Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years 1963-65 by Taylor Branch

Author:Taylor Branch
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2007-04-16T07:00:00+00:00

31

Riot Politics

KING SPENT MONDAY, July 27, in a crossfire of mediation between Harlem and New York’s City Hall. There, far removed from the rural culture of segregated Mississippi, one small incident had flashed into a ten-day crisis of national proportions, exposing political nerves connected through the movement years. Analysts blamed a host of causes, including a school board that assigned citywide summer remedial classes to a school on Manhattan’s wealthy Upper East Side. A crusty building superintendent exchanged daily criticisms with the passing traffic of unfamiliar teenagers, to the point that he turned his cleaning hose on one unruly group and yelled, “You dirty niggers! I’ll wash the black off you!” When a swarm of students drove him into retreat with bottles and trash can lids, an off-duty police lieutenant responded to the commotion and shot to death a fifteen-year-old boy on the sidewalk of 76th Street. Many of the nearly eight hundred summer students in the vicinity gathered around the body in rage, so that it took police reinforcements several hours to clear the neighborhood.

White House aides exchanged fretful memos the next day. Hypersensitive to the northward spread of racial conflict, they worried that “a great deal of the Negro leadership simply does not understand the political facts of life. . . . They are not sophisticated enough to understand the theory of the backlash. . . .” This was before New York CORE workers organized three hundred student pickets outside the Robert Wagner School with signs reading “Stop Killer Cops,” and well before large crowds gathered outside the Levy and Delaney Funeral Home in Harlem, where James Powell’s corpse lay. From the first rocks and bottles hurled down upon police cordons, and the first police gunshots to drive away rooftop attackers, pitched battles and sporadic looting spread through the weekend from Harlem into Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant area. When Bayard Rustin pleaded for calm through a bullhorn, street battlers booed him 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!” Rustin shouted. “And if you’re not willing to do the same, you’re fools!” Hooted down, Rustin retreated by escorting a bloodied teenager to the hospital. James Farmer of CORE fared no better when he tried to tell another angry crowd that they were only feeding police violence, not redressing it. “We don’t wanna hear that shit!” jeered a heckler.

By the daylight lull on Monday, July 20—with fifteen people shot, two hundred arrested, a dozen police officers and more than a hundred civilians injured (mostly by rocks and nightsticks, respectively)—secret consulations had engaged the highest staff echelon at the White House. If Johnson did not respond, aides warned, voters would wonder why he showed such interest in Mississippi and Georgia but not New York, when “too many people up there are ‘scared.’ ” Bill Moyers recommended “Sending Bourke [sic] Marshall up (he knows most of the Negroes in NYC),” but Johnson decided instead to announce that he had sent in the FBI.

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