Tomorrow-Land
Page 21
The threats of a stall-in ruining the World’s Fair filled the liberal political establishment with fear. Like Senator Humphrey, President Johnson worried any disturbance at the World’s Fair would empower the Senate’s bloc of Dixiecrats, who at that very moment were staging their own stall-in by making sure the civil rights bill didn’t get anywhere. Such extreme measures in the streets of New York, Johnson told reporters, would “do the civil rights cause no good.”
On April 16, at a meeting of the American Society of Newspaper Editors in Washington, DC, Farmer continued to condemn the actions of his organization’s rogue chapter. But he told the largely white editors in the audience that while he disapproved of their methods, he understood their viewpoint; there was a “growing frustration, anger, militancy” among young blacks throughout the country, he warned, and unless action—real action rather than more broken promises—was delivered, the future didn’t bode well for America.
Speaking at the same conference, Attorney General Kennedy struck a similar note, condemning the stall-in as irresponsible and urging the Senate to pass the civil rights bill his late brother had introduced the previous June. If the Senate didn’t act soon, Kennedy predicted, young African Americans might start to believe that “there’s no future for [them] in this system.” What Kennedy either didn’t know or failed to acknowledge was that many young activists in New York and elsewhere had already come to that conclusion.
It was apparent to anyone who was watching that the civil rights movement was hardly united under one banner or philosophy: A fissure exposed its warring factions, and the NAACP’s Wilkins, one of the most moderate of the national leaders, wanted it fixed, and quickly. He sought a consensus from the top civil rights groups, and joined by Farmer, the Urban League’s Whitney Young, and the SNCC’s John Lewis, issued a statement that same day, declaring the stall-in a “revolutionary proposal” that was not in “the broad interests and needs of the Negro people,” and characterizing the protest as “neither orderly or nonviolent.”
While it is hard to imagine a mammoth New York traffic jam being orderly, declaring the protest as something other than nonviolent was pure spin. Lewis, one of the original Freedom Riders, apparently agreed. The next day Lewis, who was as devoted to Gandhian principles as Farmer or King, and who had sustained severe beatings at the hands of Southern racists, withdrew his name and organization from the hastily organized statement. There was “no evidence,” he stated, that the stall-in violated “the time-honored tactics of civil disobedience.”
Wilkins and the others told reporters that King, who had not signed the anti-stall-in statement, would eventually join them in condemning the actions of the rogue CORE activists. But King, the personification of the civil rights struggle for millions of Americans, had other ideas. In a plaintive letter to Wilkins, King admitted that he considered the stall-in a “tactical error,” but flatly refused to condemn the young activists. “Which is worse, a ‘Stall-In’ at the World’s Fair or a ‘Stall-In’ in the United States Senate?” he pointedly asked. “The former merely ties up the traffic of a single city. But the latter seeks to tie up the traffic of history, and endanger the psychological lives of twenty million people.”
Sensing the seismic shift in the civil rights movement he had helped lead for nearly a decade, King attempted to explain the tactics of the Brooklyn activists to a broader audience. “The World’s Fair action must be viewed in the broader context of 20,000,000 Negroes living in an unfair world,” he wrote in a statement to the press, “facing grinding poverty and humiliating denial of elementary and fundamental rights to equal accommodation, voting, housing, education and jobs.”
The split stance of the mainstream civil rights leaders only bolstered the militant posturing of Brooklyn CORE, who quickly found allies rallying to their side. Already aligned with CORE’s Bronx chapter as well as Reverend Galamison’s organization, Brooklyn CORE accepted pledges of support and the promise to send drivers from other local chapters—Manhattan, Long Island, Columbia University—and SNCC activists from Washington, Maryland, and Pennsylvania. “You do not stand alone,” one supporter wrote to the group. And at least one New York union leader, John J. Felury, president of the Sanitation Men’s Local 831, told reporters that none of his ten thousand sanitation workers would report to work on April 22 if the city ordered them to tow cars. “We’re not going to scab on anyone fighting for freedom or civil rights,” he said.
Meanwhile, activists around the city passed out leaflets, many of them handwritten with drawings of the Unisphere, to rally drivers for their cause. “Drive awhile for freedom,” exhorted one flyer. “Take only enough gas to get your car on exhibit on one of these highways,” it read, and listed the five roadways they would target: the Grand Central Parkway, the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, the Belt Parkway, the Interboro Parkway, and the Van Wyck Expressway—every one of them built or refurbished by Moses.
Throughout the hectic weeks leading up to the World’s Fair, when every day brought a new drama to the stall-in saga, Moses was curiously quiet. Perhaps, after decades of spouting off at his enemies—both real and imagined—the Master Builder had learned that silence could be the better side of valor. With his historical unfriendliness toward civil rights activists and his combative nature, his usual pontifications in the press could only make things worse. Already, unbeknownst to Moses, one of the activists had circulated a flyer with his picture (cut out from the New York Times) accentuated by several hand-drawn arrows pointed at his image and the words: The Target April 22 1964.
Privately, Moses used his connections with his friends in the media elite to write editorials coaxing city officials to come down hard on the would-be protesters. Writing his friend Jack Flynn, publisher of the Daily News, he suggested any driver whose car stalled on April 22 should have his license, registration, and liability insurance revoked—permanently. “A fine is not the answer,” Moses declared. “The penalty of forfeiting the right to drive seems the best suggestion made.” At a preview of the Illinois Pavilion, which would soon mesmerize Fairgoers with its animated Abraham Lincoln, Moses sat silently as his friend Adlai Stevenson, the former governor of Illinois, former great liberal hope of the Democratic Party, and at the time US Ambassador to the UN, criticized the stall-in as a “civil wrong” and declared that there must be “respect for law and order.”
But ultimately and quite uncharacteristically, Moses felt powerless as the threat of the stall-in grew. When his friend Robert Daru, a well-connected lawyer, offered his legal assistance to battle the activists, Moses politely declined. “The trouble is that the main part of this problem lies outside of the Fair and is directly under the city administration and the Police Commissioner,” Moses complained. “I have no doubt of Commissioner Murphy’s ability and courage but some of the others who ought to be heard from have been singularly silent.” He closed the letter by stating he was confident his Pinkerton police force could meet any challenges inside the Fair but that what happens outside the Fair’s gates was beyond his control. “There are indeed a number of things which could be done,” he lamented, “but I am not in a position to advocate, much less do them.”
All along Moses had been preoccupied with the press coverage of the World’s Fair. Now, here was a story that couldn’t be ignored: a traffic jam intended to prevent tens of thousands of Fairgoers from reaching their destination. Given the city’s roiling racial turmoil of the past year, it wasn’t hard to imagine that such an undertaking—even if it was a nonviolent act of civil disobedience—could touch off a full-blown race riot. And Moses’ worst fears were realized when one would-be Fairgoer from Clayton, Ohio, wrote him to say that after reading reports about the civil rights activities in New York, he had decided against subjecting “our children to such unhuman [sic] like actions, this degrading spectacle . . . we have decided to cancel our reservations and take our vacation in a more human atmosphere somewhere else.”
By now
the players in the stall-in drama were busy ratcheting up their rhetoric. Farmer announced that he would lead activists from National CORE in a “positive” counterdemonstration inside the World’s Fair, specifically targeting the exhibits of Jim Crow–supporting Southern state pavilions like Louisiana. Farmer would brandish a cattle prod, just like the ones that Louisiana police used on civil rights workers, and some of his activists might attempt to scale the twelve-story Unisphere. This new CORE protest would illustrate “the contrast of the glittering fantasy of the technical abundance” of the World’s Fair with “the real world of discrimination, poverty and brutality faced by the Negroes of America, North and South.” Millions of people would be attending the Fair; millions, Farmer noted, who remained neutral on the issue of racial discrimination. “We hope to get them off the fence,” he said.
But for all Farmer’s high-handed talk, his real motivation for leading this new protest was to reclaim control of CORE. “The success or failure of the stall-in loomed as a test of my strength within CORE,” he later admitted.
Meanwhile, his erstwhile members held a press conference at the Hotel Theresa in Harlem—Malcolm X’s de facto office after his split with the Nation of Islam—announcing they had 1,800 drivers pledged to stall on the roadways. In fact, they claimed, they had so many volunteers that they were now planning on having people block various bridges, and tunnels around the city with their bodies and stacks of garbage and other debris as well as block subway cars and the Long Island Rail Road. The whole thing now was beyond their control, they claimed. “It’s not so much that CORE is planning [the stall-in] but that the man in the street is going to do it,” Leeds told reporters. “From what I’ve heard in Bedford-Stuyvesant, neither CORE nor anyone else is going to be able to stop him. That’s the beauty of this whole operation.” A last-minute effort by the Queens DA, who met the stall-in leaders for a half hour in his office at the Kew Gardens courthouse to get them to reconsider, led to nothing. Later that day he served the stall-in leaders with papers declaring their proposed protest illegal.
As opening day approached, Mayor Wagner announced that the city wasn’t taking any chances. All roads leading in and out of Queens, he said, would be swarming with 1,100 officers in police cars, accompanied by dozens of tow trucks; three command centers would be set up; and there would be a police presence on every subway. That was on terra firma; from the sky, police helicopters would be hovering, including one that was capable of lifting an automobile into the air. As far as the city was concerned, this was war.
Mayor Wagner engaged in his own histrionics when, on the eve of opening day, he called the activists’ plans “a gun to the heart of the city”—exactly the kind of violent imagery that Moses thought did nothing to counter New York’s growing reputation as a savage city or benefit the World’s Fair. Later that night, the New York Times put together a story about a meeting of stall-in leaders who claimed drivers from Philadelphia and New Jersey were in New York already, prepared to risk their cars. “[The stall-in] is planned to dramatize the Negroes’ dissatisfaction with the pace of civil rights progress,” the Times reported on its front page the next day. “No power on earth can stop it now.”
21.
Unless we can achieve the theme of this fair—“Peace Through Understanding”—unless we can use our skill and our wisdom to conquer conflict as we have conquered science—then our hopes of today—these proud achievements—will go under in the devastation of tomorrow.
—President Lyndon B. Johnson at the World’s Fair opening ceremony
After five long years of negotiations and toil, the opening day of the World’s Fair—April 22, 1964—finally arrived. As millions of New Yorkers awoke that morning to an unseasonably chilly day and rainy skies, more like late autumn than early spring, crowds gathered at the Fair’s gates, anxious to roam the 646 acres of manicured Fairgrounds where oblong-, pylon-, and ziggurat-shaped pavilions had been taking shape for more than a year.
When the gates opened at 9:00 a.m., the first visitor of the day was ushered in: eighteen-year-old Bill Turchyn, a freshman from St. Peter’s College in Jersey City, who had been waiting—first in line—for nearly two days, braving the rain and cold. Standing behind him, along with thousands of others, was Michael Catan, who twenty-five years earlier had been the first customer at the 1939–40 World’s Fair.
Third in line that blustery morning, and equally intent on making history, was a big-band jazz drummer from Chicago named Al Carter, an admitted fair buff. Carter loved being first; in fact, he had made an art of it: He had been the first paying customer to enter Chicago’s 1933 Century of Progress exhibition, as well as Seattle’s Century 21 Exposition two years before (and he would be the first paying customer at Montreal’s Expo ’67 three years later). “I like to participate in moments of history,” Carter told the New York Times. “That’s my hobby. Is it any crazier than those people who collect little pieces of paper—stamps?” That was exactly the kind of enthusiasm and dedication that Robert Moses was banking on.
Despite the weather, the festivities went along as scheduled. The opening parade featured five thousand people marching in the rain before the reviewing stand, where the Fair’s executive vice president, General William E. Potter, saluted them. The paraders were a microcosm of the World’s Fair itself, in all its multicultural glory: bagpipers (from three countries); a Chinese drum and bugle corps; Montana cowboys; Japanese geishas; Spanish guitarists (plus flamenco dancers); the University of Pennsylvania’s 101-piece marching band; a horse-drawn beer wagon from Germany; a steel-drum troupe from the Caribbean; an Israeli accordionist; a soaked-to-the-bone Miss Louisiana, who smiled bravely in her strapless sequined dress while perched in a slow-moving red convertible; and several Walt Disney characters.
Unbeknownst to the paraders and revelers, a short distance away at the 74th Street and Broadway station in Jackson Heights, the first protests of the day had already taken place. After threatening to bring New York’s arterial highway system to a halt, the activists of Brooklyn CORE and their cohorts opted to target the city’s subway system. In response, Mayor Robert F. Wagner Jr. and Police Commissioner Michael J. Murphy had stationed a cop on every subway car; all twenty-five thousand members of New York’s Finest had been activated for duty, like a heavily fortified army ready to defend its homeland from foreign marauders.
The No. 7 Train in Queens, the “official” World’s Fair subway—“Just pay 15 cents—hop aboard!—and you’re on your way / Yes, part of the fun of the World’s Fair is the Subway Special that takes you there” promised a Metropolitan Transit Authority TV commercial—provided an easy and inexpensive way for millions of travelers to get to the Fairgrounds and Shea Stadium. It was also an obvious target for protesters.
The trouble started around 6:00 a.m. when four teenagers—three boys and a girl—blocked the subway doors from closing on a Fair-bound train at the 74th Street station. The police quickly surrounded the youths, who refused to budge while clutching the doors. Officers pried their hands loose by bashing their knuckles with nightsticks, and the quartet was promptly arrested. About an hour later, at the same station in Queens, a crowd of fifty teenagers rushed another train, holding open its doors and shouting “Freedom Now!” and “Jim Crow must go!” Dozens of police moved in. When the protesters refused to move, officers dragged them away by their feet.
“This is America!” one black youth shouted as he was carried away. “Look what they’re doing to a sixteen-year-old boy who wants freedom!”
Another black protester asked his arresting officer, also black, if the white policemen called him a “boy back at the station.” His response was to bash the protester with his club. An older black woman thought the cops were going too easy on the teens. “What they need is bayonets stuck in them,” she said.
When it was over, seven people were injured in the melee, four protestors hospitalized for head wounds and three police offic
ers. Twenty-three people were arrested in all, four of them charged with felonious assault. A CBS reporter saw the whole thing. “The police did their job but it required a great deal of force,” he told the New York Times, “and a number of people got hurt quite badly.”
The incident illustrated how the racial dynamics in the North differed from its Southern counterpart. These weren’t Bull Connor’s racist Southern policemen happily beating peaceful protesters chanting “We Shall Overcome”; this was Queens, New York, already one of the country’s fastest-growing melting pots—a pastiche of cultures and ethnicities—with both an integrated police force and a subway system. In New York’s racial landscape, black policemen faced not only on-the-job discrimination, but also taunting from young activists, as subway riders—black and white—nodded their consent as they watched those same officers use brute force against civil rights protesters.
For many Northern Democratic voters, using civil disobedience to end the South’s Jim Crow laws was one thing; using similar tactics to end discrimination in New York was something else entirely. Somewhere Connor and Senator Richard B. Russell were smiling, while ensconced at his Wall Street law firm former vice president Richard Nixon was taking notes—and calculating the political benefits of a potential “backlash” among white working-class voters—while plotting his political comeback.
Despite the disruptions to the No. 7 Train, the highways outside the World’s Fair were nearly empty—at least by New York City rush hour standards. So were the bridges and tunnels. As police stood in the rain wearing yellow slickers or patrolled the roads in black-and-white cruisers, tow trucks roamed nearby and helicopters hovered overhead. In fact, there was nary a traffic problem to be found—only a dozen drivers were arrested when their cars stalled. Firebrand preacher Reverend Milton A. Galamison and comedian/activist Dick Gregory drove to Queens but quickly realized the stall-in wasn’t happening. For all their ballast, the Brooklyn activists couldn’t pull it off. With nothing else to do, Galamison suggested they head back to the church and regroup. “Regroup what?” quipped Gregory, who would use the stall-in as a punch line in his comedy routine.