Strike the Hammer

The Black Freedom Struggle in Rochester, New York, 1940–1970

Laura Warren Hill

• Editorial: Cornell University Press
• Año: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781501754425
• Categoría: Historia
• Categoría: Historia de Norteamérica

On July 24, 1964, chaos erupted in Rochester, New York. Strike the Hammer examines the unrest—rebellion by the city's Black community, rampant police brutality—that would radically change the trajectory of the Civil Rights movement. After overcoming a violent response by State Police, the fight for justice, in an upstate town rooted in black power movements, was reborn. That resurgence owed much to years of organizing and resistance in the community.

Laura Warren Hill examines Rochester's long Civil Rights history and, drawing extensively on oral accounts of the northern, urban community, offers rich and detailed stories of the area's protest tradition. Augmenting oral testimonies with records from the NAACP, SCLC, and the local FIGHT, Strike the Hammer paints a compelling picture of the foundations for the movement.

Now, especially, this story of struggle for justice and resistance to inequality resonates. Hill leads us to consider the social, political, and economic environment more than fifty years ago and how that founding generation of activists left its mark on present-day Rochester.

CHAPTER 1

Black Rochester at Midcentury

Agricultural Migration, Population, and Politics

At midcentury, Rochester was in flux. Demographically, politically, and spatially, Rochester faced rapid changes, which had only accelerated with the onset of World War II. The most dramatic change was racial. Demographic forces, long underway in northern and western cities throughout the United States, explained in part the movement of a sizable number of African Americans into the city of Rochester, swelling two of the city’s wards. At the same time, white flight or the rapid exodus of white people from the inner city exacerbated the racial shift. Neighborhoods that once consisted of Germans, Italians, Polish, and various other white ethnic groups increasingly became Black neighborhoods, as the whites moved to the outer reaches of Rochester and its suburbs.

Institutions that had long catered to white immigrants—settlement houses and churches—either regrouped to serve the newcomers in this moment, as the settlement houses attempted, or moved to the suburbs with their congregants, as did several churches. Storekeepers, who once lived above their businesses and among their customers, maintained their shops but increasingly moved their families out of those neighborhoods and away from the communities they served. By 1950, Rochester’s total population began a slow decline that would continue for several decades. The city’s Black population, however, entered a period of rapid increase. For many, the changes represented more than just a demographic shift. One settlement house, for example, saw the influx of African Americans as qualitatively different from what had happened in previous generations: “Now the entire character of the neighborhood had changed until it seemed imperative that the Settlement should be primarily a character building agency.”¹

While consistent with national changes in migration patterns, which relocated unprecedented numbers of southerners to the North and West, the Rochester sojourn does not fully reflect the typical Great Migration story. These were not rural migrants heading to urban locales in search of factory work. Instead, they were agricultural migrants who first resided seasonally in nearby farming communities, all the while accumulating extensive knowledge of the greater metropolitan area, prior to permanent relocation. The steady increase of partially acculturated migrants helped foster generational challenges to longtime Black leadership in the city, which ultimately spurred a new wave of organizing.

Another set of migrants, smaller in number but with more formal education, moved into the city alongside the agricultural migrants. These Black newcomers, the Young Turks, as they came to be known, were inspired by changes taking place in the South as a result of the civil rights movement, and they hoped to apply similar strategies to the North. The Young Turks quickly swelled the local branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and they promoted new forms of organization and agitation.

When accounts of the Rochester uprising circulated nationally in 1964, any mention of Black agency, community formation, organization, or leadership were truncated or omitted in favor of narratives about Black disorder and pathology. Told that way, Black Rochester appeared disorganized, chaotic, lacking in leadership, and unable to identify and name its oppression. Nothing was further from the truth.

The East Coast Migrant Stream

During the 1950s, war veteran Robert F. Williams migrated to Rochester, lured there by the promise of factory work at the Eastman Kodak Company. He spent several weeks pounding the pavement in search of work, to no avail. He would later testify to the limited industrial opportunities in Rochester for Black men: “I walked that place inch by inch, and there was no job to be had.” Without money to return home, Williams went to the nearby orchards and fields to secure work picking beans, cherries, and apples. Unlike many migrants to Rochester (and other northern cities), Williams stayed only long enough to earn money to return south, in his case, to his native North Carolina.² Once there, he went on to become the famed activist and author of Negroes with Guns.

Williams’s story reflects the larger trajectory and the impact of the Great Migration on the urban landscape.³ Black migrants were drawn away from the South to industrial opportunities frequently during times of war, when labor shortages were exacerbated by restrictions on immigration.⁴ This Black migration changed the complexion of the nation’s largest cities, including New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Detroit, and Pittsburgh. “In the 1900s,” James Gregory offers, “only 8 percent of the nation’s total Black population” lived outside the South. By 1970, more than 10.6 million African Americans lived outside the South, 47 percent of the nation’s total.⁵ Gregory further notes that while this changed the face of the nation’s major cities, the migrants “were also going to regions that previously had known little racial diversity.”⁶ Though sensitive to minor differences in sex, familial circumstance, and time and route of departure, the migration narrative remains largely the same whenever it is told. Large numbers of Black southerners left behind the segregation and violence of the Jim Crow South in search of industrial job opportunities—or in the case of women, domestic service positions—in the North, thus improving their economic stability.

Rochester was not exempt from these forces. An economic boom placed Rochester in a much better position economically than other upstate New York cities. The Eastman Kodak Corporation, headquartered in Rochester, continued to dominate the film and camera industry and served as Rochester’s leading industrial employer. The city also benefited greatly from the expansion of the Haloid Company, which became Xerox, as it capitalized on new xerography patents. While Kodak and Xerox commanded international attention, other manufacturing industries also fueled this local boom. For many reasons, however, Rochester’s labor shortage did not translate into industrial opportunities for Black migrants.

Rochester did provide opportunities for agricultural migrants. A less studied and less understood facet of the Great Migration is the trickle-down effect industrial expansion had on rural and agricultural areas in the North. Take for example the more than 40,000 African Americans who moved to Rochester between 1950 and 1970, which more than tripled the Black population (see table 1). As the story of Robert Williams demonstrates, their presence was not the result of an open industrial labor market grateful for their presence. Rochester’s corporate world relied on a highly skilled and technically trained workforce. Kodak and Xerox required laborers to have at least a high school diploma whether the job in question required this level of education or not.⁷ They also preferred to fill industrial openings with local, white agricultural laborers eager to abandon the grueling work and long hours in the fields in exchange for stable, year-round work that promised better wages and benefits.⁸ The absence of white laborers, of course, created substantial openings for field hands to maintain and harvest crops throughout the summer and fall. At the same time, increasing mechanization in the southern agricultural landscape had left many Black agricultural workers jobless.⁹

The East Coast Migrant Stream fashioned a solution for both the short-staffed farms and the underemployed or unemployed Black southerners. This stream of migrants originated in Florida, ultimately depositing workers throughout thirty-six rural counties in New York State; the bulk were concentrated in western New York, including the area around Rochester.¹⁰ It was common for farm owners in the area to instruct a trusted employee to return to his (women were rarely, if ever crew leaders) hometown to recruit twenty-five to eighty more people to work the season. In this way, migrants were frequently acquainted through familial or communal networks with one another prior to leaving the South. Once a migrant had an agreeable experience on a particular farm, he or she often traveled to the same farm yearly, sometimes as an individual working with a crew, other times as a member of an independent family unit. While it was not a lucrative undertaking, families could make enough to support themselves if they worked through the myriad crops. One migrant remembered that in upstate New York, “you could start in June and work right straight through until November because you had tomatoes, you had beans, you had cherries, you had apples, your pears, your prunes, you know, all of those things would keep you busy all the way through.”¹¹ While those were central agricultural crops in New York, migrants also planted, tended, and harvested strawberries, potatoes, cabbage, celery, and onions.

Unlike most migrants whose travel was restricted by the rail system, agricultural migrants were not limited by the tracks; rather, they came in migrant trucks, owned cars, or traveled North with friends or family who owned vehicles. The car afforded greater flexibility in traveling and returning, and it became the source of fond family memories. Ruby Ford, born in 1956 in Haines City, Florida, recalled coming “with my father and mother, sisters and brothers; there was ten of us then. We all came up in one car.”¹² Emmarilus McCants Jenkins, born to migrant parents in North Rose, New York, remembered preparing to return to Florida for the first time as a married woman; pregnant with her first son, she went into labor the night before they were to leave the camp. The family car allowed them to stay until both mother and son were able to travel safely.¹³

This flexibility in movement also facilitated economic flexibility. Families could determine when and where to stop along the stream. Pandora Tinsley Cole, born in 1940, traveled the circuit for twenty-five years before permanently settling in upstate New York. She traveled with her mother as a child, first to Hendersonville, North Carolina, then to Dover, Delaware, where they picked beans, and then on to Wayne County (next to Monroe County, where Rochester is located), where she picked cherries and apples in the orchards. Like many migrants who remained in the stream, Cole eventually “started working in [the] canning plant where [she] worked on machines, canning beans and beets, and applesauce.”¹⁴ The fields and orchards yielded such a large quantity of produce that canning factories for companies such as Mott’s, headquartered at the time in Rochester, were often built on site.¹⁵

Some families moved directly from Florida to New York each year, avoiding working along the way. Migrant crews, particularly those comprised of families, found it undesirable to set up camp at more than two farms throughout the season.¹⁶ Montrose Cole, born in 1969, worked the migrant stream alongside her father, who taught her to pick apples. She recalled coming to Wayne County from Haines City, Florida: “I’ve been coming up here on the seasons all my life.… It usually takes us a day and a half to come; we leave in the morning, and should get up that next night—late that next night.… We always go to this truck stop in Pennsylvania, which is nice.”¹⁷

The yearly rituals that families developed, remembered so fondly by some migrants, demonstrate both familial order and communal organization. They further suggest that families were attuned to their own economic and educational needs, and the various obstacles that could prevent progress in either of these areas. While many migrants continued to work the stream by returning to Florida each winter, a growing number of migrants “settled out” in the Rochester area. These settled-out migrants, or “stagrants,” sought better opportunities by choosing to remain year-round, significantly altering the racial demography of upstate New York by 1960. Agricultural work was often the only option available to many laborers. While some recalled the rhythms and routines of migrant life fondly, structural forces made it a difficult way to make a living. Working the fields of upstate New York satisfied wanderlust, offered a respite from southern heat and violence, and provided marginally better pay. However, federal legislation and corrupt farm owners tipped the scales against the migrant workers.

The unpredictable conditions in which migrant families lived and worked, combined with abysmal housing, exacerbated negative perceptions of agricultural migrant work, including by migrants themselves. As one former migrant stated, “This isn’t a man’s work. This is just too dirty. I’d like to see people doing other work, not like this.”¹⁸ Other migrants saw honest work made unpredictable and therefore unprofitable. Another reported, “This traveling stuff is not good. You can’t predict the weather, you can’t predict what’s going to happen, you can’t predict the good days or the bad days, so nine times out of ten you end up with some kind of complication and no work. You do pretty good for a week and then have no work at all so it just doesn’t add up to anything.”¹⁹

These difficulties prompted migrants to look for alternatives whenever possible. Ivory Simmons, a migrant born in Vero Beach, Florida, in 1929 came to New York State in the 1950s to work in the camps. He left the migrant stream as quickly as possible, highlighting the decision many migrants made. “There are a lot of disadvantages in being a migrant,” he offered. “I guess that’s why I decided to not be a transient. I started to stay because I wanted to put some roots somewhere, and if I was going to be in this part of the world then I might as well stay here permanently instead of coming back and forth.”²⁰ Wayne County resident Charles Jackson recalled, “I had to leave Florida because I owed my children a better future. I needed more money. The farms up north did pay more than the southern farms. With my educational limitations, it would have been hard to find work even in a factory.”²¹

While Simmons and Jackson viewed leaving the migrant stream in personal and familial terms, structural forces made migrant agricultural work precarious, transferring the risk of doing business to the employees rather than t...