Tomorrow-Land (27 page)

The attackers
dumped the bodies at the bottom of a ditch on a farm three miles south of Philadelphia. After tossing the three in the Mississippi earth in the wee hours of June 23, amidst the silence of a hot and humid summer night in the middle of nowhere, a bulldozer covered the spot where the bodies were buried, pouring cement over the makeshift dirt grave, yet no one heard a thing. The ditch would be flooded over just as soon as the new dam was finished. Nobody would ever see the three again, they thought.

At home in New York, Farmer got a call about the missing men at 2:30 a.m. In Ohio, Rita Schwerner received the news, too. By Tuesday, President Johnson was getting briefings about the case. One of the first things he did was call Mississippi Senator James O. Eastland, head of the powerful Judiciary Committee and one of the Senate's most rabid segregationists. Eastland told Johnson that the whole thing wasn't true,
suggesting to the president, a fellow Southerner, that there was no Klan activity in that part of his state. The trio was probably off somewhere having fun; it was all just a plan to disgrace Mississippians.

Soon the media, national and international, were reporting the story. In no time at all, Meridian was flooded with reporters. Eventually, J. Edgar Hoover would reluctantly send his FBI men down to Mississippi—the only state where the bureau had no full-time office. Hoover had made no secret of his contempt for civil rights organizations or the likes of Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman; all of them, according to America's top cop, were Communist stooges.

On July 2, while President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, surrounded by Martin Luther King Jr. and Farmer and Robert Kennedy, reporters and FBI agents were flooding the back roads of Mississippi, talking to anyone who might have seen something; their questions were met with stony silence. According to many Mississippi officials, the three men had faked their own disappearance so that the federal government would “invade” the South; in their eyes, it was the Civil War all over again. Even those whites in Meridian who hated the Klan and what they represented didn't want all these
foreigners
around.

As FBI agents and newspapers reporters collected information in Neshoba County, on July 18 another racial disturbance was exploding in New York City. After all the riotous tension of the previous year, it was only fitting that it should happen in Harlem, the epicenter of black life in New York and a prime example of what was wrong with the city's urban centers. “Overcrowded and exploited politically and economically, Harlem is the scene and symbol of the Negro's perpetual alienation in the land of his birth,” wrote novelist Ralph Ellison, author of
Invisible Man,
in an essay that appeared in summer of 1964, just before Harlem burned.
*

Two days earlier on East 76th Street, a confrontation between an Irish immigrant superintendent and three black youths would leave New York's political class, national civil rights leaders, and many Americans shaking their heads in disbelief. What's known for certain is this: The
superintendent was watering the flowers and sidewalk in front of the building where he worked. The black teenagers were attending summer school at Robert F. Wagner Sr. Junior High School—namesake of Mayor Wagner's father—in the mayor's old Yorkville neighborhood on Manhattan's Upper East Side. The teens didn't live in the area; they were from further uptown. But the local school board—perhaps in an attempt at desegregation—had sent the youths to the overwhelmingly white district, which still maintained a strong German-American flavor. The teens, for whatever reason, decided to sit down on the building's stoop and relax a while. The superintendent said he asked them to move. They either didn't, or didn't move fast enough.

What happened next remains murky. Either by accident or by design, the superintendent sprayed the three youths with the hose. Some reports said the teens had provoked the superintendent; others said it was just an accident; still others said the superintendent, in his thick Irish brogue, taunted the teens by shouting “I'll wash the black off you!” In the summer of 1964, with memories of Birmingham police pummeling black children with powerful fire hoses still fresh, such an innocuous instrument as a garden hose was viewed by young blacks as a weapon rife with symbolism. The teens reached for the most obvious weapons they could find: garbage can lids and the debris stacked inside. Soon bottles and other detritus were being thrown at the Irishman, who fled into the building behind him. The garbage and bottles shattered the building's glass front door.

According to the official police account, one of the black teens, James Powell, age sixteen, produced a pocketknife and went after the superintendent with the intention of cutting him. Others said there was no knife and that Powell never threatened to cut anyone. But by then, an off-duty policeman, Lieutenant Thomas Gilligan, had arrived and drew his gun. Witnesses said Powell and the other teens ran. Gilligan said Powell lunged at him with the knife, giving him no choice but to defend himself. He opened fire, shooting Powell dead. Some people claimed that Gilligan shot Powell in the back as the teen ran away; some said the officer emptied his weapon into the young man's body
until Powell was riddled with bullets and lay bleeding to death on a New York City sidewalk.

Gilligan then reportedly flipped the body over with his foot. Although a knife was found on the body, that was hardly proof to most black New Yorkers. (CORE's Farmer would later say that black police had told him white cops always carried knives to plant on the bodies of their shooting victims, just in case evidence was needed.) Many people questioned the likelihood that a 122-pound black teenager would charge a 200-pound white policeman—who was armed and had a license to kill—with nothing more than a penknife.

Soon enough, the other kids in the school program—as many as eight hundred students—heard about the shooting and rushed over to the scene. So did police reinforcements. In no time at all, the two opposing sides squared off. Black teens threw bottles at the white policemen, taunting them, “Come on, shoot another nigger!” One teen, standing in the glass-splattered streets of Mayor Wagner's old neighborhood, screamed what many black New Yorkers had been thinking for a long time: “This is worse than Mississippi!”

Two days later, on July 18, uptown New York exploded into open warfare. It started just hours after a peaceful CORE rally in Harlem for the missing Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman, whose trail, aside from the burned-out blue Ford station wagon that the trio had last been seen in, had gone cold. As far as the crowd was concerned, the missing Freedom Summer workers in Mississippi and the Harlem teenager shot to death on the streets of New York were victims of the same vicious hatred. Whether that hatred was born in Ol' Dixie or in the Northern ghettos didn't matter. Southern racist sheriffs or racist New York cops—in the minds of many Harlemites, there was hardly any daylight between the two.

Reverend Nelson C. Dukes, the pastor of the local Fountain Spring Baptist Church, had had enough. He stood on a chair and angrily addressed the crowd. A crime had been committed, and the guilty party—Officer Gilligan—was still free. Reverend Dukes said they would march to the nearby police precinct and demand that Gilligan be arrested and charged with murder. As they roamed the streets of Harlem, the mob
took on a life of its own. By the time they arrived at the station, they were shouting “Killers, murderers, Murphy's rats!”—as in Commissioner Murphy, who by now was a regular target of activists' ire and frustrations. The crowd tried to get inside. A human wall of policemen, arms interlocked, held them back.

The police pushed the crowd back out to the pavement. Bottles, rocks, and anything else that could be thrown hailed down to the street from local rooftops. Soon a bus with a special unit of judo-trained police officers arrived: Each was at least six feet tall, young, and prepared to fight hand-to-hand combat. The citizens of Harlem started turning on their own neighborhood, smashing windows, especially those of white-owned stores, which forced black proprietors to hastily make signs to hang in their windows—
Black Owned
—or stand and protect their shops with their lives.

More police arrived, some wearing riot gear, many wielding nightsticks and swinging them at anything that moved—men, women, teens—as bottles shattered on the streets, rocks pelted the police, and Molotov cocktails exploded. (“It'll be Molotov cocktails this month, hand grenades next month and something else next month,” Malcolm X had said. “It'll be ballots or it'll be bullets.”)

In response, police emptied their guns into the open air, firing warning shot after warning shot, trying to disperse the crowd.
They ran into tenements with their weapons drawn to reach the roof and occupy it, as if each rooftop was a Viet Cong stronghold that had to be neutralized.

“Go home!” police shouted, attempting to clear the streets.

“We are home, baby!” came the response.

At one o'clock in the morning, the phone at Farmer's downtown apartment rang. A voice told him, “You'd better get your ass up here fast! Harlem is blowing up like a volcano! . . . The cops are shooting like cowboys.” Farmer took the subway to Harlem, and when he got there, he found out that description was accurate. Seeing the tragedy unfolding before his eyes, Farmer did his best to calm the crowd down. When he told a throng of angry Harlemites that great strides were being made down south, they booed.

“We don't wanna hear
that
shit!” someone shouted back him.

When Farmer said, “Now I'm bringing the movement north, so we can deal with the problems of the northern ghettos,” he received cheers. He got their attention by recounting meetings with City Councilman Paul Screvane (who was also a member of the World's Fair Executive Committee) demanding more black cops in Harlem (reportedly a difficult assignment to get due to the potential for lucrative bribes and payoffs that police extracted from Harlem's criminal class). More cheers.

But even Farmer couldn't keep the peace. He marshaled a crowd into a protest march, in the hopes that as the crowd moved through the Harlem streets, he and his CORE workers could convince them to return to their homes. “If we pass by your house, man, drop out and go home,” he told the marchers. It was working until gunfire erupted. Who fired—and at whom—was unknown. At the first sound of gunfire, those stationed on rooftops resumed tossing bricks and bottles; cops responded by firing in the air, unable to see their assailants. The crowd scattered; even Farmer wanted to run for cover. Joe Overton of the NAACP, who was leading the march with him, quickly reminded him that as the leader, he couldn't run away.

Another civil rights leader, Bayard Rustin, who had devoted his life to left-wing causes and nonviolence, was there that night and had been shouting into a bullhorn, telling his fellow Harlemites to stay calm. For his efforts he was shouted down as an Uncle Tom. “I am prepared to be a Tom if that's the only way I can save women and children from being shot down in the street!” replied the organizer of the March on Washington—which young Powell had attended. “And if you're not willing to do the same, you're fools!”

The Battle of Harlem raged all night. Finally, as dawn rose over the city, a ghostly quiet filed the glass-covered streets. Shops were destroyed; fifteen people had been shot, while scores were injured, including a dozen cops. More than two hundred people were arrested. And the battle would continue for the next two nights. The crowd that gathered in front of the funeral parlor holding Powell would attack three
New York Times
journalists—one
Times
photographer was beaten so brutally that
he almost lost an eye—and other whites who happened to wander into the war zone.

The insurrection quickly became a problem for President Johnson. The Republicans had just selected the ultraconservative Senator Goldwater from Arizona as their presidential nominee the week before at their National Convention in San Francisco. Goldwater, who had voted against the Civil Rights Act, was courting the racist vote, while Southerners now added Lyndon Johnson to their most-hated list, which included the likes of Earl Warren, John F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King. Goldwater would hit Johnson hard if the president failed to intervene in New York City but had sent Hoover's FBI men into Mississippi.

Johnson had no choice but to have Hoover work up a report on the New York City disturbances. Naturally Hoover thought the riot was the work of Communists, while Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller, in a phone call to the FBI director, suggested that it might have been the work of right-wing groups. After all, Rockefeller said, Goldwater supporters had taunted him at the Republican convention, a riotous and raucous affair with no love lost between activists from Rockefeller's liberal wing of the Grand Old Party and the conservative zealots of the Goldwater wing. His own party deemed that race riots would soon embarrass the New York governor, who for the second consecutive presidential cycle failed to secure the Republican nomination.

And it wasn't just Harlem. Soon Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant district, New York's second-largest black neighborhood, was burning, as well as Rochester, New York. Insurrection spread to Jersey City and to Philadelphia, too. Forced to choose between the ballot and the bullet, many urban blacks chose the latter, just as Malcolm X had predicted they would. Many observers felt that the Muslim preacher was behind the riots—the thought certainly crossed President Johnson's mind—but, in fact, Malcolm was traveling through Africa and the Middle East, encountering Islam in its purest form, in the part of the world where the Prophet Muhammad originally preached it. When Malcolm returned to the United States, he would undergo self-transformation once again.