Sherman’s March on Paterson

Monday, February 25, 2019

Not until many years later would I come to realize the irony of having a black kid from Paterson have his his parents name him Sherman -- after the general who set the south to blaze, and a few years after I met him, blacks would burn down Newark just as Sherman burned Atlanta.

Sherman was the black kid from the Alexander Hamilton projects in Paterson who had joined the Green Beret marching band with us, telling us how much he loved to drum.

That was before Watts set the tone for each summer to follow, before Newark, before Detroit.  even before anyone knew what it meant to set your own neighborhood on fire in protest against what they claimed white people did.

These riots – especially Watts, Detroit and Newark-- scared the white community on the border of Paterson just the way that Haiti riots had a century before had scared the South and destroyed any kind of reconciliation or even reform.

The massive Abolitionist Movement – that was far larger than the one in the north that pushed the Union into the Civil War – simply evaporated and a climate of dread gripped whites in and out of Paterson, including the Jews who worked so hard to help with the Civil Rights Movement, so that many sympathetic to the plight of blacks began to wonder if they’d made a mistake.

The Six-Day War in 67 turned many blacks against Jews because blacks seemed to see Arabs as oppressed people, even though they are the ones that spent the greater part of a century trying to drive the Jews out of Palestine, painting Jews as oppressors even though many of the Jews had been instrumental in overthrowing Jim Crow. Part of this was a perverted form of a Muslim faith invented in the ghetto of Newark, which Malcom X would later come to reject, but not many of those who became leaders of the Black Panthers.

Kids then, none of us knew anything about any of that in 1964 when all we wanted to play music together and Sherman seemed to know more about playing music than any of us did.

He was small and fast and ran his way up Lakeview Avenue from the projects to Saint Brendan's for practice every afternoon when we were done ran all the way back.

He liked me and Dave though looked a bit odd standing next to us, Dave at six foot two and me at five foot eleven when he was only about five foot three.

We didn’t talk about race except for him to tell me his father didn’t like white people. I said my uncles were scared of blacks.

Even when the riots started -- and the looting, and the shooting -- we did not think it had anything to do with us. It all seemed remote, the way the war was and the marches in the South. We saw nobody with Billy clubs or fire hoses.

All that was on tv - until it wasn't.

When we saw Newark burn, we all got scared.

We all knew those streets from those rare times our families took us there to shop -- whole blocks razed as if Sherman's name sake had passed through on his way to the sea.

In my house, we waited for Paterson to burn -- and Passaic -- with us caught in the middle and my uncles with guns at every window, waiting for the riot that never came, fearing the looting of our family store that did not transpire.

But travel to Paterson and Passaic became more dangerous and nobody knew went near Newark at all until later when the draft got us, and then we only passed through the place on our way to Fort Dix and some to Vietnam.

The gangs I remembered from when my mother and I lived in the projects in 1959 and 1960 roamed openly by 1967, no longer competing with whites, but hating us, looking for victims most of whom were not white. Black gangs fought Latino gangs for turf no white man wanted.

Sherman stopped coming to practice - too dangerous for a black face in a white neighborhood where police suspected everybody and constantly feared a riot that never came.

But there were mini riots -- mostly among Latinos.

It was during one of these that I last saw Sherman. He hid behind one car on Market Street and I hid behind another. We saw each other, nodded as if hoping each of us might get out of there alive.

But we ran, he went one way and I another destined never to cross paths again.