The Peekskill Riots Revealed the Racism and Antisemitism Hidden Beneath the Surface of the Anti-Communist Movement

Shortly after Deputy Sheriff Franklin Bowman arrived at an outdoor concert venue in New York’s Hudson Valley on August 27, 1949, he realized that he needed reinforcements. Paul Robeson, one of the most lauded African American entertainers of his time, was about to perform, and the crowd was going to be much bigger than expected. That meant there was more potential for trouble than expected, too. Car after car turned off of Hillside Avenue and continued down the long driveway to the concert grounds. Meanwhile, ahead of Bowman on the main road, hundreds of angry World War II veterans were getting ready to hold a demonstration against Robeson.

It was a Saturday evening in the summer of 1949. The Cold War against the Soviet Union was well underway, and anyone who aligned themselves too closely with leftist causes—including Robeson, a major labor and civil rights advocate—was suspected of collaborating with the enemy.

The location was an unusual place for conflict: in the middle of the countryside, an hour north of New York City and three miles northeast of Peekskill (pop. 17,000). Bowman had to walk 200 yards just to find a house with a telephone. Once there, he called the Westchester County jail and requested the aid of as many guards as possible. By the time he returned to the intersection, the protest had gotten underway. The veterans, some in uniform, marched up and down in the middle of the road, leaving little space for traffic to pass. Their signs read, “We stick to our veterans” and “Not Wanted: Commies. Wanted: Good Americans.”

Bowman waited with two fellow deputies, but reinforcements didn’t arrive. Around 8:30 p.m., the protest disbanded, and its leader told the veterans to go home. Very few did. Instead, they drifted down toward the picnic grounds, pulled by their curiosity, their passion and the possibility of conflict.

As the crowd of veterans grew larger, filling up the entryway, it pushed the deputies deeper into the driveway. Some 100 yards down, where the driveway crossed a culvert, stood about 50 Robeson supporters. They were organized in three lines, shoulder to shoulder. These were stalwart men, Black and white, many of them laborers or veterans themselves. Right behind the final line stood a two-and-a-half-ton truck, parked sideways across the road like a bulwark.

The veterans, by most accounts, started the name-calling first. Since many trade union members and leftists at the time were Jewish: “Kill the Jews,” “N—– lover,” and “[Adolf] Hitler did a good job, and we are here to finish it.” The Robeson supporters shouted back, calling the men fascists.

Still lacking backup, Bowman and the other deputies tried to keep the two groups apart, sometimes ordering the crowd and at other times cajoling it. Some of the veterans tore wooden posts out of a nearby fence and waved them around like clubs.

The Robeson supporters weren’t afraid of conflict. They threw stink bombs into an adjacent pond to scare the veterans away. Once the bombs hit water, they smoked and emitted a noxious odor. At one point, the concertgoers linked arms and sang “We Shall Not Be Moved,” a Black spiritual. The song’s lyrics (“Just like a tree that’s standing by the water / We shall not be moved”) angered the veterans further, as some of them mistakenly assumed it was a communist anthem.

Before long, the two groups met face to face on the bridge over the culvert. They started throwing rocks and then fell into hand-to-hand combat. A Navy veteran in his mid-20s, William Secor, was pushed forward by protesters behind him and then, suddenly, felt a painful blow on his side. When he looked down, he saw blood. He had been stabbed through the lower ribs. (His assailant was never publicly identified.) A fellow veteran bundled Secor away to the hospital, where he stayed for seven nights. Word spread among the protesters: “They have stabbed one of our fellows!” Then all hell broke loose.

The 1949 Peekskill riots—a second one took place at a rescheduled concert eight days later, on September 4—are rarely remembered today. Yet the echoes of these protests can still be heard in violent political clashes, such as the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, or the Black Lives Matter protests and counterprotests of 2020. As in those cases, race was an ever-present subtext, though the veterans at Peekskill said they were merely protesting Robeson’s politics.

This account of the oft-forgotten riots is drawn largely from the testimony given to a grand jury convened to investigate the incidents, as well as police reports and contemporary newspaper stories. Together, the sources expose the acrimony that lay beneath the prosperity and peace of postwar America. They also open a window into a pivotal moment in the early civil rights movement, which at that time was often intertwined with the political left.

Paul Robeson: The First Black Star | TIFF 2017

“Peekskill was a reminder that civil rights activism of any variety across the political spectrum was controversial,” says Thomas Sugrue, a historian at New York University and the author of Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North. “White Americans found the demands for racial inequality unsettling. And that was true even in the ostensibly liberal North, places like New York.”

Robeson, for his part, was a modern Renaissance man. A four-sport varsity athlete at Rutgers University and a graduate of Columbia Law School, he spoke more than 20 languages and was an accomplished actor and singer, plus a political activist to boot. One thing he wasn’t—at least not officially—was a member of the Communist Party of the United States of America, according to biographer Martin Duberman. But as a strong advocate of racial equality, he clearly preferred communists to the Democratic or Republican parties of the time, both of which would be considered conservative by modern standards.

Communists, in contrast, treated civil rights as part and parcel of the struggle against capitalism. Even more so than other left-wing Black intellectuals of the time, like Richard Wright and Langston Hughes, Robeson defended communists in public and joined forces with them in political actions. In the 1930s, he visited the Soviet Union and praised it for “abolishing all discrimination based on color or nationality” (a sentiment undermined by the well-documented persecution of ethnic minorities in the USSR). In 1948, Robeson told a U.S. Senate committee that communists stood for the “complete equality of the Negro people” and that they “make every effort of any possible kind to see that the Negro people secure their rights.”

Given his vast celebrity, Robeson’s politics hardly mattered for the first half of his career. He had acted in a dozen movies, most famously as Joe the dockworker in Show Boat, and numerous plays, including a staging of Othello that still holds the record for longest-running Shakespeare production on Broadway. What’s more, Robeson’s patriotism ran deep. His performance of the cantata “Ballad for Americans,” broadcast live on CBS radio in 1939, captivated the country; a follow-up recording topped the music charts. At the end of World War II, Robeson took part in 32 United Service Organizations shows held to boost troops’ morale.

With the onset of the Cold War, however, anti-communism surged. Six years before Senator Joseph McCarthy’s infamous hearings began in 1953, President Harry S. Truman imposed a “loyalty” screening on U.S. civil service workers. In 1949, 11 leaders of the American Communist Party were convicted under the Smith Act, which prohibited advocating for the violent overthrow of the government. Meanwhile, the FBI was trying to figure out who was leaking atomic bomb secrets to the Soviets, and communists were among the prime suspects.

Starting in 1946, Robeson came to Peekskill once every summer to raise money for civil rights organizations. The region provided a ready audience. The nearby countryside featured a number of “colonies” where working-class families from New York City would spend the summer in inexpensive, rudimentary cabins. Many of these summertime visitors were leftists; some were Jewish and saw parallels between racism and antisemitism.

Local, year-round residents were not as thrilled by Robeson’s visits. In 1947, a nearby branch of the American Legion, an organization of U.S. veterans, called for a boycott of the singer’s annual concert, but the effort was unsuccessful. In 1949, veterans tried a different approach.

On August 23 of that year, four days before the concert was slated to take place, the Peekskill Evening Star published a caustic editorial about Robeson. Despite acknowledging his “magnificent voice,” the editorial noted that the concert’s beneficiary, the Civil Rights Congress, had been labeled “subversive and communist” by the attorney general. (The organization, one of the first to speak out about police brutality against Black people, was indeed headed by a Communist Party member, one William L. Patterson.) The editorial declared, “The time for tolerant silence that signifies approval is running out.”

Within days, veterans’ groups in the area had planned a “protest parade” on Hillside Avenue. Though the planners asserted that the demonstration would be peaceful, fearful Robeson supporters sent telegrams to several local leaders, asking them to intervene. The newspaper editorial, the petitioners wrote, would inspire “illegal action and violence against a peacefully conducted concert.”

The Westchester County executive deferred to the district attorney’s office, which decided that protest security was the police’s job. Officials thought the police were well aware of the situation. But neither state troopers nor county sheriffs had prepared for such violence. The state police were more concerned about politics than safety: The commander assigned four undercover men to gather intelligence on communist concertgoers, two uniformed officers to direct traffic and no one to keep the peace. Another 18 troopers were put on standby at a nearby stationhouse, without a communications link to the scene.

Bowman and the other two deputy sheriffs were the only officers dedicated to preventing veterans and concertgoers from clashing, and they apparently had no idea that backup troopers were nearby. Instead, Bowman called in off-duty jail guards who had to drive from their homes to the jail to pick up equipment, then travel another 20 miles to the riot—all on narrow country roads stopped up due to the parade.

The backup officers took so long to reach the scene that none had arrived by the time Secor was stabbed. As word of his injury spread, more veterans swarmed down the driveway toward the culvert. Soon, they numbered around 500. The Robeson supporters hopped onto their truck and drove it the quarter-mile back to the concert grounds, where about 200 concertgoers who had arrived before the ruckus were gathered. There, they corralled women and children concertgoers onto the stage and formed a semicircle around them.

The veterans came running in behind the crowd. When they arrived at the stage, they found hundreds of folding chairs set up in rows, so they lit a fire and threw the chairs into it. By that point, the sun had set. Bowman shut off the stage lights. Unable to see their adversaries, the veterans headed back to the main road.

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Some of the concertgoers tried to get away, too. One car sped up the driveway and nearly crashed into a crowd of veterans who had constructed a blockade out of rocks. The veterans stoned the car and turned it over on its roof. Another six or seven vehicles met similar fates. On a nearby hillside, a group of teenagers ignited a 12-foot-tall wooden cross that inevitably evoked the specter of the Ku Klux Klan. Robeson’s fans could see its glow from down below.

Police reinforcements finally arrived sometime around 10 p.m.—two hours after Bowman had first summoned them. By that time, they were no longer needed. The mob had pretty much dispersed on its own.

Robeson himself escaped unharmed. His car drove into the fringes of the brawl before turning around and heading to safety. But the concert’s cancellation only stiffened the singer’s resolve to perform in Westchester County. Three days later, he appeared at a rally in Harlem and announced that he would perform the following weekend at a former country club near the original concert grounds. Promising to bring his own security force, Robeson declared, “From now on out, we take the offensive. … The sure way to get police protection is to make it clear we will protect ourselves.”

In Peekskill itself, veterans and their allies were jubilant about having stopped the concert. Locals put up a banner that read, “Wake Up America—Peekskill Did.” Two effigies of Robeson hung from lampposts downtown. In response to news of the singer’s rescheduled concert, the veterans’ organizations announced a second anti-communist demonstration.

District Attorney George Fanelli feared that this time, Robeson and his guards, not the protesters, would become violent. He tried to convince the veterans’ groups to hold their protest elsewhere but was unsuccessful.

Fanelli later said he didn’t have the constitutional right to force the veterans to move their parade. Instead, he gathered the largest security force possible. At 8 a.m. on Sunday, September 4, he deputized 904 county, state and local officers at the county jail. Then he sent the officers to 14 different locations within two miles of the country club. Still, he urged caution. “Many times,” Fanelli explained later, “by being a little hasty and a little rash, you could provoke a real incident and uprising by just going after somebody.”

Robeson supporters, meanwhile, had been conducting their own organizing. By the time police arrived at their posts on Sunday morning, some 2,500 union men had already formed a security perimeter around the spot where Robeson was slated to perform. A much smaller group of guards circled the stage itself, ready to take a bullet for their hero.

Late that morning and into the afternoon, school bus after school bus arrived from New York City, along with hundreds of private cars. The racially diverse audience numbered an estimated 15,000 to 25,000 people, far larger than the 200 who had managed to reach the concert grounds eight days earlier. Attendees had not just come to enjoy the music. They had come to make a statement.

The performance began at 2 p.m. with the national anthem. A mix of classical and folk music followed, including a set by singer Pete Seeger. Robeson came last, opening with “Let My People Go.” Once he finished, he left the stage and entered a car, lying down on the back floor. Two union members lay on top of the 6-foot-3 singer. The windows of that car and several others were covered with blankets so attackers would not know which vehicle to target. Then the caravan headed toward the exit.

While no violence took place inside the concert grounds, the scene outside was different. Before and during the performance, hecklers heaved rocks at the union guards and skirmished as ticketholders entered the field. Media outlets were far more plentiful than the previous weekend, and they captured the violence on film and tape.

A CBS reporter gave a play-by-play to radio audiences: “The situation has gotten very tense here. There is no longer any order to the parade—just men moving back and forth on the highway, blocking the entrance to the concert area.” At one point, cameramen recorded police beating Eugene Bullard, a decorated Black World War I combat pilot, as he made his way toward the concert. Authorities said Bullard had spit at a police officer and become unruly; a witness contradicted this report, explaining that Bullard simply “spat back at an anti-Robeson veteran who had spit in his face.”

Once the concert let out, a few reporters sensed what was going to happen next. Warren Moscow of the New York Times saw demonstrators piling rocks into cairns at various points along local roads. Other reporters saw cars loaded with basketfuls of rocks. A pickup truck ferried hecklers from the center of Peekskill out to where the action was.

Buses returning to New York had to pass through this gauntlet of rock-throwers, which stretched as far as four miles along the main exit roads. “Everybody was apprehensive,” recalled Sara Levitt, a young settlement house worker who was on one of those buses. “Everybody was scared. Everybody was ducking down.” Outside, she saw people “who were very angry, holding sticks and bats, throwing stones.”

By the end of the night, more than 140 people had been reported injured, and at least 11 were hospitalized. About a dozen men ranging in age from 16 to 48 were arrested for throwing stones and overturning cars.

The headlines that week were damning: “Robeson Followers Stoned”; “150 Hurt in Concert Rioting”; “Riders Say Women, Children Joined in Attacks.” The raw brutality of the second riot demonstrated that even after a world war sparked by racial dogmatism, the U.S. could not restrain a mob motivated by intolerance, even if the mob was itself made up of people who had served in that war.

Former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt denounced the violence, writing, “This is not the type of thing that we believe in the United States.” Though she disapproved of Robeson’s politics, Roosevelt added, “If he wants to give a concert, or speak his mind in public, no one should prevent him from doing so.” The New York Times called the riots “a disgrace to the community and a reminder that as great violence can be done to democracy by a gang of hoodlums in Westchester County as by a lynch mob in darkest Georgia.”

Yet it seemed that this outrage diminished the closer one got to Peekskill itself. Local law enforcement officials blamed Robeson and his followers for provoking veterans by warning about violence before the first concert and bringing their own security to the second. Authorities said they had confiscated 250 baseball bats, wrenches, bottles, and containers of red and black pepper, which they claimed the union guards were planning on using against the veterans. (The leader of the guards denied that they’d carried any weapons.) In an official report, State Police Superintendent John Gaffney wrote, “The meeting was held deliberately to create an incident or breach of the peace.”

Similarly, New York Governor Thomas E. Dewey, a Republican, alleged that Robeson had somehow manipulated the mob into reacting the way it did. “Obviously, these people fell into a communist bear trap,” Dewey said in a statement. “By creating disorder after the meeting, they gave to the communists effective propaganda which has been used all over the United States, in Europe, South America and Africa.”

Dewey ordered a grand jury to investigate the incidents. He put Fanelli, the district attorney who had failed to stop the veterans from protesting the second concert, in charge of it. Ten months and 247 witnesses later, the grand jury released its findings, arguing that the violence outside Peekskill “was basically neither antisemitic nor anti-Negro in character.” Instead, the grand jury declared that the protesters were motivated by hostility toward communism. While the grand jury condemned the rioters, it said the greatest injury they had inflicted was to “the best interests of the community and of the United States.”

Peekskill offered a valuable lesson for civil rights activists. By the late 1940s, mainstream civil rights organizations were already taking pains to remove communists from their ranks, even though they had long been among its most dedicated and energetic members. The equivocating response to the riots by Dewey and the grand jury showed, to anyone who doubted it, the political necessity of such purges. If the civil rights movement had maintained its ties to communism, it would have continued to lose credibility.

Robeson, in contrast, continued to voice his support for communism and even the Soviet Union. His career faltered. In the fall of 1949, he embarked on a cross-country tour but had many of his concerts canceled. His Los Angeles performance took place only after a fierce campaign by Black organizations. When Robeson took the stage in California, he thanked the supporters who had stood up for him at Peekskill and sang “We Shall Not Be Moved,” bringing the crowd to its feet with some of the spiritual’s closing lines: “Black and white together / We shall not be moved.”