Word: gilligans
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...crowd of excited Negro youths at his back, the off-duty cop held his badge in one hand, his .38-cal. revolver in the other, and advanced toward the doorway to face a Negro boy who was holding a knife. "I'm a police lieutenant," said Thomas R. Gilligan. "Come out and drop it." James Powell, 15, kept the knife chest-high, lunged at Gilligan. The policeman fired a warning shot to the left, into the building. Powell swung the knife. Gilligan blocked the blow with his right hand, but the blade scraped his arm. Powell slashed out again...
That was New York Police Lieut. Thomas Gilligan's version of an incident last July that exploded into five days of Negro rioting in Harlem and Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant section. And last week, after taking 1,600 pages of testimony from 45 witnesses, a New York county grand jury decided that Gilligan's account was essentially correct, ruled that he was not criminally liable for James Powell's death...
...would remain for a grand jury to get at all the facts. Some Negro witnesses claimed that Gilligan gave no warning, others that the youth had had no knife-even though one was found in the street not far from Powell's dead, outstretched hand...
...many people it seemed incredible that a man of Gilligan's experience could not have dealt with the boy without resorting to gunfire.*For two days after that, this notion seeped through the Negro districts of New York City like liquid dynamite. Negroes, long lacerated by the thousand painful shards of ghetto life, by emotions stirred in the civil rights movement, by their hatred for police, whom they regard as both oppressive and corrupt, were only too ready to believe that the Powell death was a case of deliberate murder. And "police brutality" became their battle...
...raunchy radicals issued inflammatory broadsides. From a pro-Red China outfit called the Progressive Labor Movement came a handout that screeched insurrection: "Once again the cops have murdered one of our children. They have been killing about one black person a day in New York City. Lieut. Thomas Gilligan (remember that name) shot James once and James fell to the ground. This fascist cop stood over him and fired two more bullets into him. He then kicked the dead body. THIS is THE WAY THE FASCIST AND RACIST COPS OPERATE HERE IN 'LIBERAL' NEW YORK. These murderers follow...