Tomorrow-Land (23 page)

But for all Farmer's high-handed talk, his real motivation for leading this new protest was to reclaim control of CORE. “The success or failure of the stall-in loomed as a test of my strength within CORE,” he later admitted.

Meanwhile, his erstwhile members held a press conference at the Hotel Theresa in Harlem—Malcolm X's de facto office after his split with the Nation of Islam—announcing they had 1,800 drivers pledged to stall on the roadways. In fact, they claimed, they had so many volunteers that they were now planning on having people block various bridges, and tunnels around the city with their bodies and stacks of garbage and other debris as well as block subway cars and the Long Island Rail Road. The whole thing now was beyond their control, they claimed. “It's not so much that CORE is planning [the stall-in] but that the man in the street is going to do it,” Leeds told reporters. “From what I've heard in Bedford-Stuyvesant, neither CORE nor anyone else is going to be able to stop him. That's the beauty of this whole operation.” A last-minute effort by the Queens DA, who met the stall-in leaders for a half hour in his office at the Kew Gardens courthouse to get them to reconsider, led to nothing. Later that day he served the stall-in leaders with papers declaring their proposed protest illegal.

As opening day approached, Mayor Wagner announced that the city wasn't taking any chances. All roads leading in and out of Queens, he said, would be swarming
with 1,100 officers in police cars, accompanied by dozens of tow trucks; three command centers would be set up; and
there would be a police presence on every subway. That was on terra firma; from the sky, police helicopters would be hovering, including one that was capable of lifting an automobile into the air. As far as the city was concerned, this was war.

Mayor Wagner engaged in his own histrionics when, on the eve of opening day, he called the activists' plans “a gun to the heart of the city”—exactly the kind of violent imagery that Moses thought did nothing to counter New York's growing reputation as a savage city or benefit the World's Fair. Later that night, the
New York Times
put together a story about a meeting of stall-in leaders who claimed drivers from Philadelphia and New Jersey were in New York already, prepared to risk their cars. “[The stall-in] is planned to dramatize the Negroes' dissatisfaction with the pace of civil rights progress,” the
Times
reported on its front page the next day. “No power on earth can stop it now.”

21.

Unless we can achieve the theme of this fair—“Peace Through Understanding”—unless we can use our skill and our wisdom to conquer conflict as we have conquered science—then our hopes of today—these proud achievements—will go under in the devastation of tomorrow.

—President Lyndon B. Johnson at the World's Fair opening ceremony

 

After five long years of negotiations and toil, the opening day of the World's Fair—April 22, 1964—finally arrived. As millions of New Yorkers awoke that morning to an unseasonably chilly day and rainy skies, more like late autumn than early spring, crowds gathered at the Fair's gates, anxious to roam the 646 acres of manicured Fairgrounds where oblong-, pylon-, and ziggurat-shaped pavilions had been taking shape for more than a year.

When the gates opened at 9:00 a.m., the first visitor of the day was ushered in: eighteen-year-old Bill Turchyn, a freshman from St. Peter's College in Jersey City, who had been waiting—first in line—for nearly two days, braving the rain and cold. Standing behind him, along with thousands of others, was Michael Catan, who twenty-five years earlier had been the first customer at the 1939–40 World's Fair.

Third in line that blustery morning, and equally intent on making history, was a big-band jazz drummer from Chicago named Al Carter, an admitted fair buff. Carter loved being first; in fact, he had made an art of it: He had been the first paying customer to enter Chicago's 1933 Century of Progress exhibition, as well as Seattle's Century 21 Exposition two years before (and he would be the first paying customer at Montreal's Expo '67 three years later). “I like to participate in moments of history,” Carter told the
New York Times
. “That's my hobby. Is it any crazier than those people who collect little pieces of paper—stamps?” That was exactly the kind of enthusiasm and dedication that Robert Moses was banking on.

Despite the weather, the festivities went along as scheduled. The opening parade featured five thousand people marching in the rain before the reviewing stand, where the Fair's executive vice president, General William E. Potter, saluted them. The paraders were a microcosm of the World's Fair itself, in all its multicultural glory: bagpipers (from three countries); a Chinese drum and bugle corps; Montana cowboys; Japanese geishas; Spanish guitarists (plus flamenco dancers); the University of Pennsylvania's 101-piece marching band; a horse-drawn beer wagon from Germany; a steel-drum troupe from the Caribbean; an Israeli accordionist; a soaked-to-the-bone Miss Louisiana, who smiled bravely in her strapless sequined dress while perched in a slow-moving red convertible; and several Walt Disney characters.

Unbeknownst to the paraders and revelers, a short distance away at the 74th Street and Broadway station in Jackson Heights, the first protests of the day had already taken place. After threatening to bring New York's arterial highway system to a halt, the activists of Brooklyn CORE and their cohorts opted to target the city's subway system. In response, Mayor Robert F. Wagner Jr. and Police Commissioner Michael J. Murphy had stationed a cop on every subway car; all twenty-five thousand members of New York's Finest had been activated for duty, like a heavily fortified army ready to defend its homeland from foreign marauders.

The No. 7 Train in Queens, the “official” World's Fair subway—
“Just pay 15 cents—hop aboard!—and you're on your way / Yes, part of the fun of the World's Fair is the Subway Special that takes you there”
promised a Metropolitan Transit Authority TV commercial—provided an easy and inexpensive way for millions of travelers to get to the Fairgrounds and Shea Stadium. It was also an obvious target for protesters.

The trouble started around 6:00 a.m. when four teenagers—three boys and a girl—blocked the subway doors from closing on a Fair-bound train at the 74th Street station. The police quickly surrounded the youths, who refused to budge while clutching the doors. Officers pried their hands loose by bashing their knuckles with nightsticks, and the quartet was promptly arrested. About an hour later, at the same station in Queens, a crowd of fifty teenagers rushed another train, holding
open its doors and shouting “Freedom Now!” and “Jim Crow must go!” Dozens of police moved in. When the protesters refused to move, officers dragged them away by their feet.

“This is America!” one black youth shouted as he was carried away. “Look what they're doing to a sixteen-year-old boy who wants freedom!”

Another black protester asked his arresting officer, also black, if the white policemen called him a “boy back at the station.” His response was to bash the protester with his club. An older black woman thought the cops were going too easy on the teens. “What they need is bayonets stuck in them,” she said.

When it was over, seven people were injured in the melee, four protestors hospitalized for head wounds and three police officers. Twenty-three people were arrested in all, four of them charged with felonious assault. A CBS reporter saw the whole thing. “The police did their job but it required a great deal of force,” he told the
New York Times
, “and a number of people got hurt quite badly.”

The incident illustrated how the racial dynamics in the North differed from its Southern counterpart. These weren't Bull Connor's racist Southern policemen happily beating peaceful protesters chanting “We Shall Overcome”; this was Queens, New York, already one of the country's fastest-growing melting pots—a pastiche of cultures and ethnicities—with both an integrated police force and a subway system. In New York's racial landscape, black policemen faced not only on-the-job discrimination, but also taunting from young activists, as subway riders—black and white—nodded their consent as they watched those same officers use brute force against civil rights protesters.

For many Northern Democratic voters, using civil disobedience to end the South's Jim Crow laws was one thing; using similar tactics to end discrimination in New York was something else entirely. Somewhere Connor and Senator Richard B. Russell were smiling, while ensconced at his Wall Street law firm former vice president Richard Nixon was taking notes—and calculating the political benefits of a potential “backlash” among white working-class voters—while plotting his political comeback.

Despite the disruptions to the No. 7 Train, the highways outside the World's Fair were nearly empty—at least by New York City rush hour standards. So were the bridges and tunnels. As police stood in the rain wearing yellow slickers or patrolled the roads in black-and-white cruisers, tow trucks roamed nearby and helicopters hovered overhead. In fact, there was nary a traffic problem to be found—only a dozen drivers were arrested when their cars stalled. Firebrand preacher Reverend Milton A. Galamison and comedian/activist Dick Gregory drove to Queens but quickly realized the stall-in wasn't happening. For all their ballast, the Brooklyn activists couldn't pull it off. With nothing else to do, Galamison suggested they head back to the church and regroup. “Regroup what?” quipped Gregory, who would use the stall-in as a punch line in his comedy routine.

But if Moses and the political elite inside the World's Fair thought that the day's troubles were over, James L. Farmer Jr. had other ideas. Although the national CORE chairman only planned his “counterdemonstration” as a last-minute rebuttal to the stall-in, he had managed to put together a contingent of highly motivated veteran activists, including Bayard Rustin, the co-organizer of the March of Washington. Earlier that morning Farmer had gathered his troops at Community Church on East 35th Street and reiterated that their demonstration had clear and precise goals—unlike the stall-in. Their mission, he would say throughout the day, was to illustrate “the contrast between the glittering world of fantasy and the real world of brutality, bigotry and poverty.” They then traveled down to Penn Station—the magnificent neoclassical building that would by year's end be torn down in an act of architectural vandalism—and boarded the 8:43 a.m. Long Island Rail Road for Flushing Meadow.

Debarking the train, Farmer strode up to the Fair's gate, where he and his group encountered members of Moses' Pinkerton private police force. The guards readily spotted the nationally known Farmer—hard to miss with his barrel-chested frame and linebacker build. Prepared for any contingency, the CORE leader already had advance troops inside the Fair equipped with walkie-talkies to scope out the scene.

As Farmer stood at the gate, one of his young troops listened in on the Pinkertons' wavelength, overhearing the Fair's official plan: Farmer would be stopped at the gate, and thus unable to lead a demonstration. Such a calculated move seemed to have Moses' fingerprints all over it. But improvising on the fly, the young activist imitated a guard and barked into the walkie-talkie. “Correction! There are new orders. Let Farmer and his group come in. Repeat.
Do
let them come in. That is all.” Just like that, Farmer, with his group in tow, entered the Fairgrounds. Whatever happened next at the World's Fair, one thing was certain: The fate of CORE as a national civil rights organization hung in the balance.

Born in Texas in 1920, Farmer was the grandson of a slave. His father, James L. Farmer Sr. was a preacher and professor who taught literature in three ancient languages—Aramaic, Hebrew, and Greek—and was reportedly the first black man in Texas to earn a PhD. Following in his father's footsteps, Farmer earned a degree in theology from Howard University. With his deep baritone and intellectual mind, he was well-suited for preaching but in 1942 cofounded CORE, an interracial civil rights group. It was during his college years—he began his undergraduate studies at age fourteen—that he first encountered Gandhi's philosophy of nonviolent protest, which CORE would help make a hallmark of the civil rights movement.

After working as a journalist for a time, Farmer labored to integrate the public school system in the South. In February 1960, when four black college students sat at a whites-only lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, they turned to CORE for support. A year later Farmer became CORE's national director, and that summer he pushed for the first Freedom Rides to desegregate the South's public transportation system. After angry white mobs assaulted the riders again and again, Robert Kennedy suggested CORE postpone their protests so that both sides could “cool off.” “We have been cooling off for 350 years,” Farmer told Kennedy. The Freedom Rides continued.

Now, three years later, he was defying the Northern liberal establishment again. He and Rustin headed to the Louisiana and Mississippi pavilions, where they joined other protesters. Farmer brandished a
three-foot-long electric cattle prod—to inform Fairgoers that it was a weapon of choice of the Louisiana police to use on black activists. Unfortunately for Farmer, the pavilion was empty, one of several that weren't ready for opening day. Heading over to the New York City Pavilion, Farmer and Rustin sat in the doorway, blocking entry. It didn't take long for the Pinkertons to find Farmer and politely ask him to move. When he refused, the guard in charge tried pleading with the civil rights leader.

“Mr. Farmer, you know you're blocking entrance to the building,” the guard said. “Won't you please move over.”

Farmer still refused.

“Mr. Farmer, Robert Moses, who is in charge of the World's Fair, does not want you arrested,” the Pinkerton informed him. “We don't want to arrest you. So please move. Your picketing is all right and quite legal, but blocking the entrance is illegal.” While Moses might have advocated behind the scenes to throw the book at the would-be stall-inners, when it came to the politically connected Farmer—who had sat in the White House opposite presidents—he used kid gloves.

Ordinary Fairgoers had mixed feelings about the protesters that ranged from hate to sympathy. One mother grew annoyed with her six-year-old girl as they passed in front of the New York State Pavilion because the youngster walked around the prone protestors. “When I say step on them,” the mother reprimanded the child, “step on them.” One older woman was moved by what she saw. “There's a part of me that feels like joining them,” she said. A Pakistani couple who viewed the display of civil disobedience were aghast. “I think we should move on. I do not like to look at this.”

Still refusing to move, Farmer was asked by one Pinkerton guard if he would speak to him privately. Again he reiterated how Moses did not want to have the civil rights leader arrested. When Farmer defiantly reclaimed his spot in front of the entrance, the Pinkertons had little choice but to arrest him. It took three guards to carry the heavy Farmer away. “Gee, Mr. Farmer,” one of them said as they lifted him to the paddy wagon, “you got to lose some weight.” Even Farmer got a laugh out of that.

Years later, the CORE leader recalled that unlike in his Southern campaigns, he and his fellow activists weren't breaking a “bad law” at the World's Fair—blocking entrance to a building was, after all, hardly a misappropriate use of the legal code. But Farmer noted they were purposefully violating it “in order to bring the spotlight of public attention on other evils in New York such as employment discrimination, housing discrimination, and de facto segregation in the schools,” which was, contrary to what Farmer or anyone else claimed, exactly what Brooklyn CORE's proposed stall-in meant to do, only on a far grander scale.

However, the Brooklyn group was unable to pull it off. The hundreds of cars promised by fellow activists from outside New York City never arrived. Most were scared off by the court injunction obtained by Queens District Attorney Frank D. O'Connor against Brooklyn CORE for threatening the stall-in; many were afraid that the radical chapter lacked the funds to bail them out if they were arrested.

Arriving in the afternoon at the 110th Precinct in Elmhurst, Queens, where the arrested teenage activists from the subway protests were being held, Brooklyn CORE chairman Isaiah Brunson told reporters that despite the stall-in's failure, there would be other protests in the future. “We are not stopping here,” he said, “and there will be no peace in New York City until Mayor Wagner meets our demands.” It was bold talk but only talk; within a few days Brunson, troubled by his inability to stage the stall-in, went into hiding.