In the Heat of the Summer. Michael W. Flamm
1970s, had signed both laws four months earlier despite protests from the New York Post and Amsterdam News, which contended that they would give a “green light” to the most “bigoted or sadistic” officers. The NAACP also argued that “aggressive preventive patrol”—a common practice in urban policing by the early 1960s—would lead to greater harassment of racial minorities.74
Aggressive policing certainly led to greater tensions in Central Harlem, where the battle to control the street corners escalated. A member of the “Blood Brothers” declared that the gang planned to protest the new laws by staging a “hit” on either a patrolman in the 32nd Precinct or an officer with the elite TPF, which had flooded the area in pairs since the wave of high-profile crimes in April. Even if the threat was a bluff or bravado, it put the police on edge and made them apprehensive.75
As the school year ended, the panic among whites was growing and spreading. On July 16, two weeks after President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act and the same day that Thomas Gilligan shot and killed James Powell, National Review reminded readers that over Memorial Day weekend, twenty black teens had vandalized an entire subway car, punching, kicking, and knifing the terrified passengers. It was not simply another incident of urban mayhem. “What is happening,” asserted the conservative magazine, “or is about to happen—let us face it—is race war.”76
Forty-eight hours later, the riot began. “Harlem’s history is made on Saturday night,” observed author Claude Brown, “because for some reason or another, Negroes just don’t mind dying on Saturday night.”77
CHAPTER 4
THE FIRE THIS TIME
In the heat of the summer
When the pavements were burning
The soul of a city was ravaged in the night
After the city sun was sinkin’
—Phil Ochs, “In the Heat of the Summer”
SATURDAY, JULY 18
The minister was rueful and shaken. “This has got out of hand,” admitted the Reverend Nelson C. Dukes of the Fountain Spring Baptist Church shortly after 10 P.M. on Saturday night. “If I knew this was going to happen, I would not have said anything.” He then disappeared from the 28th Precinct, located on 123rd Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, but it was too late. The fire this time had arrived and it would burn for three nights in Harlem.1
At a rally earlier that Saturday evening at the corner of 125th Street and Seventh Avenue, Dukes had told the assembled crowd that the time for talk about the senseless murder of James Powell was over. “Let’s go to the station,” he shouted from the sidewalk, and approximately 150 persons followed him as he marched two blocks to the precinct house. By 9 P.M. the crowd, which had grown to 250, was chanting “murder, murder” and singing “[Police Commissioner Michael] Murphy is a bastard, he must be removed” (to the tune of “We Shall Not Be Moved”) in front of the station house. As police reinforcements and barricades arrived, the confrontation escalated and expanded until by midnight a large portion of Central Harlem was engulfed in rioting and looting.2
By dawn on Sunday morning the official figures were one dead, thirty-one injured (including twelve officers), and thirty arrested (the low number was because every arrest meant another officer had to leave the line when none could be spared). Among those taken into custody was Life photographer Frank Dandridge, who faced charges when he refused to stop taking photos of an officer arresting a woman. More than thirty businesses were vandalized. Hospital records subsequently showed that at least a hundred persons had sought medical treatment for serious injuries caused by gun shots, building tiles, nightsticks, and other objects. By law the police had to report all injuries to medical personnel, but many residents probably chose to treat their own wounds, which meant the actual figures were in all likelihood even higher.3
As the sun rose, the streets resembled a battle zone and the sidewalk leading to the emergency entrance at Harlem Hospital was splattered with blood. “Murphy’s Gestapo,” muttered a subdued man in a dark suit as the sidewalks began to fill with churchgoers. “It looks like a war out there,” said a young woman with a baby in her arms as she entered the Hotel Theresa.4 For many it was.
Saturday began quietly. It was also hot—scorching hot. By noon the temperature was ninety-two degrees in Central Park, a relatively cool green space. In the concrete jungle of Upper Manhattan, it was undoubtedly warmer. And in the crumbling tenements and brownstones of Central Harlem, where air conditioning was a rare luxury, the temperature might have reached a hundred degrees or more. To escape the heat, people naturally congregated on the street corners, fire escapes, rooftops, and building stoops. For the police and the residents of Harlem, it was going to be a hot night in every sense of the word.
At the same time, many important leaders, black and white, were away from the city, state, and country—Mayor Robert Wagner and Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. were in Europe preparing to attend a conference in Geneva on the impact of automation on cities, Malcolm X was in Cairo observing the African Unity Conference, and NAACP executive director Roy Wilkins was in Wyoming vacationing with Governor Rockefeller at his family’s ranch. Their absence would prove a major problem in coming days, as self-proclaimed leaders with few followers would seek to fill the void in Harlem.5
At 2 P.M. two events took place in two parts of the city, reflecting partially the racial divide and conflicting views of recent events. At the Levy and Delany Funeral Home in Central Harlem, more than three hundred visitors filed the past the open casket of James Powell and paid their respects to his mother, Annie Powell, who became distraught at the sight of her son. “They killed my baby. They murdered my baby,” she cried as she was led to her car. “That’s all it was. Murder.” The crowd seemed tense, sullen, and emotionally on edge. The police had barricades and were on hand in force if needed, which they were not.6 Instead, they stood on the sidelines, silently watching and waiting.
In Yorkville on the Upper East Side, the site of the shooting on Thursday and the protest on Friday, officers were also present as a tiny band of white extremists gathered to blame civil rights activists for the rising tide of urban disorder. A small group of white spectators was scornful of both the white extremists and the CORE demonstrators. “The fact that the boy was killed is a terrible thing,” said a woman. “But [the protesters] aren’t helping things by going around the streets like wild animals.” A middle-aged man in the publishing trade contended that “many people are exploiting the Negro problem” and that the civil rights movement was attracting “the support of other minority groups, the lunatic fringe, the bearded and the unwashed.” A cab driver who had witnessed the demonstration on Friday called it counterproductive. “Instead of giving the civil rights laws an opportunity to be applied,” he asserted, “there are crackpots advocating violence.”7
The rest of the afternoon was uneventful. But three CORE chapters—Downtown, East River, and South Jamaica—had scheduled a rally for the early evening on the corner of 125th Street and Seventh Avenue. The original focus was the lack of progress in the search for the missing civil rights workers in Mississippi. After Thursday’s shooting of James Powell, however, the theme was changed to police brutality. A few minutes before 7 P.M. a young woman from the Bronx chapter of CORE climbed onto a shaky blue chair next to a small American flag. “I’m mad. I’m so damn mad tonight. I’m not much older than that boy and I’m scared of every cop out here,” said seventeen-year-old Judith Howell, a high school student dressed in a button-down shirt, skirt, and loafers without socks.8
Under the watchful eyes of a dozen officers, the crowd of a hundred or so, neither rowdy nor violent, began to stir amid the steaming heat. “That’s the way to go, little girl,” yelled someone in support. “James Powell was shot because he was black,” Howell continued. “We got a civil rights bill and along with the bill we got Barry Goldwater and a dead black boy.” Slowly, the mood of the listeners shifted as anger, frustration, and impatience—with Harlem life, white policemen, black leaders, the