Free Peekskill USA: Inside the Infamous 1949 Riots by Howard Fast

will hold perhaps a little better than five thousand people, and this Tuesday night it was more than capacity. I parked my car a block away, but around the front of the Golden Gate was a massed crowd of Negroes, solid in front and spilling well onto Lenox Avenue, solid on the corners and spilling down each side street and across each side street. How many there were outside, I don’t know; but I would think at the very least three thousand and possibly as many as six thousand. It is hard to estimate a crowd like that—but at the very least, three thousand. And most curiously, no police in sight.
    You would have to know the situation in Harlem at that time to understand the full significance of such a crowd with no police in attendance. You would have to recall the year-long series of police brutalities in Harlem, the beatings and killings upon the slightest provocation or upon no provocation at all; and you would have to take into consideration the fact that in the course of that year, from the summer of ’48 to the summer of ’49, Harlem had been turned, in many respects, into an armed camp, a place of military occupation by the New York City police force, to appreciate the extraordinary effect of such a crowd without police in attendance. (I should say, without police in sight.)
    Well, there it was, and I had to get into the hall somehow; so I pushed and wriggled and slid and managed to make my way through. It was an orderly crowd, but it was a bitter crowd; it was an ominous, angry crowd, coldly disciplined with that kind of cold anger which is very certain and very deep-seated. It was that kind of a crowd, practically all Negro, which I pushed through until I was in a confined, enclosed, half-circle of space left directly in front of the entrance. And there were the police, almost a hundred of them, caught between the crowd inside and the crowd outside, the guest who came and stayed—there they were.
    Oh, that was something to see, almost a hundred New York City cops in a spot like that—indeed, that was something to see. I have never seen the like of it before in New York, nor since, such quiet cops, such genteel cops, such silent cops, each one of them standing quietly and politely right in his place, eyes on the ground, nightstick clasped unostentatiously, their whole attitude being, “Just don’t you dare notice us at all, because we’re just here because we have to be here, duty and all that, you know; but after all, New York’s finest, and who else takes children across the street or finds them when they’re lost?” Yes, that was something; and I could only think of the French police when the working class of France comes out in all its mighty power—and at such times the French police assigned to cover the demonstration stand very still, eyes on the ground, neutral in the best tradition.…
    Well, when I got into that open space I realized that two huge mass meetings were going on at once. A low rumble of sound came from within the hall, and out here another speaker’s stand had been set up, with an outdoor meeting going on, and with never a bit of interference or objection from those trapped cops, never an attempt on the part of six or seven of them to open a man’s skull with their clubs—as I have seen more times than I can count—never a boot in a worker’s groin when they are six to one or ten to one, and never a woman dragged by her hair, but just polite observation. People say so glibly that you can’t change human nature; and I wish such people could have been there that night and seen how three or four thousand angry Negroes changed the nature of a large number of New York City police. And if you can change a cop’s nature, I insist there is no limit to what you can do with human nature.…
    Once in there, I was spotted by the friend whose wife had been in the last car to go out of the picnic grounds. When I told him that