At least two police departments felt it necessary to dispatch officers to travel far beyond their jurisdictions to monitor events firsthand in Washington. In Philadelphia, Commissioner Howard Leary assigned James Reaves, a Black inspector heading the Police Community Relations Division, to travel to D.C. by himself to attend the event in plainclothes and write a report on what he observed. This was in spite of the more than 50 Philadelphia Guardians who were already attending the event who could have easily shared their impressions of the day with Leary.
But Reaves had a different assignment in Washington. The 47-year-old veteran officer had a long record of working closely with George Fencl, the head of Philadelphia’s intelligence squad, also known as the Civil Disobedience Unit. Among other responsibilities, the CDU was tasked with creating a file card for every demonstrator it could identify at protests in Philadelphia. Reaves later recalled that he initially had his concerns about the march and had been “hesitant to attend for fear of trouble.” Law enforcement justifiably expected violence, Reaves contended years later, because “riots and demonstrations were the order of the day in many urban communities, and the expression ‘long hot summer’ was well understood. Therefore any information on the subject was anxiously sought.” This was a strange rationale for traveling to Washington, essentially a rewriting of history, considering that virtually no urban riots occurred that decade until uprisings in Harlem, Rochester, and Philadelphia erupted in the summer of 1964.
Reaves described in his memoirs his joy in witnessing the march. He was especially glad that “there were no embarrassing incidents to mar the events of the day,” hinting at his fear that the march would somehow reflect unfavorably on Black people. But his positive impression in no way precluded him from sharing his surveillance with police leadership. Upon returning to Philadelphia, he reported to Commissioner Leary how peaceful the march had been, which he concluded was due largely to the security provided by the Guardians.
But Leary, as Reaves recalled, “seemed more interested in who was there, who spoke, and the attitude of the speakers as well as the crowd. He was so impressed that he had me give a verbal report at the following inspectors’ meeting in his office.” Apparently, Philadelphia’s police leadership did not think that the wall-to-wall media coverage of the march sufficed to demystify the day’s activities, so they needed their plainclothes colleague to share the things he had seen that had somehow escaped the notice of thousands of reporters.