50 Years in Plainfield's History: From Rebellion to Supposed "Re-birth"
THE SUMMER OF LOVE TURNED TRAGIC IN PLAINFIELD. WE LOOK BACK AT WHAT HAPPENED AND FORWARD TO WHERE THE CITY IS HEADED.
Mike Deak , @MikeDeakMyCJ
For white Americans, 1967 was the Summer of Love. Baby boomers cherish memories of the season when smoldering opposition to the draft and the Vietnam War fueled newfound expressions of freedom and rejection of the Establishment’s unwritten rules. You didn’t trust anybody over 30, you did your own thing and the length of your hair was a political statement.
For black Americans it was a summer of discontent. While white Americans were debating whether it was proper to have sex before marriage, black Americans were increasingly frustrated by a painfully slow crawl toward political, cultural and economic equality. Whether it was in the North or South, blacks were frustrated by the Great Society’s much-touted War on Poverty that promised much, but delivered little. Despite the Civil Rights Act of 1964, segregation persisted and was particularly virulent in housing and education.
In the 1960s Plainfield was not unlike other urban areas, both large and small. Projects that promised better housing only exacerbated segregation. Banks still practiced discriminatory lending polices. At Plainfield High School, students were separated into two tracks — one for college (mostly whites) and one for vocations (mostly blacks). And rules were enforced along racial lines: white students were allowed to wear turtleneck sweaters, which were popular at the time, while black students weren't.
Literally on the other side of the tracks, Plainfield’s West End, always a forgotten neighborhood, began to deteriorate after World War II when industry, which had attracted migrants looking for a steady job and a better life, began to vanish. Mack Trucks closed its plant in 1961, moving more than 2,500 jobs to Maryland.
As unemployment mounted so did frustration. Prosperity always seemed to be around the next corner. Nobody in city government seemed to care about the West End. Racism was an everyday presence and tension escalated between police and citizens, who were often characterized by racial epithets on police radios.
"Even as far back as kindergarten I can remember policeman throwing kindergarten kids in the car for fighting and taking them to police headquarters," Plainfield High School student Robert Nelson, president of the Plainfield NAACP Youth Council told the Governor's Select Commission on Civil Disorder in the fall of 1967. "The officers never treated them like people. These were five and six-year-old kids. They would throw them into the car and talk to their mother like a dog."
The teen told the commission that no bond had ever been established between black youths and the police because the officers "never treated them like people."
Nelson said it was "a tale of two cities."
For blacks in Plainfield, it was not the good old days.
Plainfield was not unique. In the long, hot summer of 1967, more than 150 American cities experienced racial unrest. Some of the worst violence was just 18 miles away in Newark when rioting erupted on July 12 after a black cabdriver had been arrested and beaten by white police officers. In Newark there were 26 deaths, more than 700 injuries and 1,000 arrests. Many of the riots across the country were ignited by reports of police brutality. Justice seemed always to be out of reach for black Americans.
As the second day of turmoil gripped Newark in mid-July, violence exploded in Plainfield. In just a few short days, a police officer was killed, and 46 people were injured, 23 by gunfire. Most of the 167 arrests were for disorderly conduct. Damage was estimated at $700,000 which in 2017 terms would be more than $5 million.
Plainfield would never again be the same and newcomers and younger generations began to wonder why it was ever called the “Queen City.”
Now, a half century later, Plainfield may finally be turning the corner and entering what Mayor Adrian Mapp calls a "renaissance unlike anything seen here in decades" with 62 redevelopment projects representing an investment of more than $250 million.
None of that seemed possible 50 years ago.
July 14, 1967
All that was needed in Plainfield was a match.
The unrest was sparked on Friday evening, July 14, after an incident at one of Plainfield’s enduring landmarks, the White Star Diner on West Front Street. In 1967, it was the place for young people to hang out, the Plainfield equivalent of Arnold’s on “Happy Days.” It was the place for a hamburger and milkshake and somewhere to go with your date after a movie at The Strand.
Exactly what happened at the diner that evening remains murky. One version says that a bully punched a black teenager, Glasgow Sherman, cutting his face, and a white police officer, moonlighting as a security guard, refused to intervene or call an ambulance. Another version says that black teens were hanging out in the diner’s parking lot when a car with four or five white guys passed by and a Molotov cocktail was tossed. Though it didn’t explode, some teens were hurt by flying glass.
Some in the crowd at the dinner — some say it was 50 and others say it was 150 to 200 — began marching toward the heart of downtown. Angered by how police treated the black community, they threw rocks through store windows and at police cars. When the group reached downtown, they were met by a line of police officers and the group dispersed.
Saturday seemed to be a normal day in Plainfield. Downtown was crowded with shoppers, but city officials were meeting to discuss the growing tension. Two black councilmen, Everett Lattimore, who later became Plainfield's first black mayor, and Harvey Judkins, met with 50 to 150 youths that evening at a recently opened teen center in the West End. The youths complained about police brutality and the lack of a public swimming pool in the West End, a dire necessity in a hot season in a neighborhood where air conditioning was a luxury.
Not satisfied with the answers they were getting, some stormed out of the meeting and soon violence broke out. Eight fires were set, most at white-owned businesses in the West End. Rocks were thrown at firefighters when they arrived to extinguish the fires.
Police, who were trying to control the situation, got a lucky break when a storm rolled over the city, breaking up the crowds.
Though the match on the fuse was struck on Friday, Plainfield did not explode until Sunday, July 16. And it took just one word.
That hot afternoon, about 100 black youths went to Green Brook Park for a meeting so they could formulate how to present their grievances to the city. But, because the group did not have a permit, Union County Park Police tried to break it up. Spurgeon Cameron, first vice president of the Plainfield NAACP, testified at the governor's commission that one of the officers said, "Come on, boys, let's go."
"There is nothing more infuriating to a black man than to be called 'boy'," Cameron said. "When someone calls me 'boy' I will knock him in the mouth myself."
That is what triggered the most violent day in Plainfield's history.
The youths rushed out of the park. Cars were overturned, buildings were set on fire and stores were looted. Cars driven by whites were stoned. Appliances stolen from a store became barricades to block outsiders from entering a part of the West End now called "Soulville."
Police sealed off the neighborhood to keep the trouble contained to the West End.
Then it took a deadly turn.
The killing
When her father was killed, Elizabeth Gleason LaTorre was a couple of months shy of her fourth birthday.
She doesn't have many clear memories of her father, though she remembers him giving her rides on his shoulder and holding her little sister who had just been born.
Though she thinks about him every day, she has no more memories of John V. Gleason, the Plainfield police officer who was the only fatality in the days of unrest.
Though no formal commemoration of the riots has been planned, LaTorre hopes that what happened to her father will be remembered. There is a memorial to Gleason and the other officers who have died in the line of duty at police headquarters.
"My dad and mom were aware something bad was going to happen that day," LaTorre said. "His last words to my mom was 'I can take care of myself'."
At about 8 p.m. July 16, Gleason, whose father had been a lieutenant in the police department, was directing traffic at Plainfield Avenue and West Front Street at the perimeter of the cordoned-off area. Two white males approached him and told him that they had been threatened and pursued by a black man, later identified as Bobby Lee Williams, who was wielding a hammer.
The officer left his post and followed Williams down Plainfield Avenue toward West Third Street, where Gleason was surrounded by a crowd of 20 to 40 people. Some in the crowd threw items at him as he was trying to arrest Williams. In response to a move made by Williams, Gleason fired his gun, hitting Williams in the arm and stomach.
The group then came after Gleason and he tried to escape up Plainfield Avenue. The crowd knocked him down. As a state appellate court later wrote in a ruling, "members of the mob inflicted a savage beating which continued until he died." Court records say say he was beaten with a baseball bat, hammer or meat cleaver, rocks, bottles, boards, clubs and a shopping cart.
Eleven people were indicted in the murder. In the 42-day trial that ended two days before Christmas in 1968, one was acquitted by the judge, the jury found seven not guilty and was deadlocked on one.
Two, George Merritt Jr. and Gail Madden, were found guilty of first-degree murder. There was testimony that Merritt struck Gleason with a meat cleaver while Madden, who weighed about 250 pounds, jumped on the officer and stomped him while he lay on the ground. Then, according to a witness at the trial, as she was walking away, Madden was heard to say, "We killed him."
Merritt and Madden were sentenced to life in prison.
However, the convictions were later overturned in appellate court and a second trial was held in 1974. Both were found guilty again and two years later, an appellate court upheld Madden's conviction but reversed Merritt's conviction.
A third trial was held in 1977 and again Merritt was convicted. But the state Supreme Court overturned that conviction, citing inconsistencies in statements that Donald Frazier, the sole witness who identified Merritt, made to police and the testimony he gave during the trial. A police report, revealed 12 years after the murder, said that Frazier did not initially identify Merritt as part of the mob that attacked Gleason. Because that report could have impeached Frazier's credibility, Merritt's conviction was overturned for a third time.
In 1980, the Union County Prosecutor's Office decided not to bring Merritt to trial for a fourth time and the indictment was dismissed.
Williams was brought to trial and found guilty of assault with a dangerous weapon. Madden was released from custody in the 1980s, LaTorre said.
A flashpoint, then and now
A half century later, Gleason's killing remains painfully and stubbornly divisive.
In the overheated rhetoric of the time, radical defense lawyer William Kuntsler, who defended Williams, said that Gleason "deserved that death." In a speech to the United Front Against Facism, Kuntsler said the crowd "justifiably" stomped him to death, the result of four centuries of "white power structures preying upon the ghetto like vultures prey on meat."
New York Times columnist Tom Wicker contributed to a pamphlet, "The Plainfield Truth," for the United Defense to Free Political Prisoners. Merriit, Madden and Williams became known as "Plainfield's black hostages" and many believed they were "framed." Rallies were held to support them and fund drives collected money for their defense.
Gleason has also been portrayed in some accounts of the riots as a bigoted and brutal cop who reportedly shot a black child in 1966. Those allegations have been vehemently denied by LaTorre who is disturbed that there are "some crazy people who still believes he deserved it.
"Nothing can justify it," she said.
LaTorre still feels compelled a half century later to defend her father who posthumously was awarded the police department's first Medal of Honor.
"He wasn't a racist," she said. "He had a good relationship with blacks. He got along with everybody."
Gleason was a good beat cop, who was earning $5,000 a year and had to work a second job at a flower shop to support his family, said Walter Hetfield, the great nephew of Mayor George Hetfield who was in office at the time of the riot.
Gleason didn't even know he passed the sergeant's exam before he died." It came in the mail two months later," LaTorre said.
Like his father, Gleason "worked for the town he loved," LaTorre said.
"My father died for Plainfield," she said.
The war at home
After Gleason's death, the situation deteriorated further Sunday night.
The violence spread beyond the original 14-block area that police had cordoned and soon spread to the entire end. Stores were looted and set on fire. There was a gun battle between a store owner and looters.
The looters were careful in choosing their targets. They did not rampage through white neighborhoods or attack white homes. They did not attack schools. Instead they targeted white-owned stores. A Courier News story said stores that had a reputation of gouging black customers were targeted. More than 300 pints of liquor were stolen.
Black-owned businesses were spared and even "Soul Brother" signs were posted on windows of black-owned stores.
Legendary New York City television reporter Gabe Pressman, who died on June 23, was arrested at police headquarters and charged with trespassing.
After firefighters came under attack when they responded to fires, they retreated to a firehouse at West Third Street and Bergen Street. Soon, like an isolated medieval fort, the firehouse came under siege. The six firefighters could not leave the building because of the gunfire until the National Guard arrived.
Sometime that night, around 9:45 p.m., 46 semi-automatic rifles, M1 carbines, were stolen from the Plainfield Machine Company in Middlesex Borough. Rumors say the small company sold guns to the CIA where they may have ended up in the Bay of Pigs invasion or South Vietnam.
Nobody knows who took the guns, but Plainfield police feared that they would be used by snipers in the West End. Gunfire had become so heavy in the West End that entire families, fearful that a bullet would come through their windows, lay on the floors of the living room as if it was a foxhole.
In his recently published book, "Insurrection," Isiah Tremaine, who was 16 at the time, recalls that when his parents heard gunfire from the area of their backyard, the television and all the lights were turned off. "For the first time in my life, I heard live gunfire," he writes.
Norman Deen Muhammad, chairman of the Plainfield Anti-Violence Coalition, was six years old in 1967 and still has vivid memories of what happened.
His mother, who worked a second shift, could not return home because authorities had cordoned off the area and were not allowing people to enter.
Because there was no social media or cell phones in 1967, she didn't know what was going on. "She was very distraught," Muhammad said.
The National Guard arrived at 12:30 a.m. and by 3 a.m., order was beginning to be restored in the West End. Muhammad remembers looking out a window and seeing an Army personnel carrier passing on the street. But nightmare was not over for residents.
On Monday, neighborhood leader Linward Cathcart negotiated a truce with the city; terms called for police to leave the West End and a dozen prisoners to be released in exchange for the return of the 46 guns.
But when the guns were not surrendered, Gov. Richard Hughes declared a state of emergency which allowed state troopers and National Guardsmen to search West End homes for the rifles.
"These people had been cowering in their homes, lying on the floors, and now soldiers were searching their homes," Hetfeld said.
By the time the search was called off, only five carbines had been found and the 400 National Guardsmen and 200 state troopers were withdrawn from the neighborhood.
One of the most powerful and lingering images of July 1967 are pictures of National Guardsmen searching for the guns.
It was like news reports on television from Vietnam, eerily similar to the images of American soldiers scouring Vietnamese villages looking for Communists.
"I was seeing the same thing on the streets of Plainfield," Muhammad said.
The hollow prize
Like a tire with a nail, Plainfield was slowly deflating in the early 1960s. It was an insidious decline that cities throughout the country were experiencing. And when the riot came, the tire had a blowout.
Factories, large and small, were leaving and taking the manufacturing jobs for people who did not have college degrees. Besides Mack Trucks, companies like Scott Paper and Knickerbocker Toys were closing in Plainfield, along with several small family-owned manufacturers.
The suburbs were starting to sprout in the areas around Plainfield. Where the split-levels were being built, stores followed, with shopping centers lining highways as shrines to the growing prosperity of the middle class.
Why should Central Jersey residents remain loyal to their traditional shopping patterns and come to downtowns for their purchases? If you lived in a split-level development, it was easier to stick to the highway and do your shopping at Two Guys or Korvette's in the Blue Star Shopping Center. A super store like Great Eastern, where Costco is now, was a "dreamland," Hetfield said.
Even with Tepper's and Bamberger's struggling to survive, it was too much bother to drive to downtown Plainfield and find parking compared to the shopping centers where it was easy to find a space.
With television winning the entertainment war over film, Plainfield's movie theaters began to fade out as people stayed home to watch television, instead of coming to downtown Plainfield for a movie, dinner and a walk by the stores.
All those factors, not unique to Plainfield, fed the growing frustration by West End resident who saw economic opportunity slipping from their grasp while they were still subjected to the same pattern of discrimination.
There was an undercurrent of racial tension in the city, said Peter Dreier, a 1966 graduate of Plainfield High School who is now the Dr. E.P. Clapp Distinguished Professor of Politics, and chair of the Urban and Environmental Policy Department, at Occidental College in Los Angeles. But the city's establishment dominated by white Republicans, Dreier said, had "no idea."
"A lot of white people were surprised," said Dreier, whose family owned Dreier's Sporting Goods. The city's white, Republican leaders possessed "the inaccurate belief that Plainfield did not have the same social problems" of other cities experiencing unrest.
"They thought African-Americans were happy, content," Dreier said. "The riots were a wake-up call."
Bcause he played baseball in school, Dreier said he had a lot of black friends in high school and unlike many white students, he was aware of the simmering racial tensions at the school. His black friends told him about racist teachers, who would stop black students in the hall for minor dress code infractions.
As a Jew, Dreier said he felt empathy for his black friends because Jews too faced discrimination and were not allowed to join certain country organizations.
After the unrest, whites started to flee Plainfield. Real estate agents descended "like barracudas" on white neighborhoods and convinced white homeowners to sell before prices dropped, The number of blacks in Plainfield doubled from 1960 from 9,836 to 18,749 in 1970 and by the turn of the century, blacks were 61 percent of the city's population. But in the past 15 years, the proportion of Plainfield's black population has declined to 50 percent as the Latino population has dramatically increased and the number of black residents has fallen by 4,000.
That new ethnic composition brings challenges but it's also something the city can be proud of, Mayor Mapp said.
"It is even more important now as we have such a diverse population that there is representation for all ethnicities and segments of our community," the mayor said. "People become restless and discontent when they feel overlooked or frustrated if their voices aren't being heard."
As whites continued to leave Plainfield, blacks began to assume positions of power. Everett Lattimore became the city's first black mayor in 1981 and the first Democrat elected mayor in 68 years. But the new generation of leaders was left with with what political scientists call a "hollow prize," an economically devastated area with a dwindling tax base that could not provide the revenue to fund a first-class public school system or high-quality municipal services. The white flight brought down property values and the Great Society anti-poverty programs vanished. Urban renewal projects seldom delivered what they promised and, like the Park-Madison project, took a long time to materialize.
"The aftermath of the riots left an indelible mark on Plainfield's economy that is still felt to this day," Mapp said. "We aren't trying to re-create the Plainfield that existed pre-riots, but we are working to create a new reality for Plainfield, one that speaks to its own unique identity and has its own brand."
In 1971, the school district finally started a desegregation plan, but because of the white flight, Dreier said, integration was difficult to achieve. In 1967, blacks were 52 percent of students at Plainfield High School and that number increased to 70 percent by 2007. But with the influx of Hispanics, blacks are now a minority at the high school with the number of Hispanics nearly double the number of blacks. And whites are only .3 percent of the enrollment.
Thanks to federal subsidies, within a year of the unrest, one of the community's biggest grievances was addressed. A public pool was built in the West End.
And more is coming for the West End, Mapp said, including a state-of-the-art recreational, entrepreneurial and educational center. In addition, there are several mixed-use and residential projects.
"It needs the willingness to embrace the change that may accompany redevelopment," the mayor said. "We are making strides and I am optimistic about the chances for lasting and positive change in all parts of our city."
'One Plainfield, one future'
There is an interesting piece of trivia about the week that changed Plainfield.
According to Hetfield, who's a music teacher in Delaware, two singles by two groups with roots in Plainfield — one black and one white — had songs on the national record charts that week. The white group was The Critters with "Don't let the Rain Fall Down on Me," while George Clinton's group, The Parliaments, was on the charts with "I Want to Testify." Clinton worked at a barber shop, called at different times the Tonsorial Parlor and The Silk Palace, that was near ground zero of the unrest.
Chances are that literal and metaphorical harmony will never again be achieved in Plainfield. But the city, 50 years later and in a new century, appears to be poised for a fresh start.
That may be one of the reasons why no formal commemorations are planned to mark the 50th anniversary of the unrest. Last October, a program, “The Plainfield Rebellion: 50 years later, a Retrospective” was held at Washington School as part of the Plainfield Frontiers International’s Westry Horne Cultural and Heritage Series.
In an article published on the 40th anniversary of the riots, Dreier wrote that his classmates attending a reunion hardly discussed the riots. With few exceptions, photos of the reunion, Dreier said, showed that blacks and whites sat at separate tables. "Forty years later, and, still, two separate worlds," he concluded.
"A lot of people are not aware of what happened," Muhammed said, adding that 50 years ago Plainfield was in the spotlight of national attention and was mentioned "in the same breath" as Watts and Detroit.
It's still important to look back and see what caused the unrest, he said, but it's more important to concentrate on the future. "Backwards Never, Forward Ever" is one of his mantras.
The risk in remembering what happened 50 years in Plainfield and the rest of the country is that it may tear the scab off a wound that many think is still open.
The outrage over police brutality, as evidenced by the reaction to the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and other police shootings, speaks to the belief that blacks are still subject to unequal treatment.
"Black people are still getting the short end of the stick," said East End resident Elizabeth Faraone, who started the Witnesses to the Plainfield Insurrection of 1967 page on Facebook. "This country is not safe for black people and never has been."
Another example of the unequal treatment, Faraone said, "Muhlenberg Hospital was stolen from this community."
"We are still patiently waiting for redevelopment," Muhammed said about the West End.
Though there are redevelopment projects near the Raritan Valley Line, Muhammed's "biggest fear" is that city residents may be "left out of the process."
He also said that local contractors should have access to the work. Muhammed has a new hashtag, BUILD — Being United and Involved in Local Development.
Mapp realizes that residents should not be left out of redevelopment. "It's important that our current residents are afforded the opportunity to take advantage of these new living spaces," he said. "We are mindful of that balance as we move ahead with our redevelopment projects."
And there are still too many young men in Plainfield who are "under-educated and under-employed" who need job training so they can have the opportunity to find well-paying jobs, Muhammed said.
Young men, who may have gotten into trouble, also need assistance in their "re-entry into the community," Muhammed said.
Assemblyman Jerry Green, who moved to Plainfield 40 years ago, has sponsored legislation to shorten the time to expunge a criminal record and to eliminate questions about criminal records from the initial employment application.
Green said the key to ensuring Plainfield's future is by making an investment in human capital through education that will pay dividends for decades.
His top priority is to make sure that Plainfield receives enough state aid for its public school system. With the city's changing population — 40 percent of the population speaks Spanish at home — "the bottom line is that the students need our help."
"We have to give people the opportunity to get good, high-paying jobs," Green said.
To revitalize the West End, economic conditions must improve. That's one of the reasons why the minimum wage should be raised, Green said.
The government can help by awarding incentives and encouraging companies to locate in the West End, he said. At one time, Plainfield was the center of shopping in Central Jersey; now, he said, even Plainfield residents leave town to shop either along the Route 22 corridor in Watchung and North Plainfield or the Interstate 287 corridor in Piscataway and South Plainfield.
Relations between the community and the police department have improved, but there is still "room for improvement," Muhammed said.
Community policing is important but just as important is hiring officers from the community.
"Officers should know the name of every family on their beat," he said.
Mapp agreed that progress has been made.
"Confidence in our police force has increased dramatically," Mapp said," and the morale of the force itself is higher than it has been for a long time."
Officers have been told to walk through neighborhoods every day and interact with residents, the mayor said. Since officers started wearing body cameras, there has been a 50 percent drop in complaints against officers. Though there have been high-profile cases, the city''s overall crime rate has fallen.
The mayor added that it is a priority to recruit new officers from the city because "the officers have a vested interest in being fair."
"We have finally realized we all have to work together and put community first," Green said. "We will no longer fight over power, we will fight for what is good for the city."
Mapp also realizes that it's essential for Plainfield to move forward together.
"Meaningful and actionable discourse is sometimes all that's needed to come to a reasonable solution and find answers that will satisfy all," the mayor said.
That spirit of unity is an echo of something that was said a half century ago.
In an open letter to the community shortly after her husband's death, Mrs. John Gleason asked for healing. "I fervently hope we may work together to bring dignity back to our town and to make it a safe and happy place."
Staff Writer Mike Deak: 908-243-6607; mdeak@mycentraljersey.com
Mike Deak , @MikeDeakMyCJ
For white Americans, 1967 was the Summer of Love. Baby boomers cherish memories of the season when smoldering opposition to the draft and the Vietnam War fueled newfound expressions of freedom and rejection of the Establishment’s unwritten rules. You didn’t trust anybody over 30, you did your own thing and the length of your hair was a political statement.
For black Americans it was a summer of discontent. While white Americans were debating whether it was proper to have sex before marriage, black Americans were increasingly frustrated by a painfully slow crawl toward political, cultural and economic equality. Whether it was in the North or South, blacks were frustrated by the Great Society’s much-touted War on Poverty that promised much, but delivered little. Despite the Civil Rights Act of 1964, segregation persisted and was particularly virulent in housing and education.
In the 1960s Plainfield was not unlike other urban areas, both large and small. Projects that promised better housing only exacerbated segregation. Banks still practiced discriminatory lending polices. At Plainfield High School, students were separated into two tracks — one for college (mostly whites) and one for vocations (mostly blacks). And rules were enforced along racial lines: white students were allowed to wear turtleneck sweaters, which were popular at the time, while black students weren't.
Literally on the other side of the tracks, Plainfield’s West End, always a forgotten neighborhood, began to deteriorate after World War II when industry, which had attracted migrants looking for a steady job and a better life, began to vanish. Mack Trucks closed its plant in 1961, moving more than 2,500 jobs to Maryland.
As unemployment mounted so did frustration. Prosperity always seemed to be around the next corner. Nobody in city government seemed to care about the West End. Racism was an everyday presence and tension escalated between police and citizens, who were often characterized by racial epithets on police radios.
"Even as far back as kindergarten I can remember policeman throwing kindergarten kids in the car for fighting and taking them to police headquarters," Plainfield High School student Robert Nelson, president of the Plainfield NAACP Youth Council told the Governor's Select Commission on Civil Disorder in the fall of 1967. "The officers never treated them like people. These were five and six-year-old kids. They would throw them into the car and talk to their mother like a dog."
The teen told the commission that no bond had ever been established between black youths and the police because the officers "never treated them like people."
Nelson said it was "a tale of two cities."
For blacks in Plainfield, it was not the good old days.
Plainfield was not unique. In the long, hot summer of 1967, more than 150 American cities experienced racial unrest. Some of the worst violence was just 18 miles away in Newark when rioting erupted on July 12 after a black cabdriver had been arrested and beaten by white police officers. In Newark there were 26 deaths, more than 700 injuries and 1,000 arrests. Many of the riots across the country were ignited by reports of police brutality. Justice seemed always to be out of reach for black Americans.
As the second day of turmoil gripped Newark in mid-July, violence exploded in Plainfield. In just a few short days, a police officer was killed, and 46 people were injured, 23 by gunfire. Most of the 167 arrests were for disorderly conduct. Damage was estimated at $700,000 which in 2017 terms would be more than $5 million.
Plainfield would never again be the same and newcomers and younger generations began to wonder why it was ever called the “Queen City.”
Now, a half century later, Plainfield may finally be turning the corner and entering what Mayor Adrian Mapp calls a "renaissance unlike anything seen here in decades" with 62 redevelopment projects representing an investment of more than $250 million.
None of that seemed possible 50 years ago.
July 14, 1967
All that was needed in Plainfield was a match.
The unrest was sparked on Friday evening, July 14, after an incident at one of Plainfield’s enduring landmarks, the White Star Diner on West Front Street. In 1967, it was the place for young people to hang out, the Plainfield equivalent of Arnold’s on “Happy Days.” It was the place for a hamburger and milkshake and somewhere to go with your date after a movie at The Strand.
Exactly what happened at the diner that evening remains murky. One version says that a bully punched a black teenager, Glasgow Sherman, cutting his face, and a white police officer, moonlighting as a security guard, refused to intervene or call an ambulance. Another version says that black teens were hanging out in the diner’s parking lot when a car with four or five white guys passed by and a Molotov cocktail was tossed. Though it didn’t explode, some teens were hurt by flying glass.
Some in the crowd at the dinner — some say it was 50 and others say it was 150 to 200 — began marching toward the heart of downtown. Angered by how police treated the black community, they threw rocks through store windows and at police cars. When the group reached downtown, they were met by a line of police officers and the group dispersed.
Saturday seemed to be a normal day in Plainfield. Downtown was crowded with shoppers, but city officials were meeting to discuss the growing tension. Two black councilmen, Everett Lattimore, who later became Plainfield's first black mayor, and Harvey Judkins, met with 50 to 150 youths that evening at a recently opened teen center in the West End. The youths complained about police brutality and the lack of a public swimming pool in the West End, a dire necessity in a hot season in a neighborhood where air conditioning was a luxury.
Not satisfied with the answers they were getting, some stormed out of the meeting and soon violence broke out. Eight fires were set, most at white-owned businesses in the West End. Rocks were thrown at firefighters when they arrived to extinguish the fires.
Police, who were trying to control the situation, got a lucky break when a storm rolled over the city, breaking up the crowds.
Though the match on the fuse was struck on Friday, Plainfield did not explode until Sunday, July 16. And it took just one word.
That hot afternoon, about 100 black youths went to Green Brook Park for a meeting so they could formulate how to present their grievances to the city. But, because the group did not have a permit, Union County Park Police tried to break it up. Spurgeon Cameron, first vice president of the Plainfield NAACP, testified at the governor's commission that one of the officers said, "Come on, boys, let's go."
"There is nothing more infuriating to a black man than to be called 'boy'," Cameron said. "When someone calls me 'boy' I will knock him in the mouth myself."
That is what triggered the most violent day in Plainfield's history.
The youths rushed out of the park. Cars were overturned, buildings were set on fire and stores were looted. Cars driven by whites were stoned. Appliances stolen from a store became barricades to block outsiders from entering a part of the West End now called "Soulville."
Police sealed off the neighborhood to keep the trouble contained to the West End.
Then it took a deadly turn.
The killing
When her father was killed, Elizabeth Gleason LaTorre was a couple of months shy of her fourth birthday.
She doesn't have many clear memories of her father, though she remembers him giving her rides on his shoulder and holding her little sister who had just been born.
Though she thinks about him every day, she has no more memories of John V. Gleason, the Plainfield police officer who was the only fatality in the days of unrest.
Though no formal commemoration of the riots has been planned, LaTorre hopes that what happened to her father will be remembered. There is a memorial to Gleason and the other officers who have died in the line of duty at police headquarters.
"My dad and mom were aware something bad was going to happen that day," LaTorre said. "His last words to my mom was 'I can take care of myself'."
At about 8 p.m. July 16, Gleason, whose father had been a lieutenant in the police department, was directing traffic at Plainfield Avenue and West Front Street at the perimeter of the cordoned-off area. Two white males approached him and told him that they had been threatened and pursued by a black man, later identified as Bobby Lee Williams, who was wielding a hammer.
The officer left his post and followed Williams down Plainfield Avenue toward West Third Street, where Gleason was surrounded by a crowd of 20 to 40 people. Some in the crowd threw items at him as he was trying to arrest Williams. In response to a move made by Williams, Gleason fired his gun, hitting Williams in the arm and stomach.
The group then came after Gleason and he tried to escape up Plainfield Avenue. The crowd knocked him down. As a state appellate court later wrote in a ruling, "members of the mob inflicted a savage beating which continued until he died." Court records say say he was beaten with a baseball bat, hammer or meat cleaver, rocks, bottles, boards, clubs and a shopping cart.
Eleven people were indicted in the murder. In the 42-day trial that ended two days before Christmas in 1968, one was acquitted by the judge, the jury found seven not guilty and was deadlocked on one.
Two, George Merritt Jr. and Gail Madden, were found guilty of first-degree murder. There was testimony that Merritt struck Gleason with a meat cleaver while Madden, who weighed about 250 pounds, jumped on the officer and stomped him while he lay on the ground. Then, according to a witness at the trial, as she was walking away, Madden was heard to say, "We killed him."
Merritt and Madden were sentenced to life in prison.
However, the convictions were later overturned in appellate court and a second trial was held in 1974. Both were found guilty again and two years later, an appellate court upheld Madden's conviction but reversed Merritt's conviction.
A third trial was held in 1977 and again Merritt was convicted. But the state Supreme Court overturned that conviction, citing inconsistencies in statements that Donald Frazier, the sole witness who identified Merritt, made to police and the testimony he gave during the trial. A police report, revealed 12 years after the murder, said that Frazier did not initially identify Merritt as part of the mob that attacked Gleason. Because that report could have impeached Frazier's credibility, Merritt's conviction was overturned for a third time.
In 1980, the Union County Prosecutor's Office decided not to bring Merritt to trial for a fourth time and the indictment was dismissed.
Williams was brought to trial and found guilty of assault with a dangerous weapon. Madden was released from custody in the 1980s, LaTorre said.
A flashpoint, then and now
A half century later, Gleason's killing remains painfully and stubbornly divisive.
In the overheated rhetoric of the time, radical defense lawyer William Kuntsler, who defended Williams, said that Gleason "deserved that death." In a speech to the United Front Against Facism, Kuntsler said the crowd "justifiably" stomped him to death, the result of four centuries of "white power structures preying upon the ghetto like vultures prey on meat."
New York Times columnist Tom Wicker contributed to a pamphlet, "The Plainfield Truth," for the United Defense to Free Political Prisoners. Merriit, Madden and Williams became known as "Plainfield's black hostages" and many believed they were "framed." Rallies were held to support them and fund drives collected money for their defense.
Gleason has also been portrayed in some accounts of the riots as a bigoted and brutal cop who reportedly shot a black child in 1966. Those allegations have been vehemently denied by LaTorre who is disturbed that there are "some crazy people who still believes he deserved it.
"Nothing can justify it," she said.
LaTorre still feels compelled a half century later to defend her father who posthumously was awarded the police department's first Medal of Honor.
"He wasn't a racist," she said. "He had a good relationship with blacks. He got along with everybody."
Gleason was a good beat cop, who was earning $5,000 a year and had to work a second job at a flower shop to support his family, said Walter Hetfield, the great nephew of Mayor George Hetfield who was in office at the time of the riot.
Gleason didn't even know he passed the sergeant's exam before he died." It came in the mail two months later," LaTorre said.
Like his father, Gleason "worked for the town he loved," LaTorre said.
"My father died for Plainfield," she said.
The war at home
After Gleason's death, the situation deteriorated further Sunday night.
The violence spread beyond the original 14-block area that police had cordoned and soon spread to the entire end. Stores were looted and set on fire. There was a gun battle between a store owner and looters.
The looters were careful in choosing their targets. They did not rampage through white neighborhoods or attack white homes. They did not attack schools. Instead they targeted white-owned stores. A Courier News story said stores that had a reputation of gouging black customers were targeted. More than 300 pints of liquor were stolen.
Black-owned businesses were spared and even "Soul Brother" signs were posted on windows of black-owned stores.
Legendary New York City television reporter Gabe Pressman, who died on June 23, was arrested at police headquarters and charged with trespassing.
After firefighters came under attack when they responded to fires, they retreated to a firehouse at West Third Street and Bergen Street. Soon, like an isolated medieval fort, the firehouse came under siege. The six firefighters could not leave the building because of the gunfire until the National Guard arrived.
Sometime that night, around 9:45 p.m., 46 semi-automatic rifles, M1 carbines, were stolen from the Plainfield Machine Company in Middlesex Borough. Rumors say the small company sold guns to the CIA where they may have ended up in the Bay of Pigs invasion or South Vietnam.
Nobody knows who took the guns, but Plainfield police feared that they would be used by snipers in the West End. Gunfire had become so heavy in the West End that entire families, fearful that a bullet would come through their windows, lay on the floors of the living room as if it was a foxhole.
In his recently published book, "Insurrection," Isiah Tremaine, who was 16 at the time, recalls that when his parents heard gunfire from the area of their backyard, the television and all the lights were turned off. "For the first time in my life, I heard live gunfire," he writes.
Norman Deen Muhammad, chairman of the Plainfield Anti-Violence Coalition, was six years old in 1967 and still has vivid memories of what happened.
His mother, who worked a second shift, could not return home because authorities had cordoned off the area and were not allowing people to enter.
Because there was no social media or cell phones in 1967, she didn't know what was going on. "She was very distraught," Muhammad said.
The National Guard arrived at 12:30 a.m. and by 3 a.m., order was beginning to be restored in the West End. Muhammad remembers looking out a window and seeing an Army personnel carrier passing on the street. But nightmare was not over for residents.
On Monday, neighborhood leader Linward Cathcart negotiated a truce with the city; terms called for police to leave the West End and a dozen prisoners to be released in exchange for the return of the 46 guns.
But when the guns were not surrendered, Gov. Richard Hughes declared a state of emergency which allowed state troopers and National Guardsmen to search West End homes for the rifles.
"These people had been cowering in their homes, lying on the floors, and now soldiers were searching their homes," Hetfeld said.
By the time the search was called off, only five carbines had been found and the 400 National Guardsmen and 200 state troopers were withdrawn from the neighborhood.
One of the most powerful and lingering images of July 1967 are pictures of National Guardsmen searching for the guns.
It was like news reports on television from Vietnam, eerily similar to the images of American soldiers scouring Vietnamese villages looking for Communists.
"I was seeing the same thing on the streets of Plainfield," Muhammad said.
The hollow prize
Like a tire with a nail, Plainfield was slowly deflating in the early 1960s. It was an insidious decline that cities throughout the country were experiencing. And when the riot came, the tire had a blowout.
Factories, large and small, were leaving and taking the manufacturing jobs for people who did not have college degrees. Besides Mack Trucks, companies like Scott Paper and Knickerbocker Toys were closing in Plainfield, along with several small family-owned manufacturers.
The suburbs were starting to sprout in the areas around Plainfield. Where the split-levels were being built, stores followed, with shopping centers lining highways as shrines to the growing prosperity of the middle class.
Why should Central Jersey residents remain loyal to their traditional shopping patterns and come to downtowns for their purchases? If you lived in a split-level development, it was easier to stick to the highway and do your shopping at Two Guys or Korvette's in the Blue Star Shopping Center. A super store like Great Eastern, where Costco is now, was a "dreamland," Hetfield said.
Even with Tepper's and Bamberger's struggling to survive, it was too much bother to drive to downtown Plainfield and find parking compared to the shopping centers where it was easy to find a space.
With television winning the entertainment war over film, Plainfield's movie theaters began to fade out as people stayed home to watch television, instead of coming to downtown Plainfield for a movie, dinner and a walk by the stores.
All those factors, not unique to Plainfield, fed the growing frustration by West End resident who saw economic opportunity slipping from their grasp while they were still subjected to the same pattern of discrimination.
There was an undercurrent of racial tension in the city, said Peter Dreier, a 1966 graduate of Plainfield High School who is now the Dr. E.P. Clapp Distinguished Professor of Politics, and chair of the Urban and Environmental Policy Department, at Occidental College in Los Angeles. But the city's establishment dominated by white Republicans, Dreier said, had "no idea."
"A lot of white people were surprised," said Dreier, whose family owned Dreier's Sporting Goods. The city's white, Republican leaders possessed "the inaccurate belief that Plainfield did not have the same social problems" of other cities experiencing unrest.
"They thought African-Americans were happy, content," Dreier said. "The riots were a wake-up call."
Bcause he played baseball in school, Dreier said he had a lot of black friends in high school and unlike many white students, he was aware of the simmering racial tensions at the school. His black friends told him about racist teachers, who would stop black students in the hall for minor dress code infractions.
As a Jew, Dreier said he felt empathy for his black friends because Jews too faced discrimination and were not allowed to join certain country organizations.
After the unrest, whites started to flee Plainfield. Real estate agents descended "like barracudas" on white neighborhoods and convinced white homeowners to sell before prices dropped, The number of blacks in Plainfield doubled from 1960 from 9,836 to 18,749 in 1970 and by the turn of the century, blacks were 61 percent of the city's population. But in the past 15 years, the proportion of Plainfield's black population has declined to 50 percent as the Latino population has dramatically increased and the number of black residents has fallen by 4,000.
That new ethnic composition brings challenges but it's also something the city can be proud of, Mayor Mapp said.
"It is even more important now as we have such a diverse population that there is representation for all ethnicities and segments of our community," the mayor said. "People become restless and discontent when they feel overlooked or frustrated if their voices aren't being heard."
As whites continued to leave Plainfield, blacks began to assume positions of power. Everett Lattimore became the city's first black mayor in 1981 and the first Democrat elected mayor in 68 years. But the new generation of leaders was left with with what political scientists call a "hollow prize," an economically devastated area with a dwindling tax base that could not provide the revenue to fund a first-class public school system or high-quality municipal services. The white flight brought down property values and the Great Society anti-poverty programs vanished. Urban renewal projects seldom delivered what they promised and, like the Park-Madison project, took a long time to materialize.
"The aftermath of the riots left an indelible mark on Plainfield's economy that is still felt to this day," Mapp said. "We aren't trying to re-create the Plainfield that existed pre-riots, but we are working to create a new reality for Plainfield, one that speaks to its own unique identity and has its own brand."
In 1971, the school district finally started a desegregation plan, but because of the white flight, Dreier said, integration was difficult to achieve. In 1967, blacks were 52 percent of students at Plainfield High School and that number increased to 70 percent by 2007. But with the influx of Hispanics, blacks are now a minority at the high school with the number of Hispanics nearly double the number of blacks. And whites are only .3 percent of the enrollment.
Thanks to federal subsidies, within a year of the unrest, one of the community's biggest grievances was addressed. A public pool was built in the West End.
And more is coming for the West End, Mapp said, including a state-of-the-art recreational, entrepreneurial and educational center. In addition, there are several mixed-use and residential projects.
"It needs the willingness to embrace the change that may accompany redevelopment," the mayor said. "We are making strides and I am optimistic about the chances for lasting and positive change in all parts of our city."
'One Plainfield, one future'
There is an interesting piece of trivia about the week that changed Plainfield.
According to Hetfield, who's a music teacher in Delaware, two singles by two groups with roots in Plainfield — one black and one white — had songs on the national record charts that week. The white group was The Critters with "Don't let the Rain Fall Down on Me," while George Clinton's group, The Parliaments, was on the charts with "I Want to Testify." Clinton worked at a barber shop, called at different times the Tonsorial Parlor and The Silk Palace, that was near ground zero of the unrest.
Chances are that literal and metaphorical harmony will never again be achieved in Plainfield. But the city, 50 years later and in a new century, appears to be poised for a fresh start.
That may be one of the reasons why no formal commemorations are planned to mark the 50th anniversary of the unrest. Last October, a program, “The Plainfield Rebellion: 50 years later, a Retrospective” was held at Washington School as part of the Plainfield Frontiers International’s Westry Horne Cultural and Heritage Series.
In an article published on the 40th anniversary of the riots, Dreier wrote that his classmates attending a reunion hardly discussed the riots. With few exceptions, photos of the reunion, Dreier said, showed that blacks and whites sat at separate tables. "Forty years later, and, still, two separate worlds," he concluded.
"A lot of people are not aware of what happened," Muhammed said, adding that 50 years ago Plainfield was in the spotlight of national attention and was mentioned "in the same breath" as Watts and Detroit.
It's still important to look back and see what caused the unrest, he said, but it's more important to concentrate on the future. "Backwards Never, Forward Ever" is one of his mantras.
The risk in remembering what happened 50 years in Plainfield and the rest of the country is that it may tear the scab off a wound that many think is still open.
The outrage over police brutality, as evidenced by the reaction to the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and other police shootings, speaks to the belief that blacks are still subject to unequal treatment.
"Black people are still getting the short end of the stick," said East End resident Elizabeth Faraone, who started the Witnesses to the Plainfield Insurrection of 1967 page on Facebook. "This country is not safe for black people and never has been."
Another example of the unequal treatment, Faraone said, "Muhlenberg Hospital was stolen from this community."
"We are still patiently waiting for redevelopment," Muhammed said about the West End.
Though there are redevelopment projects near the Raritan Valley Line, Muhammed's "biggest fear" is that city residents may be "left out of the process."
He also said that local contractors should have access to the work. Muhammed has a new hashtag, BUILD — Being United and Involved in Local Development.
Mapp realizes that residents should not be left out of redevelopment. "It's important that our current residents are afforded the opportunity to take advantage of these new living spaces," he said. "We are mindful of that balance as we move ahead with our redevelopment projects."
And there are still too many young men in Plainfield who are "under-educated and under-employed" who need job training so they can have the opportunity to find well-paying jobs, Muhammed said.
Young men, who may have gotten into trouble, also need assistance in their "re-entry into the community," Muhammed said.
Assemblyman Jerry Green, who moved to Plainfield 40 years ago, has sponsored legislation to shorten the time to expunge a criminal record and to eliminate questions about criminal records from the initial employment application.
Green said the key to ensuring Plainfield's future is by making an investment in human capital through education that will pay dividends for decades.
His top priority is to make sure that Plainfield receives enough state aid for its public school system. With the city's changing population — 40 percent of the population speaks Spanish at home — "the bottom line is that the students need our help."
"We have to give people the opportunity to get good, high-paying jobs," Green said.
To revitalize the West End, economic conditions must improve. That's one of the reasons why the minimum wage should be raised, Green said.
The government can help by awarding incentives and encouraging companies to locate in the West End, he said. At one time, Plainfield was the center of shopping in Central Jersey; now, he said, even Plainfield residents leave town to shop either along the Route 22 corridor in Watchung and North Plainfield or the Interstate 287 corridor in Piscataway and South Plainfield.
Relations between the community and the police department have improved, but there is still "room for improvement," Muhammed said.
Community policing is important but just as important is hiring officers from the community.
"Officers should know the name of every family on their beat," he said.
Mapp agreed that progress has been made.
"Confidence in our police force has increased dramatically," Mapp said," and the morale of the force itself is higher than it has been for a long time."
Officers have been told to walk through neighborhoods every day and interact with residents, the mayor said. Since officers started wearing body cameras, there has been a 50 percent drop in complaints against officers. Though there have been high-profile cases, the city''s overall crime rate has fallen.
The mayor added that it is a priority to recruit new officers from the city because "the officers have a vested interest in being fair."
"We have finally realized we all have to work together and put community first," Green said. "We will no longer fight over power, we will fight for what is good for the city."
Mapp also realizes that it's essential for Plainfield to move forward together.
"Meaningful and actionable discourse is sometimes all that's needed to come to a reasonable solution and find answers that will satisfy all," the mayor said.
That spirit of unity is an echo of something that was said a half century ago.
In an open letter to the community shortly after her husband's death, Mrs. John Gleason asked for healing. "I fervently hope we may work together to bring dignity back to our town and to make it a safe and happy place."
Staff Writer Mike Deak: 908-243-6607; mdeak@mycentraljersey.com
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