Peekskill USA: Inside the Infamous 1949 Riots (8 page)

Once in there, I was spotted by the friend whose wife had been in the last car to go out of the picnic grounds. When I told him that I had never seen its like before, including the cops, he answered.

“They don't like to think that Paul Robeson could have died up there. This is the way they feel about that.”

Ben Davis was speaking to the crowd on the street then. “Let them touch a hair of Paul Robeson's head,” he cried bitterly, “and they'll pay a price they never calculated!”

A low roar; it was not a loud crowd; the noise was a throaty, deep one.

I spoke after Ben Davis, and then we went inside. The Golden Gate was packed with all it could hold. Now it began to sink in, what
Peeskill
was and what
Peekskill
meant. Now I knew something of what this towering, incredible man, who in a way was bigger and stronger and prouder than any other man I have ever known, meant to his own people. The whole world had momentarily focused its attention on our wild, hopeless little battle in the hollow; but for these people the vileness—that specific and stinking vileness which has sent the stench of American lynching into every corner of the earth—was directed against the one great man who had broken through their bonds and bondage, who would not be jimcrowed, who would not hang his head, who would not crawl and who would not be bought off, not with dollars and not with cheap handouts from a cheapened and bloodstained government.

He came into the hall then, and the noise was fused into a somber, angry meaning. He came in very proud and very troubled; and though I had seen him before in so many places in all the years our paths had crossed, I had never seen him like this, so proud and so troubled, with the whole face of the future bare to him, waiting and challenging.

It was very hot there on that hot summer evening, and the manner in which that old, gilded ballroom was packed with humanity did not lessen the heat. Men sat in their shirtsleeves, but the sweat ran off them, and the heat hung like a heavy cloud under the ceiling. But no one rose to go, and one after another, people spoke of
Peekskill
, of what had happened on Saturday night, of the meaning inherent in it. You could not watch that crowd of serious, troubled faces—faces of people who had known little else than trouble—and not understand that something new was in the making here. It was a bitter coming of age. “You have harrassed our people so long, and now you go against this man whom we love and honor, because he is such proof of our seed of greatness.”

I had read the papers by now. How does one write of such things? It is said that every man's gorge has a point of eruption, a moment when his stomach empties itself out of nausea and disgust; but there is no such point for the men who write in our “great” newspapers. The
New York Times
“regretted” that such un-American doings had occurred. The
New York Herald Tribune
added that such displays of vulgarity were “understandable,” for all that they might be deplored. It is
so
wrong to make martyrs of these Reds, since it is precisely what they want. Contempt for Robeson; more contempt for Howard Fast. There is a better way to do these things, the
New York Times
sighed. But the obvious rags, the
News
and
Mirror
and
Journal
, howled with glee—here it is, and you can bet we'll do better than Adolf ever did; and of reaction's press, only the social democratic
New York Post
showed a tremor of fear, a reluctant knowledge that for every Communist who dies in this particular
auto da fé
, there are a hundred “sincere” anti-communists who also go into the flames. All this I thought of as I spoke to those troubled, upturned faces, and again as I heard Robeson speak.

It is better than a year later now, and the conscience—if so it can be called—of the
New York Post
is dead, and also dead is any reluctance of the
New York Times
to embrace that fifth horseman of the Apocalypse whose name is fascism. Fascism, we have come to know, sits easily with the big buck, and a government with a dollar in one hand and a gun in the other can produce a remarkable silence within its own population; but those people who sat in the Golden Gate that night had a less than intimate acquaintance with the dollar, and as for the gun, it had never been turned away from them. They did not read the editorials in the
Times
too carefully, so they did not fully comprehend that Paul Robeson was a willing “tool” of Moscow, “duped” by the Communists, and that he had given up a vast income, gold-plated glory, and the approval of those same editorial writers in order to be pulled by the ears into some “foreign” conspiracy and risk his life and face prison and death, and know never a moment free from the threat of Mr. Hoover's gestapo, all because—(Well, even insanity in editorials has its limits, and how can you argue ethics or morality with those who have no ethics and no morality either.)—because he is a “tool,” and wants to be a “tool,” and isn't it nice to be a “tool?”

“Yes, I will sing wherever the people want to hear me,” he said. “I sing of peace and freedom and of life!”

I have seen Harry Truman speak, and heard him too, for what it was worth, but I never saw tears pour from the eyes of those who listened, and I never saw love on their faces…

When the meeting was over, finally, the people poured out of the hall. The crowd outside had increased, and now the whole joined throng flurried and swept the police away. It swept them away without violence, but swept them away, and then turned into the avenue and formed ranks, and suddenly there was a massive parade marching down Lenox Avenue. Now the horse cops had come up, the “great” ones on their chestnut-colored steeds, but they would not stop this tonight and they too were swept out of the way and the huge concourse of people marched on down Lenox Avenue.…

It was late when I returned to Croton, and later still before I could fall asleep. There are a great many—some ignorant, some shrewd—who will tell you that there are no classes and no class struggle in America, and they are by and large cut out of the same cloth as those who insist that the Negro is perfectly free in this “most free” of all lands and that there is no oppression whatsoever in the home of the washing machine and the refrigerator. Thereby,
Peekskill
was the work of a few hoodlums expressing somewhat “excessive” resentment against “un-American” elements, although no one has fully explained why Americanism, or what passes under that title these days, always attracts to itself the filthiest, rottenest elements in the land, the jack-booted pimps and perverts who glory in the brass knucks and a chance to kick a woman in the stomach.

I was beginning to break through the remains of any such illusions.
Peekskill
did not just happen; it was not by the merest chance that the state and county police remained aloof until an opportunity arose to pin a framed murder rap on us; this was not the local doings of the local
lumpen
, and the FBI agents did not just happen to be out for an evening stroll in the Hudson River Valley. The three sheriffs did not suddenly contract amnesia and stroll off at precisely the right moment, and the whole matter was by no means a spontaneous outbreak of local filth. After that evening at Golden Gate, I was able to see many more pieces of the puzzle than I had been able to see before. There was the Negro liberation movement, and there was Paul Robeson; and in that first attack there was no way for the fascists to know that Paul Robeson was not already within the picnic grounds. There was a plan somewhere for the imposition of a police state in America—a plan brought to fulfillment at the time of this writing—and certain aspects of the matter had to be, tested. Piece after piece became clear, but still too many were missing for me to have the whole picture.

Most horribly, the remaining pieces were finally added a few days later.

Part Six

The Second Night of Terror

IT WAS REWARDING TO
read in the
New York Compass
that Governor Dewey had requested District Attorney Fanelli of Westchester County to submit a full report on what had happened at Peekskill. The district attorney stated “that he didn't know anything about the disorders but was sure that the concert-goers—and not the veterans or the hoodlums who attacked them—were responsible.” The governor had discharged his duty. All was well and would be well in the state of New York. And one must not be harsh on the little governor, for a new
common law
was coming into being—already upheld by the courts—to the effect that the murder of a Communist or a reasonable facsimile of a Communist not only was not a capital crime but was in a sense no crime at all.

“We're going to have the concert after all,” I told Mrs. M——, “and Paul will sing.” This was on Thursday.

“When?”

“On Sunday afternoon.”

“I think he should sing if he wants to,” Mrs. M——said quietly. “I think anyone who wants to should.”

“I should have mentioned that I'll be the chairman again.”

“That can be a troublesome habit. You were once. Isn't that enough?”

“That's why. We set out to hold a concert, and now we're going to hold it. You can't run away from this kind of thing.”

“Maybe you can't. But Rachel and Johnny and I can, and we're not going to stay here through another
Peekskill.”

“It won't be another
Peekskill.”

“You got a lot to learn, Mr. Fast,” she said. “You know a lot about a lot of things, but I know more than you do about white folks and how they behave.”

“What do you mean—white folks?”

“You know what I mean,” she said, and the next day she began to pack. I didn't argue with her, and I was relieved that the children would be back in the city. We drove back Saturday morning, opened the house, and refurbished the refrigerator. Then I called B—— R——, a good friend and a Lincoln Brigade veteran. I asked him whether he wouldn't like to ride back to Croton and come along with me to the concert.

“I'll be down in half an hour,” he said.

We drove back to Croton together that evening, and before we got there, I listened to a long lecture by R—— on common sense caution. “No one is dead yet,” I pointed out.

“That's just the point,” R—— said. “In your own way, you're just as blind as your middle class friends who insist that there is no fascism in America and will be none.”

“I'm ready to admit it's in the making. God knows I should. But no one's out to kill me.”

“Why not?”

“Because it's B picture cloak and dagger nonsense. It would serve no useful purpose, and when the FBI decides to be rid of me, it will do it nicely and legally.”

“Because you keep thinking in terms of the FBI. But when the trumpets sound this kind of song, all the lice crawl out—and they crawl out to kill because fascism is the way of death and there's no holding it back once it's loose. I know. I was in Spain, and I saw those bastards operate in Spain.”

“You're exaggerating,” I argued, “and you will see tomorrow that we'll have no trouble at all. These lice, as you call them, don't like firmness, and this is a question of firmness.”

“We'll see tomorrow,” he agreed.

Before we went to the house, we stopped off at the N—'s and had tea with J——and his lovely wife. I put the question R——had raised to J—— N—— and asked him what his opinion was.

“I think we'll have trouble, but I also think we'll be in shape to handle it. There has been a call for trade unionists to protect the meeting, and I imagine we'll get a good response. On the other hand, the Peekskill gang has sent out a call for thirty thousand veterans, and every radio station in New York State has picked that up and broadcast it all day—just to help out—and it's no secret that this kind of a call means violence. My own guess is that three thousand is closer to what they'll get, but even three thousand can mean lots of trouble.” (As a matter of fact, only a thousand or so hoodlums and thugs turned up the next day. It is anyone's guess how many of them were veterans.)

“What about the neighborhood?”

“This is a funny neighborhood,” J—— said. “You know, there's no real industry here except the railroad, and the kids grow up in these river towns with no jobs and no future—just a rotten, perverted petty-bourgeois outlook. They get a job at a gas station or a grocery store or a lunch wagon or with the fire department or some other political handout—or they don't work and just scrounge around and live off the few dollars they pick up. They get twisted with bitterness, and they don't know what causes it or where to direct it. Then they hate, and it's easy for the Legion and the local Chamber of Commerce to use that hate. They're using it now. The Legion announced they would parade in front of our concert tomorrow, and we tried to get an injunction to stop the parade, but it seems that a lot of big operators want this thing to proceed according to plan. Also, there have been threats against people living here on the hill, so keep an eye cocked tonight.”

“What time are you going to leave tomorrow?”

“Eight in the morning. How about breakfast here?”

“Isn't that early?” (The concert was scheduled to begin at two o'clock in the afternoon.)

“This time I want to get in,” J—— smiled.

We agreed to meet at his house at seven-thirty, and then we left. It was a short ride to my house, and it was an uneasy feeling to be in the place, so dark and empty. Before we turned in, R—— switched off all the lights. Then we stood quietly in the living-room, listening.

“I feel extraordinarily foolish,” I whispered.

“Nobody ever died of feeling foolish.”

“What do you expect?”

“I wouldn't be standing here like this if I knew what to expect. I'm standing here like this because I don't know what to expect. But if you hit anyone, hit him hard. It's very dangerous to hit anyone lightly.”