The wave of public insistence on desegregation was moved partly by this photo that appeared on the front page of the Baltimore Sun, showing one of us -- Allison Turaj -- bleeding heavily from a cut on her face, with bloodstains on her dress, from a rock thrown by a pro-segregation mob who were already -- to our surprise -- inside the park..
by Rabbi Arthur Waskow
Others in the photo include (to Allison's right) Carol Cohen McEldowney, whose memory is a blessing; to her right, Todd Gitlin, now a well-known sociologist; and to Allison's left, me. I am carrying my shoes because we had to cross a stream to actually enter the park the back way, rather than be ritually arrested at the front entrance. As you can see in the photo, we are under arrest -- and the police who arrested us probably saved our lives from the mob
That summer, I wrote an essay on the arrests that appeared originally as an article in the Saturday Review. It was later published as the opening chapter of my book Running Riot: A Journey Through the Official Disasters and Creative Disorder of American Society (Herder and Herder,
Here are excerpts from that
Why Jail?
At 11 o'clock on the morning of Sunday , July 7, 1963, I wrote the last paragraph of the last chapter of a scholarly study of a series of race riots that swept across the United States in 1919. At 5:30 that afternoon, I joined several men and women, white and Negro, to enter a Baltimore amusement park, Gwynn Oak, which had
By 5:40 , one of my companions had been badly hurt by a thrown rock, and all of us had been surrounded by a raging mob that, as I could recognize from my study of the 1919 riots, was whipping itself up to the point of assault
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After the police had reached us and arrested us, our march to the paddy wagon brought us past some of the same cotton candy stands and thrill rides that I could remember from fifteen years ago. " I felt utterly pierced by the knowledge that this was my Baltimore, the mob my fellow Baltimoreans, showing me hatred that I had never had to face, but that Baltimore Negroes must have faced for
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A basic question: if I feel that scholarship and writing are important tasks for me to keep on with (and I do), what place should something like civil disobedience have in my life? Scientists get exempted from the military draft; should intellectuals be exempted from nonviolent (but risky) protest? Ultimately, I decided it is dishonest to urge without undertaking, and impossible
I was prepared to go back to Gwynn Oak, but the management, under pressure of the demonstrations, agreed to integrate the park. I scarcely expect to be on the picket lines every Sunday . But where an event reaches out to touch my life again as this one did, I do not think I will be able to stay at my
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