At about 3:00 a.m. on June 17, 1966, the late-night calm of Paterson, New Jersey, was suddenly shattered by the voices of an angry white mob that had gathered in front of a dilapidated old bar and grill. The crowd furiously pushed and shoved against a cordon of police officers who had surrounded the tired nightspot, trying to get a look at the four bullet-riddled, blood-smeared bodies lying on the floor inside.
Their attention was momentarily diverted as a five-car, siren-screaming cavalcade sped around the corner and screeched to a grinding halt in front of the tavern. Several shotgun-bearing policemen leaped out of their cars and scrambled around a white Dodge that they had just escorted to the scene.
The chattering mob pressed closer as the police forced the two black occupants of the car out onto the street. The two men were confused by the hostile reception the mob gave them, and they had reason to be. I know, because I was one of them.
“Get out of the car!” a bull-faced cop snarled as he pulled open the door. “Stand up against that wall over there, and don’t move until I tell youse to!”
Whatever else was wrong, I knew that getting out of that car might prove to be by far the worst thing I could do. “What the hell did you bring us here for, man?” I asked, but the cop just backed away and snaked out his pistol.
“Shut up!” he barked. There was complete silence around us now. Everybody in the street must have heard me when I swallowed. The cop pulled the hammer on his pistol back to full cock. “Just get up against that wall, and shut up!” he growled.
Before I could think of anything more to say, a paddy wagon and several more ambulances added further confusion to the already congested area. I felt myself being roughly searched, along with John Artis, a twenty-year-old boy who had been riding with me. Then we were pushed into the stinking rear of the paddy wagon and it took off, leaving my car behind.
My mind began racing for an explanation, but I could find none. Things were happening too fast. Before I had grasped the full significance of my predicament, the wagon slid to another halt at Paterson’s St. Joseph’s Hospital. Surrounded by squads of fully armed cops, we were hustled out of the truck and into an emergency operating room. There, a crew of doctors and nurses were frantically trying to save the life of a balding middle-aged white man. He had been shot in the head. The bullet had made a jagged exit from his left eye.
The room, along with almost everything in it, was all white. Cops dressed in blue, with white faces, crowded around us. Not a black man in the bunch. The sickly odor of ether hung in the air, and the room reeked of dried blood. I hated hospitals. Especially this one.
“Can he talk, Doc?” asked the bull-faced cop who a few minutes earlier had acted like he was Quick-Draw McGraw.
The doctor was clearly irritated by our sudden intrusion into his operating room. He glanced back over his shoulder, giving the cops, and then John and me, an annoyed look. When he spoke, it seemed to be with extreme reluctance.
“Yes, he can talk,” he said finally. “But only for a moment.” With the aid of one of the nurses, he raised the victim’s head. The man was weak, pale, and seemed nearly dead; he had a ragged hole in his face where his left eye had been.
“Can you see clearly, sir?” Quick-Draw asked, absurdly. “Can you make out these two men’s faces?”
The wounded man nodded weakly.
“Are these the two men who shot you?”
For what seemed an eternity, the injured man stared at me intently with his one remaining eye, glanced at John, then stared back at me some more. I almost cried with relief when he began to shake his head from side to side.
“But sir!” the cop said urgently. “Are you sure these are not the men?”
Then I saw it coming. Everything suddenly fell into place. I realized with a deep-seated uneasiness that if, in fact, two black men had shot this man, then it would make no difference to him that I was short, and the boy with me tall; that I was bald, bearded, and ugly while John Artis had no hair on his face at all; that I was black as virgin soot, and he as yellow as the sun—because to this critically injured man teetering there on the brink of death, all black people would look the same, especially those the cops had brought in.
I stood there watching the tortured expressions of pain wash over the one-eyed man’s face, and felt a sharp pang of my own. But unlike his, mine came only with the memory of my past run-ins with the cops, of past incarcerations and hostilities. I closed my eyes and clenched my fists in rage, and at that moment I might indeed have been able to commit murder.
“Dirty sonofabitch!” The words spurted out of me so loudly and suddenly that everybody in the room turned in surprise and stared. “Dirty motherfucker!” I cried out again, and heard the despair in my voice. Dirty motherfucker, I thought. Here I go again.