Imposing Boundaries and Behavior

Shared misery, in the same confined space, produced a race-first consciousness in Rochester. As longtime local historian Blake McKelvey explained: “In the forties … a new migration from the south had more than doubled the city’s non-white population, with most of the newcomers settling in the Seventh Ward.”⁶ McKelvey failed to share with readers that few options existed for Blacks outside the Seventh Ward, whether in housing, schooling or recreation.

Though many larger cities had fought redline housing battles with some success by 1960, Rochester’s smaller Black middle class could boast no such achievement. A report by the statewide Human Relations Commission noted, “In 1958 … Rochester had the most rigid barriers against the sale of houses in the suburbs to Negroes,” even as the city’s “economy was attracting a greater influx of non-whites, proportionately, than any city in the state.”⁷ Further, many white Rochesterians, who remained in the city and experienced the deterioration of these neighborhoods, blamed the newcomers, rather than city hall, for the conditions. At the same time, they objected loudly and bitterly—most often to William Lombard, the chief of police—to the increased presence of African Americans. Olive Le Boo was a local resident who shared her grievances so vociferously with city officials that the mayor opened a file specifically for her correspondence. She complained of these “transient undesirable Negroes” or, more pointedly, “this low down hoodlum negro element.”⁸ By 1963, these conditions in the everyday lives of Black Rochesterians had the effect of blunting socioeconomic divisions among them, of decreasing class tensions, and of heightening racial consciousness, thereby fostering Mildred Johnson’s notion of being Black folks first.

Of all the obstacles that African Americans in Rochester faced, however, none caused a more immediate, visceral, and emotive response than police brutality. As always in oppressed communities, the police formed the vanguard of state repression. In early 1961, the local NAACP began to publicly protest police brutality against Black people.⁹ As with housing, so too with policing, the local NAACP was new to confronting city hall. Here the Young Turks, that recently arrived group of agitators, placed themselves at the forefront of efforts once again. Journalist Desmond Stone took note, reporting the arrival in Rochester of a new breed of Black leadership. “One thing is certain,” Stone wrote at the time, “the disappearance of the old Negro docility and the emergence of new, fiercely aggressive attitudes is bewildering to many police and citizens alike.”¹⁰ These new activists, individuals such as Walter Cooper, Constance Mitchell, and others, were behind the NAACP’s growing frustration with business as usual, an attitude best expressed on the explosive issue of police brutality. But this issue lent itself to support by a wide cross section of Rochester’s Black population, young and old, longtime resident and newcomer. Police brutality was one issue they all faced and could therefore get behind.

As policing Black bodies and movement became a constant source of contention for Black Rochester, local leaders proposed a multipronged counter attack. In the early 1960s, the Young Turks, under the leadership of Glenn Claytor and youth adviser Laplois Ashford, took it upon themselves to relieve some of this pressure on Black youth. They led teenagers on trips not only to explore nearby Letchworth Park and thereby to experience upstate New York’s natural beauty and foster wonderment but also to escape the constant urban surveillance. A second undertaking involved leading these youngsters in picketing the skating rink in town where they spent time. The presence of Black teenagers seemingly drew police units with their K-9 or police dog units. After all, the police and their dogs did not patrol recreational venues in other (white) city neighborhoods.¹¹ The picketing eventually led to meetings with city hall to end the practice. This young group of activists did not yet, in the main, have children of their own. Their actions were not of self-interest but, instead, reflected a general concern for the well-being of their larger community.

But as the Young Turks’s insistent demand for dignity and respect from the police grew, conditions worsened. Between 1962 and 1963, several cases of police brutality and harassment shook Black Rochester.¹² Three of these cases will serve to demonstrate the police terror and its total impact on community formation among African Americans at that particular moment. The first case involved an innocent gas station attendant harassed by police as he locked up the service center where he was employed. The second case had the police entering a religious service of the recently formed NOI, while the third involved a man beaten at a block party for moving his car from one side of the street to another while intoxicated. Together and separately, they showed the conditions that Black Rochester faced.

The first of these, the “Fairwell case,” riled Black Rochesterians because they considered the working-class victim an upstanding and productive member of the community. One stuffy August night in 1962 after completing his chores, Rufus Fairwell got ready to close the service station where he worked. Importantly, Fairwell’s uniformed employment at the station was a source of working-class pride for many in the community. Undoubtedly aware of this, two Rochester police officers pulled into the establishment and demanded to know what Fairwell was doing there.¹³ Local residents report that this type of harassment was common in their communities, particularly by specific officers. Fairwell, clad in his uniform, replied that he was closing up and produced a key to further attest to his legitimacy. The unimpressed officers tartly responded, “What’s a nigger like you doing with a key?” Fairwell likely responded in kind. The officers followed with a physical assault that left Fairwell with two broken vertebrae and confined to a wheelchair.¹⁴

The second case of police terror to infuriate Black Rochester involved members of the Nation of Islam, which had been operating quietly in the city for some years. In January 1963, several months after the Fairwell incident, two officers forced their way into the NOI mosque, reportedly acting on an “anonymous tip.” In the process, they disrupted a religious service in progress, all in search of “a man with a gun.”¹⁵ Accompanied by police dogs, their seemingly ever-present companions when patrolling the Black community, the officers arrested two Muslim men on the spot and recorded the names of every man present at the religious service. That was only the opening salvo in a larger campaign of repression against the NOI in Rochester and across the state. Weeks later, a grand jury indicted an additional seventeen male Muslims from the disrupted service. The saga of the Rochester Seventeen, whose travails may be seen as something of a prelude to the more famous and searing case of the Wilmington Ten, had begun.¹⁶

The third case of police brutality came just weeks after the violation of the mosque and was particularly brutal. This incident left A. C. White, another Black Rochesterian, hospitalized for twenty-one days and shattered any illusion that justice existed for the Black community.¹⁷ Although White was not regarded as a model citizen, as Fairwell or the members of the NOI were viewed, the community was no less furious about his case. White incurred the wrath of the police by moving a vehicle from one side of the street to another while a block party was in progress. Known for his hardworking ways during the week and his enjoyment of libations on the weekends, White was not entirely sober at the time.¹⁸ Still, the block party was a joyous affair where families and children from the neighborhood celebrated together as a community, no accident occurred, and no one had requested police intervention. Unconcerned with such niceties, several police officers assigned to observe the block party arrested White, brutally beat him in front of the revelers, transferred him downtown, beat him some more, and then delivered his mangled body to the emergency room. White would live to tell the tale, but Black Rochester was beside itself. Minister Franklin Florence, a recent migrant from Florida who would cut his teeth politically on the White case, recalled, “It was as if the police were saying ‘You don’t have any control over your neighborhood.’ ”¹⁹ With their gruesome brutality and disrespect, the police reminded Black Rochester of who ultimately controlled their neighborhoods.

For its part, the Black community acted in concert both to relieve the suffering of Rufus Fairwell and A. C. White and to defend them and the NOI members in their subsequent trials. When Minister Florence and others sought to locate White after the beating, their efforts took them first to the local jail. There they were told White was receiving medical care for his injuries. On what seemed a wild goose chase, they traveled to Strong Memorial Hospital, where they were told that no one by the name of White had been admitted. Frustrated, the men converged in the vestibule to discuss their next steps. As they did so, a Black maintenance worker perched above them on a ladder asked the men to continue looking at each other so as not to draw attention to what he was about to tell them. Florence and his companions did as they were asked but listened carefully to the janitor. The unnamed and unknown janitor directed the men to the basement of the hospital, where he said orderlies had taken White for treatment, out of the spotlight the hospital staff had anticipated. Florence thanked the man and then promptly found White and ensured continued access to him.²⁰

The extent of Fairwell’s and White’s injuries and the violation of a sacred religious space sparked outrage and an outpouring of activism in Black Rochester because it spoke to a common experience. As a result, Black Rochester’s organizing efforts rippled nationally. A united action committee, which included the now-veteran Young Turks and first-time activists, such as Minister Florence, alike, sprang up immediately following the attack on Fairwell. Groups such as the NAACP, the Human Relations Commission, and the Rochester Area Council of Churches were also well represented.²¹ The coalition’s aims were threefold: to raise money for Rufus Fairwell’s legal and medical expenses, to pursue action against the arresting officers, and to end police brutality and harassment in Black neighborhoods. The group soon commanded some attention from city manager Porter Homer, who met with representatives of the coalition repeatedly over more than two months. Despite the activists’ best efforts, Homer failed to resolve a total of nine cases of police brutality to their satisfaction and offered little to alleviate the problems. Eventually, the community activists turned to higher authorities, requesting an investigation of the Fairwell case by the Department of Justice.²²

It was the second attack, the one on the Nation of Islam, however, that galvanized national attention around police brutality in Rochester. Though just a small fraction of African Americans actually joined the NOI, its impact outsized its membership. Many non-Muslim African Americans reported attending NOI meetings on occasion. Still more purchased the group’s publications and kept abreast of its activities. Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X, and the NOI offered a mouthpiece for widely held sentiments regarding American race relations nationally, even if African Americans did not rush to join the group.²³

In Rochester, the NOI personified Black nationalism as the most readily accessible voice for Black militancy. Though numerically insignificant in 1962 and 1963, the NOI influenced a sizable portion of Rochester’s Black community, including its Christian ministers, who appreciated Malcolm X and his racial, if not his religious, ideology. Testifying to its local importance, police officials reported their increased awareness of the local NOI and quickly put the organization under surveillance, which led to the attack on the mosque.²⁴ What is more, the Rochester Seventeen, arrested immediately following the police intrusion, were well-known and respected members of the Black community. So when police arrested these men, their African American, non-Muslim neighbors rallied to their support. Finally, police did not perpetrate this attack on a public street, where Black Rochesterians had come to expect harassment, but rather in a private, sacred space—a religious temple. The assault on the Muslims eventually brought Malcolm to Rochester, which was not his first trip; however, his engagement with the larger Black community became deeper and more self-sustaining at that point.²⁵ For these reasons, the story of police brutality in Rochester must be understood in the context of the state attack on the Nation of Islam across New York.

Anti-Muslim Hysteria in New York State

As an organization born and raised in adversity, state repression and hostile propaganda were nothing new to the NOI. Even by this standard, however, the NOI had a hard time in 1963 in New York State, where a cabal of police, prosecutors, and journalists seemed determined to crush it. The Rochester events were central to a larger statewide campaign of repression against the NOI specifically and Black activism broadly. Rochester became significant in that larger campaign to blunt the growth of the NOI in the New York State prison system. Attica state prison, which would gain national prominence after its 1971 prison revolt, had special importance to Rochester, to Malcolm, and to the NOI.²⁶ Many Black Rochesterians knew family or friends incarcerated at the nearby prison. Local ministers often traveled to Attica to serve former congregants imprisoned there. For the NOI, Attica too was a major recruiting ground.²⁷ For this reason and for its Black nationalist position, prison officials across the country loathed the NOI, refusing to acknowledge it as a religious organization. Consequently, imprisoned NOI members were denied the rights, considerations, and privileges granted other inmates who professed a religious affiliation. NOI members at Attica boldly challenged the discrimination. They sued in federal court, seeking to have their organization recognized as a legitimate and constitutionally protected religious body. This suit, combined with others filed by NOI inmates throughout New York State, would have national implications. If successful, they would open the door for imprisoned NOI members everywhere in the country to stake their own claims.²⁸ The NOI in Rochester was intimately connected to Attica and Buffalo because the same minister served Muslims in all three places, or would have been expected to, in the case of Attica. For multiple reasons, therefore, an attack on Muslims in Rochester, the event responsible for Malcolm’s presence at the Baden Street rally, also threatened the NOI elsewhere in upstate New York, namely at Attica and in Buffalo.

With this case still undecided, it was as if the anti-Muslim coalition wanted to make a preemptive strike against the potential legitimization of the NOI in the prison system, a major source of recruits. The opponents of the Muslims seemed to strike especially hard in Rochester for three reasons: the NOI branch there was the most vulnerable in the state, it was in close proximity to Attica, and widespread agitation over the large Black migration to the city was widely shared by a broad cross section of the majority population. Eliminating the NOI could be read as a next step toward curbing the Black migration. The Muslim community in Rochester, like the larger Black community, was still in formation and so was more tenuous, for instance, than the NOI branch in Buffalo. As the forces of repression likely saw it, a fatal or crippling blow to the Muslims in Rochester would have larger consequences, demoralizing the NOI statewide and the anti–police brutality campaign then underway.

Given the close links between the NOI and the prison system, and the pushback to contemporary policing practices in Rochester, it was predictable that the campaign against the Muslims would be passed off as a war on crime in that city. In Rochester, the police and prosecutors needed the media to present their repressive tactics as necessary protection for the white majority. It was not coincidence that the following article, conflating Black migrants with the NOI and crime, appeared in a Rochester newsweekly on January 7, 1963, a day after the police barged into the Rochester mosque:

It hasn’t become the talk of the town yet, but in some sections of the city and, fortunately, among some high police officials, there are strong suspicions that the crime wave that hit Rochester the past year can be laid at the door of some Black Muslims.… The truth of the matter is that in the first nine months of 1962 Rochester experienced the greatest crime wave in its history. Most of them were committed by the riff raff of the Negro race. Migrants have been blamed for many of these crimes, but in recent months there has been a growing suspicion that the real cause for this big increase can be traced to the Black Muslims, whose membership is made up largely of convicts and ex-convicts. This reporter talked to a high-ranking police official two weeks ago and was told that there were strong reasons to suspect that Black Muslims are responsible for the record crime wave in the city.… It became known two weeks ago that the Black Muslims of Rochester have a temple or meeting place on North Street, above Buddy’s Casino. There they hold their meetings and sell copies of their official newspaper, published in Chicago.²⁹

Precise numbers on the NOI presence in Rochester at that time are not available, but in all likelihood the nineteen men in jail represented a substantial number, possibly even a majority, of the male Muslims in Rochester. The attack was meant to decapitate the local NOI specifically, to derail the state prison lawsuit, and to discredit the anti–police brutality campaign then taking place in Rochester. The subsequent reporting aimed to connect Black migrants with criminality in the larger community.

Black Rochester was determined that a campaign of brutality against the Black community, including the NOI, would not succeed. Given the gross attacks on their community, they drew on all possible resources, including Malcolm X, with whom they had some familiarity, to fight back. For his part, Malcolm seemed more than ready to join the fray, accepting an invitation to speak at the University of Rochester in 1963. Members of the NAACP—recently regrouped under the presidency of the more radical but well-connected Wendell H. Phillips—approached the University of Rochester’s College Cabinet Subcommittee on Civil Rights to provide a venue for Malcolm to speak publicly in Rochester.³⁰ An ordained minister, Phillips grew up in Pittsburgh but moved to Rochester to attend Colgate Rochester Divinity School. According to his son, Phillips “believed in God and religion, but he had grown weary of denominations and their doctrines” because “denominations did more to divide churches as opposed to providing cohesion.”³¹ If his presidency of the Rochester branch of the NAACP is any example of his stewardship, he felt too that organizations often served to divide the race in their struggle for equality, and he worked against this. An invitation by an NAACP president to the NOI’s chief spokesman demonstrated this desire to transcend organizational and religious affiliation (see figure 2.2).

Once in Rochester, Malcolm used his speech to connect the conditions of police brutality in that city to those across the country. Always the humorist, Malcolm “drew laughter when, after a dog howled in the audience, he remarked: ‘That’s probably a police dog—they’re famous around here.’ ”³² The audience was overwhelmingly white, reflecting the racial makeup of the Rochester NAACP at the time and the location of the event at the University of Rochester, a place where few African Americans would have gone. Among Malcolm’s listeners that evening was an unlikely Black Rochesterian, recently elected Third Ward supervisor Constance Mitchell. She came to hear Malcolm upon an invitation from Dr. Freddie Thomas, a friend of Mitchell’s, who spent a lifetime researching and writing Black history.³³ On Mitchell’s reporting, Malcolm invited Thomas and Mitchell, two of the only African Americans present, to stay behind following the event.³⁴

That night, after Malcolm’s formal discourse ended, the trio began a discussion that increased Malcolm’s presence in Rochester and brought him into their activist fold. As the auditorium closed and the janitor asked the three to leave, Mitchell, unconcerned with the political liability of fraternizing with Malcolm X, invited her interlocutors to her home, which had become the informal gathering place for socially and politically conscious Rochesterians during her election campaign. Though the hour was late, she immediately called friends and coworkers, many of them veteran campaigners who had assisted in tutoring migrants to pass the literacy exam necessary to cast a ballot in her election the previous year. It was the first of several informal invitations to participate in Rochester’s community affairs that Malcolm would accept. The open and ongoing invitation enabled Malcolm to develop close personal relationships with members of many organizations and groups and to transcend the various racial, religious, professional, and organizational attachments that worked to divide them.³⁵

Malcolm returned to Rochester in search of allies in western New York some months later when the NOI first came under severe attack. While Black activists viewed the persecution of the local NOI as an attack on Black Rochester, Malcolm, in his capacity as head of the NOI on the East Coast, came to defend the NOI. Black Rochester, for its part, was glad to have Malcolm’s support. They believed his national prominence and his reputation for speaking truth to power would command the attention of city leaders, such as city manager Homer Porter, who consistently sought to deflect scrutiny and responsibility. In the struggle by Black activists to protect Black life, Malcolm’s presence could only benefit Black Rochester. In any case, they had little to lose by consorting with Malcolm. It is noteworthy that Malcolm and the NOI met much less resistance from the Black leadership in Rochester than they did in many other cities, especially those with larger populations. Actually, Rochester was one of the few urban centers where mainstream African American leaders, not the Black nationalist or the radical element, openly embraced Malcolm both before and after he left the NOI. Malcolm returned the favor; he seemed partial to Rochester. From all accounts, no other city of Rochester’s size received as much of his affinity and attention. Malcolm would further mention Rochester in a famous assessment of the potential for Black liberation in 1965, the year of his death. Significantly, he was in Rochester just five days before he died. This trip to Rochester may well have been Malcolm’s last visit outside of New York City, and that at a time when he no doubt had many invitations to appear in much bigger and more famous places.

In any case, Malcolm had become a familiar presence in Rochester, something the local police department, among others, did not welcome or appreciate.³⁶ Referring to the raid on the mosque, Malcolm opined, “A similar situation would not have occurred ‘if someone called and said there was somebody in another church with a gun.’ ”³⁷ Consequently, he formally lodged complaints, as had so many Black Rochesterians, with both the State Commission for Human Rights and with the Rochester public safety commissioner.³⁸ Not to be outdone by the anti-Muslim forces publishing stories about Muslim violence, Malcolm launched his own propaganda offensive, predicting that Rochester “may be a precedent-setting city for police hostility towards Muslims” and that it “will be better known than Oxford, Mississippi.”³⁹ By comparing Rochester to Oxford, a place notorious for its hostility to the civil rights movement, Malcolm was directly connecting the struggles of the Muslims in the North with those of Black people in the South, politically and morally. It was time for Black folks, Muslims and non-Muslims, North and South, in and out of Rochester, to accomplish greater unity. In Rochester, the city fathers took offense to the comparison to Oxford. “Obviously he [Malcolm X] is a stranger to Rochester because he is not describing any condition that exists here,” retorted Mayor Henry Gillette, sounding appalled.⁴⁰

The mayor’s dismay did little to relieve the repression of the Muslims, or Black folks in general, in Rochester. Despite his claims to the contrary, Mayor Gillette’s actions mirrored those taking place in the South. Even his fire department joined the attack. Taking their cue from their counterparts in law enforcement, Rochester firemen, acting on the usual “anonymous tip,” entered the same mosque previously raided by the police. The building custodian, however, reported no signs of fire. It only remained, in this formulation, for the media to chime in, which they soon did. Fed the usual “tips” by the police department, the local papers continued to paint a picture of violent and crime-prone “Black Muslims.” One paper denounced the “Black supremacy organization” and the “secret sect preaching Black supremacy.” Lacking any evidence that the Muslims were actually a threat, another daily informed readers that a pipe had been found in the hallway of the building where the NOI mosque was located, implying the Muslims had sinister intentions.⁴¹

Clearly the campaign against the NOI was a coordinated effort by state and local officials (possibly national ones too), with allies in the media. Muhammad Speaks, the NOI organ, reported on the connivance, singling out the situation in Rochester: “Political observers have linked both the police and fire department to a statewide attempt to create public hysteria against Muslims in New York State and to brand the followers of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad as ‘subversive.’ ”⁴² On one of his visits to Rochester, Malcolm called attention to the role of the media in the campaign: “The racists … use the press to get public opinion on their side. When they want to suppress and oppress the Black community, what do they do? They … make it appear that the role of crime in the Black community is higher than it is anywhere else.… It makes it appear that anyone in the Black community is a criminal.”⁴³ In Rochester, Malcolm and Muhammad Speaks were preaching to the choir. But Black activists certainly appreciated the national attention that Malcolm’s presence drew to their condition.

In his search for Black allies in Rochester, Malcolm cast a wide net. The result was sometimes surprising. Loftus Carson was one of those surprises. Some in Black Rochester viewed Carson, an African American member of the statewide Human Rights Commission, as an “Uncle Tom.”⁴⁴ Carson, needless to say, saw things differently. True to his self-perceived role as mediator, he arranged a meeting between Malcolm and Rochester’s city fathers. Malcolm emerged from the meeting to announce that a better understanding had been reached and that the talks “had been very, very fruitful.”⁴⁵ However, the deliberations were not so fruitful as to persuade Malcolm to call off other forms of protest. As usual, he would pursue multiple tracks. On returning to New York City, he promptly organized a rally outside city hall that highlighted the anti-Muslim repression statewide, including in Rochester. Religious scholar Louis A. DeCaro Jr. describes a document distributed at the rally: “The flier also referred to the disruption of Muslim services in the Rochester mosque as ‘gestapo-like,’ and bore in its challenge to Black people Malcolm’s own inimitable signature: ‘We must let [the Rochester Muslims] know they are not alone. We must let them know that Harlem is with them. We must let them know that the whole Dark World is with them.’ ”⁴⁶ Another NOI rally in Times Square similarly “protest[ed] the arrest and indictment of 19 persons who attended a Muslim meeting” in Rochester.⁴⁷ Protestors at this event carried signs declaring, “America Is a Godless Government” and “We Demand Freedom of Religion.”⁴⁸

Mounting Pressure

Within days of those protests, Malcolm returned upstate for the Baden Street anti–police brutality rally, connecting Rochester to the larger anti–police brutality efforts underway across the state. The Baden Street event, which featured an inspiring lineup of Black activists, was formative in the struggle for African American freedom in Rochester. The attendees included clergy and members of the NAACP, CORE, the Monroe County Non-Partisan League, the Committee for Rufus Fairwell, and the Rochester Civil Rights Committee. In addition to African American churchmen, these committees included an impressive number of white clergy. While they played a secondary role in the Baden Street event, their support set a precedent for ministerial aid in Rochester’s Black Freedom Struggle. But, importantly, although organized by the NAACP and supported by ministers, the rally was not held in a church or in an office downtown, as was generally the case in Rochester and across the nation with such NAACP events. The decision to meet at Baden Street, the site of a settlement house in the heart of the ghetto, seemed to signal a new dawn. If the poorest and most dispossessed could not come to the table, the table would come to them. Given the sizable crowd—more than six hundred attended—people from all walks of Black life took part.

Members of the Rochester NAACP prioritized the organization and advertising efforts required to pull off the Baden Street rally. In a press release, Rozetta McDowell, the NAACP secretary, informed the media of her hope that “a committee will evolve out of the meeting to unite local Negroes. ‘This is what we need and this is what we’re going to have,’ ” she confidently predicted. Graphically illustrating the kind of unity she had in mind, McDowell’s press release included a picture of herself, Malcolm, the Rochester Seventeen and the other two Muslims facing prosecution.⁴⁹ As for the committee she hoped the rally would produce, McDowell noted, “It is quite possible that the Black Muslim nationalist movement will be represented on such a committee [as] ‘they do represent a segment of the Negro community here.’ ”⁵⁰ It made perfect sense that this should be so, since Muslims were also part of the planning committee and were among those on the official list of speakers. The NAACP deliberately and explicitly sought to unite with all members of the community, the better to influence public opinion and dialogue on the issue of police brutality.

Malcolm was excluded from the list of speakers either because he was not expected to show up or because it was a Rochester event and the planners endeavored to feature local speakers. Still, after Mildred “We Are Black Folks First” Johnson and others had held forth, Malcolm was invited to the podium “amid shouts of ‘speech, speech.’ ”⁵¹ He did not disappoint. The local press reported that Malcolm “took a swipe at unidentified Negro factions ‘too afraid of the white man to unite.’ ” The reporter apparently failed to realize that Malcolm was likely contrasting the unity rally in Rochester with events taking place in other cities and on the national scene. Muhammad Speaks would later report on the historic nature of the gathering: “Observers called the rally the ‘most spectacular display of Negro unity ever witnessed in Rochester.’ ”⁵²

Not surprisingly, the national NAACP was not impressed with this display of Black unity. Just two days after the Baden Street rally, Gloster Current, the NAACP director of branches who was based in New York City, announced that there was a “problem in Rochester.” The problem, of course, was the Rochester branch’s seemingly cozy relationship with the NOI and Malcolm. “Our problem in Rochester,” Current informed Roy Wilkins, the longtime head of the national NAACP, “is how to protest police brutality and not appear to be supporting the Muslims on their program per se, a position into which Malcolm ‘X’ wants to push us.”⁵³ Fearing that Rochester might influence other locales, Current issued a memorandum to every NAACP branch in the country. Entitled “NAACP and the Muslims,” the memo provided strict instructions to govern future exchanges with the NOI. “If a community-wide mass protest meeting called by the NAACP involves other groups, avoid, if at all possible, having Muslim speakers at your rally,” Current commanded. “Public meetings are, of course, open and the possibility is that Muslims will attend, ask questions and seek to get their viewpoint across.” In that case, “NAACP spokesmen should reiterate our policy, stating clearly that in fighting police brutality we are not supporting Muslims.” The Rochester folks had set a dangerous precedent in their unabashed support of the NOI, and the national NAACP strongly disapproved of the kind of unity advocated at the Baden Street rally. “Avoid at all costs any inference of a Unity Movement or that NAACP is calling for a ‘common front,’ ” Current’s directive to the branches concluded. “Point out clearly wherein our programs differ, although we uphold all citizens’ constitutional rights.”⁵⁴

The Rochester branch, whose action had incurred Current’s wrath, did not respond accordingly. Having brought some of the activist heart back to the organization, Wendell Phillips, the new Rochester NAACP president, acknowledged ideological differences with the NOI, but he did not seem repentant about the Baden Street rally. “While we are in total disagreement with their separatist philosophy, we do, however, vigorously uphold their right as citizens to the enjoyment of all constitutional guarantees of protections from police brutality,” Phillips said of the Muslims.⁵⁵ Eugene Newport, a Rochester native, youth adviser for the local NAACP, and one of Malcolm’s hosts, was even less compliant. If anything, Newport seemed to reject outright the directive from the national NAACP. He told the local press, “Ranting against the activities of these dissenting nationalistic groups are pointless.… The situation demands, without further delay, that this community recognize that our Negro citizens are entitled to all the rights and privileges of American citizenship. Failure to do this can only stimulate the growth of nationalistic organizations, and increase the vigor of their protest.”⁵⁶ Evidently, by 1963, instructions to stay clear of the Muslims were not being received well in Rochester, even among the NAACP leadership. Mildred Johnson’s “We are Black folks first” message seemed to have greater appeal.

The United Action Committee that formed immediately following the attack on Rufus Fairwell had accomplished each of its goals. When the Rochester police department refused at the last minute to release the results of its investigation into Fairwell’s assault, and a grand jury ultimately found that “Fairwell did not assault the policemen; they did not assault him” despite the severity of his injuries, the group successfully pressed the federal Department of Justice to intervene.⁵⁷ The committee was instrumental in forging alliances and garnering support among a wide cross section of Black Rochesterians. They supported Fairwell financially, and this set the ball in motion to reign in the Rochester police. And while the committee’s efforts did not immediately ensure a change, its unwavering determination generated tangible engagement around this issue.

The city leaders appeared eager to blunt this gathering momentum. Increasingly, they became less resistant to the idea of a citizens’ police review board, a central demand of the newly energized Black coalition. Pressure was mounting from various quarters. Days after the Baden Street rally, the local clergy, including the Black Rochester Area Ministers’ Conference, placed a full-page advertisement in the paper calling for the creation of a police review board. The declaration, signed by a hundred members of the clergy, announced, “We have investigated sufficiently to learn that there is a list of documented cases, gathered in a responsible fashion, which detail a story of difficult and bitter experiences undergone by many Negro citizens.”⁵⁸

Immediately the police chief took evasive action. He countered with an offer of a “police retraining program” aimed at producing kinder and gentler officers, meaning, in practice, kinder and gentler to Black Rochesterians. The police chief was not the only one trying to blunt the Black protest. So too were some of the newly converted supporters of a police review board, such as the Human Relations Committee of Monroe County, which includes Rochester. The committee hoped that the creation of a police review board would reduce its caseload while simultaneously draining support from the emerging Black coalition. With any luck, the members surmised, the review board would also blunt nationalist sentiment and drive Malcolm out of town. The Human Relations Committee finally put its support behind “an independent citizens’ group to review complaints against police … [and] also hailed the non-violent committee for ‘performing a valuable service by providing a focus for the concern of the entire community and an alternative to the leadership of Malcolm X and his Movement.’ ”⁵⁹

Rochester City Council members apparently found this argument persuasive in the face of mounting militancy among a unified Black Rochester. In the face of strong and colorful opposition from the police department, they approved a police review board.⁶⁰ Rochester became the second city to have such a body, after Philadelphia, which had agreed to form one only months earlier. The police review board was one of the first concrete results of the new political momentum that originated at the Baden Street rally. Contrary to the wishes of the Monroe County Human Relations Committee, however, creation of the police board did not curb police conduct, nor did it blunt the burgeoning frustration within Black Rochester. Nonetheless, Black activists had done their best to raise the alarm locally and nationally. All was not right in Rochester.