Peekskill USA: Inside the Infamous 1949 Riots by Howard Fast Page A

comfortable or brave; the branches made a poor shelter indeed, and I had no assurance that those high-powered rifles with the telescopic sights might not be indecisive as to their target. When I got down and when Pete Seeger had begun to sing, I went to our security head and told him.
    â€œI don’t think Paul ought to sing,” I said. “The hell with it! It’s not that important, and if you want to be naked, just stand up there.”
    â€œHe’s going to sing. He’s decided that. He’ll be all right. We’ve taken certain measures.”
    They took measures, which meant that fifteen workers did a very brave and a very selfless thing. When Paul Robeson stood up to sing, those fifteen workers stood behind and alongside of him, forming a human wall between him and the hillside, and in this they were neither uncertain nor troubled. It was something they did quite casually and matter of factly, but it was also something I will never forget. They were white workers and Negro workers, and this giant of a man was one of the very, very few intellectuals in the whole land who had not fled from their side, who had not betrayed them, who had not crawled for cover, but stood like a rock unperturbed and unshaken. This was a better answer than words.
    So our concert went smoothly enough, and with all the difficulties there was good music there that day. The great voice of Paul Robeson echoed back from the hills; the music of Handel and Bach was played there; and Pete Seeger and his friends sang those fine old songs of a time when treason and hatred and tyranny were not the most admired virtues of Americans. And the police did what they could. When they saw that they were not able to prevent the concert, they brought in a helicopter and it hovered over our sound truck constantly, swooping down to buzz us again and again, trying to drown out the sound of our music with the noise of its motor. To some extent they succeeded, but we were fortunate that the motor of a helicopter is less noisy than that of a regular airplane. It did not spoil the concert.
    In any case, the important factor was that the concert had been held and that the right of assembly had been upheld; and through it all no person on our side had committed any act of provocation, nor had any person on our side broken the disciplined order of our defenses.
    That was accomplished, but at the same time it was a new America, a different America, in which thousands of workers and their allies had to conduct a mass struggle of such size and consequence for a Negro singer to give his music to people who wanted to hear it. A change had come about, not in the eight days of Peekskill— more gradually than that, certainly for a long time before that in process—but brought to a head and climaxed by the eight days; and in this changed America, we had won a victory in the name of the American people, most certainly in the name of the American people and in the very best traditions of the American people.
    Yet the day was not by any means over, not by any means; and it was only late afternoon now, and the night of terror and horror, so much greater terror and so much worse horror than a week before, still lay ahead. The concert was done, and once again I found R—— and the two of us walked aimlessly among the crowd. Now was the time for getting out, but though cars had driven into the entranceway and filled the inside road, nothing moved. We who were in the hollow below did not know what held things up. We took it for granted that it required time and patience to clear such a place of so many hundreds of cars through one narrow road. We didn’t know that the fascists had blocked the road, that our security people were arguing with the police to clear it or let us clear it ourselves. We also didn’t know that the police were set for their spell of riot, their own incredible plan of what should happen. We didn’t know any of that