Brave mayor quelled crowds

SID DAVIDOFF’S two-way radio crackled to life just after 8:30 p.m. on April 4, 1968.

The young aide to Mayor John Lindsay was eating dinner with a colleague at a steakhouse on University Place near E. 11th St.

Within minutes, Davidoff was on the phone with the mayor’s night secretary. The news was beyond grim.

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. had been shot dead in Memphis.

King’s assassination marked a seminal moment in American history. But Davidoff had no time to reflect on its significance.

The call was passed through to the mayor. Lindsay declared that he wanted to go to Harlem to be with the people.

Davidoff thought it was a bad idea: A white mayor heading to the beating heart of black America in the minutes after the assassination of the nation’s most influential civil rights leader.

“Let me at least get up there and see what it’s like,” Davidoff recalls telling Lindsay.

He and fellow aide Barry Gottehrer hopped into Davidoff’s city-issued black Mercury and switched on its siren and flashing red light. The car shot up the FDR Drive.

Around the same time, a 37-year-old assemblyman named Charles Rangel was digesting the dreadful news at a community meeting on W. 137th St.

“The pain and the shock left people absolutely speechless,” Rangel recalled. “The only thing you could hear in that group was moaning: ‘Oh, no. It can’t be. It didn’t happen.’

“I thought the worst. I thought that the country was coming apart.”

Rangel would soon be on his way to the same place as the young mayoral aides. Harlem, they all feared, was poised to explode.

lll King’s assassination sparked devastating riots in several American cities.

Newark went up in flames. Baltimore erupted in chaos. Washington saw 13 people killed in three days of looting, fires and bloody strife.

Thousands of active-duty soldiers, including snipers, were called in to quell the unrest in Chicago, Baltimore and Washington.

New York experienced spasms of looting and arson in Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. The perpetrators smashed windows and stole goods from several grocery, liquor and clothing stores in the early morning hours of April 5.

Times Square also saw an outburst of violence, and minor looting hit Columbus Circle.

In all, some 120 people were arrested in the mayhem. But there was no large-scale riot, no bloody confrontations with police, no raging infernos devouring whole blocks.

While there are surely many reasons — political and economic — to explain the absence of widespread unrest, many credit the city’s relative calm to what transpired on the streets of Harlem in those first few hours after the nation learned it had lost King.

lll On his way uptown, Davidoff started compiling in his head a list of the community figures they would contact in anticipation of a visit from the mayor.

They weren’t the typical names you’d expect in a mayor’s Rolodex. These were street preachers, gang leaders and even Ellsworth (Bumpy) Johnson, the larger-than-life Harlem kingpin who controlled the numbers racket.

Lindsay had made it a hallmark of his mayoralty to cultivate relationships with such influential, if not wholly innocent, characters. These men commanded respect on the street. Their support would signal to potential troublemakers that a visit from the mayor had the blessing of the neighborhood’s most respected — and feared — figures.

Davidoff pulled up his car outside a popular lounge on W. 125th St. called the Shalimar. This was the de facto headquarters of the Five Percenters, an offshoot of the Black Muslims. The group’s leader was a man known as Allah. “He, probably more than anybody we knew, had his ears to the ground as to what was happening,” Davidoff recalled.

From the Shalimar, Davidoff saw people pouring out of buildings in droves. Soon hundreds of people had flooded the streets in and around the bar.

“At this point, it was sorrow and grief, which could easily explode into anger and rage,” Davidoff said.

He reached out to the mayor and described the scene. “I’m coming up,” Lindsay replied. Davidoff tried to persuade him otherwise. “This is