The Day the Music Died

A NYC friend of mine (I have given him space in this blog before) wrote the following and I thought it worth being aired.  The title of the piece was just to rope you in to reading his piece.

Click the Photo for more images and one man's story

It was Memorial Day in New York City, just a few years ago, 55 years ago to be exact, 1967.  What do New Yorkers do on Memorial Day?  Same as big city folks across the nation.  They find a park to picnic in.  I lived on the Lower East Side and Tompkins Square Park was my city park. 

The long and short of it was that by day’s end, some 42 of us had been arrested, taken to the local police station, jailed, fingerprinted, and released.  Finally, we had our day in court.

Here is the real story as we lived it.  There we were, an assortment of folks of all stripes, maybe a hundred, most likely fewer; hippies, blue-collar and white-collar New Yorkers, Black, white, and Hispanic; and even some tourists.  We were a mixed group, not a bunch of unruly hippies as the tabloid press labeled us the next day.  So, a lone cop comes over and tells us to leave.  “Why?” we asked.  “Because I said so.”  We knew we were not breaking any law, we were NOT playing music loud, which would have been legal anyway in daytime.  There were NO Keep off the Grass signs, and grass in public parks is meant to be trod upon.  Seeing that we were within our rights to stay and picnic, we refused to move.  Within a few minutes, the cop had called for reinforcements, and a half-dozen paddy wagons arrived!  The cops lifted us into the paddy wagons (we were NOT going willingly), and deposited us at the local police station, where we spent several hours behind bars, were finger-printed, and released.

The next day, the tabloid press slandered us as trouble-making filthy hippies.  We were told by our pro bono ACLU lawyer that unless they named names, there was nothing we could do about their lies.  Don’tcha just love the Free Press?

Our "trial” about a month later lasted less than an hour.  We were formally charged with disturbing the peace, disorderly conduct and resisting arrest.  Sound familiar?  Our ACLU lawyer never stood up from his table or uttered a word in our defense.  We were acquitted on the spot.  Hunnhh?  Well, the District Attorney, whose nominal job was to prosecute law breakers, went after the cops (one in particular whose inner demons had caused the problem to begin with), and humiliated them by telling the story that you have in front of you; it was the cops’ riot!  We had broken no laws.  New Yorkers and their tourist friends are allowed to picnic and play music in all our parks.  PERIOD!

The tabloids didn’t cover our trial.  They would have looked foolish contradicting their own story of a month earlier.

Apparently, the cop who asked us to leave had a bee up his bonnet.  But as he could not arrest us on his own say-so, he went looking for a park employee who might register a complaint about us.  He finally found one, he had covered his own sorry ass, and he told us to leave.  You know the rest.

Here is a Daily News story.  Its byline is August 2017!   It was originally published in October 1998, still 31 years after the fact.  Here are the first two short paragraphs:

As the hour grew late and working people around Tompkins Square Park began turning out the lights on Memorial Day 1967, police asked several hundred music lovers to turn down the volume of a guitar-and-bongo concert in the park.

The crowd's reply, according to official police reports of the incident, was a barrage of bottles, bricks and fists that left seven officers injured.

I have quoted these few words because of all the lies.  The hour was early mid-day, between two and five o’clock, not nighttime.  There was no concert, formal or informal.  There was no loud music.  Just random groups picnicking, and maybe a few plucked guitar or sitar strings.  The crowd did not attack the cops in any way other than maybe verbally.  And not a single cop was injured.  PERIOD!  Part of a Free Press is their Constitutionally protected right to lie, and New York’s tabloids have always had a right-wing agenda (for real!) and they were taking on hippies!  I was a 9-5 wage slave myself, not a hippie in any way except for occasional weed that someone offered me.

Here is another link to the story, once again written decades after the facts.

I searched for the original story with the NY Daily News and the NY Post.  Not to be found.  But others had written about it.  From a multi-decade-after perspective – and got it all wrong.  Some of the stories claim that the judge ruled thus: “This court will not deny equal protection to the unwashed, unshod, unkempt, and uninhibited.”  Maybe he said that and maybe he didn't.  But the fact remains that the District Attorney NEVER put us on trial.  Our defense lawyer never uttered a word on our behalf!  That fact seems to have been lost on these journalists who were far from being eyewitnesses to what really happened.

The photo atop this story was taken by someone who was present that day.  I know, because I am in the picture.  You may not like his politics, but at least his photos tell the truth.

Just setting the record straight.  I have told the story dozens of times, never changing a detail.  This is the first time that I have a mass audience.

Glad to oblige!