WORTH: 2% of semester grade
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BE
SURE TO FOLLOW THE FILE-NAMING CONVENTIONS FOR THIS COURSE
(5% penalty if you do not).
All files should be saved on your computer
as: your last name, followed by an underscore ("_"),
followed by the first two letters of your first name, followed
by an underscore ("_"), followed
by the assignment number. So if a student named Saddam Hussein
were to submit assignment number 12, the file name would
be:
hussein_sa_12.doc
THIS
IS ASSIGNMENT 12
On August 17, 1954, the District Attorney for Kings County, New York charged four white teenagers with a series of crimes committed in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. The District Attorney identified the boys as Jack Koslow, 18, Melvin Mittman and Jerome Lieberman, both 17, and Robert Trachtenberg, 15. Police arrested them on August 6, after catching them beating a homeless man in Louis Sobel Park on Division Avenue. Once in custody, the boys quickly confessed to more crimes, including the murder of “a middle-aged vagrant” named Rheinhold Ulrickson, the killing of a black homeless man named Willard Menter, and an assault on two girls, both of whom disappeared after the four boys “waylaid and horse-whipped” them in Brooklyn’s McCarren Park around 11:00 pm on August 6.
Police later discovered the whip in one of the boys’ homes.
Though largely forgotten, the trial of Koslow, Mittman, and Lieberman made headlines during the late summer of 1954, providing a unique lens into popular fears and political responses to juvenile delinquency in the early 1950s.
How the public viewed of Koslow, Mittman, and Lieberman contrasts strongly with public outrage over a similar string of violent crimes perpetrated by black youth on New York City subways during the summer of 1964.
Even a brief comparison of the way that newspapers covered these two episodes—situated almost exactly a decade apart—underscores the ways in which headline trials provide a useful lens through which to view larger cultural and legal trends.
Follow the steps below, answering the short questions as they come up.
STEP 1)
Search the New York Times Historical Database for the name of the first of the teen-agers (Jack Koslow) for the first 20 days of the month of August, 1954.
STEP 2) After reading the article(s) you find, answer the following question:
Although opinions (as expressed in the New York Times coverage) varied about Koslow, Mittman, and Lieberman, there was a fair amount of both sympathy for the teenagers and finger-pointing to society.
Be sure to do both part (A) and (B) from below.
PART A
In one paragraph following the cl/ev/wa format, demonstrate the existence and nature of this sympathy. Your claim should assert the nature of the sympathy (e.g. “New Yorkers, while condemning the crimes, did not see teen-agers as monsters because they all had grown up in Idaho.”)
Requirements:
A) You should have at least two quotations from the New York Times coverage.
B) Organize your response around the familiar claim/evidence/warrant format and be sure to have at least two pieces of evidence from the text in the form of direct quotations of no more than 10 words. (see here for how to reduce quotations).
C) Integrate your direct quotations using either METHOD 3 OR METHOD 4 FROM THE EXPLANATION OF HOW TO INTEGRATE QUOTATIONS (-10% IF YOU DO NOT)
PART B
In one paragraph following the cl/ev/wa format, demonstrate that some observers at the time blamed society as well as Koslow, Mittman, and Lieberman.
Requirements:
A) You should have at least two quotations from the New York Times coverage.
B) Organize your response around the familiar claim/evidence/warrant format and be sure to have at least two pieces of evidence from the text in the form of direct quotations of no more than 10 words. (see here for how to reduce quotations).
C) Integrate your direct quotations using either METHOD 3 OR METHOD 4 FROM THE EXPLANATION OF HOW TO INTEGRATE QUOTATIONS (-10% IF YOU DO NOT)
STEP 3)
Psychiatrists emerged with shocking explanations for the murders committed by Koslow, Mittman, and Lieberman that differed from previous explanations of crime.
Search the New York Times Historical Database for the name of the first of the teen-agers (Jack Koslow) for the first week of the month of February, 1955.
After reading the article(s) you find, answer the following questions (A & B) in one or two paragraphs for each question:
QUESTION (A)
How did psychiatrists explain the murders committed by Koslow, Mittman, and Lieberman?
Requirements:
A) You should have at least two quotations from the New York Times coverage.
B) Organize your response around the familiar claim/evidence/warrant format and be sure to have at least two pieces of evidence from the text in the form of direct quotations of no more than 10 words. (see here for how to reduce quotations).
C) Integrate your direct quotations using either METHOD 3 OR METHOD 4 FROM THE EXPLANATION OF HOW TO INTEGRATE QUOTATIONS (-10% IF YOU DO NOT)
QUESTION (B)
How did that explanation differ from how an adherent to the Chicago School of Criminology might explain those murders?
Your claim should define the nature of the difference (e.g. “While psychiatrists explain the murders by emphasizing X, an an adherent to the Chicago School of Criminology would have, instead, emphasized Y”)
Requirements:
A) You should have at least one quotation from the New York Times coverage and one from the Rafter reading about the Chicago School that you have already done (reading found in Blackboard under “content”). .
B) Organize your response around the familiar claim/evidence/warrant format and be sure to have at least two pieces of evidence from the text in the form of direct quotations of no more than 10 words. (see here for how to reduce quotations).
C) Integrate your direct quotations using either METHOD 3 OR METHOD 4 FROM THE EXPLANATION OF HOW TO INTEGRATE QUOTATIONS (-10% IF YOU DO NOT)
HISTORICAL CONTEXT
(this material is essential for answering the following questions and you will be using direct quotations from this text, so don't skim)
From 1954—the year that Willard Menter was murdered—to 1964, the racial emographics of New York boroughs like Brooklyn changed dramatically. Due partly to massive in-migrations of African Americans from the South and Latino Americans from Puerto Rico, Brooklyn’s racial composition went from nearly all-white—and in the case of Williamsburg, all Jewish—to nearly all black and Hispanic, a transition accelerated by massive white flight to distant suburbs.
As racial demographics changed, so too did popular perceptions of delinquency. One year after the murders, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer released a controversial film about juvenile delinquency in an urban setting eerily reminiscent of Brooklyn entitled Blackboard Jungle.
)
(theatrical trailer for Blackboard Jungle)
For some, like Georgia Governor Ernest Vandiver, the movie represented a frightening documentary of what might happen were public schools to be integrated. “[A]n environment of switchblade knives, marijuana, stabbings, rapes, violence and blackboard jungles” declared Vandiver, would descend on the South were the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown v. Board of Education to be enforced.
Other southern leaders agreed, including future Mississippi Governor and United States Representative John Bell Williams, who organized a formal inquiry into delinquency in desegregated schools in Washington, D.C., seeking a conclusion that integration heightened racial tension and accelerated juvenile crime.
Just as delinquency became a battle cry against Brown, so too did delinquency plague the urban North, further complicating popular perceptions—and newspaper coverage—of youth and schools. In 1957, for example, white parents in Brooklyn made headlines by resisting an NAACP- sponsored attempt to have a school district in Bedford Stuyvesant, a predominantly black neighborhood, rezoned to incorporate white students. Part of the hesitation, related the Times, resulted from increasing violence at integrated schools in the Bedford-Stuyvesant and Bushwick neighborhoods. In November 1957, a special grand jury called to investigate violence in New York City’s public schools garnered further newspaper coverage by calling for the assignment of police officers to patrol hallways after reports of fights between students during class time. In January 1958, the principal of John Marshall Junior High School, an integrated Brooklyn school that had become the site of increasing disorder, including the rape of a female student in the school’s basement, made the first page of the Times by jumping off the roof of his apartment building before being scheduled to testify before a Kings County grand jury investigating incidents on his campus.
As suicides, rapes, and grand jury investigations made news, the tone of the coverage changed, moving away from critiques of city services to attacks on ambitious efforts at liberal reform, including Brown. “[I would] hate to think what the metropolitan press would have done to us,” exclaimed Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus in a 1958 New York Times article, “if the Brooklyn school violence had happened in Little Rock. . . . [P]eople are not being told one-tenth of the trouble about racial problems outside the South.” On February 5, 1958, the Times reported on another segregationist’s view of the Brooklyn violence, this time former Georgia Governor (and then-Senator) Herman Talmadge, who announced that the citizens of Georgia were “deeply sympathetic with the citizens of Brooklyn in the difficulties they are experiencing in maintaining the integrity and independence of their public schools.” Talmadge even went so far as to suggest that “the President of the United States send Federal troops to Brooklyn to preserve order in the public schools there in the same manner that he did to force a new social order upon the public schools of Little Rock, Arkansas.”
While few took Talmadge seriously, the problem of keeping headlines focused on southern racism—not northern delinquency—proved to be part of a much larger challenge faced by civil rights leaders in the late 1950s. In 1958, or example, Martin Luther King, Jr. sought to draw publicity to the southern struggle for civil rights by publishing Stride Toward Freedom, a personal memoir of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. From May 1957 to May 1959, King and A. Philip Randolph organized mass “prayer pilgrimages” that drew thousands to Washington, D.C., commemorating the Supreme Court’s decision inBrown v. Board of Education.
Critical to direct action was non-violence. So long as black demonstrators remained non-violent, their protests retained a higher likelihood of winning popular support, partly because they instigated what Leo Kuper has called “Embarrassment of the Rulers.” Such embarrassment stemmed from the fact that the demonstrators frequently had to endure violent white reactions—a recurring theme that lent the civil rights demonstrations a Christ- like quality. Ann Moody, a black activist, described a student sit-in at a Woolworth’s in Jackson, Mississippi in 1960:
We bowed our heads and all hell broke loose. A man rushed forward, threw Memphis from his seat, and slapped my face. Then another man who worked in the store threw me against the adjoining counter.
Down on my knees on the floor, I saw Memphis lying near the lunch counter with blood running out of the corners of his mouth.
STEP 4)
Search the New York Times Historical Database for gang attacks in Manhattan subways from the year 1964.
After reading the article(s) you find, summarize the nature of the attacks in one paragraph and identify any similarities with the crime spree engaged in by Koslow, Mittman, and Lieberman in 1954.
You do not need direct quotations.
STEP 5)
The pubic response to the 1964 subway attacks was very different than the public response to the crimes of Koslow, Mittman, and Lieberman.
Some of the most interesting public comments about the attack came from Roy Wilkins, executive secretary of the prominent civil rights advocacy organization the NAACP.
Search the New York Times Historical Database for Roy Wilkins for the month of June, 1964.
After reading the article(s) you find and THINKING CAREFULLY ABOUT THE HISTORICAL INFORMATION PROVIDED ABOVE ABOUT THE BATTLE FOR CIVIL RIGHTS AND DELINQUENCY IN THE NORTH, answer the following question in one or two paragraphs that adopt the cl/ev/wa format:
| How did Roy Wilkins describe the teenagers in the 1964 subway attacks and why, given the larger battle for civil rights, might he have chosen to describe them in that particular way? |
Requirements:
A) You should have at least two quotations from Wilkins and at least two from the historical context I have provided you above about the battle for civil rights.
B) Be careful when introducing your quotations from Wilkins that you correctly identify the original source of that quotation—not simply in your citation for that quotation but in the INTRODUCTION of that quotation.
C) Organize your response around the familiar claim/evidence/warrant format and be sure to have at least two pieces of evidence from the text in the form of direct quotations of no more than 10 words. (see here for how to reduce quotations).
D) Integrate your direct quotations using either METHOD 3 OR METHOD 4 FROM THE EXPLANATION OF HOW TO INTEGRATE QUOTATIONS (-10% IF YOU DO NOT)
NOTE: FOR TEACHING PURPOSES I HAVE EXCLUDED THE NECESSARY CITATIONS AND REFERENCES IN MUCH OF THE ABOVE MATERIAL.