According to the official police account, one of the black teens, James Powell, age sixteen, produced a pocketknife and went after the superintendent with the intention of cutting him. Others said there was no knife and that Powell never threatened to cut anyone. But by then, an off-duty policeman, Lieutenant Thomas Gilligan, had arrived and drew his gun. Witnesses said Powell and the other teens ran. Gilligan said Powell lunged at him with the knife, giving him no choice but to defend himself. He opened fire, shooting Powell dead. Some people claimed that Gilligan shot Powell in the back as the teen ran away; some said the officer emptied his weapon into the young man’s body until Powell was riddled with bullets and lay bleeding to death on a New York City sidewalk.
Gilligan then reportedly flipped the body over with his foot. Although a knife was found on the body, that was hardly proof to most black New Yorkers. (CORE’s Farmer would later say that black police had told him white cops always carried knives to plant on the bodies of their shooting victims, just in case evidence was needed.) Many people questioned the likelihood that a 122-pound black teenager would charge a 200-pound white policeman—who was armed and had a license to kill—with nothing more than a penknife.
Soon enough, the other kids in the school program—as many as eight hundred students—heard about the shooting and rushed over to the scene. So did police reinforcements. In no time at all, the two opposing sides squared off. Black teens threw bottles at the white policemen, taunting them, “Come on, shoot another nigger!” One teen, standing in the glass-splattered streets of Mayor Wagner’s old neighborhood, screamed what many black New Yorkers had been thinking for a long time: “This is worse than Mississippi!”
Two days later, on July 18, uptown New York exploded into open warfare. It started just hours after a peaceful CORE rally in Harlem for the missing Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman, whose trail, aside from the burned-out blue Ford station wagon that the trio had last been seen in, had gone cold. As far as the crowd was concerned, the missing Freedom Summer workers in Mississippi and the Harlem teenager shot to death on the streets of New York were victims of the same vicious hatred. Whether that hatred was born in Ol’ Dixie or in the Northern ghettos didn’t matter. Southern racist sheriffs or racist New York cops—in the minds of many Harlemites, there was hardly any daylight between the two.
Reverend Nelson C. Dukes, the pastor of the local Fountain Spring Baptist Church, had had enough. He stood on a chair and angrily addressed the crowd. A crime had been committed, and the guilty party—Officer Gilligan—was still free. Reverend Dukes said they would march to the nearby police precinct and demand that Gilligan be arrested and charged with murder. As they roamed the streets of Harlem, the mob took on a life of its own. By the time they arrived at the station, they were shouting “Killers, murderers, Murphy’s rats!”—as in Commissioner Murphy, who by now was a regular target of activists’ ire and frustrations. The crowd tried to get inside. A human wall of policemen, arms interlocked, held them back.
The police pushed the crowd back out to the pavement. Bottles, rocks, and anything else that could be thrown hailed down to the street from local rooftops. Soon a bus with a special unit of judo-trained police officers arrived: Each was at least six feet tall, young, and prepared to fight hand-to-hand combat. The citizens of Harlem started turning on their own neighborhood, smashing windows, especially those of white-owned stores, which forced black proprietors to hastily make signs to hang in their windows—Black Owned—or stand and protect their shops with their lives.
More police arrived, some wearing riot gear, many wielding nightsticks and swinging them at anything that moved—men, women, teens—as bottles shattered on the streets, rocks pelted the police, and Molotov cocktails exploded. (“It’ll be Molotov cocktails this month, hand grenades next month and something else next month,” Malcolm X had said. “It’ll be ballots or it’ll be bullets.”)
In response, police emptied their guns into the open air, firing warning shot after warning shot, trying to disperse the crowd. They ran into tenements with their weapons drawn to reach the roof and occupy it, as if each rooftop was a Viet Cong stronghold that had to be neutralized.
“Go home!” police shouted, attempting to clear the streets.
“We are home, baby!” came the response.
At one o’clock in the morning, the phone at Farmer’s downtown apartment rang. A voice told him, “You’d better get your ass up here fast! Harlem is blowing up like a volcano! . . . The cops are shooting like cowboys.” Farmer took the subway to Harlem, and when he got there, he found out that description was accurate. Seeing the tragedy unfolding before his eyes, Farmer did his best to calm the crowd down. When he told a throng of angry Harlemites that great strides were being made down south, they booed.
“We don’t wanna hear that shit!” someone shouted back him.
When Farmer said, “Now I’m bringing the movement north, so we can deal with the problems of the northern ghettos,” he received cheers. He got their attention by recounting meetings with City Councilman Paul Screvane (who was also a member of the World’s Fair Executive Committee) demanding more black cops in Harlem (reportedly a difficult assignment to get due to the potential for lucrative bribes and payoffs that police extracted from Harlem’s criminal class). More cheers.
But even Farmer couldn’t keep the peace. He marshaled a crowd into a protest march, in the hopes that as the crowd moved through the Harlem streets, he and his CORE workers could convince them to return to their homes. “If we pass by your house, man, drop out and go home,” he told the marchers. It was working until gunfire erupted. Who fired—and at whom—was unknown. At the first sound of gunfire, those stationed on rooftops resumed tossing bricks and bottles; cops responded by firing in the air, unable to see their assailants. The crowd scattered; even Farmer wanted to run for cover. Joe Overton of the NAACP, who was leading the march with him, quickly reminded him that as the leader, he couldn’t run away.
Another civil rights leader, Bayard Rustin, who had devoted his life to left-wing causes and nonviolence, was there that night and had been shouting into a bullhorn, telling his fellow Harlemites to stay calm. For his efforts he was shouted down as an Uncle Tom. “I am prepared to be a Tom if that’s the only way I can save women and children from being shot down in the street!” replied the organizer of the March on Washington—which young Powell had attended. “And if you’re not willing to do the same, you’re fools!”
The Battle of Harlem raged all night. Finally, as dawn rose over the city, a ghostly quiet filed the glass-covered streets. Shops were destroyed; fifteen people had been shot, while scores were injured, including a dozen cops. More than two hundred people were arrested. And the battle would continue for the next two nights. The crowd that gathered in front of the funeral parlor holding Powell would attack three New York Times journalists—one Times photographer was beaten so brutally that he almost lost an eye—and other whites who happened to wander into the war zone.
The insurrection quickly became a problem for President Johnson. The Republicans had just selected the ultraconservative Senator Goldwater from Arizona as their presidential nominee the week before at their National Convention in San Francisco. Goldwater, who had voted against the Civil Rights Act, was courting the racist vote, while Southerners now added Lyndon Johnson to their most-hated list, which included the likes of Earl Warren, John F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King. Goldwater would hit Johnson hard if the president failed to intervene in New York City but had sent Hoover’s FBI men into Mississippi.
Johnson had no choice but to have Hoover work up a report on the New York City disturbances. Naturally Hoover thought the riot was the work of Communists, while Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller, in a phone call to the FBI director, suggested that it might have been the work of right-wing groups. After all, Rockefeller said, Goldwater supporters had taunted him at the Republican convention, a riotous and raucous affair with no
love lost between activists from Rockefeller’s liberal wing of the Grand Old Party and the conservative zealots of the Goldwater wing. His own party deemed that race riots would soon embarrass the New York governor, who for the second consecutive presidential cycle failed to secure the Republican nomination.
And it wasn’t just Harlem. Soon Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant district, New York’s second-largest black neighborhood, was burning, as well as Rochester, New York. Insurrection spread to Jersey City and to Philadelphia, too. Forced to choose between the ballot and the bullet, many urban blacks chose the latter, just as Malcolm X had predicted they would. Many observers felt that the Muslim preacher was behind the riots—the thought certainly crossed President Johnson’s mind—but, in fact, Malcolm was traveling through Africa and the Middle East, encountering Islam in its purest form, in the part of the world where the Prophet Muhammad originally preached it. When Malcolm returned to the United States, he would undergo self-transformation once again.
When the US government’s final report was issued in September, the New York Times cited it as characterizing the riots as a series of “attacks on authority,” not a racial disturbance. The NAACP’s Roy Wilkins was pleased—he had feared the uprisings would damage the greater cause of civil rights. Intentional or not, Hoover had helped the movement by airbrushing the racial component of the conflict out of the picture. But by doing so, the FBI and the nation’s political leadership missed the point entirely.
Urban ghettos were repositories for a slew of social problems: rundown housing, rat-infested streets, horrible public schools, subpar hospitals, and rampant crime, including the crime that dare not be named—police brutality. Such places were prime examples—Exhibit A, in fact—of the death knell of American cities. Their very existence was proof positive that America was failing to provide real opportunities for all its citizens. And the irony, of course, was that these ghettos existed in the North, where blacks were free to vote.
The Harlem riots were the latest example that New York City—home and host of the 1964–65 World’s Fair—was imploding. Race riots, the murder of Kitty Genovese, pollution, soaring violent crime—all were the mark of a great metropolis in decline. Or as a Fortune magazine cover story put it shortly before the FBI report was released, New York was “a city destroying itself.”
While a young black teen was shot dead under extremely questionable circumstances, and while Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant burned, Mayor Robert F. Wagner Jr. vacationed on the sunny Mediterranean island of Mallorca. Cautious as ever, the mayor didn’t think it was necessary to fly home while the two largest black neighborhoods in his city burned. “New Yorkers scarcely missed him,” wrote Richard J. Whalen, the author of the Fortune story. “They have come to expect deep silence from City Hall in any emergency.”
When Wagner finally returned, ahead of schedule, he immediately met with King at City Hall on July 29, in the hopes of finding a solution to the root causes of the Harlem riots. More jobs were needed. New York slums had only grown worse since the end of the war and the emergence of Title I and “slum clearance”—the details of which Wagner, like his predecessors, had left in the hands of Moses. Wagner knew—and just about everyone in New York City and in Albany knew—that giving Moses an enormous task meant giving the Master Builder license to do whatever he wanted. It mattered little if Moses’ solutions—invariably erecting soulless high-rise slab towers in once bustling, if poor, neighborhoods—worked or not. Few had the fortitude to challenge the Master Builder, least of all Mayor Wagner.
The mayor and King agreed on just about everything except Lieutenant Gilligan. King argued that the New York policeman should be suspended or, at the very least, put on leave. But Wagner and his staff wouldn’t go for it. Such a move would only encourage those who wanted a civilian police review board and, in their view, undercut police authority. Wagner was dead-set against such measures. A review board made up of citizens, he would later tell President Johnson and the First Lady at a private meeting at the White House, would kill New York’s Finest’s morale, dropping it to “zero overnight.” King was unconcerned about police morale, singling out Police Commissioner Michael J. Murphy as “utterly unresponsive to either the demands or the aspirations of the Negro people” and claiming that Murphy was doing all he could to block any civilian review board from trying to “investigate charges of police brutality.” And, in fact, the police commissioner was.
As New Yorkers pondered the meaning of the riots, down south the urban disturbances were all the proof that the anti–civil rights forces needed. Mississippians who resented the presence of the Freedom Summer workers, the reporters from around the nation, and the scores of FBI agents felt vindicated that just weeks after the Civil Rights Act was signed into law, blacks in New York had erupted in a frenzy of destruction, burning down their own neighborhoods and turning parts of New York into a war zone. “It is a sad commentary that while mobs stalk the streets of New York,” said one Mississippi US representative, “. . . some 15,000 so-called civil rights workers and troublemakers are in Mississippi—a state with the nation’s lowest crime rate—subjecting innocent, law abiding people to insult, national scorn and creating trouble.” There were still those in Mississippi who denied that Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman had been murdered—such as Senator Eastland, who even in late July was still claiming the disappearance was “a hoax” and the work of Communist spies. Bloodshed and shame, these people argued, were only to be found in New York.
That farce ended on August 4. While the World’s Fair welcomed its twenty millionth visitor in Queens—the winners were a family of six from Bedford, Indiana—down in Philadelphia, Mississippi, FBI agents chased down a few leads. And although comedian Dick Gregory had offered a $25,000 reward for anyone who could provide information that led to a conviction, it was only after the FBI was said to open up its checkbook that the “cotton curtain” loosened and people in the small town started talking. “Blood, in the deep south of all places, is thicker than water,” wrote Louis E. Lomax, “but greed, particularly among poor Mississippi white trash, is thicker than blood.”
The federal agents had arrived early that morning to start digging through the top of the dam with heavy machinery. It took a few hours in the airless summer heat, but the stench of death was soon apparent. They used shovels before digging with their hands. Some smoked cigars to mitigate the smell of decaying flesh.
And there they found them, lying buried in the Mississippi soil. The first body was Mickey Schwerner, naked except for his Wrangler jeans and his wedding band. Below him was Andrew Goodman, found facedown, his left hand in a tightened fist clutching the red clay that would be his burial ground, and raising the specter that he had been buried alive. Then, at last, they unearthed James Chaney, whom the terrorists couldn’t resist beating senseless, very likely whipping him with chains, breaking his bones and body before he finally bled to death from his wounds. When the bodies were wrapped in plastic and sent to the coroner’s office, in a sadistic twist of fate, Deputy Sheriff Price was on hand to help carry them. By all accounts, Price had been one of the last people to see the trio alive.
The news that the three were dead was hardly shocking to the citizens of Meridian, Mississippi, or Neshoba County. Three civil rights workers arrested midday and released late at night? Two of them Jewish New Yorkers, the other a local black man, the blue station wagon they were driving was found, burned out and abandoned, and no one had seen them for weeks? It didn’t take a weatherman to know which way the wind had blown.
But even now, with the dead bodies uncovered, some whites still felt that somehow they had been betrayed. “Somebody broke our code,” one complained. “No honorable white man would have told you what happened.” Some blacks complained, too. The simple fact was that there were at least a dozen unsolved murders of blacks in Mississippi at the time and no one was in a rush to solve them; it took the death of two white liberal New Yorkers for the worl
d to pay attention.
Such was the sentiment that Rita Schwerner voiced. “My husband did not die in vain,” she proudly proclaimed. “If he and Andrew Goodman had been Negro, they would have taken little note of their death. After all, the slaying of a Negro in Mississippi is not news. It is only because my husband and Andrew Goodman were white that the national alarm has been sounded.”
For all the hope and optimism that the Freedom Summer and the passage of the most significant civil rights legislation in the history of the republic had ignited in the hearts and minds of Americans, the decaying bodies of three young men in the mud of Mississippi and the human wreckage of Harlem and the blood-stained pavement of East 76th Street defied the notion put forth by President Johnson that America was moving toward a “Great Society” or operating with the World’s Fair’s utopian purpose of peaceful coexistence among nations. Before America could end the Cold War with the Soviet Union, it had to end the civil war with itself. And by August 1964, it showed no signs that it was capable of doing so.
24.
Many citizens of the United States who have planned a visit to the World’s Fair in New York City are much concerned for their safety from mob violence.
—Letter from a would-be Fairgoer to Robert Moses, June 15, 1964
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