The truth was, for most New Yorkers, regardless of ethnicity or political persuasion, it was hard to square the images of marauding mobs that had already been indelibly etched into the city’s consciousness with some abstract notion of social protest. A “pained message” (as Gutman had put it) from the ghettos? No, this felt more like criminals taking advantage of the darkness, and the safety found in numbers, to rob stores and destroy buildings.
And so the blackout backlash was born. At its worst, it was bigotry, hatred, a blindness to the cause-and-effect rapport between poverty and crime. One Times reader, for instance, accused the city’s poor, en masse, of being welfare cheats. “We either cut them off completely, or we will have to face a drastic evaluation of the situation,” he wrote. “The Puerto Ricans can go back to P.R. They belong there anyway, and if the blacks do not shape up they can go back to the South.”
At its best, the backlash took the shape of an enlightened awareness that it was possible—no, imperative—to feel the pressing need to do something about New York’s hurting neighborhoods, to find ways to create full-time long-term jobs and promote urban renewal from the ground up, without excusing the looters from taking responsibility for their actions. To do otherwise was patronizing, paternalistic, racist even. Those who pointed to the misery of life in New York’s ghettos to explain the looting weren’t just missing its real cause; they were perpetuating it by fostering diminished expectations for the underclass.
“We must end the vicious double standard that now governs politics, the news media and the society,” declared Bruce Llewellyn, the Harlem-born owner of Fedco Foods. “Whites are expected to learn, but black children are assumed to be uneducable, are allowed to graduate illiterate. Whites are expected to obey the law, but blacks are allowed to defy it—so long as they confine their depredations to other blacks.” Fedco’s blackout losses totaled one million dollars, a third of what Llewellyn had paid for the supermarket chain, leveraging everything he owned in the process, eight years earlier. Explaining what had moved him to speak out, Llewellyn averred that the looting had turned the minds of too many New Yorkers into “poisonous mush.”
40.
FROM the start some of the most unequivocal denunciations of the looters had come from the black community, where one difference between the disturbances of the 1960s and the blackout looting seemed especially apparent. In the sixties rioters had spared merchants with the foresight to mount “Soul Brother” signs in their windows. During the looting of ’77 not only were black- and minority-owned businesses not spared, but they bore the brunt of the destruction.
“When you see a black florist on Nostrand Avenue wiped out, and a supermarket on the same street suffer the same fate, both black-owned, how can I buy excuses that no jobs and poverty motivated this mob action?” asked Woodrow Lewis, a black assemblyman from Brooklyn, a couple of days after the blackout. “We can’t coddle or pamper acts of vandalism.” It was not lost on Lewis that as bad as unemployment in the ghettos had been on July 13, with hundreds of stores cleaned out, and hundreds more demolished, it was now going to be far worse.
In fact, the pillaging had been fueled as much by an antiblack sentiment as by an antiwhite one. LeMans, a stylish men’s clothing store that catered to middle-class blacks, had been the first place hit on Amsterdam Avenue, miles from central Harlem. Its coowners had started the business in 1968, on the back of a twenty-five-thousand-dollar loan from the Small Business Administration. When they arrived at the store to find the plundering in progress on the night of the thirteenth, one of the owners screwed up the courage to ask a looter, whose arms were full of designer suits, why. The answer came: “Your things were too high, man.”
“Buy black” had been the mantra during the struggle for civil rights in the fifties and sixties. Now local church leaders and politicians were urging the community not to buy black if the merchant in question was hawking stolen goods. The Amsterdam News wrote that the real power failure was within the city’s black leadership and decried the community’s willingness to tolerate lawlessness and violence. “It is not enough not to condone looting,” the paper declared in a front-page editorial; “we must forthrightly and adamantly condemn it.”
Manhattan borough president and mayoral candidate Percy Sutton shared this view. On the Sunday morning after the blackout, Sutton, a slender, cocoa-colored man with a thin mustache, took to the pulpit at the Abyssinian Baptist Church, the massive Gothic cathedral at 138th Street and Seventh Avenue where Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., had once held court. “You can’t, on Tuesday, buy a television set that was stolen from the store around the corner,” Sutton said, “and then, on Sunday, go to church and call yourself a Christian.” His calls for harsh treatment for “those who took advantage of the darkness to rip and plunder, to pillage, loot, and burn” echoed through the gleaming marble interior.
It was a stirring speech, worthy of the great Powell himself, but Sutton already knew he was finished. The blackout looting was not racially motivated, yet the vast majority of those arrested were black. The white backlash would be impossible for any black candidate to overcome.
It was an especially cruel fate for the fifty-six-year-old Sutton, a master builder of color-blind alliances, who had long ago been tapped most likely to become New York’s first black mayor. (New York magazine titled a May 1974 Sutton profile “Guess Who’s Coming to Gracie Mansion.”)
The son of a man who’d been born into slavery, Sutton learned his craft at the feet of New York’s original black power broker, the Harlem Fox, J. Raymond Jones. As a lawyer and civil rights activist during the 1950s and 1960s, Sutton fought for desegregation: He respectfully scolded Attorney General Robert Kennedy for moving too slowly to redress racial inequality and was even thrown in jail for sitting in the white section of a segregated diner in Maryland. But with his natty three-piece suits and slicked-back hair, Sutton would never be mistaken for a black militant. In 1968, when Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated and violence threatened to engulf Harlem, Mayor Lindsay asked Sutton to walk the streets, urging blacks to exercise restraint. Sutton was more than happy to oblige.
So it was perhaps no surprise that when it came time to launch his mayoral drive in February 1977, Sutton had focused his energy on white voters. “Our first task was to make him a candidate that was acceptable to whites at a time of great racial polarization in the city,” recalls his campaign manager, Frank Baraff. “Percy knew that at that point in history you were not going to become mayor by being the black candidate.”
Sutton’s campaign headquarters were not in Harlem but in an empty office building along a strip of abandoned factories and car repair shops in Queens, the least black of New York’s boroughs save for Staten Island. His first celebrity campaigner was the former middleweight boxing champion Italian-American Rocky Graziano, who pledged to help Sutton “KO crime.”
There had been seventy-five felonies committed every hour in New York in 1976, making it the worst crime year in the city’s history. In his radio ads, Sutton blatantly played to white New York’s growing sense of fear: “New York City is a great city, but it’s a city turned sick with the fear of crime. And who doesn’t know where the criminals are? You do and I do. They’re on our street corners, openly selling dope. They’re in our hallways and in our schoolrooms and in our subways and in our streets. They’re mugging and crippling our people. They’re operating nursing homes and Medicaid mills. They’re cheating, stealing, and driving away our families and our jobs. Crime has laid its violent hands all over us.”
Not everyone agreed with Sutton’s strategy. William Banks, who ran the campaign’s Brooklyn operation, could see that the terminal state of New York’s ghettos and the steady stream of grim unemployment data were empowering a new generation of militant, self-styled community leaders whom Sutton risked alienating. The ideological heirs to Malcolm X, they were men like Brooklyn’s Sonny Carson, who went on to lead the campaign to expel Korean grocers from the black neighborhood
s of Bed-Stuy and Flatbush, inspiring a story line in Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing.
“If you’re going to make a chocolate cake, you’ve got to have the cake first,” Banks told Sutton early in the campaign in an attempt to persuade him to focus on his black constituency. “Then maybe you can have a white icing.”
“That’s not my style,” Sutton answered. “I’m running for the mayor of New York City. I’ve got to relate to all the people.”
Even before the blackout, Sutton was coming around to Banks’s point of view. In May the candidate relocated his headquarters from Queens to Lenox Avenue in Harlem—“lest my base feel neglected”—and then called together the ministers of hundreds of black churches to help mobilize their congregations on his behalf. In June he swapped Rocky Graziano for the militant black icon Muhammad Ali. Having just caused a stir on a local morning news program by lashing out at the Jewish and Italian managers who had “robbed” him over the years, the aging heavyweight champion campaigned all afternoon with Sutton.
In the wake of the blackout Sutton’s frustration at his inability to bridge New York’s racial gap turned to anger. His mayoral dreams deflated, his faith in the integrationist ideal dented, he accused the white press of ignoring his campaign: “I am treated as Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man.” Sutton brought the Reverend Jesse Jackson, Jr., to Harlem to echo the charge. “The media have tried to destroy Percy with indifference,” the Reverend Jackson thundered at a rally on 125th Street. After he “picked Abe Beame up on his shoulders and walked him across this community,” Jackson continued, referring to Sutton’s support for Beame in the 1973 mayoral election, “the Jewish community has turned its back on Percy Sutton.”
At the end of 1977 a bitter Sutton resigned “forever” from public life, saying simply, “I no longer want anything from the city.”
PART THREE
41.
TO Osborn Elliott, whose job as New York’s deputy mayor for economic development was to attract business to the city, the real disaster wasn’t the blackout looting. It was the New York Post’s coverage of it. After scanning the paper on the Friday after the blackout—the front-page headline bayed, 24 HOURS OF TERROR—Elliott hastily dispatched a letter to the paper’s publisher and editor in chief, Rupert Murdoch. “So your New York Post has now covered New York City’s first big crisis since you took over,” wrote Elliott. “Are you proud of what your headlines produced?”
Not long after assuming control of the paper, Murdoch had stood in the Post’s newsroom and assured his staff that he had no dramatic changes in mind, just a little freshening up. “Don’t judge me by what you’ve heard about me,” he said. “Judge me by what I do.”
The first sign of change had been harmless enough. On January 3, 1977, Murdoch added a thick red stripe to the Post’s otherwise black-and-white front page. That same day the paper’s gentlemanly gossip columnist, “Midnight” Earl Wilson, finally got some company, Page Six. (In its first month Page Six, a gossip column assembled by a team of reporters, spotted Woody Allen canoodling with a “very young girlfriend” at Elaine’s; reported that Dorothy Hamill was carrying on with Dean Martin’s son, Dino, Jr.; and quoted Muhammad Ali saying that he’d like to star in an all-black remake of Ben Hur.)
Murdoch was an active presence in the newsroom, writing and rewriting headlines, peering over reporters’ shoulders, even answering telephones. Men with Australian accents—gangaroos, as veteran Posties called them—were soon roaming the paper’s halls too. They liked the feel of the city, and they loved that the pubs stayed open past ten-thirty, but they had a lot to learn about New York. One of the new editors, Peter Michelmore, asked veteran reporter George Arzt about the ethnicity of the staff.
“We’re mostly Jewish,” Arzt replied.
“I haven’t met many Jews,” said Michelmore. “We were always taught that they had horns on their head.”
“Mine are retractable,” answered Arzt.
The most reviled of Murdoch’s new editors was Edwin Bolwell, a short, squat, beery-looking Aussie prone to shouting and turning red in the face. Among other ignominous acts, Bolwell decided that the reviews by the Post’s young film critic, Frank Rich, were “too windy” and ordered them halved. Murray Kempton, who called Murdoch “Mr. Merdle,” after the unscrupulous banker in Dickens’s Little Dorrit, might well have suffered the same fate had the Post’s new editors been more successful parsing his sentences.
Bolwell was under specific orders from above to punch up the paper’s headlines and copy, but the rhythm of the tabloid beat eluded him. Fortunately for Murdoch, some of his other editors, most of whom had toiled for one of his papers in London or Sydney, had a better feel for the music. Topless women wouldn’t fly in New York, but that didn’t mean cheesecake was out. In March 1977 the Post ran twenty-one items on Farrah Fawcett-Majors, the feather-haired star of Charlie’s Angels. Stories became shorter, pictures bigger, headlines louder. On the eve of the execution of serial killer Gary Gilmore, the first person put to death in America in a decade, a peaceful protest took place in front of his Utah penitentiary. THREAT TO STORM GILMORE PRISON, read the front page of the Post. Paul Sann quit in protest the following day.
Change was also afoot on the editorial page, where the aging anti-Communist Wechsler had become known as the Red Menace. By the middle of July the Murdoch makeover was almost complete. “Dolly Schiff’s liberal backwater,” writes Murdoch biographer William Shawcross, “had become a roiling, clamorous torrent of news, mostly conservative opinion and hucksterish entertainment.”
Murdoch came into the paper’s un-air-conditioned office at dawn the morning after the blackout and quickly sweated through his white dress shirt. The power outage prevented the Post from publishing that afternoon, but the paper’s “Blackout Special,” complete with a pullout section headlined A CITY RAVAGED, was on the streets the following morning.
Mayor Beame denounced the paper’s arriviste publisher, calling Murdoch an “Australian carpetbagger” who “came here to line his pockets by peddling fiction in the guise of news.” The Post, the mayor continued, “was making Hustler magazine look like the Harvard [Law] Review.” Pete Hamill also turned on Murdoch, comparing the publisher to a guest who vomits at a dinner party: Everyone looks at him with alarm and pity, but no one knows quite what to do with him. “Something vaguely sickening is happening to that newspaper,” Hamill wrote, “and it is spreading through the city’s psychic life like a stain.”
Murdoch himself could not have cared less. The Post’s July 15 blackout special exceeded the paper’s usual Friday sales by seventy-five thousand. It was safe to say that the city was on the brink of its first newspaper war since the fifties.
Baseball has long merchandised its similarity of real life. But these Yankees seem stunned, unequipped to discuss what they are part of in the limited jargon of the locker room. Often, the Yankees cut too close to the bone. They resemble the suffering, everyday world far too much.
THOMAS BOSWELL, THE WASHINGTON POST
AT baseball’s mid-July All-Star break, Chicago had two first-place teams and the Los Angeles Dodgers, who were being managed by a rookie skipper named Tommy Lasorda, had left the world champion Cincinnati Reds in the dust. But the biggest surprise of all was the close race in the Eastern Division of the American League, where the mighty Yankees were running third behind the streaky Red Sox and an overachieving Baltimore Orioles team that started no fewer than five rookies.
Billy Martin’s pitchers were refusing to stay healthy, and his boss, George Steinbrenner, was refusing to leave him alone. At a Baltimore Hilton on July 9, the Yankees’ pilot had confided in Thurman Munson that his biggest concern was how he’d support his family, which included two ex-wives and children from both marriages, if he were fired. “As we spoke, tears welled up in his eyes,” the catcher later remembered. “To avoid having anybody see him so upset, we took a walk around the block until he could clear the air a little.”
Munson had no shortag
e of complaints himself. He was still bitter about his contract and the Sport magazine story, and he’d been taking an unholy beating behind the plate. The foul tips that were forever crashing into his mask had been causing throbbing headaches, his right pinkie was lined with stitches, and a loose pipe dangling from a batting cage had gouged a hole in his forehead. Adding insult to injuries, Carlton Fisk was on his way to outpolling him yet again in the All-Star balloting, and this year’s game was going to be played in the Bronx. Not only would Munson be playing behind his nemesis, but he’d be doing so in his own goddamn ballpark.
The day after his walk with Martin, Munson took two reporters aside in the hotel lobby. After they agreed to refer to him only as a “prominent Yankee,” Munson proceeded to carve up Steinbrenner for, among other things, forcing lineup changes on his embattled manager: “George doesn’t care about anybody’s feelings. To him, we’re not professionals, we’re all employees. He treats everybody like that. He’s destroyed Billy. He’s made him nothing.”
It was just Martin’s luck. Munson had meant to help his manager’s cause; instead, he’d made him look powerless. When the story broke, the Yankees were en route to Milwaukee, and Steinbrenner was in a lather of his own. The moment the team arrived, he told Martin to call a press conference to insist that the front office wasn’t meddling in his affairs. It was another humiliation for Martin: As much as he denied it, the newspapermen knew that Steinbrenner had dictated the statement.
By now Martin, never a fan of the free press—“if writers knew any goddamn thing, they would be managers,” he once said—was getting more fed up than usual with the media. In Martin’s day the papers didn’t use quotes that made the team look bad. What’s more, ball clubs were covered through their managers. Between his bigfooted owner and loudmouthed players, even those who were only trying to help, Martin never had a clue to what was going to be in the papers, especially when it came to the scandal-mongering Post.
Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning_1977, Baseball, Politics, and the Battle for the Soul of a City Page 25
