I admit, I was picturing Spielberg. I didn’t expect a warehouse of wooden crates exactly, but when a classmate and I visited the Schomberg Center for Research in Black Culture, I was hoping for dust and cobwebs, or at least some microfilm. I always liked the whirring sound those machines make.
My goal was to find another perspective on the Michael Farmer case, a blockbuster murder trial I’ve been researching that captivated New York City and eventually the nation in 1958. What I’d read so far was mainstream news coverage. But given the racial dynamics at play — the suspects accused of stabbing Farmer, a white 15-year-old, were all either African American or Hispanic — I wanted to see how the city’s African American newspapers covered the trial.
The Farmer trial didn’t exist in a vacuum. The killing had erupted out of a dispute between youth gangs over access to a municipal swimming pool, and played out in a period of intense anxiety over juvenile delinquency in America. What seemed like a wave of crime committed by teenagers probably wasn’t — historians have had a hard time verifying the reported spike in violence and deviancy reported at the time — but it felt very real in the 1950s.
Farmer’s murder would become something of a political football in the national debate about the state of the country’s youth. From the very beginning, the details were fudged by politicians looking to make a point. One widely reported detail was Farmer’s polio-related disability. He walked with a limp. But in the emotional retelling of the night of his murder, he became “crippled” and “helpless.” Some testimony in the interminable congressional hearings about juvenile delinquency — hearings that stretched for more than a decade, focusing on everything from venereal disease to 3-D comic books — even had him in a wheelchair, even though Farmer had at most a minor limp. Farmer was quickly turned into a blameless victim in the debate that followed, though the truth may have been less cut-and-dried.
I’d read some accounts of the trial that mentioned a disparity in coverage between the city’s mainstream outlets and the minority community media. I was hoping to get an idea of those differences. The aspect of the story I’d been focusing on most closely was the relationship between gangs of various ethnicities. Competing factions tended to brush up against one another in Washington Heights, a formerly Irish but increasingly heterogeneous neighborhood that was then in transition.
When we arrived at the Schomberg center and asked where we might find some African American newspapers from the time, I was a bit surprised when the librarian sat us down at a computer station and pulled up ProQuest. Wouldn’t we need some latex gloves to handle delicate manuscripts from the past? Shouldn’t we be ushered into some kind of a cleanroom?
As it turns out, much of the material we needed was available electronically, in the form of keyword-searchable PDFs. Convenient, yes. But romantic? Not exactly.
We spent a few hours reading and taking notes at the library computers, but realized that the institutional setting had limited us somewhat. Most of our belongings had been checked at the door, including the thumb drive I’d brought along with me. The library computers wouldn’t allow access to email, so we couldn’t send them to ourselves that way. Perhaps the final indignity of the day was the realization that all of the resources we had intrepidly come to seek out were available through the Columbia library, from the convenience of our personal laptops. We came looking for archives, and found that the modern world had beat us to them.