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

I had never seen its like before, including the cops, he answered.
    â€œThey don’t like to think that Paul Robeson could have died up there. This is the way they feel about that.”
    Ben Davis was speaking to the crowd on the street then. “Let them touch a hair of Paul Robeson’s head,” he cried bitterly, “and they’ll pay a price they never calculated!”
    A low roar; it was not a loud crowd; the noise was a throaty, deep one.
    I spoke after Ben Davis, and then we went inside. The Golden Gate was packed with all it could hold. Now it began to sink in, what Peeskill was and what Peekskill meant. Now I knew something of what this towering, incredible man, who in a way was bigger and stronger and prouder than any other man I have ever known, meant to his own people. The whole world had momentarily focused its attention on our wild, hopeless little battle in the hollow; but for these people the vileness—that specific and stinking vileness which has sent the stench of American lynching into every corner of the earth—was directed against the one great man who had broken through their bonds and bondage, who would not be jimcrowed, who would not hang his head, who would not crawl and who would not be bought off, not with dollars and not with cheap handouts from a cheapened and bloodstained government.
    He came into the hall then, and the noise was fused into a somber, angry meaning. He came in very proud and very troubled; and though I had seen him before in so many places in all the years our paths had crossed, I had never seen him like this, so proud and so troubled, with the whole face of the future bare to him, waiting and challenging.
    It was very hot there on that hot summer evening, and the manner in which that old, gilded ballroom was packed with humanity did not lessen the heat. Men sat in their shirtsleeves, but the sweat ran off them, and the heat hung like a heavy cloud under the ceiling. But no one rose to go, and one after another, people spoke of Peekskill , of what had happened on Saturday night, of the meaning inherent in it. You could not watch that crowd of serious, troubled faces—faces of people who had known little else than trouble—and not understand that something new was in the making here. It was a bitter coming of age. “You have harrassed our people so long, and now you go against this man whom we love and honor, because he is such proof of our seed of greatness.”
    I had read the papers by now. How does one write of such things? It is said that every man’s gorge has a point of eruption, a moment when his stomach empties itself out of nausea and disgust; but there is no such point for the men who write in our “great” newspapers. The New York Times “regretted” that such un-American doings had occurred. The New York Herald Tribune added that such displays of vulgarity were “understandable,” for all that they might be deplored. It is so wrong to make martyrs of these Reds, since it is precisely what they want. Contempt for Robeson; more contempt for Howard Fast. There is a better way to do these things, the New York Times sighed. But the obvious rags, the News and Mirror and Journal , howled with glee—here it is, and you can bet we’ll do better than Adolf ever did; and of reaction’s press, only the social democratic New York Post showed a tremor of fear, a reluctant knowledge that for every Communist who dies in this particular auto da fé , there are a hundred “sincere” anti-communists who also go into the flames. All this I thought of as I spoke to those troubled, upturned faces, and again as I heard Robeson speak.
    It is better than a year later now, and the conscience—if so it can be called—of the New York Post is dead, and also dead is any reluctance of the New York Times to embrace that fifth horseman of the Apocalypse whose name is fascism. Fascism, we have come to