FROM the start some of the most unequivocal denunciations of the looters had come from the black community, where one difference between the disturbances of the 1960s and the blackout looting seemed especially apparent. In the sixties rioters had spared merchants with the foresight to mount “Soul Brother” signs in their windows. During the looting of ’77 not only were black- and minority-owned businesses not spared, but they bore the brunt of the destruction.
“When you see a black florist on Nostrand Avenue wiped out, and a supermarket on the same street suffer the same fate, both black-owned, how can I buy excuses that no jobs and poverty motivated
this mob action?” asked Woodrow Lewis, a black assemblyman from Brooklyn, a couple of days after the blackout. “We can’t coddle or pamper acts of vandalism.” It was not lost on Lewis that as bad as unemployment in the ghettos had been on July 13, with hundreds of stores cleaned out, and hundreds more demolished, it was now going to be far worse.
In fact, the pillaging had been fueled as much by an antiblack sentiment as by an antiwhite one. LeMans, a stylish men’s clothing store that catered to middle-class blacks, had been the first place hit on Amsterdam Avenue, miles from central Harlem. Its coowners had started the business in 1968, on the back of a twenty-five-thousand-dollar loan from the Small Business Administration. When they arrived at the store to find the plundering in progress on the night of the thirteenth, one of the owners screwed up the courage to ask a looter, whose arms were full of designer suits, why. The answer came: “Your things were too high, man.”
“Buy black” had been the mantra during the struggle for civil rights in the fifties and sixties. Now local church leaders and politicians were urging the community not to buy black if the merchant in question was hawking stolen goods. The Amsterdam News wrote that the real power failure was within the city’s black leadership and decried the community’s willingness to tolerate lawlessness and violence. “It is not enough not to condone looting,” the paper declared in a front-page editorial; “we must forthrightly and adamantly condemn it.”
Manhattan borough president and mayoral candidate Percy Sutton shared this view. On the Sunday morning after the blackout, Sutton, a slender, cocoa-colored man with a thin mustache, took to the pulpit at the Abyssinian Baptist Church, the massive Gothic cathedral at 138th Street and Seventh Avenue where Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., had once held court. “You can’t, on Tuesday, buy a television set that was stolen from the store around the corner,” Sutton said, “and then, on Sunday, go to church and call yourself a Christian.”
His calls for harsh treatment for “those who took advantage of the darkness to rip and plunder, to pillage, loot, and burn” echoed through the gleaming marble interior.
It was a stirring speech, worthy of the great Powell himself, but Sutton already knew he was finished. The blackout looting was not racially motivated, yet the vast majority of those arrested were black. The white backlash would be impossible for any black candidate to overcome.
It was an especially cruel fate for the fifty-six-year-old Sutton, a master builder of color-blind alliances, who had long ago been tapped most likely to become New York’s first black mayor. (New York magazine titled a May 1974 Sutton profile “Guess Who’s Coming to Gracie Mansion.”)
The son of a man who’d been born into slavery, Sutton learned his craft at the feet of New York’s original black power broker, the Harlem Fox, J. Raymond Jones. As a lawyer and civil rights activist during the 1950s and 1960s, Sutton fought for desegregation: He respectfully scolded Attorney General Robert Kennedy for moving too slowly to redress racial inequality and was even thrown in jail for sitting in the white section of a segregated diner in Maryland. But with his natty three-piece suits and slicked-back hair, Sutton would never be mistaken for a black militant. In 1968, when Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated and violence threatened to engulf Harlem, Mayor Lindsay asked Sutton to walk the streets, urging blacks to exercise restraint. Sutton was more than happy to oblige.
So it was perhaps no surprise that when it came time to launch his mayoral drive in February 1977, Sutton had focused his energy on white voters. “Our first task was to make him a candidate that was acceptable to whites at a time of great racial polarization in the city,” recalls his campaign manager, Frank Baraff. “Percy knew that at that point in history you were not going to become mayor by being the black candidate.”
Sutton’s campaign headquarters were not in Harlem but in an
empty office building along a strip of abandoned factories and car repair shops in Queens, the least black of New York’s boroughs save for Staten Island. His first celebrity campaigner was the former middleweight boxing champion Italian-American Rocky Graziano, who pledged to help Sutton “KO crime.”
There had been seventy-five felonies committed every hour in New York in 1976, making it the worst crime year in the city’s history. In his radio ads, Sutton blatantly played to white New York’s growing sense of fear: “New York City is a great city, but it’s a city turned sick with the fear of crime. And who doesn’t know where the criminals are? You do and I do. They’re on our street corners, openly selling dope. They’re in our hallways and in our schoolrooms and in our subways and in our streets. They’re mugging and crippling our people. They’re operating nursing homes and Medicaid mills. They’re cheating, stealing, and driving away our families and our jobs. Crime has laid its violent hands all over us.”
Not everyone agreed with Sutton’s strategy. William Banks, who ran the campaign’s Brooklyn operation, could see that the terminal state of New York’s ghettos and the steady stream of grim unemployment data were empowering a new generation of militant, self-styled community leaders whom Sutton risked alienating. The ideological heirs to Malcolm X, they were men like Brooklyn’s Sonny Carson, who went on to lead the campaign to expel Korean grocers from the black neighborhoods of Bed-Stuy and Flatbush, inspiring a story line in Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing.
“If you’re going to make a chocolate cake, you’ve got to have the cake first,” Banks told Sutton early in the campaign in an attempt to persuade him to focus on his black constituency. “Then maybe you can have a white icing.”
“That’s not my style,” Sutton answered. “I’m running for the mayor of New York City. I’ve got to relate to all the people.”
Even before the blackout, Sutton was coming around to Banks’s point of view. In May the candidate relocated his headquarters from
Queens to Lenox Avenue in Harlem—“lest my base feel neglected”—and then called together the ministers of hundreds of black churches to help mobilize their congregations on his behalf. In June he swapped Rocky Graziano for the militant black icon Muhammad Ali. Having just caused a stir on a local morning news program by lashing out at the Jewish and Italian managers who had “robbed” him over the years, the aging heavyweight champion campaigned all afternoon with Sutton.
In the wake of the blackout Sutton’s frustration at his inability to bridge New York’s racial gap turned to anger. His mayoral dreams deflated, his faith in the integrationist ideal dented, he accused the white press of ignoring his campaign: “I am treated as Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man.” Sutton brought the Reverend Jesse Jackson, Jr., to Harlem to echo the charge. “The media have tried to destroy Percy with indifference,” the Reverend Jackson thundered at a rally on 125th Street. After he “picked Abe Beame up on his shoulders and walked him across this community,” Jackson continued, referring to Sutton’s support for Beame in the 1973 mayoral election, “the Jewish community has turned its back on Percy Sutton.”
At the end of 1977 a bitter Sutton resigned “forever” from public life, saying simply, “I no longer want anything from the city.”