(3 of 4)
The Leaders. In the lulls between the riots, Bayard Rustin, the Negro who organized last year's Washington civil rights march, roamed through the streets, urging residents to remain at home, but he had little success. An N.A.A.C.P. official issued a pleading leaflet: "Cool it, baby, the message has been delivered!" But to the rioters, anyone who urged restraint was only an "Uncle Tom."
They much preferred to hear leaders like CORE'S National Director James Farmer, who ambled through Harlem insisting all the while that he was really trying to soothe the people. "I saw the cops united against the black man," he told a church meeting. "I saw New York's night of Birmingham horror!" He claimed that he saw a cop draw his service revolver and deliberately shoot a woman in the groin (the woman was actually nicked in the thigh by a ricocheting bullet). "I saw the blood pouring off heads of men and women!'' Farmer cried. "It was my son and your son and every black mother's and father's son who died before that policeman's bullets!"
"Kill 'em!" the crowd answered.
Another Harlem "leader" made no pretense at all about his aims. He was Jesse Gray, a venomous little demagogue with a long record of Communist associations, who made a name of sorts for himself last year when he instigated a rent strike in Harlem. Gray sent out a call for "100 skilled black revolutionaries who are ready to die. There is only one thing that can correct the situation and that's guerrilla warfare!" He exhorted "revolutionaries" to establish platoons and to recruit 100 men apiece. "This city can be changed by 50,000 well-organized Negroes. They can determine what will happen in New York City!" A Black Nationalist named Edward Mills Davis issued a plea that "all you black people that have been in the armed services and know anything about guerrilla warfare should come to the aid of our people. If we must die, let us die scientifically!"
News to One. Returning hastily from his vacation, Mayor Robert Wagner broadcast a radio and TV appeal for calm and promised that he would do his utmost to redress legitimate grievances, but he warned that the city would not tolerate lawlessness. "Law and order," said the mayor, "are the Negro's best friend—make no mistake about that. The opposite of law and order is mob rule, and that is the way of the Ku Klux Klan, the night riders and the lynch mobs."
The mayor seemed most concerned for the city's reputation, during a World's Fair year, as a tourist attraction. Hotels had reported more than 500 reservations canceled, and Wagner, making a patently preposterous claim, said that "no single visitor to our city has been physically attacked or brutalized in any way." That was news to Max Colwell, 61, manager of the famed Pasadena Tournament of Roses, who, only five hours before, had been beaten and robbed of nearly $1,000 while visiting New York.