70 years ago today: Remembering Peekskill
The 1949 Peekskill Riots remind us of a period of postwar rebellion and reaction that set the stage for the rest of the century.
At dusk on August 27, 1949, in a meadow called Lakeland Acres just outside Peekskill, New York, black radical singer, actor, and intellectual Paul Robeson was set to headline a concert. Pete Seeger and his fellow People’s Artists would open the show.
This performance would be Robeson’s third appearance in northern Westchester County in as many years. The “red summer belt” in northern Westchester County had become a kind of Borscht Belt for New York’s working-class radicals. The colonies and socialist summer camps also attracted black radicals and many fellow-traveling liberals.
Each resort had a different political pedigree: Mohegan Colony (once an old-line anarchist camp had, by 1949, become home to an eclectic mix of leftists and liberals), Camp Unity (closely affiliated with the Communist Party), Camp Followers of the Trail (an enclave of hardcore working-class communists), Camp Three Arrows (a Socialist Party retreat), and Shrub Oak Park (a “progressive” camp for left-wing New Dealers, unionists, “labor” Zionists, a handful of communists, and even some religious Jews).
The proceeds from this late-summer 1949 performance would support the Harlem chapter of the Civil Rights Congress’s freedom struggle and help pay for the legal defense of some of its communist leaders, on trial in Manhattan’s Foley Square under the provisions of the Smith Act. Howard Fast, prominent American novelist and communist, served as concert chairman.
A protest parade, consisting of right-wing veterans, Westchester and Putnam County conservatives, and local teenage toughs, marched on the concert. The countermobilization quickly escalated into a full-blown riot, and organizers had to cancel the Civil Rights Congress benefit concert before it started.
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https://jacobinmag.com/2017/06/peekskill-riots-woody-guthrie-paul-robeson-anticommunism?fbclid=IwAR3FMPubfvJ9IbX0PnX548sUWoc36cSbeTpnmAgpN9p6aHj8-fEBbvO8E0A
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