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By Saturday night, the most restless elements of Harlem, the broken-or no-home kids and the seething out-of-job adults, were bristling for a fight. It was hot and humid. Scores of people gathered for an outdoor protest rally called by three local chapters of Congress of Racial Equality. After harangues by CORE leaders, the Rev. Nelson C. Dukes, pastor of Harlem's Fountain Spring Baptist Church, and a veteran agitator, launched into a 20-minute call for action, exhorting everyone to march on the local police precinct station to present their "demands." "Let's go! Let's do it now!" cried his listeners, and the mob, swollen by now into a howling tide, headed for the station house.
Police squads tried to hold them back, but the screaming mob swarmed through the streets. From tenement rooftops came a hail of bricks, bottles and garbage-can covers. The police, firing their guns into the air, moved the rioters back. Reinforcements poured into the neighborhood, and still came the storm of bricks and bottles. Whaling away with their night sticks, the helmeted cops waded into the mob. Pastor Dukes, watching it all with growing horror, muttered, "If I knew this was going to happen, I wouldn't have said anything." Then he walked away.
"Kill 'Em!" The senseless nightmare stretched, night after night throughout the week, through the main streets of Harlem, and, like an echo, through the Bedford-Stuyvesant slum district of Brooklyn. Roving bands of rioters—most of them kids—surged through the districts, aimlessly, desperately pursuing their urge for violence. They attacked a passing car driven by a white man and roughed up a woman passenger. They broke doors and windows in shops owned mostly by Jewish merchants, tearing down protective iron gates and screens. They ran off with TV sets, appliances, canned goods, clothing.
One man was arrested while wearing a new coat, the price tag still dangling from his sleeve. A Negro woman lay down on the sidewalk and muttered through her drunken stupor: "They walk all over me in Greenville, South Carolina, and they might as well run over me here." An onlooker cried: "Did you see that? They shot that woman down in cold blood!"
Some hoodlums lobbed Molotov cocktails into the battalions of pursuing police. An organization called "Harlem Freedom Fighters" had helpfully issued a crude flier: "How to Make a Molotov Cocktail. Instructions: Any Empty Bottle, Fill With Gasoline, Use Rag as Wick, Light Rag, TOSS AND SEE THEM RUN!"
The nights shook with gunfire. Police exhausted their ammunition, and had to send out emergency calls for more. False fire alarms rang through the area. Mounted police heaved back against the mobs with their horses. Again and again came the cries of "Police brutality!" "Kill 'em!" "Murderers!" A white newsman, telephoning from a bar, heard a Negro yell: "We gotta kill all the whiteys!" He dropped his phone and scooted out. A bartender shook his head sadly: "Where are their parents? If the parents would take charge of them, they couldn't get mixed up in this."