One of the harshest yet least spoken truths about the lightning-fast demise of Syracuse's 15th Ward was the fact that, in reality, it had already been falling apart well in advance of any systematic and government-sanctioned razing; worn thin by years of termites, vermin, brutal weather and shoddy maintenance by scores of absentee landlords. What's more, by the dawn of the decade as many as a third of its housing units still lacked many basic necessities of modern life – including, in a number of cases, running water.
Yet, the cracks that had already been threatening to lay to waste Syracuse’s poverty-stricken and all-but-orphaned Ward ran deeper than simple matters of physical wear-and-tear. They were far more corrosive and troublesome. The Ward's cracks were cultural and spiritual. They were intellectual, social, and even, for lack of a better word, aspirational.
But above all, they were generational.
If you were a young African American in the middle of the 20th Century, and you called the Salt City home, it didn’t matter what hopes, dreams, and ambitions you might have harbored. Your fate was sealed and you were pretty much consigned to being lumped in with a bunch of people with whom, perhaps, the only two things that you shared were the color of your skin and the section of the city you called home.
And while that had proven to be less of a problem in the first half of the century, by the 1960’s it had started to become a very big problem.
By then, singular voices with in-your-face and chin-out attitudes belonging to such compelling artists, thinkers and provocateurs as Richard Pryor, Nina Simone, Dick Gregory, Gordon Parks, Lorraine Hansberry, Melvin Van Peebles, Cassius Clay, James Baldwin, Curtis Mayfield, H. Rap Brown, James Brown, and even the Ward’s own John Williams – began speaking out and demanding more out of life, including the right to stand up and be counted.
As a result, the deep-rooted sense of acceptance, a resigned and passive sense that had long-gripped many older folks in hundreds of African American communities from coast to coast, began teetering on the edge of what would prove to be a very steep and jagged cliff.
Because for every powerful, angry, and strident voice in Black America, even in Syracuse, there were perhaps dozens, if not hundreds, of men and women of color who wanted that voice to simply hush up and be still. To not rock the boat, to mind its manners, and to fall back in line and remember its place.
What’s more, by the midway point of the century there were also hundreds of young men and women in places just like the Ward who started to want more than their parents had ever had, and who began dreaming of their own little piece of that American dream they’d always heard about, including a house to call their own, maybe a family, and perhaps even a white picket fence in some leafy little suburb somewhere.
For that, such dreamers and seekers would have to get out of the Ward and, indeed, wanted to get out.
Of course, not every 15th Ward resident felt like that. That’s why fundamental cracks began to form in its longstanding sense of community, even if those cracks weren’t always visible to those on the outside.
When left-wing activists like Saul Alinsky and George Wiley came to Syracuse spinning their radical ideas and daring notions into rich tapestries of protest and revolution, for every local kid with a mind and dream of his (or her) own, like Dolores Morgan, who dared to join in and dared to raise his or her voice, there were ten times that many older “Negroes” in town, if not more, who simply went about their business and tried to keep their noses to the ground.
Syracuse’s 15th Ward had been a house divided for years and now, in the early days of the 1960’s, was one primed for a fall.
That’s why, in 1964, as plans for picket lines were being developed to protest the proposed Greyhound terminal the company hoped to build in the middle of a residential block of Harrison Street, in the heart of the Ward, it was not Ward residents who comprised the bulk of protesters and sign-carriers, it was S.U. and Le Moyne College professors and their students, along with various friends and family members. It was, likewise, CORE leaders and volunteers, many of whom were from out-of-state. And it was residents from across the area, city and suburbs alike, many of them white, who simply empathized and wanted to show some support for the cause.
The vast majority of those who actually lived in the Ward, however, simply chose to sit the protest out and not make waves. They chose, in other words, to avoid a public squabble that might get them arrested or, worse, jeopardize their chance of getting that subsidized apartment they’d been waiting so damn long for.
Even the Niagara Mohawk protests of 1965, for all their moral certainty, brought a fundamental level of division within a number of groups in the city. Because for all their intent to improve the job prospects of many in the Ward, the protests against the city’s power company in that magnificent art deco building west of downtown were fueled in large part by CORE and George Wiley, the Syracuse University professor who was something of a carpetbagger and a guy from a place other than Syracuse.
Most in the Ward, even though they stood to benefit, invested not a minute’s worth of shoe leather on the Niagara Mohawk picket lines in protest over the company’s decades-old (and mostly all-white) hiring practices.
Who knows? Maybe a number of those who kept their heads low, and who chose to avoid the line of fire, felt it would have been too “uppity” to walk a picket line or challenge their city’s longstanding, widely embraced, and largely all-white status quo.
It was the early 1960’s, after all, and picket lines were anything but common sights in America. The buttoned-up Fifties, those dark and intemperate days of Joe McCarthy, Red baiting and the HUAC hearings, had only just ended – but not before fueling a long, deep and, some might contend, creepy obsession with Soviet infiltration and the crazy notion that there might just be a spy lurking behind every tree.
As a result, many in Republican and conservative-leaning Syracuse – Black and white alike – believed in their heart that to protest anything was un-American. To such people, any group marching in a circle and holding signs of any kind carried the almost unmistakable whiff of Communism.
And, yes, Charlie Brady took up Wiley’s cause wholeheartedly and spent hours on the lines, himself. And, yes, he was frequently joined by more than a few African Americans from his beloved Ward, in part because they were members of his Catholic Interracial Council (which, as much as any group in town, rolled up its sleeves and did what it could); people like the aforementioned Dolores Morgan and the onetime hustling and barrier-breaking guard for Bobby Felasco's St. John the Evangelist squad, Marshall Nelson.
Yet, at least when it came to that one issue, the line drawn in the sand in front of Niagara Mohawk building proved to be so divisive that even Brady often found himself on the lonely side of it, a line that many of those nearest and dearest to him simply refused to cross.
Tom Costello, for example, the young cleric whose life and calling had been changed forever by Brady, who loved the man dearly, and who’d marched side-by-side with him in Alabama in support of Civil Rights and Dr. King, chose not to participate in the protests against the local power company – as did Brady’s other housemates, including Charlie Fahey, Ed Hayes and John McGraw.
Those priests were, after all, relatively young men early in their careers in service to the Lord. As such, they all had other mountains to climb, other dragons to slay, and, certainly, other factors to consider. As Costello would later say, “It was one thing to protest in Selma. It was something else entirely to do it in your own hometown.”
The simple fact was that the 15th Ward was splintering long before Interstate 81 and Urban Renewal came to town. And when a decidedly radical element was added to the mix, things only became that much more volatile.
To understand the impact that the out-of-town activists were having on the fabric of Syracuse’s troubled and vulnerable Ward, one needed look no further than the curious case of young Willis Jones, a broad-shouldered, powerfully built, and perhaps slightly shady kid from the Ward, one who always seemed to carry with him just a touch of menace, if not a threat of violence. Jones, who knew plenty of folks in the Ward, had become more and more political over the course of the decade, especially once Alinsky came to town and started singing his siren song of organization, revolution, and the rights of the downtrodden.
Central to Alinsky’s message to the city’s neediest, especially its Blacks, was that they were all being oppressed by the white man – but not just the whites who openly hated them and fought to deny them their rights. They were also, he told them, being oppressed by whites who constantly offered them charity and, in the process, softened their will and weakened their collective resolve.
The most insidious and sickening form of white oppression, at least for Alinsky, was charity, which he told anyone who'd listen was patronizing, quietly controlling, and wrapped in an insidious cloak of sanctimony and piety.
That’s why, one day, the young and somewhat troubled Jones took dead aim on the most unlikely target of all, the Saint of Syracuse, Father Charles Brady, who'd become legendary for driving around the streets of his "parish" and offering food donated by local merchants to all in the Ward who needed it, a process he later refined by handing out printed "chits" that were then redeemable at various stores and food markets in the neighborhood. After needy folks redeemed their chits, Brady’s Foery Foundation would, in turn, give that merchant a fair price for whatever food had been "purchased." It was an honor system at its purest and most innocent, yet an honor system that worked, and did so beautifully.
However, Willis Jones bought into Alinsky’s radical ideas about the inherent evils of charity, and in an attempt to punish Brady for what he viewed as the priest’s ongoing oppression of his people, Jones broke into his desk in the foundation office one evening and stole his entire stock of chits. He then went out and gave every one of them away, including many to his friends, and did so all at once, in essence flooding the market.
The subsequent wave of redeemed chits, quite literally, broke Father Brady. It broke his bank and limited budget, to be sure. But, more than that, it broke his heart. To think that anyone would do such a thing to him, much less one of his own, was devastating and, indeed, put Brady into a deep depression.
Nevertheless, it soon became clear there was now something of a circular firing squad at work in the 15th Ward. Even the purest and most well-intentioned, in other words, like Brady, were being demonized and subverted by a bunch of outsiders – political, social and moral ideologues – who, it seemed, would rather be right than do right.
Ironically, it took another outsider to recognize that circular firing squad and call it out for exactly what it was.
In March of 1967, a brash young Jamaican-born civil rights leader named Stokely Carmichael, a charismatic and fiery orator, came to town at the invitation of the Syracuse University student union to speak at Hendricks Chapel in the center of campus. Just twenty five years of age, Carmichael had already made quite a name for himself. He’d recently popularized the term Black Power and would soon conceive and unleash a phrase on America’s youth that would emerge as its signature anti-war chant during the latter stages of Vietnam, “Hell no, we won’t go!” Carmichael had also recently been identified by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover as the man most likely to replace the now-assassinated Malcolm X as the country’s next “Black messiah.”
To the students’ credit, and in the interest of presenting a broad array of viewpoints, Carmichael’s appearance at Hendricks Chapel came not long after a similar appearance by Theophilus Eugene “Bull” Connor. Bull Connor was the infamous Birmingham, Alabama police chief who'd four years prior, following the cold-blooded murder of four Black girls on his watch as they prayed in church on Sunday morning, cemented for himself a dark and ugly place in American history by setting his city’s police dogs and fire hoses on hundreds of black protesters as the cameras rolled and a stunned nation watched.
Carmichael may have been the polar opposite of Connor. But the two men did have at least one thing in common. They were both fed up with white liberal intellectuals in schools just like Syracuse; men and women who, for all their high-minded ideals and lofty rhetoric, regularly talked one game and lived another.
The difference was, while Connor came in as the virtual poster boy for all the bottled up anger that many around the country felt for the kind of runaway white liberalism taking root in America, Carmichael was critical of those there that night not so much for their aims, but for their hypocrisy. Like almost anyone who’d been paying even half-attention to the events unfolding in town, Stokely Carmichael knew exactly what was going on in the streets of Syracuse, where thousands of families were being thrown out of their homes, and those homes subsequently leveled. He also knew that many whites in the area, including many there that evening, continued to spend their days voicing outrage and wringing their hands over the situation, before heading home to cozy, comfortable, safe lives, all of them secure in the self-satisfied knowledge that their hearts had been in the right place.
"I’m sure you think you’re all doing a great job fighting for social justice and racial equality," Carmichael told the jam-packed audience, many of them long-haired, mustachioed and wire-rimmed professors and would-be members of the counterculture. "But I have to be honest," he said, "I’m not buying it. Sweet Jesus, you ask me…Hell, I look around and I see more black faces on the campus at Oxford, Mississippi than I do outside those damn doors there. And I’m not talking about students," Carmichael sneered as he pointed toward the thick oak doors standing between his audience and the world outside them. "I’m talking about staff and faculty."
The young, take-no-prisoners civil rights leader pulled no punches on the campus of Syracuse University that crisp night in March. Clearly, he'd spent more than a few hours with Wiley that afternoon, the founder and head of the local CORE chapter, and one of only two or three African Americans employed by S.U as a full time professor, because his words were oddly similar to many of those that had been voiced by Wiley in the days leading up to that evening.
Among those gathered to hear Carmichael deliver his scathing gut-punch to the liberals was Dolores Morgan, the first African American child in all of Syracuse to attend a Parochial League school. Unfortunately, in Dolores’ case, her stab at a Catholic education didn’t quite take. Many in Cathedral Academy, where she’d enrolled as a fourth grader in the late 1940’s, shunned her socially and tried to convince her she’d be better off with her own kind – including, sadly, the majority of the school’s nuns and its mother superior.
Dolores did eventually transfer out of Cathedral, and did, indeed, start going to school with her own kind. Her mother one day simply decided her baby had cried herself to sleep one too many times. But little Dolores remained a devoted Catholic through it all and, despite the racial backlash she continued to endure, continued to absorb, question and probe any and all new ideas that happened to present themselves during the course of her journey.
Over the years, Dolores would become even more spiritual and more enamored of Charlie Brady and his singular mission of love. Just like the young priests that Brady lived with over on West Onondaga, she tried to be more like him – her very own hand-picked role model, from her earliest days as a schoolgirl to her time as a struggling and sleep-deprived young mother.
As Dolores started her own family, and as that family expanded to include, not just a husband, but ten young and hungry mouths to feed, she continued to work with Brady's Catholic Interracial Council and continued to try – just like her role model – to put Jesus’ words into action every day of her life, without exception.
But it grew increasingly hard as the neighborhood of her youth, the place she’d grown to know and love like no other, continued to disappear underfoot.
There was a day in 1967, in fact, when walking home from the bus, Dolores stopped and looked around, trying to fathom what had become of her neighborhood. She and her husband had only recently bought a house on Cedar Street in the Ward, one of the few black families in Syracuse who actually owned their own home, but what she saw that day, literally, brought her to tears. Because what she looked over that overcast day was not her beloved Ward, but the broad swath of nothingness that had replaced it, a barren and hollowed-out landscape, save for the faint sound of a few earth movers and dump trucks, along with a rising, eerie sort of dusty swirl that seemed made up of little more than dried gravel and what remained of a community’s worth of pulverized homes and shops. It was, Dolores imagined, what the surface of the moon might look like.
The only thing new on the entire vista spread out before her was a large strip of elevated and ominous-looking highway, rising above the dust and snaking its way along the skyline to the west of her. The all-new and soon-to-be-completed Interstate 81 – like some gigantic boa constrictor – was slowly and painfully squeezing the life out of the most vibrant and colorful city Dolores could ever imagine.
More than a third of Pioneer Homes, for example – the sprawling and once state-of-the-art public housing complex that Eleanor Roosevelt had come to town to dedicate – had already been reduced to rubble to make room for the highway. Many of its signature red bricks had been used as hard fill to support its massive weight.
What’s more, despite all the smaller access roads that continued to exist between the two worlds, the all-new highway was creating for the very first time both a real and symbolic barrier between Syracuse University, high on its haughty hill, and the proud little city that stretched out beneath it – a blue-collar town full of hard-working men and women who supported the university, loved it, and gave it a home. For the first time in history, the distance between “town and gown” in Syracuse had become clear and present, because for the first time ever there was now a concrete symbol of the growing distance between the university and its host city; one the locals could see, touch and even hear.
Just as onetime urban planner and city engineer Nelson Pitts had predicted almost two decades prior – a prediction that ultimately cost him his job – an elevated highway directly through the heart of Syracuse was killing off miles and miles of once-thriving urban landscape, making it no longer good for anything but transportation. There’d be no homes. There’d be no stores. There’d be no churches or schools. There’d be no greenery and, ultimately, no life. There’d only be access and speed; a gateway portal to the wide open spaces of suburbia and the facility to get to and from them as quickly and painlessly as possible.
It was clear that the writing was on the wall – and there would. be no stopping it. And so, as the day of the 1967 All City Championship drew near, most, if not all of the radical organizers had already cut their losses, declared victory, and left the Salt City for greener, riper pastures.
Oh, a few of their protests had worked, to be sure. And they had, indeed, accomplished some measure of good.
Greyhound, for example, scrapped its plans for a new terminal in the heart of a residential block in the Ward where dozens of young boys and girls lived and used the streets for touch football and skipping rope. Ultimately, the company chose to build elsewhere.
But even that victory would prove to be painfully short-lived as less than a year later, the same block of aging wooden frame homes that had been in Greyhound’s crosshairs would be claimed under the sweeping power of eminent domain, leveled, wiped away like so much chalk on a blackboard, and then used as the site of the all-new MONY Tower.
That shiny new building would, in turn, serve as the base of a new white-collar employer in town, a sixteen-story study in modern, steel-and-glass design that would be able to tell anyone in Syracuse – just by looking up – what the temperature was and, perhaps more important, which way the wind was blowing.
Likewise, those endless Niagara Mohawk protests in the Spring of 1965 also made a difference. Led by a unique (and thoroughly unlikely) coalition that included both the flamboyant and verbose George Wiley and the meek and humble Charlie Brady, the protests, along with the news coverage they triggered – statewide, mind you – caused the company to rethink its hiring practices and make provisions to try bring the percentage of “Negroes” on its payrolls to levels more reflective of the various communities they served.
That’s why, when the company created an all-new Director of Diversity position and filled it with someone to serve as Niagara Mohawk's conscience in all matters race, it chose none other than Marshall Nelson, the young man and former altar boy from the Ward who’d once helped break the Parochial League color line and who that Spring had marched side-by-side with Brady, his mentor and role model.
It's also why Niagara Mohawk would end up eventually swinging its doors wide open and hiring hundreds of new linemen, office workers and laborers, among them big Dave Sims, the brawny African American from out of state who’d been so instrumental in helping toughen up Tookie Chisholm of St. Lucy's.
And why, that very same year, the company would hire former Corcoran star Jimmy Collins and his New Mexico State teammate, Sam Lacey, a 6’10” monster of a rebounding machine from rural Mississippi, two African American boys home from college who, for three months one summer, would work for the power company in what both would later concur was the single hardest job they'd ever had in their lives.
Mostly though, when all those radicals left Syracuse in pursuit of new battles to fight, strewn among the wreckage of what had once been the city’s 15th Ward, were now simply broad chasms of division, a whole lot of festering anger, and a ton of bitterness.
Those carpetbagging organizers had come to Syracuse to make a point, if not a difference. The problem was, somewhere in the process of trying to make that difference, the point they’d been trying to make wound up buried beneath mountains of their own rhetoric, bombast, and unfilled promises.
As a result, on the eve of the 1967 All City Basketball Championship, a bloodied and bowed Syracuse was left with the responsibility of not only cleaning up its own streets, but, somehow, trying to suture its own deep and gaping wounds.
* * * * *
Whatever factors that were in play – Urban Renewal and the sweeping Interstate Highway Act, chief among them – what might have been the trigger mechanism that ultimately led to the full blown eradication of the 15th Ward was the front-page arrest, a few years prior, of Percy Harris, the colorful bon vivant and head of the city’s booming numbers racket.
Harris had long served as the Ward’s Robin Hood and self-appointed guardian angel; a flamboyant and ambitious racketeer who made hundreds of thousands annually off that poverty stricken part of town, even as he was using a healthy portion of his proceeds to grease the right palms and support the right candidates – all in the interest, of course, of shielding his little Ward from harm, while also protecting his booming street-level lottery.
Which is why, to understand the importance of the 1967 All City Championship to Syracuse’s African American community, it’s necessary to explore the events leading up to the previous year’s game. That was the game during which many in town felt Kenny Huffman and his Corcoran Cougars had been given a raw deal and were on the receiving end of a horrifically bad call – a call that, at least to many in the Ward, seemed to be based as much on skin color as it was basketball.
For purposes of this story, the first important date to keep in mind is Friday, May 13, 1960. That was the day the dominos started to fall, because that was the day – or the early evening of that day, to be precise – on which a team of New York State Troopers, armed with guns, dogs and a search warrant, charged into Percy and Alice Harris’ apartment on Harrison Street and uncovered tens of thousands of dollars in small, neatly stacked bills, all of them tucked away; some in a wooden whiskey crate, but the bulk of them beneath a loose floorboard in the far corner of a rear bedroom.
What the troopers didn’t find, at least initially, were the tens of thousands that Harris’ frantic yet ever-resourceful wife, Alice, had unceremoniously tossed out the window of another rear bedroom, just as the troopers were beginning their search.
Below that particular window on that late afternoon were a bunch of teenagers, including Ricky Chisholm, who liked to spend his days, not playing basketball from sunup to sundown, like his kid brother Tookie, but singing and playing music with his buddies. Ricky and his friends had started out performing a cappella do-wop songs on the Ward’s street corners some time prior, but were now – as a new era of music was taking shape – starting to add instrumentation to their sound, including drumming on whatever hard or hollow surface they could get their hands on.
As the boys were midway through their rendition of yet another contemporary hit, amid the soft pastel glow of magic hour, they stopped cold at the hollow sound and muted thud they heard just a dozen or so feet behind them. Turning, they saw a large weathered carpetbag with brown handles and a leather strap, at the end of which was a small hasp that sealed it shut. The boys looked at each other for the briefest of moments before bolting in the direction of the bag, their minds racing with possibilities.
What they found went far beyond any possibilities their young minds could have entertained. What the five boys found staring up at them from that old bag were piles upon piles of U.S. paper currency; ones, fives, tens and twenties, all grouped, all neatly stacked, and all bound with cheap, brown twine. It was more money than they’d ever seen in their lives and, in some cases, ever would see.
Before they could respond or offer up a single whoop of celebration, a tall, imposing presence appeared, one that loomed over them like a ten-foot giant; a towering, uniformed figure casting an equally towering shadow. Hovering over those five street corner musicians was a New York State Trooper, part of the team participating in the raid on the Harris home. The guy simply reached down, closed the hasp, grabbed the bag in his thick, powerful fist, and said, “Thank you, boys. I’ll take that.”
The surprise raid, you see, was not the product of the local Syracuse police or any of the higher-ups who, for years, had been so handsomely and regularly compensated by Percy Harris to look the other way.
To the contrary, it was one of the earliest examples of a promise made (and kept) by the new Attorney General of the State of New York, a promise to clean up corruption, especially at the local level. Those in power in Syracuse, as a result, had no idea the raid on Harris’ apartment was planned until the morning it actually occurred.
There were plenty of red faces afterward, too, but none any redder than that of Anthony Henninger, Syracuse's mayor, a good, decent and honest public servant, who was livid and held his chief of police, a former Irish beat cop named Harold F. Kelly, personally responsible for giving a numbers operation like Harris' such a free rein. In fact, as soon as the following morning, Henninger made it clear there was a good chance he was going to give that same top cop, the now humiliated Kelly, the boot.
The mayor, a lifelong Republican, never did fire Kelly. But the embarrassment was real and it mattered deeply, especially since the raid caught everyone in City Hall with their pants down and occurred smack dab in the middle of the one of the most bitterly fought presidential campaigns in modern history, the knock-down, drag-out affair between Vice President Richard Nixon and the dashing young senator from Massachusetts, John Fitzgerald Kennedy.
Central New York had been a longtime Republican stronghold, but the charming and youthful JFK, who was not just a decorated war hero, but a ruggedly handsome, telegenic guy with a razor sharp wit, continued to chip away at Nixon’s once-formidable lead.
And the realization of the breadth and scope of Harris’ numbers operation carried broad and deep implications because it absolutely reeked of Republican corruption or ineptitude – neither of which was a particularly good option for the party desperately seeking to hold on to the White House.
Yet, the raid on Percy and Alice Harris' tiny apartment was merely the first shoe to drop.
Because, while the money seized that day, along with the unmasking of one of the worst kept secrets in Syracuse, may have been important, what was crucial, if not ultimately fatal to the Ward was something small and seemingly innocuous that the troopers also stumbled upon amid all those neatly piled stacks of money.
What they discovered and learned was this: Alice Harris was not just another shapely looker or fine-and-tall drink of American womanhood. And she was not, in addition, just one more overlooked and underestimated American housewife. She was, as they’d soon discover, a woman with the mind of a chief executive, one with an incredible eye for detail, with both the ability and the inclination to capture and record even the smallest business transaction.
For that reason, Percy Harris’ wife not only kept meticulous records of all her husband’s street-level affairs, she also kept copious notes and paid careful attention to every one of his powerful and politically connected clients. To that end, Alice Harris maintained an accurate and up-to-date ledger, a leather-bound record of numbers, clients and transactions that stretched back years, and one, following her arrest – like a gift from the gods – became a virtual road map for those hoping to unlock and bring to its knees the rampant racketeering going on in the Salt City, a malfeasance that may have started in the streets of the Ward but ran all the way up to the fanciest offices in town.
Four months later, on the night of Wednesday, September 28th, a state trooper (again, not a local cop) pulled up behind a late model Studebaker parked at an angle in the lot of a rundown motel on Seventh North Street, a lot directly on the proposed site of the all-new Interstate 81. Suspicious of the vehicle because of its odd angle, the trooper flashed his lights into its steamed-up windows.
Moments later, a pasty-faced and doughy man named George L. Traister, along with his female paramour, a twenty-something pro from the North Side with the given name of Mary Neil, were being handcuffed and carted off to the city lockup; her on various charges, including prostitution; him on multiple counts of illegal and deviant sexual behavior, including the granddaddy of them all, sodomy.
The problem was, George Traister wasn’t just a garden-variety, working-class stiff in a stale marriage or some middle-aged John Q. Nobody possessing multiple chins and the gnawing desire to get a little something-something on the side.
No, George Traister was the duly elected Treasurer of Onondaga County. More important, he was the sitting chairman of the Onondaga County Republican Party.
And, that Wednesday, September 28th, was a mere forty days before Election Day, and just twenty-four hours before the most powerful Democrat in America – the surging John F. Kennedy – would be coming to Syracuse on a full-blown campaign stop.
From a political perspective, Syracuse had suddenly become a key city in a suddenly crucial state. And Kennedy’s handlers, well aware of that, had shuffled things around so that their candidate could speak to well-wishers in Clinton Square, followed by a major fund-raising luncheon at the Hotel Syracuse, a rubber-chicken stumper that would be carried live, via closed circuit, and broadcast on a massive screen erected just outside the hotel.
Syracuse’s two local newspapers, as a result, would both have themselves a pair of killer stories battling for readers’ attention on the front page, both of them on the same day, both of them sitting side-by-side, and both perched prominently and proudly above the fold.
One would be the story of the massive throng of adoring Kennedy voters, supporters and onlookers, many of them young women, who’d come out en masse, like screaming schoolgirls at an Elvis show.
The other would be the Day Two story of the head of the local Republican Party and that poor sap’s sloppy, late-night arrest for getting caught red-handed with a low-end call-girl in the parking lot of a flea-bag motel.
The fallout from Traister’s arrest was as swift as it was absolute. The night following his arrest and subsequent perp walk with his disheveled and lipstick-smeared girlfriend du jour, the secretary of the local Republican Party, Richard Aronson, with his publicity chair, Elmer Bogardus, rapped unannounced on the door of the Traister home in the Village of Liverpool.
There, at the family dinner table, with Traister’s wife looking on worriedly, wringing her hands, Aronson handed the glum and soon-to-be ex-Republican chair a terse letter of resignation that Bogardus had taken the liberty to compose and type up on his behalf.
Aronson then pulled out a PaperMate from his inside pocket, clicked it, and set it on the letter in front of Traister, unemotionally instructing him to sign it. It wasn’t one of those Don Corleone “your signature or your brains” moments, but it was darn close. The radioactive Traister was done in politics.
As the two no-nonsense Republicans made their way to the front door of the Traister home, one thanked the Mrs. for her instant coffee and sugar cookies, as they both donned the soft felt fedoras they’d been carrying. Then, with all the passion of a guy telling his cleaner how he likes his shirts done, Aronson informed the woman’s ashen and slump-shouldered husband that come tomorrow he was also going to walk into the county office building and resign from his $9,300 a year job as Treasurer. Also, he suggested, it would probably be prudent if he were to do that at some point early in the morning, rather than waiting until after, say, he got back from lunch, because they had already scheduled a noon meeting at the Yates Hotel to introduce State Senator John Hughes as the new Onondaga County party chair. Hughes, in turn, would tell all those worried men seated around him that none of them should leave with their head down. The Republican Party is, was, and would always remain, bigger than any one person.
As always in such situations, neutralizing the problem was only part of the solution. Until the blame had been properly assigned elsewhere, and the necessary steps taken to ensure that no such future incident would ever occur, the matter would not be settled.
Enter the 15th Ward, a place that, from that moment on, and from that point forward, would no longer be viewed by anyone in town who mattered as just some benign repository for fourteen or so thousand of the city’s “Negroes.” Instead, the Ward would be cast forevermore as a festering, open wound on Syracuse’s proud, but now battered and bruised face; a place that would no longer be just another slum but, now, a damn incubator for the exact kind of vice that had, somehow, and in some way, managed to ensnare their hard-working little town in its cold and vile clutches.
That’s why just a few weeks later, on Tuesday, October 18, George Traister would find himself indicted on sodomy charges. News of that would be sprawled across the front pages of both papers under screaming headlines – and, if that weren't bad enough, according to one of the stories, the former chairman of the Republican Party would be committed to a sanitarium and placed on a 24-hour watch for his own benefit.
Within those newspaper accounts would be five additional indictments that actually led those front-page stories and made most everyone reading them want to keep reading, even to the jump page. Indicted as well were a number of high-ranking public officials, every one of them for having played a role in Percy Harris’ well-oiled and insanely profitable numbers racket.
Among the four officials (along with a local smoke shop owner) paraded into court in handcuffs were Herbert Johnson, the Syracuse Police Court Clerk, and Francis Garn, a detective and 31-year veteran of the force. In fact, it was Garn’s photo that graced the front page of the following day’s Post-Standard, just below the Post’s blaring headline. The photo showed the disgraced 56-year old cop attempting to hide his handcuffs under his trench coat as he was led away.
Indicted as well were various members of Percy Harris’ “management” team, including his right hand man, Gerald “Buster” Mordecai, his wife Alice, and, of course, Harris himself.
Trying their best to mitigate the political humiliation that this confluence of events continued to inflict on Nixon’s now-bleeding campaign in Central New York, the Republicans countered quickly. They immediately dispatched vice presidential candidate Henry Cabot Lodge to Syracuse the same day the indictments were slated to come down. There, in Syracuse, Mr. Lodge promised that if Richard Nixon were elected president next month, he'd likely name the first Negro in history to one of his cabinet positions.
He announced as well that Nixon, at Governor Nelson Rockefeller’s urging, would soon be returning to Syracuse to address them all; either October 31st, November 1st, or November 2nd – literally, just hours before Election Day.
The story of Lodge’s speech, his bold prediction of Nixon picking a “Negro” cabinet head, and his announcement that his running mate would soon be returning to Syracuse, made the Post-Standard’s front page, right next to the Garn photo and its corresponding story.
To many in and around Syracuse, however, it felt like a case of too-little-too-late. What was done was done, after all, and no magic wand or political sleight-of-hand was going to change what had happened. Yet, as a result of all that transpired on that Tuesday, without Percy Harris and his mountains of money to stop them – without the firewall he created with so many greased palms – the barriers to the sweeping changes in the offing started to fall with almost frightening speed.
Less than two years later, Bill Walsh would become mayor and make a decision on where to carve a path for Interstate 81. A short time after that, the wrecking ball would begin to swing in earnest; swiftly, surely, and with deadly accuracy and an almost chilling level of dispassion.
When that began to happen, hundreds of African American homes and dozens of African American and Jewish businesses started getting laid to waste, and the neighborhood that housed them all soon found itself relegated to that shady, gray area that can often exist between one man’s warm memories and another’s footnote to history.
For many in the Ward, it wasn’t the tearing down of their homes that gnawed at them or burned so deep in their souls. It was the cold and systematic demolition of all those public gathering places that had long united them and for so long had bound them as family; the barber shops and beauty salons, the diners, the saloons, the jazz joints, the churches, the schools, and the social clubs.
Most of those folks rented, anyway. Their dwellings were, as a result, of secondary concern. But having ripped from their loving arms all those special places that, over the years, they’d built into what they’d become, and that now defined how so many of them viewed themselves, that was the thing that, in the end, broke their spirit. It shattered what was left of their little neighborhood’s cast-iron will and once-indomitable sense of itself.
One by one, they lost them. Among the first gone was Grant Malone’s Barber Shop, the Ward’s social crossroads and mostly-male beehive, where anyone who was anyone regularly went to talk, laugh and discuss the Orangemen or the sordid details of Emo Henderson’s latest column; then went Norm’s Chili Bowl, the dirty store, the ragman’s cart, Slim’s Pool Hall and Aunt Edith’s Kitchen, the cozy little place where the coffee was always hot, the pies always fresh, the conversation always spirited.
After that, Fineberg’s Butcher Shop, Chocolate’s Smoke Shop, Meltzer’s Deli, Sable’s, Herbson’s, Volinsky’s and Miller’s Jewelers, many of them Jewish-owned emporiums whose histories stretched well back to the days before the Ward had transformed itself into a mostly black neighborhood.
Gone too would be the Embassy, the Penguin and the Clover Club, among so many others hopping jazz joints, where all the biggest entertainers in Black America, whenever they came to town, would flock like swallows to Capistrano.
Also leveled would be the two beautiful synagogues where the few remaining Jews in the Ward still went to worship every Sabbath and holy day.
And Washington Irving School, where it seemed almost every child in the Ward took his or her first wobbly steps down a path that would lead at least a few to college and beyond, but far more simply to adulthood, in whatever humble shape or form.
Gone as well would be certain streets which would disappear from the city map entirely, never to be seen again; small, little two-and-three block byways with gentle sounding names like Grape Street, Orange Street and, of course, Renwick Place.
Gone would be Father Brady’s remarkable Foery Foundation in that sturdy but withered old brick building on Foreman Ave, where the Saint of Syracuse not only lived in a tiny apartment with little more than a pair of shoes, a few spare toiletries, and two or three pieces of furniture, but where he breathed life into the Word of God every day by putting that very same Word into action for an entire city to see.
Lost would be the building that housed the original Dunbar Center, where learning how to play and compete, and how to stand on principle and fight for one’s rightful share, were just a few of the things that countless boys and girls would learn firsthand.
Gone as well would be the Huntington Club, or at least the Huntington Club in its original incarnation, a place that years prior had been established to support single women who, during World War I, moved to the city in search of a job, a room of their own, and a safe place to lay their head. In the years hence, it would reinvent itself as a family center for teaching essential life and job skills, while providing comfort, support, and even food to the neediest of God’s children.
No more would people be able to find succor in the humble little St. Joseph’s French Church on Genesee Street, once one of the spiritual pillars of the Ward but now merely one more vacant, doomed building whose usefulness had, sadly, passed.
And gone, as well, would be all but small traces of the one-of-a-kind inner-city neighborhood that had once welcomed the gracious, gentle giant, Earl Lloyd, with open arms and heart, welcomed him like one of its own even as he was trying to cope with all the racism and hatred in all those angry NBA towns – while at the same time quietly and with almost regal dignity helping to break the league’s color line with the old Syracuse Nats. Years later Lloyd would call the neighborhood “my salvation” because in it he’d found a mostly-Black world in which he and his adopted family could bond in what he, for the rest of his life, would refer to as the “brotherhood of the briar patch.”
The point is that there was much more riding on the outcome of the 1967 All City game than simple bragging rights and a shiny trophy.
What was at stake, at least for Corcoran – or, more to the point, for those of the 15th Ward – was something that went to the very essence of what it meant to be a Black man in Syracuse during the Spring of 1967. It was a chance to strike back and be heard, if only briefly and if only in a small way. It was a moment to try to win back a sliver of what had been ripped away from you so heartlessly. And it was an opportunity to channel all that bottled up hurt and frustration into something that, in the end, wouldn’t hurt a soul.
It was, after all, just a silly little basketball game – although winning it would sure feel damn good.
More than anything, though, the 1967 Syracuse All City Championship was a chance to showcase Black pride in what would turn out to be the final such championship the proud and booming factory town would ever experience.
And if folks didn't know they were about to witness the last All City game ever, could you really fault them? Because even with all the telltale signs around the city, if not the country as a whole, it was still impossible for most to wrap their brains around the fact that the Syracuse they’d known for so long – just like the Ward they’d so loved and the neighborhood they’d been so proud to call their own – was about to disappear in what would seem like a flash, right before their eyes.
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