Both findings cast doubt on the claim by some witnesses that Lieutenant Thomas Gilligan had fired the second and third bullets at close range while Powell was lying on the ground. But the forensic evidence would only arrive weeks later—too late to quell the rumors or quench the outrage felt by many in the black community.2
On the final morning of his young life, Powell said goodbye to his mother Annie at 7:30 A.M. and left his home in the Soundview Housing Project, a lower-income apartment complex in the Bronx. At age fifteen he was a relatively small and slight youth, standing five feet six inches tall and weighing 122 pounds. An only child and a ninth-grader at nearby Samuel Gompers Vocational High School, Powell was taking voluntary remedial-reading classes at Wagner Junior High School for the summer term, which had started nine days earlier.3
Since the death of his father Harold three years earlier, Powell had begun to get into scrapes with the law, including arrests for armed robbery and breaking a car window. Twice he was also charged with trying to board a subway or bus without paying the fare. None of those arrests had led to convictions. But according to the FBI, Powell ran with a gang and had suffered a knife wound in his right leg that required hospitalization. That might explain why he gave two knives, one with a black handle and one with a red handle, to Cliff Harris and Carl Dudley, two other boys who joined him on the way to the subway on that fateful morning.4
Neighbors had a mixed view of Powell. Some believed that he was a good kid and doubted that he would have sought serious trouble. Others contended that he was a troubled youth who “liked to get high on whiskey” and was beginning to develop a wild streak. From interviews with school officials and social workers, the FBI learned that Powell was a chronic truant who had been absent thirty-two days in the spring term, which was why he needed to attend summer school. When he was present, fellow students accused him of bullying them, stealing from them, and starting fights—even in the guidance office.5
Powell and his friends were part of a group of about one hundred students who were waiting for classes to begin at 9:30 A.M. Some were standing near the entrance to the school. Others were leaning on cars or sitting on stoops across the street where a superintendent named Patrick Lynch, a stocky thirty-six-year-old Irish immigrant with a strong brogue, was watering the plants, flowers, and trees in front of the apartment buildings at 211 and 215 East 76th Street.6
Lynch and his white tenants had little patience for the summer school students, most of whom were black. The Yorkville neighborhood had few minorities, and during the regular term Wagner Junior High School, which had not previously hosted a summer school session, was roughly half white, a quarter African American, and a quarter Puerto Rican. Those students were not a problem according to the superintendent. “They sit on the stoops to eat lunch and I don’t pass any remarks,” he told a reporter later, in what seemed like a partial confession. “They clean up. They’re good kids.”7
Not so the kids who attended summer school. In Lynch’s eyes, they were rude and loud, creating problems for everyone, especially local merchants, and leaving litter everywhere. He repeatedly complained to the school principal, Max Francke, a mild-mannered, white-haired man who was not sympathetic and tended to side with the students. The building superintendent also lodged more than twenty complaints with the police, who were equally unresponsive. “The other day, my wife was on the street when a couple of kids went for each other with bottles,” Lynch said later in a tone of sadness and regret. “My wife went upstairs and called the police, but they never came. They always come after something serious. But why couldn’t they come before? Then this would never have happened.”8
What happened on July 16 at 9:20 A.M. in front of 215 East 76th Street was unclear and contested, both then and now. The grand jury, which by law automatically reviewed every fatal police shooting in New York, heard testimony from “all known” witnesses, including those brought to the attention of the district attorney by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Of the forty-five interviewed, fifteen were teenagers who were friends or acquaintances of Powell. Among them were his buddies Harris and Dudley. But the eyewitnesses offered conflicting testimony about whether Powell was armed or had attacked Gilligan, perhaps because a repair truck parked in front of the building obstructed their views. Whether the officer had issued a warning or identified himself was also contentious.
Despite the controversy surrounding the incident, the basic cause of the deadly confrontation was not in dispute. According to Lynch, he was washing the sidewalk with a hose at 9:15 A.M. when he repeatedly asked a group of students who were standing near the steps to move so that they would not get wet while he watered some flowers on a fire escape above them. They refused and then claimed that the superintendent had sprayed them with water after calling them “dirty niggers” and threatening to “wash the black off you.”9
Lynch denied the accusation, but Francke backed the teens, asserting that the hosing was done with “malice aforethought.” The principal also accused the superintendent of poor judgment and blamed him for the tragedy. True or not, the incident was laden with overtones from the demonstrations in Birmingham a year earlier, when police officers turned fire hoses and water cannons on black children. Now the students began to retaliate by throwing bottles, trash, and metal garbage can lids at Lynch, who quickly darted inside the building. Yet by then it was too late—the confrontation had already attracted the attention of Powell, Harris, and Dudley across the street.10
“I am going to cut that [expletive],” said Powell, who asked Dudley for the knife with the red handle. When he pretended not to have it, Powell asked Harris for the knife with the black handle. “What do you want with it?” asked Harris. “Give it to me,” said Powell, who added “I’ll be back.” So Harris gave the knife to Powell, who started to cross the street. A girl pleaded with him and tried to restrain him, but he brushed her aside and, with the knife in his right hand, headed up the steps screaming “hit him, hit him, hit him.”11
At that moment, Gilligan emerged from the Jadco TV Service Company next door. For the officer, a solid man who stood more than six feet tall and weighed two hundred pounds, the morning was supposed to be quiet and uneventful. The plan was to get a radio fixed at a shop he knew from previous duty in the precinct. A thirty-seven-year-old resident of Stuyvesant Town, a middle-class, virtually all-white apartment project on the East Side, he was off duty and out of uniform, although he had his badge and revolver with him as department regulations required. Like all officers he was obligated to stop crime, arrest offenders, and protect life as well as property at all times.
On this day, Gilligan was assigned to the 14th Inspection Division in Brooklyn, where he was a decorated officer who had joined the force after serving in the Pacific during World War II. In seventeen years on the job, he had received nineteen citations, represented by impressive rows of enameled bars above the gold badge on his dress uniform. He had four citations for disarming suspects without firing his weapon and two for disabling suspects with his revolver (he had never killed anyone until Powell). In 1958, he had fought for his life with a man on a rooftop; despite a broken wrist, Gilligan managed to shoot him as he fled. In 1960, he was able to wound a youth in the right shoulder who was vandalizing cars outside Stuyvesant Town and had broken two fingers on the officer’s gun hand with a fire nozzle.
Gilligan also had numerous citations for saving lives. He had, wrote two reporters, “rescued women and children from a fire, saved an unconscious man by first aid, stopped a man from a suicidal jump, rescued an unconscious man trapped in a basement after an explosion, and used mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to revive a woman who had attempted suicide by swallowing barbiturates.” By many accounts, Gilligan was a hero cop. By many others, he was a “Killer Cop” whose face was soon plastered on “Wanted for Murder” posters across Harlem.12
The histories of Powell and Gilligan were, of course, immaterial in a court of law. Powell’s background had no direct bearing
