Tomorrow-Land (22 page)

Five days later Goldwag sent a telegram to Mayor Wagner, Governor Rockefeller, and Moses with another ultimatum:

 

The people of this community are fed up with empty promises and pious pronouncements. Unless you formulate and begin to implement a comprehensive program, by April 20, which will end police brutality, abolish slum housing and provide integrated quality education for all—we will fully support and help organize a community-backed plan to immobilize all traffic leading to the World's Fair on opening day.

Although civil rights groups had been lobbying Moses to appoint more blacks to executive positions at the Fair—to date there were two, Dr. Ralph J. Bunche and baseball icon Jackie Robinson—and to use his considerable power to force union leaders to hire more African Americans and Puerto Ricans for several years, Brooklyn CORE wasn't interested in such simple objectives. They wanted to make a symbolic point: that the World's Fair was being hosted in a city that was anything but
fair.
“Our objective is to have our own civil rights exhibit at the World's Fair,” noted Oliver Leeds, another leader of the Brooklyn chapter. “We do not see why white people should enjoy themselves when Negroes are suffering.”

Although Brooklyn CORE's rhetoric was belligerent and confrontational—radically different than that of mainstream activists—the stall-in would be an act of pure nonviolent civil disobedience. When asked why they would disrupt the World's Fair just to make their point, the activists claimed they had no choice. “The Power Structure of this City, State and Country must be made to realize that we will accept palliation no longer,” Brunson, the Brooklyn CORE chairman explained. “Empty promises, investigatory committees, and such have done nothing to alleviate the problems that exist.”

Few honest New Yorkers could disagree.

However, the backlash began immediately. The first to react was Farmer, CORE's national chairman, who called the notion a “harebrained idea.” After a contentious meeting with the Brooklyn activists at his Manhattan apartment that went until four in the morning, he suspended the group on April 11, a move that brought indignation from several of CORE's other New York chapters. “We are not splitting with them,” Farmer told the
New York
Times,
“they are splitting with us.”

While Farmer struggled to gain control of his organization—as one member of CORE's steering committee quipped, the stall-in “won't end segregation but it might end CORE”—other national civil rights groups tried to make light of the proposed protests. The NAACP's Roy Wilkins, who lived in Queens, dismissed the stall-in organizers' rhetoric as “strictly Brooklynese”—a snobbish comment that only amused the
Brooklyn chapter. “Oh, you're so right, baby!” laughed a Brooklyn activist after hearing Wilkins's snide remark.

City officials were outraged. Police Commissioner Michael J. Murphy declared that New York's Finest would “protect the constitutional rights” of anyone “to peacefully assemble and petition,” but he had an obligation to protect “all men to the pursuit of happiness . . . the World's Fair should be a happy occasion in a somewhat far from happy world. No unlawful acts by any groups will be allowed to mar it.” Traffic Commissioner Henry A. Barnes—one of Moses' favorite punching bags—quickly added a new law to the books making it illegal to intentionally run out of gas on a New York City roadway. Although he announced the law days after the Brooklyn group's announcement, Barnes told reporters with a straight face that the new rule had nothing to do with the stall-in. And then, just to keep the city's thermostat at a roiling temperature, Goldwag announced that his Brooklyn unit was planning on wasting millions of gallons of water by turning on New York City faucets just in case the stall-in didn't yield the desired results.

The media's condemnation of the activists was swift. “The projected traffic tie-up can win few converts to the civil rights banner,” complained the
New York Post
. “It will provide new ammunition from racists—here and in Washington . . . it will in short be a form of sound and fury, carrying no clear message to most of the populace.” As
Time
's Theodore H. White memorably quipped, the traffic jam would amount to a “grab at the groin of a community of 10 million” New Yorkers.

Ordinary citizens flooded newspaper editors with letters. Some were from liberals concerned that the protest “would turn many people against the Negro cause,” while others wrote that protesters should be arrested for “loitering, inciting to riot, and being plain fools.” Some letters, sent directly to Brooklyn CORE's office, were unabashedly racist. “The colored people of Brooklyn want to be and act like parasites that should be exterminated,” one anonymous writer wrote, adding “
You Will Be Judged by Your Acts
.” Another note, written on NYC Board of Education letterhead, read, “Why you miserable
blacksonofabitch!
How dare you threaten the World's Fair and the Christian White
Power structure of this City? You nigger bastards belong in Africa not here among genteel white Christian folk! We hope the police break your black ape heads on [opening day]! So drop dead!” One black woman from Manhattan wrote to the
Daily News
to express her disdain for the plan, suggesting that every car used in the protest should be towed away, and every driver's license suspended for one year. “I was hired to work at the Fair,” she wrote. “I am a Negro, and I think this tie-up stuff is just too much.”

The threats of a stall-in ruining the World's Fair filled the liberal political establishment with fear. Like Senator Humphrey, President Johnson worried any disturbance at the World's Fair would empower the Senate's bloc of Dixiecrats, who at that very moment were staging their own stall-in by making sure the civil rights bill didn't get anywhere. Such extreme measures in the streets of New York, Johnson told reporters, would “do the civil rights cause no good.”

On April 16, at a meeting of the American Society of Newspaper Editors in Washington, DC, Farmer continued to condemn the actions of his organization's rogue chapter. But he told the largely white editors in the audience that while he disapproved of their methods, he understood their viewpoint; there was a “growing frustration, anger, militancy” among young blacks throughout the country, he warned, and unless action—real action rather than more broken promises—was delivered, the future didn't bode well for America.

Speaking at the same conference, Attorney General Kennedy struck a similar note, condemning the stall-in as irresponsible and urging the Senate to pass the civil rights bill his late brother had introduced the previous June. If the Senate didn't act soon, Kennedy predicted, young African Americans might start to believe that “there's no future for [them] in this system.” What Kennedy either didn't know or failed to acknowledge was that many young activists in New York and elsewhere had already come to that conclusion.

It was apparent to anyone who was watching that the civil rights movement was hardly united under one banner or philosophy: A fissure exposed its warring factions, and the NAACP's Wilkins, one of the most
moderate of the national leaders, wanted it fixed, and quickly. He sought a consensus from the top civil rights groups, and joined by Farmer, the Urban League's Whitney Young, and the SNCC's John Lewis, issued a statement that same day, declaring the stall-in a “revolutionary proposal” that was not in “the broad interests and needs of the Negro people,” and characterizing the protest as “neither orderly or nonviolent.”

While it is hard to imagine a mammoth New York traffic jam being orderly, declaring the protest as something other than nonviolent was pure spin. Lewis, one of the original Freedom Riders, apparently agreed. The next day Lewis, who was as devoted to Gandhian principles as Farmer or King, and who had sustained severe beatings at the hands of Southern racists, withdrew his name and organization from the hastily organized statement. There was “no evidence,” he stated, that the stall-in violated “the time-honored tactics of civil disobedience.”

Wilkins and the others told reporters that King, who had not signed the anti-stall-in statement, would eventually join them in condemning the actions of the rogue CORE activists. But King, the personification of the civil rights struggle for millions of Americans, had other ideas. In a plaintive letter to Wilkins, King admitted that he considered the stall-in a “tactical error,” but flatly refused to condemn the young activists. “Which is worse, a ‘Stall-In' at the World's Fair or a ‘Stall-In' in the United States Senate?” he pointedly asked. “The former merely ties up the traffic of a single city. But the latter seeks to tie up the traffic of history, and endanger the psychological lives of twenty million people.”

Sensing the seismic shift in the civil rights movement he had helped lead for nearly a decade, King attempted to explain the tactics of the Brooklyn activists to a broader audience. “The World's Fair action must be viewed in the broader context of 20,000,000 Negroes living in an unfair world,” he wrote in a statement to the press, “facing grinding poverty and humiliating denial of elementary and fundamental rights to equal accommodation, voting, housing, education and jobs.”

The split stance of the mainstream civil rights leaders only bolstered the militant posturing of Brooklyn CORE, who quickly found allies rallying to their side. Already aligned with CORE's Bronx chapter as well as
Reverend Galamison's organization, Brooklyn CORE accepted pledges of support and the promise to send drivers from other local chapters—Manhattan, Long Island, Columbia University—and SNCC activists from Washington, Maryland, and Pennsylvania. “You do not stand alone,” one supporter wrote to the group. And at least one New York union leader, John J. Felury, president of the Sanitation Men's Local 831, told reporters that none of his ten thousand sanitation workers would report to work on April 22 if the city ordered them to tow cars. “We're not going to scab on anyone fighting for freedom or civil rights,” he said.

Meanwhile, activists around the city passed out leaflets, many of them handwritten with drawings of the Unisphere, to rally drivers for their cause. “Drive awhile for freedom,” exhorted one flyer. “Take only enough gas to get your car on
exhibit
on one of these highways,” it read, and listed the five roadways they would target: the Grand Central Parkway, the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, the Belt Parkway, the Interboro Parkway, and the Van Wyck Expressway—every one of them built or refurbished by Moses.

Throughout the hectic weeks leading up to the World's Fair, when every day brought a new drama to the stall-in saga, Moses was curiously quiet. Perhaps, after decades of spouting off at his enemies—both real and imagined—the Master Builder had learned that silence could be the better side of valor. With his historical unfriendliness toward civil rights activists and his combative nature, his usual pontifications in the press could only make things worse. Already, unbeknownst to Moses, one of the activists had circulated a flyer with his picture (cut out from the
New York Times
) accentuated by several hand-drawn arrows pointed at his image and the words:
The Target April 22 1964.

Privately, Moses used his connections with his friends in the media elite to write editorials coaxing city officials to come down hard on the would-be protesters. Writing his friend Jack Flynn, publisher of the
Daily News,
he suggested any driver whose car stalled on April 22 should have his license, registration, and liability insurance revoked—­permanently. “A fine is
not
the answer,” Moses declared. “The penalty of forfeiting the right to drive seems the best suggestion made.” At a
preview of the Illinois Pavilion, which would soon mesmerize Fairgoers with its animated Abraham Lincoln, Moses sat silently as his friend Adlai Stevenson, the former governor of Illinois, former great liberal hope of the Democratic Party, and at the time US Ambassador to the UN, criticized the stall-in as a “civil wrong” and declared that there must be “respect for law and order.”

But ultimately and quite uncharacteristically, Moses felt powerless as the threat of the stall-in grew. When his friend Robert Daru, a well-connected lawyer, offered his legal assistance to battle the activists, Moses politely declined. “The trouble is that the main part of this problem lies outside of the Fair and is directly under the city administration and the Police Commissioner,” Moses complained. “I have no doubt of Commissioner Murphy's ability and courage but some of the others who ought to be heard from have been singularly silent.” He closed the letter by stating he was confident his Pinkerton police force could meet any challenges inside the Fair but that what happens outside the Fair's gates was beyond his control. “There are indeed a number of things which could be done,” he lamented, “but I am not in a position to advocate, much less do them.”

All along Moses had been preoccupied with the press coverage of the World's Fair. Now, here was a story that couldn't be ignored: a traffic jam intended to prevent tens of thousands of Fairgoers from reaching their destination. Given the city's roiling racial turmoil of the past year, it wasn't hard to imagine that such an undertaking—even if it was a nonviolent act of civil disobedience—could touch off a full-blown race riot. And Moses' worst fears were realized when one would-be Fairgoer from Clayton, Ohio, wrote him to say that after reading reports about the civil rights activities in New York, he had decided against subjecting “our children to such unhuman [
sic
] like actions, this degrading spectacle . . . we have decided to cancel our reservations and take our vacation in a more human atmosphere somewhere else.”

By now the players in the stall-in drama were busy ratcheting up their rhetoric. Farmer announced that he would lead activists from National CORE in a “positive” counterdemonstration
inside
the World's
Fair, specifically targeting the exhibits of Jim Crow–supporting Southern state pavilions like Louisiana. Farmer would brandish a cattle prod, just like the ones that Louisiana police used on civil rights workers, and some of his activists might attempt to scale the twelve-story Unisphere. This new CORE protest would illustrate “the contrast of the glittering fantasy of the technical abundance” of the World's Fair with “the real world of discrimination, poverty and brutality faced by the Negroes of America, North and South.” Millions of people would be attending the Fair; millions, Farmer noted, who remained neutral on the issue of racial discrimination. “We hope to get them off the fence,” he said.