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

know, sits easily with the big buck, and a government with a dollar in one hand and a gun in the other can produce a remarkable silence within its own population; but those people who sat in the Golden Gate that night had a less than intimate acquaintance with the dollar, and as for the gun, it had never been turned away from them. They did not read the editorials in the Times too carefully, so they did not fully comprehend that Paul Robeson was a willing “tool” of Moscow, “duped” by the Communists, and that he had given up a vast income, gold-plated glory, and the approval of those same editorial writers in order to be pulled by the ears into some “foreign” conspiracy and risk his life and face prison and death, and know never a moment free from the threat of Mr. Hoover’s gestapo, all because—(Well, even insanity in editorials has its limits, and how can you argue ethics or morality with those who have no ethics and no morality either.)—because he is a “tool,” and wants to be a “tool,” and isn’t it nice to be a “tool?”
    â€œYes, I will sing wherever the people want to hear me,” he said. “I sing of peace and freedom and of life!”
    I have seen Harry Truman speak, and heard him too, for what it was worth, but I never saw tears pour from the eyes of those who listened, and I never saw love on their faces…
    When the meeting was over, finally, the people poured out of the hall. The crowd outside had increased, and now the whole joined throng flurried and swept the police away. It swept them away without violence, but swept them away, and then turned into the avenue and formed ranks, and suddenly there was a massive parade marching down Lenox Avenue. Now the horse cops had come up, the “great” ones on their chestnut-colored steeds, but they would not stop this tonight and they too were swept out of the way and the huge concourse of people marched on down Lenox Avenue.…
    It was late when I returned to Croton, and later still before I could fall asleep. There are a great many—some ignorant, some shrewd—who will tell you that there are no classes and no class struggle in America, and they are by and large cut out of the same cloth as those who insist that the Negro is perfectly free in this “most free” of all lands and that there is no oppression whatsoever in the home of the washing machine and the refrigerator. Thereby, Peekskill was the work of a few hoodlums expressing somewhat “excessive” resentment against “un-American” elements, although no one has fully explained why Americanism, or what passes under that title these days, always attracts to itself the filthiest, rottenest elements in the land, the jack-booted pimps and perverts who glory in the brass knucks and a chance to kick a woman in the stomach.
    I was beginning to break through the remains of any such illusions. Peekskill did not just happen; it was not by the merest chance that the state and county police remained aloof until an opportunity arose to pin a framed murder rap on us; this was not the local doings of the local lumpen , and the FBI agents did not just happen to be out for an evening stroll in the Hudson River Valley. The three sheriffs did not suddenly contract amnesia and stroll off at precisely the right moment, and the whole matter was by no means a spontaneous outbreak of local filth. After that evening at Golden Gate, I was able to see many more pieces of the puzzle than I had been able to see before. There was the Negro liberation movement, and there was Paul Robeson; and in that first attack there was no way for the fascists to know that Paul Robeson was not already within the picnic grounds. There was a plan somewhere for the imposition of a police state in America—a plan brought to fulfillment at the time of this writing—and certain aspects of the matter had to be, tested. Piece after