New York: When Night Falls

Like so many affairs of their kind, the New York riots followed an isolated incident that in other, quieter times would have passed almost unnoticed in history’s larger march. It took place on Thursday morning a fortnight ago, on a sidewalk in Manhattan’s predominantly white East 70s. For reasons now lost in a tangle of differing tales, a white apartment-house superintendent turned a hose on a group of Negro teenagers. The kids threw bottles and ashcan lids at the man, and three of them, including a 15-year-old named James Powell, chased him into the building.

A police lieutenant, off duty and in civilian clothes, heard the ruckus, flashed his badge, ordered the youngsters to quiet down. He was Thomas Gilligan, 36, a 6-ft., 200-lb. veteran of 16 years on the force and the holder of 19 citations, including several awards for disarming dangerous suspects. According to the police report, the Powell boy went after Gilligan with a knife. Gilligan ordered him to stop, but Powell kept coming. Then, “in defense of himself,” Gilligan fired his revolver three times. The third shot went wild—but the first two killed the boy.

It would remain for a grand jury to get at all the facts. Some Negro witnesses claimed that Gilligan gave no warning, others that the youth had had no knife—even though one was found in the street not far from Powell’s dead, outstretched hand.

To many people it seemed incredible that a man of Gilligan’s experience could not have dealt with the boy without resorting to gunfire.*For two days after that, this notion seeped through the Negro districts of New York City like liquid dynamite. Negroes, long lacerated by the thousand painful shards of ghetto life, by emotions stirred in the civil rights movement, by their hatred for police, whom they regard as both oppressive and corrupt, were only too ready to believe that the Powell death was a case of deliberate murder. And “police brutality” became their battle cry.

“Let’s Go!” Hate-preaching demagogues took to the street corners, and raunchy radicals issued inflammatory broadsides. From a pro-Red China outfit called the Progressive Labor Movement came a handout that screeched insurrection: “Once again the cops have murdered one of our children. They have been killing about one black person a day in New York City. Lieut. Thomas Gilligan (remember thatname) shot James once and James fell to the ground. This fascist cop stood over him and fired two more bullets into him. He then kicked the dead body. THIS is THE WAY THE FASCIST AND RACIST COPS OPERATE HERE IN ‘LIBERAL’ NEW YORK. These murderers follow the orders of Commissioner Murphy, Mayor Wagner and Rockefeller. We don’t have to go to Mississippi because MISSISSIPPI is HERE IN NEW YORK.”

By Saturday night, the most restless elements of Harlem, the broken-or no-home kids and the seething out-of-job adults, were bristling for a fight. It was hot and humid. Scores of people gathered for an outdoor protest rally called by three local chapters of Congress of Racial Equality. After harangues by CORE leaders, the Rev. Nelson C. Dukes, pastor of Harlem’s Fountain Spring Baptist Church, and a veteran agitator, launched into a 20-minute call for action, exhorting everyone to march on the local police precinct station to present their “demands.” “Let’s go! Let’s do it now!” cried his listeners, and the mob, swollen by now into a howling tide, headed for the station house.

Police squads tried to hold them back, but the screaming mob swarmed through the streets. From tenement rooftops came a hail of bricks, bottles and garbage-can covers. The police, firing their guns into the air, moved the rioters back. Reinforcements poured into the neighborhood, and still came the storm of bricks and bottles. Whaling away with their night sticks, the helmeted cops waded into the mob. Pastor Dukes, watching it all with growing horror, muttered, “If I knew this was going to happen, I wouldn’t have said anything.” Then he walked away.

“Kill ‘Em!” The senseless nightmare stretched, night after night throughout the week, through the main streets of Harlem, and, like an echo, through the Bedford-Stuyvesant slum district of Brooklyn. Roving bands of rioters—most of them kids—surged through the districts, aimlessly, desperately pursuing their urge for violence. They attacked a passing car driven by a white man and roughed up a woman passenger. They broke doors and windows in shops owned mostly by Jewish merchants, tearing down protective iron gates and screens. They ran off with TV sets, appliances, canned goods, clothing.

One man was arrested while wearing a new coat, the price tag still dangling from his sleeve. A Negro woman lay down on the sidewalk and muttered through her drunken stupor: “They walk all over me in Greenville, South Carolina, and they might as well run over me here.” An onlooker cried: “Did you see that? They shot that woman down in cold blood!”

Some hoodlums lobbed Molotov cocktails into the battalions of pursuing police. An organization called “Harlem Freedom Fighters” had helpfully issued a crude flier: “How to Make a Molotov Cocktail. Instructions: Any Empty Bottle, Fill With Gasoline, Use Rag as Wick, Light Rag, TOSS AND SEE THEM RUN!”

The nights shook with gunfire. Police exhausted their ammunition, and had to send out emergency calls for more. False fire alarms rang through the area. Mounted police heaved back against the mobs with their horses. Again and again came the cries of “Police brutality!” “Kill ’em!” “Murderers!” A white newsman, telephoning from a bar, heard a Negro yell: “We gotta kill all the whiteys!” He dropped his phone and scooted out. A bartender shook his head sadly: “Where are their parents? If the parents would take charge of them, they couldn’t get mixed up in this.”

The Leaders. In the lulls between the riots, Bayard Rustin, the Negro who organized last year’s Washington civil rights march, roamed through the streets, urging residents to remain at home, but he had little success. An N.A.A.C.P. official issued a pleading leaflet: “Cool it, baby, the message has been delivered!” But to the rioters, anyone who urged restraint was only an “Uncle Tom.”

They much preferred to hear leaders like CORE’S National Director James Farmer, who ambled through Harlem insisting all the while that he was really trying to soothe the people. “I saw the cops united against the black man,” he told a church meeting. “I saw New York’s night of Birmingham horror!” He claimed that he saw a cop draw his service revolver and deliberately shoot a woman in the groin (the woman was actually nicked in the thigh by a ricocheting bullet). “I saw the blood pouring off heads of men and women!” Farmer cried. “It was my son and your son and every black mother’s and father’s son who died before that policeman’s bullets!”

“Kill ’em!” the crowd answered.

Another Harlem “leader” made no pretense at all about his aims. He was Jesse Gray, a venomous little demagogue with a long record of Communist associations, who made a name of sorts for himself last year when he instigated a rent strike in Harlem. Gray sent out a call for “100 skilled black revolutionaries who are ready to die. There is only one thing that can correct the situation and that’s guerrilla warfare!” He exhorted “revolutionaries” to establish platoons and to recruit 100 men apiece. “This city can be changed by 50,000 well-organized Negroes. They can determine what will happen in New York City!” A Black Nationalist named Edward Mills Davis issued a plea that “all you black people that have been in the armed services and know anything about guerrilla warfare should come to the aid of our people. If we must die, let us die scientifically!”

News to One. Returning hastily from his vacation, Mayor Robert Wagner broadcast a radio and TV appeal for calm and promised that he would do his utmost to redress legitimate grievances, but he warned that the city would not tolerate lawlessness. “Law and order,” said the mayor, “are the Negro’s best friend—make no mistake about that. The opposite of law and order is mob rule, and that is the way of the Ku Klux Klan, the night riders and the lynch mobs.”

The mayor seemed most concerned for the city’s reputation, during a World’s Fair year, as a tourist attraction. Hotels had reported more than 500 reservations canceled, and Wagner, making a patently preposterous claim, said that “no single visitor to our city has been physically attacked or brutalized in any way.” That was news to Max Colwell, 61, manager of the famed Pasadena Tournament of Roses, who, only five hours before, had been beaten and robbed of nearly $1,000 while visiting New York.

Whose Handiwork? Bad as the riots were, they were overplayed not only by most of New York’s papers, but by the U.S. press as a whole. They did not hold a candle to recent insurgencies at Oxford, Miss., or Birmingham, or even to a 1943 riot in Harlem. Perhaps no more than 1% of the Negro population of New York was directly involved. One Negro was killed by a police bullet as he pelted officers with bricks from a rooftop; 140 people, including 48 cops, were injured, and 520 were arrested. The total cost in property damage and theft was yet to be determined, but it would certainly run into hundreds of thousands of dollars; more than 500 cases of property damage alone were reported.

President Johnson ordered 200 FBI agents into the Negro districts to investigate. There was little doubt that they would find evidence of Communist agitation behind the riots, but it was a mistake to assume that the week’s violent handiwork was just a plot ordered by leftists and fire-eating Black Nationalists. The disorders were an outward symptom of a condition that runs so deep—through a maze of confused and ancient feelings—that even the most understanding hearts and minds find a solution difficult.

A Negro woman tried to explain her impulsive participation.

“I clean the white man’s dirt all the time,” she said. “I work for four families and some I don’t care for, and some I like. And Saturday I worked for some I like. And when I got home and later when the trouble began, something happened to me. I went on the roof to see what was going on. I don’t know what it was, but hearing the guns I felt like something was crawling in me, like the whole damn world was no good, and the little kids and the big ones and all of us was going to get killed because we don’t know what to do. And I see the cops are white and I was crying. Dear God, I am crying! And I took this pop bottle and it was empty and I threw it down on the cops, and I was crying and laughing.”

— Then again, maybe not: less than a week later, a man who was being arrested by another officer suddenly lashed out with a knife—and the cop ended up on the hospital critical list with a slit throat.