Like so many affairs of their kind, the New York riots followed an isolated incident that in other, quieter times would have passed almost unnoticed in history's larger march. It took place on Thursday morning a fortnight ago, on a sidewalk in Manhattan's predominantly white East 70s. For reasons now lost in a tangle of differing tales, a white apartment-house superintendent turned a hose on a group of Negro teenagers. The kids threw bottles and ashcan lids at the man, and three of them, including a 15-year-old named James Powell, chased him into the building.
A police lieutenant, off duty and in civilian clothes, heard the ruckus, flashed his badge, ordered the youngsters to quiet down. He was Thomas Gilligan, 36, a 6-ft., 200-lb. veteran of 16 years on the force and the holder of 19 citations, including several awards for disarming dangerous suspects. According to the police report, the Powell boy went after Gilligan with a knife. Gilligan ordered him to stop, but Powell kept coming. Then, "in defense of himself," Gilligan fired his revolver three times. The third shot went wild—but the first two killed the boy.
It would remain for a grand jury to get at all the facts. Some Negro witnesses claimed that Gilligan gave no warning, others that the youth had had no knife—even though one was found in the street not far from Powell's dead, outstretched hand.
To many people it seemed incredible that a man of Gilligan's experience could not have dealt with the boy without resorting to gunfire.*For two days after that, this notion seeped through the Negro districts of New York City like liquid dynamite. Negroes, long lacerated by the thousand painful shards of ghetto life, by emotions stirred in the civil rights movement, by their hatred for police, whom they regard as both oppressive and corrupt, were only too ready to believe that the Powell death was a case of deliberate murder. And "police brutality" became their battle cry.
"Let's Go!" Hate-preaching demagogues took to the street corners, and raunchy radicals issued inflammatory broadsides. From a pro-Red China outfit called the Progressive Labor Movement came a handout that screeched insurrection: "Once again the cops have murdered one of our children. They have been killing about one black person a day in New York City. Lieut. Thomas Gilligan (remember that name) shot James once and James fell to the ground. This fascist cop stood over him and fired two more bullets into him. He then kicked the dead body. THIS is THE WAY THE FASCIST AND RACIST COPS OPERATE HERE IN 'LIBERAL' NEW YORK. These murderers follow the orders of Commissioner Murphy, Mayor Wagner and Rockefeller. We don't have to go to Mississippi because MISSISSIPPI is HERE IN NEW YORK."