Michael W. Flamm - In the Heat of the Summer: The New York Riots of 1964 and the War on Crime

IN THE HEAT OF THE SUMMER

POLITICS AND CULTURE IN MODERN AMERICA

Series Editors: Margot Canaday, Glenda Gilmore, Michael Kazin, Stephen Pitti, Thomas J. Sugrue

Volumes in the series narrate and analyze political and social change in the broadest dimensions from 1865 to the present, including ideas about the ways people have sought and wielded power in the public sphere and the language and institutions of politics at all levelslocal, national, and transnational. The series is motivated by a desire to reverse the fragmentation of modern U.S. history and to encourage synthetic perspectives on social movements and the state, on gender, race, and labor, and on intellectual history and popular culture.

In the Heat of the Summer

THE NEW YORK RIOTS OF 1964 AND THE WAR ON CRIME

Michael W. Flamm

PENN

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS

PHILADELPHIA

Copyright 2017 University of Pennsylvania Press

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Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

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In The Heat Of The Summer

Words and Music by Phil Ochs

Copyright 1966 BARRICADE MUSIC, INC.

Copyright Renewed

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Reprinted by Permission of Hal Leonard Corporation

Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress

ISBN 978-0-8122-4850-0

For Austin and Alexandra

CONTENTS

PROLOGUE

Come on, shoot another nigger!

With tears streaming down her face, the black teenager taunted a helmeted phalanx of New York City policemen. Amid a barrage of books and bottles from two hundred black students, the officers struggled to maintain order outside Robert F. Wagner Junior High School on East 76th Street in Upper Manhattan. The only serious casualty at the scene was the sole black patrolman, who suffered a concussion when hit in the head by a can of soda. He remained on duty for more than an hour before collapsing, and was raced unconscious to Lenox Hill Hospital, where he eventually recovered.

The heated protests spontaneously erupted minutes after Lieutenant Thomas Gilligan, a white off-duty officer in civilian clothes, fired three shots and killed a black student, fifteen-year-old James Powell, on July 16, 1964. The fatal confrontation followed an earlier altercation that Thursday morning between a white superintendent and black teenagers in front of an apartment building across the street from the school. But tensions were already high from a publicized series of violent crimes featuring black assailants and white victims.

At that instant, three thousand miles away in San Francisco, weary aides to Barry Goldwater were putting the finishing touches on his acceptance speech to the Republican Convention. At the Cow Palace the previous night Goldwater had received the greatest prize of his political careerthe presidential nomination. Now he would announce to the excited delegates in the arena and the American people watching on television that the conservative moment had arrived and what the nation needed was law and order.

Fourteen hours after Powell bled to death on the sidewalk, Goldwater strode to the podium as the band played The Battle Hymn of the Republic

The unexpected conjunction of these two events represented a pivotal juncture in the nations history, which had previously featured intermittent episodes of public interest in law enforcement and criminal justice. Although the federal government had periodically embarked on crusades against crime or immorality in the past, and plenty of local, state, and national politicians had voiced similar ideas, Goldwaters words combined with impending developments would have an impact in the future that few of his listeners or viewersnot even devoted friends or avid foescould have anticipated.

On Saturday evening, thousands of Central Harlem residents took to the streets to protest the Powell shooting and other grievances. Most were bystanders, not participants, in the violence that erupted during the next three nights. The unrest then spread to Bedford-Stuyvesant (Bed-Stuy), a section of Brooklyn, for another three nights. In both communities, the rioting and looting were intense, although the vast majority of black residents, regardless of their sympathies or beliefs, never ventured from their homes or apartments.

The Harlem Riot, as most whites called it, was accompanied by hundreds of injuries and arrests as well as at least one death. In both neighborhoods, the business districts were devastated, with white-owned and black-owned stores vandalized and ransacked. Soon the rebellion or uprising, as some blacks described it, spread to other cities such as Rochester, New York, and sent shockwaves across the country.

MAP 1. Central Harlem

MAP 2. Bedford-Stuyvesant

The conservative appeal to law and order posed a serious threat to the liberal dreams of President Lyndon Johnson, who responded to the political pressure with a dual strategy. As the campaign for the White House reached a climax in the fall of 1964, he promised with extravagant rhetoric that the War on Poverty would combat the social conditionsrising unemployment, failing schools, and poor housingthat plagued urban ghettos and generated racial violence. With broad and bipartisan support from both liberals and conservatives, the president in the spring of 1965 also declared a War on Crime in the optimistic belief that it would raise the level of police professionalism and lessen the incidence or perception of police brutalityanother source of black anger and frustration.

Johnson hoped and thought that better policing combined with social programs and a national commitment to civil rights would reduce black crime and unrest, which liberals attributed to white racism. But the War on Crime had limited impact, although it substantially widened the door to federal intervention in local policing. Within three years it had evolved into an anti-riot program in the wake of the unrest that Harlem had foretoldWatts in 1965, Newark and Detroit in 1967, Washington and more than a hundred other cities after the assassination of King in 1968. By then Johnson had decided not to run for another term and the War on Poverty was also in retreat, denounced and defunded by white conservatives who contended that it had encouraged and rewarded black rioters.

After Republican President Richard Nixon moved into the White House, he recast the War on Crime as a War on Drugs, with the addict and dealer now joining the criminal and rioter as public enemies. Building on the political consensus in favor of a larger federal role in law enforcement and appealing to the public demand for law and order, Nixon in the 1970s

The bipartisan War on Drugs has cost tens of billions of dollars to date. It has also harmed minority families and communities across the nation. In 2014, fifty years after the Harlem Riot, the United States had more prisoners behind bars by a wide margin than any other country in the worldmost of them poor young men of color convicted of nonviolent crimes. And it had a rate of incarceration between five and ten times as high as in Western Europe and other democracies. Although on the decline, the rate remained historically high in comparison to incarceration levels in the United States from the mid-1920s to the early 1970s.