In the Heat of the Summer. Michael W. Flamm
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& World Report Magazine Collection (LC-U9-10332 frame 11).
An estimated quarter million people of all races and religions gathered in the nation’s capital in August to demand jobs, freedom, and passage of the civil rights bill. Behind the scenes, it was a tense time as debates erupted between the White House and civil rights leaders over the length of the demonstration, the tone of the speeches, the role of whites, even the dress of the participants. But in the end, after King had made his iconic “I Have a Dream” speech, most Americans saw the March on Washington as a great triumph of the human spirit and a historic occasion when racial reconciliation at last seemed like a realistic possibility. The demonstration, Rustin believed, had also prevented violent unrest in northern cities by channeling hostile energy.74
A month later, the optimism generated by the March on Washington was shattered by the explosion of a bomb at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, where four little black girls waiting for the start of Sunday school were tragically murdered. For the slender and soft-spoken Clark, a liberal integrationist, it was a fateful moment. “The present battle for racial justice in America is in its showdown stage,” he wrote in Ebony. “Negroes and committed whites will either remove the last barriers to racial equality in America within the next year or two, or will witness a frightening and revolting form of racial oppression and moral stagnation.” No middle ground existed.75
But on his public television program The Negro and the Promise of American Life, Clark managed to strike a cautiously positive note after a series of conversations with Baldwin, King, and Malcolm X, with whom he was friendly even though they disagreed on most issues. “We have come to the point where there are only two ways that America can avoid continued racial explosions: one would be total oppression; the other total equality,” Clark concluded. “There is no compromise. I believe—I hope—that we are on the threshold of a truly democratic America.” In the coming year, the violence and unrest in New York would sorely test, if not dash, his faith in the future.76
CHAPTER 3
THE GATHERING STORM
Down the street they were rumbling
All the tempers were ragin’
Oh, where, oh, where are the white silver tongues
Who forgot to listen to the warnings?
—Phil Ochs, “In the Heat of the Summer”
FRIDAY, JULY 17
The morning after James Powell’s death at the hands of Thomas Gilligan, fifty officers arrived at Wagner Junior High School, site of the confrontation. The patrolmen were armed with nightsticks, not standard equipment for a daytime assignment. Consultations immediately began between the NYPD, school principal Max Francke, and Madison S. Jones, executive director of the City Commission on Civil Rights, who had offered his services to Francke in the wake of the shooting and protests on Thursday. After the police received assurances that only students would participate in the demonstration planned by CORE for later that morning, the nightsticks were returned to the 19th Precinct on East 67th Street. The officers, however, remained in place, hoping for the best but prepared for the worst.1
By 8 A.M. around seventy-five demonstrators had arrived, many with their school textbooks. Led by Chris Sprowal, the tall and slender chairman of Downtown CORE, they chanted “Police Brutality Must Go” and “Freedom Now.” They waved placards that proclaimed “Save Us from Our Protectors” and “Stop Killer Cops.” And they sang civil rights freedom songs such as “We Shall Overcome.” The protests were peaceful and organized in contrast to Thursday’s demonstrations. “We all know there are agitators around who profess violence,” said Sprowal. “We saw who they were and we weeded them out.” The pickets also were integrated. Most of the demonstrators were black, but several were white or Puerto Rican—one sign read “Demandamos El Fin De Brutalidad Policia.”2
FIGURE 3. Police observe as demonstrators on East 67th Street protest the killing of James Powell. Photo by Marion S. Trikosko. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, U.S. News & World Report Magazine Collection (LC-U9-12259 frame 1).
At noon the ranks of the demonstrators swelled with the addition of a hundred or so summer school students who had finished their morning classes. “People around here just want you to get into trouble,” warned Sprowal through a bullhorn as they prepared to march to the 19th Precinct. “Act like the young ladies and gentlemen that you are. Don’t act like they expect you to act. Hold your heads up.” Because the station house was on the same block as a firehouse, the Russian Mission to the United Nations, and the Kennedy Child Study Center, only a token group of twenty-five demonstrators was permitted to picket in front. The remainder paraded a block away next to the Lexington School for the Deaf, whose students came outside to observe and discuss the protest in sign language. An hour later, the demonstration ended and Sprowal urged the students to return daily until the date of the funeral was set.3
As the students began to disperse, three members of the Organization of Afro-American Unity arrived. Followers of Malcolm X, who had formed the group after he split with Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam, they counseled the teens not “to let people push you around.” But their leader was not in New York at the time—he was in Cairo attending a meeting of the Organization of African Unity. In his capacity as an observer, Malcolm X issued a statement that linked the struggles in America and Africa. “Our problem is your problem,” he informed the delegates. “It is not a Negro problem, nor an American problem. This is a world problem, a problem for humanity. It is not a problem of civil rights, it is a problem of human rights.”4
Segregation and discrimination in the United States, Malcolm X added, were worse than apartheid in South Africa because white Americans hypocritically preached integration and equality. “Out of frustration and hopelessness our young people have reached the point of no return,” he wrote. “We no longer endorse patience and turning the other cheek. We assert the right of self-defense by whatever means necessary, and reserve the right of maximum retaliation against our racist oppressors, no matter what the odds against us are.”5
The implied threat triggered an immediate reaction from Police Commissioner Michael J. Murphy. “Nobody will be allowed to turn New York City into a battleground,” he declared. Local activists like Malcolm X, he contended, had a “lust for power” and “other sinister motives.”6 Many blacks in Central Harlem would nevertheless heed the message in the coming days, although without the leadership and direction Malcolm X might have provided. His absence contributed to a vacuum that others would try, without success, to fill.
The Progressive Labor Party (PLP) also had representatives at the protest on East 67th Street that day. Formed by dissident members of the Communist Party in 1961, the group believed that both the Soviet Union and American leaders had betrayed the revolution by advocating reformist positions such as “peaceful coexistence” with the noncommunist world. The PLP was dedicated to an immediate grassroots class struggle based on the Chinese Communist model of resistance. The most prominent black member was William Epton, chairman of the Harlem branch, who was later convicted of conspiring to riot and criminal anarchy in the aftermath of the violence that would erupt on Saturday night. But on Friday morning he too was not present. Instead, a teenager from Monroe, North Carolina, was representing the PLP and distributing leaflets. In his hometown, the youth said, “If the cops shoot a Negro, we arm ourselves and get that cop worse than he got us.” Such talk alarmed the CORE officials, who urged the students to remain peaceful and orderly.7
But as the demonstrators started to head home, a white passerby saw the “Stop Killer Cops” placard and yelled, “He [Powell] deserved killing.” The students made a rush for the man, but the police got to him first, hustled him behind their barricade, and told him to keep his mouth shut and leave. When asked by reporters to give his name the man refused to answer, but offered two rhetorical questions: “What the hell business do they have carrying knives? What