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

because it don’t pay to have trouble when you don’t have to have no trouble.”
    And then the three deputy sheriffs turned to us and wanted to know what in hell we were doing there making all this kind of trouble.
    I kept glancing at my watch. It was ten minutes after seven then. I also had a chance to look at the “boys” in the Legion caps, and they were by no means boys. They were in their thirties and forties and fifties—many of them in their fifties—and they were not lumpen either, not in the strict sense of the word. Most of them were prosperous-appearing men, well set up, well dressed, real-estate men, grocery clerks, lunch counter attendants, filling station hands and more of the kind. Tip over any gin mill in Peekskill or Shrub Oak, and this is what you would get. Throw in a couple of hundred “decent” citizens, a hundred teen-agers whose heads were filled with anti-Communist sewage; add a hundred pillars of the local Catholic church, half a hundred college students home on vacation, half a hundred workers drawn along, and two or three hundred of the sweepings and filth of that whole Hudson River section, and you have a good idea of what we faced there that night. Liquor them up to a high point of courage, give them odds of twenty to one, put the police on their side—and then you have the rest of the picture; and these were the “boys” whom the deputy sheriffs held up for just enough minutes to enable us to survive.
    Not that the deputies wanted that; but it was a beginning and there was no precedent for this kind of thing in Westchester County in New York State, and the three sheriffs with the polished gold-plated badges were uncertain as to how to play their own role. For that reason they held back the “boys” and asked us what the hell we were doing there making this kind of trouble.
    I became the spokesman then, and a good many of the things I did afterwards were the result of this—chiefly because I was older than most of our handful and because the merchant seamen and the trade unionists nodded for me to talk. Anyway, I had agreed to be chairman and it seemed that this was the kind of concert we would have, not with Paul Robeson and Pete Seeger singing their lovely tunes of America, but with a special music that had played its melody out in Germany and Italy. So I said that we were not looking for any trouble but were here to hold a concert, and why didn’t they clear the roads so that our people could come in and listen to the concert in peace?
    â€œYou gimme a pain in the ass with that kind of talk,” said one of the deputies delicately. The others stood there looking at us. Very clearly do I remember them. We cut deputy sheriffs to pattern in America; their bellies slopped over their belts; their faces were loose and full of hate; and they feared only the responsibility for what was happening that night and they desired only that it should happen in spite of themselves. So they said:
    â€œJust cut out the trouble. We don’t want no trouble and we don’t want no troublemakers.”
    I explained it again. I explained to them carefully that we were not making trouble, that we had not lured these three hundred innocent patriots to attack us, and that all we desired was for them to clear the road so that people could come to the concert.
    â€œHow in the hell can we clear the road? Just look up there,” they told me.
    â€œTell them to get out and they’ll get out,” I said.
    â€œDon’t tell me what to tell them.”
    â€œLook, mister,” I said. “We hold you responsible—for whatever happens here.”
    â€œUp your ass,” said the guardian of the law.
    â€œWe’ll talk to the boys,” another said.
    And then they talked to the “boys,” and we had five minutes. I didn’t listen to what they said to the boys. I was beginning to realize that they had no intention of