Water Under The Bridge:
New Yorkers Remember The Jamaica Bay Hurricane, Part 2 by Chris Oakley
(adapted from material previously posted at TIAH.co.uk)
Summary: In the first chapter of this series we charted the path ofthe Jamaica Bay hurricane, a.k.a. Hurricane Cleo, across New York Cityand heard the personal recollections of a former NYPD sergeant who wasassigned to Queens at the time of the hurricane as well as commentary bya Columbia University professor renowned as an expert regarding Cleo’seffects on New York’s subway and bus systems. In this installment, we’llget a longtime Harlem resident’s personal perspective on Martin LutherLuther King’s legendary “Do Not Forget Harlem” speech in the aftermathof the hurricane and meet an NYU political science scholar whose three-volume book series on John Lindsay’s political career has garnered hima Pulitzer Prize nomination.
In the aftermath of the Jamaica Bay hurricane there was a strong
perception within New York City’s black community that Harlem was being
overlooked when it came to apportioning federal disaster relief funds.
It was in an attempt to correct this state of affairs that civil rights
leader Dr. Martin Luther King gave what is now generally considered to
be one of the finest speeches of his career, the eloquent “Do Not Forget
Harlem” address delivered from the pulpit of the city’s oldest African-
American church. Victor Morton was an eight-year-old schoolboy when he
first heard Dr. King’s stirring rhetoric; now in his early sixties, he
himself commands the ears of millions of listeners throughout the five
boroughs as host of a public affairs show on the city’s largest black-
owned radio station. There are only two times during the year when you
don’t hear his booming baritone over the airwaves; Christmas Day and the
anniversary of the hurricane, when he gives his time slot over to a 90-
minute tribute to the New Yorkers who were victims of Hurricane Cleo’s
wrath.
“My family lost half of what they owned in the hurricane.” Morton
says, holding court in the wood-paneled studio from which he broadcasts
his show. They weren’t alone; in the days and weeks immediately after
the hurricane, insurance companies were inundated with damage claims by
families all over the Northeast, with the highest number of such claims
coming from the metropolitan New York area. “Ten minutes after the radio
announced the storm had hit, my father was rushing around trying to get
all of us kids and Mom into the car and make it to higher ground before
the floodwaters hit. Back on the Gulf Coast, where my family originally
came from, people were used to that kind of thing...but in New York? We
thought maybe it was the end of the world.” Certainly it turned out to be
the beginning of the end of Morton’s father’s world; less than two months
after Cleo struck New York City, the senior Morton would succumb to heart
failure at a Long Island hospital, leaving Victor and his three brothers
fatherless.
As days turned into weeks and weeks into months, black New Yorkers
grew increasingly frustrated with the federal government’s failure to get
post-disaster aid to their neighborhoods in a timely fashion. Morton saw
this frustration every day on his walks to and from school and in his own
home-- and felt some of it himself. “I honestly felt as if my family was
being left out in the cold.” Morton recalls. By late September, nearly a
third of all the Harlem neighborhoods struck by Hurricane Cleo were still
waiting for reconstruction funds and black protestors were demonstrating
outside Gracie Mansion on a daily basis. Certain black militants were even
broaching sinister conspiracy theories alleging these neighborhoods were
being deliberately left to rot away so that the city would have an excuse
to demolish them and replace them with luxury apartment buildings for the
city’s richest white residents. Whether or not one subscribed to any such
theories-- which Morton doesn’t --there was certainly good reason to be
exasperated with the way the administration of then-mayor Robert Wagner
was bungling the task of repairing the damage which Cleo inflicted on the
homes and businesses of Harlem. In fact, New Yorkers of all ethnic stripes
were getting fed up with Wagner’s inability to effectively co-ordinate the
city government’s post-hurricane recovery effort; shortly before Dr. King’s
historic speech the New York Post blasted the incumbent mayor in a no-holds-
barred editorial bluntly titled “Wagner Must Go”.
On October 1st, 1960 New York City’s oldest African-American church was
filled to capacity to hear Dr. King deliver his now-legendary “Do Not Forget
Harlem” sermon; Morton vividly recalls sitting just three rows away from the
pulpit. “He was talking fairly softly, but there was so much power stored up
in that voice you could actually feel the floor vibrating.” Morton chuckles.
“The reverend definitely knew how to get folks’ attention.” And it was more
than just the ears of the churchgoers that Dr. King’s sermon reached: in the
two weeks immediately following King’s New York visit the Red Cross reported
a 50 percent spike in donations to charities and organizations which served
Harlem.
Morton himself remembers saving up pennies for weeks so that he could
give something to people who were even worse off than himself. “My dad and
my grandparents taught me the importance of helping others.” he explains in
a modest tone. That lesson remains a fundamental part of his moral code to
this day: not only is he extensively involved with charity work in the New
York area, but he is also a proud member of more than two dozen nationwide
charitable organizations.
******
Jonathan Brinkley is a political history professor at NYU whose main
specialty is late 20th-century New York civic affairs. Besides being one of
the most respected political scholars in American academia today, Brinkley
is also a highly successful author; his three-volume series on the life and
career of John Lindsay has earned him millions of dollars in royalties and
a Pulitzer Prize nomination in the historical literature category. In light
of the extensive research the professor has devoted to Lindsay’s life, it’s
only natural that people would turn to him for his take on the speech which
started Lindsay on the road to Gracie Mansion. In fact, you might be
interested to know that Brinkley owns a rare copy of the New York Times
published the day after Lindsay’s now-famous Capitol Hill speech which
criticized the federal government’s inefficiency in getting aid to the
survivors of the Jamaica Bay hurricane. As the professor explains it,
what Lindsay said about the Eisenhower-Nixon administration during his
address generated a storm almost as big as the hurricane itself.
“I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that Lindsay’s post-
Hurricane Cleo speech to Congress basically punched his ticket to a
higher level of national prominence.” Professor Brinkley asserts as he
drains the last of a hazelnut coffee. “Next to Martin Luther King’s
Harlem sermon, Lindsay’s address is probably the most famous speech in
America in regards to the hurricane.” While Lindsay wasn’t shy about
criticizing incumbent New York mayor Robert Wagner’s response to Cleo,
the main targets of his wrath when he took the floor on September 3rd,
1960 were outgoing President Dwight Eisenhower and Eisenhower’s vice-
president, Richard Nixon.
“Lindsay let Ike and Nixon have it but good.” Professor Brinkley
says, jabbing the air with a fountain pen to illustrate his point. “He
called them every name except ‘child of God’ before he left the podium.
Twice he nearly got himself censured by (then-Speaker of the House)Sam
Rayburn for intemperate language, and at least once there was actually
booing from the House floor...Lindsay said things about the Eisenhower
Administration even Ike’s harshest Democratic critics hadn’t accused him
of.” Interestingly, none of the boos hurled at Lindsay came from the New
York Congressional delegation; as a New York Daily News political writer
would later observe, Lindsay was saying in public what many of his fellow
New Yorkers had been privately thinking for weeks. The moment that Lindsay
finally stepped down from the podium, the rest of New York’s U.S. House of
Representatives delegation gave him a standing ovation which lasted seven
full minutes.
Indeed, within days of Lindsay’s blast at Eisenhower and Nixon the
future mayor of New York City became a modern folk hero to the residents
of the five boroughs. Two weeks after his speech to Congress the magazine
The New Yorker put a black and white cartoon on its front cover depicting
Lindsay as Superman standing astride the top of the Empire State Building.
With Robert Wagner faced with increasing pressure to resign as mayor and
rumors flying that a special election would shortly be called to choose his
replacement, a grass roots drive to draft Lindsay as a mayoral candidate
set up shop in Brooklyn and within less than a week had spread throughout
the rest of New York City; by the end of September this movement had grown
into a political juggernaut that had its own Park Avenue offices and drew
support from every social, ethnic, financial, and party group in the city.
“The ‘Draft Lindsay’ movement was one of the most diverse political
coalitions this city has ever seen.” At this point in the interview the
professor holds up a lapel button given to him as a Christmas gift last
year by a fellow professor whose grandparents were both volunteers with
the ‘Draft Lindsay’ organization; reading “Lindsay For Mayor”, the button
represents thousands of others like it that were a common sight on the
streets of New York in the weeks following Lindsay’s tirade against the
Eisenhower Administration. “Hasidics from Brooklyn, Irish Catholics from
the West Side, Harlem shopkeepers and Cuban refugees, Wall Street tycoons
and beatniks from Greenwich Village, immigrants from eastern Europe....”
Brinkley then lets out a laugh that can be distinctly heard from at least
two rooms away. “About the only place they didn’t have a branch was in the
lions’ cage at the city zoo.”
In a more serious tone the professor adds: “The groundswell of support
Lindsay got after his speech was incredible...it says a lot about the depth
of respect he’d gained and the frustration people felt with Mayor Wagner’s
utter inability to manage the aftermath of Hurricane Cleo that so many were
willing to vote for a Republican candidate in one of America’s most heavily
Democratic cities.” Lindsay’s still-unofficial mayoral campaign got a major
boost when on October 3rd, two days after Dr. King’s “Do Not Forget Harlem”
sermon, Wagner officially tendered his resignation as mayor; as many of the
city’s political pundits had suggested would happen, a special election was
set for the second Tuesday in January and Lindsay was immediately tabbed as
the odds-on favorite to win the GOP primary on December 6th.
Vice-President Nixon, still incensed at what he was convinced was an
intentional and unforgivable personal affront on Lindsay’s part, mounted a
secret offensive to sabotage the Lindsay campaign only to have his devious
machinations backfire when the congressman won the GOP mayoral primary by a
landslide. It was an omen of the bitter petty-mindedness that would clinch
Nixon’s political demise twelve years later when, during his reckless last-
gasp bid for the presidency, he was caught using campaign funds to conduct
an illegal undercover operation to obtain damaging information on potential
Democratic opponents.
******
The January 1961 special election to choose New York City’s next
mayor was one of the biggest political events in the Big Apple’s history.
More than three-quarters of the city’s eligible voters braved a typically
ice-cold East Coast winter to cast their ballots for either Lindsay or one
of his challengers; interim mayor Abe Stark, the former Brooklyn borough
president who had been appointed to temporarily run New York when Robert
Wagner resigned, had decided against being one of those challengers after
one of his closest confidants told him he wouldn’t stand much of a chance
of defeating the wildly popular Lindsay. His instincts proved to be right:
Lindsay won with 87 percent of the vote, with his biggest triumph coming in
storm-ravaged Queens.
“Lindsay’s victory in the ’61 special election was the closest thing
this country has ever had to a unanimous vote for high office.” Professor
Brinkley says, pointing at a blow-up of a now-legendary New York Daily News
black and white photo showing Lindsay in the midst of his victory speech.
“He carried every one of the five boroughs without a struggle...to give an
idea just how decisive his win was, the Democratic candidate begin to write
his concession speech just 90 minutes after the polls closed in Manhattan.”
A popular joke that circulated around New York in the days immediately
after Lindsay’s victory claimed that his votes in the special election
weren’t counted, they were weighed. And there was a considerable grain
of truth in that jest: in each of New York City’s five boroughs records
were set for voter turnout in a mayoral election that still stand more
than half a century later. Even the 2013 race to choose a successor to
three-term mayor Michael Bloomberg hasn’t generated as much passion as
the ’61 special election did.
“Nixon went berserk when Lindsay won the special election.” says
Professor Brinkley. “He was already upset about losing the presidential
election to JFK...but to have Lindsay, his archenemy, become mayor of New
York on top of that was just the straw that broke the camel’s back as far
as he was concerned. He wanted to hang Lindsay from the top of the Empire
State Building.” But like his presidential aspirations, Nixon’s hopes of
derailing Lindsay’s political career were destined to remain unfulfilled.