At Berkeley in the Sixties: The Making of an Activist

27 New York City

of voters; the remedy was new rules for the next convention. They saw the world through different eyes than did the MFDP and its supporters. My fund-raising activities gave me still another example of how perception shapes response. For a few hours each day I sold my anti–“Go With Goldwater” buttons. I moved a couple hundred feet down the boardwalk in order to keep my roles separate, put on a straw hat sporting large LBJ buttons, and held up my poster, which replicated the pink buttons that lined the top. I was quite amazed at how many people thought I was demonstrating for Goldwater. Roughly 20 percent of the people who stopped spoke to me harshly—until I pointed to the mushroom cloud between the words and the LBJ buttons on my hat. Then they apologized and often bought a button, or two, or three. Business was very good. I sold out and had the problem of turning the coins into bills so I could carry them and keep them safe. I gave $50 to the MFDP and a few bucks to Mrs. Moore for the breakfasts she had fed me and left on Thursday while President Johnson was accepting the nomination. 27 New York City Aug. 31, 1964 Dear Mother: Since I was this close I had to go to New York. Went to the UN and couldn’t very well miss the World’s Fair. I’m staying with the daughter of a woman I met in Atlantic City. She was in charge of feeding us and ¤nding places for the 100 odd people to sleep. Starting from scratch with no money and no promises she did a remarkable job. In fact it was the only well organized part of the whole demonstration. New York City l 137 The previous spring, CORE had focused several demonstrations on the World’s Fair. Three hundred were arrested for blocking the New York City Pavilion. A brief sit-in on the Triborough Bridge halted traf¤c for a while. Brooklyn CORE, which regularly broke new tactical ground, threatened to block access to the Fair for the opening ceremonies on April 22nd by having hundreds of cars run out of gas on the access roads. However, it only had a dozen vehicles and the advance publicity kept most of the public away.1 After weeks of boasts, threats, and counterthreats , demonstration day was wimpy. But the publicity it generated was mammoth; hundreds of column inches and equivalent TV time educated the public about CORE’s concerns. By the time I got to the World’s Fair, all signs of protest had faded. In fact, the movement was shifting from organized nonviolent direct action to unorganized violent direct action. New York City had had its own long hot summer. The morning of July 16th, an off-duty police of¤cer shot a 15-year-old boy who lunged at him with a knife. That night Senator Barry Goldwater told the Republican convention that “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. . . . Moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.” Two days later, CORE turned a Harlem rally that was called to protest the disappearance of the Mississippi civil rights workers into one on police brutality. After a march on the local police precinct became unruly, all hell broke loose. By the next morning one person was dead, scores were injured, hundreds of windows had been broken, and dozens of shops had been looted. The riot spread to Brooklyn and was followed by sporadic disruption until rain drenched the city the following Thursday. Whites in the neighborhood around police headquarters made their own protest—hurling rocks and rotten vegetables, damning the Negroes, and rooting for Goldwater.2 One casualty of the New York City riots was leadership, or, more accurately, the belief that established Negro leaders spoke for the masses. The people who stormed the streets acknowledged no one as their representatives , either Negro or white, whether elected, organizational, or appointed . Throughout the week black leaders called upon the rioters to cease, while other, less well known, personages told the cops to get out of their community. “Law and order” competed with “self-defense” as rhetorical themes. The people who came to the streets at night to throw bottles, break windows, carry off merchandise, and yell obscenities at the police ignored all pleas. Seeing this, New York City’s white establishment wondered if there was some organized conspiracy promoting the...