Authors: T. J. English
The incident that actually set off the riots was an altercation between a cop and a black teenager. At 9:20
A.M.
on Thursday, July 16, fifteen-year-old James Powell was sitting with fellow students on a stoop near a high school building on East Seventy-sixth Street. The neighborhood
was predominantly Irish and German. The students, all of them black, were waiting for their summer school class to begin in ten minutes. Next door, a white resident was watering flowers in front of his house. After an unfriendly exchange of words between the resident and the black “interlopers,” the resident turned his hose on the students and said, “Dirty niggers, I'll wash you clean.”
Some of the students jumped out of the way, but the white man kept spraying them. In return, the kids threw a can of soda and a bottle in his direction. Then James Powell went after the man, who dropped the hose and ran away toward a nearby apartment building.
At that moment, an off-duty cop named Thomas Gilligan was leaving a television repair shop across the street. When he saw the black kid chasing the white man, he ran over to help. Gilligan was dressed in street clothes, with no indication that he was a police officer. He pulled out his gun.
When Powell saw the man he was after duck into an apartment building, he gave up the chase. When he turned around, Gilligan was standing there. The off-duty officer fired three shots. Powell went down.
A fellow student ran over and knelt beside his friend. “Jimmy, what's the matter?” he said. Powell didn't answer; blood gurgled from his mouth. The student turned to the man and said, “Why did you shoot him?”
Gilligan answered, “This is why.” He took a police badge from his pocket and pinned it to his shirt. Then, according to the student, he said, “This black bastard is my prisoner. Somebody call an ambulance.”
There would be many conflicting eyewitness accounts of the shooting. Gilligan claimed he told Powell twice that he was a police officer, and that each time he did, the young man lunged at him with a knife. The second time, he opened fire.
The students disputed the claim that Powell had a knife, though some conceded that he may have lunged at Gilligan. A knife was found at the scene, but its blade was closed.
Within a few hours of the shooting, James Powell was declared dead at the hospital.
Even before the news of Powell's death, trouble was in the air. A sprawling group of community activists gathered at the sight of the shooting; that night, the local TV newscasts were filled with angry protesters sounding off about police brutality. The police department kept Lieutenant Thomas Gilligan under wraps and said nothing.
The next day, Friday, the protests were more organized and even angrier. The Congress for Racial Equality (CORE) led a group of protestersâmostly blacks and Latinos, with some whitesâwho gathered first at the location where Powell was killed and then marched toward the Nineteenth Precinct station house on East Sixty-seventh Street. The police would not let the sprawling crowd of protesters block traffic in front of the precinct, though they were allowed to picket on a nearby avenue. The mood was angry, and once again the cameras and reporters were there to record every moment. When the crowd dispersed later in the afternoon, protesters and passersby traded insultsâmostly white drivers shouting racial epithets as they passed and then quickly pulling away.
There was no official statement from the police, and little outreach between police and the community. The negative energy was building, with little or no attempt to understand what happened or anticipate what lay ahead.
Saturday was hot and humid, a typical summer day in the city. Another protest took shape, this time in Harlem. By early evening the crowd had grown to around five hundred people. Speakers and rabble-rousers roamed over 125th Street, shouting over bullhorns. Someone proclaimed, “We got a civil rights bill and along with the bill we got a dead black boy. This shooting of James Powell was murder!” Another voice said, “It's time we let the Man know that if he does something to us we're going to do something back. You kick me once and I'm going to kick you twice!”
Among the protesters was William Epton, a well-known self-pro-claimed black communist and leader of a group called the Progressive Labor Movement. From a soapbox on Seventh Avenue, Epton called for armed insurrection.
Someone with a bullhorn yelled, “Let's march to the station!” The growing throng began moving toward the Twenty-eighth Precinct station house on West 123rd Street between Seventh and Eighth avenues. Garbage cans were knocked over, glass broken, bottles thrown. Police commanders at the scene called in for reinforcements.
Among the officers in Harlem that day was Robert Leuci, a member of the department's highly touted Tactical Patrol Force (TPF). Just twenty-four years old, Leuci had been on the job for only three years. He was called into work that day to deal with crowd control. Leuci and his partner, Ronnie Heffernan, were sent up to the rooftops. In Harlem
and other black neighborhoods, where cops were mostly considered an unwelcome presence, rooftops were a source of danger. Youths gathered atop tenement roofs to serenade the police with a symphony of bricks, bottles, rocks, and other missiles.
Around 10:00
P.M.,
Leuci heard a loud soundâ
pop pop pop pop
âin rapid succession. He said to his partner, “Hey, you hear that? Somebody's setting off firecrackers.” Heffernan listened, then shook his head. They both realized at the same time:
That ain't firecrackers. It's gunfire.
They headed down to the street and walked into the middle of a full-blown riot. Years later, Leuci remembered the scene:
The noise was incredible, an ocean of sound that came in wavesâpeople screaming, sirens wailing, the sound of breaking glass, shots fired. Traffic had been diverted from 125th Street and was backed up on the side streets, with horns honking and white people in their cars looking terrified. On 125th Street was a battleground, with police and looters in hand-to-hand combat. Some cops were firing warning shots into the air, which caused people to scatter, regroup, and then come back with even more force. I bumped into another TPF cop, Dave Christian, who was driving a sergeant when two of his tires were blown out. I told Dave I could swear I saw tracer rounds ricocheting off a building on the avenue. Dave's eyes got real wide, and he smiled.
Leuci was shocked by the sheer chaos of what was unfolding all around him, but as a TPF cop who interacted with the locals in an intimate and sometimes combative way, he had sensed a reckoning like this might be coming.
TPF had been instituted in 1959, another special unit created by Commissioner Stephen Kennedy. It was designed as a kind of special forces squadâa crew of big, tough cops who climbed fire escapes, traversed rooftops, and busted down doors. Their nickname was Kennedy's Commandos.
One of TPF's assignments was to deal with youth gangs and serious criminals. In doing so, however, they often stormed through buildings and busted into the apartments of average citizens. In black and Hispanic communities, they were despised.
Some TPF cops were more brutal than others. Leuci had to pull strings to get into the unit because, at five foot nine, he did not meet the unit's height requirement. “I guess I had something to prove,” said Leuci. “I was as gung ho as anybody. I was a racist cop like everybody else, but I didn't want to be.”
Leuci's conscience sometimes got the better of him; his Italian American father was an armchair socialist who read the
Daily Worker
and warned his son that the oppression of Negroes in the United States would one day come home to roost. When his son became a cop, Leuci Sr. wasn't exactly thrilled.
Leuci thought his father was nuts. Like other Italian cops, he sometimes used pejoratives like
tuttsoon
or
yom
to describe black people. (Irish cops tended to favor the fully Americanized epithetsânigger, spade, and jig.) Still, he had to admit that the level of poverty in Harlem, the South Bronx, and parts of Brooklyn could be downright shocking. “There were no social services in these neighborhoods,” he remembered. “Nobody picked up the garbage. In East Harlem people would throw their garbage out the back window and it piled up almost to the first-floor windows. And there were rats everywhere. More than once I saw young children who had toes gnawed to stubs because their apartments were infested with rats. In the winter people froze to death because they had no heat, and of course there was no such thing as air-conditioning at the time in those neighborhoods.”
Poverty created a sense of alienation; the brutishness of police units like TPF created anger. “They hated us. And you respond to that hatred with a hatred of your own.”
According to Leuci, police brutality was not uncommon. Some cops sought out tactical patrol because they were the kind of people who liked to bust heads. At the time, Leuci didn't question what he saw. Like any TPF cop, he was expected to show he had the right stuff. “I walked in on a lot of beatings. And when you walked in on a beating, you were expected to add a kick or a punch of your own to show you were with the program. Some cops were more brutal than others. Some of this was because there was brutality all around usâit absorbed us, inhabited us, and made us feel a kinship that no outsider could ever understand.”
By the summer of '64, Leuci had begun to sense that something was changing. One reason was the emergence of Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam on the scene. The Nation of Islam militants, with their suits
and bow ties, were sometimes open in their scorn for the men in blue. Leuci remembered one occasion when he was walking in uniform along 125th Street and came upon two Nation of Islam people. They gave him a nasty look, and one of them started singing a song that was riding the Top 40 at the time: Ruby and the Romantics' “Our Day Will Come.”
“What's your problem?” asked Leuci.
“You're our problem,” responded the Muslims.
The riot galvanized this kind of antipolice sentiment. For those caught in the middle of the violence, there would be many unforgettable imagesâcops and blacks fighting in doorways and on the sidewalks; looters being chased and clubbed; shadowy figures on rooftops throwing bricks from above. By the second day of rioting, police were no longer firing guns into the air; they were firing at people, using what cops referred to as a “gypsy gun,” nonpolice issue, unregistered, and untraceable.
Bob Leuci described one shooting in his memoir,
All the Centurions
(2004):
A young man, barefoot, muscular, stripped to the waist, was jumping up and down on the roof of a car, his face gleaming, his eyes wide with unspeakable rage. Theatrical and dramatic, he held a bottle in each hand and was throwing karate kicks at the cops who were trying to grab him. He stretched his neck and thrust his jaw forward as he screamed out, “White motherfuckers”â¦
He threw a circular kick and I reached up to snatch his ankle and missed. I swung at him with my stick, went for his leg, missed again, and he swiftly kicked me in the shoulder. He was dancing, spinning around, throwing kicks like a ninja warrior in a Kung Fu movie. I scrambled up onto the hood of the car, thinking that maybe I saw a motorcycle cop ride up. I couldn't figure out what he was up to, shouting for me to get out of the way.
Then the guy on the roof of the car changed everything. He threw a bottle at the motorcycle cop. The cop drew his pistol, fired a shot, and blew the guy off the roof of that car.
Everyone froze.
Then everyone ran.
For three days and nights, Harlem burned. Then the chaos spread to Brooklyn.
In Bedford-Stuyvesant and Brownsvilleâthe area where George Whitmore spent his lost night inside the Seventy-third Precinct station houseâMolotov cocktails were launched from rooftops. The streets rang with the sounds of running feet, smashed shop windows, screams, the clicking of hooves from cops on horseback, the dull thud of nightsticks hitting bare skull. People stumbled through the street with blood running down their faces, shirts torn, a crazed glint in their eyes. Leuci and his TPF unit were moved from Harlem to Brooklyn, dispatched to catch looters. Residents were backing trucks up to storefronts, tying rope to security gates, and driving away, wrenching the gates off their hinges. Bricks shattered windows and looters flooded in and out with TVs, clothes, food. “Get those niggers!” commanded a sergeant. A wave of cops descended.
Police violence in Brooklyn was even more unfettered, with little control or oversight to stop it. Riot cops in helmets clubbed blacks indiscriminately: “Go on, you bastards, run.” “Yipee-yi-yo-ki-yay, get along little doggies.” A cop proclaimed: “I'm tired of you damn niggers.” A Negro boy of about ten or eleven, holding his mother's hand, looked at the cop and said, “You think you're having trouble tonight, just wait till tomorrow.”
After the first night of rioting in Brooklyn, Mayor Robert Wagner took to the airwaves. “Without law and order,” he announced on TV, “Negro and civil rights progress would be set back half a century. Law and order 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 lynch mobs.”
Wagner's implication was obvious. But the era when public officials could keep the Negroes in line by evoking Klan retribution had apparently passed, and the mayor's admonitions were ignored. That night saw more rioting, more shooting, more looting and fires, more bloodshed and death.
After the third night of chaos in Brooklyn, the sky openedâfirst a sprinkle, then a heavy downpour. The rains saved the city from descending further into chaos. Six straight days and nights of lawlessness and terror finally came to an end.
The postmortems ranged far and wide, some citing Negro disre
spect for law and order, others citing the savage police response. “Sure, we make mistakes,” Commissioner Michael Murphy conceded. “You do in a war.”