WW in 1977: Rebellion of poor in New York City

Workers World is in its 50th year of publication. We reprint this article from the July 22, 1977, issue of  the paper as part of our special archival series.

It started as a citywide power failure of the Con Edison system, but it ended up as a night of rebellion by New York City’s poor.

The lights went out at 9:30 p.m. on Wednesday, July 13, as a result of what Con Ed claimed was a freakish coincidence of lighting strikes against three of its lines bringing in electricity to the city. Unlike the blackout of 1965 (after which the giant power monopoly said it had made sure that such a disaster could never happen again), this complete shutdown of the city’s power was not over in a few hours.

For more than 24 hours, residents of New York had to cope with stalled elevators and subway trains, no lights, fans, refrigeration, air conditioning, or any of the other appliances that make life in cramped city apartments more bearable.

For many, the blackout meant real disaster. Patients at Bellevue Hospital, the notorious city-owned facility that treats only the poor, were plunged into darkness without respirators or other life-supporting equipment for hours, as the hospital’s emergency generators failed almost immediately. At Brooklyn Jewish Hospital, surgery was moved to the parking lot where fire trucks provided the only lights from emergency generators. Dozens of patients were operated on and stitched up in the cluttered lot.

Anger against Con Ed, which charges some of the highest rates in the country, mounted as hour after hour dragged by without power being restored. But by the next day, the press was already turning that anger aside. Its targets were not the wealthy power barons of Con Ed or the banks that really run and run down this city, but the poor and oppressed.

The rebellion began around midnight in the South Bronx, but very quickly reports were coming in from poor neighborhoods all over the city that the people were taking food, clothing and other items out of the local stores. The reaction of the city officials and the press was instantaneous: get the “looters.” The press campaign quickly built up into a racist crescendo against Black and Latin people.

Blackout of the truth

As the arrests mounted into the thousands, the real “blackout” began: a blackout in the press of what were the real causes of the rebellion in the oppressed communities. Nowhere were there headlines about the poverty and terrible unemployment that this massive uprising revealed. None of the commentators or columnists could remember back to even a few months ago, when the same youths who were now being arrested for taking sneakers or meat out of the stores had stood in line for days by the thousands hoping to get the few city jobs that opened up for the summer.

Crisis behind the crisis

But in the oppressed communities, the causes of the uprising were known only too well. The most important is unemployment: among the youth of 16 to 19 years, the rate is as high as 60 to 75 percent. The Department of Labor admits to a nationwide figure of nearly 40 percent for “minority youth,” and in areas like Brownsville, the South Bronx and Bedford-Stuyvesant everyone knows it runs even higher. In recent months, when unemployment generally has decreased slightly, it has risen even higher for Black and Latin youth.

The rebellion wasn’t caused by the heat or the blackout: those were only the trigger. Its specific origins can be traced back to New York City’s financial crisis of November and December 1975, when the banks demanded–and got–tremendous layoffs, higher taxes and crippling service cuts from the city government under the threat of a “default” on the city’s debt payment.

Default became another word for Armageddon–the end of the world. But what it really meant was that the city might not be able to pay all the interest it owed to the giant banks that had been bleeding the city dry for decades. In December 1975, the banks were demanding that the city pay out on its debt a sum larger than the entire city payroll for that month!

Through its illegal agencies like the Emergency Financial Control Board (EFCB) and Municipal Assistance Corporation (Big MAC), which usurped the power of the elected officials and began running New York City like a corporation (for their profits, not for the people’s welfare), the banks were able to get 60,000 layoffs and cutbacks in such areas as hospitals, clinics, day care centers, libraries, mass transit, fire houses and other essential services.

The blight of poverty from these massive cutbacks spread at a time when there was already a general economic decline. Half a million jobs had dried up in the city since 1969. The poor of course felt it the most. The last-hired, first-fired Black and Latin people especially found it more and more of a struggle just to stay alive.

This rebellion was the inevitable outcome and a justified expression of the people’s misery.

Those who should be held accountable are not the teenage children–who have had open admission taken away from them, who can neither get an education nor find a job, who have nowhere to go but the streets–but the capitals of high finance like investment banker Felix Rohatyn and William Ellinghaus, president of New York Telephone, who as members of the EFCB helped put this stranglehold on the people of the city.

Struggle to get prisoners released

The struggle on behalf of the oppressed communities today focuses on the nearly 4,000 prisoners who were rounded up in Gestapo-style sweeps and herded into prisons under conditions no better than the Nazi concentration camps. Two have already died in the densely packed, filthy cells where thousands endured searing heat with no food and little water for days.

Committee wins show-cause order

An Emergency Committee for Prisoner Release was formed within a few days of the arrests, and today won a show-cause order in federal court demanding that Mayor Beame, Police Commissioner Codd and other city officials be in court [July 21] to show cause why all the remaining prisoners should not be released immediately.

While the city is claiming that all the 4,000 arrested have now been processed through arraignment, Legal Aid lawyers say that at least 500 have been “lost” by the judicial system and are somewhere behind bars in this city.

The Emergency Committee publicized its demands in a press conference yesterday morning and a demonstration last evening of 500 people at the dungeon-like Tombs prison in lower Manhattan.

The committee intends to continue its struggle with more mass actions and a $500 million suit in federal court demanding damages for all those illegally arrested and an invalidation of all the charges against them.