In the Heat of the Summer. Michael W. Flamm
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 on his actions that day. Gilligan’s record was also irrelevant—good officers make bad shootings and vice versa. But in the court of public opinion, which the civil rights movement and press coverage had greatly influenced, the information mattered deeply. As in all controversial police incidents with racial overtones, many whites and blacks fit the “facts” as they understood or perceived them into a simplistic narrative with an innocent or menacing victim and an upright or brutal officer.
When the owner of the appliance store told him that Thursday morning of the trouble with the summer school students, Gilligan had no desire to get involved. But the officer would not have a choice. As the merchant watched through the front window of the shop, the teens begin to hurl objects at Lynch and there was a loud crash as glass shattered. At that point Gilligan ran out of the store, removing from his trouser pockets his badge with his left hand and his revolver with his right hand. He was standing at the bottom of the stoop when Powell turned from the entrance to the building and headed back down the steps to the street.13
“Stop, I’m a cop,” Gilligan yelled. “Drop it.” But Powell kept coming down the stairs. With the knife in his right hand, he tried to strike at Gilligan, who had a split second to make a life-or-death decision. With his heart pounding and adrenalin pumping, he fired a shot. The teen slashed again at the officer, who blocked Powell and pushed him away. The knife, however, sliced Gilligan’s arm and when the youth raised it once more, the officer fired again. The bullet struck the teen’s wrist and deflected into his chest, but his forward momentum continued. And so Gilligan stepped back and fired a third time into the abdomen of Powell, who collapsed on the sidewalk, face down, his blood pooling underneath him.14
Seeing Powell on the ground with his body parallel to the curb, his friend Harris raced across the street. “I ran over to where he was and got down on my knees next to him and said, ‘Jimmy, what’s the matter?’” he recalled. But there was no response except for a trickle of blood from Powell’s mouth as he tried to spit. So Harris turned his attention to the officer, who was looming over them with