New York police policed public folk singing as a proxy for other marginalized groups

Evidence

Although the impromptu hootenannies had been going on since 1944, the police—acting under a directive by Mayor Wagner’s new city parks commissioner Newbold Morris—began dispersing and arresting folksingers for performing without a permit. “Musicians of unsavory appearance” were panhandling in the park! In a way, the folksingers were surrogates for the Beats, the Blacks, the tourists, and the gay men who cruised the area known as the Meat Rack, along the square’s western edge. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 291

Categorization

• DEFINE: Explains how ‘Beatnik Riot’ functioned — folksingers as surrogates absorbing police pressure aimed at several out-groups at once.