Peekskill USA: Inside the Infamous 1949 Riots (11 page)

(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 these 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.”

I ate what my stomach would hold, and then turned on the radio and listened to the piecemeal descriptions of the assault on human life and human dignity. The hospitals were filling up; all over Westchester the hospitals were filling up with the blinded, the bleeding and the wounded, the cut, lacerated faces, the fractured skulls, the infants with glass in their eyes, the men and women trampled and beaten, the Negroes beaten and mutilated, all the terribly hurt who had come to listen to music.…

I paced back and forth, nervous, worried; it was not over—asking myself the question: “Would it ever be over?”

Then the phone rang. It was a friend in the city, and he told me something of what had happened at the end of things. About a thousand of the trade unionists had remained to the very end—to prevent a mob attack on the grounds. They didn't know at that time, I believe, what was transpiring along the roads. Their buses had driven off, but they remained to hold the place, and finally in a group they began to march out. The police drove them back into the grounds. With swinging clubs, the police—hundreds of police—charged into them, beat many of them into insensibility, pulled guns on them, arrested twenty-five of them—who were marched away with hands over their heads, like prisoners of war—then searched the rest for weapons. No weapons were found. The police surrounded the trade unionists with guns drawn and held on them. Finally, in the darkness, they were told,

“All right—get out of here!”

Now my friend told me that word had just come from a group of them stranded near Golden's Bridge. Would I drive back and look for them?

So I went back—and as I drove through Peekskill, a bullet whistled past my car, just to complete the enormous insanity. Just to make the whole of it as impossible and as monstrous as it actually was.

I followed instructions, but when I reached the place, all had gone, and the little store where they had been was dark and closed. I drove home then. I had two brandies and went to bed.

The eight days of
Peekskill
were finished.

Part Seven

A Point of View

AT THE TIME OF THIS
writing it is fifteen months since the
Peekskill Affair;
and the onrush of events, moving with bewildering rapidity, has made of those two nights of horror isolated incidents of the past. Since then the McCarran Act has legalized the police state in America, and the creeping rot of fascism is infesting the country. Since then, the Korean war—and the immense war propaganda which accompanies it—has put severe penalties upon any form of protest or dissent, and thousands of “liberals” and “progressives” have run for cover. At the time of
Peekskill
, there was almost no political prisoner in American jails; today there are a great many. At the time of
Peekskill
, the leaders of the Communist Party of the United States were on trial; since then they have been found guilty and the Communist Party has been placed under indictment by the McCarran Act, At the time of
Peekskill
, mass deportation of aliens had not yet begun nor was the concentration camp at Ellis Island in operation as it is today. At the time of
Peekskill
, this was not wholly a land of loyalty oaths, witch hunts, and terror for all who might hate war and love peace and democracy. And at the time of
Peekskill
, the plan to divide and betray the American labor movement had not yet been brought to fruition.

Such is the speed of history today that, when this is published, so many new and perhaps more shocking developments may have taken place that the events herein detailed may seem even more remote. But even if that is the case, they will not thereby be less important.
Peekskill
was a decisive step in the preparation for American fascism and it was a proving ground for a great deal that came afterwards.

Unfortunately, much about both Peekskill incidents remains unknown and will, perhaps, not be revealed for years to come. The degree to which high state and county officials were implicated has not been determined yet, but the above narration and appendix which follows contain ample proof that they were implicated. What private discussions, plots and agreements led up to
Peekskill
, I do not know—but again there seems no doubt that there were such discussions, plots and agreements. I would like to know, for example, how the three Department of Justice agents happened to be upon the scene; I would like to know what happened to the three lost deputy sheriffs; I would like to know what withheld the state police, who apparently were on the scene long before they intervened, from coming down into the hollow at Lakeland Acres and halting the attack; I would like to know who gave them their orders to enter when the possibility of frameup finally arose; I would like to know who the two marksmen with the high-powered rifles and the telescopic sights were, and whether they were operating on their own or in agreement with others.

It is also wholly proper to ask a number of questions concerning the role of the police in general. Why were the ringleaders of the first attack not arrested, when their names were known to hundreds in the area? Why were no police—except the three sheriffs—on hand when the Saturday night trouble began? Why were the police so insistent that the guards at the second concert be moved into the actual area of the concert itself? Why and through whose instructions did the police take on the task of protecting the rock-throwing units? Why did the police attack and arrest so many of the guards after the concert was over and the audience had gone?

In asking these questions I do not refer to police brutality in general, to the clubbing and beating of Negroes, and to the frenetic attacks upon automobiles and the people in them which the police carried out, a number of which I witnessed personally. These are so universally the mode of police behavior in relation to any sort of left wing or working class demonstration that they can be considered the natural—or unnatural—and ordinary role of police in America.

Many more questions of this sort can be asked, but I think those questions are explicit in the account I have given here as well as in the appendix which follows. The important thing is, I think, to see the manifestation of
Peekskill
in relation to national and world events which followed and which still go on. Anyone who participated in any way in either of the two incidents cannot help but be struck by the extraordinary difference in the behavior of the two factions—the fascists on the one hand (and
fascist
is the only correct, scientific term for them, whether they called themselves legionnaires, veterans, patriots or what you will), and the people rallied around Paul Robeson on the other.