Why We Lost the Review Board
Harrington, Stephanie
Under New York City's ancien regime, presided over by the amiable Bob Wagner, political hot potatoes were handled by appointing committees to study them until they were cold and dead. A year...
...John Lindsay understands this...
...And then after the Review Board was defeated, these same people turned around and said, "See, the white folks got the power and you can't do nothin' about it...
...So he set one up, thereby making the Policemen's Benevolent Association unhappy enough to call for a referendum and landing himself in the most impolitic of political positions—i.e., smack in the middle of a campaign for a good but unpopular cause, scarcely a year after the electorate had deigned to give him a try...
...The political and trade union organizations that were involved in FAIR had to divide their labors between support for the board and support for individual candidates...
...Even taking into account that this was not a presidential year, Harlem's registration was, in Rustin's view, inordinately low...
...There was also the other side of the coin in Harlem—what Rustin calls "politics of despair...
...The mass of middle-class Jewish, Irish, and Italian voters might also benefit from a little education...
...Putting principle before pragmatism, he ended up out on a limb, and New York elected to leave him there...
...The review board 16 would not even have dented these problems, but in the case of the most desperate of the poor—those whose lives are bounded by precinct house walls—it could have mitigated their alienation a little by giving them some recourse against the authority that runs their lives...
...And the PBA convinced them that their individual interests depended on a police force unchecked by anyone...
...Lindsay staff members estimate that about 50 per cent of the Puerto Ricans voting against the board meant to vote for it...
...A year ago New York voted for a change—a change it may not be prepared to cope with...
...But a moral victory, certainly—and an example to a city that has seen less than its share of principle in City Hall...
...The PBA's argument against "tying the hands of the police" carried as far north as Harlem...
...And since, true to the culture of the ghetto, Negroes prey most on other Negroes, the Negro middle class does not want the police to be hampered in breaking up the Harlem numbers racket or in getting the addicts off the streets...
...But even these gestures to assure slumdwellers they were not forgotten lost Lindsay support in the middle class...
...Floyd McKissick of CORE...
...Being a moral man, he interpreted his election as a mandate to fulfill his campaign promises— including that of a review board...
...Added to this were some glaring absences among review board proponents— most notably Harry Van Arsdale, Morris Iushewitz, and the New York City Central Labor Council...
...The long-range lesson to be drawn from this defeat is, in Rustin's view, that "Negro leaders have a massive job ahead of them to educate the people in their communities on the power of the vote...
...It was crucial to make people, whose English was imperfect, understand that voting yes meant no review board and vice versa...
...But the SNCC-oriented Black Panther party took the position that the review board was useless and not worth bothering about...
...A political defeat, perhaps...
...By comparison the Federated Associations for Impartial Review ran a penurious campaign...
...The police, on the other hand, were mobilized around a single issue, and their agents, simply in the course of duty, were on street corners all over the city, many of them pushing their own cause and discouraging civilians from expressing hostile points of view...
...It elected John Lindsay after he had campaigned for a civilian-dominated police review board...
...But the Jews are the basis on which liberal causes in New York are won or lost...
...This year, in the Bronx and Brooklyn, the Democratic gubernatorial candidate, O'Connor (who supported the review board) , won by nearly 50,000 votes and 76,000 votes respectively, while the board lost by 107,000 and 212,000...
...People were grumbling," said a Lindsay aide, "that he was 'spending all his time in the ghetto with them while he's raising our taxes.' " In Brooklyn Democratic party workers handed out pro-O'Connor literature together with anti-review board stickers...
...It admitted to spending at least half a million on its anti-review board advertising, and the frequency of its television spots indicated that the financial score was probably a lot higher...
...Muggings and murders do happen...
...and African nationalist leaders Ed Davis and James Lawson...
...The Review Board is only advisory anyway...
...The middle- and lower-class Italians and Irish were mostly written off to the backlash from the start...
...The PBA, which is technically neither a political organization nor a union, is not required by law to account for its budget...
...In Frank's Restaurant, where Harlem's "elite meets to eat," a straw poll was taken and one third of the patrons came out against the review board...
...In the Puerto Rican neighborhoods, the language problem became paramount...
...Minister Farakhan, leader of Malcolm X's Muslim Temple Number Seven...
...The answer is that while New York is sentimental about youth, beauty, vigor, and vitality, its citizens are also singularly tough-minded about their individual interests...
...Yet given the same choice, he would do the same thing again...
...In the jungle of cities these days no one feels safe, not the Catholic in Queens nor the Jew in Brooklyn nor the Negro in Harlem...
...The Negro middle class [says Bayard Rustin], took the view of the middle class in general—more police protection, and not less...
...New York's review board was simply the latest scapegoat for a nation that chooses not to spend the funds necessary to create the jobs, housing, and educational facilities that can change a mugger into a man with a stake in society...
...Their fears are real enough, but the negative solutions pointed to by their latest electoral performance promise only to reinforce the basis of those fears...
...The defeat of the review board was scored as a political defeat for Lindsay...
...It elected a mayor who is young, energetic, and as moral—at times overbearingly so—as his predecessor was pragmatic...
...Roy Wilkins of the NAACP...
...And a Lindsay staff man passed two Liberal party storefronts, one in Brooklyn and one on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, with antireview board signs in the windows...
...According to the strategists involved in the pro-review board campaign, the decisive swing vote that most decidedly swung the wrong way was that of middle-class Jews...
...Rustin himself feels that the struggle for the review board was worthwhile, not because it could fundamentally change the pattern of urban life, but because it was "psychologically necessary...
...Voter registration in Harlem was extremely low...
...They fell for the PBA's line that 15 the review board would tie the hands of the police...
...Among those who agreed with him and who went out onto the streets on this issue were Jesse Grey...
...It's one reason he made so many personal appearances on the streets of Harlem and Bedford Stuyvesant...
...In the face of the Council's foot-dragging, 5S local unions, under the aegis of the Jewish Labor Committee, did endorse the review board...
...This was practiced by people who said,] "Why bother voting...
...And none of them is to be blamed...
...But—and purists must remember that New York is THE city run on ethnic politics—it was not the timid middle-class Negroes or despairing lower-class Negroes and Puerto Ricans who lost us the review board...
...Money was another problem...
...Moreover, its participating organizations were not, for the most part, political and were, therefore, not mobilized for the kind of intensive street campaigning that was necessary...
...John Lindsay, himself, carried much of the burden of street corner oratory...
...And the turnout for the review board was much better in Harlem than in Bedford Stuyvesant...
...The frustration was stacked against Lindsay...
...Some of his advisors fear the campaign cost him a good chunk of the electorate— permanently...
Vol. 14 • January 1967 • No. 1
