up against the wall, and then they’re going to machine-gun you down!”
There was silence.
“What a way to go!” someone quipped after a few beats.
No one laughed.
After dinner Kitty and I retreated across the street to our house, followed by staring eyes. Not a word was uttered. Soon afterward headlights traced our yard, and the dinner guests disappeared down the road.
Afterward I wondered if there was any projection in my outburst, if maybe I was acting out my own fears when I sentenced my brother’s dinner guests to summary execution. When I was a child attending Riverdale Country School, Harlem had seemed like a sort of no-man’s-land—a nonspace we traversed to get where we were going. But that was not the reality. Harlem was another country, separate and filled with a very particular variety of anger and despair and, at the same time and despite all that, very much filled with itself. The “collective” known as Harlem was based on shared experience that was stronger than whatever tied Dionne Donghi to the other Weather Underground people she ran with, having its roots in slavery. And if the people did decide to come down from Harlem to find a pound of flesh, I’d be thrown against the wall too.
17
The Harlem Four
Following Tony Maynard’s trial and shortly after returning from Attica, I was asked to take part in the defense of the Harlem Four, who were accused of a long-ago murder of a white storekeeper and stabbing of her husband in their 125th Street clothing store in 1964. Six boys, including the present four, then in their late teens, had been accused of that crime during a robbery attempt. The black-on-white crime would have been sensational enough, as it occurred on Harlem’s main white-dominated business street, but it had been blown way out of proportion by a later completely debunked New York Times story that claimed there was a group called the Blood Brothers that required the killing of a white for admission to membership, and that the killing of Margit Sugar had been for that purpose.
The defense team, I was told, would be supported by an interracial group called the Charter for a Pledge of Conscience, which included the actors Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee as well as Manhattan Borough president Percy Sutton, an old friend of Bob Carter from his NAACP days. As with Tony’s case, I could expect no fee, but the group had worked hard in support of the boys’ mothers, and many people in Harlem considered the case a racist prosecution.
The boys, originally called the Harlem Six, had been arrested quickly after the killing, and the evidence against them seemed compelling. A seventh boy, who became a prosecution witness, said he was involved in the plot to rob the store, but his mother had kept him at home when the crime was committed. By the time he got out of his apartment and ran to the meeting place, the crime had already occurred, and the others told him what went down. A young black girl told the police she was near the store when she saw the boys run out and down the street. There was a fingerprint of one of the boys on the store door. Finally, two of the boys confessed while in custody. Trying all six boys together, with the later recanted confessions of the two boys put into evidence, the 1965 trial was a slam dunk. The convictions, however, were thrown out on appeal, the court ruling that the two who had confessed had to be tried separately. In the following trial one of the defendants was convicted of murder, and the other pled to manslaughter. That left the Harlem Four. Even though they had spent seven years in prison and none of them was accused of being the actual killer, and despite the fact that the Blood Brothers story had evaporated, the legendary District Attorney Frank Hogan demanded a plea to murder if the young men wanted to escape a trial.
I joined Bill Kunstler and a much-older and ready-to-retire local civil rights lawyer, Conrad Lynn, to defend the first-named defendant, Wallace Baker, which would require me to go first in all the arguments, presentations of evidence, and summations. Why did I join the defense when there was so much evidence against the defendants and did I think they were guilty became recurring questions. I have always answered that the boys denied their guilt, and there were serious concerns about how the cops went