The Savage City Read Free

onlookers who were slow to disperse.
    One Harlem resident, Hinton Johnson, was horrified to see the police beating one innocent bystander. “You are not in Alabama,” he reportedly told a cop. “This is New York.” The cop turned on Johnson, clubbing him over the head, cracking his skull and knocking him unconscious.
    More cops arrived on the scene, but as the crowd of residents grew more hostile, the police retreated to the Twenty-eighth Precinct station house—where they were startled to find a menacing mob gathering in front of the building.
    Hinton Johnson was a black Muslim, known to his congregates as Johnson X. Many of the Irish Catholic cops in the fray that afternoon probably didn’t even know what a Muslim was, much less that a group calling itself the Nation of Islam had taken root in Harlem. Johnson X was a member of Mosque Number Seven, the largest Muslim mosque in the country, located in a building at 116th Street and Seventh Avenue, not far from where the police beating had occurred.
    The leader of the mosque was a young Muslim preacher named Malcolm X. When Malcolm received word of the beating—and learnedthat Johnson X had been transferred to the station house, bleeding and unconscious—he set off to find him.
    Within minutes, Malcolm X arrived at the Twenty-eighth Precinct to serve as a negotiator between the police and the community. The cops were demanding that the protesters disperse from around the station house, but the angry residents were refusing to budge. A member of the police negotiating team, Walter Arm, the NYPD’s public relations officer, opened the meeting by saying that the presence of both the captain of the precinct and a deputy commissioner “indicates how much concern the police department has for this situation. However, I’d like to say that the police of the city of New York can handle any situation that arises in Harlem, and we’re not here to ask anybody’s help.”
    The police spokes people had never heard of Malcolm X. Thirty-one years old at the time, dressed in the Nation of Islam uniform of a bow tie, white shirt, and brown suit, the Muslim leader listened quietly as the police made their statement. Then he looked at the cops, stood up, and proceeded to leave the room.
    When the cops realized that their hard-line tactic had failed, they immediately sent a reporter from the Amsterdam News, Harlem’s black newspaper, to find Malcolm X and bring him back to the negotiating table.
    When Malcolm returned, he made his position clear. “I have no respect for you or your police department,” he told Walter Arm and the other police representatives. If the police wanted the crowd to disperse, he announced, they must transfer Johnson X to Harlem Hospital at once. The police agreed. After making a series of further demands, Malcolm filled out an incident report that noted that Johnson X had been an innocent bystander who was attacked on account of brute viciousness by city police officers.
    Johnson X was escorted out of the station house by a phalanx of Muslims. Then, with a simple hand gesture, Malcolm X motioned the group of protesters to disperse, which they did in an orderly fashion.
    â€œNo man should have that much power over that many people,” one police captain reportedly said.
    It was the beginning of a new kind of relationship between blacks and the police in the city of New York.
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    IN RETROSPECT, the hostilities that ravaged New York City in the 1960s may have been inevitable. With such dramatic shifts in the city’s social makeup, the fault line between black and white residents could no longer hold. Blacks felt aggrieved; many whites felt a mounting sense of terror. As one political operative put it, “A boiler that is allowed to get too hot will eventually explode.”
    It is a testament to the resilience of the city that this explosion did not occur all at once. The social upheaval that