During the nine-thirty A.M. third period, a white male student jumped a black male student in a hallway. As news of the attack spread, enraged black students, outnumbered at Utrecht four to one, fled from their classrooms and stormed through the lunchroom and out of the school building. Teachers barricaded their classroom doors and locked white students inside. The following day, racial fights on the nearby BMT “el” and outside the school building resulted in several injuries to both white and black students (some serious enough to require hospitalization), and in the suspension of eighteen students and the arrest of six others. On Wednesday, school was shut down. On Thursday, New Utrecht, heavily guarded by police from four precincts, opened only for Regents exams. On Friday, October 11, school reopened. No serious incidents were reported that day to the more than two-hundred policemen who were there to be sure that there would be no repetition of bloody Tuesday. On that tense Friday, however, twenty-one blacks, reputed to be carrying meat cleavers, pipes, and chains, were arrested at the BMT station. None of them was a New Utrecht student.

Those are the facts of which everybody — black students and white students, neighbourhood hang-out goons, teachers, schools administrators, and community people — seem to agree. Those are the only facts on which everybody agrees. From there on, Bensonhurst was a changed community.

There is one other point of consensus; that is the fact that no one from the press cares enough even to try to sort truth from fiction. The population of Bensonhurst and New Utrecht is vociferously contemptuous of media people, and in particular, of television journalists, who are seen as predatory, manipulative trouble-mongerers with scant regard for fact or sensibility. I heard from too many sources not to give credence to the story that television cameramen “posed” and instructed kids (“All right, let‘s have fists up in the air... let’s hear “kill the niggers “... or “kill whitey"‘) for maximum-impact footage. (The first call alerting anybody to the troubles at Utrecht was made [by a student] not to the cops, but to Channel 5 TV.)