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Conclusion “BrooKlyn stands with selMa” Things are moving, but the whites have got to understand that we are flesh and blood, and we want our rights now, and through protest is the only way we are going to get it. —Bedford-Stuyvesant resident, July 1964 After the stall-in, Brooklyn CORE members struggled to find an action campaign. The Young Turks faded away from power. Isaiah Brunson disappeared from the organization. Oliver Leeds remembered that Brunson was so disturbed by the logistical failures of the stall-in that he never recognized its success in keeping people off the roads that day. The rest of his cohort stepped aside and let more moderate leaders come to the fore, although Arnold Goldwag remained as the public relations chairman.1 Many of the same people who had been members of Brooklyn CORE since 1960 remained involved to some degree, albeit in lesser roles. Although no longer chairman, Oliver Leeds continued to advise the chapter’s leadership cadre and participate in meetings. Marjorie Leeds and Mary Ellen Phifer divided their time between Brooklyn CORE and the Parents’ Workshop, which had organized the massive one-day school boycott in February 1964 and continued its grassroots efforts to gather community support for widespread reform of the school system. But since Brooklyn CORE had slowly moved away from the types of community-organizing efforts it experimented with during Operation Clean Sweep and the Bibuld campaign, Marjorie Leeds and Phifer no longer felt it was the type of organization in which they, as individuals, could have the most influence. Others, like Elaine Bibuld, felt tired and frustrated after the stall-in and turned their attention toward their home 280 • Fighting JiM Crow in the County oF Kings lives. She spoke for others of her cohort who “felt that our time had gone and it was about time for us to get out of it. And our children were becoming teenagers and needed us at home and things like that.”2 Maurice Fredericks continued to attend meetings, and he began bringing younger blacks from the neighborhood as his guests. Sonny Carson, who had gravitated toward Brooklyn CORE during the Downstate campaign, was a frequent visitor to Brooklyn CORE meetings in late 1964 and throughout 1965. Fredericks remained committed to his friends in Brooklyn CORE, but he also gravitated toward local activists who were more aligned with black nationalism than the African Americans still in the chapter.3 Rioghan Kirchner remained a member of Brooklyn CORE’s Housing Committee, but she also formed an interracial housing advocacy group in a small, predominantly white old fishing community in Brooklyn called Sheepshead Bay. She and some of her black and white friends from the neighborhood’s public housing projects, which were the most integrated residential areas of the community, called their group Freedom Organizations Coordinated for Unity in Shorefronts (FOCUS) and modeled it after Brooklyn CORE as an action-oriented, interracial organization.4 But the political and social winds in Brooklyn, and indeed in many other cities with large, racially segregated, poor black populations, had started to change direction as early as the summer of 1964. During the hot weeks of July, the failure of the city to address many of the problems with housing, schools, and jobs that civil rights activists in Brooklyn CORE had brought to its attention boiled over into one of the nation’s first urban “race riots” of the 1960s. As had been the case when riots broke out in New York City earlier in the twentieth century, the spark that ignited the summertime violence was an incident of police brutality. The murder of a fifteen-year-old African American boy by a white, offduty police officer rubbed raw the deep wounds of social isolation, political frustration, and economic alienation that Brooklyn CORE had tried to correct through its numerous direct-action protest campaigns.5 When Lieutenant Thomas Gilligan shot and killed James Powell on the streets of the Upper East Side on the morning of July 16, 1964, he had no clue that his actions would be the touchstone for several days of violence in Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant. He probably thought he was coming to the aid of a white superintendent who, witnesses said, was attacked by black teenagers after he sprayed them with water, shouted racial epithets, and ordered them to move from the steps of one of his apartment buildings. The teens reacted by throwing bottles and [18.116.36.192] Project MUSE...

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