds to capture the excitement of opening day; the world would—quite literally—be watching.

  In a joint statement on April 4, the Brooklyn and Bronx chapters of CORE announced their plan to disrupt the opening of the World’s Fair on April 22 unless the city addressed the problems of job discrimination, police brutality, slum housing, and poor schools—immediately. “While millions of dollars are being spent on the World’s Fair, thousands of Black & Puerto Rican people are suffering,” the statement read:

  There will be no peace or rest until every child is afforded an opportunity to obtain high-quality education, and until significant changes are made in all areas mentioned. The World’s Fair cannot be permitted to operate without protest from those who are angered by conditions which have been permitted to exist for so long—conditions which deny millions of Americans rights guaranteed them by the Constitution of the United States. We want all our freedom!!! We want it here!!! We want it Now!!!

  Five days later Goldwag sent a telegram to Mayor Wagner, Governor Rockefeller, and Moses with another ultimatum:

  The people of this community are fed up with empty promises and pious pronouncements. Unless you formulate and begin to implement a comprehensive program, by April 20, which will end police brutality, abolish slum housing and provide integrated quality education for all—we will fully support and help organize a community-backed plan to immobilize all traffic leading to the World’s Fair on opening day.

  Although civil rights groups had been lobbying Moses to appoint more blacks to executive positions at the Fair—to date there were two, Dr. Ralph J. Bunche and baseball icon Jackie Robinson—and to use his considerable power to force union leaders to hire more African Americans and Puerto Ricans for several years, Brooklyn CORE wasn’t interested in such simple objectives. They wanted to make a symbolic point: that the World’s Fair was being hosted in a city that was anything but fair. “Our objective is to have our own civil rights exhibit at the World’s Fair,” noted Oliver Leeds, another leader of the Brooklyn chapter. “We do not see why white people should enjoy themselves when Negroes are suffering.”

  Although Brooklyn CORE’s rhetoric was belligerent and confrontational—radically different than that of mainstream activists—the stall-in would be an act of pure nonviolent civil disobedience. When asked why they would disrupt the World’s Fair just to make their point, the activists claimed they had no choice. “The Power Structure of this City, State and Country must be made to realize that we will accept palliation no longer,” Brunson, the Brooklyn CORE chairman explained. “Empty promises, investigatory committees, and such have done nothing to alleviate the problems that exist.”

  Few honest New Yorkers could disagree.

  However, the backlash began immediately. The first to react was Farmer, CORE’s national chairman, who called the notion a “harebrained idea.” After a contentious meeting with the Brooklyn activists at his Manhattan apartment that went until four in the morning, he suspended the group on April 11, a move that brought indignation from several of CORE’s other New York chapters. “We are not splitting with them,” Farmer told the New York Times, “they are splitting with us.”

  While Farmer struggled to gain control of his organization—as one member of CORE’s steering committee quipped, the stall-in “won’t end segregation but it might end CORE”—other national civil rights groups tried to make light of the proposed protests. The NAACP’s Roy Wilkins, who lived in Queens, dismissed the stall-in organizers’ rhetoric as “strictly Brooklynese”—a snobbish comment that only amused the Brooklyn chapter. “Oh, you’re so right, baby!” laughed a Brooklyn activist after hearing Wilkins’s snide remark.

  City officials were outraged. Police Commissioner Michael J. Murphy declared that New York’s Finest would “protect the constitutional rights” of anyone “to peacefully assemble and petition,” but he had an obligation to protect “all men to the pursuit of happiness . . . the World’s Fair should be a happy occasion in a somewhat far from happy world. No unlawful acts by any groups will be allowed to mar it.” Traffic Commissioner Henry A. Barnes—one of Moses’ favorite punching bags—quickly added a new law to the books making it il
legal to intentionally run out of gas on a New York City roadway. Although he announced the law days after the Brooklyn group’s announcement, Barnes told reporters with a straight face that the new rule had nothing to do with the stall-in. And then, just to keep the city’s thermostat at a roiling temperature, Goldwag announced that his Brooklyn unit was planning on wasting millions of gallons of water by turning on New York City faucets just in case the stall-in didn’t yield the desired results.

  The media’s condemnation of the activists was swift. “The projected traffic tie-up can win few converts to the civil rights banner,” complained the New York Post. “It will provide new ammunition from racists—here and in Washington . . . it will in short be a form of sound and fury, carrying no clear message to most of the populace.” As Time’s Theodore H. White memorably quipped, the traffic jam would amount to a “grab at the groin of a community of 10 million” New Yorkers.

  Ordinary citizens flooded newspaper editors with letters. Some were from liberals concerned that the protest “would turn many people against the Negro cause,” while others wrote that protesters should be arrested for “loitering, inciting to riot, and being plain fools.” Some letters, sent directly to Brooklyn CORE’s office, were unabashedly racist. “The colored people of Brooklyn want to be and act like parasites that should be exterminated,” one anonymous writer wrote, adding “You Will Be Judged by Your Acts.” Another note, written on NYC Board of Education letterhead, read, “Why you miserable blacksonofabitch! How dare you threaten the World’s Fair and the Christian White Power structure of this City? You nigger bastards belong in Africa not here among genteel white Christian folk! We hope the police break your black ape heads on [opening day]! So drop dead!” One black woman from Manhattan wrote to the Daily News to express her disdain for the plan, suggesting that every car used in the protest should be towed away, and every driver’s license suspended for one year. “I was hired to work at the Fair,” she wrote. “I am a Negro, and I think this tie-up stuff is just too much.”