The Flop

It was a wild-eyed, harebrained, crackpot scheme, and in the end it was a total flop. But before the end, it tried the patience of national, state and city officials, wasted taxpayers' money for protective measures, set a city of 8,000,000 on edge, and hurt the cause of civil rights.

The idea was to ruin the opening of the New York World's Fair by stalling cars on the heavily trafficked highways and bridges leading to the Flushing Meadows site. It had a certain demonic appeal -- New York is, after all, a city where a single flat tire can ordinarily cause a miles-long jam-up of horn-pounding, curse-shouting motorists.

Behind this prickly little plot was the dissident Brooklyn chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality. Their leader was a 22-year-old Negro named Isiah Brunson, an auto mechanic who appeared in Brooklyn from South Carolina a couple of years ago and before long started stirring up civil rights strife.

His top lieutenant was a Brooklyn white man, Arnold Goldwag, 26, a chain smoking ex-Brooklyn College student with a fertile but peculiar imagination.

It was he who dreamed up the idea of getting slum residents to dump their garbage on the steps of Brooklyn's Borough Hall. Also involved was Brooklyn Negro Minister Milton A. Galamison, 41, who tried to paralyze the New York City school system with two boycotts early this year.

More responsible civil rights advocates publicly washed their hands of the Brooklyn militants. CORE'S National Director James Farmer, himself a rough-tough fighter who had plans of his own for demonstrations on the fairgrounds, suspended Brunson's chapter from the national organization. The Queens district attorney got a court injunction against the stall-in. President Johnson and key members of the U.S. Senate warned that demonstrations of that kind would serve only to stiffen opposition to civil rights progress.

Dos & Don'ts. But Brunson and his group kept right on with their plan. Stall-in motorcades from Maryland, Pennsylvania and Chicago were said to be on the way to New York. Brunson boasted that no fewer than 2,000 cars would stop dead on the highways. His demonstrators would slow down ticket lines at the fair by paying 199 pennies for the $2 admission. The city subway system would be paralyzed by 6 a.m., and the major highway approaches to the fair by 7:30 a.m. An airplane would fly over the fair and drop thousands of leaflets protesting discrimination, and a Harlem contingent would collect hundreds of live rats in the slums and release them into the crowds as President Johnson spoke at the fairgrounds.

Just before the opening, Galamison proposed a list of dos and don'ts: "Just leave your car and walk off. You don't have to run out of gas. Simply decide you want to get some fresh air, or you could complain that your car is overheating. You could lock bumpers with a CORE car in front of you."

On the Subway. New York officials laid their own plans accordingly. Police leaves were canceled, cops and tow trucks were assigned stations along the highways and bridges. Transit Authority police, who guard the subway system, were given posts in key trains and subway stations.

At first, the Brooklyn group's effort seemed about to live up to its nightmarish prospects. Early in the morning, some demonstrators tried to keep a subway train from moving by holding the doors open. A cop batted their hands with his night stick, the doors closed, and the train moved on.

Shortly afterward, another fair-bound train stopped in the station, and again a bunch of demonstrators wedged themselves in the doorways to keep the train from starting. This time a flying squad of Transit Authority police, some of them Negro, barreled to the rescue. The protesters refused to budge. The cops hauled them out one by one. Some of the demonstrators, several of whom were white, began fighting back. Billy-clubs began swinging, and before long some of the demonstrators were nursing bloodied heads. In all, 23 of them were carried off to jail.

But the stall-in got nowhere. For one thing, a chill rain kept thousands of would-be fairgoers at home. For another, the fear of getting caught in Brunson's traffic jam was enough to make all but the most imprudent motorist stay off the highways. So light was the traffic, in fact, that driving became almost a pleasure.

On the Roads. But the chief cause of the failure of the stall-in was Brunson's and his cohorts' own ineptitude. Only a few out-of-town demonstrators materialized; there were never more than a dozen cars operating on the highways in a stall-in effort. Brunson, who ventured cautiously onto the roads with some friends, quickly got disheartened over the presence of so many police and so few demonstrators, pulled off and disappeared for the day.

As for Galamison, he got into his 1962 Lincoln Continental and with Negro Comedian Dick Gregory drove along the expressways, looking in vain for a good place to stall. As he approached the fair site in Flushing Meadows, he found the dividing strip between lanes on the highway lined with police. Several times a fellow demonstrator, following Galamison in his own car, drew abreast of the minister and shouted: "When are you going to stall?" Galamison cried back: "Let's keep looking!"

At length he gave up. "I think the police have done an excellent job," he said, obviously deflated. "I've never seen traffic run so smooth." Returning to his Brooklyn headquarters, Galamison tried to figure out some face-saving ploy. "Should we try to regroup?" he asked plaintively. "Regroup what?" retorted Comedian Gregory.

"Step on Them!" At the fair itself, James Farmer and some 700 "legitimate" CORE demonstrators got in a few licks. Aiming to "point up the contrast between the glittering world of fantasy and the real world of brutality, bigotry an.d poverty," Farmer and his crews scattered across Flushing Meadows to raise a ruckus. Some of them charged into the Schaefer Beer Pavilion, stood on counter tops to proclaim against "Jim Crow Schaefer Beer" and Schaefer's "flagrant discrimination in hiring." They raised a chorus of derision at .the U.S. Pavilion during the President's speech, gathered at buildings erected by several Southern states, marched into the Ford Pavilion and so disrupted traffic that the place had to be closed down for a while. At the New York State Pavilion, visitors had to step over some demonstrators who lay down or sat in the entranceways. One woman scolded her six-year-old daughter: "When I say step on them," she cried, "step on them!"

About 300 demonstrators were arrested during the day. Among them was Farmer. "Be as gentle with him as you can," William Kimmins, chief of detectives at the Fair, instructed his policemen, who hauled Farmer politely into a paddy wagon.

Only one conclusion could be drawn from the whole unhappy affair: a tiny minority in the civil rights movement had managed to make a lot of people mad without achieving a single thing for their cause.

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