Peekskill USA: Inside the Infamous 1949 Riots by Howard Fast Read Free Book Online Page A

here or not?”
    â€œI’ll ask the questions.”
    â€œLook—we’ve had a tough time here.”
    â€œYou’ll have a tougher time if you don’t God damn well do as we say. Who are you anyway?”
    I told him I was the chairman of the concert that never took place.
    â€œWho’s running it?”
    â€œThey never got here.”
    â€œAre you in charge?”
    â€œAs much as anyone, I guess.”
    â€œAll right,” he said. “You keep these people where they are. If anyone moves, if anyone tries to get away from here, there’ll be trouble. Understand?”
    â€œWe’ve got little children here. Don’t you understand what we’ve been through tonight?”
    â€œYou’re looking for trouble, aren’t you?” the trooper said.
    â€œI’m not looking for any trouble, trooper. We’ve had enough trouble. We want to get out of here.”
    â€œJust do as I say and keep them in their places or there’ll be hell to pay.”
    So I went through the crowd and along the line and told them that. “A little longer,” I told them. “We stuck it out until now, so we can stick it out a little longer, I guess. Just take it easy.”
    In a way that was the hardest part of the evening. Not so much the sitting there with a dozen state troopers stationed in front of us, legs spread, fingering their clubs—but to stay there after I learned what was behind it. And that was soon enough.
    They let me walk around, and one of the Westchester police was willing to talk. Briefly, he told me that one of the fascists—William Secor, his name turned out to be—had been knifed and had been taken to the hospital, and a rumor had just come through that he Had died. I often thought that it was only on the basis of this rumor that the police had entered the hollow at all, but I have no proof of that. In any case, if Secor was dead, every one of us who had held the road against the attacks would face a murder charge. That was why we were being kept here this way—so that they could get a report from the hospital and if necessary pull us in on a murder rap.
    (There was no knife among our men. Later, it was proved that Secor had been knifed by one of his own gang in the drunken frenzy of their attack.)
    I went back to our people. “I don’t understand it,” I said. “There were no knives in our group.”
    â€œThey had knives, plenty of them.”
    â€œCan they make a murder rap stick?”
    â€œIf they want to hard enough—I guess they can frame anything.”
    â€œAfter what happened tonight, can they try forty of us for murder?”
    â€œThey can if they want to, and they can get a conviction if they want to. They set this up, didn’t they?”
    I didn’t want to believe it. Here we were alive. All evening we had fought against the most monstrous and inconceivable mass lynching ever attempted in the northern states of America, not simply a riot or a mob demonstration, but a calculated attack to kill two hundred people, and because we had kept our heads and kept our courage, we had frustrated it; and now we were alive when no. one of us had had any real expectations of emerging alive; and now the police were here and the state troopers and all the fine legal protection that an American citizen comes to expect as his right, his lawful right in a democratic republic—and now we were being held so that a charge of murder could be brought against us, so that we could be framed into a great mass spectacle for the type of animal who had planned and executed the business of the night.
    It was hard to believe then, but it is not hard to believe now. The “monstrous” has become the accepted pattern of life, and frameup runs like a thread through the lives of all progressive Americans today, and the gibbering, conscienceless stools sit in the witness chairs all over the land, and their lies