At 3 A.M. the level of violence fell—rioters must sleep, too—and police patrols imposed a semblance of order in the ghetto. In the morning shop managers called their insurance companies, clerks cleaned up the mess, and those who knew nothing about riots assumed this one was over. Their disillusionment began at 7:45 P.M. that Thursday, just twenty-four hours after the arrest of young Frye. At first it was all a repetition of Wednesday evening: youths pouncing on passing autos, pelting cops with bricks, breaking windows. The change came at 4 A.M. At that hour the day before, a peace of exhaustion had fallen over the ghetto. This time a second shift of rioters spilled into the streets. These men were older and more vicious. They were also armed. Dick Gregory toured Watts with a bullhorn, begging for order, and was shot in the leg. The ghetto violence was approaching the force of an insurrection, but the authorities didn’t realize it yet; a flying wedge of policemen cleared Watts’s darkened streets and then announced that the situation was under control.
The truth was revealed to them at 10 A.M., when two white salesmen were attacked in the first incident of daytime violence. At 11 A.M. a policeman wounded a black looter. Governor Edmund Brown, on vacation in Greece, read reports of the growing disorders and hurried home; his lieutenant governor granted a request from the L.A. police chief for National Guard troops. The first contingent of Guardsmen reached Watts Friday afternoon. Even as they were being briefed in an elementary school the version they heard was being outdated by new developments in the ghetto. More than 5,000 rioters now roamed a 150-block area, firing buildings with Molotov cocktails and ambushing firemen who answered the alarms. Watts claimed its first fatality, a sheriff’s deputy mortally wounded in the stomach, at 9:40 P.M. Three other deaths quickly followed. National Guard soldiers entering the district with fixed bayonets saw looters, their way illumined by a hundred major fires, carrying guns, appliances, liquor, jewelry—everything of value—from the shops of the ghetto. Crudely lettered signs outside some stores read “Black Brother,” “Soul Brother,” “Negro Owned,” and “Owned by a Brother.” Some had been robbed anyway. One gang was trying to burn Oak Park Community Hospital, which was crowded with Negroes hurt in the disorders. Robert Richardson, a black Los Angeles Times reporter, wrote: “The rioters were burning their city now, as the insane sometimes mutilate themselves.”
On Saturday snipers on rooftops began picking off soldiers and policemen. Firemen were issued bulletproof vests. The Guard force grew to 10,000 men, then to 14,000; a curfew was imposed on 40 square miles Saturday and on 46 square miles Sunday. Intermittent shoot-outs continued until the early hours of Wednesday, August 18, when officers seized 35 blacks after a gunfight at a Black Muslim mosque. That was the end of it. During the six days of madness 34 had been killed, 898 hurt, and over 4,000 arrested. Losses were put at 45 million dollars.
The Watts devastation was called the worst race riot since Detroit in 1943, but it was really in a class by itself. While the death toll was the same, the damage in Detroit had been less than a million dollars. There was trouble elsewhere, too. Coincident with Watts, the West Side of Chicago ran amok when a fire truck, answering an alarm in West Garfield Park on August 12, struck and killed a black woman. Negroes fought cops and 2,000 Guardsmen for two nights, looting and hurling bottles at whites. Over 100 were arrested and 67 hurt. And in Springfield, Massachusetts, far from the ghettos of the great cities, the arrest of eighteen blacks outside a nightclub gave rise to accusations of brutality against seven cops; Molotov cocktail bombings of stores owned by whites then led to mass arrests and, once more, the calling of the National Guard. A protest march by 4,000 Springfield Negroes ended at City Hall, where George Wiley, assistant national director of CORE, told them that “the civil rights struggle in the North” would be “longer, bloodier, and more bitter” than it had been in the South.
It was characteristic of the 1960s that each outbreak of violence was followed by the appointment of a commission to study it. Governor Brown picked a panel of eminent citizens led by John A. McCone to look into Watts. Their findings were published under the title Violence in the City: An End or a Beginning? By then everyone knew that Watts was only a beginning, but the searches for remedies followed various paths. The McCone Report came down hard on the need for law and order. Black militants protested that objection to laws oppressing Negroes was what Watts had been all about. Bayard Rustin called it “the first major rebellion of Negroes against their own masochism.” Theodore H. White thought that television and radio reporting shared some of the responsibility. White charged that it had gone “beyond reporting and become a factor in itself,” and he asked, “Can electronic reporting be curbed in the higher interest of domestic tranquillity?” Martin Luther King, touring the smoking ruins of Watts, received a mixed welcome. He was growing accustomed to this. The torch had been passed to the new generation of black leaders, and it had become a real torch.
If the summer of racial disorders had been hot in 1965, it had also been short. Until Watts burst into flame that second week in August there had been hope that the country might make it that year without a major riot. The next year was a different story. Again Los Angeles sounded the tocsin, but this time it was in March that a gang of Negro students stoned the auto of a white teacher there, attacked other whites, and turned to looting. Angeleno policemen had learned a lot the year before; this new threat was suppressed overnight with only two deaths. Yet if L.A. escaped with fewer scars, the rest of the nation did not. It almost seemed as though every large black community in the United States was in rebellion against society. In Washington, D.C., Negroes rose in April. By May three California cities were embattled. Cleveland erupted in late June, and Omaha, Des Moines, and Chicago two weeks after that. Next came Cleveland, and then in swift succession Brooklyn, Baltimore, Perth Amboy, Providence, Minneapolis, Milwaukee, Detroit, Dayton, Atlanta, San Francisco, and St. Louis; Pompano Beach, Florida; Cordele, Georgia; Cicero, Illinois; and Lansing, Muskegon, Benton Harbor, and Jackson, Michigan. By the end of the summer the toll was seven dead, over 400 hurt, some 3,000 arrested, and more than five million dollars lost to vandals, looters, and arsonists. By the end of 1966, America had been scarred by forty-three race riots that year.
In Cicero a Negro march for open housing ran into a counterdemonstration by hostile whites, who repeatedly tried to lunge past police to harm the blacks. Twelve were hurt; six officers were hit by missiles; 32 of the whites were arrested. Cicero was of special interest because it demonstrated that policemen, far from starting riots, often held together a fragile peace; when Negroes went after them it was often because the cops represented authority and were the only whites in sight. In working-class communities whites often matched, and more than matched, the black rage. The tension between the races was felt on both sides. It was in 1966 that backlash came into its own.
Originally the open housing demonstration had been in Cicero’s Marquette Park and led by Martin Luther King. He called it off when a rock hit him and knocked him to his knees. Robert Lucas, Chicago chairman of CORE, defiantly sponsored the new march, explaining that “CORE wants to keep the pressure on.” Lucas was one of the new militants, and 1966 was turning into their year, too. Floyd McKissick replaced the more moderate James Farmer as head of CORE and Stokely Carmichael succeeded John Lewis as chairman of SNCC. The development was not as auspicious for the movement as they thought. Carmichael had been in office just a month when an event that none of the civil rights leaders had taken seriously showed the extent of the divisions in their ranks.
***
On June 5 James H. Meredith announced that he was leaving Memphis to hike 225 miles to Mississippi’s state capital in Jackson. His motive was to prove that American Negroes were unafraid. The McKissicks and Carmichaels thought the idea impractical and visionary—“the silliest idea I ever heard of,” one movement leader called it—and they decided to ignore him. Meredith was undaunted. Still guided by a feeling of “divine responsibility,” as he had called it in Th
ree Years in Mississippi, his account of his ordeal on the Ole Miss campus, he believed that destiny awaited him in his native state, and he was correct, destiny in this case being represented by a middle-aged, unemployed white Mississippian named Aubrey James Norvell. At 4:15 P.M. on the second day of the journey, Meredith and a convoy of FBI agents were striding along U.S. 51 just south of Hernando, Mississippi, when Norvell rose out of the bushes beside the road. “James Meredith!” he yelled. “James Meredith! I only want Meredith!” He fired three shotgun blasts. Doctors in a Memphis hospital found Meredith peppered with birdshot.
None of the wounds was serious. Norvell’s real damage had been done to the notion that Meredith’s walk needn’t be taken seriously. The bursts of gunfire had turned it into a crusade, and everyone in the movement wanted to be part of it. Dick Gregory flew to Memphis to retrace Meredith’s steps, and McKissick, Carmichael, and Martin Luther King headed south on foot from the stretch of pavement where Meredith had fallen. Dr. King, borrowing two thousand dollars to launch what he called the Meredith March for Freedom, ordered his Southern Christian Leadership Conference to mobilize resources for another Selma.
It wasn’t possible. Selma had been an achievement of united Negro leadership advocating nonviolence. Now King’s critics, and particularly those in SNCC, were out in the open. The day after Norvell’s ambush Carmichael told a Memphis rally, “The Negro is going to take what he deserves from the white man.” King deplored such demagoguery; Roy Wilkins of the NAACP and Whitney M. Young Jr. of the Urban League agreed. But the rhetoric of the young militants became more bellicose. In Philadelphia, Mississippi, where in the Freedom Summer of 1964 death had come to three members of the movement—two of them white—a white Mississippian was wounded by gunfire in the dark, and Ralph Featherstone of SNCC, far from regretting the incident, exulted that blacks were no longer meek, that “their reaction is shot for shot.” Carmichael spoke up for the Black Panther political party. In Yazoo City young Negroes chanted, “Hey! Hey! Whattaya know! White folks must go—must go!” and that night in the Yazoo City fairgrounds Willie Ricks, a twenty-three-year-old member of SNCC known as “the Reverend” because of his evangelical style, mounted a flatbed truck and delivered a sermon of hate that made older Negro leaders shudder. He spoke of the blood of whites flowing and repeatedly described his goal in two explosive words: “Black power!”
In Greenwood, forty-five miles away, Carmichael was emerging from seven hours in jail. In a way his plight was a consequence of his militancy. White liberals, dismayed by it, were being far less generous with contributions than they had been at the time of Selma. Food and shelter were a problem, and Carmichael had been arrested while trying to erect tents on a Negro school playground. He heard about Ricks’s speech just as he himself was climbing another flatbed truck to address a Greenwood rally. Using the repetition and question-and-response techniques which civil rights leaders had adopted so successfully from Negro preachers, he reminded his audience that he had been apprehended by police in a Negro schoolyard. “Everybody owns our neighborhoods except us…. Now we’re going to get something and we’re going to get some representing. We ain’t going to worry about whether it’s white—maybe black. Don’t be ashamed. We… want… black… power!”
They shouted, “That’s right!” and he took up the theme: “We… want… black power! We… want… black… power! We want black power! We want black power! That’s right—that’s what we want…. Now, from now on, when they ask you what you want, you know what to tell them. What do you want?”
“Black power!”
“What do you want?”
“Black power!”
“What do you want? Say it again!”
“Black power!”
What did it mean? Roy Wilkins had no doubts: “The term ‘black power’ means anti-white power…. It has to mean going it alone. It has to mean separatism. We of the NAACP will have none of this.” Wilkins called the phrase “the father of hatred and the mother of violence.” Martin Luther King said much the same thing at first, though later, seeing that the coalition of civil rights groups was coming apart over the issue, he hedged, interpreting it as “an appeal to racial pride, an appeal to the Negro not to be ashamed of being black, and the transfer of the powerlessness of the Negro into positive, constructive power.” McKissick saw it as an appeal to joint action: “Unless we can get around to unifying black power, we’re going to be in bad shape.” But Charles Evers, brother of the martyred Medgar Evers and the ranking NAACP worker in Mississippi, warned that “If we are marching these roads for black supremacy, we are doomed,” and A. Philip Randolph, deploring the war cry as “a menace to racial peace and prosperity” said that “No Negro who is fighting for civil rights can support black power, which is opposed to civil rights and integration.”
A nationwide New York Times survey reported that the dissension among civil rights leaders in Mississippi was reducing public support for the movement. An opinion poll found that 77 percent of whites felt the black power creed was hurting the black cause. James Meredith agreed. “There seems to be a good bit of show going on down there,” he said in New York, where he was convalescing. Fully recovered, he rejoined the march and was embraced by King and the others. Nevertheless his doubts remained. “I think something is wrong,” he said, and he spoke of “some shenanigans going on that I don’t like.”
An open break between the old leaders and the new was inevitable. It came at Canton, near the end of the Meredith March, on June 23, after police had refused to let them pitch their tents on another school playground. Refusing to disperse, twenty-five hundred blacks stood their ground. Carmichael cried, “The time for running has come to an end.” It hadn’t really—when the police charged with nightsticks and tear gas the people scattered—but when King turned down a proposal that they try to put up the tents anyway, the SNCC leadership deserted him. One of them said, “What we do from now on we will do on our own.” Then they proposed that the NAACP be excluded from the climactic rally in Jackson on the ground that its support of the march had been tepid. King and an organization of volunteer doctors and nurses, who had provided medical attention during the journey, opposed the resolution, but SNCC, CORE, and two other groups representing young blacks gave it a majority. Charles Evers said, “It’s all right. I’ll be here when they’re all gone.” He observed caustically that marches did nothing to register black voters. When the procession reached the statehouse grounds in Jackson, with a band playing “When the Saints Go Marching In,” veterans of other civil rights demonstrations noted that the whites who had marched with King in other years were not there.
That did not end the liberal commitment to justice for blacks, of course. Nor did it block programs for Negro progress which were already under way. That same month a six-month boycott of white businesses in Fayette, Mississippi, ended with the hiring of black clerks in Fayette stores, the closing of filling station toilets for colored people, and the swearing in of black policemen and deputy sheriffs. Julian Bond, having been elected to the Georgia legislature three times in twelve months, was finally seated by order of the U.S. Supreme Court. In Selma Sheriff Jim Clark quietly removed his “Never” button as his job went on the ballot. It didn’t save him; when Negro voters, registered under the voting act he had opposed, went to the polls, he lost.
Once it had been enough for all blacks that a few blacks made it. The entire race had been proud of the few. No more; typically, Carmichael quoted a Negro woman as saying that September, “The food that Ralph Bunche eats doesn’t fill my stomach.” The elevator operator and the three-dollar-a-day cotton picker wanted their share, too. It was human and it was natural, but the militants’ way of going about it was hopelessly unrealistic. Negroes constituted only 11 percent of the U.S. population. The talk of black revolution—and there was a lot of it in 1966—was senseless, and SNCC’s demand that blacks reject integration was absurd.
Philip Randolph, appalled by the violent confrontations bet
ween slum blacks and policemen, suggested in September that “the time has come when the street marches and demonstrations have about run their course.” He proposed a new approach, “a shift from the streets to the conference table.” In October he, Wilkins, Young, Rustin, and three other veterans of the civil rights struggle signed a statement repudiating violence, rioting, and demagoguery, and concluding: “We not only welcome, we urge the full cooperation of white Americans.” Martin Luther King, while approving in principle, declined to sign on the ground that he did not want to give the impression that he thought the spokesmen for black power were “conclusively and irrevocably committed to error.”
The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972 Page 160
