The Savage City Read Free Page B

percent increase. Rape was up 120 percent, robberies up 82 percent, assaults up 90 percent. Homes and places of business were violated and burglarized at a staggering rate. The city’s descent into criminal pathology seemed to have no narrative thread and no purpose. Urban life became synonymous with a state of chaos.
    There was no disputing that crime was out of control. But the mood of fear and paranoia in the city was also a product of the social agitation of the postwar years—and that, in turn, was a reaction to decades of oppression and abuse. As the civil rights movement moved northward from the South, its tactics changed. The concept of nonviolent resistance gave way to Black Power; the dream of integration was subsumed by the demand for black liberation. The NYPD was assigned the task of containing a revolution. The violence that resulted must have seemed pointless, an expression of hatred and self-destruction in its purest form. But within the conflict there was also hope—the pain and anxiety of a city yearning to be something better than it was, with a criminal justice system that deserved the trust of its citizens.
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    THE PAST IS not past: a city’s identity is composed not just of events in the present moment but also of all that came before. If New York City today is a place of prosperity, safety, and good times, as its civic leaders and financial developers contend, it is useful to remember that these things have come at a price. Forty-five years ago, a generation of New Yorkers—motivated by chutzpah, fear, an instinct for survival, and a sense of righteous indignation—changed their city forever. The process was long, agonizing, and ugly, but if we are to understand the city that thrives today, we must first come to understand the past, when the struggle for fairness, respect, and personal security was literally a matter of life and death.
    So let us lift the rock and sift through the detritus of a time, not so long ago, when no one in their right mind would have called New York the Safest Big City in America. Let us revisit an era when the great metropolis was struggling to define itself in the modern age, when crime was on the rise and dread and hostility entwined the citizenry in what seemed to be a dance to the death. It was a time of hope and desperation, a time of reckoning, a time when the nation’s greatest experiment in democracy earned the right to be called the Savage City.

| PART I |
    I have a dream that one day…the rough places will be made plain and the crooked places will be made straight.
    â€”Martin Luther King Jr.
August 28, 1963

[ one ]
BLOOD OF THE LAMB
    WHEN MARTIN LUTHER King Jr. visited the great city of New York, he was greeted with a silver letter opener plunged swiftly and unceremoniously into his chest.
    It happened at Blumstein’s department store in Harlem. King was in town to promote Stride Toward Freedom, his new book about the Negro rights struggle. At Blumstein’s, he sat at a table signing books and making small talk with Harlem residents. King was young—just twenty-nine—but he was already a preacher and civil rights leader of note, a survivor of the 1955 Montgomery bus boycotts, and a man known for his skills as a speaker. He was famous for his rapturous oratorical style and basso profundo voice, which sounded like the instrument of a much older man and seemed to carry the very wisdom of the ages.
    At one point during the signing, King was approached by a harmless-looking black woman, age forty-two. “Is this Martin Luther King?” she asked.
    â€œYes, it is,” he replied cheerily.
    That’s when the woman lunged at the good reverend with something metallic. King tried to block the attack with his left arm; the razor-sharp opener sliced his hand before sinking into his chest a few inches below and to the left of the knot in his tie. Without removing the weapon, the woman stepped back and declared,