The Epic of New York City (99 page)

Negro leaders flared in rage, demanding to know why an experienced police officer had to shoot a boy much smaller than himself. The next day 200 Negro boys and girls staged an orderly 4-hour demonstration in Yorkville to protest the shooting, and in separate incidents 2 white men were attacked by roving bands of Negro youths. The people of Harlem seethed in fury.

Harlem was ripe for an explosion. It was nearly 3 times more
crowded than the rest of the city. Within its
3½
square miles lived more than 232,000 persons, of whom 94 percent were Negroes. Half of Harlem's buildings were officially classed as “deteriorating” or “dilapidated.” Harlem's landlords got $50 to $74 a month for 1-room flats that rented for only $30 to $49 in white slums. Infant mortality was nearly twice that in the rest of New York.

Every fourth Negro man was without work. Nearly one-fourth of Harlem's people were on welfare. Their families having been torn apart by white slave traders in the past, Negroes lacked a tradition of family stability. Only half of Harlem's children lived with both parents. Negro boys lagged behind in their studies, and more than half who entered high school quit before graduating. Harlem's juvenile delinquency rate was almost
2½
times as great as in the rest of the city. Narcotics were used at a rate 8 times that prevailing elsewhere in New York. Harlem's murder rate was 600 percent higher than the city's. A Harlem woman declared, “This is the jungle—the very heart of it.” James Baldwin, the brilliant Negro writer, said, “The most dangerous creation of any society is that man who has nothing to lose.”

Harlem erupted on Saturday, July 18, 1964. It was a hot and humid night. Workers for the Congress of Racial Equality set up a blue kitchen chair and a small American flag at 125th Street and 7th Avenue, which was the Times Square of Harlem. One speaker after another climbed onto the chair to shrill angrily about the killing of James Powell. More and more Negro spectators crowded closer to hear: “James Powell was shot because he was black. . . . It is time to let the Man know that if he does something to us, we are going to do something back. . . .”

A minister exhorted everyone to march to the 123d Street Police Station, a couple of blocks away, to demand that Police Lieutenant Gilligan be arrested for murder. The people moved off in the direction of the precinct house, picking up reinforcements and swelling from a crowd into a roiling mob. “Killer cops!” screamed the Negroes. “Murderers!” Policemen tried to seal off approaches to the station, but the enraged multitude bulled past the barricades and clashed with the cops.

Hoodlums, skulking across the roofs of tenements, threw bricks and bottles and garbage-can covers onto the streets below. Homemade Molotov cocktail bombs hit the pavement and burst into flames five feet high. Screaming thousands thrashed back and forth in
the heart of Harlem, fighting policemen, assaulting white people, menacing reporters, and smashing windows. Helmeted policemen clubbed them. The mob refused an order to break up and go home. Now police officers gave the order to fire over their heads. Cops also squeezed off warning shots above the roof-scampering hooligans. It was a full-scale riot, in which the police never lost control of the streets. Gunfire hiccuped throughout the rest of this sad and sour night, but reason did not return with the dawn.

Between July 18 and July 23 violence rocked both Harlem and the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn. One person was killed, and 140 persons were seriously injured. A total of 520 persons were arrested. Perhaps no more than 1 percent of the city's Negro population was direcdy involved in the riots.

President Johnson ordered 200 F.B.I. agents to investigate, declaring, “American citizens have a right to protection of life and limb—whether driving along a highway in Georgia, a road in Mississippi, or a street in New York City.” Mayor Wagner was in Europe at the time, and Paul R. Screvane, president of the city council, was serving as acting mayor. Screvane said that the disorders were incited partly by “fringe groups including the Communist party.” Two months later, however, the F.B.I. reported that there was “no systematic planning or organization” behind these riots in New York and eight other Northern cities.

The F.B.I. concluded that the riots were not basically racial. Instead, it announced, “a common characteristic of the riots was a senseless attack on all constituted authority without purpose or reason.” The F.B.I. said further that “the Communist Party U.S.A. does not appear to have officially instigated these riots, though its members were observed taking part” in some of them. In 1965 an admitted Communist was convicted of conspiring to riot and of advocating the overthrow of the state of New York. He had been arrested soon after the Harlem riot.

Mayor Wagner cut short his visit to Europe and flew back to New York. The evening of July 22, 1964, he was driven to a studio in Liederkranz Hall, at 111 East Fifty-eighth Street, to address New Yorkers by television. Looking solemn and drawn, Wagner said:

Some people sadly wagged their heads and said that the city was sick, that it was trying to destroy itself, that it was too huge and complex to be governed, and that its problems were too difficult to be solved. Undeniably, the problems were staggering, and they seemed to worsen with each passing day. There was violence on the streets, in the subways, and in the lobbies of apartment buildings. The gulf between rich and poor increased. Welfare cases mounted. Automation threw people out of work. Manufacturing firms moved out of the city. Unemployed boys lolled about the streets, looking for trouble. Dope addiction increased. Decent housing was inadequate. Traffic jams strained tempers. Commuter service declined. Sometimes there were delays in getting patients into hospitals. The city's budget rose. The quality of education and racial balance in schools fretted thoughtful people. Courts were jammed with backlogs of civil cases. Air pollution edged toward lethal levels. Water too was polluted and becoming ever more scarce. Piers rotted, and the port got an ever smaller share of the nation's oceanborne foreign trade.

Trying to govern a city in crisis visably aged Mayor Wagner, who finally decided he had had enough. When he announced that he did not plan to run for a fourth term, he set the stage for an exciting and significant mayoralty campaign in 1965.

Three candidates vied for what Robert Moses called the “preposterous, impossible job” of being mayor of New York City. Abraham Beame, the colorless city comptroller, ran as the candidate of the city's Democratic machine. William F. Buckley, Jr., the tart-tongued editor of the
National Review,
ran as the candidate of the Conservative party, with the avowed purpose of taking votes away from the third candidate. This was John V. Lindsay, a maverick Republican, who won the endorsement of the Republican, Liberal, and Independent Citizens parties.

Lindsay said, “You hear a lot of people say that the city is too big to be governed by one man. I don't agree with that at all.” Political observers gave him a scant chance of winning in a city where registered Democrats had a seven to two edge. Lindsay was
up against a rich and entrenched Democratic machine, and right-wing members of his own Republican party opposed him.

A liberal Congressman who had helped draft the 1964 civil rights bill, Lindsay announced, “I am a Republican, but New York City must have an independent, nonpartisan government.” His campaign literature quoted John F. Kennedy: “Sometimes party loyalty asks too much.” Lindsay all but disowned his own party, disdained the help of regular Republicans, relied heavily on volunteer workers, opened storefront offices throughout the city, averaged only 4 hours of sleep the last part of the campaign, and traveled nearly 7,000 miles visiting every corner of New York. But Lindsay posters boasted: “He's fresh while every one else is tired.”

Lindsay was only forty-three years old, having been born on November 24, 1921, in a modest West Side apartment. After he attended a private school in Manhattan, he was graduated in 1940 from St. Paul's School in New Hampshire. He next took an accelerated course at Yale and then entered the navy, taking part in the invasion of Sicily and participating in landings on various Pacific islands. In 1946 he was discharged as a full lieutenant with five batde stars.

Following the war he earned a degree from the Yale Law School. After working briefly as a bank clerk, he signed up with a top Manhattan law firm and within five years became a full partner. A superb trial lawyer, he won praise from Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter. Ever since returning to the city after the war, Lindsay had been active in Manhattan politics, and in 1958 he was elected to Congress from Manhattan's Seventeenth Congressional District, called the Silk Stocking District because it included the fashionable Upper East Side. During his seven years in the House of Congress he racked up a voting record more liberal than that of many Democrats.

By the time Lindsay ran for mayor, he was married and the father of four children. He was a strikingly handsome man—even better looking than John F. Kennedy, with whom he was favorably compared. Broad-shouldered and narrow-waisted, Lindsay stood six feet three and had wavy light-brown hair, blue eyes, and a flashing smile. He was ambitious and earnest, vigorous and eloquent, and had an appetite for command. He blamed the city's decline on Mayor Wagner and hammered away at “machine men” and the “backroom, clubhouse hacks.”

In a major political upset, Lindsay won the 1965 election by a
narrow margin. His triumph was an intensely personal one. Richard Nixon, the former Republican Vice-President, said, “It is a Lindsay rather than a Republican victory.” Shortly before being sworn in as the 103d mayor of New York City on January 1, 1966, Lindsay said, “I plan to give New York the most hard-working, the most dedicated and, I hope, the most exciting administration this city has ever seen.”

Chapter 50

N
EW
Y
ORK
is one of man's greatest achievements. There never has been another city like it. Only superlatives can express its magnitude, power, and renown.

New York is the capital of the world because it contains the head-quarters of the United Nations. It is the best known city on earth. It is the wealthiest city of modern times. Its influence is felt in every corner of this planet. It is the world's greatest cultural center and creative force. It has the world's largest educational system. It is the greatest tourist attraction in the world. It is the biggest and busiest manufacturing city in the world, Robert F. Wagner once saying that New Yorkers “make more, sell more, buy more, eat more and
enjoy more than the citizens of any other city in the world.” It is the financial capital of the world. It is headquarters for most of the biggest corporations in existence. It is the communications capital of the world. It is the entertainment capital of the world. It has more churches than any other city in the world. Its government is the largest in the United States, except for the federal government. Its police force is larger than the standing armies of many foreign nations. Its subway system is the most heavily traveled passenger railroad in the world. Its harbor is bigger than the world's next six largest harbors put together.