I must find Phil Trombino, it’s true.  Phil Trombino is a living primary source.  There is little on-line about the Human Relations Unit, its day to day operations, no trace of the sensitivity sessions I imagine, based on my father’s descriptions during the lulls in fighting over dinner.   Phil would have been in the room when the Unit went down to James Madison after the incident that began on December 7, 1973, thirty-two years to the day after another that would live in infamy.

The investigation into the incident, where blacks and whites squared off several days running in a Brooklyn high school that had almost ten years of integrated coexistence by then, can be found on-line, you can read all about it here.  Within a few days 100 policemen would be called in to keep a lid on the unrest.  I got as far as the last section of the introduction (page 4) when I was stopped in my tracks by the tone of the report.   Here is one section, containing language that seems inconceivable in the age of corporate spin we now all live in:

“Analysis, understanding and remedy-seeking?”  What?  What kind of idealistic jerk-off seeks that in a report on who is to blame for a riot?

“We mean this report to help them, not discourage them in meeting difficult challenges on which all of us in this country need all the help we can get.”

“Challenges on which all of us in this country

need all the help we can get.”

Challenges that more than forty years later we have all but abandoned working on, in favor of pointing fingers and fixing blame.  My father is grimacing in his grave at the abandonment of the ideals that animated this report, the creation of the Office of Intergroup Relations, his years of hard, doomed work.  

“It does make a man wonder: for what was I pelted with rotten vegetables, called a fucking kyke Commie cocksucker, cornered by snarling, red faced New York City racists who bumped me as I left the auditorium?  Why bother sending those two New York City cops with me the next time?  Why bother explaining Brown v. Board of Education to rooms full of parents and teachers who simply and unequivocally hated niggers?  And nigger was the word that foamed on every lip in those days.  Jack Roosevelt Robinson?  Nigger. No other way to put it.  We’ve come so far as a politically correct society, of course, we’re, you know, all post-racial and shit, now white people lose their jobs for hate speech for failure to refer to that magic word as the “n-word”, you know, but the condition for actual n-words on the ground, the masses of them?  They’re fucked, vilified, feared, loathed.  Thugs, yo.  Them n-words is fucking thugs, yo, you know what I’m sayin’?”

Calm down, dad.  I know what you’re saying.  You’re singing to the choir director.  The children of the poor are largely doomed.  Doomed.  There are less dramatic ways to say it, but none are as concise or accurate.  If you are born into poverty, as you know, your chances of dying an early death in poverty are incalculably greater than your chances of escaping poverty.  America, America, God shed His grace on thee.  

“You remember you had nightmares after that piece in Mad Magazine?  Wow, I just thought of that, Elie.  Mad magazine had a version of that song, illustrated with photos, and over ‘crown thy good with brotherhood’ there was a shot of a cemetery where all the grave stones had swastikas painted on them.  I think that same spread had a lynched body hanging there somewhere.   You must have been nine or ten.  It was not long after we passed the display windows along the Time and Life building at Times Square and you saw that magazine with piles of starved extermination camp inmates on the cover, you were up a few nights after that one.”  

Well, yeah, I’ve never had much love for fucking Nazis, dad.  It’s not as though they didn’t kill every member of my family on both sides except for the few who made it here to the USA, USA!   But we can chat about that another time.  I’m reading through the report of the racial tensions at James Madison– I was already out of high school by that time, and this report reads like something out of the Freedom Rides down in Alabama.

“Uppity Negroes, Elie, never satisfied with their station, you know what I’m sayin’?”    

So I get to this part– rumors fly that black high school girls are trapped by a white mob in a local luncheonette, in Brooklyn, 1973, and police are called in to stand between angry whites and angry blacks in front of the luncheonette, which was closed and empty.  And Benjamin Tucker, a black community relations officer in plain clothes, is struck by a white cop, who “mistook him for a student”.  Presumably struck the black man with a baton, probably in the head.  The report is silent on this.

“New York City, Elie, at the dawn of 1974.  I was fifty, starting to get tired.   You believe, and you fight, and even though your ideas are right, and your ideals are unshakable, you will get beaten down when nothing changes.  I think I was in NYU hospital again that winter, I don’t remember.  You wonder what the fuck any of it means, after a while.  Benjamin Tucker, I met the guy when we were at James Madison.  He was angry as hell, I remember he said to me ‘Irv, I’m on a street corner in Brooklyn, working, and I get cracked across the skull from the blind side by some fucking Bull Connor wannabe because he thinks I’m some nigger high school kid?  Crackers in Brooklyn hate niggers just as hard as those white boys down in Allybama.’  And he was right to be angry.  I had absolutely nothing to say to him, except ‘You’re right, Mr. Tucker.’  That’s what I had to give him, the respect of calling him Mister.  Nice fucking world, you know?”

OK, dad, calm down, calm down.  It is a nice fucking world, if by nice you mean infinitely fascinating.  I’m going to read the rest of this New York City Commission on Human Rights report and then go for a stroll, to think about all these nice things, and I’ll check in with you later.

“Catch you later, I’m eatin’ a pertater,” said the skeleton, sinking back into its long nap.