Peekskill USA: Inside the Infamous 1949 Riots Read Online Free Page B

concentrated on holding our lines. The first line took the brunt of the fighting, the brunt of the rocks and clubs. The second line linked arms, as did the third, forming a human wall to the mob. In mat fight four of our first line were badly injured. When they went down we pulled them back, and men in the second line moved into their places. It was a beautiful piece of organization on the part of everyone concerned, in some ways a miracle of organization. Here were forty-two men and boys who had never seen each other before for the most part, and they were fighting like a well-oiled machine, and the full weight of three hundred screaming madmen did not panic them or cause them to break. By sheer weight we were forced back foot by foot, but they never broke the three lines.
    And then they drew off. For the moment they had had enough. They drew off, leaving about twenty feet between the front of their mob and our line of defense. There were more of them now, many more of them; the solid mass of their bodies and faces stretched back to the public road and along the road.
    On our part, we were hurt, but not so badly that every man couldn’t stand on his feet. We relieved the worst battered of the front line, linked arms and waited.
    â€œNow we’re all right,” I told myself. “We’re alive and this can’t go on much longer. The state troopers will have to get here.”
    How many times I told myself that in the course of the evening! But there were no state troopers, no police, but instead a half-hysterical girl from the hollow below who panted,
    â€œThey’ve crossed over the hills and we’ve got to have some men down there!”
    â€œHow many are there?”
    â€œI don’t know. I counted twelve or fifteen.”
    I detached our seventh squad on the double, which left us with thirty-six to hold the road. But before they left I told one of them, the driver of the big truck that had brought the children down from Golden’s Bridge, to pull his truck up the road to where the embankment began and to swing it broadside and across the road. I did this because we had been pushed back more than twenty feet in the course of the fighting. A few feet more, and we would no longer have the protection of the embanked road, and then they could simply swarm around us and it would be all over. But with the truck to back us up we could hold that embankment a long time.
    As it darkened, a qualitative change came into the ranks of the fascist mob, a sense, organization. Three men appeared as their leaders, one a dapper, slim, well-dressed middle-aged man who was subsequently identified by people on our side as a prosperous Peekskill real-estate broker. A fourth man joined them, and a heated discussion in whispers started. At the same time, cars up on the road were swung around so that their headlights covered us. Though the police and state troopers were remarkably, conspicuously absent, the press was on the scene. Newspaper photographers were everywhere, taking picture after picture, and reporters crouched in the headlights taking notes of all that went on. In particular, my attention was drawn to three quiet, well-dressed, good-looking young men who stood just to one side of the beginning of the embankment; two of them had shorthand notebooks in which they wrote methodically and steadily. When I first saw them I decided that they were newspaper men and dismissed them from my mind. But I saw them again and again, and later talked to them, as you will see. Subsequently, I discovered that they were agents of the Department of Justice. Whether they were assigned to a left-wing concert or an attempted mass murder, I don’t know. They were polite, aloof, neutral, and at one point decently helpful. But they were always neutral—even though what they saw was attempted murder, a strangely brutal, terrible attempt.
    The four men in front of the mob broke off their discussion now, and one of them, a