Peekskill USA: Inside the Infamous 1949 Riots (3 page)

“How in the hell can we clear the road? Just look up there,” they told me.

“Tell them to get out and they'll get out,” I said.

“Don't tell me what to tell them.”

“Look, mister,” I said. “We hold you responsible—for whatever happens here.”

“Up your ass,” said the guardian of the law.

“We'll talk to the boys,” another said.

And then they talked to the “boys,” and we had five minutes. I didn't listen to what they said to the boys. I was beginning to realize that they had no intention of doing anything about them, and when I looked up at the road and saw the roadblocks and the solid mass of the American Legion, I began to realize that not only was it extremely unlikely that anyone else on our side would get in, but quite unlikely that any of us already here would get out. There was the beginning of a shock in that realization, but only the beginning—the full impact would not happen until much later. It was still daylight; the world of the Hudson River Valley was still bathed in a golden glow; we were still people who had come to hear a concert. You do not adjust immediately to the fact of death; death is embarrassingly dramatic, and it does not happen in this fashion in the United States of America. Yes, there would be trouble, but nothing highly dramatic or full of dangerous content.

Let me make the point. Just as the sheriffs turned back to talk to the mob, a man came walking through. Precisely in that manner, almost as an abstraction, this man calmly walked through the mob and up to me, and precisely because he proceeded in that manner and was so much not of this world, they let him through. People do strange things at strange times. This man was in his middle twenties. He was tall; he wore a beard, a beret, and loose, brightly-colored slacks. He had stepped out of the time-worn pages of Leonard Merrick, and what he was doing west of the left bank I don't know. But there he was, and I asked him who in hell he was and where in hell did he come from?

“I'm a music lover,” he said.

No self-respecting writer dares to invent such things; but they happen. “Can you fight, Music Lover?” I asked him.

“I can't and I won't.” There was indignation and disgust in his voice.

“But you can and you will, Music Lover,” I pointed out. “Otherwise, go back up there. This time they'll tear you to pieces.”

Those with me there on the road will remember the scene and bear witness to it. Later that evening I spoke to the music lover again. I never learned his name; he will always be Music Lover to me, but when I spoke to him again he had lost his beret, his slacks were in shreds, and there was blood all over him—and a wild glint of battle in his eyes.

“By God, I
can
fight!” he said in triumph. He had learned that, as many of us did that night, as did a Negro lad of sixteen. It was a little later, when we were organizing our squads, that this Negro lad started off the road across the fields. I called him back and he stood there, full of shame and fear and full of all the thoughts and bitter visions of Negroes who had been lynched and tarred and feathered and beaten to death and tortured beyond human belief.

“I can't fight, Mr. Fast,” he said. “I can't, and I got to get out of here, I got to!”

“And if they get you out on the fields, do you know what they'll do to you?”

“I know, but I can't fight.”

“You can fight,” I said. “Sonny, you can, as good as I can, and that isn't much good, but we both can. So let's both stay here and fight.”

I spoke to him later. His scalp was open six inches across the top, and the blood was running over him like a little river. By virtue of what force he still walked, I don't know, but he said, quite calmly,

“I'm hurt, Mr. Fast, and if you think I'm hurt bad, I'd like to lie down a little, but if you think I'm all right, I can still fight.”

These are only two, of the many things of the sort that happened that night; I make a point with them, that it is hard to adjust quickly to the imminence of death, which is so final and in many ways so obscene a matter.

The sheriffs were talking, and down in the hollow were women and little children, and I began to think of what would happen to them if that mob on the road broke through us and got down there. The men and boys, Negro and white, had clustered around me in the little respite, and I was supposed to do something because I had written many books in which people did things in times like this, so I asked them if they wanted me to do it, and they nodded.

“All right,” I said. “We're in a very bad place but we'll keep our heads and in a little while some real cops will come and put an end to all this insanity. Meanwhile, we've got to keep that mob here where the road is narrow and high, and it's a good place to defend in any case. We keep them here because there's a lot of kids and women down below. That's our whole tactic. Agreed?”

“Agreed,” they said.

“All right. Just two things. Let me do the talking and let me decide when there's a quick decision, because there may not be time to talk it over. Is that all right?”

They said yes, and our time was running out. A compression of incident and event began. First I told the girls to run back down the road, get all the women and children onto the platform, keep them there for the time being, and send every able-bodied man and boy up to us. Then I asked for a volunteer.

“I want someone to crawl through those bushes, reach the road, find a telephone, and call the troopers—call the
New York Times
and the
Daily Worker
, call Albany and get through to the governor —I want someone who can do that.”

I got him. I don't know what I can say about him, except that he had great inventiveness and lots of guts. He was small and bright-eyed, and his name, A—K—, will stay in my mind a long time and I have never seen him since that night. But three times he went back and forth through that howling mob, and he did what he was supposed to do.

Now the remaining men from below appeared and I counted what we had. All told, including myself, there were forty-two men and boys. Just about half were Negro, and about half were in their teens. I divided them quickly into seven groups of six, appointing a leader for each group. Three lines of two groups each—in other words, three lines of twelve—formed across the road where the embankment began. Each line anchored on a wooden fence, our flanks protected by the ditch and the water below. The seventh group was held in reserve in our rear.

I looked at my watch again. It was 7:30 p.m. The three deputy sheriffs had disappeared and we never saw them again that night. The mob was rolling toward us for the second attack.

This was, in a way, the worst attack of that night. For one thing, it was still daylight; later, when night fell, our own sense of organization helped us much more, but this was daylight and they poured down the road and into us, swinging broken fence posts, billies, bottles, and wielding knives. Their leaders had been drinking from pocket flasks and bottles right up to the moment of the attack, and now as they beat and clawed at our lines, they poured out a torrent of obscene words and slogans. They were conscious of Adolf Hitler. He was a god in their ranks and they screamed over and over,

“We're Hitler's boys-Hitler's boys!”

“We'll finish his job!”

“God bless Hitler and f—— you n—— bastards and Jew bastards!”

“Lynch Robeson! Give us Robeson! We'll string that big n—— up! Give him to us, you bastards!”

I remember hoping and praying that Paul Robeson was nowhere near—that he was far away, not on the road, not anywhere near.

“What Medina started, we'll finish!” they howled. “We'll kill every commie bastard in America!” Oh, they were conscious, all right, highly conscious.

I am not certain exactly how long that second fight lasted. It seemed forever, yet it couldn't have been more than fifteen minutes. But in that time the sun sank below the hills to the west of us and the shadow of twilight came.

We concentrated on holding our lines. The first line took the brunt of the fighting, the brunt of the rocks and clubs. The second line linked arms, as did the third, forming a human wall to the mob. In mat fight four of our first line were badly injured. When they went down we pulled them back, and men in the second line moved into their places. It was a beautiful piece of organization on the part of everyone concerned, in some ways a miracle of organization. Here were forty-two men and boys who had never seen each other before for the most part, and they were fighting like a well-oiled machine, and the full weight of three hundred screaming madmen did not panic them or cause them to break. By sheer weight we were forced back foot by foot, but they never broke the three lines.

And then they drew off. For the moment they had had enough. They drew off, leaving about twenty feet between the front of their mob and our line of defense. There were more of them now, many more of them; the solid mass of their bodies and faces stretched back to the public road and along the road.

On our part, we were hurt, but not so badly that every man couldn't stand on his feet. We relieved the worst battered of the front line, linked arms and waited.

“Now we're all right,” I told myself. “We're alive and this can't go on much longer. The state troopers will have to get here.”

How many times I told myself that in the course of the evening! But there were no state troopers, no police, but instead a half-hysterical girl from the hollow below who panted,

“They've crossed over the hills and we've got to have some men down there!”

“How many are there?”

“I don't know. I counted twelve or fifteen.”

I detached our seventh squad on the double, which left us with thirty-six to hold the road. But before they left I told one of them, the driver of the big truck that had brought the children down from Golden's Bridge, to pull his truck up the road to where the embankment began and to swing it broadside and across the road. I did this because we had been pushed back more than twenty feet in the course of the fighting. A few feet more, and we would no longer have the protection of the embanked road, and then they could simply swarm around us and it would be all over. But with the truck to back us up we could hold that embankment a long time.

As it darkened, a qualitative change came into the ranks of the fascist mob, a sense, organization. Three men appeared as their leaders, one a dapper, slim, well-dressed middle-aged man who was subsequently identified by people on our side as a prosperous Peekskill real-estate broker. A fourth man joined them, and a heated discussion in whispers started. At the same time, cars up on the road were swung around so that their headlights covered us. Though the police and state troopers were remarkably, conspicuously absent, the press was on the scene. Newspaper photographers were everywhere, taking picture after picture, and reporters crouched in the headlights taking notes of all that went on. In particular, my attention was drawn to three quiet, well-dressed, good-looking young men who stood just to one side of the beginning of the embankment; two of them had shorthand notebooks in which they wrote methodically and steadily. When I first saw them I decided that they were newspaper men and dismissed them from my mind. But I saw them again and again, and later talked to them, as you will see. Subsequently, I discovered that they were agents of the Department of Justice. Whether they were assigned to a left-wing concert or an attempted mass murder, I don't know. They were polite, aloof, neutral, and at one point decently helpful. But they were always neutral—even though what they saw was attempted murder, a strangely brutal, terrible attempt.

The four men in front of the mob broke off their discussion now, and one of them, a good-looking man of thirty or so, came toward us. He wore a white shirt, sleeves rolled up; his hands were in his pockets; he walked to our line and in a not unfriendly manner said,

“Who's running this?”

“I'll talk to you,” I said.

He told me he was a railroad worker, a Peekskill resident, and had been drawn into this because he belonged to the local Legion post. “I don't like commies no better than the next one,” he said, “but this kind of thing turns my stomach. I'm on the wrong side. I should be with you guys instead of them. What I want to know is this—will you call it off if we do?”

“We never called it on,” I said.

“Well, someone did, and now will you call it off?”

“And do what?”

“Clear out?”

“If you empty the road and let us get a police escort, we'll clear out. We got a hundred and fifty women and kids down there in the hollow and we're not going to send them into that pack of wolves.”

“Let me try,” he said.

“O.K.—we don't want any more of this.”

He went back and resumed his whispered argument with the three leaders of the mob, and now behind us the truck appeared. I dropped back to help get it across the road, and when it was in place, blocking the road, I had a quick conference with two of the trade unionists. We agreed to spar for time—to do anything for time, and they pressed me to try to continue the conversation with the railroad worker. Since there was no sign of troopers or police or any relief, one of the trade unionists agreed to try to get through their lines and phone for help. But as he slipped over the embankment they attacked us again, and that was the last I saw of the railroad worker.

This attack was more deliberate. They closed slowly with all their weight, forcing us back until our three lines were pressed solidly against the truck, and they punished our front line badly —concentrating their attention upon a tall, well-muscled Negro worker who had already given a good account of himself. Like yapping dogs around a huge wolf, they clawed at him and he swept them off and drove them back with his fists. This I remember, and a bit here and there, but otherwise my attention was in front of me. I had not fought this way in fifteen years, not since my days in the slums where I was raised, not since the gang fights of a kid on the New York streets; but now it was for our lives, for all that the cameras were flashing and newspaper men taking it down, blow by blow, so you could read in your morning papers how a few Reds in Westchester County were lynched. Only we would not be lynched and we drove the great, sick, screaming weight of them back, and once again there was a clear space in front of us.