August 28, 1964, 60 years ago: A race riot breaks out in North Philadelphia, lasting 3 days, and revealing to the nation a latent racism that had infected "The City of Brotherly Love," and the birthplace of the nation and its Constitution.
At the time, the population of Philadelphia was a shade over 2 million, making it the 4th-largest city in the country behind New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. The city was about 65 percent white, 33 percent black, and almost no Hispanics or Asians lived there. About 2/3rds of the city's black population lived in North Philadelphia, with most of the rest in West Philadelphia.
But being "the Birthplace of Liberty" didn't help much. When Jackie Robinson integrated Major League Baseball in 1947, it was the city's baseball team, the Philadelphia Phillies, that offered the loudest and most noxious resistance. In 1950, the Phillies, with a young team known as the "Whiz Kids," became the last all-white team to win the National League Pennant. They didn't integrate until 1957, the last NL team to do so.
By 1964, the Philadelphia Police Department had made a conscious effort to hire black cops, and sending integrated patrol car units in black neighborhoods: One white uniformed officer, one black uniformed officer. And a civilian review board had been established to handle cases of police brutality. And with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 having just been passed, hopes were high.
But New York's Harlem had broken out in a race riot a few days before, following a case of police brutality. And it would be one of those that would spark the riot in North Philadelphia -- and another in Watts in Los Angeles the next year, and another on the East Side of Cleveland and another on the West Side of Chicago the year after that, and others in Newark and Detroit and other cities the year after that.
Still, this had been a good Summer for Philadelphia. There hadn't been much rain, the Jersey and Delaware beaches were clean in those days, and the Phillies were in first place. But things had already begun to go wrong on many fronts, and this riot was a convenient historical landmark.
On August 28, 1964, Odessa Bradford was driving her husband Rush Bradford, both of them black, and they started arguing. She pulled over at the corner of 22nd Street and Columbia Avenue. A police car pulled up to Ms. Bradford's car. Inside were black officer Robert Wells and white officer John Hoff. Ms. Bradford, still angry, began taking her anger out on the officers. They tried to remove her from her car. A man came to her aid by attacking the officers, and he and Ms. Bradford were both arrested.
As would later happen with Watts in 1965 and Newark in 1967, a rumor spread that a black person taken into custody by the police had been killed by them. In this case, the rumor was that it was a pregnant black woman, beaten to death. As with those two later cases, the rumor wasn't true, but by the time anyone found out, it was too late. Ms. Bradford was neither pregnant nor beaten, but she did say, "If that policeman had only treated me like a human being, none of this (rioting) would have happened."
Indeed, once she was released, Cecil B. Moore, President of the city's chapter of the NAACP, drove her around the neighborhood on a truck with a loudspeaker, allowing her to say, "I'm alive! I'm alive!" But it did no good.
I have looked for a reference as to whether Ms. Bradford is still alive, but I haven't found it. I have found 50th Anniversary articles on the riot from 2014, and none had an interview with her, so I suspect she was already dead by that point. Moore was elected to the City Council in 1976, and died in office in 1979. In 1987, Columbia Avenue was renamed Cecil B. Moore Avenue in his memory.
Cecil B. Moore
Moore's efforts were in vain. As with Harlem, many of the businesses in the mostly-black neighborhood were mostly-white-owned. (This led black business owners in later riots to paint "SOUL BROTHER" on their windows, in the hopes of their stores being spared.)
Depending on whose story you believe, nobody died in the rioting, or one person did. (If there was one, it was not Odessa Bradford.) There were 341 injuries, 774 arrests, and 225 stores damaged.
The epicenter, 22nd and Columbia, was about a mile south of Connie Mack Stadium, home of the Phillies since 1938, and home of the now-departed Philadelphia Athletics from 1909 to 1954. It had been named Shibe Park until 1953. The epicenter was also 7 blocks east of the site of the 1st home of the A's, Columbia Park, where they played from 1901 to 1908.
The Phillies were in Pittsburgh at the time of the riot, so it didn't result in any games being postponed. But it scared white fans, who may already have been wary of getting mugged coming down Lehigh Avenue out of the subway, or of their cars getting vandalized if they drove in.
The Phils had 15 home games left, not counting 2 rainout makeups, and the average attendance was 21,265. They really didn't have a home-field advantage the rest of the way, and this may have contributed to the 10-game losing streak that took them from being 6 1/2 games in 1st place with 12 games to go, to finishing 1 game out.
Philadelphia has had racial tension since. In 1971, Police Commissioner Frank Rizzo was elected Mayor on an openly racist platform. In 1975, despite having been caught in corruption, he ran for re-election on white backlash, and won again. He knew he couldn't run for a 3rd term, partly due to his 1977 overreaction to the black nationalist group MOVE. But the city's 1st black Mayor, Wilson Goode, had an even worse overreaction to them in 1985.
Today, the population of Philadelphia is about 1.6 million, ranking 6th behind New York, L.A., Chicago, Houston and Phoenix. It's about 40 percent black (mostly living west of Broad Street in North, West, and Southwest Philly), 37 percent white, 15 percent Hispanic, and 8 percent Asian. It is more diverse than ever before. But that underlying tension remains.
