The Education of a WASP

Chapter Twenty-three

Chapter Twenty-three When Newark and Detroit erupted in July 1967, my first reaction was that people would now understand that if "\Vatts was a cry for help, Newark and Detroit were screams. It took only a few days to find out I was wrong again. \Vhite people we overheard in restaurants or on trolleys talked about law and order, but only for black people. They behaved as if there had been no white riots ever, no Little Rock, no University of Mississippi, no Folcroft or Kensington . People like Woody and Louise Beecher had their fears reinforced, their guilt over feeling prejudice washed conveniently away. White news media reported the racial events in Newark and Detroit with little sifting of hearsay or hysteria. Even President Johnson said sternly on a special telecast, "There is no American right to loot, burn, or shoot a rifle from a rooftop!" He must have forgotten the Boston Tea Party and he was proved wrong about rooftop snipers. The Commission he appointed to study what really happened in Newark and Detroit would state later "most reported sniping incidents were demonstrated to be gunfire by either police or National Guardsmen." But no one would know this for over a year. During the terrible two weekends in July as I read the confusing, sometimes self-contradictory articles in white newspapers, I knew we could get an eye-witness report from Mike Le Bee, a black newscameraman friend who surely covered both events. This time I didn't want to hear the truth; what I could piece together from the white newspapers was sickening enough. By reading beyond their strange preoccupation with property damage, I had found that fifty-nine Americans had been killed-fifty-four of them black. In the Boston Massacre of 1770 five Americans died when the British tried to enforce their law and order; in South Africa's Sharpesville Massacre in 1960, the United States condemned the street slaughter of sixty-eight black Africans. Yet now, in the Newark and Detroit Massacres, it was the property damage and rumors of snipers, not the death toll, that made up the headlines. Mike Le Bec would know what the newspapers had not reported and I didn't want to hear it. We had met Mike in early spring of 1967 through Dolph Priest. As a reporter for the Negro-owned newspaper, Dolph had given Mike assignments long before Mike joined an international news service as one of the first black cameramen in America. Dolph was at our house one evening when Mike phoned, trying to locate him. I impulsively asked Dolph to invite Mike over. Through Mike Le Bec, Ben and I were to learn of American life that horrified even black militant Marc Moses. When Mike Le Bee arrived at our door that first evening, he looked exactly as I expected a newscameraman to appear. Except for his light brown Negroid face and his crinkly bushy hair, he might have been the Hollywood version of a news-chasing photographer. He was dressed in well-worn but expensive sports clothes, a cashmere sweater, tweed slacks, burnished loafers. He walked into our house carrying his tall - 286 - muscular frame with a loose athletic assurance. Apparently in his forties, his hair showed a touch of gray and I noticed a long scar on his left cheek. Later we learned this had come from a beating by police when he photographed the events in Selma, Alabama. As the evening progressed, Dolph urged Mike to show us his South Philadelphia film. "Here?" Mike said. "Don't worry," Dolph told him. The film was in his car. He brought it in and set up his equipment. With his camera, Mike had penetrated a part of the ghetto no white person could ever have entered. We learned later that it had taken weeks before even Mike was trusted. He had stayed in the neighborhood, letting people talk to him. Finally, he was allowed to see what their lives were like, the lives of the old and the ill, people pushed by the mistakes of urban renewal, the nit-picking of welfare rules, and the blank walls of human indifference into their last resting places. Mike's film showed an old man, hobbling through his own waste on bandaged feet, warming some mess over a gas ring. He said quaveringly, "If I could only get me just a little education in...