Remembering the Peekskill riots, a caution for the right and left

(RNS) — Twenty years before Woodstock and 75 years ago on Tuesday (Aug. 27) was the anti-Woodstock.

In the small city of Peekskill, New York, in the bucolic northwestern corner of Westchester County, the Black singer and actor Paul Robeson, along with other artists such as Woody Guthrie, Lee Hays and Pete Seeger, were scheduled to give an open-air concert on Aug. 27, 1949. Guthrie, Seeger, Hays and Robeson were all prominent leftists. Then came what are remembered as the Peekskill riots.

Two months before, Robeson had said at the Paris Peace Conference: “It is unthinkable that the Negro people of America or elsewhere … would be drawn into war with the Soviet Union,” arguing that it was the only nation in the world to outlaw race discrimination. As anticommunist agitation grew in America, so, too, did the rage against Robeson’s perceived communist loyalties.

Peekskill then was a scenic Hudson River town where year-round residents, most of them working class and conservative, mixed with the summer people and weekenders, many of whom were middle-class Jews whose politics leaned decidedly left.

The permanent residents knew of Robeson’s political leanings. Many denounced the planned concert as un-American. Various groups announced that they would peacefully picket the concert.

It didn’t work out that way. As the event began, local mobs blocked the entrance to the concert area and harassed concertgoers. Attackers screamed: “We’re Hitler’s boys — here to finish his job.”  Shortly after eight o’clock in the evening, the attackers burned a 12-foot-high cross on the picnic grounds. They went on to burn books, sheet music and chairs.

A wave of hatred spread through northern Westchester County. In other Hudson River towns, signs and bumper stickers read, “Wake Up America — Peekskill Did!” “Communism Is Treason. Behind Communism Stands — the Jew! Therefore, for my country — against the Jews!” Local Jewish residents were terrorized; it was, according to some, like living through a pogrom.

Paul Robeson, at microphone, sings at an outdoor concert near Peekskill, N.Y., on Sept. 4, 1949. (Photo courtesy LOC/Public Domain)

Undeterred, the organizers rescheduled the Robeson concert for Sunday, Sept. 4. Some 25,000 people attended. Many of them were trade union members; about 40% of the crowd was women, and one local resident estimated that about 80% were Jews.

The program opened with classical music. Then, Guthrie, Seeger and Hays appeared, singing American folk songs and topical songs. Then, Robeson came on, singing a medley of songs ranging from Spanish Civil War melodies to civil rights anthems. He performed the last aria from “Boris Godunov” and finished up with his famous rendition of “Old Man River.”

The concert ended around 4 p.m. As cars and buses started to depart from the concert grounds, police routed the vehicles through the northern Westchester woods and up a steep, winding road.

There, crowds of men and boys were waiting. They hurled rocks at the vehicles. More than 50 buses and countless cars had their windows smashed; at least 15 cars were overturned. Bus drivers abandoned their vehicles and fled on foot, leaving about 1,000 of their passengers stranded.

The violence spread beyond the concert. Some men and boys attacked a bus traveling along the highway; its passengers were Black people returning from a field trip to visit the Franklin D. Roosevelt home in Hyde Park. At least 150 people were injured badly enough to warrant medical attention.

Leslie Matthews, a staff correspondent for the now-defunct Black newspaper New York Age, offered this eyewitness account:

I hear the wails of women, the impassioned screams of children, the jeers and taunts of wild-eyed youths. I still smell the sickening odor of blood flowing from freshly opened wounds, gasoline fumes from autos and buses valiantly trying to carry their loads of human targets out of the range of bricks, bottles, stones, sticks.

Pete Seeger immortalized the event in the song “Hold the Line”:

As we held the line at Peekskill
We will hold it everywhere.
Hold the line!
Hold the line!
We will hold the line forever
Till there’s freedom ev’rywhere.

Why does Peekskill still matter?

Peekskill reminds us of the bonds between Jews and Blacks.

Several years ago, I was teaching a Bible class at a college in Georgia. Many of my students were Blacks. They asked me about antisemitism, and that opened up a very frank conversation. 

I told them: “Please realize something: Everyone who hates you, also hates me. And vice versa. That hatred is a ‘two-fer.’”

They got it.

But, beyond the racial issues, the political lessons of Peekskill still resonate.

First, on the right. The Peekskill riots became the musical prelude to the anticommunist career of Sen. Joseph McCarthy. Within a few months of the riots, McCarthy would raise the specter of communist infiltration into the State Department: a haunting fear whose repercussions and implications would last for decades.

We still encounter the danger of political rhetoric that brands liberal ideas as communist, and the danger that such rhetoric will become violent. 

Second, on the left.

Let us invoke the memory of one of the past century’s most significant political figures — Henry A. Wallace. Wallace had served as FDR’s vice president from 1941 to 1945, as well as secretary of agriculture and secretary of commerce. Wallace had run for president on the Progressive Party ticket in 1948, with Robeson’s and Seeger’s help.

The Progressive Party believed in racial desegregation, the establishment of a national health insurance system and the expansion of the welfare system. Its membership comprised A-listers in American culture and society, especially authors and entertainers.

So, what happened to the Progressive Party? Wallace saw what happened in Peekskill, and it terrified him, and not only the riots themselves. Wallace believed that the Progressive Party had drifted too far toward communism. He left the party, and it soon folded.

The memory of Peekskill might remind those on the right that there are limits to an ideology of demonization of the Other, of violence, that is alive in our time, at Charlottesville, where chants of “The Jews will not replace us!” should have awakened us to those dangers.

But the memory of Peekskill should remind those on the left too of their ideology’s own limits.

Leon Wieseltier recalls a lesson that he learned from the late Diana Trilling: “The art of being against Joseph Stalin and against Joseph McCarthy at the same time.” It was necessary to despise both of them.

Once, the extreme leftist temptation was communism. Today, it is Hamas — which, like Stalin, has its own cadre of American apologists, relativists and even willing dupes.

The Peekskill riots are a disturbing, dark chapter in American cultural history. I suspect that everyone who was involved, and almost everyone who was there, is probably dead by now. But the memory lives. It is an object lesson for America today.

Postscript: When I was a student at SUNY Purchase in the 1970s, I did an independent study on Peekskill with John Cohen  — professor, folklorist, filmmaker, photographer and part of the old folk group the New Lost City Ramblers. He was also rumored to have been the inspiration behind the Grateful Dead song “Uncle John’s Band.” I miss John Cohen, and I dedicate this essay to his memory.