by Howard Fast
I think it was about noontime that Robeson arrived. The singers and musicians from People’s Artists had arrived a little earlier, and since I had to make up the program, we sat down below, next to the sound truck, and talked it over. Under advice of the security people, Robeson remained in his car.
There were Pete Seeger, Sylvia Kahn, and a number of others, one of them a young concert pianist of talent and importance. They were thrilled by the occasion, the crowd, the sea of human beings. When had there been a chance to sing to a mass of people as great as this?
“And it’s all yours,” I told them. “Whatever has to be said here today aside from my own remarks, you’ll have to say with your music and songs.
“That’s the moment we always dreamed of,” Pete Seeger grinned. “To do it with songs and with nothing else.”
“Well, that’s the way you’ll have to do it. Suppose we start some group singing in about a half hour. Then you’ll lead off. Then the piano pieces; then Paul; then we’ll take a collection; then you people again, and then Paul to close the program.”
“It sounds good.”
“Then write down the titles of your numbers, so I can announce them.”
I walked to Paul’s car and said hello to him. It was the first chance to speak to him since the Saturday before, and I was full of the contrast between the two occasions and understandably proud of that wall of trade unionists which surrounded the whole area.
“A little different,” I remember saying.
He nodded, but he was sober and troubled. He felt what was in the making, but I was full of our own strength and our own discipline and full of contempt for the creatures on the road. Nothing was going to happen; this was our day!
I walked over to the sound truck and was standing there talking to the engineer, when the man responsible for security at the center came over and motioned me aside.
“Howard,” he said, “I want you to set the sound truck under that big oak, right under it.”
(You will recall that there was one great oak in the center of the arena area.)
“How can we? If we put the sound truck under the tree, our people will be singing through the branches. That doesn’t make sense.”
“It makes sense.”
“Why?”
“Because we’ve had our scouts out in the woods and up there on the hills since early this morning, and we just learned that they flushed up two local patriots who had made a little nest for themselves up there overlooking the valley. And they had high-powered rifles with telescopic sights. In other words, they want to kill Paul, and they will stop at very little to do it. So put the sound truck under the tree.”
You do not equate fascism with sanity; I had learned that. You do not equate it with reason, with intelligence, with civilization or decency or morality. The impossible becomes possible, the incredible credible; what is evil is matter of fact and part and parcel of the whole.
I had the sound truck placed under the tree. Then I took the program notes, went up to the microphone, and announced that we would begin our concert. Believe me, I did not feel good or comfortable or brave; the branches made a poor shelter indeed, and I had no assurance that those high-powered rifles with the telescopic sights might not be indecisive as to their target. When I got down and when Pete Seeger had begun to sing, I went to our security head and told him.
“I don’t think Paul ought to sing,” I said. “The hell with it! It’s not that important, and if you want to be naked, just stand up there.”
“He’s going to sing. He’s decided that. He’ll be all right. We’ve taken certain measures.”
They took measures, which meant that fifteen workers did a very brave and a very selfless thing. When Paul Robeson stood up to sing, those fifteen workers stood behind and alongside of him, forming a human wall between him and the hillside, and in this they were neither uncertain nor troubled. It was something they did quite casually and matter of factly, but it was also something I will never forget. They were white workers and Negro workers, and this giant of a man was one of the very, very few intellectuals in the whole land who had not fled from their side, who had not betrayed them, who had not crawled for cover, but stood like a rock unperturbed and unshaken. This was a better answer than words.
So our concert went smoothly enough, and with all the difficulties there was good music there that day. The great voice of Paul Robeson echoed back from the hills; the music of Handel and Bach was played there; and Pete Seeger and his friends sang those fine old songs of a time when treason and hatred and tyranny were not the most admired virtues of Americans. And the police did what they could. When they saw that they were not able to prevent the concert, they brought in a helicopter and it hovered over our sound truck constantly, swooping down to buzz us again and again, trying to drown out the sound of our music with the noise of its motor. To some extent they succeeded, but we were fortunate that the motor of a helicopter is less noisy than that of a regular airplane. It did not spoil the concert.
In any case, the important factor was that the concert had been held and that the right of assembly had been upheld; and through it all no person on our side had committed any act of provocation, nor had any person on our side broken the disciplined order of our defenses.
That was accomplished, but at the same time it was a new America, a different America, in which thousands of workers and their allies had to conduct a mass struggle of such size and consequence for a Negro singer to give his music to people who wanted to hear it. A change had come about, not in the eight days of Peekskill— more gradually than that, certainly for a long time before that in process—but brought to a head and climaxed by the eight days; and in this changed America, we had won a victory in the name of the American people, most certainly in the name of the American people and in the very best traditions of the American people.
Yet the day was not by any means over, not by any means; and it was only late afternoon now, and the night of terror and horror, so much greater terror and so much worse horror than a week before, still lay ahead. The concert was done, and once again I found R—— and the two of us walked aimlessly among the crowd. Now was the time for getting out, but though cars had driven into the entranceway and filled the inside road, nothing moved. We who were in the hollow below did not know what held things up. We took it for granted that it required time and patience to clear such a place of so many hundreds of cars through one narrow road. We didn’t know that the fascists had blocked the road, that our security people were arguing with the police to clear it or let us clear it ourselves. We also didn’t know that the police were set for their spell of riot, their own incredible plan of what should happen. We didn’t know any of that yet. The evening was still early in the Hudson River Valley, with shadows becoming longer and the sun dropping lower, but with the enormous crowd in a holiday spirit, a picnic spirit, nobody too impatient, everybody pleased that this simple act of assembly had been carried through.
It was a family crowd, as it was bound to be on a summer afternoon. There were many women, more women than men, I suppose, for so many of the men were in the defense line of the perimeter; there were a great many children, a great many very small children, and at least a few hundred infants. You might wonder that so many people would bring children and little infants after what had happened the week before, but I must explain that by and large people were not ready to accept what had happened the week before, even intelligent progressive people who had known about fascism for so long. For one thing, until you read it in this account, there was no complete narrative of the first Saturday of Peekskill. I had not told the story fully, nor had anyone else; so that while it was known that there had been trouble, no one really saw the complexion of that trouble. People said to themselves,
“The first time, the trouble was an accident. The police didn’t arrive until very late and things got out of hand. But this time the whole world has its eyes on Peekskill, and there can’t possibly be any trouble. T
he governor would not allow it. The state troopers would not allow it. The county police would not allow it. District Attorney Fanelli is in enough hot water already, and certainly he would not allow it. So it will just be a sunny, peaceful concert, and we’ll bring the kids and have a good time.”
Yes, as inconceivable as it sounds, that is what people said to themselves and to each other, and that is why they brought little children and nursing infants with them; for the reality of what did happen was even more inconceivable.
Now, while we were waiting for the cars to begin to move, two of our security guards appeared, escorting a young hoodlum who had crept through their lines. He sat on the grass, looking around him, a lad of eighteen or so with his face full of hate and his eyes full of terror. But no one had hurt him or made any move to hurt him, and while R——and I watched, two women tried to explain to him some meaning in connection with his role. He couldn’t listen; there was too much hatred all through him, and when the guards told him to go, he bolted like a deer.
Cars were moving now and the afternoon was wearing on. R——, who has spent the best years of his life being a soldier in two wars and an industrial organizer, has a better nose for danger than I have, and now he was shaking his head.
“I don’t like it, I don’t like it,” he kept saying.
We got in the car. Two men begged us for a lift, and we put them in back. I started the motor and pulled into the outgoing line. Then the line stood still, and I cut my motor. It seemed like a long wait was on the agenda.
Two of the security guards passed down the line of cars, telling each driver, “Close all windows as you approach the exit. They seem to be throwing things.”
The situation was new to us, and Fords and Plymouths and Pontiacs were not built as military weapons. If people were throwing things, it seemed eminently correct that the windows should be closed protectively, and motorists as a whole have a rather childlike faith in the much-touted and widely advertised shatter-proof glass. No one questioned the advice, but even if they had, the damage would have simply taken other forms.
The line would move a few feet, then stop; a wait of about five minutes and then a few feet more. Driving an old car and depending on it, I was afraid of overheating, so I cut my motor constantly. But then suddenly we were in motion and the entrance was in sight and we rolled up and through it and out. A small cluster of hell was at work at the entrance; cops, in a craze of hate, were beating cars, not people, with their long clubs, smashing fenders, lashing out against windshields, doing a dance of frenzy as the autos rolled out of the place. Even through our closed windows we could hear the flood of insanely vile language from the police, the unprintable oaths, the race words, the slime and filth of America’s underworld of race hatred compressed into these “guardians” of the law, and released now. There were about thirty of them grouped there at the entrance, and they flogged the cars as if the automobiles were living objects of their resentment.
(That was the experience, incidently, of the car which carried Paul Robeson. The police beat in the windshield and smashed at the car itself in their desire to get at the occupants.)
But that was only the beginning. When a car left the concert grounds, it had a choice of three roads. Directly ahead, through the state road, was a narrow byroad which led to the parkway. The state road itself ran north and south, so it might be thought of as approaching a T from the top of the crossbar; that is, the state road made the crossbar and the small road the upright of the T. The crazy dance of police fury imposed a quick decision on each car, and my own was to turn right since I did not know the other two roads and had a very strong desire to drive on familiar territory.
This is what happened and what I saw. I state it carefully, as something I witnessed, with R—— beside me to support this statement. I might add, however, that the experience on each of the other two roads was a good deal worse, particularly on the narrow road which led to the parkway. Of what happened on that road, ample photographs give evidence.
It happened more quickly than it takes to tell it, but it must be told slowly. About thirty yards after I turned right on the state road, it began. On the left side of the road there were two policemen. The two policemen were about twenty feet apart, and between them were six or seven legionnaires with a great pile of heavy rocks. As my car came within range, they began to throw. The cops did not throw. They watched, smiling approval, and it became evident that these two policemen had been detached as guards for the group of rock-throwers—just in case a car should stop and turn on the rock-throwers.
(I dwell on this because this same thing was true of every organized group of rock-throwers. Each group had one or two cops detailed—I say detailed because I can’t believe that the cops just wandered along the road—as protection. It is true that there were many individual rock-throwers along the road without police protection, but where they were in groups, cops were with them.)
One reacts slowly, and I only comprehended what was happening when the first rocks crashed against the car. The first hit the door frame, between the front and rear windows; the second hit the frame of the windshield; two more heavy rocks crashed into the body of the car. The cops held their bellies and howled with mirth.
Fortunately, I had a block or two of empty road in front of me, and I was able to step on the gas and shoot ahead. Forty or fifty yards, and there was the second group, and this time, full of rage, I turned my car into them and roared over the shoulder at forty miles an hour. The group scattered and the cops tumbled away for shelter. The third group, however, caught us like sitting ducks, and once again the flood of boulders crashed against the car. Once again amazing luck was with us; the rocks smashed against the body and frame of the car, missing the windows. (Ours was one of the very few cars which escaped without broken glass and bleeding passengers.) With the next group, on the left this time, I used the same tactics as before, driving across the road, up on the shoulder and right into them, and as before they scattered. And so it went, from group to group, through that nightmare gauntlet.
Then, suddenly, we had to slow down. The car ahead of us had fared worse than we; every window was smashed, even the rear window. I remember saying to R——,
“The road is wet. They must have gotten the gas tank or the radiator.”
There was a dark wetness that flowed out of the car ahead of us; and then we realized that it was blood, but an enormous flow of blood that ran from the car that way and onto the road.
The rocks began again, and I jockeyed on. We had gone over a mile now. The car ahead pulled over to the side and the driver sat with his head hanging over the wheel. His head was bloody all over.
After a mile and a half there were no more large, organized groups of rock-throwers, but individuals instead. An occasional crashing blow reminded us of the individuals. (But further on, three, four, five and ten miles from Peekskill, organized groups were stationed on every overpass, to pelt the cars below with rocks. In this way, many cars which had never been near the concert that day were badly smashed and their occupants hurt.)
Two miles or so from the concert grounds, a car had pulled into a gas station. This car, like so many others, left a trail of blood behind it. Five adults and one child emerged, and they were all covered with blood from head to foot. The child was weeping softly and they stood like people dazed, and a few feet away a group of young hoodlums hurled rocks at the passing cars. I pulled over to the gas station to stop and see if we could help the wounded people, but a cop stationed there ran at us, screaming oaths and beating the car with his club. When he started to draw his revolver, we drove on. Another car stopped and R——, turning around, saw the policeman beat the windshield of the car in with his club while he drew his revolver with his other hand. It was behavior which bordered on the paranoid, and though I have many times in the past seen police go into their frenzied dance of hatred against workers or progressives, I never saw anything to equal this display. And I must make the point that thes
e were not single instances, for a while later when we stopped at a crossroad, we saw another policeman smashing in the windshield of a car which had halted for directions.
In Peekskill, in Buchanan and in Croton-on-Hudson, we continued to run the gauntlet of rocks, and the road we traveled was running with blood and littered with broken glass. Never in all my life have I seen so much blood; never have I seen so many people so cruelly cut and bleeding so badly. At another service station we saw three cars parked in a great spreading pool of blood and the people trying to staunch the flow of it.
R—and I dropped the two passengers we carried at Harmon, where they were going to take a train north to their summer cottage. We discussed going back to the concert grounds, but it was evening now and we decided that it would be to no purpose to try to return. By now, certainly, all the cars were out; and as for the horror of proceeding along the roads, we still had to face that ourselves, and we could not change it. We drove to my house; it was still and peaceful in the twilight. I called the N—’s but no one answered the phone, and I wondered where they and their three children were.
“New York?” I asked R—— He nodded, and we got in the car and drove down the hill, and ran into another barrage of rocks at Harmon. (My windows were down now. I preferred to take my chances with rocks rather than flying glass.) We turned onto the parkway, and a car in front of us was met by a volley of heavy rocks from the first overpass we came to. I drove wide and around to escape, but the car behind us was shattered glass and bleeding passengers. And all the rest of the way back into New York City we saw those cars around us on the road—the bent fenders where the police had smashed them in, the shattered windows, the bleeding passengers. It was as though the survivors of a bombing raid or a battle were driving into the city.…
In the city, I dropped R—— and came back to my own house. It was night time now, and the children were being made ready for bed. Mrs. M—— had been keeping supper hot for me. It was a quiet, orderly world, the world of so many Americans, the world of sanity and peace and civilization. It was the world which had looked out on the monstrosities of German and Italian and Spanish and Japanese and Greek and Hungarian and Rumanian fascism and had said, with such childlike and insular certainty, “It can’t happen here.”
