The single most violent confrontation of the era took place over two days in August and September 1949, in the town of Peekskill, New York. The inhabitants of this tiny burg relied on the summer trade for their livelihood, but increasingly resented the seasonal influx of thirty thousand New Yorkers, many of them Jewish, and the regular arrival of Communists who held conferences at the area’s residence camps. Paul Robeson1 had headlined annual fund-raising concerts in the area dating back to 1946. His return in 1949 set off a bloody riot.
If the fracas needed a spark, it was the publicity surrounding a speech Robeson made in Paris earlier that year. Seizing upon a remark in the speech, the nation’s press roundly attacked him as a traitor who had renounced his allegiance to the United States in favor of the Soviet Union. What the man had actually said was “It is unthinkable that the Negro people of America or elsewhere . . . would be drawn into war with the Soviet Union.”
When the concert was announced, the Peekskill Evening Star cried “subversive” in three-column headlines and stated flatly, “The time for tolerant silence that signifies approval is running out.” Joining in the call for mass action against the concert was the Peekskill Chamber of Commerce, the Junior Chamber of Commerce, the assistant county district attorney, the American Legion, the Veterans of Foreign Wars, and the Catholic War Veterans.
The rioting that ensued marked the opening volley of popular state-sanctioned violence against the Left. Governor Dewey’s investigating committee and grand jury exonerated and praised the nine hundred state troopers and local police that actively participated in the violence. One immediate effect of the praise was to mobilize hate groups along the Eastern Seaboard. From Staten Island to Tallahassee, effigies of Paul Robeson hung from burning crosses. In the Bronx, a church meeting to protest the violence was attacked by a mob of two hundred. The police did not respond.
Back in Peekskill, the atmosphere thickened. Bumper stickers were distributed: “Communism Is Treason. Behind Communism Stands the Jew! Therefore: For My Country—Against the Jews!” Jewish residents received threatening letters and phone calls. In a neighboring village, a Jewish home was stoned by a mob, while anti-Semitic remarks were screamed at the mother and child within. Four firebombings were attempted on the home of Stephen Szago, the owner of the concert grounds, and his front door was riddled with bullets. On September 6, the Peekskill Star compared the perpetrators of the two riots to the patriots of the Boston Tea Party.
The attacks left 215 concert-goers injured, of which 145 were hospitalized; twenty-five were arrested.
In 1949, Irwin Silber was the executive director of People’s Artists, Inc., the sponsor of the Peekskill concert. Silber is the editor of more than twenty song anthologies, including Lift Every Voice, Songs of Independence, and The Folk Singer’s Wordbook.
I remember 1938 was the first time I was in a May Day parade.1 It was impressive, there must’ve been a quarter of a million people marching along Eighth Avenue in New York City, with people hanging out the buildings cheering you on. And I remember the last big May Day parade in ’50 or ’51. There was ten thousand of us—maybe. It was dangerous, people really dumping on you, throwing rocks and garbage and all kinds of stuff at the parade. And the cops were not interested in protecting you. After a while it got reduced to just holding a rally in Union Square without a parade,2 then it was not possible to hold even those anymore. It was all very sad.
That was the beginning of the big decline of the Left, and Peekskill was one of the last gasps. The Peekskill concert was sponsored by my organization, People’s Artists, which published Sing Out!3 We were responsible for the actual program. In fact, my ex-wife sang “The Star-Spangled Banner” at the second Peekskill concert, the one that wasn’t broken up. You know, there were two concerts. Well, the first one didn’t get held. There was a riot. Then a week later, everybody went back and put on a concert.
See, this was an annual event. It was held for the benefit of the Civil Rights Congress.4 Paul Robeson, who was a founding director and charter member of our organization and a friend of mine, would sing at these every summer. They raised a lot of money. People would come from all over the summer resort area in upstate New York for this concert. But this was 1949, shortly after Robeson, at the height of his prestige, made this speech in Paris saying that there was no reason for American blacks to fight in a war that the United States might cook up with the Soviet Union. People were furious with him. So a bunch of American Legionnaires in a peace delirium organized a protest against the concert. They whipped up a tremendous amount of fervor for about a week before the concert. So when we all drove up there it was an incredible traffic jam. They blocked the entrances to the concert grounds; nobody could get through. These people had actually captured the concert stage area and were blocking all the roads and nobody could go forward or back.
We didn’t know what was going on. My wife got out of the car and went wandering off—for some crazy reason—to find out what was happening. She ran into six or eight guys, who began tossing her around like a football. They just kept shoving her around and feeling her up and so on. She finally got away from them, but she was shaken by that. Some other people got beaten up5 and finally everyone made their way home.
People were furious. They really wanted to put on this concert. A large number of people knew that this was the beginning of serious harassment of the Left, and a lot of us felt, “Okay, this is the way fascism probably looked in its earliest stages, and if we don’t make a stand now, we’re all gonna be in trouble.” In the intervening week it was decided to fight back. So people in the left-wing trade unions, and the Communist Party, and a lot of blacks in Harlem decided to get together and put this concert on again. One of the stories they tell is that the leading black gangster in Harlem came up to Paul Robeson and said, “Listen, you want us to go back up to Peekskill with you and take care of you during this concert? I’m prepared to bring one hundred guys with me who’ll let these people know where it’s at if they mess with you.” And Robeson said, “Well, I really appreciate that, but that’s not quite what we had in mind.” We wanted to do it a little bit more politically than that.
Anyway, we went back to Peekskill with about fifteen hundred people armed with baseball bats to guard the concert.6 They surrounded this big open field—furriers, wholesale workers, wherever the Left was strong in the unions. A lot of people turned out—about twenty-five thousand. It was quite an event. Very impressive.
After the concert, when the people left on the buses, they were attacked. The mobs were waiting a little further down the road. Some of the bus drivers refused to drive, and people who were at the concert who’d never driven buses before drove the buses out of the place. Bricks and stones were thrown at the buses—with the cooperation of the police.7 The state police turned their backs. The pictures showed big beefy policemen pretending as though they wanted to hold back the crowd, and people just throwing—it was an open scandal. A couple hundred people were injured. One guy I knew lost his eye. He got hit by a stone.
Getting Robeson out was hair-raising. That was one of the big security problems they had to solve. They got a relatively large car, but still inconspicuous, and he lay on the floor, rolled in a blanket. So it looked like just one other car. But they had a ring of cars around him, with people who were prepared to deal with any contingency, in case he got spotted. But he was smuggled out of the place. Later, there was an investigation, but all phony. Nothing happened. I think eventually the commission concluded that the riot was provoked by the people who ran the concert.8 [Laughs.]
The aftermath was painful. I think it was a victory of a kind, but it was mixed. We never could do another concert there again. It was part of the last gasp of the Left before the fifties.
In 1949, Bob Black was a young musician with People’s Folksay, a spin-off of People’s Songs that provided folk singers, political satirists, and performers for union meetings and political action groups. Since 1979 he has been on the faculty of the Native American studies program at the University of California at Berkeley.
The day before the second concert, I was driving up to Pete Seeger’s house with a friend. Pete lived in Beacon, New York, and we were going to spend the night there, then go back for the concert the next day. On our way, we stopped in Peekskill for a cup of coffee. I remember sitting in a booth and listening to the people behind us. One of these guys was saying to the other, “You coming to our riot tomorrow? We’re going to show these Commies.” When we got to Pete’s house I told him, “They are getting ready for a big one—they’re really organizing.”
The next day, we went back through Peekskill, and there was a big banner across the main street, “Wake up, America—Peekskill did!” In other words, they had shown up the threat of the left-wingers and this was a clarion call to America to be on the alert for subversion. They had people in the streets. One guy was throwing handbills into cars, parodies on popular songs of the day. One I remember, there was a popular song “He’s Too Fat for Me” and the parody was “He’s Too Red for Me.”
Out on the concert grounds, the union guys had the whole performance area double-ringed. The inside ring contained the performers. Robeson was well protected by bodyguards. I got to talking to Woody Guthrie, Pete asked me to come on the stage. We did a group number together and we just had a great time. It was a real picnic affair. Off in the distance, the VFW, and the American Legion were marching with banners and shouting. You could see them on the road. They did not try to break through. Of course, they couldn’t, the whole area was ringed. I later found out that all of the union guys had baseball bats hidden in the grass around the area. Later, during the confusion and the attacks, the police moved in and arrested a lot of the guys for carrying weapons, i.e., the baseball bats.1
So we spent a very pleasant day. I remember it was just a wonderfully harmonious time. Nobody paid any attention to all of the commotion going on at the edge of the area.
The problem was, there was only one road in and out of the grounds. Toward the end of the day, we were getting ready to leave. I was in a car with a friend and two other people. Seeger was in another car, a little station wagon. One of the union guys came over and said, “Better roll your windows up—they’re throwing sand.” We rolled the windows up and we left through that one road.
As soon as we got on the road, you would see the state police directing traffic. It was one-lane and it was very slow and you had to stop and wait because everyone had to get out the same way. At least, this is what we were told. On both sides of the road were locals, the American Legion, Veterans of Foreign Wars. They were shouting2 and then they started throwing rocks. I do not know how many people were hit but quite a number of cars had their windows smashed.3 A rock about eight or nine inches in diameter busted the window of the car I was in, hit the driver on the side of the head, and knocked him out.
A fat state policeman, I can still see his protruding belly, walked up with his hand on his gun and said, “You goddamn Commie Jews. If you don’t get out of here, I’m going to kill you.” I was in the backseat, the guy was knocked out in the front seat—more and more rocks were hitting the car. This friend of mine jumped into the front seat, pushed the other guy off to the side, and started driving. We were hiding in the back down on the floor and we moved slowly out. Pete was in the car in front of us with his wife, Toshi, and one or two of his kids. His windows were smashed out too.
Throughout this, the state police did absolutely nothing. Actually, they egged them on. There was no attempt to protect the cars. Some people were blinded and quite a number of people were hurt very seriously, had to go to the hospital. We made it out of there by the skin of our teeth. We went out to Pete’s house, took out the broken glass from the car windows and buried it. Pete was worried about the locals, he wanted to keep it as quiet as possible.
There was a little progressive camp nearby, in a community called Woodland Park. We all got together there that night. Pete spoke about Peekskill and all of us sang “We Shall Overcome.” The next day we drove back to New York City in Pete’s car without any glass and it was colder than hell.
1Paul Leroy Robeson (1898–1976) was a world-famous African-American singer and actor. A courageous leader in the civil rights movement and an unbending spokesman for many left-wing causes, Robeson was hounded for more than twenty years.
1Observance of May 1 as an international labor holiday first began in the United States in 1886, when it was the date of a nationwide strike for the eight-hour day. But it was Chicago’s Haymarket Square riot on that first May Day and the two hundred workers killed or wounded by the police that memorialized the date. Over the years, May Day as a labor holiday has become almost exclusively identified with the Left. During the Red Scare, May Day parades were routinely photographed by the FBI for later identification of the heretics participating in this “Red Holiday.”
2In April 1953, the New York State Supreme Court upheld a mayoral ban on the Eighth Avenue May Day parade because, as the police commissioner put it, the marchers were “puppets of the Soviet government.” However, they were allowed to gather in Union Square.
3Sing Out! was a magazine of folk, labor, and civil rights songs published by People’s Artists—the Party-oriented successor to People’s Songs, the entertainment arm of the Left labor movement founded by Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie.
4A legal defense organization active from 1946 to 1956, the CRC was called the most successful “Communist front” of all time. Utilizing mass organization tactics to further their legal efforts, the CRC fought against Jim Crow laws and for civil liberties.
5At this first incident, fourteen concert-goers were injured before the police intervened.
6Other sources put the number of guards at 2,000 to 2,500.
7Many of the nine hundred policemen present actively participated in the violence, smashing windows and dragging people from their cars to run a gauntlet of club-swinging officers.
8On September 14, Governor Dewey characterized the concert-goers as “followers of Red totalitarianism” and ordered a grand jury investigation to determine whether the concert was “a part of the Communist strategy to foment racial and religious hatred.” Not surprisingly, the grand jury report of June 1950 absolved the police and local officials of all blame, while tagging the hapless picnickers as “the shock troops of a revolutionary force.”
1As the last of the cars pulled off the concert grounds, the police drew their revolvers and charged the remaining union guards. The guards were clubbed, arrested, and forced to march to the police compound with their hands held over their heads. The baseball bats were handed over to the mob.
2Eyewitness reports have it that among the epithets of “Dirty Jew!” “Nigger!” and “Commie Jew!” was the chant “We’re Hitler’s boys—out to finish the job!”
3Fifty buses and cars had their windows smashed, fifteen were overturned.