Radical Intellect by Tinson Christopher M.;

Author:Tinson, Christopher M.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press

The Harlem Riots, 1964

The Harlem Riots of 1964, which lasted for four long days, began on July 17 with the shooting death of fifteen-year-old James Powell by an off-duty police officer named Thomas Gilligan in the front of Senator Robert F. Wagner Junior High School. Gilligan alleged that the young boy lunged at him with a knife and he was therefore forced to fire three shots at him. One shot hit him in the hand, another in his abdomen, and a third bullet missed its target. When news of this killing reached Harlem, the black community there rebelled. Staff writer Ossie Sykes wrote of the riot as a rebellion by “the downtrodden, who … exploded in a fury of resentment against a society that hates them.”149 Accompanying Sykes’s report on the Harlem rebellion was a cartoon of King dressed in a dark suit with a satchel hung across his chest illustrated by Leo Carty. Across the satchel were the words, “Dr. King’s Tranquilizers: ‘Bleed and Be Happy,’ ” and King is shown handing out pills on a path from Birmingham to Harlem, leaving black folk battered, bruised, and discombobulated along the way. Positioning the cartoon adjacent to Sykes’s report, emphasized how Liberator perceived the question of nonviolence, a theme consistently poked at throughout the magazine. Moreover, it reminded readers that African Americans were victimized and in a perpetual state of war. Indeed, Sykes likened Harlem to South Vietnam and other war-torn sections of the globe, a point Malcolm also made often, though at the time of the rebellion he was still on his African tour.150 Sykes’s article also pointed at one of the flyers distributed during the rebellion. One such flyer, produced by the Harlem Defense Council (HDC), which was likely a front for the Progressive Labor Party, pictured Gilligan in a police uniform with the words “WANTED FOR MURDER” in bold letters above the photo.151 Sykes’s report also displayed a highly incendiary and controversial flyer that instructed how to make a Molotov cocktail, which was also circulated during the rebellion. Though the words, “Harlem Freedom Fighters,” were stenciled across the top of the handbill, it is uncertain if this was an actual organization, and it is more likely to have been an ad hoc group of agitators.152

The HDC was one of several groups that organized the United Council of Harlem Organizations, which consisted of Negro American Labor Council (NALC) members, Muslims, Christians, NAACP representatives, and African nationalist organizations, as well as Parent-Teacher Association members.153 This loosely formed and politically diverse coalition, which was also known as the Unity Council, was headed by NALC leader Joseph Overton, and Livingston Wingate, chairman of the Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited (HARYOU) Executive Committee.154 The Unity Council had several meetings with Mayor Wagner, at which they informed the mayor and his staff of their demands. The group, which represented a broad cross-section of Harlem residents’ political opinion, urged the mayor to appoint black police captains to head up several key precincts servicing predominately black areas of the city and to promote other African American officers to ranking positions.

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