In his firsthand account of the 1949 Peekskill Riot, the two-day frenzy of state-sanctioned mob violence against a left-wing music festival headlined by Paul Robeson, writer Howard Fast mostly describes his disbelief. He was invited to help first with the planning and then with the defense of the concert, as mobs of vigilantes with clubs, knives, and guns shut down the performances, violently assaulted many of the attendees, and forced Robeson into hiding. Fast, in the face of mobs shouting racist and antisemitic slogans, believed they could bring Robeson back a week later, with a cordon of United Electrical and Longshoremen union members ringing the concert. The exit from the fairgrounds became a living hell: a gauntlet of thrown rocks, smashed windows, overturned cars, and concertgoers beaten within inches of their lives, including the first Black military aviator in World War I, Eugene Bullard.
After driving through a hail of rocks and slurs, Fast recorded in his book Peekskill, USA his stunned disbelief at seeing the glistening, wet pavement around the burning metal carcasses of smashed-up cars. At first thinking the slick rivulets were gasoline or oil, he realized the streams were blood from the fleeing concertgoers. He recalls a sense of disassociated unreality: this could not, he thought, be happening. Remembering the conversations with others after the violence over the weekend — no strangers to the Left or struggle — “their talk was uneasy and troubled. They were trying to understand what had happened, what had changed . . . a pervading difference had come to the place; they had to know what that difference was.”
I have thought of Fast’s…
Auteur: Benjamin Balthaser
