July Nineteen Sixty-Nine

The unrest that tore through York in July of nineteen sixty-nine did not arrive without warning. Racial tension had been building for years. Black residents had organized in nineteen sixty-three, marching to City Hall to demand a biracial police review board after documented incidents of police violence.

The all-white city council turned them down. The same pattern repeated across the decade: grievances raised, demands denied, frustration hardening. When the violence finally broke, it broke fast.

In mid-July of nineteen sixty-nine, over the course of roughly ten days, more than sixty people were injured, buildings burned, and the city fractured along racial lines. Pennsylvania Governor Raymond Shafer declared a state of emergency and called in two hundred National Guard troops to restore order. Two deaths became the center of everything.

Henry Schaad was twenty-two years old, a rookie police officer with eleven months on the force. He was riding in an armored vehicle when a bullet struck him. He lingered in the hospital for nearly two weeks before dying from his wounds.

Lillie Belle Allen was twenty-seven years old, a seamstress and mother of two from Aiken, South Carolina, visiting family in York. On July twenty-first, she was riding in a car with relatives when it entered a street controlled by a white gang known as the Newberry Street Boys. The car was met with gunfire from the street, from rooftops, from windows.

More than one hundred rounds were fired. Allen was killed. No charges were filed for more than thirty years.

In two thousand one, prosecutors reopened both cases. Two men were convicted of second-degree murder in Allen's killing. A former police officer who later served as mayor of York, Charles Robertson, was charged in connection with the same attack but was acquitted in two thousand two.

The names are on memorial benches in the city today.