Share This PagePennsylvania:
A History of the Commonwealth
edited
by Randall M. Miller and William Pencak
Though racial conflicts declined dramatically at the end of the century, an uncomfortable reminder of earlier issues was provided by the case of Mumia Abu-Jamal. Co-founder of the Philadelphia chapter of the Black Panther Party, and later a supporter of move, Abu-Jamal was tried and convicted for the 1981 murder of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner and sentenced to death. Legal anomalies in the trial, however, combined with Abu-Jamal's celebrity status as a writer, aroused controversy about the verdict. A "Free Mumia" campaign, which so powerfully recalls the radical rhetoric of the 1960s, has attracted worldwide attention, due in part to his own best-selling books. (The movement also became a major presence on the Internet.) For the political left in Europe as much as for North America, Abu-Jamal was a heroic symbol of the injustice inflicted on minority and Third World people. Celebrities who wrote on his behalf include Gwendolyn Brooks, Allen Ginsberg, Toni Morrison, Cornel West, John Edgar Wideman, and Alice Walker. However strange this concept would appear to most Pennsylvanians, at the turn of the millennium Abu-Jamal was in global terms perhaps the state's most famous resident.
THE BIG MAN: FRANK RIZZO
Many loved him, many hated him, but nobody ignored him. For better or worse, Frank Rizzo represented the soul of Philadelphia politics over a turbulent quarter-century. He was born in 1920, the child of a Calabrian family living in South Philadelphia. In 1943 he followed his father into the Philadelphia police force, of which he became Commissioner in 1966. He became legendary for his determined resistance to minority protests during the days of rage in the 1960s, and he became a populist folk-hero for many white residents, and especially for the city's ethnic blue-collar residents, who thoroughly identified with him.
Rizzo attracted countless memorable images in these years, often involving his well-armed officers forcefully raiding the premises of radical and black militant organizations. The crowning moment came in 1969 when Commissioner Rizzo, summoned from a banquet to confront a burgeoning riot, personally supervised his force's actions while stylishly attired in a tuxedo complete with a nightstick in his cummerbund. For his admirers, he epitomized a "Dirty Harry" image of the dedicated officer fighting for the decent people against criminals, terrorists, and rioters, and he did much to put the "law and order" theme in the center of American politics. For minorities and for liberals, he seemed unarguably to deserve words like "fascist" and "storm trooper." During the crisis year of 1970 he warned that to keep antiwar protesters and social radicals at bay "the only thing we can do now is to buy tanks and start mounting machine-guns." He continued: "It is sedition. This is no longer a crime, but revolution. It must be stopped even if we have to change some of the laws to do it."
His self-dramatizing role as the Big Man laid the foundations for an enduring political career. Rizzo was elected mayor in 1971 and 1975, in contests that both exposed and aggravated the city's acute racial divisions. In his second campaign he promised, memorably, "to make Attila the Hun look like a faggot." His fanatical loyalty to his police force became ever more controversial at a time when protests were mounting about the corruption and violence of the city's officers, complaints that Rizzo conspicuously scorned. For almost twenty years, the politics of the state's largest city seemed almost to divide between the supporters and opponents of Frank Rizzo, for whom party labels were a matter of passing convenience. He ran again for the mayoralty, unsuccessfully, in 1983 and 1987, and he won the Republican primary for that office in 1991, shortly before his death.
In 1999 Philadelphia unveiled a statue of Frank Rizzo: it stands by the Municipal Services Building and faces the City Hall in which Rizzo had long played so enduring a role. A large mural of Rizzo greets visitors to the Italian Market in South Philadelphia, one of the white ethnic bastions of Rizzo's strength and, along with Rocky's gym nearby, a testimony to ethnic pride and a reminder that tough guys can make it in America.
In the city of York too, other ghosts of the 1960s were walking as the twentieth century drew to a close. During a long, hot summer in the city in 1969, black and white gangs often engaged in open warfare. Tensions reached dreadful heights that July. Following the shooting death of a white police officer, white militants gathered at a rally, where another officer was reportedly seen handing out ammunition to members of a white street gang and urging them to conduct "commando raids" against black neighborhoods. Shortly afterward, white extremists fired at a passing car, killing a black woman then visiting from her home in South Carolina. Rumors about the shootings circulated for years, but only in the 1990s did new facts come to light. In the year 2001, criminal charges were pressed against several participants in the case, including York's mayor, a former police officer, who was accused of leading the white power rally in 1969.
crime and justice
As the Frank Rizzo story indicates, racial tensions were often thinly concealed under the rhetorical cover of "law and order" politics. Soaring crime rates were a critical index of social decay: property-crime rates rocketed upward from the mid-1960s, reaching one peak around 1981 and another a decade later. This growth was particularly damaging to the public's sense of safety because it coincided with a contraction in the numbers of police officers, as cash-strapped cities sought to economize. In the 1970s the media dubbed Philadelphia (questionably) the "youth-gang capital of America." The soaring homicide rate of the 1970s and early 1980s also indicated the growing crisis. At the same time, the overburdened courts failed to deliver swift justice, and many lesser offenses were unofficially amnestied; by about 1990, Philadelphia had some 33,000 outstanding warrants, and only thirty officers to seek out and arrest the errant offenders. Matters deteriorated further in the decade after 1985, as new patterns of drug trafficking disrupted the long-established criminal networks, which for all their flaws at least had a vested interest in avoiding ostentatious violence. Philadelphia's murder total soared to more than 500 by the end of the decade, compared with about 120 annually in the late 1940s, and there was a dramatic rise in the proportion of murders involving young teenagers both as victims and as offenders. Similar rises were recorded in Pittsburgh and other major cities and were likewise generally blamed on the twin demon figures of crack cocaine and street gangs.
The reasons for increasing crime and violence are not hard to find, in that during the 1970s the large baby-boom generation was entering its most crime-prone age-its late teens-and the disastrous economic decline of the 1980s was inevitably going to have some spillover in terms of violence and substance abuse. Because blacks made up so large a share of the urban population, it is not surprising that news reports featured blacks as both the victims and the perpetrators of violence. Nevertheless, the images served to reinforce white stereotypes of black criminality.
In response, governments adopted ever-harsher penal policies, especially toward drug offenders. In keeping with national trends, every year from 1985 through the end of the century Pennsylvania added at least one new prison to its expanding range of facilities. Meanwhile, the state's corrections budget grew fivefold during the 1990s, to more than $1 billion. Taking state prisons and local jails together, Pennsylvania had some 14,000 inmates behind bars in the late 1970s, but this number rose to more than 35,000 by 1990, and to more than 60,000 at the end of the century. By this point about one-third of new prisoners were incarcerated for drug crimes. Including federal prisoners as well, the state had 77,000 inmates by the year 2000, a combined population equal in size to the city of Scranton. As happens so often in the United States, those sentenced to prison are disproportionately black and minority, so that a troublingly large proportion of that population found itself under the supervision of the criminal justice system, either incarcerated in adult or juvenile institutions, or subject to parole or probation. And the overcrowding in prisons did not ease as crime and violence rates fell steadily toward the end of the century.
John F. Kennedy came to Wilkes-Barre on October 28, 1960, just days before the presidential election, in which he won a closely con-tested campaign over Richard M. Nixon. Min Matheson, chairwoman of the ILGWU Local 22, spoke to the crowd at Public Square before Kennedy's arrival. At a time when few women held political office in Pennsylvania, Matheson was politically astute at lobbying state and federal officialson behalf of the working-class communities of the Wyoming Valley. Kennedy carried Pennsylvania in the 1960 election.
Harsher attitudes toward crime are also evident in Pennsylvania's restoration of its death penalty law, which had remained inactive since 1962. The first of the new round of executions occurred in 1995. Symbolic of the state's shifting emphases in the last quarter of the century, Pennsylvania created two new major executive bureaus: the Department of Aging (1979) and the Department of Corrections (1984).
the new politics
Racial allegiances and concerns did much to replace class politics. Also contributing to this trend was the rise of moral issues in national affairs from the 1970s onward, in conflicts over abortion and homosexuality. These changes contributed to a growing conservatism in the state and opened the way to a major Republican revival. The state's changing demographics once more proved significant, as an aging population made the state conservative in areas of moral controversy and gender while remaining relatively liberal over issues of welfare and labor.
The history of gender politics in Pennsylvania is paradoxical. It was marked by feminist successes in early years and by surprising setbacks later on. Traditionally, the state had produced a distinguished cohort of women political figures, including Genevieve Blatt, who was a perennial and popular candidate for state office in the 1950s and 1960s. Blatt's greatest triumph came in 1964, when she defeated the powerful Judge Michael Angelo Musmanno for the Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate seat. Though she failed to win that seat, it was an impressive achievement, as she had in effect taken on the whole party organization. As early as 1962, women voters were out-registering men in Pennsylvania, and the gender gap grew steadily as the century progressed. In addition to their role in national and congressional elections, women played a decisive role in many community organizations and grassroots action groups.
During the 1960s and 1970s too, many of the state's women participated enthusiastically in the emerging women's movement, which grew out of the wider movement toward social liberation. In the long, historical perspective, the change in the role of women during these years will probably be remembered as one of the most important changes in American history, though most of the trends were not peculiar to Pennsylvania. As in the rest of the United States, women in Pennsylvania made sweeping gains in the professions from the 1970s on. But though not unique, Philadelphia deserves recognition as a vibrant center of the women's movement. Appropriately, this city was the setting for the epoch-making ordination of several women as Episcopal priests in 1974, an event that made news worldwide. Through the 1970s, feminist activism in Pennsylvania focused on securing passage of the federal Equal Rights Amendment, and such a law was added to the state constitution as early as 1971. Feminists also created a network of community institutions, including rape crisis centers and refuges for victims of domestic violence.
Changing attitudes toward gender and sexuality were also apparent from the growth of a visible gay and lesbian community in Pennsylvania. Before the 1960s, when homosexuality featured in the news it was usually in the context of a "vice raid" or a mass arrest of "perverts." One journalist recorded how in Pittsburgh "the prowling of sex deviates" around movie houses, public lavatories, and a downtown shopping arcade became so blatant in 1948 that the citizens rose up in arms. They told the Bureau of Police that their town virtually was being "taken over." In response, the police Morals Squad began a campaign against "the blatant prowlers, the ones who made quagmires out of public parks, the proselytizers of youth," which scored almost 500 "homosexual arrests" over a twenty-month period. Matters changed dramatically during the liberal 1960s, as protests against repression and discrimination increased, and Philadelphia in particular played a leading role in gay organization. On July 4, 1965, four years before New York's legendary Stonewall riot, some forty gay and lesbian demonstrators protested outside Independence Hall, under then-shocking slogans like "Homosexuals ask for the right to pursue happiness" and "End official persecution of homosexuals." Through the 1970s and 1980s, gay-rights issues became a familiar component of liberal rhetoric, and antihomosexual discrimination gained the kind of social stigma that had once befallen public displays of homosexuality. Conservative on many issues, Pennsylvania usually showed itself tolerant on matters of sexual expression.
The African American civil rights movement inspired women, Indians, and gay and lesbian activists to follow in the same direction. Some of the earliest gay-rights protests occurred in Philadelphia, such as this demonstration outside Independence Hall on July 4, 1965. As with civil rights protesters at the time, marchers tried to look as respectable as possible to attract support. Gays and lesbians later faced the same dilemma as African Americans and feminists: Should they attempt to integrate into mainstream society, or militantly assert a "queer" identity that emphasized their special contributions to the greater culture?
More important than the political developments, though, were the changes in every-day life, which made it possible for ordinary people to follow alternative lifestyles and to restructure the whole notion of family. By the 1990s gay and lesbian couples in fourteen Pennsylvania counties were allowed to adopt children, though recent court decisions have cast doubt on the legality of the practice. By 2000 the U.S. Census counted more than 21,000 Pennsylvania households in which unrelated people of the same sex lived together in "a close personal relationship." Such households were especially numerous in Center City Philadelphia, Upper Darby in Delaware County, and New Hope, Bucks County, but they were widely scattered throughout the state. The numbers themselves are perhaps less startling than the fact that an official agency could ask about such a once-taboo subject, and that so many people would feel comfortable about responding.
In light of these achievements, it is remarkable just how unusually conservative Pennsylvania was in the latter years of the century compared with other large states. Throughout the 1990s the state had the dubious distinction of possessing an almost all-male congressional delegation-consisting of both U.S. Senators and (except for Marjorie Margolis-Mezvinsky, who was elected for one term in 1992) all twenty-one U.S. Representatives-and in 2000 only one woman was elected, making it 20-1 in the House. While the proportion of women in the state legislature grew steadily in the decade, it had reached only 12 percent of the whole by the year 2000. By this point, Pennsylvania stood forty-sixth among the states in terms of women's participation in state government, and Pennsylvania's women rank forty-fourth in voter registration. Presumably linked to this political weakness was the poor showing of women in many economic indicators, including wage equity with men.
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© 2002 The Penn State University