Business leader Sumner A. Sirtl wanted an all white Brooklyn. Black Lawyer Henry Ashcroft had a different dream. Part Two: the battle for parks 1943

In 1943 a new danger threatened the people of Bedford-Stuyvesant. That danger came from a group with a peaceful-sounding name, The Midtown Civic League.? Led by business leader Sumner A. Sirtl and Catholic priest Monsignor Father John Belford, the League had some dangerous goals.? The members of the Midtown Civic League did not like Black people, especially the newcomers from the American South and the West Indies.?Their dream was to somehow drive Black people out of Bedford-Stuyvesant. They saw Manhattan’s gated, white people-only, Stuyvesant Village as a model for their own Brooklyn community.? They planned on removing Black people from the neighborhood and tearing down their homes, stores and apartments. Then, copying Manhattan’s Stuyvesant Village, the Civic League would build a wall and inside, construct blocks and blocks of new beautiful housing, only for white people.?

By the summer of 1943, they came up with a clever way to make their plan actually happen.? The Civic League convinced the New York State justice system to look into complaints that Black people were making the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood an unsafe place to live.? With help from the State, Brooklyn’s District Attorney created a Grand Jury.? This group of local people was led by one of the States’ top lawyers in Brooklyn, Assistant District Attorney Edward A. Heffernan.? The Grand Jury was given the job of identifying the frequency and types of crime in Bedford-Stuyvesant.? They were also given the power to develop solutions that New York State government would have the legal power to quickly put into action.

The jury interviewed one hundred people, white people from Bedford Stuyvesant, along with the mayor of New York and the police chief. ?In his interview, Mayor LaGuardia, seemed to think that crime was not a problem in the neighborhood and he did not think there was a need to change anything there.? Everyone else the Grand Jury spoke to thought that Black people, especially Black teenagers, were running wild on the streets stealing from stores, and attacking people with knives.?The residents spoke of churches, mainly churches with white members, that could no longer hold evening services because their members were afraid to go outside their homes at night. They claimed that Black people lived almost like animals, packed into crowded apartments where people took turns using the few beds inside. Black people, witnesses said, were loud and gathered in large groups on street corners, insulting and scaring white people.? The police, the Grand Jury reported, had been told by the mayor that they could not hit anyone breaking the law with a police nightstick.? This made Black men not at all afraid of the police and allowed them to break the law without consequences, or so the Grand Jury believed.

The Grand Jury recommended that more police begin patrolling Bedford-Stuyvesant immediately.? The Grand Jury also felt strongly that Mayor La Guardia was preventing the police from using more violent methods to stop crime.? They wanted the police to use their wooden nightsticks and guns much more often.? They wanted the police to, in their words, have a “muss ‘em up attitude that this kind of lawlessness deserves.”?The Grand Jury members also wanted any large public gatherings banned.? They especially wanted to forbid people from gathering in groups on sidewalks.? The jury felt that crimes were planned by these groups on the sidewalks of Brooklyn.

To drive the newcomers from the South out of ?Bedford Stuyvesant, the Jury recommended that private citizens be given the powers of policemen.? These groups of citizen police could then use violence to drive off the criminals and groups of people on the streets.? To keep poor Black people from moving to Bedford Stuyvesant from the American South, the Jury wanted the city to close down crowded apartment buildings.? They did not want food and other kinds of assistance given to poor people by the city. The Grand Jury members felt that food aid attracted people to come to Bedford-Stuyvesant to “live off relief.”? The Jury did agree with Albert Clarke in one area, they felt that there should be more playgrounds, but they complained that children did not use the ones they had.

In November 1943, the Grand Jury’s recommendations were made public.? Brooklyn’s newspapers were filled with people’s reactions to the Jury’s statement that Black people were the cause of Bedford-Stuyvesant’s problems.? People also had strong opinions about the Jury’s demand that the Mayor flood the area with more police, use strong police violence to stop crime, give private citizens the power to act like police, and ban public gatherings.

Sumner Sirtl, John Belford and the members of the Midtown Civic League were really excited and were very pleased with the Grand Jury report.? As people were reading the report in their local newspapers and hearing about it on the radio, Sumner Sirtl called for a November meeting of the Midtown Civic League at the Bedford Branch YMCA. The goal of the meeting was to have the group vote on whether to send a message to the New York State Governor demanding that he remove Florio La Guardia as Mayor of the City and replace him with a mayor willing to let the police use their nightsticks, someone ready to let citizen police violently attack criminals. ?

Newspaper reporters and three Black community leaders heard about the meeting and came along as well.? Everyone at the meeting with the exception of the three Black men, were white newspaper reporters, white businessmen and white community leaders from Bedford-Stuyvesant. ?At the meeting, Monsignor John L. Belford, the Catholic pastor at the Church of the Nativity said that policemen had told him that “they could clean up the city in 24 hours if they were allowed…” ….Monsignor Belford, claimed that he had been “saying for ten years that conditions in the Bedford-Stuyvesant area are ‘a disgrace to the city.’ “Anarchy” does exist in the area where Negro youth dare to say to the police ‘If you lay a hand on me, I’ll complain to the Mayor,” and to teachers, “I’ll have you fired,” the 82-year-old priest insisted.? The mayor was a disgrace and the mayor’s supporters were “the scum of New York and Brooklyn.” Belford added, “The trouble has been interference of the Mayor.? He tells the police to deal gently with the Negro and not use the nightstick.”

Others at the meeting focused on the Black southern migrants arriving in Bedford-Stuyvesant.? They were labeled “disease-spreading, disorderly, and a disgrace.”? One white off-duty police officer stood up and said that morale among the police was really low, the lowest it had been in ten years.? This was all because the mayor would not allow police to use their nightsticks on the heads and backs of criminals.? He said that crime in the city is caused by “slightly sunburned people from the deep south who "mistake liberty for a license" and "overdo it.”? He continued, “And I know something about the Deep South because I spent two years at the University of Alabama.”? “Under-educated Negroes,” he said, from the South “stop off at Washington and get a taste of the liberty they missed in the South, and when they get to New York they get a further taste.”

At this point in the meeting, a Black lawyer from the neighborhood stood up.? Like the police officer who just spoke, Henry Ashcroft was a government official, a lawyer and a probation officer at the Special Sessions Court.? Sumner Sirtl allowed him to come to the front of the meeting and speak. “For two hours you have been treated to a fine tirade against the Negro race.”? Next, Henry Ashcroft tried to tell the Civic League about everything that Albert Clarke and other Black leaders were doing to get better housing and more schools and playgrounds. But few people heard his words.? The business leaders in the audience started to loudly shout “Throw him out!? “Sit down!”? Shut up!”? Henry left the stage and next, the Civic League voted to have Mayor LaGuardia investigated by the New York State Governor.?? The members of the Midtown Civic League left the meeting satisfied that the Grand Jury’s directions would soon be carried out and Black people would be removed from Bedford-Stuyvesant.?

In the 1950s, New York real estate developers and Park Commissioner Robert Moses would use many of the same tactics pioneered by Sumner Sirtl to harass and remove whole neighborhoods of Jewish, Black, and Puerto Rican people in Brooklyn. But ten years before, in1943, Sumner Sirtl’s attempt to expel Black people was an utter failure.

On November 25, 1943, more than one thousand people of all races gathered together at the Brooklyn Academy of Music auditorium to speak out against the Grand Jury’s orders and oppose the Midtown Civic League.? Three types of people were in the audience.?The foremost group were Black people. For years, Black men and women spent their weekends and evenings at community, church and labor union group meetings, talking about and finding solutions to Bedford-Stuyvesant’s problems.? In the days before television, online games and social media kept people at home, Brooklynites often spent their free time meeting together face to face. There were dozens of Black organizations in Bedford-Stuyvesant at that time, with dozens and dozens of talented women and men quite capable of using their skill and political influence to defeat Sumner Sirtl and the Grand Jury. ?These Black men and women were excited about sharing their solutions with the audience that night, hopeful that this time their plans for new schools, new housing, new playgrounds, and better jobs, would finally happen.

The next group of audience members at the Brooklyn Academy of Music that night were white people who cared a lot about the future of America. They read the Grand Jury’s solutions to Bedford-Stuyvesant’s problems.? The solutions sounded very much like the ones that Nazi leader Adolph Hitler, Italian Fascist leader Benito Mussolini, and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin used to terrorize ethnic groups they did not like.? They wanted America to show the world that it could truly live by the Four Freedoms that Franklin Roosevelt had claimed America stood for.? Sumner Sirtl’s solution, using police violence, seemed very different than the solutions a democratic country should choose.? These speakers stood up and said that the Grand Jury’s plan was a “double-barreled attack against the American people” and “an attempt to set brother against brother.”? They wanted to put into practice the solutions Black leaders were calling for instead of the “Hitler methods” the Grand Jury was calling for. ?Catholic Priest Father Raymond J. Campion gave interviews to Brooklyn’s newspapers, trying to counteract the hateful words of Father Belford.? His Bedford-Stuyvesant church was made up of Black and white members.? He asked his fellow white citizens to learn about the causes of racism that Black people faced every day in Bedford-Stuyvesant and to support an end to the oppression.?

The last and perhaps most significant group at the meeting were city government officials and members of the police department. The Grand Jury accused them of losing control of Bedford-Stuyvesant and allowing for lawless anarchy on the streets. These accusations would be studied by the Governor of the State, who could easily overact, send in State police, and violently take control of the situation.??In August 1943, just a few months before, Mayor La Guardia helped end three days of fighting and riots between the police and Black and white people in the borough of Harlem. The mayor knew that the violent “solutions” promoted by the Grand Jury and the Midtown Civic League would most likely “set brother against brother” as one of the speakers warned.? Fighting between New Yorkers had just happened in Harlem, and Mayor La Guardia and other government officials had to act fast to prevent an even worse, and even more tragic, racial battle in Brooklyn. People from all of these groups were hopeful as they left the meeting that night.

Within days, Mayor La Guardia flooded the streets of Bedford-Stuyvesant with hundreds and hundreds of policemen and detectives.? They came not with guns and nightsticks, but with clipboards and pencils and a survey to fill out.? The mayor asked the police to go door to door to hundreds of homes and businesses and ask the Bedford-Stuyvesant people questions about their feelings about how safe the community was, where and when they felt unsafe, and why.? Sumner Sirtl mocked the mayor’s response and said that it was another example of how weak the mayor was.?

In reality, the survey project gave the mayor a lot of valuable information about non-violent ways to help Bedford-Stuyvesant, and most importantly a lot of policemen and citizens got to meet each other and talk for the first time. The police spoke to many white churchgoers about their fears of going to church at night. ?Their fears seemed linked to the vicious battle between the US Navy, merchant ships, and the German Navy, a few miles away in the Atlantic Ocean. In order to make it harder for German submarines to spot and sink American ships at night, just off the coast of Brooklyn, city officials had purposely made the streets of Brooklyn dark at night.? Church members said the dark streets and scary reports of crimes in the newspaper, made them afraid, not anything they personally witnessed.? Black community members stated that thousands of Black churchgoers continued to attend church at night without fear.? They felt that reports of increased crime were made up. In fact, they felt that with more and more jobs being open to Black people, the streets had become safer and crime was down in 1943. ?The police studied their arrest records and said the same thing, Bedford-Stuyvesant was safer in 1943 than in years past. Everyone agreed that the community needed to help the thousands of young people whose parents were away, busy winning the war.

Next, Brooklyn’s Kings County Courts stepped in.? Kings County Judge Nathan Sobel called for a new Grand Jury to meet in December.? This jury would be made up of Black and white community leaders.? Judge Sobel also made clear that this new jury needed to come up with new solutions to Bedford-Stuyvesant’s problems, not solutions similar to those ordered by the last Grand Jury.? Sobel had Brooklyn’s newspapers print his directions for the new Grand Jury.? He asked them not to blame community problems on one race of people.? He said that the last Jury had “blamed an entire people for the faults of a very few. It places the great body of decent law-abiding Negroes [Black people] in a most humiliating position.? It stirs up resentment, hatred, and fear.” To blame crime on all Black people living in a community “does the gravest danger to the entire race of Negroes, to their jobs, their homes, and to their children. The innocent much more than the few calloused guilty feel the cold finger of suspicion pointed at them at work, at home, and at school.? That is what hurts them most. It is a subtle way of branding them and it is more painful than a hot iron.”?

Sobel asked the Jury to realize that from a young age, Black Americans realize that the right to liberty and a desire for some comforts and happiness are really only guaranteed for white Americans.? “Our vaunted concept of equality becomes…a bitter joke” for Black people.? Judge Sober asked this jury to recognize these problems and end them in 1944.??

To further impress the jury, Judge Sober had Henry Ashcroft come and stand next to him in the courtroom.? There the Black attorney read the speech he attempted to give at the Midtown Civic League meeting.? He called for Black and white citizens of Bedford-Stuyvesant to work together to solve its problems.? He ended his speech by saying that he and his fellow Black community members believed that police using violence had “never solved social problems in any group, anytime, anywhere.”? He felt that trying to isolate racial minority groups from the rest of society hurts the “mental and social health of the community.” More than anything else Henry Ashcroft said that an official City Government sponsored committee, made up of all racial groups, was needed to meet and tackle the real problems in Bedford-Stuyvesant. Part three: an interracial committee is created lead by a talented new leader: Ada B. Jackson