In the Heat of the Summer. Michael W. Flamm
a large man with grim blue eyes, took his usual position (back to the wall) and ordered his usual meal (shrimp curry with rice). Three years into his tenure, he still resembled, in Rosenthal’s description, “a tough Irish cop because he is a tough Irish cop.” But unlike many of his fellow officers, Murphy was not born into the job. A native of Queens, he spent six years after high school with the Equitable Life Insurance Company. The work was monotonous, however, so he responded to an ad to become a state trooper. From the start he loved it. “One day I was solving a homicide,” he said, “and the next day I was on a motorcycle chasing speeders.”42
But after Murphy was married he joined the NYPD in 1940 so that he would not have to worry about a transfer out of the city. After five years he made sergeant—the fastest rise in the history of the department. At age thirty-two he was the youngest sergeant on the force; within nine years he was promoted to deputy inspector and put in charge of the Police Academy, where he instituted the equivalent of a college curriculum. A dedicated student, Murphy earned three degrees while working full-time. “He had a great legal mind,” said the dean of Brooklyn Law School, where Murphy graduated summa cum laude and first in his class in 1945. “You rarely get a student with the combination of alertness, pleasant personality, curiosity, and the power of analysis that this man had.”43
After the Academy Award–winning film On the Waterfront depicted brutal racketeering among dock workers, Murphy took a leave from the NYPD in 1955 to become executive director of the New York–New Jersey Waterfront Commission. Four years later, he returned to the department as chief inspector. In 1961, he became police commissioner, succeeding Stephen Kennedy. By then he was above all an administrator, but he remained an officer at heart. “Police work is the most fascinating in the world,” he said. “I don’t know of any other occupation that can approach it for variety and challenge.”44
On the day Murphy dined with Rosenthal at Emil’s, the challenge that most worried the commissioner was not the Genovese killing. “In the spring of 1964,” the Times editor wrote in Thirty-Eight Witnesses, his account of the case, “what was usually on the mind of the Police Commissioner of New York was the haunting fear that someday blood would flow in the streets because of the tensions of the civil rights movement.” Murphy was supportive of activists—to a degree. “If New York had a whole system of laws I considered unjust, I’d probably be out there breaking them,” he said. “But we don’t have those kind of laws here.” Nevertheless, he defended the actions of protesters—within limits. “I think they have a right to demonstrate,” the commissioner said, “and I’m prepared to protect and assist them so they can have their say with a minimum of interference to other men and women in the community.”45
Later in March, art imitated life—with a surprising and deadly twist—when a one-act play by LeRoi Jones (who had not yet changed his name to Amiri Baraka) premiered at the Cherry Lane Theater. Dutchman was a short but brutal play about Lula, a thirty-year-old white temptress in a tight dress, and Clay, a twenty-year-old black professional in a three-piece suit. They meet on the subway, where Lula first tries to seduce Clay. Then she challenges his authenticity and manhood as the dialogue crackles with insults and innuendo. Finally, Lula provokes Clay into slapping her twice and threatening to cut off her breasts.46
“Shit, you don’t have any sense, Lula, nor feelings either,” Clay explodes. “I could murder you now. Such a tiny ugly throat. I could squeeze it flat, and, watch you turn blue, on a humble. For dull kicks. And all these weak-faced ofays squatting around here, staring over their papers at me. Murder them too. Even if they expected it. That man there … as skinny and middle-classed as I am, I could rip that paper out of his hand and just as easily rip out his throat.” Clay finishes and prepares to leave the train. But Lula grabs a knife and stabs him twice. She and the other passengers quickly remove his body from the car. And when another young black professional enters and takes a seat behind her, she turns and gives him a long, slow stare.47
Dutchman was an immediate sensation and turned the twenty-one-year-old Jones into an instant celebrity. A year later, radicalized by the assassination of Malcolm X, he divorced his Jewish wife, moved from Greenwich Village to Harlem, changed his name to Amiri Baraka (or “blessed prince”), and became a founder of the Black Arts Movement. Baraka was later elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters and named the poet laureate of New Jersey. But Dutchman was his first success, perhaps because it truly captured the tensions of 1964. “If this is the way the Negroes really feel about the white world around them, there’s more rancor buried in the breasts of colored conformists than anyone can imagine,” wrote the New York Times reviewer after opening night. “If this is the way even one Negro feels, there is ample cause for guilt as well as alarm, and for a hastening of change.”48
By the spring even moderates like Kenneth Clark were losing patience. The city’s failure to implement a comprehensive plan for school integration and Congress’s refusal to pass the civil rights bill rankled. “I must confess that I now see white American liberalism primarily in terms of the adjective ‘white,”’ he wrote in Commentary. “And I think [that] one of the important things Negro Americans will have to learn is how they can deal with a curious and insidious adversary—much more insidious than the out-and-out bigot.” Increasingly, Clark saw liberalism as an ideology of words rather than deeds, which “attempts to impose guilt upon the Negro when he has to face the hypocrisy of the liberal.”49 The fragile alliance of whites and blacks in the freedom struggle was fraying as disappointments multiplied and strains deepened.
More tensions flared in early April. With the World’s Fair set to open in several weeks, the Brooklyn and Bronx chapters of the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE) announced that they would conduct a massive stall-in unless the city immediately addressed the problems of police brutality, substandard housing, and failing schools. On the roads, bridges, and tunnels leading to Queens, black motorists would deliberately run out of fuel, pretend to have car trouble, or simply abandon their vehicles to block traffic. “Our objective is to have our own civil rights exhibit at the World’s Fair,” declared Oliver Leeds of Brooklyn CORE. “We do not see why white people should enjoy themselves when Negroes are suffering.” The plan generated an instant and negative response from James Farmer, executive director of CORE, who called it a “hare-brained idea” and suspended Leeds’s chapter. Similar reaction from city officials, daily newspapers, ordinary citizens, and liberal officials in Washington was equal parts outrage at the possible disruption and fear that the protest might damage public support for civil rights.50
Most mainstream civil rights leaders agreed with Farmer that the stallin was a tactical mistake. King and others found it difficult, however, to condemn the activists for proposing nonviolent civil disobedience. “Which is worse, a ‘Stall-In’ at the World’s Fair or a ‘Stall-In’ in the U.S. Senate?” King asked in reference to the filibuster against the civil rights bill. “The former merely ties up the traffic of a single city. But the latter seeks to tie up the traffic of history, and endanger the psychological lives of twenty million people.”51
Aware that he was losing control of CORE, Farmer stated that he would lead a protest at the exhibit halls of southern states that supported segregation. Meanwhile, Mayor Robert Wagner, who called the stall-in a “gun to the heart of the city,” announced that he would have more than a thousand police officers on the road and in the air, supported by three command centers and dozens of tow trucks, to act if needed. In the end, they were not—only a dozen motorists were arrested. But significant protests unfolded at subway stations and the opening ceremony, where Lyndon Johnson gave one of his first public speeches since becoming president. Farmer was taken into custody with supporters after blocking the doorway to the New York City Pavilion.52
Back in Harlem, crime continued to create anxiety. On April 11, a young white social worker named Eileen Johnston, who had only recently moved to New York from Chicago, went to Count Basie’s Night Club with a black co-worker. A few steps from the front door, two black youths confronted them. “This one’s mine,” said one of the assailants as he jammed a knife into Johnston’s back. Six days later, seventy-five teens overturned a fruit stand on Lenox Avenue near 128th Street and began to