In the Heat of the Summer. Michael W. Flamm

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СКАЧАТЬ heroin—were a major cause of youth crime. In the 1950s, heroin claimed the lives of author Claude Brown’s brother and many of his friends. By the 1960s, “there were a lot more drugs than we ever saw in our life, a lot more burglaries, and a lot more assaults,” recalled Detective Sonny Grosso, a native of Harlem who also served there. “And that’s all tied to the addicts trying to get more money to pay for their drugs.” Dope pushing and gang banging—although the term was not yet invented—were rampant. According to a Harlem supervisor with the Youth Board, many leaders and members were heroin users, which led to internal conflict and gang disintegration as well as more crime and turf wars.⁶⁸

      At least half of New York’s thirty thousand addicts lived in Central Harlem, where narcotics arrests were more than ten times higher than in the rest of the city by 1964. “Property crimes skyrocketed to pay for habits, and then violent crimes followed, not only in the competition between dealers, but also in the disciplinary and debt-collecting functions of the gangs,” wrote a police historian. “Heroin created thousands of rich killers and millions of derelicts, whores, and thieves. In short, it created crime as we know it.”⁶⁹

      Dealing drugs was not, however, the only visible and profitable criminal activity in Harlem. Gambling was also widespread because “people were always looking for a way out,” recalled Detective Barney Cohen, who also served in Bed-Stuy. “The numbers game remains a community pastime; streetwalking still flourishes on 125th Street; and marijuana is easy to get,” Michael Harrington wrote in The Other America, his famous 1962 expose of urban and rural poverty. “These things are not, of course, natural’ to the Negro. They are by-products of a ghetto which has little money, much unemployment, and a life to be lived in the streets. Because of them, and because the white man is so ready to believe crime in the Negro, fear is basic to the ghetto.”⁷⁰

      Disillusionment and disenchantment were also pervasive according to a black journalist who testified before the state legislature in June 1963. “The mood of the Negro, particularly in New York City, is very, very bitter,” said Louis Lomax, who co-produced the documentary The Hate That Hate Produced about Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam. “He is losing faith. The Negro on the streets of Harlem is tired of platitudes from white liberals.” Adding to the impatience and frustration was a sense of invisibility and inadequacy, because while Harlem simmered and suffered in the shadows, the national media spotlight shone brightly on the civil rights struggle in the South.⁷¹

      In the North, African Americans now felt mounting pressure to become more active and visible in the freedom struggle. “Southern Negroes have shown bravery and should shame the Northern Negro,” said the entertainer Sammy Davis, Jr. “They seem to have more spunk and backbone,” said a machinist in Harlem. The protests in Alabama were the turning point—the televised images had a searing impact, especially on urban teenagers. “For the black people of this nation,” wrote Rustin after a visit, “Birmingham became the moment of truth.” The civil rights movement, he believed, had reached a new stage. “The Negro masses are no longer prepared to wait for anybody,” he added. “They are going to move. Nothing can stop them.”⁷²

      With the civil rights bill facing an uncertain future in Congress, Rustin in July brought his idea for a march on Washington to the “Big Six” movement leaders—King, Randolph, Wilkins, Farmer, Whitney Young of the Urban League, and John Lewis of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). At a meeting in New York at the Roosevelt Hotel, Rustin called for a mass, nonviolent demonstration, which would require extensive planning and organization. But Wilkins immediately and strongly objected to him serving as director. “He’s got too many scars,” the NAACP leader said, citing Rustin’s flirtation with communism in the late 1930s, his prison term during World War II, and his arrest in Pasadena in 1953. “This march is of such importance that we must not put a person of his liabilities as the head.”⁷³

      Farmer, however, defended him, and after Randolph cleverly volunteered to serve as director (with Rustin as his assistant), Wilkins reluctantly agreed on the condition that Rustin remain in the background and avoid the limelight, which proved impossible. With less than two months to prepare, Rustin instantly set to work, hiring a staff, inventing policies, raising funds, and maintaining unity among the many organizations sponsoring the demonstration. It was the most intense period of his lengthy career, but he achieved a remarkable feat, earning forever after the title of “Mr. March” from his mentor, Randolph.

      FIGURE 2. Bayard Rustin briefs reporters at the March on Washington in August 1963. Photo by Warren K. Leffler. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, U.S. News & 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 СКАЧАТЬ