In the Heat of the Summer. Michael W. Flamm
to be part of an elite, ass-kicking, crime-fighting, gut-busting squad,” he recalled in his memoir A Cop’s Tale, “and I couldn’t wait to get started.”31
Robert Leuci joined the TPF in 1962 after calling every day for weeks in search of an opening, despite the fact that he was only five feet nine inches tall. What excited him was the work and that most of the men in the unit were “ex-marines and paratroopers, all with an appetite for the things that active street cops enjoyed, the jobs that most other cops avoided as a matter of course.” He was from a poor family in Bensonhurst, an Italian section of Brooklyn, and his brother had died of a drug overdose, which was probably why narcotics graft continued to trouble Leuci long after many other police officers ceased to see it as “dirty money.” His father was a union organizer who read four newspapers a day and was a staunch liberal (it was only during the Red Scare of the 1950s that he had stopped reading the Daily Worker and dropped his membership in the Socialist Party). At first he opposed his son’s choice of career, but during the social change and racial turmoil of the 1960s he came to support it. “Just be a good cop, don’t be a schmuck, treat working people fairly,” he counseled.32
Leuci tried his best to follow the advice, but it was difficult. On his first night with the TPF, he recalled assembling on a street corner and receiving the hostility of the neighborhood. “We thought we were there to help,” he wrote in his memoir All the Centurions, “but they saw it as an invasion of their neighborhood. Back then I didn’t understand the rage I saw in their faces, the contempt.” Aggressive policing was the only kind practiced in the TPF, and in the ghetto that created anger and antagonism. “They didn’t like us, simple as that,” he remembered. “They felt we were intruding in their lives. And we were. TPF didn’t only patrol the streets—we went into the alleyways, the basements, onto the rooftops, through the tenement hallways.”33 But for Leuci the job provided an adrenaline rush like no other, even if the price was alienation from the community.
By 1964 the corrosive combination of police neglect, corruption, and brutality had led many blacks in Central Harlem to question and challenge, directly or indirectly, the authority and legitimacy of the NYPD. But of perhaps equal or even greater importance, although less publicized, were the daily discourtesies inflicted upon many residents by white officers. It was the “small indignities”—the constant rudeness and casual racism—that most offended Percy Sutton, a prominent lawyer and future borough president. He wondered why the Police Academy could not devote more time to training cadets in basic civility. Police harassment of black residents was, admitted then-Lieutenant Anthony Bouza, who visited 125th Street regularly, “a form of Chinese water torture” that led to a flood of resentment and anger.34
At the same time, the growing violence and disorder in New York posed a classic case of cognitive dissonance for many whites. Intellectually, they knew that most blacks were not muggers; emotionally, they could not ignore the sense that most muggers seemed black. Adding to the racial tension and providing human faces to the grim statistics were a dramatic series of high-profile events and a disturbing number of sensational black-on-white crimes in the first six months of the year.
Even before the Harlem Riot, Bayard Rustin was a well-known figure in New York. In mid-January, on the heels of the March on Washington, he received an urgent call from Milton Galamison, a Brooklyn minister. He wanted to know whether Rustin was willing to dedicate his organizing talents to a citywide boycott designed to protest the rampant segregation and glaring inequities in the school system. More than 40 percent of the students were minorities; fewer than 3 percent of the teachers were black. A decade after the Brown decision, spending on white students was seven times higher than on nonwhite students. Despite reservations about the mercurial Galamison and the shaky coalition of parents and activists behind the boycott, Rustin agreed. But he had only two weeks to work his magic. No matter—with extraordinary energy and unrelenting attention to detail he largely succeeded.35
At Siloam Presbyterian Church in Brooklyn, Rustin established a “war room” staffed around the clock with volunteers. At age fifty-three, he still had the energy of a much younger man, routinely putting in eighteen-hour days and at times sleeping at the church in pajamas, a bathrobe, and slippers rather than returning to his Manhattan apartment on 28th Street and Eighth Avenue. “Do not think,” he told others in reference to the white in his hair, “that just because there is snow on the roof there is no fire in the furnace.” To keep the fire stoked, he subsisted on cold coffee and cheese sandwiches while making endless lists and taking copious notes on yellow legal pads. The holes in his shoes were a testament to his dedication and a reflection of his pay—around $71 a week for a labor of love and principle.36
On a cold and blustery Monday in early February arguably the largest civil rights demonstration in history took place. More than 450,000 mostly African American students (45 percent of total enrollment) boycotted classes in an effort to promote school integration. An estimated hundred thousand students attended almost five hundred freedom schools staffed by supporters of the protest. The president of the Board of Education was dismissive, but Rustin was publicly elated by the turnout (more than three times the normal absentee figure) and predicted that “we are on the threshold of a new political movement.” In a prescient moment, he also cautioned that the “winds of change are about to sweep over our city” and that those “who stand aloof from the frustrations and deprivations of the ghetto” could expect more unrest in the near future.37
The next day an exhausted Rustin canceled a speaking engagement at Syracuse University and agreed to meet with peace activists from Eastern Europe at the Soviet consulate. When he arrived he was greeted by photographers and reporters from the Journal-American and the Daily News, both conservative tabloids. “Boycott Chief Soviets’ Guest” blared the headline on Wednesday in the Daily News, which blasted Rustin for “consorting with the Soviets.” The presence of the press was not coincidental. The FBI, which back in November had tapped Rustin’s phone and planted a bug in his apartment (with Attorney General Robert Kennedy’s approval), had alerted the newspapers to discredit Rustin and the movement.38
In public, Rustin stood his ground, calling the controversy a “red smear.” But the damage was done and he knew it. In private, he told a friend that visiting the Soviet consulate was “a mistake.” The incident again made him persona non grata, at least officially, to moderate black leaders like Roy Wilkins and King, who now distanced themselves from him. After his long and arduous return from exile and isolation, Rustin was once more back on the outside.39
As the publicity surrounding Rustin subsided in March, white fears of racial violence resurfaced with news of the brutal murder and rape of Catherine “Kitty” Genovese, a twenty-eight-year-old Italian American bar manager. She lived in the Kew Gardens section of Queens in an apartment that she shared with her lesbian partner Mary Ann Zielonko. On the ground floor was the Interlude Coffee House, where folksinger Phil Ochs, who later wrote a song about the murder called “Outside of a Small Circle of Friends,” performed from time to time between bigger gigs. As Genovese was returning home from work in the early morning, she was attacked by Winston Moseley, a twenty-nine-year-old African American who later confessed to killing two other women and committing at least thirty burglaries. Genovese saw Moseley approach as she walked from her car to the building. She tried to run, but he caught her and knifed her in the back twice. “Oh my God, he stabbed me!” she screamed. “Help me!”40
A few of her neighbors heard her, but it was a cold night and, with the windows closed, they were not sure what she had said. When one man shouted, “Leave that girl alone!” Moseley fled and Genovese staggered toward the building, seriously injured. She was alive, but not visible to the residents and unable to enter because of a locked doorway. Ten minutes later, Moseley returned and found Genovese, who was still conscious. Despite her efforts at self-defense, he stabbed her several more times, stole $49, and raped her while she lay dying. Media accounts subsequently claimed, dramatically but inaccurately, that thirty-eight of her neighbors had heard her cries for help and failed to respond, which spurred psychological research into the “bystander effect” and led to an overhaul of the NYPD’s telephone reporting system.41
Ten days