Transcript of They’ve Got Weapons | 4

Wondry Plus subscribers can binge all episodes of Empire City early and ad-free. Join Wondry Plus in the Wondry app or on Apple podcasts. Hey, you all. Just want to let you know this episode contains explicit depictions of violence. Do what you need to do to take care of yourself. I've had my share of run-ins with the police since I was a kid, but it wasn't until I was making this series that I had one that truly showed me what the NYPD has become. It happened on a late spring day in 2024, and my daughter and Yola is running across a plaza on the NYU campus where I teach. She's breaking down some slick four-year-old dance moves. She's singing, and she's lifting her voice so that folks can hear what she has to say. Palestine. Three, three, Palestine. And Yola is standing with me and her mom on the grounds of a protest encampment at NYU, a two-minute walk from where we live. After watching the catastrophic, horrific, and consistent attacks on Palestinians, we're here to demand that my university disclose and divest from Israel. Three, three, Palestine. Three, three, Palestine. Three, three, Palestine. I watch her skip off past tense and food, past hundreds of folks with green, red, and white Palestinian flags, kafias, and hijabs, and past banners saying, Never give up till Palestine is free.

We're surrounded by students, faculty, and other members of our community whose signs and chants call for an end to genocidal war. We see Jewish and Muslim students protecting each other's right to safely express their faith as humble but fierce resistance.. But as the sun goes down and Muslim students kneel for prayer, that sense of safety is shattered. An explosion of sirens pierces through this prayerful moment, and blue and red lights bounce off the faces of everyone around us, just as an NYPD bus rumbles rolls through the crowd. Panic and fear shoot through my body as I race to get to my family. I see Anyola run to her mother and grab her leg. My wife picks her up, and we exchange a knowing look before they disappear into the already scattering crowd, and I stay behind with my students. I lock arms with about 20 other faculty members, and together we form a wall with our bodies between our students and the NYPD. Scores of police police in riot gear, the strategic response team, start lining up on the Plaza. They're wearing helmets, vests, and guns, all funded by Mayor Adams' new police budget.

Bunches of white zip-tie handcuffs and tear gas canisters are dangling from their belts. As they march toward us, a loud electronic voice assaults our ears from the sky. The only word I can make out is trespassing. A young white cop grabs me, forcing my arms apart, pushing me away from my students and zip-tying my hands behind my back. He tightens it until the plastic cuts into my wrists. I watch as an officer tackles a Lebanese student, snatches her by her hair, and drags her down the street as she screams. Another cop recklessly pepper sprays into the crowd. A student journalist's head jerks back as a projectile blast of mace sets his eyes on fire. It's barely half an hour since Eniola's left the Plaza. I've been arrested, and 136 of us are being carted away by NYPD busses to one police Plaza. I sit for hours on a cold metal bench in a cell, watching through a scuffed-up dirty glass window as my colleagues, students, and other fellow New Yorkers are each dragged in and processed. All of us are outraged, but we're also energized. Some protesters are still chanting singing to drown out any fear inside of us and to keep what's happening to families in Gaza in the forefront of our minds.

And as I sat there, unable to contact my family, I couldn't help but wonder what my daughter might have seen that night. What is she thinking? Is she still awake in her bed waiting for me to come home? When the NYPD showed up that night, what I felt was the opposite of safety. It felt like a naked, savage drive, spectacular and military, had been unleashed on us, and it had nothing to do with protecting us and everything to do with violent disciplinary power. And even though New Yorkers are getting used to seeing our neighborhood police in riot gear on the news, at public gatherings, and on our campuses, the NYPD wasn't always a force beefed up with tactical units, shields, and tear gas. So when did that change? And what was the threat that was so dangerous that it pushed the NYPD to ramp up their capacity and willingness to forcefully subdue masses of people even when they're peaceful? From Wundry and Crooked Media I'm Chinjarai Kumunika, and this is Empire City, episode 4. They've Got Weisons. After New York's two police forces beat the shit out of each other on the steps of City Hall, the Metropolitan police take over as the official NYPD.

And partially because of the riot, a lot of folks view this new police as another uniform gang with nightsticks. And on day one, they have a problem. Huge parts of the city that the new police have to patrol are immigrant communities loyal to Fernando Wood and Tamanee Hall. And by day two, tensions are already at a breaking point. It's Independence Day, and a cop goes to break up a huge fight between street gangs. But as he walks through the crowd, a guy knocks him down. The gangs attack him, rip off his uniform, and beat him with his own nightstick. When he finally gets away, he runs back to the police headquarters in his boxers. He tells his squad what happens and passes out. Of course, this thing is a real problem for any police force, and these kinds of skirmishes went on for years. So the NYPD writes a request to city leaders, basically saying, Hey, can we have half a million dollars to create a riot squad with horses, short swords, and revolvers? Most of the city leaders are like, Oh, hell no. That's too much like a standing army. If that worry about the police sounds familiar, it's because it is.

When someone first said, Hey, can we have like a thousand police instead of 200? Folks said, No, man. That sounds too much like a standing army. But then later, some rich folks said, Well, actually, as long as you leave us alone, that's okay. Then, when someone suggested, Let's give the police uniforms, people said, Men in uniform? Patrolling our neighborhoods? Never. But then Matzell just put them in uniforms, and folks said, Okay, maybe not that bad. Now, the police were asking for guns, and people were like, This is too far. But there's one city leader that has the cops back. His name is John Kennedy. No relation to those Kennedy's. Since no one is budging on guns, Kennedy says, At least give us the horses or lassos, something. We can't have gangs beating up the police, and we need some way to put these rowdy folks in the city down. So the city leaders Others agree to horses. But what none of those city leaders knew is that in just a few years, the country would find itself smack in the middle of a bloody Civil War with no end in sight. It's 1863, and that guy, John Kennedy, is the newest NYPD police superintendent, and he's tasked with overseeing America's first military draft in New York.

And white folks are pissed about it. Now, up here in the north, in New York, a lot of folks like to puff out their chest because we were on the right side, the Abraham Lincoln side, right? But Kennedy's probably tuned in to folks who feel a whole different way. Because if you ask a lot of white folks in New York around that time, your worst nightmare is the liberation of the Black man. Historian Ed O'Donnell says that even though New York is a free state, a lot of New Yorkers are enraged at the possibility that 4 million enslaved people might be emancipated.

Because if you think you're poor now, you think you have trouble putting food on the table now, just wait. If emancipation comes, you are going to have your jobs taken, your women taken.

And the fact that they're now formerly enslaved Black folks fighting in the Civil War made this fear seem even more real. Plus, there's one caveat that most White New Yorkers really ain't feeling.

They had an exemption for wealthy people. If you could pay $300, you could buy your way out of the draft, and lots of people did so famous people like Andrew Carnegie did it. Theodore Roosevelt's father did it.

So essentially, rich people can spend their afternoons watching bougey British actors in Macbeth, while poor people die on the battlefield.

A rich man's war and a poor man's fight.

One person who doesn't fear Black emancipation is Superintendent John Kennedy. When When Kennedy hears that a bunch of Black Union troops might be traveling through the city, he fears that White New Yorkers are going to attack them and that his police are going to have to protect them. He picks up his pen again, writes to the governor, and asks if he can send him on a different route. Kennedy succeeds in rerouting the Black Regiment, but the anger he's worried about is real, and it's rising in the city. Going into the first day of the draft, Kennedy's nervous that the city might explode. Load. Foley, Francis McDonald. You know how on Bingo, there's a big cage filled with lottery balls and someone spinning the cage and calling out numbers one by one? Sanford, Henry Harrison, Sweezy, Richard M. Believe it or not, that's how the draft is carried out. Except if your name gets called, you don't fill out a spot on your Bingo board. You have to fight in the Civil War. Hauley, Samuel M. On the first day of the draft, there's some skirmishes in other cities. But to Kennedy's surprise, as the draft officials continue continue to announce the numbers in New York, nothing happens.

The draft begins on Saturday, July 11th, 1863, without a hitch. This puts a lot of folks at ease, including Kennedy, who breathes a big sigh of relief. So he heads home, assuming that Monday will go just as peacefully. But not everyone feels so sure. One person who's still worried is Captain George Washington Waling. Waling understood firsthand how quickly a mob of angry New Yorkers can spiral out of control. He had been through the Esther Place riot and the police riot. So unlike his boss, Captain Waling fears that even though the first day of the draft went okay, shit is going to turn up when they start calling out numbers again on Monday. But Waling is just one police officer. He doesn't have the authority to mobilize the whole department, so he spends Sunday night hunkered down in the precinct preparing himself for any commotion that might surface when the draft resumes. And it turns out he's right. Early on Monday morning, a group forms at the base of Central Park. It's the most dangerous group, white people filled with anger and resentment. They're enraged about the draft and being sent off to a war. And as the crowd swells, they feed off each other.

They start marching downtown, hell-bent on destruction. Eventually, they set off what's called the New York City Draft Riots, one of the biggest and deadliest urban riots in the history of America.

So where we're standing right here is where things flipped.

I'm standing with Kamal Ware, a Black historian, artist, and tour guide. He's walking me through the events of the riots. We start at the bottom of Central Park, and this location is important. Six years before the draft riots began, the thriving Black community of Seneca Village was destroyed to build this park.

And so it's metaphorical that you had white mobs gathering here who also were just belligerent toward the presence of Black people in the city at all. It's almost like an intentional place to gather. Let's go to the place where Black folks got displaced, and let's gather here to protest the draft.

Standing here today, it feels calm. Tourists are taking pictures. People are eating overpriced falafels. But on that Monday morning, back in 1863, folks were gathering a protest, and the crowd starts to march toward the draft office. Another large crowd of irritated folks gets together downtown at the ninth Police Precinct, where the draft is about to resume. As draft officials pick up where they left off on Saturday, pulling out names one by one, the crowd there gets angrier and angrier. Finally, some firefighters can't take it anymore.

They're the ones who light the match and say, You know what? We're not here for this. You're not going to tell us to go fight in this war. We're already serving the city. And then everybody else is sparked by their anger. And then they just went ahead and broke glass, attacked the spot, and the cops ran.

Kamal emphasizes this point. When the cops saw this huge mob, they ran away.

I want people to understand and appreciate the volume of people and the amount of threat that was displayed that made cops be like, We're not dying today over this.

The sight of cops running gives the mob confidence.

There's this moment of, Oh, I think we're in charge.

Now that they've gotten their first taste of how easy it is to overwhelm the authorities, the growing throng starts heading somewhere where they can get guns.

Then they go in and they sack the armory, and now they've got weapons. It's safe to expect that folks have been drinking, too.

After Superintendent Kennedy reads telegraphs about outbreaks of police violence and large crowds gathering around police stations, he hops in his buggy and heads out to see what's going on. Kennedy spots a large crowd of folks surrounding the ninth district police station. He leaves his buggy a few blocks away so he's less conspicuous, starts walking up to the station. At this point, Kennedy has civilian clothes on, but there's a former cop in the crowd who recognizes him and yells out, Here comes that son of a bitch, Kennedy. Let's finish him. The mob is merciless. Irish New Yorkers finally have the chance to take their vengeance on the NYPD official who's enforcing this draft, helping to send them off to die for a cause they don't believe in. He's walking just and then like, boom, he gets hit.

Yeah, if we could use it as street terms.

Hell, yeah. You already know, bro.

Yeah, he gets stolen. Yeah, Yes.

Somebody stole the police superintendent. The former cop hypes up the crowd as they descend on Kennedy saying, Stick together and we can lick all the damn police in the city.

He's beaten to a pulp, and then they're trying to drown him in a puddle. So just imagine a Commissioner of New York's Police Department getting his ass beat on the block.

Fortunately for Kennedy, a guy runs into the Melee and convinces everyone that he's already dead. After the mob moves on, Kennedy is secretly taken back to the police precinct. Doctors count 70 knife wounds. By now, there's skirmishes and violence erupting all over the city. Walling heads into street a few blocks away. With his club in hand and a small group of police at his side, they must have looked like his strong arm squads from a decade ago. But this time, they're up against more than a small gang. Walling's crew are confronted by a mob of 2,000 enraged rioters. He temporarily deputizes his brother and hands him a club. As they head into the brawl, he tells his men, Kill every man with a club. A small group group of men versus 2,000 armed rioters probably sounds heroic, but the truth is that Walling and his men barely make it out of that confrontation alive. When you think about a mob, you might think of an irrational hord consuming everything in its path. But this mob was selective. They ignore a lot of what they pass. They don't seek out the politicians who actually led them into war.

Instead, they focus on destroying places they see as symbols of their pain. They attack an office of a pro-war newspaper, and they even attack a Brooks Brothers store because it's a symbol of rich folks. But as the day goes on, a palpable shift takes place. The crowd moves from attacking symbols to people, and this time, it's not just the police.

They got weapons. They're more agitated. They got bigger numbers. And now they're attacking Black folks, taking them off stage coaches, pulling them out of restaurants, tearing down neighborhoods.

Now, the riots aren't just about the draft.

At that point in time, the agenda is to harm Black people.

Kamal says that this is something a lot of folks have really gotten wrong about this riot.

There are people who are academics and writers have gone along with this positioning of this as a riot that had these egalitarian reasons of people stick it up for themselves.

He says that version of the draft riots hides the fact that the media and politicians had convinced these rioters that Black freedom was their biggest threat, which is why the focus of the riot transforms before the first day was over.

And that's why I think it's a misnomer to call it a draft riot, because the draft riot lasted about five hours. The Race riot lasted about four days.

And the mob is just getting started. Now they're going to set their sight on a place that represents everything they hate. The Colored Orphan Asphalt is run by Black women. It provides shelter and care to homeless Black children. Before institutions like this, homeless Black kids would be sent to prison. According to historian Ed O'Donnell, for some White New Yorkers, this large, stately Black-run building is a sore spot.

It's a Black institution, so the rioters aren't really concerned about what Black institution. It's a Black institution, and so they propose to set it on fire and shout, kill the inhabitants, and so forth.

The mob surrounds the building, pulling up cobblestries zones and throwing them through windows, tearing down the door with pickaxes before torching the whole thing.

The rioters pour into there, smash the furniture, begin setting on fire.

The police are vastly outnumbered, and it looks like they may not be able to stop the mob and save the children. But fortunately, the Black women running the asylum aren't waiting around for the cops. These women are about to do what they do best, protect their own.

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The Enraged mob of white rioters rush into the Colored Orphans asylum.

Within just minutes, it's completely ablaze.

The Black matrons hear the mob coming and quickly mobilize to get the children out the back door. As the asylums consumed by flames, Over 200 Black children escape unnoticed by the mob.

Children are scampering away under protection of some local folks that are helping out, plus also a few police officers, and they all managed to get away.

Walling says the police escorted the children right to his precinct, and he describes them as being crazed with terror. And as the riots got worse, they were forced to hide there for the rest of the week.

Miraculously, none of the children are killed in this incident.

O'donnell makes the point that many police did step up to protect targets of the mob.

And so police do, in many cases, step in and provide at least a little bit of cover, a little bit of delay so that the person can escape. Many policemen pay a heavy price for intervening on the off of Black victims.

But at the same time...

Some police, however, don't do anything. And there's at least a couple of documented cases where African-American refugees fleeing the mob show up at the door of a police station, and the policeman, despite orders to do so, to let people in, refuses them entry.

I can't imagine what it must have felt like to have to rely on the police, to beg them to give you shelter from a bloodthirsty mob, and to have the so-called protectors turn you away. I've seen documents and books where police brag about how they defended the city during these race riots, but they never talk about this part, what they didn't do. They also don't talk about the fact that when they tried to help, there just wasn't much that they could do, because for the most part, Black New Yorkers were left to defend themselves. Abolition Mr. William Wells Brown tells the story of stumbling into a room on Thompson Street filled with the thick, choking smoke. He sees eight Black women standing around a stove, pouring soap and ashes into tins filled with boiling water. The women are armed with ladels, ready to fling the hot liquid they call the King of Pain at any rioters who may come in the door. When Brown asks if they can throw the liquid without injuring each other, One of them responds, Oh, yes, honey. We've been practicing all day. Further up town on 30th Street, the legendary abolitionist Reverend Henry Holland Garnett is also holed up in a room.

They were looking for certain leaders, churches, facilities affiliated with Black people.

Historian Kevin McGruder says that in Garnett's younger days, he earned a reputation as a rabble-rouser, preaching fiery sermons promoting radical strategies for Black liberation. He reads an example of one of Garnett's most incendiary pieces of writing.

Let your model be resistance, resistance, resistance. That's how he ends it. And so he He's basically calling for a slave rebellion.

Arm slave rebellion?

He doesn't say that, but what what rebellion would it be without them?

This public image as a radical makes Garnett a target. And with no police protection, Garnet and a group of friends squeeze into his home. They wait with baited breath as the carnage unfolds outside.

They were looking for him.

The mob is going up and down the street, ready to burst into his home as soon as they can identify it.

It seems like the mob didn't have his exact address, but they probably maybe knew that he lived on the street and trying to figure out which building, and they're not going to attack all of them.

And then Garnett's daughter makes a courageous and smart move.

He had a nameplate on his house, and his daughter removes that. But if she hadn't, who knows? They might have figured out that that's where he lived.

On Wednesday evening, three days into the riot, Garnett makes a dangerous decision. He opens the door to his house and starts looking for the mob. Thirteen years earlier, New York police might have taken Garnett back into slavery. But in the middle of this riot, Garnett might have actually been hoping to see a police officer, because at that moment, he's especially vulnerable.

He had a peg leg. A lower portion of one of his legs was amputated. Okay, you have a peg leg. How fast are you going to be able to run if you need to?

But as a prominent Black leader, Garnett feels called to see the violence for himself.

He feels he needs to be a witness of what has happened because people are going to expect him to respond.

And eventually, he witnesses a scene that strikes terror into his heart. A mob of white people has hanged a Black person by their neck right there on the street in front of them. And when they're finished, even the sight of a dangling, flinching Black body isn't enough to satisfy the mob's bloodlust.

Then the people take a knife, and the person with the knife says, Who wants a piece of in meat? And then people in the crowd are saying, I do, I do.

When we imagine white New Yorkers savagely and gleefully carving out the flesh of a Black body that they just hanged, we should be clear this wasn't a moment of drunken, irrational violence that the perpetrators wanted to distance themselves from later.

It's reminiscent of those lynching postcards where you got this crowd around somebody, and it's that same, This is a trophy, and we're going to take an artifact.

The police are nowhere to be found, so Garnett stays in the shadows. The the mob moves on, and he slowly, quietly makes it back to safety. When Elizabeth Jennings-Gram hears about the riots, she's at home with her husband and their baby Thomas. Nine years earlier, Jennings-Gram successfully sued a New York streetcar company for discrimination. But in the middle of the draft riots, she knows there's only one thing she can do. She's in front of hundreds of Black folks who escape across the East River to communities like Weeksville and Flat Bush in Brooklyn. Try to imagine the scene. You hold up in your apartment with your family as the city goes up in flames. You know you're not safe. Phones haven't been invented yet, so you can't call 911, and you know you can't stay here. So under cover of darkness, you and your husband bundle up your son and head out into the night. You hurry past the wreckage of charred buildings and torn up streets. A jolt of fear runs through you every time you hear voices or any sounds that might be the mob. Finally, you make it to the East River and step onto a boat that will ferry you to Brooklyn to safety.

And as you set off from the shore of Manhattan and finally breathe a sigh of relief, you look down at your infant's son cradled in your arms. But Jennings Graham's son, Thomas, was already a sickly child. During the journey, he falls into convulsions and dies a few days later. He was one year old. Unable to return home, Jennings Graham buries her son in Brooklyn. Reflecting with Kamal and everything that happened, it overwhelms me. I can't front it. It makes me a little emotional. Like, even when we were back at the statue and I saw the brother there. He had his kids there. And I was thinking, what would it mean to be out here with your kids and to... I know you can't protect them.

Yeah. I mean, I also think that we've been walking from the same location where the mob gathered. And what are they screaming and chant? What's the sonics of that? Do you hear the mob coming? Do you hear screaming and shouting?

After four days of riding, The City Commissioner calls in thousands of troops from the Union Army to support the police. Many of them had just fought in the Battle of Gettysburg. With federal troops occupying the city, the draft riot's finally end. During the riots, white mobs had stolen and burned property belonging to Black New Yorkers. Leaders like Henry Holland Garnett pushed the city to establish a committee of merchants for the relief of colored people suffering from the late riots. But the The money they raise is barely enough to scratch the surface of the collective suffering.

How many folks left New York and took that trauma with them? How many folks stayed here and had that trauma triggered when they saw some of the same people in the mob who did not go to jail for a day for killing Black folk?

Some of the Black residents who survived flee the city. New York's Black population drops from 11,000 to 9,000.

Imagine seeing a A bunch of like, watching 13, 15-year-olds grow up, and you know that one of those kids chased you out of your home with a bunch of other kids and whistling for other folks to come in and get involved in the violence.

Kamal points to another major historical massacre, the Tulsa Race riot. In 2001, the city of Tulsa formed a whole commission to investigate the riot and make it part of the historical record. But there's been no such effort when it comes to the draft riots in New York, not in the moment or in the years since. One of the biggest challenges is that so many of the records come from the police themselves. Historian Kevin McGruder says that people who ran boarding houses, small businesses, and churches all pitched in in big and small ways. But the NYPD's heroic stories about cops don't capture that.

I'm not denying that the police did what they did, but I know there's a broader that we don't have.

The New York police have focused on moments of victory, where they temporarily beat back the mob or save someone from being attacked. And even in the days after the riot, as the smoke still rose in the air from buildings across the city, as people search for and mourn their dead relatives and Black folks began to seek reparations, the press made the police the focus of their coverage. James Gordon Bennett's New York Harold gives the cops a glowing review. In not a single single instance has assistance been required by the police when it has not been promptly rendered. Historian at O'Donnell says the police love that coverage.

It's a golden opportunity for the police Department of New York City to rebrand themselves to New York and to the nation as this great force that will protect the populace from the dangerous classes.

The truth is, the mob had laid New York to waste, and the police couldn't stop it. But as the carnage unfolded and the body count rose, politicians in New York's business leaders were hiding in their homes, praying the mob wouldn't come crashing through their doors.

And many people say, Well, I'm still a little leery of the police. I'm still a little leery of their political connections and the corruption. But, man, we sure did need them, and we are going to need them.

Because what they fear even more than the violent and racist mobs of the draft riots is the growing mass of organized, determined working class New Yorkers. So they said, You know what? Maybe we will be safer if we have more police. And that decision is about to get tested. In 1849, when New Yorkers had rioted about Macbeth, a A guy named Abram Daurier led the military regimen that protected the city by shooting and killing more than 20 people. Then, in 1857, after the police riot kicked off citywide fighting, Daurier was there again to restore the peace by shooting people. I could keep going, but you get my point. See, ever since the Esther Place riots, the police had been forced to call in the military to shoot unruly protestors and restore And one of the guys that kept getting called is Abram DeRay. He's tall and cocky. You think, Vince Vawn in uniform with mutton chops. He makes a name for himself in the Civil War. And when he comes back, he trades in his military gear to become a New York City Police Commissioner. By 1873, he's leading a force that has grown exponentially since the draft riots, and he wants them armed.

He reaches out first to the mayor and then to the governor, and he says, Look, I'm tired of the New York police having to call the military every time they want to put down a mob. Let's create a brigade, like a 19th century SWAT team, and let's give them guns. Durey request that the New York police should have 800 rifles, 100 revolvers, 150 swords, and most terrifying of all, 10 bugles. Durey reminds everybody of the draft rights. He He says, If we had something like this police brigade back then, we could have saved a million dollars in protected property. He didn't say they could have saved lives, but you know, I'm sure he meant that. But New York's governor says, Wait, so you want me to sign off on a permanent mini army that's under the control of the mayor? No, I don't think so. So Dauier and the police chiefs still go forward with the brigade. But instead of rifles, revolvers, and bugles, they're forced to use the same batons they already had. And this new brigade inside the New York police was just in time for another threat. The previous year, a wave of business and bank failures sends America into a depression.

Imagine you were a working class person. Life was hard in the city. There is no unemployment insurance. There is no social security. There is no Medicare. There is no minimum wage. There is no welfare as we know it today.

Historian Daniel Citrum is an expert on the police in New York during the Gilded Age, and he says that the majority of working people can't afford clothes, rent, or oil to heat their homes. 90,000 people are evicted and cast into the streets.

And so the question comes, if you're out of work for six months, if you don't have enough coal for the winter, if you have a fire and you're forced out of your tenement apartment, what the hell are you going to do?

In the streets police patrol, tailors, cigar makers, streetcar drivers, and other working-class people start getting ideas in their heads about exactly what is to be done. As the railroad tycoons and oil magnates of New York, Hob hobnob with one another and attend glittering balls dressed to the nines, this new wave of poverty makes them terrified about how it could all come crashing down. These elites are seeing a huge uptick in support for organized labor. Local and national unions are formed, and for the first time, you start to see strikes and other radical labor actions on a larger scale. Thousands of working people in New York see a way to stand with each other and change their working conditions and their lives. They see a way to make America live up to what they hoped it would be. But when wealthy New Yorkers see these changes, historian Ed O'Donnell says they thought back to the draft riots. They saw a mob of poor people who wanted blood.

That idea of the masses rising up never gets out of the elite mind in the Gilded Age. It's talked about incessantly. What's going to allow you to sleep at night is having a large, increasingly, heavily armed, eventually, professionally trained police force.

So New York's business community turns to the police as their enforcers.

The chamber of commerce types, the real estate people, the banking people, the people who own the big theaters and big hotels in the Tenderloin and other neighborhoods, many of them, they worship the police Department. They thought the cops were the only thing standing between them and anarchy.

Starving workers, labor leaders in an organization called the Committee of Safety, meet to plan a rally.

Their plan is to petition the mayor and the city council to say, please provide us, at the very least, with a moratorium on evictions, but also some aid so we can feed our families.

Labor activist Samya Gompers describes this organizing push as a folk movement of primitive need. This is nothing like the Violence and Racial Terror of the draft riots. Those riots were led by mobs of racist, pro-slavery white people. This rally is a peaceful gathering of working people fighting for their basic human rights. But to those in power, the difference is irrelevant. It's another mob of people that needs to be put down. And Gompers warns, something about a marching folk group rouses dread. Those in authority do not rest comfortably. The Police chief and other leaders meet at City Hall, what newspapers call a Council of War. On January 13, 1874, over 7,000 people gather in Tompkins Square Park. But unlike during the draft riots, the police are now well-prepared for the crowds. 1,600 cops are mobilized between the park and City Hall, fully two-thirds of the entire force. Mounted squads are at the ready. And at the front of line is Police Commissioner Abram Durye with his newly formed Mounted Police Brigade, armed with clubs and ready to crack skulls. As the crowd peacefully and passionately demands that the city address their poverty, the police chief orders these horse cops into the fray.

And with that, shit kicks off.

Out of nowhere, mounted policemen and scores of the police on foot, just assault the crowd. There's no order to disperse. It's just a full-on assault, cracking heads, stomping people, trampling people.

By the afternoon, the park is cleared. 46 workers sit in jail, most of them immigrants from Europe. Justice Schwab, a young German anarchist, is attacked and arrested for wearing a red flag around his waist. Another German, a painter named Christian Maher, is arrested for allegedly attempting to defend himself by striking a police sergeant with a hammer. The newspaper describes it this way: Men tumbled over each other into the gutter. The horsemen beat the air with their batons, and many persons were laid low. Commissioner Daurier was thrilled about the NYPD's response. He writes, It was the most glorious sight I ever saw, the way the police broke and drove the crowd. Their order was perfect as they charged with their clubs uplifted. And with that, the NYPD becomes the national model for what a police force looks like, what it's equipped with, and what it's meant to accomplish.

People that are very well known that come out of that, labor activists, labor editors, and so forth, that just say, That was the moment for me. That's when I became fully aware of what they would say, the emerging class conflict or class warfare, and that the police are now the instrument of oppressing the working class.

Over time, the police are armed with even more advanced military equipment. And within 25 years, revolvers become standard issue. And these increasingly militarized police continue to come out in full force to protest. Whether they're against poverty and exploitation education, racial discrimination, climate change, or genocidal war, it doesn't matter. When masses of ordinary people take to the streets to fight for the conditions they need to survive America, the NYPD is there to beat them, shoot them, handcuff them, and take them away to maintain order. After a long day, I'm sitting on my daughter's bed with my wife, winding down and reading to her right before I tuck her in. And with no warnings, she starts talking about the police. So I quickly grab my phone. I told you. What did you tell me?

I told you that I don't want to go to jail.

I told you that I don't want to go to jail. My heart drops and fear floods my chest. And Yola's looking me right in the face waiting for my response. A year ago in Central Park, when Eniola had told me that she thought the police keep people safe, I had panicked. I wanted her to understand the parts the police won't tell you. But now that she's directly telling me about her fears of jail, I feel like everything's moving too fast. What made you think about jail? When we were eating our cookies, you had something on your phone. What did I have on there?

You just had something scary on it, and I didn't like it.

Earlier that week, when we thought she wasn't paying attention, and Yola saw us watching a video on my phone of police grabbing and handcuffing protesters. They were saying, Free, free, Palestine. That's what they were saying. What Enyola didn't say explicitly was that she had been saying those same words while she danced right before the police showed up. How did it make you feel? Sad. At age four, my daughter's starting to understand that people resisting were the ones that got thrown in jail. I finally get in Yola to bed, but for the rest of that night, I feel the weight of this conversation. As a parent, I always want to protect her. I hold her hand when she's crossing the street. I turn off a violent or explicit scene on the television. But I worry that what I think of as protection might actually be disempowering her, hurting her ability to build the awareness she needs to protect herself. That's the paradox of protection. While she's four, it feels right to protect my daughter's body and mind from the things that can hurt her. But for most of her life, she'll need the agency to navigate those dangers herself.

Because when powerful men or the police or politicians say they're doing things to protect our minds and bodies, we would all be wise to ask, what are they really protecting? And what are they unleashing? That's next time on Empire City. Follow Empire City on the WNDRI app, Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcast. You can binge all episodes early and ad-free right now by joining WNDRI Plus in the WNDRI app or on Apple podcast. Before you go, tell us about yourself by completing a short survey at wndri. Com/survey. If you have a tip about a story you think we should investigate, please write to us at wndri. Com/tips. Empire City is a production of WNDRI and Crooked Media. I'm your host and executive producer, Chinjirai Kumunika. For Crooked Media, our senior producer is Peter Bresnan. Our managing producer is Leo Durán. Our senior story editor is Diane Hudson. Our producer is Sam Riddell. Bowen Wong and Sydney Rapp are our associate producers. Sound design, mixing an original score by Axel Cucutier. Our historical consultant and fact checker is History Studios. For Wundry, our senior producer is Mandi Gorenstein. Our senior story editor is Phyllis Fletcher.

Our coordinating producer is Mariah Gosse. The executive producer at Push Black is Lily Workne. Executive producers at Crooked Media are Sarah Geismer, Katie Long, Tommy Vittor, and Diane Hudson. Executive producers at WNDRI are Nigery Eaton, George Lavender, Marshall Louis and Jen Sargent. From WNDY, this is Black History For Real. I'm Francesca Ramsey. And I'm Conscious Lee. Every week, we're going to be chronicling a lot of trials and triumphs from Black folks you ain't never heard about, even though we've been doing the damn thing since forever. Together, we'll weave Black history's most overlooked figures back into the rightful place in American culture and all over the world. Because on this show, you're going to hear a little less. In August 1492, Columbus sail the Ocean Blue. And a little bit more.

Sam looks to his fellow students.

They're just as mad as he is. He can't stop thinking about the tragic war in Vietnam and the violent backlash to the civil rights movement. It's like the whole world falling apart, and ain't nobody ready to make it right. The school board could do something to change it, but they'd have to listen first. Follow Black History for Real on the WNDYR app or wherever you get your podcasts.