Uprisings, Denunciations, and the Fracturing of the Civil Rights Coalition

On July 18, 1964, two days after the Republican National Convention, an urban uprising erupted in Harlem, followed by similar outbreaks in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood and Rochester, New York. The uprising received national attention as one of the first major urban uprisings of the 1960s, which looked markedly different from the violence broadcast on televisions across the country the previous summer when civil rights protesters were attacked in Birmingham.¹⁰ The unrest in Harlem occurred after a rally to protest the murder of a Black teenager by a police officer. James Powell, a fifteen-year-old, was fatally shot by an off-duty New York City police officer, Lieutenant Thomas Gilligan, at 9:30 a.m. outside of the junior high school where he was taking voluntary summer classes. At least fifteen of Powell’s classmates saw the shooting after the youth and his friends got into a confrontation with a building superintendent who tried to chase them off with the spray of a water hose. The officer said he shot Powell in self-defense, which the police department confirmed when it cleared him to return to duty, but eyewitness accounts refuted his claim.¹¹ The rally to protest Powell’s murder was originally planned by a local chapter of CORE to draw attention to the disappearance and suspected murder of the three civil rights workers in Neshoba County, Mississippi, but it was reorganized to protest Powell’s murder. The peaceful rally eventually drew a large crowd at the West 123rd police station to demand the suspension of Gilligan, who was on paid sick leave because of an injury he was reported to have obtained in the altercation with Powell. As the crowd began to clash with police in front of the station, chaos ensued. After the first night of violence, the Chicago Defender reported that police killed an African American man, while the New York Times emphasized the property damage caused by what it described as wild roving mobs of Blacks who attacked the police with anything they could throw as the police fired warning shots into the air. When the uprisings ended, 5 people were killed, 867 injured, and 1,650 arrested in the three communities.¹²

Civil rights organizations condemned the uprisings—and emphasized the difference between their peaceful demonstrations and violence or looting—but said the anger that fueled the uprisings was legitimate. James Farmer, CORE’s national director, described his and other members of CORE’s efforts to deescalate the tension between the youth of Harlem and police officers, the latter, he said, instigated more violence by responding with unnecessary force to the initial violence. “The rioting was insanity, and the rioters were wrong, however, great their grievances,” explained Farmer. However, the leader sympathized with the rioters who he said were driven “to desperation” and “took matters into their own hands.” He concluded that civil rights organizations such as CORE had failed to alleviate the pain they experienced. Farmer attributed the “blind fury” of the participants to “the basic problems of jobs, housing, schools, and police brutality.”¹³ On July 27, Martin Luther King Jr. released a public statement refuting the notion that “Negro leadership is fundamentally responsible for the acts of violence and rioting which have occurred.” King said that he believed rioting caused more problems, but he also said that law and order could only be maintained if “there is an ever-increasing measure of justice and dignity accorded all persons.” He concluded that elected leaders had a responsibility to provide justice to millions of Blacks by eliminating “ghettoized housing, discriminatory barriers to jobs, inferior and segregated schools and discriminatory barriers to the right to vote.” As for leaders like himself, he added, “we must be as concerned about getting rid of environmental conditions that cause the riots as we are in condemning violence.”¹⁴ Similarly, Roy Wilkins condemned illegitimate forms of protest while critiquing leaders who only condemned the violence: “We suggest that leadership must seek in these situations justice and equality as well as law and order. Responsible Negro leadership,” he continued, “needs desperately responsive white leadership as it relates to jobs, improved housing and educational opportunities.”¹⁵

As organizations like CORE and the NAACP labored to respond to uprisings in an affirmative fashion, Rockefeller tried to avoid the issue and failed to provide the nuanced response civil rights leaders hoped to receive from elected leaders. The uprising in Harlem began on July 18, four days after Rockefeller’s Republican National Committee speech condemning extremism. Although the uprisings began in Bedford-Stuyvesant on July 20, Rockefeller remained silent until July 25, the day after unrest broke out in Rochester. Rockefeller’s public statement from the Executive Chamber in Albany denounced the uprisings in New York City and Rochester as the result of “lawlessness, hoodlumism, and extremism.”¹⁶ Days before his statement, Farmer had requested Rockefeller send state troopers to Harlem to protect the residents from city police but had received no response. Rockefeller was vacationing in Wyoming and had yet to return to New York.¹⁷ Mayor Wagner was also on vacation when violence first began in Harlem, but he returned to the city and Johnson ordered the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to Harlem to investigate days before Rockefeller released a statement.¹⁸ When Rockefeller broke his silence, he condemned rioting and looting and praised the police whom he called “our principal bulwark against mob violence and chaos.” Rockefeller assured the public that although he had been out of the state, he was in “continuous communication with the appropriate officials.”¹⁹ After all his appearances to generate support in Harlem when the community experienced violence between the police and Black residents, Rockefeller made no acknowledgment of the systemic racism and poverty that he knew ravaged the neighborhood.

With the 1964 presidential election imminent, the uprisings placed tremendous pressure on traditional civil rights organizations who did not want them to detract from their larger efforts to advance African American causes. Two days after King’s public statement, the SCLC, NAACP, Urban League, and A. Philip Randolph’s Negro American Labor Council called for a “broad curtailment, if not total moratorium of mass demonstrations until after Election Day.” Instead, the organizations hoped to build on the passage of the Civil Rights Act by focusing on voter registration for African Americans, who could increase the likelihood of the new law’s enforcement by electing Lyndon Johnson. CORE declined to endorse the moratorium but joined the other organizations in signing a statement opposing “looting, vandalism or any type of criminal activities.” In declining to sign the demonstration moratorium, CORE hoped to discourage people from associating peaceful protest with criminal acts. SNCC, under the leadership of John Lewis, however, refused to endorse either statement.²⁰ The organizations who agreed to the moratorium expressed the hope that they could counteract the racism in the presidential race, which they concluded had been “injected into the campaign by the Goldwater forces.”²¹ This moment in the civil rights era was fractious for activists not only because of disagreements over strategy but also a growing sense that the leadership of civil rights organizations were ill-equipped to represent the diversity of needs and priorities among African Americans. Thomas Allen of the NAACP’s national office, concluded after visiting Rochester that middle-class white and Black organizations did not understand the desperation of “underprivileged Negroes.” Whereas many white observers looked to blame civil rights organizations for uprisings, Allen noted a significant divide between groups like his own and the residents involved in the uprising. “Many Negroes of the community are extremely suspicious and distrustful of other Negroes who confer with the ‘white power structure,’ ” he observed. “Reference is frequently made that those who confer do not represent the Negro community.”²²

Despite Rockefeller’s statements denouncing rioters, the unrest infuriated many whites who blamed Blacks and leaders like Rockefeller, who they believed condoned it. Amid letters that attributed the situation to a wide range of causes from deplorable living conditions to the savagery of Negroes, a couple from Port Chester, New York sent a missive blaming the “rioting of lawless Negro[es]” on Rockefeller and city officials’ “appeasement of Minority Groups.” A Lucile Jansen of Miami, Florida said the uprisings were a “forewarning of what the Negroes intend to do” and complained that leaders like Rockefeller supported the use of the National Guard in the South but did nothing when wild mobs roamed the streets of New York. She continued, “If this is the way you would handle the Negro rioting in the country should you have been elected President we are fortunate indeed that Mr. Goldwater carried the nomination.”²³ The attacks against Rockefeller fit within a widespread negative response to the uprisings from white New Yorkers. Laplois Ashford, an NAACP leader who participated in the organization’s investigation of the Rochester uprising, noted that “a very definite white backlash has set in, especially among the embarrassed city officials. The newspapers too are calling for a ‘hard line’ against ‘trouble makers.’ … Whites are busy convincing themselves that outside agitators are to blame because such a thing couldn’t happen in Rochester otherwise.” Ashford, who later became the first African American president of the Rochester school board, feared there would be more violence because “at the present, the local police are right no matter what they do and the Negro has little or no redress.”²⁴

Phyllis Schlafly, in her 1967 book Safe Not Sorry, claimed that Rockefeller approved of urban uprisings. Rockefeller’s aides told him that he should avoid conversations related to her accusations whenever possible, but if necessary, he should insist that he did not condone violence. Rockefeller’s staff believed that his words had been distorted because of his “known record in favor of civil rights.”²⁵ Rockefeller continued to face criticisms as urban uprisings became a more common, and increasingly dreaded, occurrence throughout the 1960s. Critics, who had long opposed the civil rights movement and the efforts of the Black community to achieve social and economic parity, needed little to convince them that African Americans deserved no more favors. The fallout would be tremendous for the African American community, the civil rights leaders who hoped to advocate for Blacks of all backgrounds, and the politicians associated with the civil rights movement. Even a politician like Rockefeller, who was vigilant in his effort to temper his liberalism with advocacy for pro–law enforcement legislation, would decide he needed to embrace even more conservative responses as a result.

While Rockefeller and a significant proportion of white New Yorkers looked to the police and law and order more generally to address uprisings, civil rights leaders ascribed much of the destruction and violence to policy brutality. On August 1, the New York branches of the NAACP adopted a resolution calling for a nine-point program to end police brutality, which included calling for the suspension of Gilligan, creating an independent civilian review board, and meeting with Rockefeller to investigate and alleviate the conditions that led to the crisis in New York.²⁶ Prominent civil rights organizations agreed that in addition to a need to address the economic and social deprivation of the communities that experienced uprisings, there was a need for police reform via civilian review.²⁷ After the Brooklyn branch of CORE organized to protest Gilligan’s reassignment to Brooklyn—a county grand jury and police departmental review board exonerated him in November 1964—the police department decided to send him to an “undisclosed post.” Brooklyn CORE’s chairman, Major Owens, concluded that Gilligan’s return to the force was proof that the city needed a civilian review board because the police “refused to consider the moral issues of Gilligan’s callous attitude toward human life.”²⁸ Farmer had previously called for the indictment of Gilligan and the creation of a civilian review board and the evaluation of policies such as requiring off-duty officers to remain armed.²⁹ Civil rights organizations who called for a civilian review board offered their support for a bill proposed by Democratic New York City councilman Theodore S. Weiss from Manhattan. Weiss called for an independent civilian review board including Black and Puerto Rican representatives that would make recommendations to the mayor and police commissioner about legitimate use of force and other procedural issues in late 1964. The bill had been in committee since April. Even though the board would have no authority over the department, supporters hoped it would improve transparency because the public knew little about how the police investigated its own. Meanwhile, the police union, which opposed any form of civilian review, began organizing to prevent civilian police oversight in the spring of 1965.³⁰

In Search of Combatants: Rockefeller’s War on Narcotics Addiction

Calls for law and order in 1964 drew significant support in a period when the nation’s crime rate was a popular concern. The appeal of Goldwater’s emphasis on law and order in 1964 coupled with a desire to get in front of a political crisis convinced President Johnson he needed to address the nation’s crime problem. On July 26, 1965, he announced the establishment of the Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice explaining that the “present wave of violence and the staggering property losses inflicted upon the nation by crime must be arrested.” He cited a report released by the FBI on the same day that found that “serious crimes” increased in 1964 by 13 percent in comparison to the previous year and that crime overall increased six times faster than the nation’s population growth since 1958.³¹ Although crime statistics like these have subsequently come into question, the era’s growing fear of crime motivated many politicians to devise plans that would appease voters.³²

During his January 1966 annual message to the legislature, Rockefeller announced that he would prioritize crime reduction during his eighth year in office by focusing on the use of illegal narcotics. By identifying a single issue, he presented the public with a simple and seemingly easy-to-understand solution to a multidimensional problem. Rockefeller said that the national crime rate had increased at an alarming pace, and despite the state’s best efforts, more needed to be done so that people did not live in fear.³³ According to Rockefeller, narcotics addiction was the “prime cause of crime” and that people with narcotics addiction committed half the crimes in New York City and “their evil contagion” was threatening the suburbs.³⁴ People with addiction were not his sole target, however; Rockefeller proposed stiffer mandatory prison sentences for drug dealers whom he called “men without conscience who wreck the lives of innocent youngsters for profit.”³⁵ Rockefeller’s proposal called for the removal of “pushers” from the street and the commitment of people with addiction in new and expanded state facilities for “effective treatment, rehabilitation and aftercare.”³⁶ Rockefeller’s executive secretary, Alton Marshall, noted that the governor’s original intention was to incarcerate those with addiction rather than place them in compulsory treatment programs in 1966. “His original drug program,” explained Marshall, “[was to] round them up.” In fact, he and his staff joked about “putting barb wire around the Adirondack Mountains and then just dump[ing] them all in there.” Marshall said that Rockefeller’s advisers, who were influenced by the “treatment modality” of the time, believed that treatment was better than incarceration, which would in effect remove people with addiction from society, and convinced Rockefeller that this was the better choice. According to Marshall, Rockefeller was a “humanitarian,” but he believed that removing people with illegal narcotics addiction from society was justified because it would benefit the most people.³⁷ Neither Rockefeller nor his staff referred to people with addiction in racialized terms, but estimates from this period identified a high percentage of racial minorities in this community. According to historian Eric C. Schneider, conservative estimates from the New York State Narcotic Addiction Control Commission found that there were sixty thousand people with heroin addiction in New York City in 1967, half of them African American, a quarter Puerto Rican, and a quarter white, most of whom lived in a limited number of neighborhoods.³⁸

Rockefeller, at the urging of his advisers, expressed concern for those who suffered from addiction, but his main purpose was to address the rising crime rate by proposing an expensive and unproven program to treat “addicts.” Rockefeller proposed longer sentences for drug dealers, up to three years of compulsory treatment for people with illegal narcotics addiction, and the creation of a state Narcotic Addiction Control Commission (NACC) as an independent department within the Department of Mental Hygiene to establish policy and “command the war on narcotic addiction.” The minimum sentence for a drug dealer who was found selling to a person under the age of twenty-one would be increased from seven to ten years and the maximum from fifteen to twenty. Those who were found selling to a person over the age of twenty-one or were found in possession of narcotics with intent to sell would receive a minimum sentence of seven years from the current minimum of five.³⁹ In a previous effort to address addiction during his first term in office, Rockefeller referred to people with illegal narcotics addiction as “unfortunate victims,” but now they were also the enemies in this war. Rockefeller argued that “a desperate addict will steal, attack and even kill to get money for drugs or the drug itself.” As a result, the proposed law also made it possible for a person to be sent to a treatment facility if the person addicted to illegal narcotics applied for an order from the courts. His new position fit well with his tough stance on crime and narcotics addiction, but there was little evidence that involuntary treatment worked. Studies from the period had not demonstrated that incarceration, even with treatment and aftercare, was a consistently effective method of treatment for addiction.⁴⁰ Rockefeller worked alongside New York City mayor John Lindsay to draft the proposal modeled after California’s drug program, which included a maximum five years of compulsory treatment for people addicted to illegal narcotics.⁴¹ Rockefeller estimated the program, scheduled to commence on April 1, 1967, if passed, would cost $75 million to be paid for by the sale of state bonds, and an additional $6 million to $7 million would be requested from the legislature to begin setting up the program. He also expressed hope that the federal government would ultimately help pay for the program in a similar manner to how it paid for two-thirds of urban renewal projects.⁴²

With the aid of exaggerated crime statistics, Rockefeller announced a “war on narcotics” that played into growing concerns about crime. The rising crime rate in New York City had been a major issue during the mayoral election in 1965 and helped usher Lindsay into office with his pledges to reduce crime. Rockefeller chose to focus on increased drug trafficking and the crimes committed by people addicted to illegal narcotics, who resorted to theft, prostitution, and other crimes to support their habits. People with addiction needed to be protected from themselves, but more important, the public at large needed to be protected from their disregard for law and order. Rockefeller cited crime statistics from 1963 to 1964 that found that people addicted to illegal narcotics comprised 20 percent of those arrested for felonies against property and were responsible for a 49 percent increase in arrests for murder. While these were the numbers Rockefeller announced publicly—including the claim that people with illegal narcotics addiction committed half of all the crimes in New York City—these numbers were higher than those cited by some members of his staff.⁴³ A memorandum from Rockefeller adviser Edward H. Van Ness noted in December 1965 that the best estimates available found there to be 25,000 to 35,000 people with illegal narcotics addiction in New York City and that of the 208,844 persons charged with crimes in the city in 1964, people with narcotics addiction comprised 9.1 percent as compared to 7 percent in 1963.⁴⁴ Unlike Rockefeller’s efforts to address drug addiction earlier in the decade, his efforts in 1966 were focused on criminality rather than the illness of addiction.

Rockefeller argued that his new plan to fight addiction was a corrective to the Metcalf-Volker Narcotic Addict Commitment Act of 1962, but his new tough approach fit within a growing trend among politicians to rethink the therapeutic approaches that the 1962 law represented. The 1962 law, which Rockefeller had supported, established a central narcotics office in the Department of Mental Hygiene, created a State Council on Drug Addiction, and sent convicted people with illegal narcotics addiction to state mental hygiene facilities for treatment.⁴⁵ This legislation aimed at treating “unfortunate victims” of drug addiction in need of “human renewal,” as Rockefeller described it in 1962, offered the option of entering rehabilitative treatment in a specialized state hospital facility rather than serve a prison term. Rockefeller was now of the opinion that this approach allowed “too many [addicts] to choose a short stay in prison and an early return to drugs when their real need is treatment, rehabilitation and aftercare.”⁴⁶ The therapeutic approach to narcotics addiction was more popular in the first half of the 1960s. In September 1962, for example, President Kennedy convened a White House Conference on Narcotic and Drug Abuse where the majority of those in attendance supported the civil commitment of people with illegal narcotics addiction. The subsequent commission report released a year later called for the relaxation of mandatory minimum sentences, which were found to be ineffective in reducing addiction; the increase of appropriations for research on addiction; and the dismantling of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics.⁴⁷ In 1966, Rockefeller said this approach had failed and called for a toughened approach that he supported with rhetoric focused on criminalizing addiction.

Immediate reactions to Rockefeller’s compulsory commitment proposal were mixed. Although many people were concerned by the rising prevalence of drug addiction and crime in New York, there was a great deal of skepticism about the effectiveness of compulsory treatment. Former state senator George R. Metcalf, cosponsor of the 1962 law, said that emphasis should be placed on aftercare and the process of helping people with illegal narcotics addiction remain clean when they return to their surroundings where they first became addicted rather than commitment. The American Civil Liberties Union opposed the incarceration of people with illegal narcotics addiction who had not been convicted of a crime. Executive Director Aryeh Neier noted that Robinson v. California ruled that it was unconstitutional to imprison someone for addiction. The majority of critics favored a less expensive alternative such as outpatient treatment at methadone clinics, but there were New Yorkers, particularly in urban areas, who supported Rockefeller’s proposal to decrease narcotic addiction. When Rockefeller first announced his plan, the New York Amsterdam News published an editorial in praise of his plan to “wage an all-out war on narcotics addiction” across all the classes and stated that “there [was] nothing so crippling in certain areas of New York as the misery connected with drug addiction.”⁴⁸

Rockefeller’s proposal passed with ease, but many state leaders doubted the efficacy of Rockefeller’s approach. On March 28, 1966, the state senate approved Rockefeller’s program by a vote of 59 to 3. Despite the margin of support, there was a heated debate over the compulsory commitment component of the law. One of the leading opponents of the bill, Manfred Ohrenstein, a Democrat from Manhattan’s West Side, said that compulsory commitment would do nothing but create a “20th century leper colony.”⁴⁹ Two days later, after four hours of debate, the assembly passed the law with a vote of 151 to 7, although some assembly members voted for the law reluctantly saying, “It was better than nothing at all.”⁵⁰ In a New York Times editorial that noted several experts’ opposition to compulsory treatment, the paper remarked on the slow nature of Rockefeller’s war. The governor said, “We must act now”; however, Rockefeller’s plan was not set to go into effect for another year—after the gubernatorial election. The editorial expressed hope that the delay was intended to give the next legislature time to study the issue but noted that the delay was politically advantageous because it allowed Rockefeller to keep the additional expense off the state budget until after his reelection.⁵¹ Rockefeller signed the narcotics bill into law on April 6, 1966 with both the controversial component calling for compulsory treatment and increased sentences for drug dealers.⁵² Befitting his law and order approach, Rockefeller appointed a Black Republican, Lawrence W. Pierce, to chair the newly created NACC. Pierce, who had no experience leading treatment facilities, had a long career in law and enforcement as a former assistant district attorney in Brooklyn, a deputy police commissioner in New York City, and a director of the State Division for Youth. The NACC would also purchase its addiction “rehabilitation centers” for voluntary and involuntary confinement from the New York State Department of Corrections. This assured that people addicted to illegal narcotics would be held in medium- and maximum-security institutions with high walls, barbed wire, ex–prison guards renamed “rehabilitation officers,” and cell blocks.⁵³

New York was part of a larger trend to curb addiction; with the passage of its new narcotics law, it became one of twenty-five states that permitted civil commitment for narcotics addiction, despite a lack of evidence to support the treatment method. Congress also established a national policy for civil commitment of people with illegal narcotics addiction with the enactment of the Narcotic Addict Rehabilitation Act of 1966 on November 8, 1966. The federal law sought to treat addiction as a disease rather than a criminal act and sentenced people with illegal narcotics addiction convicted of nonviolent federal crimes to treatment rather than imprisonment, allowing for voluntary commitment of drug users involved in criminal proceedings. In 1967, Johnson’s commission on crime reported that the extent of nondrug offenses committed by people with illegal narcotics addiction or drug abusers was unknown—and most likely impossible to know. Politicians’ focusing on crime held great appeal in cities such as New York because the concentration of people with illegal narcotics addiction was high or perceived to be so, but the commission found that there was no reliable data to assess the “common assertion that drug users or addicts are responsible for 50 percent of all crime.” According to Johnson’s crime commission, although people with heroin addiction were readily associated with an increase in property theft, it was unusual, despite popular belief, that people with illegal narcotics addiction committed assaultive or violent acts. The commission noted that crime levels had also increased in cities where drug use was not considered a major issue; therefore, committing resources “against abuse solely in the expectation of producing a dramatic reduction in crime may be to invite disappointment.”⁵⁴ Numerous factors contributed to the decline of once-stable working-class communities in New York, but rising heroin use and crimes related to it were easy targets that drew substantial ire from the public. Rockefeller seized on the idea that narcotics addiction was the main cause of a lowered quality of life in urban centers, regardless of a lack of evidence, and set a precedent for his administration seeking simple answers to complex phenomena in this field. Most immediately, Rockefeller’s advocacy for strengthened narcotics laws became proof that he was tough on crime as the gubernatorial race neared.

African American Outreach: Mismatched Priorities

The 1966 election presented an opportunity for Rockefeller to build on his limited success with Black voters in New York City. With that in mind, Rockefeller hired additional Black staff who sought to serve as liaisons between his campaign and the Black community, which was more openly expressing frustration over the slow pace of progress. Black aides could explain how policies such as Rockefeller’s new approach to narcotics addiction could benefit communities in Harlem, but their efforts could not overcome a failure of Rockefeller’s general campaign staff to understand—or even take seriously—African Americans’ demands for systemic change that extended far beyond narcotics-related crimes. Like in election years past, outreach to the African American community consumed a disproportionate amount of Rockefeller’s campaign resources. To launch his second reelection bid, Rockefeller announced his candidacy from the office of the New York Amsterdam News on April 8, 1966. The newspaper reported that his well-timed announcement in Harlem on Good Friday not only meant he would be the first gubernatorial candidate to announce his candidacy in Harlem; he then enjoyed a walk through the community to much fanfare from autograph seekers, children who were out of school for the day, Easter shoppers, and local business owners who were greeted by the governor during his impromptu visits.⁵⁵ As one Rockefeller adviser pointed out, “We need Negroes … to win in New York City,” but the number of obstacles between Rockefeller and increased Black support had only multiplied since his first election.⁵⁶ Nationally, Republicans had nominated Goldwater, which resulted in a landslide of Black support for Johnson, but locally, Rockefeller’s record, which included a failure to acknowledge the poor relations between Blacks and the police paired with largely symbolic victories in fields such as housing discrimination, meant that his campaign overtures might ring hollow. Campaign advisers warned Rockefeller that it would not be easy for the governor to emulate Lindsay’s success with Blacks the year before because of different dynamics in New York City races versus statewide elections. John D. Silvera, a Rockefeller adviser, suggested that Rockefeller “eschew the Republican label,” express to Black voters that they were wanted, stress Rockefeller support of Negro colleges, and discuss his programs related to narcotics, Medicare, and the Manpower Retraining Act.⁵⁷ Rockefeller could point to his administration’s policies that addressed concerns of African Americans, but it was unclear whether campaign stops in Harlem could outweigh the limited returns of those policies.

For Jackie Robinson and other African Americans who joined Rockefeller’s staff, assisting the governor was an opportunity to continue their work in the field of civil rights by making the GOP more attuned to African Americans’ interests. On February 7, 1966, Rockefeller named Jackie Robinson his special assistant to the governor for community affairs to communicate the governor’s record to minority groups. Robinson, who served on Rockefeller’s personal staff, had worked for Rockefeller’s campaigns in smaller capacities in 1964 as a deputy campaign director and in 1962 as a head of a reelection committee. In addition to Robinson, Rockefeller hired Warren E. Gardner Jr. as an assistant press secretary, Wyatt Tee Walker, and Sandy F. Ray as a member of the governor’s youth commission. Robinson had to make several overtures to get Rockefeller to pay for the personal staff he promised him, but eventually, he was able to hire his own assistants including Alfred Duckett, founder of the public relations company Alfred Duckett Associates, who had collaborated with Martin Luther King Jr.⁵⁸ Robinson explained his affinity for Rockefeller candidly: “In our opinion it is important for the Governor to ‘win big’ because, if he does, this will once again serve notice on the National Republican organization that the Goldwater, Bill Buckley route is the sure road to disaster.”⁵⁹ In addition to his duties in state, Robinson also called for greater unity among Black Republicans nationally, intensified voter registration, and an effort to reverse the Goldwater influence that remained in the party. Robinson told Glenn Douglas of the Chicago Defender that Lindsay’s upset victory in the New York City mayoral race in 1965 was the result of a “Negro revolt in voting patterns,” and as a result, both parties should have “more respect for the needs and ambitions of the Negro citizen.”⁶⁰ Robinson was committed to the racial liberalism the governor represented in the GOP and was not afraid to push Rockefeller in this area. The month before Rockefeller hired Robinson, for example, Robinson threatened to publicly criticize the “inexcusable” lack of Black appointees on the governor’s staff, “excluding a few appointments.”⁶¹

Walker believed his work with Rockefeller—of which reducing the presence of narcotics in urban communities was part—would aid in addressing the myriad impacts of discrimination on African Americans. When he appointed Walker as special assistant for urban affairs, Rockefeller said that the thirty-six-year-old was the newest member of a team he was assembling to “tackle the multiple problems” of Negroes in urban areas, including addressing issues related to de facto segregation, medical facilities, job opportunities, and narcotics trafficking. Walker said that he and the governor shared “the conviction that the people of the area to which I will be giving primary attention have had enough social studies, political speeches and pious platitudes to last a lifetime.”⁶² The former executive director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), aide to Martin Luther King Jr., and reverend’s first task was to coordinate plans for two-year technical colleges that Rockefeller had proposed for Harlem, Bedford-Stuyvesant, Buffalo, and Syracuse.⁶³ In his special assistant role, Walker emphasized the need to tackle the “hopelessness and frustration” felt in inner-city communities, soon joining in Rockefeller’s effort to reduce narcotics addiction and crime related to it, which Walker saw as a uniquely damaging scourge on the Black community.⁶⁴ On March 6, 1966, Walker participated on a panel with Rockefeller to discuss the benefits of the governor’s compulsory treatment plan for a television special that appeared on Channel 7 in New York titled The State versus the Addict. During the show, Walker explained that he believed the program would be particularly beneficial to the African American community. He stated, “It is not alone physiological addiction that is the problem, but the need for narcotics themselves have their root in an emotional instability and some insecurity. Naturally in the compounded frustration of the ethnic minorities, the Negro and Puerto Ricans who live with unemployment, with all kinds of insecurities, and deprivations, housing problems, etc. it becomes another one of those crutches that our decadent society demands.”⁶⁵ Walker also noted that Oberia Dempsey, a prominent minister in Harlem, gave the governor his full support, although he believed the program should go further and seek out people with illegal narcotics addiction who would then be ordered to a treatment facility. The next step should then involve preventative measures including the removal of the social conditions that drove people to narcotics. Walker and Dempsey, whose views on narcotics addiction may have been shaped by their religious views, welcomed interventions that others deemed heavy-handed, but they also thought the presence of drugs in Black communities was a symptom of larger problems that required amelioration as well.

Rockefeller and his staff believed the new narcotics program could unite New Yorkers of different backgrounds, but it was predicated on the false premise that narcotics use was an urban problem that threatened drug-free white suburbs. When Walker appeared with Rockefeller to promote the new program, he focused on how it could alleviate a scourge on the Black community, but Rockefeller promoted it to a white middle- and upper-class audience. To demonstrate that Rockefeller’s program would benefit more than poor nonwhites, the show began with a recounting of the death of a young white woman from an affluent background named Celeste Crenshaw who died of an intravenous drug overdose. Crenshaw’s death, one of 250 deaths caused by overdose in New York City in 1965, served as an example of how the scourge of narcotics addiction had reached beyond poor minority communities to privileged white America. Rockefeller argued that only compulsory commitment could have saved Crenshaw and that his program would provide “rehabilitation,” not “removal,” as his critics argued.⁶⁶ He also claimed that the program would not be as expensive as some feared because a great deal of emphasis would be placed on aftercare and vocational training rather than three years of confinement.

While Rockefeller warned white New Yorkers that addiction could overtake their communities, residents of Harlem had for years lamented the rise in crime in their community that was associated with rising poverty and ineffective policing. The week before Rockefeller and Walker’s television appearance, Harlem’s African American assemblyman Mark T. Southall told an assemblage of Harlemites that their community was in a state of emergency that defied any well-meaning talk about inequity being to blame because “these are acts of Negroes victimizing, assaulting and raping other Negroes.” Southall called for maximum punishment for “every criminal apprehended and convicted until this crime wave has been completely terminated.”⁶⁷ Rockefeller’s calls to address addiction and crime resonated with some urban African Americans in New York who had complained about crime in their neighborhoods for many years. The New York Amsterdam News, for example, had been publishing editorials and news stories calling for the arrest of major drug dealers, providing adequate hospitals for people with illegal narcotics addiction, and reporting rising rates of addiction among teenagers in the early 1950s, although with far less frequency than in the subsequent decade.⁶⁸ Southall’s views are not intended to reflect the entirety of Harlem; however, they should be considered alongside the concerns expressed by his neighbors about police brutality and a lack of community oversight. In fact, Southall joined the public protests against Rockefeller’s anti-crime bills two years before. Rockefeller’s interest in narcotics addiction aligned with a long-standing issue of concern in New York’s urban communities, at least superficially, but his proposals did not necessarily attend to the needs of African Americans who wanted nuanced interventions that did not overly empower a criminal justice system that they believed discriminated against racial minorities.

Rockefeller and his staff understood that he would need assistance to increase support among Black voters, but some on his staff demonstrated a narrow understanding of Black politics that could impair any efforts at African American outreach. Despite efforts to tailor Rockefeller’s message to Black voters, he and his staff decided to reassign Eugene T. Rossides, who was the deputy director for New York City, to take on the specific role of managing the campaign in Negro areas. Rockefeller adviser Jack Wells explained that appointing several Negro leaders to run this aspect of the campaign had produced very little in the past and even less during the current campaign because the Black community was “badly fractured.” Wells expressed concern about finding ways to reach out to a range of groups within the Black community including Black nationalists and Black Muslims, whom he referred to as “ ‘hard’ Negroes”: groups such as CORE and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), whom he called militants who sought jobs and acknowledgment as equals; Martin Luther King Jr.’s SCLC, known for nonviolent protests; and African Americans who were not politically active.⁶⁹ There was an additional fear that the “hard Negroes” might focus on Rockefeller in an antagonistic manner and that it could be difficult to communicate Rockefeller’s strong record on civil rights to groups like CORE whom Wells found to be overaggressive and scornful because they were frustrated with the speed of change in urban areas.⁷⁰ Although there was a diversity of opinion and strategy among Black activists, Wells’s conclusions overlooked the widespread dissatisfaction among Africans Americans, which he attributes to a fringe position of people he considered bad tempered. The effort to pass fair housing legislation earlier in the decade had shown that state leadership in the NAACP had also grown tired of limited or symbolic victories. Wells attributed failures to increase Black support to communication issues and divisions among Blacks because he assumed the governor’s civil rights record was satisfactory. With a focus on communication over policy, Wells suggested that Rockefeller open more storefront campaign headquarters in Black neighborhoods, but this attempt at outreach caused challenges for the campaign.

It may have been inevitable that Rockefeller’s now-standard visits to Harlem would no longer be welcome, but Walker believed jeering crowds were the result of a lack of preparation and focus on policy by Rockefeller’s campaign. “Let me say, first, that I cannot tell you how much I admired your raw courage on Tuesday evening,” wrote Walker to Rockefeller. “It certainly equaled or surpassed the San Francisco incident. Under very, very trying circumstances, you did the very best that anyone could do.”⁷¹ Walker sent this encouraging message to Rockefeller after he faced protests and jeers during a quick tour of his storefront campaign headquarters in Harlem; Flushing, Queens; Bensonhurst, Brooklyn; and the South Bronx on August 9, 1966. The New York Times wrote that the events—modeled after Lindsay’s mayoral campaign the year before—were successful although it reported the presence of hecklers. The elaborate strategy that featured pretty girls in straw hats, staff armed with walkie-talkies, and bands that played jazz and rock and roll from the back of decorated trucks could not prevent Rockefeller from being booed.⁷² It was Walker’s opinion, however, that the tour was unsuccessful. The day before the tour, Robinson had received word that a local chapter of CORE planned to picket Rockefeller because he had not “done enough for the ghetto areas”; however, there was little time to address this issue.⁷³ Walker believed that more forethought should have gone into the planning of the campaign stops in Black communities and Rockefeller could not afford to repeat this mistake. Walker explained, “The black community is in a very ugly mood and have some very legitimate reasons for being so. Most of it is despair, and any candidate who comes into their midst will feel the brunt of their venom and hostility because they are in no mood for voting for anybody so much as they are in the mood to vote against somebody. Since you are the incumbent, you can’t escape feeling the wrath which is the harvest of apathy” (emphases in the original). In this political climate, Walker said Rockefeller should have never gone to Harlem without an effort made beforehand to emphasize the “new job program” or the “signing of some bill that touches the ghetto community.” Furthermore, there was no outreach to the “Nationalists” or to those who sympathized with them.⁷⁴

Walker would have a difficult time influencing the campaign’s approach to African American outreach in urban communities; however, when other members of Rockefeller’s staff resisted the idea that the governor could do more. Leslie Slote, another member of Rockefeller’s sprawling staff, attributed the problems to form rather than substance, highlighting the conflicts that could arise between special assistants like Walker and other campaign and gubernatorial aides. Slote blamed the negative reception in Harlem on the advance men whom he criticized for not ensuring that Rockefeller supporters were in the front row instead of the nationalists who had heckled the governor. Meanwhile, Rossides said their biggest problem in Harlem had been Robinson because he did not live in the community and was not popular there.⁷⁵ Although Walker’s suggestions for paying more attention to communicating Rockefeller’s record and reaching out to Black nationalists may have helped Rockefeller in Harlem, and perhaps the activities in the newly opened headquarters would assist those efforts in the future, the Rockefeller campaign found it necessary to provide security for the Harlem storefronts. Rockefeller’s campaign manager, William Pfeiffer, explained that they paid the “wrong element” to hold watch over the storefronts throughout the night and ensured that the headquarters always remained lit to prevent vandalism and break-ins. “Without that we couldn’t have opened up a store. You couldn’t get anybody to stay in the store for one minute, unless we had this right element and to a lesser extent in the Puerto Rican section.”⁷⁶ The Rockefeller campaign continued its targeted efforts in Black communities into the fall enlisting additional support from Black clergy in hopes of capitalizing on Rockefeller’s civil rights record, but his efforts would soon seem futile when he chose not to support an effort to hold the police accountable for misconduct against Blacks and Hispanics in favor of presenting himself as tough on law and order.⁷⁷

Campaigning on Law and Order

To counteract low approval numbers, Rockefeller launched an aggressive reelection campaign in 1966 that entailed delivering 380 speeches during his appearances in all of New York’s sixty-two counties and culminated in disingenuously accusing his Democratic opponent of being soft on crime. After the state-nominating conventions in September 1966, the gubernatorial race became a four-man contest between Rockefeller, the Republican Party candidate; Frank D. O’Connor, the Democratic Party candidate; Franklin Roosevelt Jr., the Liberal Party candidate; and Paul L. Adams, the Conservative Party candidate. The ballot was even more crowded than in 1962 because liberal Democrats decided not to endorse O’Connor, former Queens district attorney and current New York City Council president, because of his association with party bosses. A private poll taken shortly after the state’s nominating conventions found that 30 percent of New Yorkers said they would vote for Rockefeller; although an improvement from previous polls, Rockefeller still trailed O’Connor by 7 percent.⁷⁸ O’Connor was in the lead, but running against an incumbent with the resources and determination of Rockefeller would be a daunting task. By Election Day, estimates revealed that Rockefeller outspent his Democratic opponent 10 to 1.⁷⁹

A major component of Rockefeller’s campaign was television advertisements that featured partisan defenses of Rockefeller’s narcotics program and what have more recently become known as “attack ads” that portrayed his Democratic opponent as a product of New York City’s bossism and fiscal mismanagement. Rockefeller exploited the classic upstate-downstate divide in New York, for example, with an advertisement that misleadingly claimed that O’Connor opposed the construction of the New York State Thruway.⁸⁰ The negative advertisements at this stage in the campaign reflected what James M. Perry called a “sharp turn for the worse” because they were no longer “ethically acceptable.” Perry, a senior editor of the National Observer, who called Rockefeller a strong campaigner and an “exceptionally able governor,” said the governor crossed the line into murky territory as Election Day neared.⁸¹ The criticism of O’Connor’s stance on the thruway, for example, misrepresented O’Connor’s position, who, like the majority of Democrats in the state legislature, did not oppose the construction of the thruway; he opposed the tolls that Republican legislators wanted to institute. Due to a general lack of organization and less money, Democrats had little success trying to correct such statements. Rockefeller’s flush coffers meant that he could easily inundate voters with television advertisements, which began airing in late July. The Rockefeller campaign, for example, paid for 208 commercials on WNBC in New York City at a cost of $237,000, compared to the O’Connor organization’s 23 commercials on the same station for $41,000.⁸² Rockefeller further politicized the issue of narcotics and crime as evidence that he should be reelected: “Governor Rockefeller’s narcotics program will get addicts off the street and into treatment. Both houses of legislature passed it overwhelmingly. All sixty-two D.A.s endorsed it. The state medical society endorsed it. Frank O’Connor is against it.”⁸³ The Rockefeller campaign used the passage of the new narcotics bill as evidence of his work to curb rising crime rates.

In an effort to make law and order appeals to voters of different backgrounds, Rockefeller sought to calibrate his message to ensure it appealed to voters who interpreted crime differently. In September 1966, Rockefeller commissioned a private survey of 600 registered voters in New York that revealed respondents considered crime and narcotics addiction the worst problems in New York, with 85 percent and 72 percent, respectively, saying they were more likely to vote for a candidate who proposed tougher programs in those fields.⁸⁴ The previous month, Rockefeller staffers were informed by Lumbard, special assistant counsel for law enforcement, that O’Connor intended to focus on the rising crime rates throughout the state and his reputation as the “Fighting D.A.” because, as the incumbent, he believed Rockefeller was vulnerable on the issue. Lumbard, who referred to O’Connor as an “old friend and working compatriot in the area of crime,” recommended Rockefeller attack the issue of crime rather than wait for O’Connor to raise the issue. Crime, however, was an “intensely complex” issue that could unite an electorate as much as it could divide and required Rockefeller to calibrate his message in specific ways to gain the most value. Lumbard pointed out that the “catch ’em and lock ’em up” approach worked well in certain communities, while Negroes and Puerto Ricans found it to be “irritating, if not outrageous, and simply another attempt by ‘Whitey’ to suppress them.” He also noted, however, that not all African Americans viewed the crime issue in the same way because “most violent crimes are committed by Negroes against Negroes in Negro communities, and there is a substantial view, in those communities, that strong enforcement is literally essential to life and limb.” As an example, he mentioned that “low paid domestics” expressed concern about crime because they had resorted to taking taxis home because they did not feel safe returning to their neighborhoods at night.⁸⁵ One way to rectify this divide was by sending specialized mailings that addressed the crime issue in communities such as Harlem to emphasize that Rockefeller’s reelection would be beneficial to African Americans in areas such as crime reduction.⁸⁶ Lumbard also noted that while a focus on narcotics addiction was very effective in New York City, it meant little to voters in upstate communities who viewed it as a “strictly hypothetical and unreal” concern.⁸⁷

Crime and narcotics addiction became major issues for the Rockefeller campaign, and he used them most often to attack O’Connor, while further vilifying people with illegal narcotics addiction by exploiting stereotypes about their criminal activity. Voters could turn on their televisions and hear their governor’s assurances that he, unlike the Democratic challenger, had an aggressive approach to reducing crime in the state. In a commercial designed to look like a dramatically staged press conference, Rockefeller declared that a vote for O’Connor was a vote in favor of crime:

The other day, the dean of boys at a Brooklyn High School told me a terrifying thing. He told me that he had been to fifty-seven funerals of neighborhood boys who had died from overdose of narcotics. Let me tell you, they aren’t the only victims of narcotics addiction, everybody is. The muggings, the stealing that addicts do to get the money for a fix account for half of the crime in New York City. Apparently, Frank O’Connor wants to keep it that way because he opposes my new law to get the addicts off the street and the pushers into jail.… If you want to keep the crime rates high O’Connor’s your man, but if you want to protect yourself and your children you vote for me.⁸⁸

Campaign commercials like this one punctuated nearly a year’s worth of speech making and legislation related to crime and narcotics addiction. For the sake of his campaign, Rockefeller equated O’Connor’s opposition to the controversial law with a weak record on crime, but O’Connor was not alone in his criticism. Many legislators who had voted for the new legislation shared the concern of experts who found compulsory treatment to be ineffective. The negative campaign commercials, which intensified in the final days of the campaign, augmented Rockefeller’s criticism of O’Connor. Rockefeller claimed that crime rates soared in Queens during O’Connor’s tenure as the borough’s district attorney. O’Connor refuted this claim, explaining that the rise in Queens’s crime rate matched the borough’s population increase and was no worse than other New York counties. Rockefeller, O’Connor stated, had resorted to “Goldwater Republicanism” out of desperation and “abysmal ignorance” of national crime trends.⁸⁹ O’Connor also clarified that he opposed compulsory commitment for people with illegal narcotics addiction because, in his experience, they could not be cured against their will. Not to be outdone, Rockefeller told an audience in White Plains, New York that electing O’Connor would leave people with illegal narcotics addiction “on the streets for purse snatching, mugging and murder.”⁹⁰

O’Connor continued to rebuff Rockefeller’s criticisms of his record on crime, but the final debate before the election showed that the governor had chosen a widely accepted position at a time when people favored harsher approaches to addiction as a solution to urban crime. The moderator asked the candidates if they thought crime rates would increase if the next governor did not adopt Rockefeller’s plan. Adams, the Conservative Party candidate, agreed that the compulsory program was necessary but asserted that the governor had actually taken the idea from William F. Buckley, who had run for mayor of New York City the year before. Buckley endorsed the use of methadone and thought the federal government should quarantine and rehabilitate people with illegal narcotics addiction.⁹¹ Roosevelt, the Liberal Party candidate, opposed Rockefeller’s plan; for financial reasons, he preferred outpatient treatment programs. O’Connor criticized Rockefeller for unfairly accusing him of being lenient on crime and turning the newly passed narcotics law into a campaign issue. O’Connor continued to explain that in the past eight years, crime rates had increased 55.4 percent across the state in both rural and urban communities and that this trend could be addressed with the creation of a centralized Department of Justice in New York patterned after the federal Justice Department.⁹² O’Connor was the only candidate who questioned the effectiveness of compulsory commitment programs, thus making him an easy target.

“Politics Is a Rough Business”

Rockefeller exploited narcotics addiction, a racialized issue that could pit communities against one another, to appeal to voters who prioritized punitive responses to crime, but a concurrent issue related to policing in New York City moved racial animus to the center of the state’s politics and again demonstrated the divisiveness of law-and-order issues in the state. In response to the resultant controversy caused by an effort to prevent community oversight of New York City police, Rockefeller forewent his traditional association with civil rights groups to maintain his support among white voters. Tensions over policing had remained high in the city since 1964 but became an issue in the New York gubernatorial election and garnered national attention in 1966 when the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association (PBA) and the New York Conservative Party organized a campaign against the Civilian Complaint Review Board (CCRB), which was intended to monitor the police department. Once elected mayor, Lindsay moved forward with his plan to appoint a new board with four civilians and three police officers with the belief that they would be more receptive to investigating allegations of police misconduct and brutality waged against African Americans and Puerto Ricans. The PBA tried to get the CCRB declared illegal by the state supreme court, and when that failed, they collected ninety-two thousand signatures in cooperation with the Conservative Party, which organized its own petition, to get a referendum placed on the 1966 ballot to disband the CCRB. Meanwhile, Lindsay appointed the first civilians to the new board in July 1966, setting the stage for a contentious fight during the fall election.⁹³

Opponents of the CCRB used scare tactics and misinformation to equate support for civilian review of the police with rising rates of crime and disorder—an argument also deployed by critics of the civil rights movement. J. P. McFadden of the National Review opposed the CCRB because he believed that minorities’ desire to police the police as hoodlums roamed the streets, as he described it, was an outgrowth of the civil disobedience advocated by civil rights activists.⁹⁴ The CCRB became a major point of contention, although it had little power and was largely a symbolic gesture made by liberal politicians who wanted to offer a diplomatic and harmless overture to the city’s racial minorities.⁹⁵ Some civil rights leaders, for example, thought the CCRB should only have civilian members to reverse the influence of the previous all-police board. Despite the board having little power, many whites in the city were outraged, for they saw it as tacit acceptance of the uprisings in Harlem and Brooklyn in 1964 and rising crime rates throughout the city. Meanwhile, the New York Times praised the CCRB as part of a larger effort to protect individual rights. It attributed much of the controversy to misunderstandings. The paper noted in editorials printed on October 10 and 22 that the civilian review board was not a tool of minorities as its opponents claimed. The majority of the complaints heard by the new board came from whites, who reported discourtesy, unnecessary force, and abuse of authority during their encounters with police officers. In fact, whites filed more complaints than people from all other minority groups combined.⁹⁶

As the battle over the civilian review board intensified, New York’s most prominent liberal leaders, with the exception of Rockefeller, united to support a cause they considered to be pivotal to the advancement of civil rights. Lindsay and Javits, both Republicans, were in support of the review board alongside Democrats such as Robert Kennedy, Roosevelt, and O’Connor, who all campaigned actively in support of the board. Both Lindsay and Kennedy argued that the referendum to disband the board sought to isolate the police and immune them to any oversight. Their position referred to a clause in the referendum to disband the CCRB that stated, “Neither the Mayor, the Police Commissioner, nor any other officer of the City of New York shall have the power to authorize any person, agency, board or group to receive, to investigate, to hear or to require or to recommend action upon, civilian complaints against members of the Police Department.”⁹⁷ In the face of such opposition, Lindsay interpreted the CCRB fight as the ultimate test for liberals who supported the civil rights movement. He explained, “This is a historic moment, perhaps the most important fight I have ever seen. I am appalled to discover, after passage of many civil rights bills, that many of the wonderful liberals are slightly doctrinaire.… This fight is the guts of it. This separates the men from the boys.”⁹⁸ While the state’s most high-profile racially liberal politicians were united in their efforts to protect the CCRB, Rockefeller kept his distance. Javits and Kennedy’s position was less of a political risk because they were not up for reelection; however, gubernatorial candidates Roosevelt and O’Connor were highly involved in the review board controversy to the point that they competed to demonstrate who did more to save it.⁹⁹ Rockefeller’s press aide Harry O’Donnell reflected on the Democratic candidate’s position saying, “O’Connor … was sort of a conservative Democrat, [but] somebody must have said: ‘Frank you’ve got to take a liberal position on at least one thing,’ so he took a liberal position in favor of the Police Review Board.”¹⁰⁰ Rockefeller, on the other hand, remained relatively silent.

Rockefeller and his staff expressed support for civilian review privately, but candidate Rockefeller disassociated himself from what he began calling a local matter because it could hurt his campaign. A private poll Rockefeller commissioned after the state convention found that voters were equally split between those who said they were more likely to vote for a candidate who supported the board, those who said they were less likely to support a candidate who defended the board, and others who were indifferent. There was little evidence that supporting the board would aid Rockefeller’s reelection campaign, and as November neared, it became increasingly controversial. Rockefeller’s position on the CCRB was much discussed during his staff’s strategy meetings throughout the campaign. Jack Wells first raised the issue in August when he argued that the governor should not campaign for the CCRB but rather call it a local issue. He prepared a statement for Rockefeller that stressed that this was a local decision and that if Lindsay, who was elected by the city, supported a review board, the governor would back his decision. The statement also expressed the hope that the referendum would not become “an occasion for indulging prejudices against any minority or minorities.” Rockefeller approved of Wells’s position paper that included a denunciation of brutality, needless humiliation, and insults committed by the police. Although Rockefeller approved of the statement, he usually only referred to the CCRB as a local issue during public appearances without mentioning the realities of police misconduct or the growing opposition. Meanwhile, earlier on the same day that Wells said Rockefeller should not campaign for the issue, Pfeiffer spoke to John J. Cassese, president of the PBA, and informed him that the governor would support the CCRB, which he assumed was the right and natural position for Rockefeller to take. Cassese assured Pfeiffer that the PBA would support the governor regardless of his position.¹⁰¹ Later in the campaign, when Rockefeller’s advisers discussed the “strong possibility” that the PBA was planning to endorse the governor in early October, Pfeiffer and Hinman agreed that it would be best for the PBA to forgo an endorsement. Days before the expected announcement, Cassese agreed not to endorse the governor but insisted that he would praise Rockefeller’s record of aiding the police.¹⁰² Pfeiffer repeatedly argued that there could be no question that Rockefeller supported the review board to no avail. Although Rockefeller’s staff unanimously agreed, Rockefeller was cautioned not to join Lindsay’s nonpartisan committee in support of the CCRB.

Rockefeller continued his outreach to Black voters, but disassociating himself from the CCRB hindered his ability to increase support in communities such as Harlem. Rockefeller’s position, which one staff member in early October referred to as “embarrassing,” was considered the safe choice because there was a “strong backlash” against the CCRB, but it cost Rockefeller support in Black communities.¹⁰³ In late October, Pfeiffer expressed concern that despite all of the effort and resources focused on Harlem, there was little improvement on Rockefeller’s behalf.¹⁰⁴ There had been early optimism that Rockefeller could win the Negro vote as Lindsay had the year before, but there was little sign that this would be accomplished. Pfeiffer was informed in early November that Rockefeller’s position on the CCRB inspired grave concern during several meetings of interracial groups.¹⁰⁵ Rockefeller’s staff knew that support of the CCRB was an important issue to African Americans, and they agreed that the review board served an important purpose, but the issue was deemed too controversial for Rockefeller to campaign for it.

As Election Day neared and the PBA adopted aggressive race-baiting campaign tactics, Rockefeller’s silence on police misconduct and emphasis on his efforts to fight crime became notable elements of his campaign.¹⁰⁶ Supporters of the CCRB accused the PBA of running a campaign “based on fear and bigotry.”¹⁰⁷ One PBA advertisement featured a photo of a ransacked street after the Philadelphia riot of 1964 with the caption, “This is the aftermath of a riot in a city that had a civilian review board.”¹⁰⁸ Newspaper and television advertisements claimed that the civilian review board would endanger citizens because police officers would hesitate at a critical moment, allowing rapists and murderers to escape, for fear that the review board would reprimand them.¹⁰⁹ The New York Times reported that while making a campaign stop in Brooklyn, Rockefeller spent the time “delivering hard attacks on his Democratic opponent and attempting to make crime in the streets the major issue of the campaign.” He criticized O’Connor’s record as Queens district attorney, touted his narcotics program as a crime deterrent, and praised the city’s police. When some voters in the crowd asked Rockefeller to take a position on the civilian review board, he said, “I think we have got a wonderful police department. We owe them a great deal. I have taken the position that I favor home rule. I’ve supported the mayor, as I support mayors throughout the state.”¹¹⁰

Rockefeller’s African American allies viewed the governor’s praise for the police and refusal to more readily take a position on the CCRB as a failure of leadership. The editorial board of the New York Amsterdam News was unimpressed with the governor’s decision to stay out of the issue: “Rockefeller is like the man who was against sin but wouldn’t do anything about it.” Although the New York Amsterdam News did not openly accuse the governor of siding with the opponents of the CCRB, it implied that such conclusions were possible. “It would be unfortunate,” stated the editorial, “if the Governor would be accused of lying low on the review board issue in order to get the anti-review board vote in the city.”¹¹¹ Robinson did not publicly criticize Rockefeller’s stance in his newspaper column; instead, he praised the leaders who chose to campaign in favor of the CCRB. In an article titled “In Praise of 2 Brave Senators,” Robinson said that he was so impressed by Kennedy’s support on the board that he had reversed his previous negative opinion of the senator. He explained that he had been suspicious of the senator’s liberalism but now admitted that he was “mistaken.” Although Robinson remained silent on Rockefeller’s position, he thought support of the CCRB was significant enough to serve as a litmus test for a leader’s commitment to liberalism.¹¹²

In hindsight, Rockefeller said he opposed the CCRB because it was unsound, but even his recollection of the 1966 campaign reveals that raw politics drove his decision-making. Years after the campaign, Rockefeller said that he used O’Connor’s position on the CCRB as a way to refute his established record as a “law and order man.” “I can see him now,” recalled Rockefeller to Hugh Morrow, “parading up Fifth Avenue with John Lindsay, Bob Kennedy and Jake Javits together in support of what to me was obviously an unpopular, unsound concept.” Rockefeller explained that the press tried to trap him with the CCRB, but he refused to get involved, while “Frank got in the middle of it.” Rockefeller went on to say that he took advantage of O’Connor’s liberal stance on law-and-order issues. “His second mistake was that I had come out for very tough laws relating to the control of hard drugs as being essential to reducing crime on the streets.… He not only opposed it but actually campaigned against it. This, combined with his position on the Civilian Review Board for police action, gave me the opportunity to in all honesty summarize my position in a brief television spot to the effect [of] if you want to keep crime on the street vote for Frank O’Connor. This proved to be a very effective spot. Obviously he had misjudged public sentiment.” Rockefeller summed up his 1966 campaign against O’Connor simply: “Politics is a rough business, but a lot of fun if you enjoy it.”¹¹³ The governor understood the potency of attacks on a politician’s record on law and order because he faced the same criticism before and after the 1966 campaign, but his own experiences did not dissuade him from using the same tactic when it suited him.

The opponents of the CCRB prevailed on November 8, 1966. New York City residents voted 3 to 2 to disband the board, with the most opposition represented in Queens, with a vote of 2 to 1. Opposition was heavy in Brooklyn, the Bronx, and Staten Island as well. Manhattan was the only borough that voted in favor of the CCRB.¹¹⁴ A costly advertising campaign to disband the board succeeded in setting the parameters of the debate—the PBA forces were estimated to have spent between $500,000 and $1 million, while supporters of the civilian review were believed to have spent less than $200,000.¹¹⁵ The victory of the referendum to disband the board was a major defeat for New York’s most prominent liberals. Cassese, who from the outset said he was willing to use the PBA’s entire treasury totaling $1.5 million to fight the CCRB because he was “sick and tired of giving in to minority groups with their whims and their gripes and shouting,” considered the referendum’s passage a major victory.¹¹⁶ “Thank God we saved this city,” he exclaimed on election night.¹¹⁷ In response to the defeat, the NAACP announced that it would set up four offices to document civilians’ complaints regarding police, take affidavits, and advise people on their options moving forward. Wilkins explained, “Unlike the opponents of the board, the NAACP does not desire to create fear and hysteria over this issue, but we insist that adverse police attitudes toward, and the mistreatment of, minorities are very real. They cannot be swept aside by an expensive advertising campaign based upon fear.”¹¹⁸ With the success of the referendum, the police commissioner would now appoint a new board free of civilians. If the CCRB was the ultimate test of liberal support for the civil rights movement, Rockefeller failed.

With nearly 5.5 million votes cast in a heavy voter turnout, Rockefeller won his third term in office by defeating O’Connor by close to four hundred thousand votes. Rockefeller won the 1962 election by five hundred and twenty thousand votes, but the field was not as crowded. The Conservative Party candidate, Paul L. Adams, and Liberal Party candidate, Franklin Roosevelt Jr., won about five hundred thousand votes each with the police review board issue dominating the minds of voters. Adams bested Roosevelt by about ten thousand votes and notably received more votes in New York City and its suburbs than the liberal candidate. The New York Times attributed this “surprise” to Adams’s “vigorous opposition” to the CCRB. Meanwhile, Roosevelt beat Adams 2 to 1 in traditionally more conservative upstate New York.¹¹⁹ O’Donnell, a Rockefeller adviser, thought that O’Connor’s position on the CCRB cost him the election. “O’Connor came out for it and it cost him his own home borough of Queens, which is conservative and where they strongly supported the police.… Nelson carried Queens by 3,000 [votes].”¹²⁰ Rockefeller won the suburban vote of Long Island and Westchester by 52 percent to O’Connor’s 28 percent. He also won upstate New York with 47 percent of the vote to O’Connor’s 38 percent. Along with winning Queens, Rockefeller also won Manhattan, but O’Connor bested the governor in New York City’s five boroughs 42 percent to 39 percent. Statewide, Rockefeller maintained his support from Black voters. According to the Columbia Broadcasting System Vote Profile Analysis, Rockefeller won 34 percent of the Black vote in comparison to 53 percent for O’Connor and 12 percent for Roosevelt. Rockefeller’s total was approximately one point lower than in 1962.¹²¹ The New York Amsterdam News reported that Rockefeller made gains in New York City’s African American communities, but rather than cite voting totals, it named prominent Black figures in Democratic and labor circles who endorsed Rockefeller. Based on returns in the four Harlem assembly districts, Rockefeller won 37 percent of the vote to 62 percent for O’Connor, which was similar to his results in 1962.¹²² Rockefeller’s message, however, appeared to again resonate less with lower-income African Americans, indicating a class distinction in the Black electorate. The Washington Post found that even though O’Connor’s advantage in middle-income Black communities dwindled to a 4 to 3 margin over Rockefeller, he had a 2 to 1 lead in the most economically disadvantaged areas of Harlem.¹²³ Overall, Rockefeller’s decision not to campaign for the CCRB did not hurt him significantly with Black voters and may have helped him win white voters in Manhattan and Queens.

The Republican Party won impressive electoral gains across the nation in 1966 including forty-seven new seats in the House—twenty-four of the thirty-eight seats gained by Democrats in 1964 were returned to the Republican column—three seats in the Senate, and eight governorships.¹²⁴ The GOP furthered its advances in the no-longer-solid South and maintained its presence in northern industrial centers, while continuing its traditional dominance in the Midwest. These victories were a great relief after Goldwater’s staggering loss to Johnson two years before. Candidates who represented the party’s right and left wings had impressive wins: Ronald Reagan defeated an incumbent to become the governor of California, Edward Brooke won a US Senate seat from Massachusetts, and Senator Clifford Case of New Jersey won reelection. Republican victories in 1966 suggested a new vitality in the party bolstered by party unification and white voters’ desire to slow the pace of change in the United States.

Republican National Committee chairman Bliss had looked to economic policy to lead the party to victory, but the tense status of race relations in 1966 provided a significant boost to the party. The month before the election, Newsweek reported that for the first time since 1962, the majority of Americans polled by Gallup (52 percent) said the Johnson administration was pushing civil rights too fast. Louis Harris, however, found that closer to 75 percent of Americans thought the Johnson administration was moving too fast, which he attributed to backlash politics. Harris predicted that backlash politics—understood as a rejection of the societal changes associated with the civil rights movement, including new federal civil rights reforms, disruption of the status quo, and unrest in the streets (both nonviolent and violent)—could be the decisive factor in nearly half of the districts where freshmen Democratic congressmen sought reelection.¹²⁵ A Harris survey from the same month found that 69 percent of respondents thought that the Republican Party “would do a better job of slowing down the pace of civil rights.”¹²⁶ It was an important distinction that Republican leadership emphasized. Weeks before the election, the Republican Coordinating Committee stated that unlike the Democratic Party, the GOP would prioritize public safety and attend to growing concerns over law and order and the pace of the civil rights movement.¹²⁷ The midterm elections were a remarkable victory for a party that many predicted would go extinct after Goldwater’s defeat, but the party’s revival was bittersweet for African Americans who remained in the Republican Party despite its embrace of the racial status quo.

The final days before the election were marked by Rockefeller accusing O’Connor of being soft on crime and drug addiction. These denunciations were fitting in an election year where opposition to the civil rights movement and calls to reestablish “law and order” in the United States became important rallying points for Republicans. The national Republican Coordinating Committee, with the support of Eisenhower and Everett Dirksen, among others, released a statement accusing the Johnson administration of condoning and encouraging “disregard for law and order.” The year before, the former president equated the urban uprising in Los Angeles to declining “moral standards” and “national character.” After a meeting with Republican senators, Eisenhower told the press, “The political party that can make itself a real crusader for the restoration of these values can win a great many converts.”¹²⁸ Rockefeller publicly refuted the claim that the Johnson administration condoned urban uprisings, but he was not above pointing fingers; he blamed mayors for the unrest instead. Meanwhile, George Romney, the leading moderate candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, said the president was to blame for creating unrealistic expectations among African Americans, which in turn led to rioting.¹²⁹ Rockefeller’s decision not to advocate for the CCRB aided his victory; it also demonstrated to Rockefeller that he could distance himself from aspects of the civil rights movement and even benefit from animosity toward Black causes without overtly rejecting his racially liberal politics. The 1966 gubernatorial campaign became Rockefeller’s first campaign where he tempered his racial liberalism to put himself in the good graces of mainstream Republicans. He steered clear of the major civil rights issue of the day in New York while also working to maintain his ties to the Black community whose support he sought at the polls.

After Rockefeller’s failure to successfully challenge his party in 1964, he decided it was time for a new approach. The Rockefeller who proposed lifetime imprisonment for anyone in possession of an illegal narcotic was still years away, but the Rockefeller of 1966 was willing to manipulate concern about narcotics addiction and crime as political capital to ensure his third-term victory. As a result, the 1966 gubernatorial campaign represents a pivotal moment in Rockefeller’s career that makes it possible to understand how the twentieth century’s most iconic moderate Republican, the Rockefeller Republican, could also be the progenitor of the 1970s’ most shockingly punitive drug laws, a legislative version of a blunt-force weapon that Rockefeller knew from the outset would disproportionately affect African Americans. In the aftermath of the passage of the “no knock” and “stop and frisk” bills, the NAACP leadership did not place the onus of the bills on Rockefeller, but Peter J. Newman, the legislation committee chairman, offered a postmortem for the legislative session published in the Twenty-Eight Annual State Convention report that could have served as a warning to be wary of prominent figures like life member Rockefeller. “As the Civil Rights battle progresses here in New York,” concluded Newman, “it becomes abundantly clear that we will run into mass and highly organized opposition on many fronts.… No effort or expense should be spared to assure us of the enactment of laws in our favor.”¹³⁰ Rockefeller would maintain his connections to African Americans with the aid of an extensive network of Black advisers in 1966, but those relationships became strained. Soon, Black advisers such as Robinson in particular would experience great alarm when the Republican Party’s most prominent champion for civil rights adopted conservative positions that targeted African Americans to curry favor with conservative whites. Before that happened, though, Rockefeller would experience a particularly demoralizing loss to Nixon in 1968 that would lead him to reexamine and renegotiate more fully his place within local and national politics.