In the Heat of the Summer. Michael W. Flamm
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to calls for assistance with pistols drawn and nightsticks swinging, the melee ended with five arrests and charges of police brutality at the station house where the suspects were taken. On April 29, a black teen stabbed to death a middle-aged Hungarian immigrant whose husband was critically injured when he tried to come to her aid in the used clothing store they operated.53
The crimes generated headlines in the mainstream media because they crossed racial boundaries. But in reality most acts of violence were either white-on-white or black-on-black, with African Americans disproportionately represented as both victim and perpetrator. That, however, was not news. “If a reporter phoned in what he believed was an interesting robbery or homicide in which the victim happened to be black, the editor invariably muttered, ‘Forget it,’” recalled Arthur Gelb, deputy metro editor of the New York Times. “Reporters, of course, knew better than even to suggest stories about crimes involving blacks against blacks. That was copy more suited for the Harlem-based weekly, the Amsterdam News.”54
Violent crimes that featured white victims and black assailants attracted national attention—even on the floor of the U.S. Senate, where the debate over the civil rights bill was under way. In mid-April, Democratic Senator Olin Johnston of South Carolina, an opponent of the measure, repeated the common conservative claim that the black freedom struggle encouraged lawlessness. Southern states, Johnston asserted in defense of segregation, “do not have the high rates of crime and juvenile delinquency of those states which are hotbeds of agitators against so many American institutions.” Another foe of the bill, Democratic Senator Richard Russell of Georgia, later raised the grim specter of Kitty Genovese during a verbal confrontation with liberal Republican Jacob Javits of New York, a staunch advocate of civil rights. “I say that couldn’t happen in the South, demean it as you may,” Russell heatedly charged.55
Individually, the crimes caused concern among whites. Collectively, they generated panic when a recently hired black reporter for the New York Times, Junius Griffin, reported in May that a new Harlem gang known as the “Blood Brothers” had formed with the “avowed intention of attacking white people” without provocation as part of an initiation ritual. “Why shouldn’t I hate all white people?” a member told the reporter. According to Griffin, the gang numbered between two and four hundred, although exact figures were hard to find. Allegedly, it was responsible for the murder of Johnston as well as the melee at the fruit stand and other crimes. Based on information supposedly provided to the reporter by a researcher for Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited (HARYOU), who had conducted taped interviews with many of the members, they were trained in martial arts and taught how to construct homemade weapons.56
A leader interviewed by Griffin said that “the main reason the gang started was to protect ourselves in a group against police brutality. If they’re going to hit one of us, and we’re by ourselves, then there’s no protection.” The “Blood Brothers,” he claimed, received financial support from numbers runners and drug dealers in Harlem. The NAACP and CORE wanted to help and had staged the school demonstrations. “But who wants an education,” he asked, “when you are going to have your brains knocked out or see your brothers or cousins shot by policemen?”57
Griffin was only the fourth black reporter on the New York Times, which like every major daily in the city had few African American writers on staff, a practice that would start to change during the summer of 1964. George Streator, a Fisk graduate, was hired in 1945 but fired four years later when it was found that he had fabricated quotes. Layhmond Robinson, Jr. was a Syracuse graduate and U.S. Navy photographer in World War II who joined the paper in 1950 after he earned his degree from the Columbia School of Journalism. Theodore “Ted” Jones was raised in Harlem and worked for the Amsterdam News while attending City College. After graduation, he joined the New York Times as a copyboy, and in 1960 was promoted to reporter. He was “the paper’s authority on Harlem,” recalled Gelb in his memoir. “But there weren’t many stories about Harlem that the Times—or, for that matter, any other white newspaper—deemed newsworthy.”58 Griffin was hired to rectify the situation.
Like Robinson, Griffin got his start in journalism in the military after growing up in a coal town and attending the two-room Stonega School for the Colored in Virginia. “I was in the Marines. I wanted to be another Ernie Pyle,” he recalled. “I struck a bargain: I agreed to reenlist; after a year, I’d get a transfer to Tokyo and be assigned to Stars and Stripes.” In Korea, he became one of only two black correspondents working for the military paper. In 1962, Griffin was discharged and headed to New York, where he joined the Associated Press and was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize as one of eight reporters who wrote the series “The Deepening Crisis” on the civil rights movement. Two years later, he joined the New York Times when Rosenthal decided that he “wanted me in Harlem; Abe thought I could bring more depth to the black coverage.”59
Whether Griffin added more depth remains a matter of controversy within journalism circles—Ted Poston of the New York Post later contended that police had peddled the story for weeks before Griffin jumped at it, in part because “Negro scare stories” were a time-honored tradition at the metropolitan newspapers. Five days after his front-page article on the “Blood Brothers” appeared, the NAACP challenged his account. In a statement, it demanded that the state attorney general “put an end to the slanderous lies being propagated concerning the Harlem Community by daily press exaggerations of the so-called blood brothers.” Executive Secretary Roy Wilkins added that “from my own information, reports on [the gang] are without foundation.” And the Reverend Dr. Donald Harrington of the Community Church of New York was equally scathing. “I believe that this is an irresponsible story patched up out of fear and malice and a few instances of violence,” he said. “Not only will it be used to justify police violence in Harlem, but it has already further alienated the great racial communities.”60
Although the NYPD affirmed the gang’s existence, other newspapers were quick to criticize the Griffin article. It was, wrote Gay Talese, a New York Times reporter in 1964, “an opportunity they never miss when they think The Times has overstepped its traditional caution.” Even some veteran reporters on the paper wondered, however, when other journalists were unable to make contact with any gang members. In the newsroom, some began to describe the “Blood Brothers” story as “Rosenthal’s Bay of Pigs,” a reference to John Kennedy’s disastrous decision to approve an invasion of Cuba by armed exiles in April 1961.61 Like the former president, both Gelb and Rosenthal were relatively inexperienced—they had assumed their editorial positions only in the fall of 1963. More important, both were unfamiliar with what was happening in Harlem.
Rosenthal, the son of a house painter from the Bronx, was familiar with poverty. But his specialty was foreign reporting—he had won a Pulitzer Prize in 1960 for his coverage of Eastern Europe. Gelb was equally unprepared. “We did not know how to cover the wants and dreams of black people,” he admitted. “Harlem—it was like a foreign country.” When he and Rosenthal questioned Griffin, the reporter always claimed that the gang had dispersed after the attention and notoriety it had received. Twenty years later, when Gelb again spoke to Griffin, who by then was working for Motown Records in Los Angeles, he still “insisted that every fact in his stories had been the truth. Even though at times I had harbored some doubts, overall I found Griffin’s sincerity convincing.” Gelb also pointed out in an interview that no one has ever proven that Griffin fabricated the article. But fifty years later, Talese had no doubts. “That story was a fake,” he declared.62
The “Blood Brothers” article had a lasting and insidious impact. “The press, the radio and television had been building a kind of horrified lynch mob in the rest of the city against Harlem,” wrote a radical white journalist in a book about the “Fruit Stand” incident in April 1964. “The phrase about the long hot summer coming on was taken as a direct threat against whites. Every act of casual rowdyism involving black people was reported as an atrocity story. The Negroes were beginning to be described as completely out of control, tearing up subways, molesting and raping white women. White neighborhood vigilantes organized into roving patrols stopped and questioned every black man straying out of his home block. New York sounded to the rest of the country