Each incident of police violence added to racial tensions. On November 17, 1963, six hundred Puerto Ricans protested in front of a police station after a New York City police officer shot and killed two Puerto Rican youths. Leaders of the National Association for Puerto Rican Civil Rights charged the police with acting “like they were running a plantation.”56
The situation grew increasingly dire in 1964, and by summer civil rights groups had put police brutality front and center. Yet despite ongoing protests and efforts by community groups to push the city to investigate incidents of police brutality or create a civilian review board, neither Mayor Wagner nor the city council budged. Daniel Monti observes that continued rebukes “spurred the NAACP, CORE, Puerto Rican Committee for Civil Rights and Workers Defense League to set up their own civilian review board in May of 1964. Relations between police and minority citizens had deteriorated to such an extent that any significant incident could have led to a serious outburst.”57
On April 17, 1964, six boys were playing and pushing each other on the way home from school when one knocked over a fruit stand owned by Edward De Luca on the corner of 128th Street and Lenox. When a crate of grapefruit fell on the ground, the boys began playing ball with the fruit. De Luca blew a whistle to frighten the boys, but the local police heard the whistle and came charging after the boys with weapons drawn. Some had them aimed at the roofs, frightening residents, who withdrew from the windows. As the police caught the boys, they began beating them and then turned on two adult residents who tried to defend the children. The men were Frank Safford, a thirty-one-year-old black salesman, and Fecundo Acion, a forty-seven-year-old Puerto Rican man, both of whom the police cuffed, beat in the street, and continued beating in the precinct.
Safford told James Baldwin that about thirty-five officers beat him while in custody: they “came into the room and started beating, punching us in the jaw, in the stomach, in the chest, beating us with a padded club. They beat us across the head bad, pulls us on the floor, spit on us, call us niggers, dogs, animals when I don’t see why we are the animals the way they are beating us. Like they beat the other kids and the elderly fellow [Fecundo Acion]. They throw him almost through one of the radiators. I thought he was dead over there.”58 Another witness told Baldwin, “Now here come an old man walking out a stoop and asked the cop ‘say, listen sir, what’s going on here?’ The cop turned around and smash him a couple of times in the head. He get that just for a question. No reason at all. Just for a question.”59 No one was charged with a crime, but Safford lost an eye as a result of the beatings.
Several days later a white couple who owned a secondhand store in Harlem was attacked and stabbed several times. The woman died from her injuries. Within hours four of the six boys the police had identified at the fruit-stand “riot” were picked up and accused of the murder. The railroading of the Harlem six had a profound influence on James Baldwin, who wrote of the event in a scathing piece for the Nation. “This is why,” Baldwin notes, “those pious calls to ‘respect the law,’ always to be heard from prominent citizens each time the ghetto explodes, are so obscene…. They are dying there like flies: they are dying in the streets of all our Harlems far more hideously than flies…. Well they don’t need us for work no more. Where are they building the gas ovens?”60 In a later article Baldwin reflects, “The only way to police a ghetto is oppressive. None of the Police Commissioner’s men, even with the best will in the world, have any way of understanding the lives led by the people: they swagger about in twos and threes patrolling. Their very presence is an insult, and it would be, even if they spent their entire day feeding gum drops to children.”61
The First Ghetto Riot of the 1960s
On July 16, 1964, Officer Thomas Gilligan shot and killed fifteen-year-old James Powell outside a schoolyard. The shooting followed an altercation between several black high school students and the white janitor of a neighboring building (as discussed in the Introduction). When the janitor turned his garden hose on the students, in a manner reminiscent of police attacks on protesters in Mississippi, as well as a barrage of racial insults, the youths responded in anger. The janitor retreated to his building with several boys on his heels. It was then that Officer Gilligan appeared. Gilligan saw the retreating janitor, turned, and shot James Powell dead. The high school students screamed in pain and outrage. In the evening hundreds of residents gathered at the police precinct, where they encountered a solid wall of police. The officers charged the protesters, and the crowd responded with rocks and bottles. The police then attempted to rope off Harlem from 125th Street and Third Avenue to Eighth Avenue, but residents resisted by hurling garbage, stones, and anything else they could find at police. Some residents began to overturn cars and set buildings aflame. Police opened fire with live ammunition. By nightfall mass looting had ensued, and riots spread from Central and East Harlem and to the Brooklyn neighborhoods of Bedford-Stuyvesant and Brownsville.
The next day civil rights groups led marches demanding that the city investigate and take action against the police department. When those efforts came to naught, the protests moved, as Sugrue notes:
from peaceful picketing to violent retaliation. On July 16 hundreds of “screaming youths” pelted police officers with bottles and cans in Manhattan’s Yorkville neighborhood. The following day two hundred teenagers took to the streets of Harlem looting, burning, and attacking police officers. Over the next week, roving bands of youths and police clashed throughout the city. The uprising followed a pattern that would become commonplace during the mid-1960s—beginning with a police incident and ending with angry crowds in the streets.62
The protests continued for five days and nights.63 Over five hundred people were seriously injured and (as described in the Introduction) one black man was shot dead by police. Activated racial boundaries, increasing police violence, and the police killing of a young unarmed youth were key ingredients. However, the first response to police violence was nonviolent. Only when the police responded to the nonviolent assembly with violence did the NAACP and CORE lose control of the crowds. As one journalist warned, “[I]t is not possible for even the most responsible Negro leaders to control the Negro masses once pent up anger and total despair are unleashed by a thoughtless or brutal act.”64
The riots were an expression of rage, a refusal to remain cowed in the face of police violence, and a defensive response to the violent policing of racial boundaries. A white man whom I interviewed told me that two black adolescent boys, whom he often hired to help him with yard work, had pelted him with stones during the riot. After the riot the two boys came by the house again to ask for work. “You just pelted me with stones,” the man said. “We didn’t throw stones at you,” they responded. “Of course you did.I saw you and you were looking right at me,” he retorted. “No,” they said, “we weren’t throwing them at you; we were throwing stones at ‘the man.’” In contrast, a black man I spoke with told me it was one of the happiest moments in his life (2009). “The most peaceful I ever felt was in the middle of the riot. None of the damn rules applied. You were absolutely free from the law.”
In the aftermath of the riots, Mayor Wagner finally promised to investigate the shooting of Powell and others and to create a civilian review board. Yet again he did neither. By 1965 complaints of brutality had become more numerous than before.65 Bertrand Russell stated, “[Harlem’s] inhabitants are brutalized at every moment of their lives by police, poverty and indignities.”66 A journalist observed that Harlem had “rioted five times since 1935. Each time an incident with police lit the fuse, the police representing the face of the enemy, of economic and social repression” (emphasis mine).67
The Harlem riot initiated a wave of riots that would spread first to cities connected to Harlem through family and friendship ties, and subject to similar levels of police violence and brutality, and then to distant cities throughout the country. Nestled within the national wave of riots were smaller incidents of riots diffused through towns geographically connected to the major city riots.68 Riots first spread from New York
