Photo of the Day: Bella Abzug Park, NYC

I took the photo accompanying this post a few weeks ago, when I had a few minutes to spare before boarding a Megabus for a short Thanksgiving vacation in Pittsburgh.

Oddly enough, though I had been in Hudson Yards a few times since it opened several years ago, I had never noticed Bella Abzug Park. 

New York residents who are Gen Xers or younger are likely to have little memory of the local politician this urban park honors, and the knowledge of tourists coming upon it by happenstance at Hudson Boulevard between West 37th and 33rd Streets is likely to be thinner still.

But, for almost a decade and a half from the mid-Sixties to late Seventies, Bella Abzug (1920-1998) attracted a great deal of attention, even beyond the borders of New York State.

This colorful and controversial feminist would have garnered at least some national attention anyway, because of the way she demanded respect from her male colleagues on Capitol Hill. But she became an especially outsized figure in New York, the media capital of the world, at a time when the anti-war, feminist, and gay rights movements were coming into their own.

News image creators from that time—newspaper and magazine editors, TV crews, and cartoonists—latched onto Abzug’s penchant for enormous hats (which she began to wear as a young lawyer, she later recalled, because “working women wore hats; it was the only way they would take you seriously”).

Then there was that voice—regarded as assertive by supporters and abrasive by critics.

Abzug would claim that her critics were, all too often, guilty of male chauvinism. There was more than a little truth to her view (she was frequently shunned by all-male committees and mocked for her weight—criticisms that most male colleagues never had to endure). 

But it is also true that her anger management issues could lead her to lash out even at supporters and her own staffers. The nickname "Battling Bella" might have been a badge of honor she wore proudly, but also pointed to the stereotype that would ultimately limit how far she would go in politics.

Nobody, however, could deny that Abzug was a conviction (as opposed to convicted) politician—a figure who displayed incisive intelligence and a steely will in labor, civil rights, and civil liberties cases undertaken as a young lawyer associated with the National Lawyers Guild, an organization of progressive attorneys denounced during the Fifties by the House Un-American Activities Committee.

Abzug was part of the Manhattan-based Democratic reform movement of the late Fifties and early Sixties that helped overthrow the Tammany Hall machine. In 1970, she was elected to the House of Representatives, and five years later became the first woman to hold a job as party whip. 

Unfortunately, her time in the corridors of power was short, as she lost her seat when she tried unsuccessfully to move up the Senate, only to be beaten by Pat Moynihan in the 1976 Democratic primary.

But Abzug left her mark in advocating for unions, the peace movement, and civil rights, civil liberties and LBGQ rights. And now, this park, part of a six-block-long greenway in Hell’s Kitchen, will remind future generations of her contributions.

Ironically, a park that offers weary urban walkers a chance to rest has taken its name from an activist politician who rarely if ever rested throughout her career.

This Day in Southern History (Supreme Court Intervenes in Racial Cause Celebre)

July 26, 1950—Heeding an appeal two days earlier by future Congresswoman Bella Abzug, Supreme Court Associate Justice Harold Burton issued a stay of execution for a convicted rapist whose case raised the issue of the impact of race on the Southern criminal justice system.

The action by Burton, the only Republican among the four appointed to the high court by President Harry Truman, incensed locals gathered at the Laurel, Miss., courthouse where the death of Willie McGee had been eagerly anticipated for the past four years. In annoyed terms that would echo in reaction to the civil-rights era that would begin in a few years, they denounced “damn Communists” and “outside interference,” according to a contemporary report by Time Magazine.

The complainers were referring to Abzug and the group that had hired her, the Civil Rights Congress (CRC), which was affiliated with the Communist Party and which had, since its founding in 1946, spearheaded battles for civil rights for African-Americans, and civil liberties for white and black labor movement radicals. But the CRC victory in 1950 was short-lived, as the full Supreme Court refused to handle the appeal of the case and McGee died in the electric chair in May 1951.

I came across a brief description of the McGee case in Leandra Ruth Zarnow’s recent biography, Battling Bella. It highlighted Abzug’s courage, as a young New York Jewish woman, in venturing into the Deep South at a time when Northern white liberals were not only regarded suspiciously in the region but threatened.

But there was comparatively little in the book about the defendant. For that, readers may want to check out an NPR news segment from 10 years ago that followed the efforts of his granddaughter to ferret out the truth. (Two years later, a full-scale account of the case, Alex Heard’s The Eyes of Willie McGee, would be published.)  

The case began in the fall of 1945, when local police charged McGee with breaking into the home of Willette Hawkins, a 32-year-old white housewife, threatening her with a knife and raping her, with one of her three children, her ailing 20-month-old daughter, by her side. McGee’s lawyers at this point did not mount a vigorous defense, even urging him to plead insanity.

The most damning charge against the prosecution’s case was the composition of the jury: Not a single Black served on it. Not surprisingly, it took the 12 men and women only 2½ minutes to sentence McGee to death. It bears noting that no white man in the state had ever received a death sentence for rape.

A retrial the following year introduced a new element--a confession supposedly signed by McGee but not introduced at the first trial--but a similar result: conviction in only 12 minutes.

Matters changed dramatically once Abzug was hired by the CRC in 1948. They would press a much more hotly disputed claim: that what happened between Mrs. Hawkins and McGee was not an assault but a consensual affair. In one stroke, they had touched the proverbial third rail: interracial sexual relations.

At the time of his arrest, supporters would say, McGee did not dare to make such a claim because he feared for his life—and, indeed, threats of lynching were so numerous and credible that he had to be transported in a National Guard truck and dressed in fatigues to conceal his identity.

Still lingering in the atmosphere was the notorious Scottsboro case, in which nine African-American youths had been charged with raping two white women on a train in Alabama in 1931. The McGee case had now become a cause celebre in its own right, as:

*"Save Willie McGee" events and petition drives were held across America;

*International supporters including Jean Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Jean Cocteau, and Richard Wright organized a rally in Paris, with similar demonstrations in Moscow and China; and

*William Faulkner, Paul Robeson, Josephine Baker, Lorraine Hansberry, and Albert Einstein supported McGee.

But, if the CRC attracted publicity to the case, its Communist affiliation also may have limited its ultimate success. By the time of Abzug’s dramatic Supreme Court appeal and Burton’s stay of execution, Sen. Joseph McCarthy had garnered headlines with his sensational claims about Communists in the State Department. 

With the nation in the grip of the Red Scare, the NAACP, President Truman, and Eleanor Roosevelt—all normally champions of civil rights—avoided involvement.

McGee’s last message to his wife Rosalie, written the night before his electrocution, continues to resonate, nearly 70 years later:

To wife Rosalie, the night before he died: “Tell the people the real reason they are going to take my life is to keep the Negro down….They can’t do this as long as you and the children keep on fighting. Never forget to tell them why they killed their daddy. I know you won’t fail me. Tell the people to keep on fighting.”