Read Online Peekskill USA: Inside the Infamous 1949 Riots by Howard Fast - Free Book Online

which side they were on, and we made adequate preparations of our own. As it happened, the meeting went off smoothly, and the single attempt at attack by a dozen young hoodlums from Peekskill was easily driven off.
    (Apparently I was not the only one who realized about then that fascist attacks upon the progressive movement, unless backed by the armed force of the state apparatus, could be easily repulsed or contained. The fact that this was realized and accepted, not only by progressives but by the Westchester County and New York State Government, accounts for the subsequent blood-bath which is better known to the world as the Peekskill Affair than our first isolated defense of the hollow at the picnic grounds. I will deal with that later; and I mention it now only to explain the ease with which our small but organized defense drove off the single attack at Mt. Kisco.)
    The Mt. Kisco place was on a hilltop, with a fine command of the countryside for miles in every direction. At a place where the lawn sloped down and away from the house, we set up a table as a speaker’s stand. As we had no chairs, we decided that the people who came—still wondering if any would come—would sit on the lawn, and since the lawn was on a hillside, the speakers would be visible to everyone. We hopefully set aside two acres as a parking lot, with two youngsters in charge of parking arrangements; and then we waited.
    You must remember that those of us directly concerned were still unaware of the impact of Peekskill on the outside world. We had not seen the newspapers, nor had we any opportunity of listening to the radio. Fighting, sleeping, and arranging this meeting had occupied every minute of our time. Therefore we could not estimate what the results of our call to the decent people of Westchester to rally here would be. In every case, in this and in later instances, we underestimated.
    The cars began to arrive shortly after three o’clock—a single car, a few more, a few more, and then steadily—and then a sudden jam of cars as far down the road as we could see, hundreds and hundreds of cars.
    More than sixteen hundred people came to that meeting, which had been called on a few hours’ notice, which was in a fairly isolated part of Westchester, hard to find, hard to get to—yet better than sixteen hundred people came. I think that there and then I began to understand that Peekskill was something more than a personal nightmare, that it was the first tangible sign of a ferment, of the making of hell on earth for the people of the United States and for the people of other lands too—but more than that, for out of Peekskill , now and later, there was to be action and reaction, a testing of fascism (made in USA) and a testing of the forces of anti-fascism.
    Cold and sober and angry were the people who came to Mt. Kisco. We had no sound apparatus, so they packed around the table, a sea of faces on the sloping lawn, listening to the story of what had happened before, listening to an itemization of how every official force in the vicinity, the district attorney, the local police, the state troopers, had so conducted themselves as to make mass murder a practical possibility. They heard the tale of the fight on the road and in the hollow, and of the attempted frameup on the murder count. And to all they listened soberly and coldly.
    At this meeting, the Westchester Committee for Law and Order came into existence and proposed that Paul Robeson be invited to sing at Peekskill again.
    Then we sang We Shall Not Be Moved , passed several resolutions on the incident, and the second day of Peekskill was over.
    Of Mt. Kisco, there is only this to add. The people who gave us their home and lawns for that meeting cannot be too highly praised. They had much to lose, and since then they have suffered a good deal for it. The brave voices of anonymity call them constantly on the phone, mixing filth and threats, as do the writers of