On August 28, 1949, the Communist party planned to hold an open-air concert in Peekskill, New York, about 50 miles north of New York City. Paul Robeson was to be one of the singers. First, the concert had to be postponed when a local mob attacked a group of sponsors who were viewing the proposed site. The concert was held a week later on September 4, and the sponsors, knowing that there was likely to be trouble, provided guards for protection. The concert went on as planned, but as the audience left it was attacked. For miles along the road to New York City, cars were assaulted by American Legionnaires, Westchester police, and local anti-Communists. They hurled rocks at windshields, beat members of the departing audience, and shouted anti-radical, anti-Negro, anti-Semitic epithets. The first account which follows was written by Howard Fast, a novelist and one-time Communist party member, who was one of the organizers of the concert. The other accounts are taken from a Westchester Citizens’ Committee Report, as reprinted in Fast: Peekskill, U.S.A., A Personal Experience (1951), 82–9, 105–7.
… our concert went smoothly enough, and with all the difficulties there was good music there that day. The great voice of Paul Robeson echoed back from the hills; the music of Handel and Bach was played there; and Pete Seeger and his friends sang those fine old songs of a time when treason and hatred and tyranny were not the most admired virtues of Americans. And the police did what they could. When they saw that they were not able to prevent the concert, they brought in a helicopter and it hovered over our sound truck constantly, swooping down to buzz us again and again, trying to drown out the sound of our music with the noise of its motor. To some extent they succeeded, but we were fortunate that the motor of a helicopter is less noisy than that of a regular airplane. It did not spoil the concert.…
Cars were moving now and the afternoon was wearing on. R—–, who has spent the best years of his life being a soldier in two wars and an industrial organizer, has a better nose for danger than I have, and now he was shaking his head.
“I don’t like it, I don’t like it,” he kept saying.…
Two of the security guards passed down the line of cars, telling each driver, “Close all windows as you approach the exit. They seem to be throwing things.”
The situation was new to us, and Fords and Plymouths and Pontiacs were not built as military weapons. If people were throwing things, it seemed eminently correct that the windows should be closed protectively, and motorists as a whole have a rather child-like faith in the much-touted and widely advertised shatter-proof glass. No one questioned the advice, but even if they had, the damage would have simply taken other forms.
The line would move a few feet, then stop; a wait of about five minutes and then a few feet more. Driving an old car and depending on it, I was afraid of overheating, so I cut my motor constantly. But then suddenly we were in motion and the entrance was in sight and we rolled up and through it and out. A small cluster of hell was at work at the entrance; cops, in a craze of hate, were beating cars, not people, with their long clubs, smashing fenders, lashing out against windshields, doing a dance of frenzy as the autos rolled out of the place. Even through our closed windows we could hear the flood of insanely vile language from the police, the unprintable oaths, the race words, the slime and filth of America’s underworld of race hatred compressed into these “guardians” of the law, and released now. There were about thirty of them grouped there at the entrance, and they flogged the cars as if the automobiles were living objects of their resentment.
(That was the experience, incidently, of the car which carried Paul Robeson. The police beat in the windshield and smashed at the car itself in their desire to get at the occupants.)
But that was only the beginning.…
It happened more quickly than it takes to tell it, but it must be told slowly. About thirty yards after I turned right on the state road, it began. On the left side of the road there were two policemen. The two policemen were about twenty feet apart, and between them were six or seven legionnaires with a great pile of heavy rocks. As my car came within range, they began to throw. The cops did not throw. They watched, smiling approval, and it became evident that these two policemen had been detached as guards for the group of rock-throwers—just in case a car should stop and turn on the rock-throwers.…
One reacts slowly, and I only comprehended what was happening when the first rocks crashed against the car. The first hit the door frame, between the front and rear windows; the second hit the frame of the windshield; two more heavy rocks crashed into the body of the car. The cops held their bellies and howled with mirth.…
And so it went, from group to group, through that nightmare gauntlet.
Then, suddently, we had to slow down. The car ahead of us had fared worse than we; every window was smashed, even the rear window. I remember saying to R—–,
“The road is wet. They must have gotten the gas tank or the radiator.”
There was a dark wetness that flowed out of the car ahead of us; and then we realized that it was blood, but an enormous flow of blood that ran from the car that way and onto the road.
The rocks began again, and I jockeyed on. We had gone over a mile now. The car ahead pulled over to the side and the driver sat with his head hanging over the wheel. His head was bloody all over.…
Two miles or so from the concert grounds, a car had pulled into a gas station. This car, like so many others, left a trail of blood behind it. Five adults and one child emerged, and they were all covered with blood from head to foot. The child was weeping softly and they stood like people dazed, and a few feet away a group of young hoodlums hurled rocks at the passing cars. I pulled over to the gas station to stop and see if we could help the wounded people, but a cop stationed there ran at us, screaming oaths and beating the car with his club. When he started to draw his revolver, we drove on. Another car stopped and R—–, turning around, saw the policeman beat the windshield of the car in with his club while he drew his revolver with his other hand. It was behavior which bordered on the paranoid, and though I have many times in the past seen police go into their frenzied dance of hatred against workers or progressives, I never saw anything to equal this display. And I must make the point that these were not single instances, for a while later when we stopped at a crossroad, we saw another policeman smashing in the windshield of a car which had halted for directions.
In Peekskill, in Buchanan and in Croton-on-Hudson, we continued to run the gauntlet of rocks, and the road we traveled was running with blood and littered with broken glass. Never in all my life have I seen so much blood; never have I seen so many people so cruelly cut and bleeding so badly. At another service station we saw three cars parked in a great spreading pool of blood and the people trying to staunch the flow of it.
Eyewitnesses: Quoted by Westchester Committee
Rose C., Brooklyn: “Another rock smashed through the front and hit the wife of the driver, seated on the front seat. Glass cut her right arm, blood was streaming, and she became quite hysterical. The driver, upset by his wife’s condition and the condition of the car as well, stopped the car and told the state trooper he would go no further unless he was given protection. The state trooper said, ‘You god damn bastard, run ahead or I’ll club you.’ ”
..…
Henry F., of Brooklyn, arrived with some other World War II veterans to help prepare for the concert. “The paraders were shouting all kinds of profane language. One shouted, ‘We’ll give you solidarity, we’ll make you eat it!’ Then, with a grin on his face, ‘Dewey is going to protect you, oh yeah!’ ”
After the concert, he and other concert guards started to ride toward the entrance. “Suddenly, as if from out of nowhere a bunch of troopers swooped down on our cars and yelled, ‘Get out of the cars!’ Before we could comply, however, they were pulling us out to the side of the road. I saw the driver in the car in front of our car get hit in the kidneys by a cop for protesting the rough treatment. The troopers threw out everything in the car that wasn’t fastened down, from the glove compartment and from the trunk. They ordered us back into the cars.
“A moment later another bunch of about fifteen deputies and police ordered us out of the cars again, this time roughing us up worse than the troopers. Some of them evidently had had something to drink. Their faces were red and they were wild, and swinging indiscriminately at everyone with their clubs.
“They ordered us into the cars once more. A moment later another group of deputies and police ordered us out of the car. This time I remarked to my companions, ‘Here we go, out again and in again.’ One cop overheard me and yelled, ‘Hey, this son of a bitch is talking back!’ Whereupon a group of cops and deputies set upon me and the car occupants in the most violent and vicious manner that I have ever experienced. One grabbed me by the collar and throat at the same time, and threw me to the ground, face down in the dirt, a distance of about eight feet from the car, and started beating us all. My shirt and suit were badly torn. Another cop dragged me to my feet and said, ‘Get in and get going, you red bastard!’ Another, who was obviously a captain of police, said, ‘Go back to Jew town, and if we ever catch you up here again we’ll kill you!’ ”
John N., New Jersey: “One of the troopers said, ‘Let’s get these bastards.’ One of them stopped at the front right window where I sat. He took careful aim and shoved his nightstick, point first, at my left eye. I ducked my head when I saw it coming. The club missed the eyeball and caught the corner of the lid. It began to bleed, and when I brought my head up, he aimed at the eye again. I fended the club off with my arm.
“The police ordered us out of the car. Then, as we got out, they began to club us over the head.
“I was forced to run through a gauntlet of 15 to 20 policemen. Each of them clubbed me across the head or back. I tried to escape. They threw me to the ground and continued the beating. One of the policemen noticed a bandage on my left hand, which had been burned a week before. He jumped on the hand and ground his heel into the bandage, fracturing one of the burned fingers.”
Sarah M., Bronx: “I saw several injured people ask the troopers and policemen for help. They were not only refused help, but were laughed at, called such names as ‘Dirty Jew,’ ‘Dirty n—–,’ and some of those injured were hit with the billies of the policemen. I also saw some troopers and policemen throw rocks at the cars and buses.”
William G., Queens: “As we were riding by, several of the state troopers cursed at us with epithets like ‘Get out of here, you dirty so-and-so’s.’ ‘You got what was coming to you, you dirty n—– lovers.’ I saw the state troopers joking and talking to the very hoodlums who were endangering our lives.”
Marvin L., Flushing, L.I.: “During all of this, the cops used all kinds of vile epithets, i.e., ‘Spread their legs and hit them in the groin.’ This last was to the cops who were beating the men in the car ahead.”
Irving W., Corona, N.Y.: “Repeatedly, men in their late twenties and also middle aged, wearing American Legion hats, and light blue overseas caps of another organization, came up to the low stone wall near me, screamed fifthy unprintable remarks, shook their fists and threatened. ‘You’ll never get out of here alive!’ and ‘Wait till you yellow bastards try to leave tonight!’ These were definitely mature participants of the parade and not teen-age boys.”