Conclusion

If there is no struggle, there is no progress.

—Frederick Douglass, 1857

The story of Rochester, New York, makes clear that even among a relatively small Black population in a medium-sized city, there was no single Black movement nor one distinct path to freedom. Black activists carved out a series of simultaneous movements, which were complicated and continuously contested. From goals to methodology, activists and organizations competed to define and stretch the boundaries of their lived experiences. And in the 1950s and 1960s, the space for such multifaceted efforts had expanded. What made this moment possible was not just a renewed effort by Black activists; Black activists had continuously fought for equality, for their freedom rights throughout the history of the United States. Rather, in the postwar world, economies were booming, opportunities were abundant, and in the face of Black insurgency, white liberals ceded some room to Black advancement.

Black folk in Rochester seized this moment, striking the hammer while the iron was hot. At the beginning of the 1960s, they used the burgeoning civil rights movement and its new strategies of direct action protest to overturn the complacent relationship between the Black leadership and the white leaders in the city. Once that was accomplished, these new Black leaders made inroads across their community, which allowed for a certain unity of action, if not of ideology. After the 1964 uprising, these leaders took advantage of the fear the disturbances caused, in Rochester and elsewhere, to enact a full-court press on the city government, the churches, and the corporations to support economic, social, and political parity for Black folk. Some scholars have argued that the most powerful legacies of this decade of urban rebellion are the modern-day campaign for law and order and the War on Drugs. They have rightly noted that the rise of a white backlash in the form of Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon, and others was a cumulative outcome of these events.¹ But in 1964, this was only one possibility, and certainly not the most pressing prospect for Black activists in Rochester. Nor did the Rochester civil rights community condemn those insurgents engaged in the uprising, as happened in places like Harlem and elsewhere. Instead, Rochester’s Black leaders used the revolt as a springboard for more oppositional organizing than occurred in other cities and certainly more than occurred within national civil rights organizations. In 1964, Black activists in Rochester saw opportunity.

By 1970, they had pressed their advantage socially, politically, and economically using multiple vehicles. Some of the more conservative activists had joined or formed new branches of traditional national organizations, such as the NAACP and the Urban League, and local organizations, such as Action for a Better Community; while others, primarily activist ministers and radical women, had launched the more militant FIGHT, which spoke directly to their immediate needs. Many in the community joined several of the organizations and worked across them to increase opportunity for Black Rochester. These organizations and the movement as a whole were about more than just strong leadership, though that mattered as well. The ordinary citizens of Rochester evinced a broad conception of the movement, one that was not limited to singular strategies for racial advancement but rather necessitated attacking the system in diverse ways. These activists partnered with politicians, with schools, with settlement houses, and with locally headquartered national businesses. And importantly, they warned of impending revolt if their demands were not considered, negotiated, or met.

At any other time, the 1964 Rochester uprising may not have yielded such results. The sheer exasperation of Black folk combined with their willingness to engage in “riots” signaled to everyone that postwar prosperity could not exclude African Americans with their silence or consent. The sharp contrast between the ghetto-like conditions in Rochester’s two Black wards and the widespread wealth at the outer reaches of the city and in its suburbs created a crisis of conscience for many white residents, especially among some church leaders and their parishioners. Activists and emergent leaders understood that a moment had presented itself and that they must direct its course. The moment, however, was just that—a moment. It could not last.

By the close of the 1960s, the space that had opened was contracting once again, in Rochester and nationally. Locally, the moment passed at the confluence of several events, some of which also had national significance. FIGHT had begun as an issues-oriented organization in 1964, and in 1971 it confronted one of the deadliest issues to date. Nearby Attica state prison, the early recruiting ground for so many Muslims and the place where the Nation of Islam had gained constitutionally protected legitimacy, erupted. Inmates took several guards hostage as they seized control, and the state struggled with how to retake the prison.² Elliott “L. D.” Barkley, a Rochester native, quickly became a spokesman for the incarcerated men. In his now famous oration, widely televised at the time, Barkley made a plea to observers of the Attica events: “We are men! We are not beasts and we do not intend to be beaten or driven as such.… What has happened here is but the sound before the fury of those who are oppressed.… We’ve called upon all the conscientious citizens of America to assist us in putting an end to this situation that threatens the lives of not only us, but of each and every one of you, as well.”³ Barkley’s appearance sent shockwaves throughout Black Rochester, which had not yet heard there was trouble at Attica. Unable to get official information from the prison system, women such as Barkley’s mother, Laverne, descended on FIGHT headquarters, pleading for assistance. Several FIGHT ministers, past and present, traveled to Attica to obtain information on their behalf. Instead of merely gathering information, the Black ministers who appeared on the scene in those early hours of the standoff were drafted to serve on the negotiating team between inmates and the state.

As the standoff concluded in tragedy, six of the thirty-two inmates murdered in the retaking of the prison had been residents of Buffalo or Rochester and thus were known to the ministers. Assuaging in part their own pain, the ministers began to organize, helping local families to bury the victims, which included L. D. Barkley. Of primary importance, they raised funds to help assist the families. Lavern Barkley had amassed a hefty telephone bill during the uprising, calling legislators, entertainers, organizers, anyone she believed might have some influence. She remembered, “I would call and ask them to go to Attica, call there, do whatever they could, because I believed that a lot of people were going to lose their lives. I did this because I was fearful.” The FIGHT ministers paid the phone bill afterward.⁴ They also vowed to never forget and, thus, set about aiding the Rochester survivors in their resultant legal battles. In many ways the Attica events consumed the organization, appropriating much of its available resources—financial, intellectual, and especially emotional—for several years to come.

FIGHT suffered other losses at the onset of the 1970s. Since its inception, Minister Franklin Florence had been FIGHT’s most visible public face. Whether formally or informally, in his own right as president or through a figurehead, Florence remained the dominant figure in Rochester’s movements. Charismatic and flamboyant, his confrontational and bracing tactics had served FIGHT well, most notably in the struggle against Kodak. Yet within the organization, those same tactics were often less effective, and they ended up alienating many. After five years with Florence at the helm, the organization’s 1970 convention doubled as a referendum on Florence’s leadership. After an abortive attempt the previous year, Florence’s detractors put up a credible candidate, the mild-mannered Bernie Gifford, to run against him in 1970. It was not a close contest. Despite various maneuvers by the minister and a rump of diehard supporters, not all of them consistent with FIGHT’s constitution or the decorum expected of a man of the cloth, Florence lost in a landslide. Many viewed Gifford as a more measured voice for the organization. One FIGHT member described Gifford this way: “Bernie had a different style. He wasn’t as—nowhere near as articulate as Franklin [Florence]. He was smart, very smart intellectually, well read, but nowhere near the charisma that Franklin had.”⁵ Though divisive, Florence had been a compelling, and militant, spokesman for FIGHT. Without his promotion of an oppositional identity, some of the fight left FIGHT. The bitterly fought election confirmed FIGHT’s decline, both as a political force in the city and as a source of moral authority in the Black community. The organization continued to exist, but Raymond Scott, who would later take the helm, theorized with the benefit of hindsight that the Florence-Gifford election “was the demise of the organization, there. That was really the demise of it, because it was divided at that point. It had been a unified group—people maybe favored this or that—but it was a unified group. That was really the crystal clear division.… The spirit just wasn’t there. And it never returned. It never returned; that was the demise.”⁶

But internal dissension alone could not have caused the decline of the movement in Rochester. Many of the organizations that formed in the wake of the uprising were in flux; the FIGHT organization was transitioning from an issues-oriented group to an economic development corporation. It was inopportune that this conversion occurred at this moment. The nation was on the verge of deindustrialization and economic recession.⁷ FIGHT continued to serve as the voice of the community in its struggles with various power holders, particularly on issues of police brutality, employment, and housing conditions. But to effect real change, they believed their strategy must progress. Thus, as the Attica events culminated in heartache and as Florence’s influence waned, the organization entered a new phase of community development.

FIGHT began to operate community development corporations (CDCs), operating three substantial business ventures into the 1970s. The first of these, FIGHTON, emerged from the partnership with Xerox in the late 1960s. The company made electrical products and sold them to Kodak, Xerox, and other local businesses. Importantly, FIGHTON employed nearly two hundred people at its height. Second, FIGHT Square, a 3.6-million-dollar housing complex built on nine acres, was completed in 1972 under the auspices of FIGHT. This facility boasted 148 low-to-moderate-income residential units in ten buildings, each with a private entry and access to a yard, garden, or recreational area. The Black-owned facility also included a community space complete with an auditorium, a health center, a pharmacy, a barbershop, a beauty salon, and a laundromat. At the time, FIGHT hoped to secure additional space for an onsite childcare center.⁸ FIGHT Square was conceived as part of a total community, in which residents could find work with Black-owned CDCs, such as FIGHTON, and with the businesses built into the housing community, and then invest their incomes with Black organizations and businesses. A third venture, a second housing project known as FIGHT Village, came to fruition in 1974. This facility, comprised of 246 units of low-income public housing, has been managed by Franklin Florence under various auspices into the present moment but funded through the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). At one point, FIGHT leaders hoped it would include a shopping center as well.⁹

But the latter half of the 1970s were not kind to FIGHT, which continued to exist in a reduced fashion until 1978, when it fizzled without fanfare. The Rochester Democrat and Chronicle acknowledged FIGHT’s passing with a postmortem describing its slow unraveling. After a poor financial year in 1976, FIGHTON changed its name to Eltrex and sold the business to an African American, Matt Augustine, who had recently been hired to manage the company. Augustine continues to run the company with the same mission, employee base, and community spirit in which it began. In 1974, for the last time, FIGHT registered with the New York State Department of State as a charity, and by 1976, FIGHT was no longer registered. The registration was not the only cancellation in 1976. In that year, FIGHT closed its community office in the face of foreclosure for nonpayment of taxes. It appears that its last two years were spent trying to stave off repossession of its business ventures. FIGHT was unsuccessful in saving FIGHT Square, which was repossessed and sold. Though it has faced constant financial difficulties, FIGHT Village has survived.¹⁰

That FIGHT’s CDCs met with mixed results is representative of the era. One of Black Power’s greatest legacies is its insistent call for Black-controlled institutions. This included Black-owned businesses in Black neighborhoods and housing developments that flourished under the auspices of CDCs. While FIGHT was in the forefront of this movement in the late 1960s, many of these came of age in the 1970s and 1980s. As Black Power practitioners sought to “do for self,” they built and maintained cooperative housing ventures, which were often supported with a mixture of public and private funds and which relied on community management and continuous financial support.

As FIGHT and many of the civil rights organizations in Rochester made the transition from an issues orientation to an economy-building emphasis, the country entered one of the greatest economic recessions of the century. The postwar boom had inflated the collective national sense of prosperity and had exaggerated what was possible financially within a capitalist system. Locally, technologically driven companies, primarily Eastman Kodak, Xerox, and Bausch and Lomb, preserved Rochester as one of the most financially comfortable cities in the country much longer than many others. It was in that flush moment, of course, that Rochester’s civil rights and Black Power movements flourished and began to make economic demands of both the city government and these businesses.

This period of boom, however, was sure to bust. As Alejandro Reuss has stated, economists understand that “capitalist economies always go through boom-and-bust cycles, with recessions interrupting the process of capital accumulation and economic growth. Most of the time, these crises are shallow enough that ‘normal’ economic growth resumes without major changes in framework institutions,” but in a moment of contraction, fear and blame typically follow.¹¹ By 1973, the economy was in free fall, and the nation’s urban centers faced the brunt of it. This particular recession was caused by a combination of deindustrialization (a decline in manufacturing) and suburbanization. Deindustrialization caused a spike in unemployment, but it also significantly reduced tax revenues, which cities had come to rely on for their social welfare programs. Simultaneously, increasing numbers of taxpayers moved to suburbs and took their tax bases with them. Both factors had a deleterious effect on the nation’s cities. That these occurrences followed on the heels of nearly a decade of racial unrest and urban revolts allowed many to lay the blame for the demise of the cities at the feet of the Black Freedom Struggle and the white liberals who had supported it. As a result, the country was “divided by two different visions for its future … [and] the contraction of the state also meant the shrinking of the social imagination.”¹² As such, financial and moral support for Black economic development, community development corporations, and experimental training programs waned rapidly.

In Rochester, as nationally, the economic contraction created a mixed legacy for the movement. Xerox CEO Joe Wilson died in 1971, just after the company opened a new research center not in Rochester, but in Silicon Valley. This move away from Wilson’s beloved Rochester reflected the larger global historical capitalist forces that were underway. Black capitalism, once a locally conceived and implemented practice, was adopted at the national level by the likes of Richard Nixon. As historian Robert Weems and others have noted, Nixon implemented Black capitalism at the national level in large part to blunt, or defang, its radical potential.¹³ Thus we see in this economic contraction a contested and unresolved legacy for Black capitalism.

Furthermore, the narrative of the 1964 Rochester uprising would begin to take its modern form in this moment. Local commentator Bob Lonsberry recalled fifty years after the 1964 uprising, “The physical, economic and social damage lingers to this day. The riot destroyed the neighborhood and it remains in large part destroyed to this day. And that is nothing to celebrate.”¹⁴ One-time Rochester police officer Joseph Cimino recollected, “We [the police] thought we were on pretty good footing.… We were totally caught off guard [by the riot], and I still think to this day it was some overt actions at the dance that just started the whole thing.”¹⁵ In such recollections the uprising and the entire ten-year organizing effort that it birthed could be reduced in the popular imagination to a mistake on the part of the police and the destruction of a neighborhood that never recovered. Black folks were already responding to the decline of their neighborhoods during the 1964 revolt, and the subsequent rally to protect them was swept away by narratives that ignore the economic decline and hail law and order policing.

This book provides a more complete recounting of the long Black Freedom Struggle, a set of multifaceted social, political, cultural, and economic movements by examining the possibilities presented by the 1964 uprising in Rochester, New York. Understanding this struggle as a series of successes and failures or a wave that rises and falls ignores the incredibly repressive environment in which Black men and women have always had to live in the United States. At the very moment that the possibility of self-sufficiency and true Black Power might have been realized, the movement was forced to assume a defensive posture again. In Rochester, the Black community had raised the possibility by creating a path to bring social and economic change to fruition. The violence and repression of Attica forced the Rochester movement back into a defensive posture. The subsequent national cries for increased law-and-order policing only solidified this defensive stance, locally and nationally. And the economic recession made it possible to defund the very efforts for which they had so long fought, to abandon the moral imperative, and to simultaneously blame Black activists for the failure of the movement.

Slowly but surely the movement’s most talented and dedicated supporters abandoned vehicles such as FIGHT. Remaining true to the cause, many activists turned their efforts to the individual neighborhood and block associations in this new climate. Consider, for example, Mildred Johnson, whose fiery speech at the 1963 Baden Street rally attended by Malcolm X, among others, summarized so well the collective feelings of Black Rochester, which was then under siege from police brutality. “We are Black folks first,” Johnson insisted on that occasion. Johnson, who came from a family with deep activist roots in Black Rochester, later emerged as a key supporter of FIGHT. With the decline of FIGHT, Johnson transferred her considerable talents and unbounded energies to other projects, chief among them the Virginia Wilson Helping Hands Association, an organization named for her mother that provides housing assistance, legal counsel, and referrals to social service agencies and employment centers.

Mildred Johnson was hardly alone in continuing the good fight once this moment passed. After unsuccessfully contesting his ignominious loss for the FIGHT presidency in the election of 1970, including a legal challenge, Franklin Florence rejoined the fray. Almost fifty years later, he remained the senior pastor at Rochester’s Central Church of Christ and served as president of the Rochester Faith Community Alliance. Florence continued to be engaged with FIGHT Village, the low-income housing project that came into being in 1969 and for which he was instrumental in securing federal funding. Still a model housing project, FIGHT Village accepts Section 8 subsidies and boasts units with up to four bedrooms, expansive and professionally cared-for lawns, and off-street playgrounds. Residents use the housing office for assistance with translation, employment issues, and legal concerns.

Then there is Walter Cooper, one of the leaders of the “Young Turks” who, on arriving in Rochester as a young professional in the 1950s, promptly took on the established Black leadership for what he viewed as its complacency and neglect of the Black community. A tireless worker and investigator, Cooper was associated with any number of organizations over the years, among them the NAACP, the Urban League, and Action for a Better Community. Cerebral and scientific in his approach to social problems, Cooper kept his distance from FIGHT and especially Florence, whose style he considered incendiary and counterproductive. Cooper would not have been fazed by FIGHT’s departure from the political scene, preoccupied as he has always been with other concerns.

In 2009, the city of Rochester lauded Cooper for fifty years of community service. His other honors include appointment to the New York State Board of Regents as a regent emeritus. More recently, the city of Rochester opened the Dr. Walter Cooper Academy, an experimental school for children in kindergarten through second grade. Students make a pledge to uphold the “Cooper code.” The school’s motto, “Never give up,” summarizes well Cooper’s lifelong work. Over the past several decades, Cooper, now in his early nineties, has spent a good deal of his time prowling the hallways of the institution named after him. He has attended curriculum meetings and contacted parents to discuss their involvement in their children’s education. For Cooper, these efforts have been but the latest attempt to improve the education of Black children.¹⁶

In Rochester, as everywhere else across the United States, the Black Freedom Struggle remains an unfinished undertaking. In the wake of one of the first urban uprisings of that era, efforts to create the FIGHT organization spawned a set of movements that not only helped to transform Rochester but also had a national impact. During its brief and sometimes glorious moment in the political ascendancy, some in Rochester’s Black community enthusiastically embraced FIGHT, while others chose to work independently of it. Mildred Johnson fell into the former category, and Walter Cooper into the latter. Both stood on strong and sturdy shoulders. Whatever their ideological disposition or organizational preferences, Rochester activists were guided by the dictum of another Black Rochesterian, Frederick Douglass, who asserted that without struggle, there is no progress. Today in Rochester, as elsewhere, that struggle for progress and dignity continues.