Three weeks later, Whitmore appeared for sentencing before Judge Helfand, a hard-nosed justice who had once been commissioner of the New York State Boxing Commission. In an appeal for clemency, Neuberger told the judge, “I am restrained to say at the outset that I cannot speak in terms of remorse. The defense persists in this position because the defendant insists upon his innocence. The court knows that this defendant has been incarcerated for some two and a half years…. This young man suffered punishment that I would describe as cruel and inhuman, awaiting the disposition of murder charges, and three trials in this particular case.” In the ten months he’d been out on bail, the lawyer noted, George had been working in Wildwood and living there with his wife and “in all aspects behaving in a manner consistent with public morals. The interests of justice would best be served by terminating this Whitmore nightmare, and to permit him to live as a human being.”
The judge was not swayed. With a minimum of ceremony, he noted that the two counts for which Whitmore was convicted “are both vicious, heinous crimes. The victim was a young mother, a nurse. She had a right to go about her business unmolested. The jury, by its verdict, has said the defendant denied her this right and subjected her to a horrifying experience. The crime cannot go unpunished.” Judge Helfand hit Whitmore with the maximum sentence: five to ten years for the attempted rape and two and a half to five years for the assault. He also ordered Whitmore to undergo psychiatric evaluation at a state mental facility—his fourth court-ordered evaluation in the last three years.
Outside the courtroom, on the front steps of the majestic courthouse building, Aida leaned on Birdine Whitmore’s shoulder. Aida was now eighteen and noticeably pregnant. She said to no one in particular, “I thought he was going to come home with me forever. I never thought he would be convicted.”
Nearby, Sam Neuberger spoke to a handful of reporters. “I would say from thirty-nine years of practicing in my borough that a Negro defendant in Brooklyn has as much chance as he has in Alabama. Perhaps less. The fear and hysteria here are greater.” Neuberger pledged to appeal the verdict yet again. “We won’t win in the Appellate Division, we may not win in the Court of Appeals, but we will win in the federal courts,” he predicted.
As the lawyer spoke, a green Department of Corrections bus carrying Whitmore and other prisoners pulled out of the courthouse driveway and stopped at a traffic light. From inside the bus, George could see Aida, his mother, and his attorney. “I thought that was it,” George remembered. “I gave up. I was so sick of all the hearings and trials and bein’ sentenced to the nut house—I couldn’t take no more.”
George looked through the mesh caging of the dingy bus window and waved good-bye to his people. He wasn’t sure if they could even see him through the metal and yellowed glass.
On the sidewalk in front of the courthouse, Whitmore saw his young wife weeping on his mother’s shoulder.
[ eleven ]
“HOLY SHIT!”
THE SUMMER OF ’67 was hot as hell. Hippies in California christened it the Summer of Love, but not many New Yorkers thought of it that way. The previous summer’s hostilities had simmered throughout the year; the city was a tinderbox waiting for one wayward spark—a shooting, a mugging, a hostile exchange between a cop and a black kid—to kindle its flames anew.
No entity was more concerned about the prospect of violence than the NYPD. Brush fires were being stoked on many fronts: Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and other radical groups were protesting the war in Vietnam; the ultraconservative John Birch Society was trying to expand its profile in New York, which it considered a breeding ground for liberals (or “secret communist traitors,” in their parlance). No threat was more alarming to the police than the black liberation movement, with its rejection of nonviolent civil disobedience in favor of the militancy of the Black Power movement.
On June 21, 1967, the NYPD made a major effort to ward off intimations of a racial revolution by arresting sixteen members of the Revolutionary Action Movement group. In dramatic predawn raids in Brooklyn, Queens, and Manhattan, police rounded up RAM members and confiscated rifles, shotguns, carbines, and more than one thousand rounds of ammunition. One of the members arrested was Maxwell Stanford, who, along with Eddie Ellis, had met with Huey Newton the previous fall in an effort to bring RAM and the Panthers together under one umbrella.
Two of the RAM members arrested were charged with conspiracy to murder the civil rights leaders Roy Wilkins, of the NAACP, and Whitney M. Young, executive director of the National Urban League—moderate civil rights organizations, and therefore, to the militants, part of the problem.
RAM was largely an underground organization, with chapters in Chicago, Philadelphia, Oakland, Baltimore, and other American cities. In New York, they operated out of Jamaica, Queens. Police claimed that their base of operations was the Jamaica Rifle and Pistol Club, where members engaged in target practice and met to discuss how best to overthrow the U.S. government. Aside from the two RAM members who were charged with conspiracy to commit murder, the other fourteen were charged with “advocating criminal anarchy” and “conspiracy to advocate criminal anarchy.” Thirteen were accused also of “conspiracy to commit arson” and seven with possession of dangerous weapons.
The arrests and indictment were announced in the most alarmist way possible. Many in law enforcement felt that the black liberation movement was now synonymous with conspiracy, even communist manipulation. RAM was described by the FBI as “pro–Red China.” An assistant D.A. in Queens stated that RAM’s activities were “not advocacy of ideas or opinions—it was advocacy of detailed revolution.” Yet these warnings were beginning to make law enforcement officials sound like the boys who cried wolf: three summers earlier they had issued a warning about an organization in Harlem they identified as the Black Brotherhood, which they claimed was dedicated to killing policemen, but in time it became clear that the allegations were exaggerated.
The cops weren’t the only ones: big city mayors and municipal officials across the country were quick to portray the black liberation movement in hyperbolic terms, stoking racial fears, alleging conspiracies, and framing the conflict as an extension of the country’s cold war with China, Russia, and Vietnam.
Some of this was generational: white Americans of an earlier generation had become accustomed to the good Negro. Even Martin Luther King had been circumspect in his criticisms of the American way, though that had begun to change when he took a stand against the U.S. war in Vietnam. Black Power seemed to suggest something more radical. To Americans who had lived through World War II, the kind of black nationalism first advocated by Malcolm X and now being promoted by Stokely Carmichael and others was unpatriotic. The suggestion that black Americans should have an identity separate and above their national identity as Americans was seen as a threat to the country’s internal security, and with groups like RAM stockpiling weapons, law enforcement reacted with a sense of urgency. White civic, political, and business leaders—the bloc for whom Malcolm X had coined the term “white power structure”—saw it as their duty to attack the concept of Black Power. They were unable or unwilling to acknowledge the concept of black liberation as anything other than a criminal conspiracy, and in no way an outgrowth of the battle for civil rights.
The RAM members were charged under an anarchy statute that was created in 1902 and had rarely been applied in the previous forty years. Eventually, the bulk of the anarchy and conspiracy charges would be ruled unconstitutional and dismissed.
Whether it was intended or not, the overheated rhetoric, exaggerated criminal prosecutions, and the general posture of the NYPD and other police departments around the country seemed guaranteed to bring about what William F. Buckley Jr. had predicted: race war.
The Harlem and Brooklyn riots of three summers earlier turned out to be a harbinger of things to come. Race riots around the United States were becoming a startling seasonal pattern. The previous two summers had seen major ghetto uprisings in Ro
chester, New York; Philadelphia; the Watts section of Los Angeles; Omaha, Nebraska; and other cities. The reasons for these uprisings were complex, rooted in local issues of poverty, substandard housing, and abysmal educational systems, but they all had one thing in common: they were touched off by a confrontation between police and the community.
In mid-July, three weeks after the RAM arrests, the pattern continued—with the worst riot yet, in Newark, New Jersey.
Just twelve miles from New York City, Newark was halfway between Wildwood, where George Whitmore lived, and Brooklyn. A city of two million people, Newark had one of the largest populations of impoverished black people outside of the Deep South. Like many big industrial cities, it had experienced a startling shift in racial demographics in recent years, with the now-familiar patterns of white flight and municipal neglect. Although the city was more than 50 percent black, city government and the police department were overwhelmingly white.
On the afternoon of July 12, 1967, an African American taxi driver named John Smith found himself blocked by a police squad car double-parked in the street. Rather than waiting, Smith tried to drive around the police car. He was immediately flagged down by cops, pulled from his car, and beaten in front of numerous onlookers. The taxi driver was then taken to a local precinct where, according to a police spokesman, the cops “only used necessary force to subdue Smith.” According to Smith at his bail hearing the next day, necessary force included the following: “There was no resistance on my part. That was a cover story by the police. They caved in my ribs, busted a hernia, and put a hole in my head…. After I got into the precinct, six or seven other officers along with the two who arrested me kicked and stomped me in the ribs and back. They then took me to a cell and put my head over a toilet bowl. While my head was over the toilet bowl I was struck in the back of the head with a revolver. I was also being cursed while they were beating me. An arresting officer in the cell-block said, ‘This baby is mine.’”
Word of Smith’s mistreatment spread like wildfire through the neighborhood. For years, blacks in Newark, like blacks in New York City, had been complaining about police brutality and mistreatment. And, in the spirit of the times, they were no longer willing to take it sitting down.
What followed was five days and nights of chaos and violence unlike anything seen in an American city since the days of the Civil War draft riots. Rampant looting led to brutal and bloody confrontation between citizens and the police. The Newark cops, like many police departments around the country, had not yet developed effective strategies for dealing with such mass urban insurrection. They knew only one way to respond: with a massive display of force. People were clubbed indiscriminately; all black people on the street were considered to be coconspirators and treated accordingly. The populace responded with Molotov cocktails, bricks, and rocks that rained down like a meteor shower on the local police precinct.
The first forty-eight hours of the riot resulted in 425 arrests, with five dead and hundreds wounded and treated at local hospitals. By the third day, the governor of New Jersey declared that “The line between the jungle and the law might as well be drawn here as anywhere in America.” He called in the National Guard.
Tanks, helicopters, and three thousand National Guardsmen stormed the city. The troops were composed mostly of white suburbanites from South Jersey towns who despised the city of Newark and everything it represented. One captain told a reporter, “They put us here because we’re the toughest and the best…. If anybody throws things down our necks, then it’s shoot to kill, it’s either them or us, and it ain’t going to be us.”
With the coming of the Guard, the situation deteriorated into complete chaos. Rumors of snipers shooting at guardsmen and police created hysteria. The New York Daily News, generally a pro-police newspaper, wrote: “Reporters in the riot area feared the random shots of guardsmen far more than the shots from snipers…. Once a frantic voice shouted [over the radio], ‘Tell those Guardsmen to stop shooting at the roof. Those men they’re firing at are policemen…’ ‘They were completely out of their depth,’ said one reporter. ‘It was like giving your kid brother a new toy. They were firing at anything and everything.’” A New York Times reporter quoted chatter from a radio: “Newark police, hold your fire! State police, hold your fire!…You’re shooting at each other! National Guardsmen, you’re shooting at buildings and sparks fly so we think there are snipers! Be sure of your targets!”
The riot gave lawmen an occasion to vent their racism—and, on the other side, for rioting locals to take out their years of pent-up rage toward the police. There were many horrific episodes, but none more so than the killing of nineteen-year-old Jimmy Rutledge, who was shot dead inside a tavern. According to an eyewitness who later testified to a commission investigating the riot, a group of people were hiding out in the tavern as the riot unfolded. Two New Jersey state troopers burst in shouting “Come out you dirty fucks!” Rutledge stepped out from behind a cigarette machine and was frisked by the troopers. Then, according to the witness, “The two troopers…looked at each other. Then one trooper who had a rifle shot Jimmy from about three feet away…. While Jimmy lay on the floor, the same trooper started to shoot Jimmy some more with the rifle. As he fired…he yelled, ‘Die, you dirty bastard, die you dirty nigger, die die…’ At this point a Newark policeman walked in and asked what happened. I saw the troopers look at each other and smile…. The trooper who shot Jimmy…took a knife out of his own pocket and put it in Jimmy’s hand…. Shortly after, three men came in with a stretcher. One said, ‘They really laid some lead on his ass.’…He asked the State Trooper what happened. The Trooper said, ‘He came at me with a knife.’”
After five days of mayhem, the riot was finally quelled. The official casualty totals were 26 dead, 725 injured, nearly 1,500 arrests, and property damage totaling $10 million.
The Newark riot might have seemed unsurpassable in its violence—until two weeks later, when an uprising in Detroit proved even worse. Again, the inciting incident involved police activity, in this case a special police squad shutting down a “blind pig”—an after-hours club—that hadn’t been making its regular payoffs to the local precinct. The Detroit riots resulted in 43 dead, 467 injured, 7,200 arrests, and 200 buildings being burned to the ground.
In New York City, the reverberations were immediate. People watched the images on the nightly news, with shell-shocked reporters on the scene struggling to make sense of the carnage.
Bill Phillips read about the Newark riot in the papers. As with most cops, the level of civil disobedience displayed was beyond his comprehension. Phillips came from a time and place where lawmen were respected—or at least feared. The fact that idiot street hoodlums were now fighting back was a source of concern, as were reports of snipers shooting at police from windows and rooftops, an urban legend that had preoccupied police ever since the Rising of the Negroes first began. Phillips knew enough about ghetto psychology to know that the effects of the Newark riots would likely send their ripple effects into the streets of New York.
On the night of July 23—the very night the Detroit riots began—Phillips was riding in a squad car with his partner when a call came over the radio of a huge disturbance brewing in East Harlem.
My partner and me pulled up to 110th Street and Third Avenue, four hundred people around, right? All those cocksuckers all over the roofs with bricks and bottles and shit. We get out of the car. OK, you fucks, break it up. Before we got back into the car, we were devastated with bricks and bottles and every other fucking thing they could throw at us…. We got back in the car. I emptied my gun at the fucking roof…. I could have killed four, five people. Who the hell knows? I didn’t give a shit at this time. I was looking out for my own ass. There’s two of us on the corner now and we’re deluged with bricks and bottles. Windows in the radio car are busted. We have three fucking flat tires now from all the broken glass in the street. We drove on the rims. Get the fuck out of there, right? We go back and get our for
ces together now. Call for help. Radio cars come. We get another car, we’re going down the block at Lexington Ave and 112th Street and they build a fire in the street and we can’t go through. Holy shit! We start to back up and here comes a fucking garbage can from a roof, full of bricks. It comes right through the windshield. We’re now covered with glass from head to foot…. Fucking garbage can still sticking out of the head of the car.
To Officer Phillips, the most frustrating aspect of the riot was the response of the police brass:
Our bosses told us, do nothing, just make them move along, don’t lock anybody up, don’t shoot anybody. There were about ten of us seasoned guys. We decided the first chance we get we’re going to get a hold of [the rioters] and beat the shit out of them…. I don’t give a fuck now because I can be a statistic in the morning. I’m going out and break heads and I’m going to break everybody’s fucking head I come across because I know these people hate us up there now and they’re looking to knock me and everybody else off…. We chased them into the 23rd Precinct and up on a roof. There was about twenty of them. We beat the living shit out of everybody. I mean beat their fucking heads, knocked their teeth out. I left them all up there for dead. Came down, no more riot. It was all over.
The city of New York considered itself lucky. The damage from the East Harlem riot was minimal compared to Newark and Detroit. The Lindsay administration claimed credit for managing the disturbance, keeping it from exploding into an urban street version of the End of Days.
Their sense of relief was misplaced. What was happening in New York was more like a slow-motion riot—a schism buried deep within the contours of city life that would rumble and spew for much of the next decade.
DHORUBA BIN WAHAD had been out of prison for two and a half months when the riots took place. Images of Molotov cocktails, National Guard troops, and rampaging Negroes brought back memories of his jitterbugging days—but this was on a much larger scale. In prison, he had seen black people herded, regimented, and controlled on a daily basis; now it seemed as though freedom was synonymous with rebellion and dissent. Watching footage of the riots on television, Dhoruba had the same thought as many leaders of the Black Power movement: if only the outrage and anger could be harnessed and directed in a more productive way, then the revolution could be transformed from a dream to a reality.
The Savage City Page 25