6. The Fight at the Construction Site

So I walked across the street and joined the picket line, and this was my first encounter with the civil rights movement in an activist’s role. And I stayed with the demonstrations the whole summer, every day. And the bug bit me.

Herman Ferguson

Rochdale Village was a hot news item in the summer of 1963, hitting the front page of the New York Times on several occasions. This was a few months before the first families would move in to the development, but the news coverage was not about the expected opening of the largest housing cooperative in the world, which was dutifully noted that December with a small, perfunctory notice in the paper of record. Rochdale Village was in the news for reasons that had nothing, directly, to do with housing. At its construction site in July, August, and September, thousands of people marched in protest and attended nearby rallies, while hundreds of people were arrested in acts of civil disobedience. Rochdale Village was one of the foci of the largest mass civil rights protests ever seen in New York City. The year 1963 was perhaps the most crucial year in the history of the modern civil rights struggle, the year when the protests in Birmingham demonstrated, to all who wished to see, that Jim Crow was dying, when the movement met in triumph in Washington to provide the classic statement of its goals, and the year when the focus of protests slowly but decisively began to shift from the legal racial oppression of the South to the related but different problems in the urban black neighborhoods in the North. In the turbulent, heady year of 1963, Rochdale had an important place.

Figure 7. Aerial view of Rochdale Village, ca. 1964. United Housing Foundation Papers, Kheel Center, Cornell University.

In some ways, New York City in 1963 was in a position to be proud of its civil rights accomplishments. Certainly no municipality in the nation had a larger or stronger battery of civil rights protections, including the aforementioned bans against discrimination in housing, employment, entertainment, and education, and no city had more public and private institutions open on a nondiscriminatory basis. But very serious problems remained. Many of the ordinances were loosely enforced, at best, and this enforcement was often undermined by the city’s turbulent demographic transformation. Between 1950 and 1970, as population growth in the city remained flat, the white, non-Hispanic population of the city declined by almost two million persons (from 6.8 to 4.9 million), with a corresponding increase in the black, Puerto Rican, and Latino population, a shift that complicated efforts at fostering integration (especially in housing and the schools), and led to larger, more racially concentrated and more economically distressed areas of minority settlement, along with strenuous efforts to keep the “rising tide of color” out of “white” neighborhoods. In many areas of public life, such as politics and the higher echelons of business, blacks remained severely underrepresented.

And in some areas, blacks were not represented at all. Perhaps the most glaring example of this in the early 1960s was in the building trades unions, a group of 121 craft unions that was responsible for a huge share of the several hundred thousand persons employed in the construction industry, then as now one of the largest and most dominant industries in the city. Entrance into the craft unions was tightly controlled by the existing membership, usually to the exclusion of minorities. In 1963 no more than 2 percent of building trades union membership were minorities (in a city whose minority population was approaching about 25 percent), and this pitiful level was reached only because some of the less benighted of the building trades unions had recently started minority apprenticeship programs, typically in entry-level positions.1

Candor about discriminatory practices would be a victim of the growing power of the civil rights movement, and the summer of 1963 was just about the last time a local labor leader would be quoted on the matter in the New York Times; an official of the International Union of Elevator Constructors told a reporter that their New York local of 1,400 had “maybe three” blacks, because most blacks were “afraid of heights.” Local 28 of the Sheet Metal Workers International Association, which had no African Americans among its 3,300 members, angrily denied engaging in discriminatory practices. The International Association of Structural Iron Workers likewise had no blacks among its 1,000-man local, but wanted credit for their large number of American Indians, the so-called Mohawks in High Steel, as the Joseph Mitchell essay had it, who had developed a reputation for working at high elevations.2

Discrimination in the building trades unions was not only unrepentant, it was highly visible. Black communities in the early 1960s further suffered from meager essential services to their neighborhoods. In a South Jamaica community meeting with the Queens borough president in 1962, local residents complained of the lack of black police officers, firefighters, sanitation workers, and teachers in the area, and that all the construction jobs were taken by whites.3 Whenever new construction went up in South Jamaica, one man who grew up there in the 1960s remembers, one of the first questions local residents always asked was, Can the men get jobs at the construction site? At Rochdale, the answer was, almost certainly, no. The injustice of the situation was compounded because of the high rates of unemployment in black neighborhoods, and because jobs in the construction industry, while often highly skilled, did not require much in the way of formal education or initial capital investment, and because, in the end, many blacks did end up working in construction, but in off-the-books jobs with firms that were often mob controlled, and at which they sometimes had to summon up their courage to ask for their pay.4

In many cities in the North in 1963—in Philadelphia, Newark, Trenton, Cleveland, and Brooklyn, as well as in South Jamaica—discrimination by the building trades unions catalyzed massive demonstrations, and the style of the protests, with marches and mass picketing, civil disobedience, and sit-ins, was an indication that the fervor of Southern protests that had so galvanized the civil rights movement had moved north.5 The targets of the demonstrations were somewhat more elusive than the blatant legal discrimination in the South. Racial discrimination by unions was by 1963 illegal in New York City, but the legislation was relatively toothless and easily evaded. In any event, to further protect their Jim Crow status, the building trades unions all had extensive waiting lists for their apprenticeship programs (entrance into which was a requirement for union membership) and these waiting lists were, of course, overwhelmingly white, so the reward for a black applicant who was finally accepted by a union could be the privilege of waiting at the back of a long queue for an entry process that stretched for years.

By bringing political pressure to bear, demonstrations were slowly forcing building trades unions to alter their hiring practices. In the spring of 1963 demonstrations had some success in Philadelphia, and in early June, Herbert Hill, the labor director of the NAACP, suggested that similar protests be undertaken in New York City.6 The most effective way to protest against these politically well-entrenched unions was by getting politicians to place pressure on them, in part by forcing politicians to chose between support from the unions and from the civil rights community. In 1963, no politician in New York State was more powerful than Governor Nelson Rockefeller, and given his expansive promises to fight for equal opportunity for all New Yorkers, few were easier to embarrass if it could be shown that there was a substantial gap between rhetoric and action. Therefore in June, a coalition of civil rights organizations decided that they would concentrate their protests against large state-funded construction sites in the city. The two largest such projects were Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn and Rochdale Village in Queens.7

Even before the protests started at Downstate Medical on July 15, there were protests at an extension of Harlem Hospital. Subsidiary protests broke out at Bronx White Castle outlets, the aptly named chain whose owners refused to hire minorities to peddle their tasty twelve-cent mini-hamburgers; in the NYCHA Rutgers Houses on the Lower East Side; new construction projects at Foley Square; and at luncheonettes that had formal or informal policies of discrimination (or in the case of chains like Woolworth’s, that had discriminatory policies in the South, if not in the North). There were sit-in demonstrations at City Hall, at the New York City offices of Governor Rockefeller, and there was talk of protests at the World’s Fair and Shea Stadium sites in Flushing Meadows, then under construction.8 The rhetoric at these events was often fiery, as in Brooklyn where, on August 1, after a near riot that involved much pushing and shoving between demonstrators and police, a black minister from Brooklyn compared New York City to Alabama, the United States to South Africa, and pronounced that “this nation is going straight to hell.”9

At the end of July, the New York Amsterdam News, in a banner headline, declared “The ‘Revolution’ Spreads all over New York” and that “the suddenly volatile petrol of long-standing Negro discontent and unaddressed grievances flowed together through the five boroughs.” (Completing the metaphor, the paper maintained that unless something was done immediately, a full-scale “racial holocaust” was in the offing.)10 On July 22, when two hundred people were arrested at a demonstration in Brooklyn, the New York Times called it the largest mass arrests in New York City since the Harlem riots in 1943.11 The protests certainly caught the attention of New York City that summer. For some it served as a call to action, for others it roused them from a complacent belief that “civil rights” was an issue only below the Mason-Dixon Line. In some it stirred something darker, which was beginning to be called the “white backlash.” By the summer of 1963 there were reports of the formation of a shadowy organization known as SPONGE (Society for the Prevention of Negroes from Getting Everything), which existed primarily as a graffiti tag and guys mouthing off in bars. A commuter interviewed by the New York Times in early August on the protests insisted they had affected his subway commute. “They [that is, blacks] used to step on your toes in the subway, but now they stomp on your whole foot.”12 For this man and others, it would be a summer of foot-stomping.

The demonstrations at Rochdale began on Tuesday, July 23, 1963. Three organizations shared responsibility for the protests: the Jamaica Branch of the NAACP, Long Island CORE (Congress of Racial Equality), and a new organization, the Coordinated (or United) Clergy of Jamaica, formed for this protest.13 In a rally in a church the previous Sunday to gain local support for the demonstrations, the rally leaders made their case, and pointed out what nearby residents had known for months, that the Rochdale contractors, needing to augment the workforce, had brought in union members from out of state. Cars with license plates from as far away as Alabama, Mississippi, and even Texas were regularly parked around the construction site, while local blacks were not hired.14

The goal of the demonstrators was to block deliveries to the site and to halt or slow construction until their demands were met. The main entrance on New York (now Guy Brewer) Boulevard was the focal point of the demonstration. Civil disobedience was carried out by a minority of the picketers. While the bulk of the protesters carried signs, a select group went in front of the entrance and knelt in prayer or lay down, preventing the passage of trucks to the site. Those who participated in this act were warned three times by the police that if they failed to move they would be arrested. When the protesters held their ground, they were arrested and transported to the Queens County Court on Queens Boulevard for arraignment. On the first day of the demonstrations there were about two hundred protesters, with twenty-seven people arrested, including ten members of the clergy and two lawyers.15

Day to day, the protesters ebbed and flowed, reaching as many as 350 but generally numbering between 50 and 100, and they were sometimes outnumbered by police, who maintained a force level of around 130 officers.16 (On some days the chants were led by Barbara Brannen, formerly of the National Negro Opera Company.)17 There was a trough in mid-August when there was some feeling the demonstrations were “bogging down” and some fleeting thought given to suspending the protests.18 The demonstrations did slacken in late September, with the beginning of the school year—teachers and students on break for the summer had made up a large percentage of the regulars—and ended for good in October.19 By the time the demonstrations had run their course, between two hundred and three hundred people had been arrested at Rochdale, probably about half of those arrested at the larger sister demonstrations at the Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn.20

The marches attracted a lot of attention, and a fair number of celebrities. Baseball great Jackie Robinson marched at Rochdale one morning, and the rally was endorsed by Martin Luther King Jr., speaking only a mile or so away at a press conference at Idlewild International Airport.21 The comedian Dick Gregory was scheduled to appear before he was arrested at a civil rights protest in Chicago.22 The rallies, which at the height of the demonstrations took place almost every evening, attracted many notables, among them John Lewis of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), James Farmer of CORE, and Herbert Hill and Roy Wilkins of the NAACP (Wilkins lived in nearby St. Albans).23 An outdoor rally in St. Albans to support the Rochdale protesters, held on July 28, 1963, attracted five hundred people and twenty ministers, and featured the Reverend Dr. Gardner C. Taylor, pastor of the powerful Concord Baptist Church in Bedford-Stuyvesant and one of the leaders of the demonstrations at the Downstate Medical Center site in Brooklyn, who called out labor leaders as “pious prostitutes who send money south and cut our throats up north.”24

But celebrities aside, these were essentially local demonstrations, rooted in South Jamaica. They were in some ways only the most visible face of a broader, community-wide organizing effort. At an August rally at the Amity Baptist Church, William Booth, president of the Jamaica NAACP and one of the leaders of the protest, said that now was the time for radical, sweeping change: “The only way that we could go more slowly, is to go into reverse. For a hundred years we have done little more than stand still on civil rights.”25 At one rally the demonstrators were entertained with a pageant, “From Slavery to Freedom,” performed by the Rochdale Freedom Singers.26 The Rochdale Freedom Singers continued to appear through 1964, in one venue with the famed modern dancer Pearl Primus.27 A local columnist observed, after seven hundred people attended a rally at Morningside Baptist Church on Merrick Boulevard in early August, “the Rochdale Village situation has served to organize Jamaica more than has any other community problem.”28

The demonstrations were generally peaceful, and the local police were basically sympathetic to the protesters. The Amsterdam News in August 1963 had a photograph of Booth and Assistant Chief Inspector William Kimmins sharing a joke in front of a hearse with a “Bury Jim Crow” sign.29 Although the first protesters were arrested and spent time behind bars, William Booth soon worked out an arrangement with the local police and courts whereby the arrested protesters would be brought before a special judge at the Queens Court who would fine them the equivalent of a traffic violation and let them go, which sometimes led to committed protesters being arrested several times in a single day.30 The police detail prided itself on its sensitivity; all officers had been given special training on the background to the picketing, and were under special orders not to look “either disgruntled or disgusted.” The protesters, said Inspector Kimmins, “have been fair with us for the most part. They’re pretty responsible people.”31

However there were other, more fiery, protests. Lincoln Lynch, the head of Long Island CORE, on more than one occasion fought vigorously with the police when he was arrested, and complained about “police manhandling.”32 One close observer noted that when Lynch was arrested “he physically fought with the police, he never had an easy arrest, and he was arrested all the time.”33 Other arrests also fell outside the Gandhian nonviolent-resistance playbook. On occasion police officers were slapped or scratched, and one teenage girl was arrested for felonious assault after trying to push a patrolman under a cement truck.34

There were occasional taunts, and worse, from the workforce on the Rochdale site, some of whom, annoyed by the way the picketing was interfering with their lunch hours, were heard to shout “Up with Jim Crow, down with Communists,” and issue the inevitable cries of “nigger.”35 The Teamsters union, initiating what would prove to be a sorry history with Rochdale, denounced “bombthrowers” and “frustrated malcontents” for blocking deliveries to construction sites.36 On at least one occasion, a picketer was attacked by a construction worker.37 But though there was some friction during the protests with the police, on the whole, and to the dismay of some who complained that the calm handing of the arrests betokened a lack of true militancy, the Rochdale demonstrations were a model of a coordinated civil rights protests.

But what attracted attention to Rochdale and the other protests in New York City in the summer of 1963, beyond their size and fervor, and what marked the protests as a decisive break from the past history of the civil rights movement, was the nature of their demands. The protesters at Rochdale were not merely calling for an end to racially discriminatory practices by the building trades unions. They were demanding that a quarter of all the jobs on the construction site, what both sides still referred to as a quota, be reserved for African Americans and other minorities, roughly equal to their percentage of the population within the city.38 With these protests, at Rochdale and in Brooklyn and other northern cities, the call for racial quotas or proportional hiring, which for many years had lurked in the background of the quest for racial equality, emerged as one of the most divisive issues within the civil rights movement. It would not be relegated to a quiet corner again. Although most civil rights liberals, from the 1930s through the debates on the 1964 Civil Rights Act had tried to evade the issue, declaring quotas anathema and incompatible with civil rights, the reality proved more complex, and in practice it was very difficult to guarantee equality of opportunity without some attention to racial percentages.39

Rochdale Village provides a perfect example of this. Despite discrimination by many of the building trades unions, there were African Americans working on the Rochdale construction site. Not all the building trades unions had equally backward policies. However, as William Booth pointed out, blacks tended to be concentrated in the lower level of construction positions, and most were laborers, plasterers, carpenters, or assistant bricklayers. There were no black electricians among the 115 on the job site (the one black electrician assigned to Rochdale refused to cross the picket line), nor any black plumbers, lathe workers, steamfitters, or elevator installers.40 The number of blacks working on the site diminished over the course of the strike. At one point during the protests twenty-three African American plasterers (half the plasterers on the job) walked off the job in sympathy with the picketers.41 There were disagreements about the number of blacks working on the job site. William Booth claimed there were about 150; Abraham Kazan argued for some 210, an unnamed state official, hostile to the protests, claimed there were “more than 300” blacks on the site.42 There were disagreements as well about the size of the total workforce, though no one claimed that, in fact, a quarter of those employed were African American.43

Abraham Kazan’s response to the whole controversy was a vain hope that it would all just go away. Kazan had a meeting, during the demonstrations, with the Queens DA and a group of protesters, described by Kazan “as twenty clergymen and a couple of white women.” Kazan said his hands were tied.44 For Kazan, whose UHF was crucially dependent on labor support, openly challenging the hiring practices in the building trades unions would have been impossible, or at least very courageous on his part, and this was a path he did not take. He argued (somewhat disingenuously, since he was the chief contractor) that “we can’t tell the contractors whom to employ, and we certainly don’t practice discrimination.” But he knew that if he used union labor, as he always did, it would of necessity be an overwhelmingly white labor force. In a press release issued at the height of the protests, Kazan emphasized the number of blacks that were working on the construction site, and offered his hope that the building trades unions would accelerate their efforts at increasing minority employment.45 He did not address the question of quotas.

For the demonstrators, quotas raised the question of what it meant to integrate a workplace or a union local and provide equal access to minorities, especially if there was reason to doubt the good faith of those who, under duress, changed their previously discriminatory policies. Did 100 on the Rochdale construction site out of a workforce of 2,000 constitute integration? Did 200? If not, what did? The simplest way to ensure equality of opportunity was by paying some attention to the results. Rather than get into debates over process and promises (often empty) of an improved hiring system, a straightforward way of verifying good faith would be setting a reasonable quota. The rampant discrimination in the building trades unions made it a perfect test case for quotas, and as the historian Thomas Sugrue has shown, it was in part through grass roots protests against discrimination in the building trades unions, such as the Rochdale protests, that quotas re-emerged as a topic of national debate.46 “We are told a quota system is not possible,” said the Reverend Gardner C. Taylor at the protests in Brooklyn, “but Negroes have been living with a zero quota for 100 years.”47

Indeed, it might be argued that discrimination in the building unions made the perfect case for quotas. Discrimination was systematic and blatant, and the waiting lists for membership, if strictly adhered to, would hinder minority union membership for years to come. But what seemed reasonable to the protesters seemed ludicrous to almost all politicians. Shortly after the protests at Rochdale began on July 23, Emmanuel Cellar, a Brooklyn Democrat, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee and a longtime liberal standard-bearer, said he would “rebel against quotas,” arguing irrelevantly that blacks were overrepresented, as a percentage of population, in jobs in the post office. Senator Jacob Javits said, “There is neither room for nor need for Negro or other exclusivity in civil rights.”48 Governor Rockefeller, using the ultimate Cold War cussword, declared that quotas were “un-American in concept and in principle,” and that “we can’t abandon our concepts of equal opportunity by giving special privilege to some.”49 (The liberal Republican U.S. senator Kenneth Keating, who attended one of the protest rallies, was one of the few prominent politicians to support the protests.)50 Many politicians raised the specter of backlash, including Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr., the undersecretary of commerce, who argued that quotas would be an “embarrassing advantage that would boomerang in the long run.”51 If this was a reasonable concern, it also had the effect of giving white fears a veto over efforts to achieve genuine racial equality.

Labor leaders, especially those close to the building trades unions, were even more hostile to the notion of quotas. Peter J. Brennan, the head of the New York City Building and Construction Trades Council, representing 122 unions and a quarter of a million union members, and the main target of the protests, asserted that the building trades did not discriminate against minorities. Like Rockefeller, he complained that quotas were un-American, and argued that his organization was “being asked to discriminate against whites,” words echoed by AFL-CIO president George Meany, a former Bronx plumber and onetime head of the plumbers union: “We cannot visit injustice on the white boy to make up to the black boy for injustice done to him in the past.” Harry Van Arsdale, head of the New York Central Labor Council (and whose own union, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, was among the most enlightened of the building trades unions) was noncommittal, but promised improvements in the number of minorities in the building trades unions.52

With protests all over the city, and extended sit-ins at City Hall and Governor Rockefeller’s New York City offices, politicians had to do something, and they put pressure on the unions to do the same. On August 6, 1963, Rockefeller, after meeting with black ministers who were leading the Brooklyn Downstate demonstrations (Brooklyn CORE members were not privy to the meetings, and no one from the Rochdale demonstrations was invited) announced a plan that included tightening up enforcement of state discrimination statutes, withholding funds from construction projects if the “existence of discrimination” is found, and working with the building trades unions to set up a program that would increase the numbers of minorities in construction.53 This ended the demonstrations at Brooklyn Downstate, much to the consternation of most of the leaders of Brooklyn CORE.54

The leaders of the Rochdale demonstrations were skeptical of the agreement between Rockefeller and the Brooklyn ministers, and the demonstrations continued in Jamaica. The skepticism was warranted. The agreement hinged on the (entirely voluntary) effort by Peter Brennan and the 122 member unions of the Building Trades Council to hire more minorities, and there was ample reason to doubt their good faith. After some arm twisting by Rockefeller, a six-person interracial committee was set up by Brennan to give special attention to the applications of minority candidates for union apprenticeship positions.55 But Brennan was never serious about the agreement—“If we have to put on a theatrical display to prove we don’t discriminate, we’ll do it,” he said—and was as good as his word. His effort to speed the hiring of blacks into the building trades unions was purely for show, without substance.56 Leaders of the Rochdale protests rightly dismissed the Brennan plan as a “public relations gimmick,” and William Booth called it “a lot of hogwash.”57 By the end of 1963, although twenty centers had been established in minority neighborhoods to collect applications for apprenticeships, by the end of the year, none of the 3,000 applicants had been admitted into apprenticeship programs, and almost all their applications had been rejected outright.58

Looking back at the Rochdale protests in November, many found the experience frustrating. Little had been accomplished. The demonstrations had neither appreciably slowed the progress of construction projects, nor led to increased black membership in the building trades unions. William Booth admitted to a great frustration over the apparent futility of the demonstrations. An unnamed leader of the summer protests told the Times that “picketing and demonstrating are not the answer,” but he had no idea what the right answer was.59

Booth was not the only one in the fall of 1963 pondering the consequences of the summer’s demonstrations at Rochdale. That October, Stanley H. Lowell, chairman of the New York City Commission on Human Rights, the city’s highest ranking civil rights position, shocked almost all respectable opinion when he became the first city or state official to endorse what he called “preferential treatment” for blacks on the union waiting lists to compensate blacks for historic inequities, arguing it was unfair to make blacks wait at the back of the line for new openings. Mayor Wagner denounced Lowell’s proposal, and said the notion of preferential treatment was barred by law, a sentiment seconded by the vice-chair of the State Commission Against Discrimination, who called it “utterly inconsistent with equality of opportunity, and utterly illegal.” The proposal was denounced as well by the New York City chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union as “violating the civil liberties of whites.” Lowell’s suggestion was condemned in a New York Times editorial as one worthy of the white supremacist White Citizens’ Councils.60 Lowell offered to resign but stayed on the job. He then claimed he had been misunderstood (though he hadn’t been), and rather than “preferential treatment,” suggested a more neutral term, one that had the advantage of being new and unknown and lacked the baggage of prior associations or connotations. On the basis of a recent Kennedy administration executive order on discrimination among federal contractors (one that, as it happened, went into effect on July 22, 1963, the day before the Rochdale demonstrations commenced) he suggested that what he had in mind might better be called “affirmative action.” The executive order was the first to use the term in somewhat akin to its current meaning, though it had remained largely unnoticed, and its use by Lowell was perhaps the first in relation to racial equality in New York City.61 If the immediate results of the Rochdale demonstrations were disappointing, the demands of the protesters for a systematic rethinking of what was meant by civil rights and racial equality could not be, and would not be, long ignored.

The Rochdale protests were also an indication of the changes under way in Jamaica in the early 1960s, and how the struggle for black equality itself was evolving. The Rochdale demonstrations brought together a broad coalition of support, from Jewish organizations such as the American Jewish Congress to emerging black nationalist organizations, a coalition that would not be brought together again. While the protests were both planned and led by blacks, they were firmly interracial in their character. White demonstrators were plentiful both among the picketers and those who engaged in civil disobedience. Photographs of the demonstrators show a racial mixture at the Rochdale construction site. Whites were regularly interviewed as participant demonstrators.62 A number of those who were present at the Rochdale demonstrations, white and black, had already purchased an apartment at the cooperative, and saw their participation as part of their commitment to integration. The mother of William Booth was scheduled to move into Rochdale a few months after it opened, and Booth was excited about the prospects of Rochdale, believing it would “further integration and help the Negro community.”63 Other prospective Rochdale residents who participated in the demonstrations included Anita Starr, later a teacher in Rochdale’s elementary and intermediate schools, and Peter Schulberg, who was planning to move to Rochdale, and told a reporter that his participation in the protest, as much as living in Rochdale, was a part of his commitment to integration.64 William Jones remembers going, as a ten-year-old, to the demonstrations with his father, the year before his interracial family moved to Rochdale.65 However, the protests at Rochdale, from beginning to end, were planned and controlled by the black community in Jamaica, and one can detect some wariness on the part of blacks as to the appropriate extent of white participation, and some uncertainty on the part of whites as to whether they were really wanted. A leader of the Jamaica branch of the NAACP urged his fellow members to “join with those white people who have a terrifying need to blot out bigotry, and to know freedom.” A poem appeared in the October 1963 Bulletin on the plight of a “White Picket,” which implored black protesters not to turn their “cold hate” on him because:

I walk on your picket line, victim of other’s guilt

My skin aflame, white is my cross, your dark eyes make me wilt.

These undercurrents aside, the Rochdale protests were certainly a time when white and black marched together.66

And it was during the Rochdale demonstrations, as if to underline and punctuate their importance, that on August 28, the single most remembered moment from the entire civil rights movement occurred: the March on Washington. In the predawn hours of that Wednesday morning, hundreds gathered at the Rochdale construction site, boarded old buses without air-conditioning, and took the long trip to the Washington Mall. Not everyone went, and some, such as William Booth, stayed home and manned the picket lines, to ensure that the building trades unions and their contractors would not get a free day without protests because of the goings-on in the nation’s capital. As Booth later recalled, for him, the demonstrations at Rochdale were more important than the March on Washington.67

When Martin Luther King Jr. in his famous speech said, “We cannot be satisfied as long as a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote,” many of the Rochdale protesters felt he was speaking directly to them. As one person wrote in the Jamaica NAACP Bulletin in September 1963:68

Dr. King did not speak specifically of southern injustice, notorious for its flagrant disregard of human dignity, he spoke rather of northern communities where bigotry lay subtle and mean white men turn from it and pretend that it doesn’t exist. We at Rochdale Village know of that subtle meanness, and we have brought back this urgent message from Washington.

Do not turn away from your duties as black Americans; do not let complacency burden you with its weight of indifference and strip you of your dignity; do not turn away from this fight which is stronger than any physical effort associated with a shooting war. Join with the pickets at Rochdale and walk and chant your way to dignity and freedom…. We returned to Jamaica dedicated to our task at Rochdale.

For the Jamaica branch of the NAACP, the Rochdale protests were, at the time and in retrospect, their finest hour, their greatest mass protest, the moment when, in the words of one contemporary, they threw over the traces of “old black middle-class complacency” and demonstrated that they were willing and able to get down and dirty in the quest for civil rights.69 The Jamaica branch of the NAACP was a mass organization. Over the course of 1963, the publicity from the demonstrations led to an increase in the branch’s membership from 5,000 to 6,000.70 Its old fight to defend the rights of black homeowners in southeastern Queens was still very much needed, and early in 1963 it came to the aid of Richard Ellis and his family after they had purchased a house in Springfield Gardens, and where they remained, despite the efforts of a local bank to renege on a promised mortgage and the icy hostility of their new neighbors, which included fire bombings, rocks thrown through windows, and threatening phone calls. (Richard Ellis purchased a shotgun for his protection.)71

By 1963 the Jamaica NAACP, long a bulwark of the black middle class and a prominent social organization, had become a powerful political force in Jamaica, increasingly able to make and unmake candidates on the basis of their racial politics. But the very political success of the Jamaica NAACP was an indication of changes in the offing, as the leaders of the branch embarked on political careers that were not necessarily tied to the organization. This was the path taken by Guy Brewer, the leader of the Jamaica NAACP in the early 1950s, who a decade later was emerging as a politician in South Jamaica, notable for his very sharp elbows to anyone, black or white, who presumed to get in his way.72 (He was posthumously rewarded by the naming of New York Boulevard, the site of the main protests at Rochdale, in his honor.) If Brewer became a power in southeastern Queens, his successors, notably William H. Booth and Paul Gibson, the two most prominent leaders of the Jamaica branch during the Rochdale protests, would wield power on a citywide scale. Booth, a Republican, was from 1966 through 1969 Mayor John Lindsay’s commissioner of human rights. In 1974 Gibson, then working as an executive for American Airlines, was appointed by Abe Beame as the city’s first African American deputy mayor.

The Rochdale protests had two other cosponsors, Long Island CORE and the Coordinated Clergy. Long Island CORE was only a few years old, and was not a social organization. Compared with the Jamaica branch of the NAACP, it was minuscule, with no more than thirty to forty members in 1962, though it claimed a membership of two hundred by early 1964, no doubt a testament to the busy and publicity-filled year of 1963.73 Although it had a black leader, Lincoln Lynch, like most CORE chapters, its membership was predominantly white.74 As its name implies, Long Island CORE was not a Jamaica-based organization but was centered in Hempstead, and had pursued civil rights actions not only in Queens but in Nassau and Suffolk counties as well. Like its parent organization, Long Island CORE had its heyday in the early 1960s, committed to both its integrationist vision of a future America and to militant direct action. Although within a few years, CORE would be riven by internal dissension and would largely self-destruct as a major civil rights organization, one of its points had already been made; the time of polite middle-class black protests against racial injustices was a thing of the past.

The other cosponsor of the Rochdale demonstrations was the Coordinated Clergy of Jamaica, under the direction of the Reverend Robert Ross, which was organized for the Rochdale demonstrations. This too represented a new direction in civil rights organizations, one largely pioneered by Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Although black churches had sometimes been active in the struggle for civil rights, they often remained in the background, and many prominent churches and church leaders were at best neutral toward civil rights militancy. But increasingly black church leaders were presenting themselves as an alternative to the NAACP as a source of civil rights leadership. Mainly it was the younger clergy and the newer congregations that participated in the Coordinated Clergy. Lloyd Burris of the Zion Temple Baptist Church in August criticized some of the old-line black churches in Jamaica for their “do-nothing” attitude during the demonstrations.75 As the Jamaica NAACP Bulletin put it in September 1963, “Everybody’s talkin’ ’bout the local clergymen who have lent their support to the Rochdale protests—and those who have not.”76 Indeed, conspicuous by its absence from the Rochdale protests was the oldest and most prominent black church in Jamaica, the Allen AME. For careful observers of the 1963 Rochdale demonstrations, it was clear the seeds of change had been sown.

But perhaps the clearest indication of coming changes in the civil rights movement was a fourth group that became prominent during the Rochdale protests, a loosely knit collection of like-minded individuals. Its origins are reflected in its name, the Rochdale Movement. It was a fairly matter-of-fact name for an organization that was, in every sense of the term, radical in its actions and in its critique of both American society and of existing black organizations. The movement shared with the other organizations the goal of increasing black employment in the building trades, but its larger, nationalist critique of the civil rights movement sought black empowerment as its end, and was, at best, skeptical and often hostile about the benefits of integration.

The Rochdale Movement was largely the product of a single person, Herman Ferguson. No one would be more changed by the protests at Rochdale, or would travel down a more unlikely path. Born in the early 1920s and raised in Fayetteville, North Carolina, a small town near Fort Bragg, he attended Livingstone College in Salisbury, North Carolina, and Wilberforce College in Ohio before coming to New York City at the age of twenty-two, in 1943, to join the merchant marine during World War II.77 While in the merchant marine he became an active member of the National Maritime Union (NMU), one of the most radical of CIO unions, and a union with blacks in positions of leadership, notably its Caribbean-born secretary, Ferdinand Smith. Ferguson spent much of his free time in the merchant marine reading the left-wing literature the NMU distributed.78 Although his politics would change considerably from the interracial leftism of the NMU, the lessons from its radicalism would be an important influence on Ferguson’s politics.

After the war, Ferguson went to NYU, obtained his teacher’s license, and began to teach in elementary schools in Brooklyn. In 1957 he moved to Jamaica, and taught in schools in Hollis and Bayside. He was primarily concerned with advancing his career, “involved in getting a firm grip on the ladder up, getting established in teaching, looking for ways to support my family, paying my mortgage, and buying a car.”79 He was very successful in his career, and by the late 1950s had become an assistant principal, and black assistant principals at the time were a commodity, as he told me, “as scarce as hen’s teeth.” (He was likely the only black male assistant principal in the New York City school system.) Within the school system he had the reputation of a quiet, competent, administrator, one who concentrated on school matters.80

Although Ferguson had some involvement with CORE and local community organizations, through 1963 most of his interest in politics had been “of the armchair type” confined to discussions “around beers and barbecues.” He had strong opinions. He had no faith in politics and politicians, whom he considered “a species to be avoided at all costs.” He rejected the movement for integration as a plaything for the black middle class, a goal that “offered nothing to the hopes and aspirations of black people.” The Nation of Islam and Malcolm X made a big impression on him, with their program of self-determination, self-reliance, and separation of the races. As for integration, he considered it something “that could not ever possibly take place in the United States with its history of racism and white supremacy.”

Ferguson attended a preliminary rally before the Rochdale demonstrations primarily as a spectator (he wanted to see civil rights leaders like Roy Wilkins and Whitney Young in person, his skepticism of their politics notwithstanding) and was unmoved by their calls for protests. When the demonstrations began, on July 23, he was asleep in bed; his wife woke him up and asked, “Why aren’t you going over to the picket lines? It’s all over the radio. The police are over there arresting people. You’ve been blasting these integrationists and talking about what needs to be done, and so on, now why don’t you put your money where your mouth is?” Feeling abashed, he went over to the nearby Rochdale construction site, and soon became a regular on the picket lines. He was interviewed on the picket line by a reporter from the Long Island Press in early August (and photographed, no doubt for the last time in his career with an NAACP and CORE sign around his neck), and told the reporter that he was planning to go back to his North Carolina hometown and enter every restaurant and movie theater that ever barred him as a youth. “This campaign here has proven to me that I—and many others like me—will do anything to achieve full equality.” He was as good as his word.81

Although Ferguson always maintained good relations with the demonstration leaders, he felt the protests were too polite, too coordinated. For him, the relatively cordial interaction between the police and the demonstrators amounted to a deal whereby the protest leaders could make their point and get their headlines, and the contractors could continue to make their deliveries. The progress of work at the Rochdale site was not being substantially delayed by the protests. “We found that they really were token arrests. The leaders of the demonstrations were whisked in a police vehicle to Queens Court on Queens Blvd. They would go before a special judge who handled nothing but these cases. They would fine them $5, and then these people [would go] right back to the construction site. People used to boast about how many had been arrested that day.” At the nightly rallies, in his jaundiced words, “all these integrationist songs were being sung, and there was a religious kind of fervor about it that would insure that there would be another large crowd there the next day.” In his opinion it was all so much grandstanding; those arrested were being used, and the protests were “designed more for publicity purposes than anything else.”

Moreover, good relations with the police offended Ferguson’s aesthetic of picketing. For a protest to be real, there needed to be real anger on both sides. You didn’t want sympathy from the police, you wanted their billy clubs; this was a sign you were fighting for something that those running things didn’t want to give you. His model for demonstrations were his days on the waterfront with the NMU, “demonstrating for wages and job benefits; the police fought us bitterly, and when you got arrested, they roughhoused you. I had never seen such congeniality between the demonstrators and the police” [as at Rochdale]. His anger at the arranged arrests “was my trade unionism coming to the fore, more than anything else.”

An article in the Amsterdam News in late August reported on Ferguson’s group and their discontent. “The Rochdale Village protest seems to be bogging down. Our offices have received calls from some persons who think that the fight is not being waged properly…. The only way gains will be made is when the construction people are made to lose time and there is a definite showdown.”82 Ferguson and his group planned guerrilla tactics. They had learned that cement was mixed off-site, and unless it was delivered to the construction site in a reasonable amount of time, it would harden and become unusable. If the trucks were under guard at the site, elsewhere they were less closely watched, and Ferguson and his allies tried to sabotage the trucks at their staging areas elsewhere in Queens, putting sand in their gas tanks, letting air out of the trucks’ tires, and chaining people to the trucks. However, the September 1963 NAACP Bulletin had a mysterious notice about “Butler’s raiders” (perhaps a nom de guerre) conducting raids against “Ryan’s Cementers.”83

But the main plan and tactic was a dramatic shutting down of the construction cranes. If they could be immobilized, all the work on the construction site would be halted, at least for the day. But the problems in arranging this were considerable. The construction site was well guarded at night. Anyone caught trying to break in to the site would face arrest, and not the kid-glove arrests that had been typical. However, the group found a piece of fence on New York Boulevard and 137th Avenue that they could work loose and crawl through.

Once the action was planned and the date and time were set—the early morning hours of September 6—many of those who had volunteered to participate failed to show. As Ferguson remembered, “Some of the most vocally outspoken people came up with lame-ass excuses why they couldn’t make it to the event.” After some scrambling, a team was assembled. Ferguson was originally not supposed to be among those participating in the action, because it was feared that it might jeopardize his position as an assistant principal. But to encourage others, and to set an example, Ferguson decided to take part. In the end, at two or three o’clock in the morning, five people crept their way onto the construction site. In the darkness, Susan Schwartz chained herself to the base of a crane, and Ferguson and Alexander Passikoff climbed one crane while Franklin Anderson and Andrew Young (not the SCLC leader) climbed another. Those climbing the cranes, in pitch blackness, went as high as sixty feet in the air, as the cranes grew increasingly rickety the higher they reached. Eventually they secured a position and chained themselves there.84 Regarding the participation of whites in the action, Ferguson told me:

These were like military actions. We needed soldiers, and we were all fighting for a common cause. As when I was with the NMU, our troops went out on the picket lines and fought with the police; we had many white guys out there with us, so that didn’t create a problem at all—we had a common cause and enemy, trying to get Rochdale to hire more black workers—the other motivations, oh I don’t know[;] those people who were willing to take this step[,] as far as I was concerned they were quite acceptable to me, I had no problem with them.

Figure 8. Leonard Sykes, “The Man on the Crane: Rochdale Village ’63.” News Bulletin, Jamaica Branch NAACP, vol. 9, no. 8 (October 1963).

Chained into place, the protesters awaited the coming of dawn and the start of the workday. “I’ll never forget, as the sun rose in the sky it was light enough to actually see us and the buildings, when the workers came in. They didn’t see us at first, but when they started the day’s work—they were at the 7th or 8th floor, and there we were on the cranes—there was a look on astonishment on their faces.” The police were called, the demonstrators refused to budge, and couldn’t even if they wanted to; they had no keys for the chains. A stalemate ensued for several hours. The media was notified, and a large crowd gathered. Eventually the cranes were lowered to a horizontal position, ten feet or so over the ground, large safety nets were opened, police officers carefully sawed open the chains, and the protesters fell into the nets and were arrested. The protesters had stopped all work on the construction site until lunchtime. When they were arraigned later in the day, the presiding judge might well have been the first to make an invidious comparison between the previous week’s March on Washington and the subsequent direction of the civil rights movement: “The demonstrators in Washington were wonderful. You people are accused of flaunting the law daily in your demonstration.”85 The effect of this spectacular act of civil disobedience was electric. The Pittsburgh Courier reported, “Anti-bias demonstrations reached new heights last week” at Rochdale, and claimed that this new tactic was the next step in the civil rights struggle. “Just picketing alone will just tire out the demonstrators. The politicians, newspapers, and ‘white liberal’ elements have always approved of ‘peaceful protests’ that have served to do no more than exhaust the protesting groups without bringing about any change.”86 The Amsterdam News published a photograph of a beaming Herman Ferguson, who referred to himself as a “freedom astronaut.”87

Ferguson and his peers were now local heroes, and the other groups at the Rochdale demonstrations rallied to their aid, providing lawyers and other assistance. The October NAACP Bulletin bore a moving illustration titled “The Man on the Crane, Rochdale Village ’63,” depicting a black man suspended in air, his left arm clutching the crane, his right arm outstretched in protest. Paul Gibson wrote an open letter to Governor Rockefeller and Mayor Wagner:

Silhouetted against a grey September sky, suspended high above the trampled earth; clung a human sacrifice, inches from death and but minutes from imprisonment, he fought his silent protest against inequality with [what] he felt was his last effective weapon—his body…. We pray that the shadowy figure of this man clinging to a crane and chained to a dream will haunt you every moment as it haunts us. We pray that he will tear at your heart and sear away your very soul…. We pray that he will infect you and give you no peace until you climb to those same dizzy heights of sacrifice and fight bigotry in your way as The Man On The Crane fights in his—with courage, bolstered by determination and dedication.

Ferguson and the others had to make a number of court appearances in connection with the trespass charges brought against them. In early December the Queens County Supreme Court judge Joseph M. Conroy dismissed all charges against the Rochdale defendants, likening them to “the patriots of the Boston Tea Party.” About a week later, the first families moved into Rochdale Village.88

Ferguson was not the only person who interpreted the demonstrations at Rochdale and other sites in 1963 as reflecting an interest in black empowerment and the need for blacks to follow a consciously black agenda, contra the “integrationist” perspective of the mainstream civil rights organizations. After the political establishment came out against the use of employment quotas, the always incendiary Adam Clayton Powell Jr. said the lesson was that “no white man anymore is going to tell me what I should do in the field of civil rights…. Follow black leadership. Don’t question it.”89 By the summer of 1963, nationalist calls for black economic empowerment were being widely discussed by mainstream civil rights organizations, including the Jamaica branch of the NAACP.90 In September 1963 a rally of the Rochdale protests was addressed by Louis Lomax, one of the leading black journalists of the era, who was a resident of St. Albans and active in the Jamaica NAACP. Lomax told the crowd that Rochdale Village was being built by Jews, while the construction industry was run by Italians. The “dilemma faced by the city and state executives is whether to alienate the Negro community or the Jewish and Italian communities” and he told the crowd that because blacks lacked political power, they would be ignored, and the Jews and Italians listened to. Blacks needed to organize a strong political organization that would listen to their interests.91 Ferguson’s belief that the NAACP and CORE “were exploiting the civil rights movement to aggrandize themselves, to swell their membership, to get more contributions, but not seriously trying to change things and get jobs for black people” had many supporters.

Over the course of the summer and early fall Ferguson’s involvement with black nationalism went beyond the confines of his armchair. He befriended members of the Nation of Islam (NOI), who typically hawked copies of Muhammad Speaks at venues that attracted politically active blacks, such as the Rochdale protests. The NOI members stayed on the sidelines, not allowed to participate in political protests, lamenting that all this black passion was being wasted on the fight for integration. Malcolm X was interested in the Rochdale demonstrations and the demonstrations that were taking place at Brooklyn Downstate. He had previous contacts with the Jamaica NAACP, and according to William Booth, he attended and marched in a demonstration held by the branch at the A&P supermarket on Merrick Boulevard and Linden in early 1963, and told them to “keep up the good work.”92 Malcolm X attended the July rally at Rochdale before the opening day of protests as a spectator, sizing up the crowd. (This was the first time that Ferguson saw Malcolm X, though the two men didn’t speak.) Members of the Nation of Islam reported back to Malcolm X on Ferguson and the Rochdale Movement, and its increasingly fiery nationalist rhetoric.

By October it was clear the Rochdale demonstrations were drawing to a close. The question among the leaders of the protests was what to do next. Everyone wanted the passion and the energy the demonstrations summoned to continue; everyone was unsatisfied with the results of the protests, in terms of creating new employment opportunities, and everyone also knew that there were many matters that still needed addressing in Jamaica. There were discussions among the various groups, the NAACP, Long Island CORE, and the Coordinated Clergy, about creating a broader and ongoing “Rochdale Movement” that would continue to focus on employment issues, in particular the lack of blacks in other than menial capacities or in insignificant numbers in most of the large stores of Jamaica Avenue, the area’s main shopping district. These demonstrations started on October 7, with the NAACP and other organizations leafleting Jamaica Avenue.93

However the NAACP was uncomfortable with pushing too aggressively for “selective buying” and boycotts, and instead tried to make arrangements with the stores for more minority hires. For Ferguson, now the public leader of the increasingly aggressive faction that had taken the name the Rochdale Movement, this was insufficient, and he and his followers demanded five hundred jobs, immediately, from major Jamaica Avenue employers such as the Gertz and May department stores, and started picketing and urging boycotts with the old 1930s slogan “Don’t buy where you can’t work.” The members of the Rochdale Movement would also assemble in the evening, have candlelight demonstrations, and march silently while handing out literature.

But the NAACP felt boycotted stores were unlikely to be accommodating in the area of providing new jobs. Paul Gibson said, “Our purpose is to get the general support for the civil rights fight, and not to cut our throats by a general selective buying campaign.” 94 The NAACP and CORE remained involved in the protests in Jamaica—indeed, William Booth said in an interview that the most important consequence of the demonstrations in Rochdale would be changes in the stores on Jamaica Avenue.95 At times the various factions worked together, as in March 1964, when the Jamaica NAACP held a strategy session with CORE, the Jamaica Coordinating Council, the Urban League, and the Rochdale Movement to discuss the boycott of Jamaica Avenue stores and their dissatisfaction with the pace of school integration.96 But more and more, the NAACP, CORE, and the Rochdale Movement were working separately, and the last, with its aggressive campaigns, garnered considerable press attention.97

The demonstrations on Jamaica Avenue by the Rochdale Movement cemented the alliance between Ferguson and Malcolm X. Members of the Rochdale Committee increasingly emphasized their black nationalist ideology. A member of the Rochdale Movement, Merle Stewart, called the Rochdale Movement in January 1964 “an off-shoot of Garveyism,” and in April 1964 said that the Rochdale Movement was “Queens’s only Black Nationalist Group.” Members of the Nation of Islam served as unofficial bodyguards for the demonstrators, sometimes intervening when bystanders threatened to become violent.98

Ferguson and his allies started to attend services on Sunday morning at the Mosque No. 7, in Harlem, and Malcolm X agreed to attend a rally for the Rochdale Movement, though as a minister of the Nation of Islam he was forbidden to speak at political events. Nonetheless, the event was advertised for Thanksgiving Day 1963 as “Thanksgiving with Malcolm.” According to Ferguson, “there was an overflow crowd, they had police everywhere, it was a great success, and we introduced black nationalism into southeast Queens.” He told the crowd that the Nation of Islam would support the Rochdale Movement, but saw this as a first and preliminary step. “He cautioned that the boycott was just a start. The next move would be to refrain from buying where you can’t work, followed by a refusal to buy where you don’t own, and blacks need to start their own businesses.”99

In 1963, Thanksgiving Day fell on November 28, five days after the assassination of President Kennedy, and three days before Malcolm X’s famous speech at the Manhattan Center, where, in answer to a question, he said the Kennedy assassination was a matter of “chickens coming home to roost.” His punishment was a ninety-day silencing by Elijah Muhammad, and in March he left the Nation of Islam. The speech on behalf of the Rochdale Movement was one of the very last, if not the penultimate, address he delivered as a minister of the Nation of Islam. According to Herman Ferguson, the subject of the Kennedy assassination did not come up in his talk in Jamaica.

After he completed his hajj to Mecca, Malcom X returned to Jamaica sometime in the spring of 1964, to witness the other focus of the Rochdale Movement, the “Billy Banjo” mural at the Jamaica Savings Bank. As part of a tableau of Queens and Long Island history the only African American included was a historical figure from the early nineteenth century, an elderly black man, the very image of the minstrel stage darky, strummin’ on the old banjo for the amusement of some white children sitting at his feet. Malcolm X wanted to see the image, and came to Jamaica one day to inspect it. According to Ferguson he created “pandemonium,” drawing stares and looks from officials in the bank and a crowd that surrounded him and was eventually dispersed by the police. The bank president denied the image was demeaning to blacks, though he did offer to replace the image with one of Booker T. Washington. After a renewed campaign to remove the image in 1967, which included a New York Times editorial attacking the depiction as “silly,” the bank did remove the image, and the entire mural, in 1967 as part of an “over-all change in décor.”100

The Rochdale Movement enjoyed a fair amount of success. By some accounts the boycotts were effective, and by November 1963, Jamaica Avenue merchants formed a committee to augment black hires. Unlike the fight against the building trades unions, the protests would have a great deal of long-term success.101 (Unfortunately, the growth of black employment along Jamaica Avenue in the mid and late 1960s coincided with the strip’s precipitous decline as a major shopping district.) However, for Ferguson and his close followers, no more than five men, the Rochdale Movement seemed too limited in its goals, and Ferguson became interested in pursuing a broader nationalist agenda, one ever more closely identified with the nationalism of Malcolm X. Ferguson became one of Malcolm X’s closest associates during the tumultuous last year of his life, and Malcolm X acknowledged the importance of the Rochdale Movement in several of his speeches in 1964.102 Although Malcolm X encouraged Ferguson to keep his involvement a secret, again to avoid jeopardizing his role as an assistant principal, Ferguson became a leader in the organization Malcolm X founded after leaving the Nation of Islam, the Organization of Afro-American Unity, became chairman of its Education Committee, and taught in its liberation school. Ferguson was present at the Audubon Ballroom the day Malcolm X was assassinated in February 1965, and became one of the most ardent keepers of the slain nationalist’s flame.

Ferguson remained very active in black nationalist circles in Queens and New York City and was active in the Revolutionary Action Movement and later in the separatist Republic of New Afrika. He gathered a group around him to study revolutionary authors such as Franz Fanon and founded the Jamaica Rifle and Pistol Club, which had as its purpose protection against police brutality and preparation for what members believed was a coming revolutionary struggle in America. Like many black revolutionary groups in the era of the FBI’s COINTELPRO, there were government efforts to infiltrate Ferguson’s group by agent provocateurs, and an undercover NYPD police agent became an active member. According to Ferguson, the double agent was a “very responsible person,” and one of the group’s hardest workers, in charge of the youth group and training young people in the use of guns; he also recommended that the group make practical use of their gun training and consider assassinating civil rights leaders, such as Roy Wilkins and Whitney Young. There was, in Ferguson’s words, “loose talk” to that effect among the other members. This was enough in early 1967 for Ferguson and sixteen others to be charged with conspiracy to commit murder. A small arsenal was found in Ferguson’s house.103

Ferguson was suspended from his assistant principal’s position, but he remained active in black nationalist causes, and given his pedagogical background, it is not surprising that he injected himself into the racially charged school decentralization debate. In the fall of 1967 Rhody McCoy, the head of the decentralization experiment in Ocean Hill–Brownsville, asked Ferguson to become a principal in the new district, but the Board of Education balked.104 Ferguson became an adviser to another decentralization pilot program, at IS (Intermediate School) 201 in Harlem, another center for controversy after the local school board forced out a Jewish principal. Ferguson spoke at the school on the third anniversary of the assassination of Malcolm X, in February 1968, calling for black self-defense against the police and sparking an outrage.105 There was much publicity in the mainstream press given to an article written by Ferguson in a local radical newspaper, in which Ferguson outlined a “black survival curriculum” for local public schools in black neighborhoods: the day would start with a pledge of allegiance to the red, black, and green flag of Africa; there would be classes in Swahili and Yoruba; and the curriculum would include gun safety, target practice, and associated classes in the physics, mathematics, and chemistry of ballistics. Loudspeakers would play the recorded works of Malcolm X, Amiri Baraka, and Aretha Franklin, while students were inculcated in the virtues of “self-determination, self-control, and self-defense.”106

By 1968 Herman Ferguson was a hero to black and some white radicals—he would be the Freedom and Peace Party candidate for senator from New York State, on a national ticket headed by Dr. Benjamin Spock—and was a model and inspiration to other radical groups in Jamaica, such as the Black Panthers, who admired him for his remarkable eloquence, his instruction in matters revolutionary (he was a natural pedagogue), and for all he had given up for his radical beliefs.107 For many whites, however, he had become one of the most feared black people in the city, a symbol of everything that had gone wrong in the struggle for black equality since 1963. In a September 1968 editorial, the New York Times assailed Ferguson’s ideas about racial separation as “Hitlerian,” and a few weeks later an article in the same paper accused him of exhibiting a “sick and dangerous kind of racism.”108 But that fall Ferguson had more important things to worry about than bad write-ups in the Times. In October he was convicted of conspiracy and later sentenced to three and a half to seven years.109 In 1970, when Ferguson ran out of appeals, he jumped bail and fled to Guyana, where he would remain until 1989, when he returned to the United States. His involvement with Rochdale Village would have an interesting coda, discussed in the book’s final chapter. 110

William Booth, too, had been transformed by the Rochdale protests. When, in February 1966, he became the city’s commissioner for human rights, he said that his first job was to “get after the construction unions” to finish what was started at the Rochdale Village demonstrations.111 A 1967 report Booth commissioned indicated little or no progress since Rochdale, and showed that blacks and Puerto Ricans still made up less than 2 percent of skilled unionized workforce in the building trades.112 If integration was important to Booth and many of the black protesters at Rochdale, it was never understood by its black advocates as simply living or going to school with whites. It was instead a strategy to increase black economic, social, and political power. The debate between integration and nationalism, at Rochdale in the summer of 1963 and thereafter, was largely over means, not ends. Subsequent events, notably the 1968 school strike, rather than further separate the two sides, would bring black liberals like Booth and radicals like Ferguson closer together.

When I was growing up in Rochdale in the 1960s I knew nothing about the demonstrations at the Rochdale construction site, and I was not alone. The UHF and the leaders of Rochdale looked on it as an unfortunate episode, external to Rochdale Village itself, and said little or nothing about it. This would change once Rochdale became predominantly black, and it would be celebrated as perhaps the greatest moment in the cooperative’s history.113 But for those who were paying attention, the demonstrations at the Rochdale construction site in the summer of 1963, if nothing else, showed that by the time the first families moved in to Rochdale that December, the clock on integration was already ticking.