After Sheriff George Smith finally escorted the hostages home early on Monday, popular support for the courageous McGhees made project leaders reluctantly undertake a lawsuit on their behalf, and bubbling resentment about helplessness and passive law enforcement made them schedule a mass meeting on nonviolence, at which Clarence McGhee spoke for the doubters: “When a man fights back, he is not attacked.” These detours, plus voluminous incident reports and affidavits, dragged the Greenwood summer project further from the single-minded purpose Bob Moses desired. Still, Greenwood workers managed to assemble the county convention of the MFDP at Friendship Baptist Church that same Monday night. Stokely Carmichael delivered the keynote address, and Laura McGhee, mother of the McGhee boys, was one of eight delegates elected to represent Leflore County at the MFDP’s first state convention in Jackson.
31
Riot Politics
KING SPENT MONDAY, July 27, in a crossfire of mediation between Harlem and New York’s City Hall. There, far removed from the rural culture of segregated Mississippi, one small incident had flashed into a ten-day crisis of national proportions, exposing political nerves connected through the movement years. Analysts blamed a host of causes, including a school board that assigned citywide summer remedial classes to a school on Manhattan’s wealthy Upper East Side. A crusty building superintendent exchanged daily criticisms with the passing traffic of unfamiliar teenagers, to the point that he turned his cleaning hose on one unruly group and yelled, “You dirty niggers! I’ll wash the black off you!” When a swarm of students drove him into retreat with bottles and trash can lids, an off-duty police lieutenant responded to the commotion and shot to death a fifteen-year-old boy on the sidewalk of 76th Street. Many of the nearly eight hundred summer students in the vicinity gathered around the body in rage, so that it took police reinforcements several hours to clear the neighborhood.
White House aides exchanged fretful memos the next day. Hypersensitive to the northward spread of racial conflict, they worried that “a great deal of the Negro leadership simply does not understand the political facts of life…. They are not sophisticated enough to understand the theory of the backlash….” This was before New York CORE workers organized three hundred student pickets outside the Robert Wagner School with signs reading “Stop Killer Cops,” and well before large crowds gathered outside the Levy and Delaney Funeral Home in Harlem, where James Powell’s corpse lay. From the first rocks and bottles hurled down upon police cordons, and the first police gunshots to drive away rooftop attackers, pitched battles and sporadic looting spread through the weekend from Harlem into Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant area. When Bayard Rustin pleaded for calm through a bullhorn, street battlers booed him as an Uncle Tom. “I am prepared to be a Tom if that’s the only way I can save women and children from being shot down in the street!” Rustin shouted. “And if you’re not willing to do the same, you’re fools!” Hooted down, Rustin retreated by escorting a bloodied teenager to the hospital. James Farmer of CORE fared no better when he tried to tell another angry crowd that they were only feeding police violence, not redressing it. “We don’t wanna hear that shit!” jeered a heckler.
By the daylight lull on Monday, July 20—with fifteen people shot, two hundred arrested, a dozen police officers and more than a hundred civilians injured (mostly by rocks and nightsticks, respectively)—secret consulations had engaged the highest staff echelon at the White House. If Johnson did not respond, aides warned, voters would wonder why he showed such interest in Mississippi and Georgia but not New York, when “too many people up there are ‘scared.’” Bill Moyers recommended “Sending Bourke [sic] Marshall up (he knows most of the Negroes in NYC),” but Johnson decided instead to announce that he had sent in the FBI. Privately, at the same time he ordered him to keep King alive in Mississippi, Johnson confided to Hoover that he had recruited former New York prosecutor Thomas E. Dewey to be a surprise public “sponsor” of the Bureau’s future report. Dewey, the Republican presidential nominee in 1944 and 1948, offered bipartisan cover for findings on a treacherous issue, and he fit Johnson’s pattern of maneuvering Hoover behind prestigious figureheads.
Plunging into the backroom politics, Hoover called New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller at the Wyoming ranch where he was recuperating from his bitter defeat at the Republican convention. They agreed at first that “left-wing labor groups” seemed to be behind the New York riots, but Rockefeller disclosed that underhanded Goldwater partisans had taunted him with predictions of embarrassing race riots in his state, and therefore may have fomented rebellion. Hoover relayed Rockefeller’s suspicions to President Johnson, with assurances that the FBI would look for conspiracy by Communists and right-wing extremists. On the burning issue of police conduct in the death of James Powell, he talked his way out of a Justice Department request “to investigate the police lieutenant who killed the colored boy the other night”—as Hoover put it in his personal files—because he did not want to burden the New York police commissioner “by harassing his officers when he is doing everything he can to control them….”*
No sooner did the street conflict subside in New York City than a similar one broke out in Rochester, New York, then shortly thereafter in three New Jersey cities, and by summer’s end in four more Northern settings, including isolated Negro areas in Oregon and New Hampshire. In each case, a street arrest triggered escalating hostility. At the White House, Walter Jenkins told the FBI’s Deke DeLoach that the uprisings were the “Achilles heel” of the Johnson administration. Theodore White, in both his book and an award-winning CBS documentary on the 1964 campaign, highlighted them as a stab of danger not only to Johnson but to the future “strategy of domestic tranquility,” exhorting the nation “to ask itself, in agony of conscience, what kind of civilization is being bred in its great and changing cities.”
More than any other mainstream interpreter, White saw in the riots an awakening to race as a national rather than sectional concern. “Starkly put,” he wrote, “the gross fact is that the great cities of America are becoming Negro cities.”* He perceived that the passing storm of riots would change the meaning of the new political term, “backlash.” Introduced the previous year among economists predicting a fierce racial competition for diminishing blue-collar jobs, the word had been transformed by the spring successes of George Wallace into a phenomenon among white voters, and now its reference began to shift toward a pathology among city Negroes. White himself recoiled from “not only a physical terror in those streets where the decent are prey for the savages, but an intellectual terror which condemns as Uncle Toms or traitors all who try to participate in the general community or lead the way to better life.” As a New Yorker, he was as much perplexed as startled by riots so close: “Why had the Negroes chosen to disrupt New York first…. No city had made a greater effort to include Negroes in its community life—or succeeded better.” In an echo of traditional segregationist argument, he assumed that the uprisings were at once mindless and contrived. Rabble-rousers, White concluded, preyed on “adolescent troops whose moral restraint had been entirely eaten away by dramatic producers and eloquent intellectuals on television, who somehow persuaded them that revenge for Mississippi and Alabama could be taken by looting and violence in the cities of the North.”
FBI investigators labored to identify any network of rabble-rousers. The New York office proposed Malcolm X as a likely architect—noting that some rampaging crowds had shouted, “We want Malcolm X!”—but theory stumbled on the fact that Malcolm had left the country well in advance. Wiretap intercepts of his few calls home from Africa, including the following excerpt from July 31, hardly suggested an active mastermind of insurrection:
MALCOLM: Has there been anything in the papers about me being in Cairo?
ANSWER: Yes, in several papers, and when they mention you on tv they say that you are in Cairo…. And also that you’re coming back Saturday…. Are you coming back Saturday?
MALCOLM: Answer my questions first. Have
things cooled down yet?
ANSWER: Yes, they have simmered down. Martin Luther King has been meeting with the Mayor, and all of the leaders are mad at him.
While collecting examples of numerous radicals who “took advantage” of riot conditions, FBI analysts backed away from the assertion that anyone had prior knowledge or exerted control anywhere—let alone across nine scattered cities.
On the law enforcement side, FBI agents did discover a pattern of erratic response: “a ‘don’t get involved’ attitude on the part of many officers” in the early stages, with occasional orders simply to ignore looters, followed by abrupt reversal into military-style suppression. This tendency—a natural hazard of all-white or nearly all-white police forces confronting novel disorder in minority areas—seemed only to exacerbate violence in both phases. To criticize unprofessional conduct would be risky to the FBI itself, supervisors realized, because some police commanders who had been trained at the FBI Academy proved “as incompetent as other police officers to cope with the riot.” When they warned J. Edgar Hoover of inevitable attempts “to wrongly discredit and smear FBI-trained officers,” Hoover responded with orders to “lay the facts on the line irrespective of the consequences.”
Hoover thought better, however, or his legendary command wilted for once as the FBI bureaucracy processed its confidential riot report. There was talk of staging a general White House conference on law enforcement at which the police issue could be surfaced discreetly, but Deke DeLoach could find no acceptable way to exclude two big-city chiefs (Orlando Wilson of Chicago and William Parker of Los Angeles) whom Hoover detested as his rare, outspoken critics. FBI authors would pull back to safety by September, praising police performance except for a hint of passivity that they excused as the result of political interference: “…where there is an outside civilian review board, the restraint of the police was so great that effective action against the rioters appeared to be impossible.” Omitting the fact that such a board existed in only one of the nine riot cities, the Bureau detected a “general feeling” among commanders that they would be “pilloried by civilians unfamiliar with the necesssities of mob control or even ordinary police actions and may lose their posts and their pensions.”
The Bureau’s draft would be sanitized again in political screenings at the White House, where top aides objected that use of the word “Negro” three times on one page was “overdoing it.” Dewey told Hoover he did not care whether the report lamented a “moral breakdown” or merely a “breakdown” in cities, and Hoover told Walter Jenkins that he would not make an issue of “nitpicking” his investigation. When President Johnson decreed that the finished product be issued from the Justice Department in Hoover’s name—not Dewey’s—Justice Department officials discerned that the FBI had developed the entire project on a back channel to the White House. They were “greatly perturbed,” DeLoach noted with satisfaction, and Hoover ordered that the Justice Department be furnished only the report itself without any of the accompanying political communications. “Nothing at all should be said about Dewey, etc.,” he admonished.
The document, released on Saturday, September 26, raised to art form the language of a disapproving, omniscient shrug. “For some reason,” declared the overview, “there suddenly occurred a rupture of the cords that normally bind people to decent conduct and respect for law and the rights of their fellow citizens…. A common characteristic of the riots was a senseless attack on all constituted authority without purpose or object.” The Sunday New York Times stacked its front page with headlines: “F.B.I. Says Riots Had No Pattern or Single Leader/Tells President They Were Not Basically Racial, but Attacks on Authority/Finds Some Reds Active.” Mayors and police chiefs endorsed “the broad conclusions,” and Roy Wilkins was pleasantly surprised that the FBI not only downplayed race and conspiracy but “cleared the civil rights movement completely.” A thin tissue of universal relief survived intact, largely because the Warren Commission made public its voluminous report on the Kennedy assassination that same Sunday, burying the riot question under fresh memories of national trauma.
THIS MARKED the second time in three months that Kennedy news helped sweep aside unwelcome controversy. On the last Monday of July, as King arrived in New York, President Johnson invited Attorney General Robert Kennedy to the White House that Wednesday to discuss his political future. A political buzz on the intervening day followed Kennedy to New York, where competing rumors had him making or not making deals with President Johnson, reconsidering or confirming his decision not to run for New York’s Senate seat in the fall. On Johnson’s side, there was a flurry of consultation about Kennedy’s larger ambitions and how he might react to a host of scripted rejections. After Kenneth O’Donnell warned Johnson of “a big blowup” in the Democratic party if he did not select Kennedy as his running mate, National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy predicted that the risk of schism depended largely on how Johnson handled the face-to-face meeting. Like O’Donnell and Robert McNamara (other intermediaries close to Kennedy), Bundy confirmed that the Attorney General wanted to be vice president, but he thought the threats of open revolt may be a bluff. “My judgment is that when he looks that one in the eye,” Bundy told Johnson, “it’s going to be so destructive to him and his brother’s memory that he won’t do it.”
The President, in spite of approval ratings near 70 percent in the polls, complained of vulnerability and isolation. He fretted that nearly all top officials in his government, like most delegates to the upcoming Democratic convention, were Kennedy holdovers,* and said that the race issue wiped out his chief source of political strength from 1960. “If I can’t offer the ticket the South, I haven’t really got anything to offer,” he lamented. “I don’t have any standing in Chicago…or Iowa or Los Angeles or New York City.” Johnson woke up nights in fear that Kennedy could seize his job at the convention, on a political tide of Camelot emotion, and he confessed corresponding personal insecurity. “When this fella looks at me, he looks at me like he’s gonna look a hole through me, like I’m a spy or something,” the President told his Texas protégé, Governor John Connally. And yet, above the skittering suspicions, the President and the Attorney General cooperated on government business. They talked congenially, for instance, about ideas to move beyond riot control and reach unemployed young people with jobs.
Kennedy’s political energy had markedly revived in recent weeks with his brother Edward’s steady recovery from plane-crash injuries and his own triumphant tour of Poland and Germany. In Berlin, the Attorney General had drawn a Caesar’s crowds, reprised his late brother’s “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech, and publicly confronted the undertow since Dallas—vowing to rise from the stubborn grip of resignation “that with him there died idealism and hope and what was clean and best in all of us.” National polls consistently showed Kennedy as the most popular choice for Johnson’s running mate. On the fallback option of a Senate race, he took soundings among New York leaders on the depth of voter resistance to him as a transplanted Bostonian. His private polls showed that he stood a better chance to defeat the incumbent Republican Senator Kenneth Keating than either of the aspiring Democrats, U.N. ambassador Adlai Stevenson and New York mayor Robert Wagner.
Mayor Wagner, having cut short his vacation on the Spanish island of Majorca, spent more than six hours on Tuesday in stalemated negotiations with King over the aftermath of the Harlem riots. Wagner looked for King to control what his assistant called “the undermuck of Harlem,” but he wanted an advance commitment that King would not criticize New York’s handling of the crisis. Some of Harlem’s established leaders, such as Harlem Unity Council president Livingston Wingate, invited King to help boost their leverage in City Hall, then diverted attention from their own weakness by branding King an interloping Uncle Tom. “Wingate of course double-crossed Martin,” complained Bayard Rustin, who shuttled between the parties. Rustin told the Harlem leaders that King was unsophisticated and averse to conflict, while telling King that the
leaders were “crackpots.” He said the Harlem street radicals were “dangerous dogs who will lash out at anything,” but he also said any settlement must meet their legitimate demands.
By Wednesday, July 29, Mayor Wagner agreed to petition President Johnson for funds to create jobs and “eradicate slums” in New York, on the theory that the contagion of violence had spread partly on economic desperation. His talks with King deadlocked permanently, however, on the volatile question of the original shooting on East 76th Street. King supported the demand of the Harlem leaders that the police lieutenant be suspended, or at least placed on administrative leave, but city leaders refused on the ground that such actions would convey doubt about the officer’s conduct, which implied the need for an investigation and inevitably would build pressure toward something beyond the police department’s internal review. After four fruitless rounds of talks, King issued a public statement of unusually sharp personal tone, drafted by Bayard Rustin, in which he attacked New York police commissioner Michael Murphy as “utterly unresponsive to either the demands or the aspirations of the Negro people.” Murphy, charged King, had “obstructed establishment of a Public Review Board to investigate charges of police brutality.”
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