ocean separating my position from the overheated radical groups that were operating in the late 1960s and early ’70s. I did not at all identify with the brand of radicalism that marked their communiqués or their bombing attacks. Perhaps it was the way I lived. I had a house in the Hamptons, we had a housekeeper, and I liked to go to the opera. I was not one of them.
Unlike today, when the goal of political bombings here and around the world is to kill and to terrorize the public, the self-described militants of the late ’60s and early ’70s exploded bombs to publicize their message. Like Sam Melville, at least in America, they sent out communiqués warning of the impending action to make sure no one got hurt. Discussions about the war, racism, and other societal wrongs were forced into America’s living rooms after each Weather Underground bomb exploded. Without the spectacle, mainstream media paid little attention to fringe points of view. The Weathermen’s Oswald office bombing, however, achieved nothing, because while the kind of actual and figurative noise produced by the bombing got attention, it was virtually all negative, and the underlying message was lost in the haze of mild hysteria and disapproval.
By contrast, compared with what the Weathermen did, I thought that perhaps my legal work had some value. The cases I worked on could open doors. I could trudge the more meaningful road of incremental progress. Maybe I could even help stem the Supreme Court’s legal retreat from the promise of equality, something I had written about in “Nine Men in Black Who Think White,” the New York Times Magazine article that got me fired from the NAACP in 1968.
Commissioner Oswald got the Weather Underground’s attention because he was Rockefeller’s front man. The order to attack on September 13, 1971, was given by him, but he didn’t act alone. Governor Rockefeller wanted the situation to be resolved, and he wanted it done at arm’s length. The sort of voter Rockefeller had in mind as he unleashed the force of repression at Attica, or pushed for the infamously anti-black-and-Latino Rockefeller drug laws, was an archetype like Archie Bunker from the sitcom All in the Family—which premiered nine months before the Attica rebellion—actually around the time I was at Auburn. It was all conveying to whites that he would hold the line on their prerogatives and keep blacks at a distance to protect their way of life.
Whatever happened to Sam Melville, the bomb that went off in Albany was a response at least in part to his death. I remember a few things: I was unhappy to hear that the Weather Underground did it; I thought the bombing made no sense, and also that the underground was trying to co-opt something that it had very little (if anything) to do with; I was relieved to hear that no one was hurt, and I thought the action would be easy to dismiss, but I could also hear President Nixon’s silent majority saying that the Attica slaughter was unavoidable with such lunatics taking over the prison. Having fought against deeply ingrained institutional racism as an NAACP lawyer, I had learned that the way you talked mattered a lot, and if you spun something like an argument about racism even slightly askew, like using the phrase “white supremacy” even if that was exactly what you were facing, there was a cost: You risked losing in the court of public opinion. And perhaps that is what I did on The David Frost Show. But what I said was on the mark. If given another chance, I would probably say the same thing again.
If you listen to the Nixon tapes, you will hear Rockefeller’s lack of concern, his contempt for the prisoners, the observers, and even his failure to recognize the sacrifice of the guards’ lives. It’s impossible to miss. It was a class thing as well as a race thing, and I was in a unique position to know. I had deep class roots in my family and plenty of prerogatives, and I know how that shaped me. So there was irony in my attack on Rockefeller’s prerogatives.
The wealth I was born into exposed me to the social reality of racism from the opposite side of the issue. Growing up, we always had servants, they were always black, and at some point that started becoming emotionally freighted for me. Eventually there was a disconnect in my life when it came to race,