cities.14
Watts, Detroit, and Washington have all generated important books. Even a smaller city like Rochester—which had a riot the weekend after Harlem—has become the subject of July ’64, an award-winning documentary film. Perhaps the violent events in New York, which attracted national and international coverage at the time, failed to fit the conventional narrative, which presents 1964 as a year of tragedy and suffering—symbolized by the disappearance and murder of three civil rights workers in the South—that led to triumph and redemption in the form of the Civil Rights Act. Possibly the unrest in Harlem and Brooklyn was simply overshadowed by the far deadlier and more destructive disorders that began in 1965. In the end, it is hard to know exactly why the largest riot of “Freedom Summer” has not received the attention it merits.15
To correct this omission and tell the story as accurately as possible, I have supplemented new discoveries from historical archives with personal interviews I conducted with dozens of Harlem residents, police officers, political activists, city officials, and print journalists, black and white. Few of my interviewees had ever spoken for the record of their experiences in July 1964. For many it was difficult, even painful, to reconstruct the past. Yet their memories and observations provided me with insights that I could not have gained elsewhere.
Nevertheless, it is impossible to reconstruct with certainty what happened in Central Harlem and Bed-Stuy more than fifty years ago. Even then the events were hazy; now they are shrouded by time. This account instead concentrates on the human dimension of the urban unrest by incorporating a broad range of personal perspectives—black and white, young and old, Christian and Jewish, angry and fearful as well as radical, liberal, and conservative. On almost every page, it showcases the voices of demonstrators and police, officials and reporters, merchants and looters, community activists and ordinary citizens. In providing these diverse and divergent perspectives, my aim is to present the viewpoints of those who were involved as fully and fairly as possible without making assumptions or passing judgments unless the evidence warrants it.
Some of the figures in this book are readily recognizable, such as Mayor Robert F. Wagner, Jr., Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. (no relation to James Powell), and Governor Nelson Rockefeller; black leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr., Roy Wilkins, James Farmer, and Malcolm X; black scholars or artists like Kenneth Clark, James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, and Ralph Ellison; and white journalists like Jimmy Breslin of the Herald Tribune and Gay Talese of the New York Times. Others are undeservedly obscure, such as George Schuyler, a conservative black commentator who served on the grand jury that reviewed the Powell shooting; Earl Caldwell, a black reporter who was launching his career; and Lloyd Sealy, the first black police officer to assume command of the 28th Precinct in Central Harlem and then reach the rank of assistant chief inspector.
The narrative, which moves back and forth from the streets of New York to the corridors of the White House, has two central characters: Lyndon Johnson and Bayard Rustin. It is difficult to imagine two more different people in the summer of 1964: Johnson, the coarse and ambitious Texan politician who was determined to win the presidential election so that he could extend civil rights, build a Great Society, and surpass the historic achievements of his political hero, Franklin Roosevelt; and Rustin, the sophisticated civil rights activist, pacifist, and socialist who after decades of nonviolent struggle against racial segregation was eager to seize the opportunity to advance his dreams of racial equality and economic justice.
Even so, Rustin and Johnson were united by their shared goals and common vision of the Harlem Riot as a major threat to their political ambitions. The racial unrest, they worried, might discredit the cause of civil rights; it might even lead to the election of Barry Goldwater by alienating white liberals and moderates who were sympathetic to the freedom movement but afraid of what the urban protests might portend. And so both the activist and the president worked feverishly, with limited success and unforeseen consequences, to stop the rioting and looting before it could spread.
Night after night, Rustin walked the streets of New York promoting nonviolence and risking his personal safety to pacify the angry youths who had lost patience. Day after day, Johnson worked the phones and levers of power in Washington in an effort to find the right political balance between firmness and compassion, law enforcement and social programs aimed at restoring hope to those who were hurling rocks and debris. Ultimately, the crisis made them allies or partners of a sort and led to greater respect between them—but it also left them vulnerable to criticism from both radicals and conservatives, which prefigured the fate of liberals later in the decade.
A final note of my own: I was born in New York in April 1964. At the time my parents were living on King Street in the West Village. In researching this project, I found a letter in the Municipal Archives that my father, a Brooklyn native, had written to the deputy mayor in charge of police brutality on July 27, three days after the final clashes in Bed-Stuy had subsided. In the letter, which was subsequently forwarded to NYPD Commissioner Michael Murphy, my father contended that the “tension and mistrust” between the police and the public was due in part to a mutual lack of respect or courtesy. A middle-class Jewish American, he observed that uniformed patrolmen, who were typically working-class Irish or Italian Americans, routinely addressed him as “Johnny” or “Mac” (not “Mister”) and my mother as “sister” or “girl” (not “Miss”).16
“Presumably the citizen is supposed to bite his tongue and accept this for the sake of law and order,” my father wrote. But he wondered whether officers “insensible to an individual’s dignity” were not also “insensible to the individual’s rights.” If police disrespect was mainly a result of “bad training,” as my father hoped, then perhaps better instruction or stricter discipline could make basic courtesy as important to officers as keeping their “shoes shined and uniform pressed,” although he conceded that preventing police brutality was a higher priority, especially for minority residents. In response, he received a two-sentence form letter. But today police cars in New York have three words—whether observed more often in the breach or not—emblazoned on the side: Courtesy. Professionalism. Respect.17
Discovering my father’s letter—which he had long forgotten—was not only an unexpected connection to family history. It was also a priceless reminder that respect for the dignity of all should matter to all. As a wise and generous friend once told me, the most valuable gift a historian can possess is empathy for the people about whom he or she writes. I hope this book meets that standard.
CHAPTER 1
THE GROWING MENACE
Now no one knows how it started
Why the windows were shattered
But deep in the dark, someone set the spark
And then it no longer mattered
—Phil Ochs, “In the Heat of the Summer”
THURSDAY, JULY 16
The death of James Powell came almost instantaneously according to the autopsy report. The first .38 caliber bullet, perhaps intended as a warning shot, broke a glass panel in the outer door to the apartment building and smashed into the inner door of the vestibule. The second, perhaps intended to disarm Powell, went through the right forearm close to the wrist and then ripped into the chest, slicing the main artery above the heart and lodging in the lungs. It was the fatal wound. The third shot entered the abdomen just above the navel and severed a major vein. But according to the deputy chief medical examiner, Powell probably could have survived that injury if hospitalized promptly.1
“There was no evidence on the body of smoke, flame or powder marks,” the autopsy report stated, “thus showing that both bullets must have travelled more than a foot and a half
