The eight teenagers -- five black, three white -- sat quietly on the outer-office floor, waiting for an audience with Mayor John Snyder.
Each day they did homework or read magazines while the business of York City went on around them.
They carried signs denouncing "police brutality in York" and sang "We Shall Overcome."
It was July 1965, and they wanted to ask the mayor why he wouldn't appoint a police review board.
They sat there for more than seven days, while Snyder used the side door. One youth was arrested for loitering.
They never got their answer. Accusations of police brutality went unheeded.
By the following summer, York's young blacks had turned from songs and signs to rocks and bottles.
In a few more years, they would turn to rifles and Molotov cocktails.
The growing rift between the police and the city's black community ultimately led to the riots of 1969 -- disturbances that left two people dead. But it is a story that has only begun to be told.
The police canine corps, formed in 1961 and once a hated symbol of oppression, is gone. But the scars remain. There still is no citizen review of police and city officials acknowledge distrust still divides many residents from those who are supposed to protect them.
In October, two men were convicted of second-degree murder in the 1969 death of Lillie Belle Allen, a black woman ambushed by white gang members. Former York Mayor Charles Robertson, a police officer during the riots, was acquitted of charges he provoked the violence that culminated in Allen's death.
But the story of the police role in the riots won't end there.
Allen's family has filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against the city, Robertson and four other policeman, alleging the police were complicit in the murder and its subsequent cover-up.
And when two black men from York go on trial next week for the murder of rookie policeman Henry Schaad, fatally shot in a black neighborhood during the riots, allegations of police provocation could be pivotal.
Terrence McGowan, the attorney representing Stephen D. Freeland, one of the two men accused of killing Schaad, has said he wants a jury of people who remember York's history -- how tension between blacks and police grew and then snapped in eight days of violence and destruction.
The story of Schaad's and Allen's deaths is the story of how the anger of many blacks boiled over into violence, and how some whites, including police officers, came to believe that the only way to protect their neighborhoods was to respond in kind.
It is a story that was nearly York's undoing, one that begins at least six years earlier, on a restless July night in 1963, with a pinch and a scream.
Let loose the dogs
Exactly what happened on July 19, 1963, in the first block of South Newberry Street may never be known.
The police later said a fight broke out and a bottle was thrown at them. But witnesses claimed it was just a boy pinching a girl, who then let out a scream.
Police quickly swarmed over the block, several with police dogs. The K-9 officers commanded their dogs with shouts of "kill." Three blacks were bitten in the scuffle, which ended only when one man's sister threw herself between him and the dog attacking him.
When a German shepherd dog attacks, it doesn't just intimidate. When it bites, the upper and lower incisors connect like scissors and the large canine teeth remove chunks of flesh. The wounds infect easily and the scars usually are permanent.
Two of the victims were in court the next morning bandaged and covered with dried blood. The magistrate was unmoved, and gave them $50 fines or 20 days in jail.
Blacks were outraged.
More than 200 people, blacks as well as whites, met in Bethlehem Baptist Church to form the Peaceful Committee for Immediate Action in York.
They were people who had long felt blacks were subject to "second-class citizenship" in York, and now, with strength in numbers, were saying so.
They saw the use of police dogs as only part of the problem. They wanted more economic opportunities, an end to segregated housing, equal treatment in the courts.
Harold Brown, a former William Penn High School basketball star active in the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE) in California, was invited back to speak to the committee.
"This is my home, and I want to tell you that York, Pa., is known as one of the worst towns in the country," he said.
A time divided
York in 1963 was experiencing the growing pains of a small town busy becoming a large town.
World War II and the post-war years had been good to York. Lured by an advantageous location, an industrious work force and a business community with a remarkable ability to pool resources for the benefit of the town, manufacturers had flocked here.
York County's population had exploded.
The county grew 14 percent between 1940 and 1950 and 15 percent from 1950 to 1960, to 233,690. Prosperity was everywhere.
Almost everywhere.
Between 1950 and 1960, York City lost about 5,000 people, as homes and factories sprouted in the suburbs. The city's black population, historically around 1,000, surged to nearly 5,000 in 1960, 8.8 percent of the city's population.
Most blacks lived in the oldest, most crowded and dilapidated neighborhoods. More than half rented their homes, and, of these, 47 percent had no hot water, 53 percent had no central heating, 40 percent had no bathrooms.
York was a place where blacks always had been expected to know their place.
"Almost all Negroes in York feel that even if they could afford to, they could not live anywhere they please, and this feeling is substantiated by the opinions and practices of York's real estate brokers and bankers," stated the 1960 "Community Audit of Human Rights," sponsored by the York County Council of Community Services.
Indeed, 31 of the 38 real estate brokers interviewed for the audit said they would not sell a home in a white neighborhood to a black family. Such discrimination would not be illegal until 1964, but it wasn't racism, they said, just a matter of property values.
"It would be bad for business," was one typical response. "People would believe me rottener than (the) person selling house."
"Negroes don't like to live in suburban areas," wrote another. They would "rather be close to downtown in the bright lights where they can raise hell together."
Of 99 York area companies surveyed, blacks made up just 1 percent of the 10,626 employees and 15 percent said they would not hire blacks for any jobs. No blacks were among the 1,000 members of the trade unions of carpenters, brick masons, electricians and plumbers in York.
The average black family lived on $3,492 per year, compared to $6,000 for white families. Unemployment among blacks was triple that of whites.
Against this backdrop, voters in 1961 elected the man who would come to symbolize racism and inequality for many in York: John Snyder.
Old York, new challenge
To many, Snyder was the old York.
He was a businessman, a World War I veteran, meticulous and a penny-pincher. He was a city councilman from 1932 to 1940, overseeing city finances. When he was mayor from 1943 to 1947, he annually refunded part of his salary to the city.
He is not easy to categorize. While, later in life, he referred to blacks as "darkies," he occasionally was known to express awareness of their plight.
For example, during his first term as mayor, in 1946, he wrote a letter to more than 50 of York's largest employers concerning their refusal to hire blacks.
"This results in making disciples for Communism, which is reaching alarming proportions," he wrote. "Whether we like it or not, conditions in this country are changing and we must change our views to meet the situation. We have here a dangerous and explosive condition, fertile soil for the seeds of violence, hatred and revolution.
"Some are qualified to do office work, clerical work, sales work and work in the trades, but there are no openings for them. If we were so restricted, we would soon rebel. So will they."
In 1947, Snyder was defeated for reelection after he banned the William Penn High School band from marching through Continental Square after football victories. But the race was overshadowed by controversy over a ballot measure to allow movie theaters to be open Sundays.
He returned to private life, but power was not so easily relinquished. He ran again in 1959 and lost.
Just two years later, he ran again and won. His rigid conservatism and fear of outside influences seemed to mesh well with the feelings of many.
He once described himself as a "stubborn Pennsylvania Dutchman." Those pushing for change soon would find out just how stubborn he could be.
Peace and protests
Snyder was in office just eight months when he created the K-9 Corps.
A dog lover who kept a German shepherd as a pet, he saw great law enforcement potential in the animals.
Within a year, there were complaints of racial bias by city police, a force of 92 white and six black officers. The York chapter of the NAACP in April 1963 planned a protest rally against the dogs, but chapter president Russell J. Hackley canceled it after meeting with Snyder.
The mayor had assured him the police wouldn't harass anyone, and would treat everyone the same.
"I'd rather not stir up anything more," Hackley told a reporter. "I feel the problem has been resolved."
It hadn't.
Four months later, after the three men were attacked on South Newberry Street, the Peaceful Committee for Immediate Action asked Snyder to ban the dogs.
"They are one of the greatest assets to any police department," he responded. "There would be no need for police dogs in a well-behaved society."
So on March 24, 300 blacks and a "scattering of whites," according to The York Dispatch, marched on City Hall.
Their signs read "York Shames the Nation" and "An End to Police Brutality."
It was not just about the dogs.
"We're hoping, by such demonstrations, to bring into sharp focus to every citizen of the community our discontent and dissatisfaction comparable to our impatience with second-class citizenship," read a statement from the committee.
But Snyder was not even at City Hall during the march -- and he had ordered all his top aides and department heads away.
"Demonstrations in themselves cannot settle anything but can be misconstrued, thereby producing unfavorable reactions," he said a week later.
Many of York's whites supported the K-9 Corps.
During the July 24 rally, two white youths held up signs reading "Keep the Dogs." James Bentzel, Snyder's secretary, told the Dispatch his office was taking many calls to expand the K-9 Corps.
People thought "it wasn't safe to walk the streets for fear of being mugged or robbed, but the dogs were a step in bettering this situation."
The Peaceful Committee met with Snyder again in August and said he should consider re-forming the police review board.
The previous administration had established the board, which met in public to hear citizens' complaints about police. One of Snyder's first acts as mayor was to disband it.
On Aug. 28, 1963, many of York's activists traveled to Washington, D.C., to hear Martin Luther King Jr. tell 200,000 people about his dream for a new America.
York hosted its own mass rally on Oct. 20. About 1,500 blacks and whites gathered at Penn Common. A steady procession of ministers and NAACP officials spoke on the evils of racism.
On the dais behind them sat county commissioners, city councilmen, political party chairmen and Snyder.
The mood again was peaceful, the talk of working together to solve problems.
It was the largest civil rights rally in York, before or since, and the last time so many prominent Yorkers publicly identified themselves with the movement.
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