Peekskill USA: Inside the Infamous 1949 Riots (7 page)

The Mt. Kisco place was on a hilltop, with a fine command of the countryside for miles in every direction. At a place where the lawn sloped down and away from the house, we set up a table as a speaker's stand. As we had no chairs, we decided that the people who came—still wondering if any would come—would sit on the lawn, and since the lawn was on a hillside, the speakers would be visible to everyone. We hopefully set aside two acres as a parking lot, with two youngsters in charge of parking arrangements; and then we waited.

You must remember that those of us directly concerned were still unaware of the impact of
Peekskill
on the outside world. We had not seen the newspapers, nor had we any opportunity of listening to the radio. Fighting, sleeping, and arranging this meeting had occupied every minute of our time. Therefore we could not estimate what the results of our call to the decent people of Westchester to rally here would be. In every case, in this and in later instances, we underestimated.

The cars began to arrive shortly after three o'clock—a single car, a few more, a few more, and then steadily—and then a sudden jam of cars as far down the road as we could see, hundreds and hundreds of cars.

More than sixteen hundred people came to that meeting, which had been called on a few hours' notice, which was in a fairly isolated part of Westchester, hard to find, hard to get to—yet better than sixteen hundred people came. I think that there and then I began to understand that
Peekskill
was something more than a personal nightmare, that it was the first tangible sign of a ferment, of the making of hell on earth for the people of the United States and for the people of other lands too—but more than that, for out of
Peekskill
, now and later, there was to be action and reaction, a testing of fascism (made in USA) and a testing of the forces of anti-fascism.

Cold and sober and angry were the people who came to Mt. Kisco. We had no sound apparatus, so they packed around the table, a sea of faces on the sloping lawn, listening to the story of what had happened before, listening to an itemization of how every official force in the vicinity, the district attorney, the local police, the state troopers, had so conducted themselves as to make mass murder a practical possibility. They heard the tale of the fight on the road and in the hollow, and of the attempted frameup on the murder count. And to all they listened soberly and coldly.

At this meeting, the
Westchester Committee for Law and Order
came into existence and proposed that Paul Robeson be invited to sing at Peekskill again.

Then we sang
We Shall Not Be Moved
, passed several resolutions on the incident, and the second day of
Peekskill
was over.

Of Mt. Kisco, there is only this to add. The people who gave us their home and lawns for that meeting cannot be too highly praised. They had much to lose, and since then they have suffered a good deal for it. The brave voices of anonymity call them constantly on the phone, mixing filth and threats, as do the writers of anonymity with their dirty little postcards. Terror paid them a lasting call. But their act was a confirmation of faith in the presence of many thousands of good, honest people like them in these United States.

Part Four

The Picnic Grounds

MONDAY MORNING, I
went back to my essay on literature and reality. A good many years before this I had decided that the only solution to my personal problem as a writer was to allow nothing—where humanly possible —to interfere with the daily practice of writing. I have never known the gentle and reflective conditions which—it still seems to me—the act of literary creation in any full sense requires. Nevertheless, I have managed a good deal of writing under less than the best circumstances, and it was in this spirit that I tackled the essay. I remember that I was going through Emerson then, looking for the particular piece of his in which he speaks of the theory of books as noble; and being unable to find it, I had asked J—— N—— to lend me his collection of Emerson. I was wondering this morning whether he would recall my request at this point, when I saw his car through the window. The interruption was particularly welcome, for my critical approach to questions of literature and reality had badly bogged down in a memory of screaming men dancing around a fire of burning chairs, into which they tossed malignant objects known as books.

I went downstairs and thanked him for the book.

“What are you doing now?” he asked.

“Trying to write.”

“My own assignment is this
Peekskill
business. I've got to do a series of pieces on it, so I thought a good start would be to have a look at the battlefield in quiet and daylight. Do you want to come?”

I had never liked cold battlefields and had seen enough of them, but this was the first one on which I had lost thirty dollars worth of eye glasses. “Sure I'll come,” I agreed.

J——'
s
son and daughter, both of them teen-agers, were in the car, and they reported on the state of the young people in the neighborhood as we drove up to the Lakeland Picnic Grounds. Most of the local boys and girls who had been up on the state road during that night of horror were a little frightened now, a little ashamed of what had happened. They had not known it would be like that. But others were not ashamed and were eager for more. J——, on the other hand, had been making a tour of bars and lunch rooms in Peekskill and Verplanck, the latter a physically and morally decaying river port which had contributed a large percentage of the
lumpen
element to the attack; and his impression was of a tight and controlled silence. No one wanted to say that they had been present; nobody wanted to say what had happened from their own particular point of view. The situation was a new one, and there was something filthy, something morally decadent, if one can place such a construction upon it, in the whole neighborhood. What had come to the surface that night had been festering for years, a fungus growth overlaid by the surface aspect of a reasonably respectable and orderly community, but there nevertheless.… At least that was how J—— N—— saw it, and subsequent investigations directed toward social factors involved bore out his conclusions.

When we arrived at Lakeland we parked the car across the road, leaving the boy and girl to watch it while we went into the picnic grounds. On this morning the place was deserted, quiet, peaceful—almost a testimony to the incredible character of the events of Saturday night. We walked past wrecked cars however—still there—and examined the length of fence torn up and used as weapons by the fascists. We went down to the grounds and I looked through the grass where the big fight had taken place, but without finding my glasses. We poked through the ashes of the fire where the books had been burned and counted around it no less than forty used flashlight bulbs. That meant that at least forty pictures had been taken of the book-burning and of the insane demonstration which had accompanied it. But I do not recall haying seen even one picture of the incident published anywhere—that is, of the book-burning incident. What happened to those pictures? Have the plates been destroyed, or will they emerge some day as a silent witness to the infamous beginnings of American fascism?

Up the slope from the hollow, toward the road, we found the remains of the fiery cross; and then, swinging toward the gulley and the embankment which we had chosen for defense, we found a great many empty liquor bottles, some thrown aside, some carefully broken to be used for weapons.

But for the scene of a crime, an unbelievably despicable crime, the place was curiously deserted. It was an attempt which had failed, and thereby to be quickly forgotten. A small and inconsequential incident on the banks of the Hudson River.

Part Five

The Golden Gate

BUT
PEEKSKILL
WOULD
not remain forgotten. At best, we Americans are a remarkably insular folk, and a taste of the country adds to that. All's right with the world in the lovely fields and woods of our eastern country; nature created this properly, and what is illogical and insane penetrates with difficulty. I took the children swimming on Monday afternoon, and once again the world was at peace. I dwell on this because it was part and parcel of the amazing resistance the ordinary people of our land display toward the acceptance of an unmistakable phenomenon—the cultivation and growth of American fascism. We simply do not believe it. We no longer seem to be politically aware people. We live in a variety of small worlds, and while some of this is good, most of it is not good; for it wraps around us an incredible mantle of indifference, and this very indifference promotes our indifference toward what the men and the women of the whole world are coming to think of us. “It can't happen here” is still deeply embedded in our conscience, and that salves us. When we do not hear the cries of the dying children in Korea, those of us with scruples explain it by saying that Korea is far away; but the truth is that we make our own measure of distance, and we hear precisely what we want to hear.

I went swimming with my children, and
Peekskill
had faded into the place of dreams, where all things lack reality. This had happened before and it would happen again. But the fires lit by those burning books are not easily extinguished.

A few minutes after we returned to the house that afternoon, the telephone rang. It was Bill Patterson of the Civil Rights Congress, that brave and tireless leader of almost every struggle for civil rights, calling from New York. “How are you feeling?” he asked.

“I'm feeling fine. I've just been swimming.”

“Well, dry yourself and come into New York tomorrow. We're having a big mass meeting at the Golden Gate to protest this damned
Peekskill
business.”

“Is there that much interest in it?”

“That much interest? For God's sake, man, this is a world event of paramount importance. Do you know what a mass, organized attempt to lynch Paul Robeson means? Do you know what a mass, organized attempt to murder two hundred people means? Haven't you seen the newspapers?”

“I thought I knew what it meant,” I said. “But it's true that I haven't seen the papers.”

“Well, look at them.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“Be one of the speakers.”

I said, “All right. I'll be there.” But I had no idea of the significance of his words until I arrived at the Golden Gate Ballroom in Harlem on the following day.

The Golden Gate Ballroom, at 140th Street and Lenox Avenue, is, I imagine, the largest public auditorium in Harlem. At full capacity it will hold perhaps a little better than five thousand people, and this Tuesday night it was more than capacity. I parked my car a block away, but around the front of the Golden Gate was a massed crowd of Negroes, solid in front and spilling well onto Lenox Avenue, solid on the corners and spilling down each side street and across each side street. How many there were outside, I don't know; but I would think at the very least three thousand and possibly as many as six thousand. It is hard to estimate a crowd like that—but at the very least, three thousand. And most curiously, no police in sight.

You would have to know the situation in Harlem at that time to understand the full significance of such a crowd with no police in attendance. You would have to recall the year-long series of police brutalities in Harlem, the beatings and killings upon the slightest provocation or upon no provocation at all; and you would have to take into consideration the fact that in the course of that year, from the summer of '48 to the summer of '49, Harlem had been turned, in many respects, into an armed camp, a place of military occupation by the New York City police force, to appreciate the extraordinary effect of such a crowd without police in attendance. (I should say, without police in sight.)

Well, there it was, and I had to get into the hall somehow; so I pushed and wriggled and slid and managed to make my way through. It was an orderly crowd, but it was a bitter crowd; it was an ominous, angry crowd, coldly disciplined with that kind of cold anger which is very certain and very deep-seated. It was that kind of a crowd, practically all Negro, which I pushed through until I was in a confined, enclosed, half-circle of space left directly in front of the entrance. And there were the police, almost a hundred of them, caught between the crowd inside and the crowd outside, the guest who came and stayed—there they were.

Oh, that was something to see, almost a hundred New York City cops in a spot like that—indeed, that was something to see. I have never seen the like of it before in New York, nor since, such quiet cops, such genteel cops, such silent cops, each one of them standing quietly and politely right in his place, eyes on the ground, nightstick clasped unostentatiously, their whole attitude being, “Just don't you dare notice us at all, because we're just here because we have to be here, duty and all that, you know; but after all, New York's finest, and who else takes children across the street or finds them when they're lost?” Yes, that was something; and I could only think of the French police when the working class of France comes out in all its mighty power—and at such times the French police assigned to cover the demonstration stand very still, eyes on the ground, neutral in the best tradition.…

Well, when I got into that open space I realized that two huge mass meetings were going on at once. A low rumble of sound came from within the hall, and out here another speaker's stand had been set up, with an outdoor meeting going on, and with never a bit of interference or objection from those trapped cops, never an attempt on the part of six or seven of them to open a man's skull with their clubs—as I have seen more times than I can count—never a boot in a worker's groin when they are six to one or ten to one, and never a woman dragged by her hair, but just polite observation. People say so glibly that you can't change human nature; and I wish such people could have been there that night and seen how three or four thousand angry Negroes changed the nature of a large number of New York City police. And if you can change a cop's nature, I insist there is no limit to what you can do with human nature.…