1967 Plainfield Riot - Ledger - Gleason family profiled

Published in the Star-Ledger, Tuesday, July 10, 2007

[Mark Di Ionno]
For one riot-scarred family, a brutal, haunting death


Elizabeth Gleason was 4 years old the night her father never came home.

Patrolman John Vincent Gleason Jr. has been dead now longer than he lived. He was 39 years old on July 16, 1967, when he was beaten to death by a mob during the third night of the Plainfield riots.

He left a young wife, the former Jane Shea, and daughters Ann Marie, 7, Elizabeth, and the baby, Susan, who was just 2 months old.

Forty years is not a long time.

"Every time I think about him, images of how he died shoot right in there," said Elizabeth, whose married name is LaTorre. "How he died has robbed me of my good memories."

Plainfield, like Newark a few days before, was fractured by the riots, and on milestone anniversaries people look for truth of cause, and the truth of impact. In the end, people are left with their own version of truth.

So we wrestle with definitions. Were they riots or civil disturbances? Was it street anarchy or justified protest?

All these years later, there are many versions of the truth. The warehousing of unskilled people in public projects. Loss of manufacturing jobs. White flight to newer suburbs. The Plainfield mayor at the time blamed outside agitators and television for showing images from Newark and Detroit, spurring copycat violence.

There is some simple truth in all of it.

But lost in all the explanations and excuses, the academic studies and sloganeering, is this fact: For some people, none of that matters. Their husbands or wives, sons or daughters, or fathers or mothers didn't come home one night in July.

The truth for the family of John Gleason is this: He was a loving husband and father who is forever missed.

The truth is the brutality of his murder remains a stomach-turning image for his survivors.

The truth is only two members of the mob that kicked and stomped him to death -- with such violence a judge later ruled mortuary photographs were too disturbing to be admissible at trial -- went to jail and both were released long before their sentences were up.

This is the truth that clouds Elizabeth LaTorre's memories.

She keeps a box of yellowed clippings documenting the murder of her father, and the ensuing 13 years of trials, in her living room closet, across from a table of family photos, which includes the black-and-white picture of her father the newspapers ran dozen of times. She is organizing the clips into scrapbooks.

"My mother gave them to me. She was moving and wanted to downsize, but I couldn't part with it. For some reason, I keep going back to it."

The truth is, it never goes away because it dominated her childhood. Not just the murder, but the continuing three-ring trials that brought in radical defense lawyers like William Kunstler to Plainfield.

"We all knew my father was killed in the line of duty, but we didn't know how," she said, "because my mother protected us. But then came the trials, and she had to tell us because it was all over the news."

For years, there were trials and mistrials, acquittals, appeals and overturned convictions. At some point, Jane Gleason, then remarried to a man named Matthew Philippi and with a new baby Jennifer, could no longer hide the truth from her girls.

"I was 13 when she told us how he died," Elizabeth said. "We all had a difficult time with it. We had nightmares. Every time you would try to put it out of your mind, it would keep coming back."

John Gleason was the lone fatality in the riots, which began on Friday, July 14, after a protest march escalated into a rock- and bottle-throwing melee, which spilled into early Saturday morning. On Sunday, young blacks gathered at Green Brook Park and as police dispersed the crowd, violence erupted. Cars were overturned and set on fire. Stores were looted. Police cordoned off 71 blocks of the West End to contain the rioters and keep gangs of whites out.

John Gleason was guarding the perimeter at the corner of West Second Street and Plainfield Avenue. Eyewitness newspaper accounts said he was trying to move a white gang out of the area when blacks turned on him. Later versions say he chased a looter into the black area and shot him, and was attacked by a mob.

Either way, the viciousness of the attack on Gleason heightened the Plainfield confrontation from a youth-driven civil disturbance to a riot that left a once-grand small city broken.

By later that night, a gun factory in neighboring Middlesex was robbed, and rumors of snipers ran as rampant as looters through the downtown. The National Guard was called in. By riot's end, more than 20 people were shot, and another two dozen beaten or seriously injured, and the city's black section remained under armed guard for five days.

As leaders tried to heal the city, they found a calming voice in Jane Gleason, who said to an apologetic black mourner at her husband's wake, "I hold no bitterness in my heart. Bitterness cannot be a part of my life, I have too much to concern me now."

Those words were repeated in a newspaper editorial, asking for leaders and rioters to restore the city to normal.

But normal, like pain, is never easily defined. The truth is, Plainfield sank to a new normal.

And in this respect, the Gleasons not only lost their husband and father, they lost their community.

"A few years after the riot, everybody was gone," Elizabeth said. "We moved to Green Brook. My grandparents, everybody, eventually moved out."

The Plainfield that emerged after the riots was not the same town where generations of Gleasons and Sheas built lives. It was not the same town where John Gleason and Jane Shea married, where John became a city cop, and worked part-time as a florist to support his growing family. It was not the same town where they bought a yellow Cape Cod on Salem Street [sic], a little house with a great backyard, the little house he didn't come home to 40 years ago.

Mark Di Ionno may be reached at mdiionno@starledger.com or (973) 392-1728.

Salem Street = Salem Road?
Gleason shot and killed a 4-year-old Black girl the year before?

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