Peekskill USA: Inside the Infamous 1949 Riots (2 page)

BOOK: Peekskill USA: Inside the Infamous 1949 Riots
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“The time for tolerant silence that signifies approval is running out.” He added, “That's from the
Peekskill Evening Star
of last Tuesday. Since then, they've worked themselves into a lather over this thing. The American Legion is going to march, and the local boys have been liquoring themselves up since this morning. On the other hand, some of the local residents have sent a telegram of protest to the DA, Fannelli, asking him to have plenty of cops and state troopers on hand, just in case. Maybe he will and maybe he won't. The point is, you've got to keep your eyes open.”

I would keep my eyes open. At the same time, I had heard this kind of threat of violence for years on occasion after occasion, and I had discovered that the gentlemen of violence, while they talk a good deal, are far more conservative in putting it into play.

“I don't think anything will happen—I just don't think so.”

They would see me about seven-thirty, they said. (But no one on the side of good-will came to the picnic grounds at seven-thirty that evening, as you will see.) They left half a dozen copies of
The Peekskill Evening Star
with me, and after they had gone I thumbed through the papers, reading here and there bits of the stupid, sometimes pathological hatred and bias that sprinkled its pages so liberally. There were threats of violence, and then disavowals of violence; there were the clumsy, poorly-composed barbs of anti-Semitism and anti-Negroism. Here, microcosmically, this dull, tawdry little journal was repeating and vaunting all the pompous phrases of post-war anti-Communism, anti-humanism. Their efforts to wrap the filth in a high-toned package became ludicrous —but no more ludicrous than the efforts of their esteemed contemporaries on the great New York City journals. As witness:

“It is unfortunate that some of the weaker-minded are susceptible to their fallacious teachings unless something is done by the loyal Americans of this area. Quite a few years ago a similar organization, the Ku Klux Klan, appeared in Verplanck [a village nearby] and received their just reward. Needless to say, they have never returned. I am not intimating violence in this case but I believe we should give this matter serious consideration and strive to find a remedy that will cope with the situation the same way as Verplanck and with the same result that they will never reappear in this area.…”

Thus from
The Peekskill Evening Star
, and more and more of the same. It would require a Mark Twain to do critical justice to such highly original use of the English language, and thinking of that I began to lose some of my sun-nurtured security. Here was a monstrous and sanctimonious piece of ignorance from a group of people who had enshrined ignorance as a God worthy to share the temple with the dollar sign.

This uneasiness resulted in a decision to take no chances on not gaining entrance to the picnic grounds. Even if part of the audience did not arrive, the chairman, at least, should be there. I would leave, therefore, at six-thirty. It could not possibly take more than twenty minutes to drive to the picnic grounds. I had no car of my own, but had rented for the month a 1940 Plymouth four-door, an old but responsive automobile which played no inconsiderable part in my adventures of the coming week.

Before I left, I told Mrs. M——that I might be rather late, since one couldn't count on the regular schedule. When J—— N—— comes,” I said to her, “tell him I've gone on ahead. I'll see him there.”

Part Two

The Night of Terror

THAT GOLDEN EVENING
of August 27 remains in my mind most clearly, most softly; it was such a soft and gentle evening as one finds on the canvas of George Inness, and even he could create that dewy nostalgia only when he painted one part or another of the wonderful Hudson River Valley. By choice, I took the little back roads twisting among the low hills and narrow valleys. I avoided the business section of Peekskill, but found the state highway north of the town. I had never been to the Lakeland Picnic Grounds before, and I drove slowly, looking for the entrance—which is on Division Street, a three-mile stretch of country road which connects Peekskill with the Bronx River Parkway.

Yet I couldn't have missed the entrance. Hundreds of yards before I reached it I found cars parked solidly on either side of the highway, which made me wonder since it was more than an hour before the concert was scheduled to begin; and at the entrance itself there was an already unruly crowd of men. Still, they didn't try to stop me, but only jeered and thumbed their noses at me as I turned left into the picnic grounds. Only one more car was permitted to enter after mine; then the entrance was sealed off.

Just inside the grounds I stopped my car. There, a few yards from the read, a handful of teen-age boys and girls had gathered.

There were not more than five of them and they were trying to hide their nervousness at the jeering, hooting crowd on the road. They had come up from New York to be ushers at the concert. I told them who I was and they seemed glad that I was there, but they were still frightened.

“What shall we do?” they asked.

“Who's running things?”

They didn't know, they said. It was so early—they didn't think anyone had come yet. But maybe there was someone down below.

“Well,” I told them, “don't let anyone in who isn't here for the concert. Just keep cool and be calm and nothing will happen.” That seemed to be a refrain of mine, that nothing would happen, that nothing could happen. “I'll park my car and see if I can't find someone to take things in hand.”

To understand what happened from here on, you must have in your mind a clear picture of Lakeland Picnic Grounds and of the area where the concert was set up. The entrance to the grounds is a left turn off the main road as you drive from Peekskill; the entrance is double, coming together in Y shape to a narrow dirt road. About eighty feet from the entrance the road is embanked, with sharp dirt sides dropping about twenty feet to shallow pools of water. About forty feet of the road is embanked in this fashion, and then for a quarter of a mile or so it sweeps down into a valley —all of this private road and a part of the picnic grounds. At the end of this road, there is a sheltered hollow with a broad, meadow-grass bottom, a sort of natural arena, hidden by hummocks of low hills from the sight of anyone on the public highway. It was in this hollow that the paraphernalia for the concert had been set up: a large platform, two thousand wooden folding chairs, and a number of spotlights powered by a portable generator.

I looked at my watch before I drove down to the hollow, and it was just ten minutes to seven. Parking my car against a clump of trees to the side of the platform, I got out and wandered around rather aimlessly. The platform was ready, the chairs set up, the spotlights in place, and there was a long picnic table piled with song-books and pamphlets. As I came in, a large bus had just discharged its passengers, boys and girls, Negroes for the most part, who had come early to be ushers. The bus lurched around and departed in a cloud of dust; the boys and girls drifted across the meadow, walking slowly and contentedly in the golden light of the evening. About a hundred and twenty other people were already on the scene, most of them women and small children, and they top were making a picnic afternoon of it before the concert began, some of them sprawling comfortably on the grass, some of them at the rustic tables, some sitting on the chairs. A party of boys and girls from Golden's Bridge, a summer colony, sat on the platform, their legs dangling. None of them were much over fifteen; most of them were much younger. A few of these people had come by car; many had walked to the picnic grounds from summer homes nearby. The children from Golden's Bridge had come down in a large truck which was parked now next to my car—and which was destined to play an interesting role that night. Just by the good grace of fortune, half a dozen merchant seamen who were vacationing in the neighborhood had decided to come early; I had good reason to be grateful for them and for four other trade unionists who happened to be present.

But none of these, I discovered, knew who was in charge of the concert—and as it turned out those in charge never reached the picnic grounds. I inquired for a while, then I gave it up and perched myself on one of the tables and settled down to wait. k was seven o'clock now, and from where we were in the hollow there was no sign of trouble.

A boy running brought the trouble to us. I watched him as he came in sight around the bend of the road, running frantically, and then we crowded around him and he told us that there was trouble and would some of us come—because the trouble looked bad; and he was frightened too.

We started back with him. There were twenty-five or thirty of us, I suppose; you don't count at a moment like that, although I did count later. There were men and boys, almost all the men and boys, and a few girls too. We ran at a jog-trot along the dusty road, but still I thought that this would be no more than foul names and fouler insults, since I had never known the kind who were up there on the road to show courage unless they caught someone alone and the odds were twenty to one.

So we ran on up to the entrance, and as we appeared they poured onto us from the road, at least three hundred of them, with billies and brass knucks and rocks in clenched fists, and American Legion caps, and suddenly my disbelief was washed away in a wild melee. Such fights don't last long; there were three or four minutes of this, and because the road was narrow we were able to beat them back, but the mass of them filled the entranceway, and behind them were hundreds more, and up and down the road hundreds more. If you have never been in a trap with no way out and a thousand people grinning with malice and screaming in hate, you won't know what it was like. And now I saw why there were no more people coming into the concert. One of the forks in the road was piled high with rocks, a great barricade of rocks, and the other had a Legion truck parked across it. So we were closed in and there was no way out, and the odds were twenty to one, precisely as they required them.

I said that we beat them back and held the road for the moment, panting, hot with sweat and dust, bleeding only a little now; but they would have come at us again had not the three deputy sheriffs appeared. Our thanks to those three miserable men; they shouldered through the crowd, through the wall of alcohol-saturated air, and their gold badges gleamed in the sunset.

They hefted their holstered guns, and they turned and spread their arms benignly at the mob. “Now, boys,” they said, “now, take it easy, because we can do this just as well legal, and it always pays to do it legal.”

“Give us five minutes and we'll murder the n—— bastards,” the boys answered.

“Just take it easy—just take it slow and easy, boys, because it don't pay to have trouble when you don't have to have no trouble.”

And then the three deputy sheriffs turned to us and wanted to know what in hell we were doing there making all this kind of trouble.

I kept glancing at my watch. It was ten minutes after seven then. I also had a chance to look at the “boys” in the Legion caps, and they were by no means boys. They were in their thirties and forties and fifties—many of them in their fifties—and they were not
lumpen
either, not in the strict sense of the word. Most of them were prosperous-appearing men, well set up, well dressed, real-estate men, grocery clerks, lunch counter attendants, filling station hands and more of the kind. Tip over any gin mill in Peekskill or Shrub Oak, and this is what you would get. Throw in a couple of hundred “decent” citizens, a hundred teen-agers whose heads were filled with anti-Communist sewage; add a hundred pillars of the local Catholic church, half a hundred college students home on vacation, half a hundred workers drawn along, and two or three hundred of the sweepings and filth of that whole Hudson River section, and you have a good idea of what we faced there that night. Liquor them up to a high point of courage, give them odds of twenty to one, put the police on their side—and then you have the rest of the picture; and these were the “boys” whom the deputy sheriffs held up for just enough minutes to enable us to survive.

Not that the deputies wanted that; but it was a beginning and there was no precedent for this kind of thing in Westchester County in New York State, and the three sheriffs with the polished gold-plated badges were uncertain as to how to play their own role. For that reason they held back the “boys” and asked us what the hell we were doing there making this kind of trouble.

I became the spokesman then, and a good many of the things I did afterwards were the result of this—chiefly because I was older than most of our handful and because the merchant seamen and the trade unionists nodded for me to talk. Anyway, I had agreed to be chairman and it seemed that this was the kind of concert we would have, not with Paul Robeson and Pete Seeger singing their lovely tunes of America, but with a special music that had played its melody out in Germany and Italy. So I said that we were not looking for any trouble but were here to hold a concert, and why didn't they clear the roads so that our people could come in and listen to the concert in peace?

“You gimme a pain in the ass with that kind of talk,” said one of the deputies delicately. The others stood there looking at us. Very clearly do I remember them. We cut deputy sheriffs to pattern in America; their bellies slopped over their belts; their faces were loose and full of hate; and they feared only the responsibility for what was happening that night and they desired only that it should happen in spite of themselves. So they said:

“Just cut out the trouble. We don't want no trouble and we don't want no troublemakers.”

I explained it again. I explained to them carefully that we were not making trouble, that we had not lured these three hundred innocent patriots to attack us, and that all we desired was for them to clear the road so that people could come to the concert.

BOOK: Peekskill USA: Inside the Infamous 1949 Riots
2.74Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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