Tomorrow-Land (17 page)

Malcolm wanted people to stop seeing their struggle as a battle of
civil rights
and to start demanding their
human rights
. Explaining the difference, he said, “Civil rights means you're asking Uncle Sam to treat you right. Human rights are something you were born with. Human rights are your God-given rights . . . any time anyone violates your human rights, you can take them to the world court.” But if this approach, the ballot approach—lawful, peaceful means—did not work, then justice must be sought with the bullet and revolutionary means would have to suffice. “Uncle Sam's hands are dripping with blood . . . of the black man in this country. He has the audacity—yes, he has—imagine him posing as the leader of the free world. The free world!—and you over here singing ‘We Shall Overcome.' ”

He pointed to the victories of the rebels that had brought Castro to power in Cuba, that had chased Europeans from Africa and defeated de
Gaulle in Algeria, and of the peasants that were battling the US Armed Forces to a standstill in the jungles of Vietnam. All over the world, black and brown and yellow Davids were besting white Goliaths. America's winning days were behind it. After all, hadn't Uncle Sam lost in Korea, settling for a negotiated truce? “America's not supposed to sign a truce,” Malcolm said. “She's supposed to be
bad
. But she's not
bad
anymore. . . . This is the day of the guerrilla . . . nowhere on this earth does the white man win in a guerrilla warfare. It's not his speed.” It would take the US government another decade and tens of thousands of dead American soldiers to grasp the logic of Malcolm X's argument.

Pledging to work with any group of any race or religion or political persuasion, Malcolm wanted a united front in the fight for black freedom. “We want freedom now,” he said, “but we're not going to get it saying ‘We Shall Overcome.' We've got to fight until we overcome.” But in the end, he seemed to say the choice was really up to the president. What President Johnson did—or did not do—would determine whether millions of African Americans chose the ballot or the bullet. Johnson had to decide. But Malcolm warned that Johnson had better act, and fast. “Let him go in there right now and take a moral stand—right now, not later,” he said.

Then Malcolm made a prescient prediction that in just a few months would come true. “If [Johnson] waits too long, brothers and sisters, he will be responsible for letting a condition develop in this country which will create a climate that will bring seeds up out of the ground with vegetation on the end of them looking like something these people never dreamed of.” By the end of the summer of 1964, as parts of New York erupted in flame, everyone in America, including President Johnson, Moses, and the other backers of the World's Fair, would understand what Malcolm was talking about.

17.

“I didn't want to get involved.”

“I was tired. I went back to bed.”

“I don't know.”

—Reasons witnesses gave when asked why they didn't call the police when they heard Catherine “Kitty” Genovese being attacked

 

The month before Malcolm X made his bold prediction, urban crime had already begun to lay waste to parts of New York City. In Kew Gardens, Queens, a sleepy neighborhood not far from the East Elmhurst home where the fiery Muslim preacher lived with his wife and five daughters, on a quiet street lined with immense sycamore and Norway maple trees and dotted with Tudor-style buildings, the most shocking murder in the history of New York City took place on March 13, 1964, just five weeks before opening day of the World's Fair.

Not that anyone knew it at the time. The murder was originally recorded in the
New York
Times
as a mere four-paragraph story:
Queens Woman Is Stabbed to Death in Front of Home
. The gruesome details would only appear later. The fact that the world would come to know how Catherine “Kitty” Genovese spent the last moments of her short life at all was in large part due to the
Times
' A. M. Rosenthal. In his quest to reacquaint himself with his hometown after a decade abroad as a Pulitzer Prize–winning foreign correspondent, Rosenthal, the
Times
' new Metropolitan Editor, made it his business to get to know New York's VIPs. In order to do his job, Rosenthal said, he needed to know the people who have “anything significant to do with the life of the city.”

A perfect case in point was New York City Police Commissioner Michael J. Murphy. On March 23, Rosenthal, along with his deputy editor, Arthur Gelb, lunched with the commissioner at the lawman's favorite spot, Emil's in downtown Manhattan. Murphy, as usual, sat with his back against the wall, agreeing to answer any question the
editors had, although the commissioner, who looked every bit like the tough Irish cop he was, wasn't giving away any classified secrets; the session was off the record.

But as the meal and conversation wore on, Murphy casually mentioned a recent murder in his native borough of Queens, where he still lived, that had left him, a twenty-five-year veteran of the force, flabbergasted. “That Queens story is something else . . . [it's] one for the books,” the commissioner said. The Timesmen didn't know what he was talking about. Thirty-eight people, Murphy informed them, had watched—or heard—a young woman get murdered in the illuminated city night, and no one could be bothered to call the police. “I've been in this business a long time,” Murphy said toward the end of meal, “but this beats everything.”

Rosenthal couldn't believe it. Certainly Murphy had gotten the number wrong. Still, he thought, even it if were less than ten eyewitnesses, it was a story—a big story. But thirty-eight? Immediately Rosenthal told the commissioner that this account needed to be on the record. Murphy agreed. The
Times
would look into it.

The very fact that the
Times
was venturing into Queens to investigate a nearly two-week-old murder was itself a story. The borough didn't get much space in the Paper of Record. Although Robert Moses and the World's Fair would soon change that, the Fair was a once-in-a-­generation undertaking. Besides, the
Times
was interested in the actual Fair, not its host borough. Despite the fact that Queens was the fastest-growing county in New York at the time, it was “probably the least exotic place” in the city, as Rosenthal freely admitted. “It can be shown statistically, I believe, that in the past few years
Times
reporters have spent more time in Antarctica than in Queens,” he wrote in 1964.

The story that eventually ran in the
Times
would paint Queens as a nightmarish urban landscape—one that should be avoided at all costs, and just in time for Moses' “Olympics of Progress.”

Around 3:20 a.m. on March 13, Genovese, a twenty-eight-year-old single woman, returned to her Kew Gardens neighborhood after a long day at Ev's 11th Hour, the tavern in nearby Hollis where she worked. Kitty, as she was known to her friends and family, pulled her red Fiat into the
parking lot of the Long Island Rail Road, adjacent to her Austin Street apartment, which was just a half block away. As she got out of her car and stood near the lighted LIRR station, she noticed a man parked on the far side of the lot watching her. What she didn't know was that Winston Moseley, age twenty-nine, had been following her for at least ten blocks, thinking only of murder and death. Moseley, who had a decent job fixing calculating machines, had left the comfort of his South Ozone Park, Queens, home at 1:20 a.m. and snuck out of his house as his wife and two children slept. He had one thought coursing through his mind, he later told the police: He was going to find a woman and kill her.

Genovese walked nervously to a nearby police call box, which was connected to the local precinct, but when she saw the man emerge from his white Corvair with a hunting knife, she ran for her life. It didn't take long for Moseley to catch up with her. When he did, he stabbed Genovese twice in the back, then the chest, and in the stomach.

“Oh my God, he stabbed me! Please help me! Please help me!” she cried out.

Almost immediately, her blood-curdling screams woke some neighbors. On a top floor of a large apartment building across the street, a window went up, a light flicked on, and a man's voice shouted out in the frosty night air: “Leave that girl alone!” Moseley stopped his attack and walked away, leaving Genovese lying in the street. Frightened that a witness had seen him get out of his car and would be able to describe it, Moseley halted his attack and returned to his automobile, driving it a short distance away. He switched hats, choosing a fedora to better disguise himself, and returned to hunt Genovese. As he later admitted, he didn't think any of the people who opened their windows “would come down to help her.” He was free to do as he wished.

Genovese had managed to stumble toward the street near the police call box, where she had first glimpsed her attacker. Bleeding from at least four wounds, she struggled to stand and turn the last corner to make it to her doorway on Austin Street.

“I'm dying! I'm dying!” she shouted into the still winter night. Now many lights went on and neighbors opened windows, craning their necks
to get a better look at what was happening on the street below; some kept the lights off to see more clearly.

When Moseley returned, however, Genovese was nowhere to be found. He walked along Austin Street, opposite the tall apartment building from where the first neighbor had shouted. The entire block of Tudor buildings here were only two stories high; on the ground floor were stores, and above them apartments. He tried the first door but it was locked. The second was ajar and inside he could see Genovese, bleeding and lying at the bottom of the staircase, unable to make it up the stairs to the safety of her second-floor apartment.

Seeing her assailant again, Genovese screamed. This time Moseley wasn't taking any chances: He stabbed her in the neck, slashing her vocal cords. “She only moaned after that,” he later explained. And there, just down the stairs from her home, Moseley cut off her clothes and attempted to rape her. If her groans grew too loud, he told the court at his trial months later, he stabbed her again. Having finished his crime, Moseley put his pants back on and left his victim for dead, but not before searching her wallet. Inside was $49, which he took.

“Why would I throw money away?” he calmly noted to prosecutors during his trial.

Despite having been stabbed seventeen times and sexually assaulted for thirty-five minutes, when Genovese was abandoned by Moseley on the bottom of her stairwell, she was still alive. The police arrived at approximately 3:55 a.m., five minutes after one of her neighbors had finally called. The man later explained that after much indecision and only after he woke up a friend in the middle of the night to seek advice, did he come to her aid and phone for help. By then it was too late.

It wasn't the fact that a young woman was stabbed and assaulted in two separate attacks in a respectable Queens neighborhood where violent crime was a rarity that shocked detectives; it was the number of neighbors who admitted—after the fact—that they saw or heard at least one of the attacks that stunned them: thirty-eight people according to police; thirty-eight law-abiding, decent, ordinary, middle-class citizens, many of them elderly—old enough to remember the 1939–40 World's
Fair, and probably many were grandparents thinking of taking their grandchildren to the World's Fair set to open in just five weeks. Thirty-eight, and only one came forward.

“The people came out,” a detective told the
Times,
at 4:25 a.m. only when the ambulance took Genovese to Queens General Hospital. An hour later, she was pronounced dead. Had someone—anyone—called them earlier, the police told reporters, Genovese might have survived. “A phone call,” a detective said, “would have done it.”

The outcry from the
Times
' follow-up article—
Thirty-Eight
Who Saw Murder Didn't Call the Police
—was immediate. The New York papers seized on the sensational story, as the populace of Kew Gardens now had to answer for the actions—or lack thereof—of its three-dozen silent witnesses. The article, assigned by Rosenthal to a young reporter named Martin Gansberg, prompted New Yorkers throughout the five boroughs to ask some difficult questions about themselves and their metropolis. When had New York devolved into a bloody battleground of life and death? When had America's most modern and cultured urban society become so depraved? What was wrong with New York?

Citizens, clergy, politicians, journalists, and psychologists offered numerous opinions in an attempt to explain the horrible crime, and the larger issues it invoked. President Johnson mentioned it in a radio address, as the murder of Genovese quickly became a symbol of all that was wrong with America's cities. The silence of those thirty-eight witnesses would be debated for decades to come; sociologists even gave a name to this new disease that was infecting urban America: Genovese syndrome.

The perception of New York—among its own eight million citizens, the nation, and the world—would never be the same. Newspapers from Moscow to Istanbul recounted the indifference to human suffering that was on display in Queens, the home borough of the World's Fair, whose self-proclaimed mission was to foster a new era of “Peace Through Understanding.” The murder of Genovese mocked such utopian schemes.

As the weeks and months passed, long after the Fair's opening day, the story refused to die; radio and television, newspapers and magazines delivered a constant barrage of “apathy” stories. “It's as if everybody in New York were watching to see how apathetic everybody else was,” Rosenthal told
The New Yorker,
after publishing a short book on the crime. “Maybe ‘apathy' isn't the right word after all. Maybe it should be ‘callousness' or ‘dissociation.' Whatever it is, there seem to be an awful lot of people who have been turning away from this or that. People don't seem to be connected to other people any more.”

With 1964 being an election year, it was only a matter of time before crafty politicos seized upon the story to drive the narratives that benefited their ambitions. Alabama's segregationist governor, George C. Wallace, who entered the Democratic presidential race in a bid to wrest the nomination from President Johnson, began to allude to urban America's soaring crime rates. The fact that Genovese's assailant—who quickly confessed to murdering two other Queens women—was black, a fact the
Times
left unreported, was used by Wallace and the defenders of Jim Crow to inflame tension between the races.

Back at his Flushing Meadow office, Robert Moses began receiving letters from frightened Americans too scared to travel to New York to see his Fair. Moses assured them that, yes, terrible crimes did transpire in New York, but that local journalists had overplayed such tawdry tales in a bid to sell newspapers. Accusing his enemies in the press of sensationalism in order to sell more copies of their ailing newspapers, such reporting “creates a picture of conditions in New York City at variance with the facts,” Moses explained in a letter to a gentleman from Virginia. “This does the city, the Fair and the Country a great disservice.” Crime in New York, he noted, was less than other “large cities.”

That wasn't saying much. Violent crime had doubled from 1963 to 1964, and urban violence would continue to soar from coast to coast throughout the 1960s and beyond. And despite Moses' warnings, the specter of Genovese—and the silent eyewitnesses to her death—would haunt New York long after the World's Fair and all its wonders were just distant memories.