4th of July, Asbury Park

by Daniel Wolff

  The promoters who hired him, the Rediker brothers, weren't rebels; they were jewelers— and insiders in local government. Through their contacts at city hall, they controlled a bunch of beachfront leases. Right after the war, they'd gotten a permit to promote dances on the boardwalk and in 1946 had kicked off with Tommy Dorsey's big band. (By then Sinatra had gone solo.) For the Fourth of July weekend, 1955, they booked Bill Haley and his Comets into the Casino. The city couldn't afford to ignore this new attraction, rock & roll, but it wanted an acceptable, clean-cut performer, and Haley was an obvious choice. Ten years older than Elvis Presley and Little Richard, he presented himself as an odd but basically trustworthy grown-up: moonfaced and spit-curled. "We can show the youngsters," he told the national press, "that fun can be clean." When it came to this new, worrisome, mixed-race music, Haley was the Arthur Pryor of his day, modifying the wild, dirty freedom of rock 6k roll into something Asbury could live with. And on top of everything else, the Comets were a shore band out of Philadelphia: a local, known commodity.

  The 1955 concert went just as planned. Publicity was no problem with Blackboard Jungle (advertised as a "Drama of Teen Terror") playing at the Eatontown Drive-in and "Rock Around the Clock" about to top the charts. Hundreds of well-behaved kids showed up at the Casino for the Saturday and Sunday night shows. At $1.50 a head, the Redikers quickly got back the $250 lease on the Casino. At the end of the Independence Day weekend, rock 6k roll had showed a good profit— and with no trouble, no rebellion. Just like in the movies.

  So, as the Fourth of July, 1956, rolled around, the Redikers must have felt that Asbury Park would be able to use rock 6k roll the way it had ragtime, jazz, and the blues. Like those, the new music mixed cultures that the city kept carefully separate. Bill Haley had learned his rock 6k roll by crossing the street to hear the Treniers, and by 1956, the new sound was already starting to bring its audiences together. DJ Alan Freed's dances at the Brooklyn Paramount were notably mixed-race. Chuck Berry appealed to white girls; Elvis moved like a black man. Plus, all this was going down within the context of a reenergized civil rights movement. The Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision threatened separate-but-equal schools; Emmett Till's battered body haunted the American judicial system; and Rosa Parks had refused to move to the back of a Montgomery, Alabama, bus.

  But official Asbury seemed convinced that it could contain and exploit these changes. In 1956, the city still advocated a brand of benevolent paternalism that dated back to James Bradley. The local paper came out strongly against discrimination. In March, it spearheaded a fund-raising drive to pay the fines of the young preacher leading Montgomery's bus boycott. "This newspaper," the Asbury Evening Press editorialized, "feels that the treatment accorded the Rev. Dr. King is a disgrace to the state of Alabama which must, in part, be shared by the whole country." And locals were beginning to admit that the whole country included Asbury Park.

  On the boardwalk, Mayor Smock's decade of maintaining the status quo meant run-down facilities and few new attractions. But inland, the same laissez-faire policy led to even deeper poverty. The West Side had never had enough decent places to live, but by the summer of 1956, the waiting list for low-rent housing had grown to seven hundred families. Thousands of Asbury's Negroes qualified for subsidies— which meant they didn't earn as much in a year as a suburbanite spent to buy a new Olds. Back in 1940, Mayor Hetrick had begun construction on the low-income Asbury Park Village. Washington Village was added in 1943, and Smock had overseen a further small expansion there. But all of the West Side's 308 low-rent units were chock-full, and plans to add 63 more would address less than a tenth of those on the waiting list.

  In the summer of 1956, the Asbury paper ran a series on what it called Asbury's "official skeleton in the closet." It included a profile of a Negro family of eight living in a two-room Springwood Avenue storefront with no hot water and only a kerosene stove for heat. While half a million federal dollars were available for West Side redevelopment, to get that money the city had to demonstrate its interest. And the city had demonstrated just the opposite. It had no redevelopment plan. Its building ordinances dated back to 1911, its plumbing code to 1906, and its health code was essentially the one that James Bradley had enacted in 1897.

  When Asbury had incorporated the West Side a half century before, there had been talk of a "complete house-cleaning." But the area was worth more to its white owners if it was left to decay. Springwood's slumlords could charge four times the rent of federally subsidized housing. And the ancient safety codes meant they didn't have to fix up their buildings. As the Asbury Park Evening Press pointed out, "Landlords who have tenants lined up waiting to pay $10 a week for a room in a squalid shack aren't going to make improvements unless they have to." And those landlords were going to support— with contributions and votes— a city government that kept the safety inspectors at bay.

  And kept the races separate. On the Fourth of July, 1956, black residents could go to Cuba's nightclub and catch Candy Bishop and her All Stars, fresh from Harlem's famous Small's Paradise. Meanwhile, on the beachfront, the ethnic attractions were aimed at white tourists: Cisco and his Los Americanos played mariachi music at the Monterey Lounge, and the hot spot at the Alan Hotel was Rocky's New Club Zulu. For the nostalgic, the daytime band concert on Eighth Avenue would have a rendition of "The Jolly Farmer Goes to Town" with a tuba solo. And Convention Hall featured acts like the McGuire Sisters, off the Arthur Godfrey TV show. They were racking up number one hits by sanitizing rock 6k roll: turning out sparkling-clean cover versions of the Moonglows' "Sincerely" and other R&LB songs.

  The Redikers wanted 1956's rock 6k roll show to feature an act just as popular and nonthreatening as Haley. Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers must have seemed the perfect choice. Here was a Top Ten group that featured an adorable thirteen-year-old lead singer. Their big hit, "Why Do Fools Fall in Love," was infectious but apparently meaningless feel-good music. Over a catchy doo-wop beat, little Frankie Lymon asked a string of naive questions: Why do fools fall in love? Why do birds sing so gay? Why does the rain fall? The teenager's high, sweet voice exuded a kind of innocent desire. "I fell in love the minute that record came on," Ronnie Spector recalled. She was twelve, a few years away from becoming lead singer with the Ronettes. "I couldn't tell if he was black, or white, or what. I just knew that I loved the boy who was singing that song."

  The fact that you couldn't tell his race was deliberate. The Teenagers were a crossover act. They wanted to appear not just in rock 6k roll but in mainstream venues— venues like Asbury Park. Onstage, the group often dressed in white cheerleader sweaters with a big red T for "teenager" on the chest. It was a dazzling, clean-cut, collegiate look that presented the Teenagers as ambassadors from the nonthreatening wing of rock 6k roll. At the end of 1956, they would even cut a single called "I'm Not a Juvenile Delinquent."

  It didn't matter that Frankie Lymon had grown up pimping on Harlem street corners ("I learned everything there was to know about women before I was 12 years old"). Or that he'd already developed a heroin habit that would eventually kill him. Or that the Teenagers were hooked up with some of the shadier Mob elements in the shady world of early rock 6k roll. No, what mattered to the Redikers were the group's clean-cut image and its popularity: "Why Do Fools Fall in Love" went to #1 R6kB and #6 pop. The Asbury promoters had to know that the Teenagers were "colored" with both Negro and Puerto Rican members. Maybe the Redikers assumed that only white kids would go to a concert in the white part of town. Maybe they figured if both races did show up, it wouldn't be a problem. After all, kids in Asbury knew their place. For proof of that, you only had to look at the city's version of school integration.

  Before 1946, Bangs Avenue Elementary School had, in every sense, been divided in two: physically, socially, educationally. Bangs Avenue North was for white children with an all-white faculty and administration, and Bangs Avenue South was for the colored. The children came in through separate entrances and w
ent to separate classrooms. Use of the only facility they shared, the auditorium, was scheduled so the races never mingled. A West Side citizens group called this "unlawful, against the ideal of brotherhood, a social evil and a breeder of fascism." But up until September 1946, that's how Asbury educated its children. Then, New Jersey passed a statewide civil rights law, and the city had no choice. Asbury Park promptly ended a half century of segregation, and just as promptly, white families moved out of town or sent their children to private schools. "They had three hundred white folks [enrolled in 1946]," one black graduate of Bangs recalls, "and every one of them went over to Ocean Township!"

  A decade later, the teenagers who had lived through both sides of this white flight were the potential audience for the Frankie Lymon concert. They went to separate schools, lived in separate neighborhoods, attended separate churches. If the two races interacted, it was pretty rare. They both listened to rock 6k roll but not in the same room.

  At dusk on Saturday, June 30, the crowd began streaming into Convention Hall for the eight-thirty show. The day had cooled from the high nineties, but it was still over eighty degrees when the opening act, Freddie Price and His Orchestra, went on. If the teenagers paid any attention, they heard proper, out-of-date Merchants Music. By the time Price was done, some twenty-seven hundred eager rock 6k roll fans were ready for the real thing. The Redikers had hired five "reserved policemen" to provide security, and the usual three city police officers were outside patrolling the Saturday-night boardwalk. Chief Lembke looked in on Convention Hall around ten-thirty. Price was still playing at that point, and everything seemed peaceful enough, so he headed back to the station. "Boardwalk crowds," as the chief put it, "always have been very orderly."

  Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers finally came on a little before eleven. A cry went up from the crowd. In their sharp outfits and with their tight choreography, they created an immediate sensation. Out front was Lymon: a foot shorter than the other members, with high cheekbones, a round face, dark brows, and a perpetual, mischievous grin. If you squinted a little, you could see him as a darker version of Tillie. Asbury's acting mayor, Roland Hines, watched as the group doo-wopped into its opening number. "When they started singing," he reported later, "I watched some of the kids. They just seemed to lose control of themselves." Apparently, it looked fine to him; wasn't this giddy excitement what the new music was all about? After the first few notes, he, too, headed home.

  Then, the fighting began.

  According to the Convention Hall custodian (backstage at the time), "The Teenagers had just started their second number, and suddenly fists started swinging." It began over by the soft-drink stand. Scared kids tried to climb onto the stage to get away, and the custodian scrambled forward to protect the sound equipment. The trouble, said producer, Joseph Rediker, "just seemed to break out."

  The Asbury police got their first call at 11:06. All available backup was sent— which turned out to be four officers including Thomas Smith, by now the force's only Negro detective sergeant. Smith and another officer took charge of a scene that included four separate fights. They got Convention Hall under control, and soon the dance started back up.

  But punches kept being thrown, scattered incidents flaring up here and there all through the crowd. At around midnight, Rediker ordered the doors to the hall closed so nobody else could get in. Still, the fighting continued. After huddling with the cops, Rediker announced that the dance was canceled and told the kids to go home. Which, as anybody from Asbury Park knew, would automatically separate the crowd by race.

  But as the fans spilled out onto Ocean Avenue— the music finished almost before it had begun, the night still young and hot— more fighting broke out. Within moments, a couple hundred kids were going at it. And now they were fighting in public, on Asbury Park's boardwalk, where a convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars had swelled the pre-Fourth of July crowd to an estimated seventy-five thousand. Angry teenagers, white and black, herded out of a canceled concert and let loose in the midst of thousands of celebrating veterans? Smith and the other officers put in an urgent call for backup.

  No one was left in Asbury's police station, so the operator broadcast an alert: "All available help for mass fighting on Ocean Avenue, Asbury Park." Soon, support started streaming in from as far south as Point Pleasant and as far north as Red Bank. In the end, officers from a dozen Monmouth communities responded. Miltary police came down from Fort Monmouth and state police from Shrewsbury.

  The combined forces closed down six blocks of Ocean Avenue and transformed the heart of Asbury's beachfront into a no-traffic zone lined with uniformed officers, police cars, and paddy wagons. The papers the next day made no bones about it: this was a riot, the "Convention Hall Riot." As the fighting continued, the cops waded in with nightsticks. It was a foreshadowing of scenes from the modern civil rights movement. At one point, according to the local paper, "Police even considered calling firemen to turn hose lines on the milling Ocean Avenue crowd."

  And then the riot spread. City officals weren't particularly disturbed by reports that there were "arguments" in the Spring-wood Avenue slums. Those were considered common occurrences. But a half hour after the cops closed Ocean Avenue, news came of "roving cars filled with young people" smashing windows on Cookman Avenue. Suddenly, teenagers and their rock 6k roll-inspired violence threatened the heart of the business district.

  According to the local paper, "only the prompt and effective work of local police and the help they received from other police forces prevented far more serious consequences." "Scores" were taken into custody, though few were actually booked. Twenty-five were injured, most of them with minor cuts and bruises, and three people hospitalized. It was one thirty in the morning before the crowd was dispersed and traffic back to normal. The police continued to guard the boardwalk into the morning hours. After all, they weren't clear why the fighting had broken out, so there was no saying when it might erupt again.

  In the aftermath, Chief Lembke characterized the disturbance as "a case of hot music and cold beer not mixing. You put beer in the stomachs of kids 15 to 20, and you've got nothing but trouble." It was a reassuring explanation. Drunkenness, after all, was as ailAmerican as Saturday night. And it wasn't Asbury Park's fault since Convention Hall didn't sell beer. What's more, the chief told his city, the troublemakers had come from out of town. "From the information I got, a bunch of colored boys from Newark started a fight with some colored boys from down this way." Unfortunately, the evidence didn't support this. Of the eight kids arrested, five were from Asbury Park and the others from towns right nearby. If the chief was right that outside agitators had caused the fighting, Asbury's police hadn't caught any.

  What Chief Lembke insisted on was that the riot was not what it looked like. Yes, the rock 6k roll crowd had been racially mixed, but this was, he reported, "definitely not a race riot. There were colored fighting colored, white fighting white and white fighting colored." It was just an odd thing, inexplicable. In his thirty-five years on the force, dating back to before the Klan marched through Long Branch, Chief Lembke had never seen this kind of "mass fighting . . . on the beachfront."

  By the Fourth of July, Asbury's local paper was less interested in the cause than the cure— which struck them as obvious: the city needed more law and order. "Whereas psychologists may help explain it," the Asbury Park Evening Press editorialized, "only police vigilance will prevent recurrences." Never mind Blackboard Jungle's happy ending where understanding saves the day. And never mind conditions on the West Side: Asbury's "official skeleton in the closet." The paper mentioned neither, and the city council agreed. Except the council felt it knew the cause of the trouble. It wasn't substandard housing or segregated schools. Acting mayor Hines had been right there in Convention Hall when Frankie Lymon had started singing. He'd seen that strange look come over the teenagers. He knew it was the music that had done it. The government of Asbury Park unanimously agreed there would be no more teen dances th
at summer. And if and when they were reinstated, officials would make sure to screen out "rock and roll and the rest of this hot music that seems to stir the kids up so much."

  The front-page headline in the local paper read CITY TO BAN ROCK 'N' ROLL. Asbury Park had once again rallied around James Bradley's American values. And as with beach segregation and the KKK, the city's position put it at the forefront of a national trend. Just days before, San Jose, California, had been the scene of what was being described as a rock 6k roll riot. And Jersey City officials had decided to refuse a permit for a teen concert— even though the headliner was Bill Haley and the host Paul Whiteman.

  Asbury's voters supported this law-and-order response. In the next city council election, the winning ticket consisted of a veteran of the police department and three lawyers, including Joe Mattice. Asbury also sent a message by defeating Dr. Lorenzo Harris (though he had "the best showing ever by a Negro candidate") and electing instead another West Side doctor, Henry Vaccaro. Some "ethnics" were now allowed in the government; some weren't. The new city council upheld the ban on rock 6k roll and added that it would remove the batting cage that had turned the boardwalk into a "honky-tonk area."