Chapter 9: Harlem

The rioting in Harlem came in furious bursts. Rocks and bottles sailed from tenement roofs. Molotov cocktails exploded on streets littered with broken glass. Cops fired salvo after salvo into smoky, pitch-black skies. Police cruisers, sirens wailing, roared in pursuit of hit-and-run looters.

Crowds lined the streets, sometimes as many as a thousand people, all of them black and screaming, jeering, ducking, dodging and - when turned on by riot-weary cops - scrambling and running. And there we were, smack in the middle of it, with notebooks in hand, dashing at the heels of the crowds, observing the battles and trying as best we could to record it all.

Frenzied as it would be in those moments of battle, that's all they were, moments. They would rise like a storm and then, just as suddenly, dissipate. And with every inevitable lull in the action, attention turned to us. "Who are you?" people demanded. Some would reach for the press credentials that dangled from our necks.

We tried to explain ourselves. "We're press," we said. But that was not nearly explanation enough. "What press?" our inquisitors fired back.

In that back-and-forth, something that even we had not realized came into focus. Harlem cops and black residents had seen black reporters before. But almost without exception those reporters worked for black newspapers, mainly weeklies. This time we represented mainstream white-owned dailies and radio stations, a major first.

A small colony of reporters who were black had arrived in the big leagues of New York City journalism. And this took all of us by surprise.

Having come from Rochester, I was at least as astonished as the police and the blacks on the streets to see at a dozen or so reporters, all black like me, representing large and powerful organizations such as The New York Times, The Associated Press, the New York Post, the Daily News, United Press International, Newsday, and Newsweek and Time magazines.

In that week, I came to know reporters such as Gerald Fraser, Austin Scott, Ted Poston, Tom Johnson, Les Carson, Claude Lewis, Ted Jones, Junius Griffin, Wally Terry, Paul Hathaway, Gene Simpson and Stan Scott.

And on the streets of Harlem, between bursts of rioting, we acknowledged with one another the bit of history of which we were a part.

It wasn't just that we were there. What was developing into one of the biggest stories in America was largely in our hands. The events unfolding on the streets of Harlem would make news all over the world.

It may have been little more than a mere footnote but it was a piece of history in the making. Never had the major media put so much of an important story in the hands of reporters who were not white.

Every chance they got, the cops would stare us down. It was as though they could not accept that we were qualified and that our reporting would be central to what people everywhere would read of the Harlem riots.

Some white reporters sought us out. They would shake our hands and stay as close to us as possible. That put them closer to the story. It also made them feel safer. Still, a white New York Times photographer was jumped by a mob and beaten so badly that the bones around his eyes were broken.

The Times had two black reporters on the story, Junius Griffin and Ted Jones, who set up a temporary bureau in the Theresa Hotel at 125th Street and Seventh Avenue. Griffin was a former Marine. He broke in as a journalist on the Stars and Stripes military newspaper. In Harlem, he emerged a hero. He saw a group of blacks surround and threaten three white reporters from the Hearst-owned Journal-American newspaper. He charged into the crowd, grabbed the reporters, and walked them out unharmed. He knew that only a black reporter could do that.

Ted Jones made news too. He watched some cops chasing black youths who had been throwing rocks and bottles. As the kids outran the cops and got away, some in the crowd cheered derisively. In frustration, the cops began to use their nightsticks at random. Impulsively, Ted interceded.

"These people didn't do anything," he yelled. When the cops ignored him and continued swinging their batons wildly, he pressed forward.

"You have no right to beat these people," he insisted. "You cannot do that. You can't."

"Who are you?" a cop barked, irritated.

Ted grabbed his press card and held it out. "The New York Times," he said.

"Get out of here," the cop ordered.

Tall and heavyset, Ted refused to budge. As the cops pursued their attack, he was knocked to the ground. He wasn't injured, only shook up, but what happened to him became a part of the news story.

The riots raged through three nights, and at the end of each day, long after the crowds and the cops had drifted away, we would still be on the streets.

We could sense that something enormous was happening and that it was our destiny as reporters to be at the center of it. Hanging together, we quickly discovered the many paths we'd taken to get here and the circumstance of timing that had opened the door for us.