Any nostalgia you might have had for the 1960s begins to break up after you read Breslin’s columns on the assassination of John F. Kennedy. When you read the work that comes in the four years that follow, it is gone. Instead, vividly, Breslin shows you the great price of attempting to wrench a society from the complacent ignorance of the status quo.
Looking back at these great battles more than sixty years later, when our society is again riven and violent, it is easy now to understand the Latin, even if yours is as rusted as a door hinge to your adolescence: status quo ante bellum.
But Breslin was writing these things as they happened. It was a time when it appeared the status quo was going to change and despite the death of Kennedy and his sail-snapping Camelot, America might, if not mature, at least move forward.
On July 2, 1964, Lyndon Baines Johnson, the 36th president of the United States, signed into law the Civil Rights Act.
On July 18, there were riots in Harlem.
There is an easy first thought of irony in this. But we can put that away. Coincidence is more like it.
There had been riots before in Harlem, and they most often started because of the way a police officer in a foreign land attempted to impose himself. Shooting, arrest, it didn’t really matter. Because in Harlem everyone knows what is behind this: an inequality in income, in opportunity, in education and in justice. Fear by whites. Breslin had written about these in May.
The legislation was all right and would do a great deal of good and lay part of a foundation so strong that no one could foresee a crack. But on Thursday, July 18, two days after James Powell, 15 and Black, was shot three times by off-duty police lieutenant Thomas Gilligan, who was white, the shooting, the police response to the shooting and a growing divide in the community over whether violence was a better approach than nonviolence in seeking change, all were on the table as partial explanations as summer seemed to boil over. None were the cause.
“I’m a Tom and I’m prepared to be a Tom when I can stop women and children from being shot down in the streets,” one great leader, Bayard Rustin, told a crowd. He was advocating for calm.
“We Want Malcolm X. We Want Malcolm X. We Want Malcolm.” The words come out with smiles from the bright, unworn faces of the young, seen on newsreels advocating for something more.
“The days of the sit-in, the lie-in, the crawl-in, the beg-in is outdated,” said Malcolm X.
The incident itself, looking back, had some similarities with an incident on February 4, 1999, when police fired 41 shots at 22-year-old Amadou Diallo. Stopped near his building, he ran for a doorway. He then went for his wallet. They went for their guns, thinking he had one. Nineteen shots, the medical examiner found, had struck the Guinean immigrant.
In this 1964 case, Powell raised his right hand as he stepped out of a hallway where he had chased a white superintendent who had hosed down other Black students sitting on his steps, his stoop. Some said the superintendent had hurled the obvious epithets. He would clean up these dirty “N—s.” Some said Powell had a knife—he had brought two with him from the Bronx, one of his friends said, when he came down for a summer program at the Robert F. Wagner school. Others said Powell had raised his hand in defense when Gilligan pointed his revolver and thrust his gold shield at him.
The only knife that came into it was about eight feet away, where one was found in the street, according to reports from the time.
Downtown, a hot summer and riots had been anticipated at City Hall and at the offices of news organizations.
In May, Breslin moved to Harlem. He told his Editor-in-Chief, Jim Bellows, in a memo that he would use small words to capture big concepts. Bellows prints the memo in his autobiography:
Tomorrow night I intend to move into somebody’s apartment in Harlem . . . What I intend to do there is simple. Build five parts and build them on anything of this sort: small facts . . .
The entire story is based on one idea: These are people. They are bewildered, uncared about and angry. They have a right to anger because white people would prefer to speak to them in great generalities and do nothing about the housing or the type of food they have to eat because of the salaries they make . . .
The result were five columns couched as “Reporter’s Notebooks,” which was a genre that newspapers used when the editors wanted to suggest that what you were getting was the raw scribble from the scene, untouched by rewriters in the main office, which of course was rarely the case, though in fact Breslin’s work usually came in pretty close to how he filed it.
The series was introduced this way:
“There is poverty in Harlem, and violence and hatred, and there are marriages too, and humor and friendliness, and, most of all, there are people, 450,000 of them. . . . Today on the brink of a long hot summer that raises fears . . . Breslin begins a five-part inspection of Harlem and its people.”
This tells you who the audience was. Part of that audience rode commuter trains on an elevated track across One Two Five Street before it chh chhed and clacked and rattled through Spanish Harlem and then dove down below Park Avenue. You could see into tenement windows through torn curtains if you looked out of yours as the train pulled out of the station and headed downtown. A glimpse, at least, of a southeast portion of Harlem. If you stepped out onto the platform and looked east, you were looking out at a main artery of Harlem. In daylight there was everything from records to buy to dentists to see to bars where you could also add a little hope to your day by giving some change to the numbers man.
Breslin’s five notebooks from Harlem were written toward the end of May.
Thirteen months earlier, Martin Luther King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” had been published in his newspaper, laid out beginning on the front page.
“For years now, I have heard the word ‘Wait!’ ” King wrote. “This ‘Wait’ has almost always meant ‘Never.’ ”
Perhaps the act of publishing said something about a shift in editorial consciousness at the Herald Tribune, but if you left Harlem, you still couldn’t get a cab to take you back home.
The columns are important. They were important when they were written, because this kind of simple exposition that Breslin used was mostly reserved for the foreign desk for frontline accounts from war zones and the like. They are important now as pebbles tossed midstream in a series of events unfolding from 1919, 1935, 1943, 1964, 1965, 1967 through at least May 2020. Riots. Riots. Riots. Riots. Riots. Protests.
The notebooks began with Hope: a marriage between a Marine, Carroll Taylor, 24, and a young woman, Sandra Hopkins, at Salem Methodist Church. But the notebook page turns and it is clear that it is Hope against History.
“I was just understanding how you figure out your life or your future or whatever it is on a day like this when you happen to be colored,” Breslin asked.
“I don’t want to know about that now,” Taylor said.
This is Notebook Number One. It goes from Hope to History to Firepower.
Across the street are the buildings where the police believe the young kids who claim they are going to kill white people this summer sat on steps and stare at police cars.
The column ends with one of those couplets that neatly summarize the fact that news reporters are best at predicting the past.
“Riot,” the bartender was saying in Maxie’s. “Who’s got time for that? People have to go to work every day. Doesn’t anybody know that?”
Notebook Two, Notebook Three, Notebook Four expand on each of the themes he had laid out in his memo to Jim Bellows. Money is one:
“Money,” a three your old says as she holds out two pennies in her hand. Her mother is being dispossessed at this time. The child runs to the store on her own and uses her money to buy little wax bottles filled with sweet fluid. Soda, Breslin says. Her mother gives her a nickel more. She is preoccupied.
Police is another: the fight between a Black soldier and a cop in 1935, the arrest of a shoplifter by police and how an unfounded rumor of the youth’s death turned into shops destroyed in 1943, and now this, James Powell. Breslin is not a historian or a conscience.
He neither blames the cops nor justifies their actions, nor does he say, he just shows: They are the only officials anyone sees on the streets. His coda:
“A mockery . . . of all the big thinking and big show and big money that this town is supposed to have,” he says in Notebook Four.
He is there as his reader’s witness. He is there to remind us.
There is one other thing that sticks out when you read these columns: Breslin was accompanied by a man with a gun. By now he is on his way to making serious money, the kind news reporters called “TV money.” The kind that just ten years later would be the equivalent of more than $600,000 depending on how you compounded the growth. Like a foreign correspondent on network TV wearing a flak jacket and a helmet and accompanied by the armed ex-soldiers detailed to them, the man with the gun is there, Breslin says, because 21 years after the last riot in Harlem, someone was concerned about a white man walking around Harlem.
When the riots happen, Breslin comes back to Harlem. He is driven up, as he cannot drive. He will never learn.
“We grew up with all this, always racing to a fire or a murder or something. Always. Always something terrible,” Kevin Breslin said.
“Like the riots in Harlem, we had to drop him off close by. My mother is driving and leaving him there. He just got out. And like, he would just leave. We’d just drive away. We (James and I) were nine or ten at the time. We were in our pajamas.”
What he writes about Harlem is what is captured in the headline to the July 20 column that appeared on the front page: “Fear and Hate—Sputtering Fuse.”
The shirtless children ran through the gutters and played with the broken glass and the dull brass cartridge shells from the riot of the night before.
The flat sky was an open oven door and its heat made people spill out of the tenements and onto the stoops . . .
The cadence eerily reminds you of Sam, and his dark, terrible note. Sam did, in that note, capture the pain of the city though in his case it was a canvas for his madness. Here it sets a scene.
The cops were everywhere, four and five of them on a street corner, wearing white steel helmets and the people of Harlem watched them and hated them yesterday afternoon.
“When I see a white cop, I can’t help myself, I just can’t stand looking at one of them,” Livingston Wingate was saying.
Wingate was a lawyer for Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited (HARYOU) and Breslin took his statement as a harbinger of the night to come.
When people of position talk the way he did the trouble is bad. And yesterday afternoon, while everybody in Harlem waited for the sun to go down and night to cloak the streets and make moving around easier, you wondered just how bad it would become.
Breslin shifts the scene, puts himself in the car in which he was driven to Harlem as it pulls to the curb to make way for fire trucks on 129th Street. And then he gets to the heart of the matter:
Right away, somebody moved off the stoop, a kid with a shaved head and a gold polo shirt.
The “kid” whose age Breslin puts at 19, goes from stoop to stoop collecting some other youths.
He said something to them and they looked at the car . . . Then he came walking back . . . and when you stared back at him, his eyelids came down and made his eyes narrow. “What are you looking at you big fat white bastard?” he said. “Oh, come on, it’s too hot for this nonsense,” we told him. “We’re goin’ to show you what’s nonsense,” he said. “We’re going to stick some nonsense right into your fat white belly.”
A firefighter with an axe comes up. The kids ignore him. This is Harlem. “‘What the hell are you doing here?’ ” the fireman said to Breslin. “‘Don’t you listen to the Newspapers? . . . They were stoning us last night . . . you don’t know what it was like here. They were trying to kill us. Get out of here if you got any brains.’ ”
There was no fire. The trucks pull away. “‘Hey, fat white bastard,’ the shaved head called out. ‘Why don’t you stay around here till these trucks leave?’ ”
The trucks left, the kids surrounded the car, and one tried to get in the back door. It was moving too fast. But the next time Breslin is driven to a riot in 1991 there was to be no such luck.
In the case of the 1964 Harlem riot, the column goes on and makes all the expected points about civil rights and garbage cans from roof tops; about sinful history and a Black arm throwing something; about publicity and rabble-rousing.
The Harlem riots were not an isolated event. Nor were the riots that erupted in other cities the next year and in the following years the only fissures. Hardly. There was heat and violence and ignorance across the nation. There were plenty of states which had many ugly, openly hate filled places. It was on this map of the United States that the great, memorialized events took place.
There was on August 9, 1964, what Breslin called “the second funeral” for Andrew Goodman, the civil rights worker who on the night of June 21 had been shot and killed with a racist’s .38 caliber handgun—one likely drawn from a the holster of a Sheriff’s deputy—and then buried, possibly still alive, in a 100-foot-long, 25-foot-high red clay wall along with his fellow Freedom Summer activists, Michael Schwerner and James Chaney, in Philadelphia, Mississippi.
Chaney was a n— and they are easy to kill. Goodman and Schwerner were Jew n— lovers from New York, and you were, of course, supposed to kill people like this.
Breslin captured the twisted Klan logic. The logic of the State of Mississippi that would be the decision not to prosecute after the alleged killers were identified and the bodies dug out seven weeks after they were interred was something else again. The state’s only prosecution came much later. The guilty verdict: For manslaughter. Not murder. It came 41 years to the day that the three young men were killed.
The federal prosecution by the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division was ferocious and it would come swiftly. It would be led by a man named John Doar, a Republican, who was already known as the face of the government’s civil rights efforts. He rode across Alabama with the Freedom Riders in 1961. He and a federal marshal led the squad that escorted James Meredith into the University of Mississippi in 1962. Before those doors were opened, and they were not opened wide, a governor had been leaning against them to keep them closed since the day Meredith first applied, and a student and citizen militia fired on the National Guard accompanying Doar, Meredith and the marshal. The army had to be called in and there were two civilians dead and at least 166 National Guard and 48 Army soldiers wounded or injured.
In 1965 Doar, as an Assistant Attorney General and a statement of Lyndon Johnson’s determination, walked from Selma to Montgomery with the thousands of freedom marchers who, after two thwarted efforts, succeeded in arriving on their third march. This week, he was already supervising an FBI investigation into the murders. Soon he would begin doing what he would become known for, meticulously building a case. In 1967, he managed to get convictions against 7 of the men involved in the crimes. Those included a Sheriff’s deputy and the state head of the Klan.
But today, on August 9, Breslin was at the Ethical Culture Society on Central Park West. The widow of Schwerner and the mothers of Goodman and Chaney held hands. A student, Ralph Engelman, who was a part of the voter registration drive, spoke, Breslin said.
“Andy risked not only death, but also dying in vain. How fast the public forgets this is a question.”
The Goodman nanny, a Black woman, wept. “I raised him. I nursed him. They go and kill him.”
“We Shall Overcome” was sung as the mourners exited. The police stood straight and the chauffeurs were somber, Breslin said, and “all of 64th Street” seemed to be crying. And then the procession headed to Mt. Judah Cemetery in Cypress Hills, Queens. And when it was over, there was Breslin. Again alone.
It was much easier burying Andy Goodman in Queens yesterday afternoon than it was burying him at night in Philadelphia, Miss.
Then gravedigger William Weatroski came up and stuck a red wooden stick into the dirt at the head of the mound. A small black plastic sign was on the stick. “Andrew Goodman,” it said.
Weatroski took a red bandana from his hip pocket and began wiping his face with it.
“What’s that?”
“Nothing. I was just talking to myself. I was just wondering how long the name on the sign is going to last.”
The staying longer than anyone else. The noting of detail. The tying of the opening themes together in a deft noting of the ease of burial, this time. The talking to the gravedigger. These are all familiar elements by now, already part of journalism’s professional curriculum after the legend-building Kennedy column. This is how to cover a crime and its aftermath and capture with simplicity what it means and what will endure.
This time he shows you how to incorporate what already had become known as “The Gravedigger” into a story with a sweep even larger than the murder of a president, who after all, whatever he embodied, was just one man, embodying hope. These three young men represented a nation’s reluctance to face a foundational crime, one that without being faced makes hope impossible. In order to tell it in this column he uses the gravedigger. It isn’t the rote repetition of a journeyman, it is, in this case, used as a motif. Everything before it is strictly necessary, plain, matter of fact, and takes you there.
He will use the sweat and hard work that goes into this technique now in column after column as he serializes over the course of columns and years the struggle, the failures and the successes in trying to confront this crime dividing a nation.
Soon enough, there was the Nation of Islam and the violence it wrought, as this was another group who wanted the privilege of living separately and didn’t want any disagreement.
And there was Breslin, on February 28, 1965 attending their annual convention in the Chicago Coliseum which he viewed as an ugly sideshow with Elijah Muhammad of Chicago a pitchman for violence.
He lives in a sand-blasted $15,000 house and he slumped between bodyguards in the backseat of a new Cadillac limousine. But he wants more than just money. He wants his people to be violent. And he has turned the Black Muslims into the Mafia of the Negro people. . . .
He is an old pale-faced, ignorant little burglar . . . but somehow he is able to put violence into the ugly shaved heads who surround him . . .
Breslin points out the attendance of this the most important annual gathering was just a couple of thousand, and they did find the energy to drag a dissenter from his seats and beat him, because they did not like a speech he gave in a park.
This fierce beating came a week after Malcolm X at 39 was murdered on Sunday, February 21, in Harlem’s Audubon Ballroom—gunned down by followers of Elijah Muhammad’s violent Black nationalists. The column appeared on Thursday, February 24.
The Unity Funeral Home is a two-story white brick building with a green canopy going out to the curb of Eighth Ave. in Harlem between 126th and 127th Sts. The sidewalk in front is white from crushed rocksalt. The Inez Beauty Lounge is on the left. The Nina bar is on the right.
They hold the wake of Malcolm X in this setting. It will last until Saturday morning. Then he will be buried.
The body of Al Hajj Malik Shabazz, Malcolm X’s full name when he died, or Malcolm Little, as he was born, or Big Red, as he was known on 125th St., was in a small green carpeted chapel in the rear of the second floor of the funeral home last night.
Almost everything else about the case will be a matter of controversy and documentaries and drawers and drawers and bags and files of police and FBI evidence and the testimony of many. But when Elijah Muhammad stepped onto the stage in midafternoon, there was only one thing that was important to him: he had told his followers in the movement that he was not going to be killed in revenge—Allah would see to that, Breslin reports. Malcolm was killed for the essential crimes of having a mind open to evolving beliefs and the reckless audacity to point out the hypocrisy of a political leader—Elijah Muhammad—and his numerous affairs.
The shopworn cheapness of this little burglar, as Breslin characterized him, would be a theme echoed by Breslin in his later depictions of the political catastrophe of Nixon. There, once again, John Doar, Republican, plays an important role. After much wrangling, arm-twisting and an understandable concern over making the right choice by Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, the New Jersey Democrat Peter Rodino, he is appointed its chief counsel. Doar would fill two essential needs: a bipartisan definition of the investigation and a strong prosecutorial mind.
He would lead with a quiet passion the methodical gathering, cross indexing and preparing of all the evidence in a case that became known popularly as Watergate. By the time of Nixon, Doar already had plenty of experience with the idea that the law of the land did not apply, some thought, when a sense of privilege of race or class was a motive for cheap crimes, and plenty of confidence that meticulous work documented on index cards in different colors could bring it all back down to the idea that was America.
In March 1965 there was Selma. TV and radio captured the sweep and significance and historic moment of the five days of marching from Selma to Montgomery with leaders like Martin Luther King, Ralph Bunche, and leading another chapter in a movement, Philip Randolph, the union organizer of the Pullman Porters who were all Black and all underpaid and unrepresented railroad workers. They were accompanied by federal generals and their troops and helicopters as well as FBI agents and US marshals in their suits with their Justice Department authority.
Breslin wrote more than a dozen columns on Civil Rights in between the murder of Malcolm X in February and St. Patrick’s Day on March 17. He had been in Harlem, Chicago and in Selma. In a number of these columns, written in Alabama and when he returned to New York, he captured with simplicity and in his detailed, matter of fact way, a few of the underlying reasons for the march and the underlying qualities of the marchers and the opposing forces of a state’s history endorsed by a backward governor who flew a Confederate flag above that of the United States on his statehouse. Breslin did not give the northern, liberal state in which he lived a pass either.
A column that appeared soon after on March 25 had this headline over it:
ALABAMA NEGRO SCHOOL:
COAL STOVES, COLD KIDS
A shack in a dirt field behind the school serves for a bathroom. There is a small coal bin on the side of the school. A tin basin, used by the students for carrying coal inside to the pot-bellied stoves, is on the ground next to the bin. A long-handled axe stands beside the building. The students gather wood at lunchtime and chop it for the fires inside.
. . . The principal, John Bowen, who also teaches the fifth and sixth grades, stood outside the school yesterday.
. . . “Well,” he said. “I work for the county school system. You shouldn’t work for a person, then give him bad publicity. But I have to say to you can’t learn in this school. There’s no way to learn here. It’s just impossible.”
The column had opened by setting the scene beside the march route, Route 80, in Lowndes County, Alabama. It describes the public school for 80 students as a once yellow building, with all the glass windowpanes gone and a roof that flaps in the winter wind.
In the winter, the wind comes strong and blows parts of the roof away and the students sit in class under the cold sky.
A boy repaired one of the benches the students sat on. A metal sign covered a hole in the floor. One of the brightest students would leave the school in a couple of years to join her father, who was a sharecropper in the fields. The column is a meticulous demonstration of what “separate but equal” meant to the governor of Alabama, George Wallace. School books from 1939. Kids with torn pants, a student whose ambition was to wait on tables. Shoes with no laces. No lunch at lunch time. One boy eats his white bread with hot sauce on his way to school in the morning. This is a long column. And it goes on in this painfully detailed way for the readers of the Trib.
The lunch period ended and Bowen said goodby and went back into school with these little children who are brought up as semi-human beings.
And the visitor drives off. Down the highway where the state troopers sang, “The n—s are coming,” as the marchers marched for putting things like this school into the past, Breslin says, in thousands now, in Montgomery, where “the great Tony Bennett” is present to entertain the marchers. The day before the state legislature had passed a resolution condemning the ministers who joined the marchers.
And the Governor of the State of Alabama, of the United States of America, which in 1965 has the Rolen School as part of its great educational system, sits in his office and says he is not going to give in to this mob rule of Communists.
The people here must be seen to be believed.
Breslin writes more columns, capturing the casual racism of a State Senator commenting as the marchers sing and come by the statehouse. “Tell you one thing,” this lawmaker is quoted as saying, “Taint anybody can’t equal n—s for keeping time to music.”
And then Breslin, and his friend, Fat Thomas the bookmaker, stage a Retreat From Selma, which Fat Thomas, at the moment retired and weighing 485 pounds—he has been as slender as 415 and has had an avoirdupois as substantial as 495 according to Breslin over the years—has checked into the Jefferson Davis Hotel, and is now, after breaking furniture and failing to change anything else, he is checking out.
In a tour of the town, Fat Thomas, whose name on numerous rap sheets is listed as Thomas Rand, had observed:
“All they do is sell guns down here.
“A guy goes into the store orders a pound of baloney, a 100 rounds of ammunition, and a loaf of Wonder Bread.”
Abused in Selma, insulted in Montgomery, where one person called out “You fat beatnik” and where a shoeshine stand owner ordered his shoeshine boy not to polish the shoes of this “white trash,” Fat Thomas, at the airport took out a little book he had been keeping during his stay. Bookmakers, when they were not carrying flash paper, often carried one of these little notebooks.
He started calling every place that had abused him. He told them all the same thing. “Go out and buy yourself a Dalmatian dog so he can bark when he smells the smoke . . . Because your joint is going to have an accidental fire in the middle of the night very soon.”
Then Fat Thomas hung up, drank his beer and got on the plane for New York, which is where he and everybody else belongs.
Fat Thomas, whose existence a short man with a big ego, Abe Rosenthal of The Times, had doubted, went home to people like Marvin the Torch who specialized in accidental fires and who Gloria Steinem had attested was very real.
Steinem, who started Ms. and who found Ronnie Eldridge instrumental in setting up the Ms. Foundation, would share a number of adventures with Breslin in the years to come. Some of them were with an amazing group of writers at New York, and some of them in what can only be called “The Wilderness of Mailer,” their quixotic 1969 bid for city office in New York—with her as press secretary and Breslin in the City Council president slot and Mailer of course on the top of the ballot as the mayoral candidate—on the secessionist ticket that promised to bring statehood to New York City, bring decision making down to the neighborhood level, and give a city-state the political clout that it warranted as an economic engine for America. The whole thing was set up not to win, but to make a point. At least for Breslin and Steinem. Mailer started to take it seriously.
But first there was Selma, and later there was the beginning of Bobby Kennedy’s campaign, and then there would be the assassination of Martin Luther King and then the assassination of Bobby. But now he had left Selma and was back home in New York, a city not immune from a pernicious form of racism and a less visible form of segregation. These columns he wrote after returning from Selma were perhaps the trickiest to manage in the diction and length of a column as they tried to combine poverty, race, and apathy and weave it all in the context of what seemed to matter most, when in the meantime these troubles remained unresolved. And do it all without abstraction.
He had been home from Selma just a few days when the first of these columns appeared, on St. Patrick’s Day.
It was a very important day in New York when the city’s Irish Catholic Americans would parade up Fifth Avenue following a green stripe painted down its center that passes by St. Patrick’s Cathedral, “The Powerhouse” of the faith. Francis Cardinal Spellman would be standing in front of its wide open grand doors to give the faithful his blessing.
In 1965, St. Patrick’s Day, which is celebrated on March 17 in Manhattan, came two days after President Lyndon Baines Johnson gave his historic “We Shall Overcome” speech, which used language of the Civil Rights movement and urged the passage of the Voting Rights Act:
“At times history and fate meet at a single time in a single place to shape a turning point in man’s unending search for freedom,” Johnson said before the Joint Session of Congress. “So it was at Lexington and Concord. So it was a century ago at Appomattox. So it was last week in Selma, Alabama.
“There, long-suffering men and women peacefully protested the denial of their rights as Americans. Many were brutally assaulted. One good man, a man of God, was killed.”
The Reverend James Reeb was killed on March 11, and the presidential aide Dick Goodwin was already thinking about the speech he would craft for Johnson.
Breslin wrote, “So many of these deaths in the civil rights movements have been wasted because they came when people were interested in other things. But the Rev. James J. Reeb did it right. He was white, not black, and he went out while everybody was looking.”
Johnson said, “There is no Negro problem. There is no Southern problem. There is no Northern problem. There is only an American problem. And we are met here tonight as Americans—not as Democrats or Republicans—we are met here as Americans to solve that problem . . .
“But even if we pass this bill, the battle will not be over. What happened in Selma is part of a far larger movement which reaches into every section and State of America. It is the effort of American Negroes to secure for themselves the full blessings of American life.
“Their cause must be our cause too. Because it is not just Negroes, but really it is all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice.
“And we shall overcome.”
Breslin wrote:
No, the City of New York is not Selma. Don’t ever accuse this joint of being a small town. We’re too sophisticated for that. We don’t pull off big messy civil rights murders. We kill people differently. We maneuver them around and box them in and then we let them sit and die as human beings a little bit at a time, day after day on the streets. Then we let time do the rest . . . Then we sit in trains and read the Newspapers about Selma. . . .
There is a simple thing which can be done about this. A very simple thing. Stand up like a man. New York ought to try this just to see how it feels. . . . Stand up and see what it’s like to be a man . . . and give some kid a chance . . . The President of the United States stood up on Monday night and it was a sight you are never going to forget. But right now, on St. Patrick’s Day, when there usually is a green stripe running up Fifth Ave., the City of New York sits with a stripe down its back. The stripe looks just a little bit yellow today.