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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 presidential election, the scorching heat, the slow pace of racial progress—started to reach the boiling point.⁹

The next few speakers encountered a less sympathetic audience. “White people dictate your policy,” shouted one man in reference to CORE’s integrated membership. “It is time to let ‘the man’ know that if he does something to us, we are going to do something back,” responded a frustrated Chris Sprowal, chairman of Downtown CORE and organizer of Friday’s protest. “If you say ‘You kick me once, I’m going to kick you twice,’ we might get some respect.” Conceding that CORE was committed to nonviolence, he countered that “when a cop shoots at me, I will shoot back.”¹⁰

The crowd replied with cries of approval: “That’s right, brother” and “blood for blood.” But Sprowal’s final appeal for peaceful protest was greeted with hoots of derision—a sign that some younger blacks in New York were losing patience with nonviolent civil disobedience. “Let’s go down to that precinct and take it apart brick by brick,” yelled Howell. After Sprowal spoke a member of South Jamaica CORE charged that “45 percent of the cops in New York are neurotic murderers.”¹¹

By now the crowd was excited and had grown to several hundred. Yet no real news appeared imminent, and so most of the reporters headed home or to a bar with ice. Among the few who remained was Paul L. Montgomery of the New York Times. A twenty-seven-year-old assistant religion editor, he became captivated by the action and opted to stay. As a result, he found himself on the front lines of a big story.¹²

After the CORE rally ended, Dukes spoke for twenty minutes, followed by Edward Mills Davis and James Lawson of the United African Nationalist Movement. Then the minister led the march to the 28th Precinct, where the protest resumed and became confrontational. Outside, a handful of officers donned helmets and linked arms to keep the crowd at bay while others raced to get their gear and offer assistance. As patrolmen rushed to the rooftops to halt the light rain of bottles and bricks, Montgomery asked the precinct captain how many officers he had. “Enough,” the captain replied. The actual number was only twenty. Inside, an ad hoc grievance committee consisting of a CORE member, two Black Nationalists, and Dukes met with Deputy Chief Inspector Thomas Pendergast. They demanded that the commissioner immediately suspend Gilligan and personally come to Harlem to make the announcement; Pendergast responded that the incident was under investigation and offered the committee a bullhorn to address the crowd in the street.¹³

At this point, the protest was a tense but predictable drama for Harlem. “This is their version of city hall,” Deputy Chief Inspector Casimir Kruszewski, commander of the 28th Precinct, observed later. “If they’re going to demonstrate against the government, they have to do it here.” Typically, the activists would offer some words, the followers would vent, the crowd would disperse, and everyone would call it a night. But July 18 was not a typical Saturday, especially for two Bronx teenagers who were at the headquarters of Harlem CORE, a second-floor walk-up on West 125th Street, when they learned about the protest and decided to witness it for themselves.¹⁴

Quentin Hill and Wayne Moreland were friends who lived in the Throgs Neck housing project. Like Powell, they were fifteen, which made his death resonate strongly with them. On weekends they both worked at Orchard Beach, where on hot days they earned good money by selling ice cream and soft drinks. After work Hill and Moreland usually liked to take the subway into Harlem to see the sights and shop. But on that night they decided to join CORE because the Powell shooting had convinced them that the freedom struggle in the South needed to become more assertive in the North.¹⁵

When the teenagers arrived at the 28th Precinct, the crowd was shouting at the officers, who “silently snickered and grinned” according to Moreland. At 9:20 P.M. a truck loaded with barricades arrived, and as darkness fell Pendergast raised a bullhorn. “This has become a disorderly gathering,” he announced. “I am instructing the police to clear the street.” But then both Hill and Moreland heard—“as vividly as if it happened yesterday”—the chief inspector state, “Okay, boys, you’ve had your say. Now why don’t you go home?” As he spoke, cries of “we’re not boys” erupted and someone hurled a rock. “That’s it,” said Pendergast as the officers and demonstrators clashed. “Lock them up.” The police immediately arrested sixteen people and dragged them roughly into the station house. Then a bottle struck Patrolman Michael Doris in the head and knocked him to the pavement with a concussion—the first officer injured.¹⁶

Angered, the police charged. Now the crowd broke and the teenagers ran. Moreland heard the “dull thud” of nightsticks hitting bone and flesh; Hill saw a Molotov cocktail (a glass bottle filled with flammable liquid and capped with a cloth fuse) float through the air and explode into flames. Amid the chaos and the sound of gunfire both were able to evade capture and duck into the Chock Full O’Nuts on 125th Street, where they dived to the floor along with the employees and other customers. At one point, Hill tried to raise his head to see what was happening. “Stay down,” ordered an older man. “I was scared,” recollected Moreland. “I recall thinking, just let me get out of here.” But Hill had a different reaction. “When you’re fifteen you’re not afraid of much,” he remembered, “and things were unfolding so rapidly that I’m not sure we had time to be afraid.”¹⁷

After the disorder abated, the teenagers went home to the Bronx. But the protest was a formative moment. For Moreland, who later became a professor of literature at Queens College, it was a radicalizing experience. “Whatever illusions I had about the political process or the inherent righteousness of justice” disappeared that night, he recalled. For Hill the rebellion confirmed his sense of the world. In “Time Poem,” which was published as part of the Black Arts Movement, he wrote, “go to the precinct / say hello to the sergeant / put your spear between his eyes and pull the trigger.” Hill later changed his name to Basir Mchawi and became an activist, editor, photographer, and educator in the public schools. He also taught at Queens College with his lifelong friend.¹⁸

While Hill and Moreland were able to avoid arrest, another protester was less fortunate. “I didn’t do it—you’ve got the wrong man,” the youth yelled as he was hauled into custody. “They’re beating him—they’re beating him,” chanted some bystanders. The false rumor quickly spread to 125th Street, where Mills and Lawson heard it. They rushed to the 28th Precinct, where they demanded to see the prisoner. The lieutenant on duty brought him from his cell and the protester denied the allegation. “They may have been a little rough when they arrested me,” he said, “but they haven’t bothered me in here.” Out there the correction made little difference as misinformation continued to circulate.¹⁹

By 10 P.M. Deputy Chief Inspector Harry Taylor, in charge of the entire Manhattan North area, had assumed command and reinforcements had started to arrive from other precincts. Many of them were off-duty detectives and patrolmen with police badges pinned to their civilian clothes. With the additional manpower and tactical support provided by two squads of TPF officers bused from Midtown, the police managed to clear 123rd Street in front of the station house and establish barricades at both ends of the block. On Eighth Avenue the crowd drifted away, but on Seventh Avenue it swelled as the curious came to contemplate the commotion. Soon the intersection contained an estimated thousand demonstrators.²⁰