Peekskill USA: Inside the Infamous 1949 Riots Read Free Page A

and girls drifted across the meadow, walking slowly and contentedly in the golden light of the evening. About a hundred and twenty other people were already on the scene, most of them women and small children, and they top were making a picnic afternoon of it before the concert began, some of them sprawling comfortably on the grass, some of them at the rustic tables, some sitting on the chairs. A party of boys and girls from Golden’s Bridge, a summer colony, sat on the platform, their legs dangling. None of them were much over fifteen; most of them were much younger. A few of these people had come by car; many had walked to the picnic grounds from summer homes nearby. The children from Golden’s Bridge had come down in a large truck which was parked now next to my car—and which was destined to play an interesting role that night. Just by the good grace of fortune, half a dozen merchant seamen who were vacationing in the neighborhood had decided to come early; I had good reason to be grateful for them and for four other trade unionists who happened to be present.
    But none of these, I discovered, knew who was in charge of the concert—and as it turned out those in charge never reached the picnic grounds. I inquired for a while, then I gave it up and perched myself on one of the tables and settled down to wait. k was seven o’clock now, and from where we were in the hollow there was no sign of trouble.
    A boy running brought the trouble to us. I watched him as he came in sight around the bend of the road, running frantically, and then we crowded around him and he told us that there was trouble and would some of us come—because the trouble looked bad; and he was frightened too.
    We started back with him. There were twenty-five or thirty of us, I suppose; you don’t count at a moment like that, although I did count later. There were men and boys, almost all the men and boys, and a few girls too. We ran at a jog-trot along the dusty road, but still I thought that this would be no more than foul names and fouler insults, since I had never known the kind who were up there on the road to show courage unless they caught someone alone and the odds were twenty to one.
    So we ran on up to the entrance, and as we appeared they poured onto us from the road, at least three hundred of them, with billies and brass knucks and rocks in clenched fists, and American Legion caps, and suddenly my disbelief was washed away in a wild melee. Such fights don’t last long; there were three or four minutes of this, and because the road was narrow we were able to beat them back, but the mass of them filled the entranceway, and behind them were hundreds more, and up and down the road hundreds more. If you have never been in a trap with no way out and a thousand people grinning with malice and screaming in hate, you won’t know what it was like. And now I saw why there were no more people coming into the concert. One of the forks in the road was piled high with rocks, a great barricade of rocks, and the other had a Legion truck parked across it. So we were closed in and there was no way out, and the odds were twenty to one, precisely as they required them.
    I said that we beat them back and held the road for the moment, panting, hot with sweat and dust, bleeding only a little now; but they would have come at us again had not the three deputy sheriffs appeared. Our thanks to those three miserable men; they shouldered through the crowd, through the wall of alcohol-saturated air, and their gold badges gleamed in the sunset.
    They hefted their holstered guns, and they turned and spread their arms benignly at the mob. “Now, boys,” they said, “now, take it easy, because we can do this just as well legal, and it always pays to do it legal.”
    â€œGive us five minutes and we’ll murder the n—— bastards,” the boys answered.
    â€œJust take it easy—just take it slow and easy, boys,