by Joshua Bloom
The next day, representatives of a variety of Black Power groups met to discuss what to do about the clashes with police. They decided to call a “police brutality protest rally” for early that evening in front of the Fourth Precinct Station. The media started to gather. At 7:00 P.M., James Threatt, the black director of the Human Rights Commission announced that the mayor had decided to form a citizens committee to investigate the Smith incident and that a black policeman was being promoted to the rank of captain. Someone shouted “Black Power!” and people started to throw rocks.
Police moved to disperse the crowd, which began looting and setting more fires. There were not enough officers to contain the rebellion, so the police concentrated on a two-mile stretch of the commercial district on Springfield Avenue. The rebellion grew. The mayor called in help from the state police and the National Guard.
Law enforcement did a lot of shooting during the weekend. They shot looters and also fired at random into crowds, hitting uninvolved bystanders on the sidelines and even some in their homes. They also shot up businesses that placed “Black Owned” signs in the windows. Countless people were wounded. Twenty-three were killed, twenty-one of them black, including two children, six women, and a seventy-three-year-old man.
LeRoi Jones was among those beaten and arrested by Newark’s police. “Again and again . . . we have sought to plead through the reference of progressive humanism . . . again and again our complaints have been denied by an unfeeling, ignorant, graft-ridden, racist government . . . [Now] we will govern ourselves or no one will govern Newark, New Jersey.”41
On July 20, the Black Panthers devoted an issue of their newspaper to the Newark rebellion. Front-page headlines read “The Significance of the Black Liberation Struggle in Newark” and “Police Slaughter Black People.” The cover photograph showed three police officers pinning down a black man, his face pressed into the sidewalk. The caption read,
How can any black man in his right mind look at this picture in racist dog America and not understand what is happening? It’s obvious that the brother on the ground is the underdog and that the arrogant Gestapo dogs on top have the advantage. What is the essential difference between the man on the bottom and the pigs on top? The gun. If the brother had had his piece with him, it is obvious that the pigs would have had to deal with him in a different way. And the brother may have gotten something down—that is, if he knew how to shoot straight.42
Lower on the page was a picture of a rifle under huge type reading, “Guns Baby Guns.”
The paper featured a two-page centerfold with a photographic montage of the Newark rebellion. Each of the sixteen pictures emphasized the violent clash between heavily armed government officers and neighborhood blacks. Pictures of bloodied and brutalized black men and women accompanied a large photo of several blacks lying face down on the concrete with armed officers standing over them as other officers hold back a crowd. Another photo showed a military jeep packed with officers carrying machine guns driving past a burned-out building. The caption read, “Vietnam? Dominican Republic? The Congo? No!!! Racist NEWARK, U.S.A.” In another shot, an officer crouched behind a jeep taking aim with his rifle. The caption: “Vicious, mad, raving, racist dog, sniping at colonized black people as though at a foreign enemy.” One photo showed a crowd of unarmed black men yelling at soldiers over the points of their bayonets. The caption read, “America’s black colonial subjects show contempt and a total lack of fear of the racist dog occupying troops.” In the center of the page were the words “Racists call it ‘rioting’, but actually it’s a political consequence on the part of black people who have been denied freedom, justice and equality.”43
Detroit
On July 23, 1967, three days after the Black Panther issue on the Newark rebellions, Detroit exploded in the largest urban rebellion in the United States in the twentieth century. Most discussions of the Detroit rebellions, as well as the other urban rebellions of 1967, draw extensively on the analysis by the Kerner Commission, appointed by President Johnson to investigate the incident.44 The commission report portrayed the rebellions as apolitical, spontaneous reactions to poor conditions rather than signs of a broader struggle over social power. As journalist Andrew Kopkind observed, though, “The Kerner Commission was designed not to study questions, but to state them, not to conduct investigations but to accept them, not to formulate policy but to confirm it.” Kopkind argued that the report’s shallow lip service to the core problem of racism bolstered rather than challenged structural racism. “Failure to analyze in any way the ‘white racism’ asserted by the commissioners in the report’s summary,” argued Kopkind, “transformed that critical category into a cheap slogan. And overall, the Report’s mindless attention to documenting conventional perceptions and drowning them in conventional wisdom made meaningless the commissioners’ demands for social reconstruction.”45
The 120 social scientists and investigators hired by the Kerner Commission, working under the guidance of Research Director Robert Shellow, provided a much more perceptive political analysis of the rebellions that the commission never published. In the concluding chapter of the analysis, “America on the Brink: White Racism and Black Rebellion,” the social scientists argued that racism pervaded all U.S. institutions and that blacks “feel it is legitimate and necessary to use violence against the social order. A truly revolutionary spirit has begun to take hold . . . an unwillingness to compromise or wait any longer, to risk death rather than have their people continue in a subordinate status.” Shellow and his team were subsequently fired, and their analysis was removed from the report.46 Powerful evidence supported the Shellow team’s view that many black people in Detroit saw the unrest as political action—that is, as a rebellion. In the Campbell-Schumann survey several months after the incident, 56 percent of the black respondents in Detroit characterized the incident as a “rebellion or revolution,” whereas only 19 percent characterized it as a “riot.”47
In the Detroit uprising, rebels not only looted but also turned to more serious insurrectionary tactics, such as arson and sniping. Unlike looting—which offers rebels instant material benefit—these activities subjected rebels to significant risk while offering no instant material benefit, thus suggesting a challenge to the social order. According to police, 552 buildings were destroyed or damaged by fires started by the rebels. Some 7,231 rebels were arrested, more than twice as many as in the Watts uprising and four times more than in Newark. By the end of the Detroit rebellion, 43 people had been killed, 33 of them black. Ten whites were also killed, a number of them government officials.48
As with other urban uprisings, the Detroit rebellion did not spring out of the blue. Strong racial polarization had existed in Detroit for many years. In April 1965, white supremacists had burned crosses in front of twenty-five black residences in integrated neighborhoods of the city.49 In the weeks leading up to the Detroit rebellion, three incidents exacerbated racial tensions. On June 12, a mob of more than eighty whites waged a miniriot and smoke-bombed the house of an interracial married couple—a black man and a white woman—who had moved into a suburban white neighborhood. On June 23, a black couple—Mr. Thomas, who worked at a local Ford plant, and Ms. Thomas, his pregnant wife—went to Rouge Park in a white neighborhood. A mob of more than fifteen whites harassed them, threatened to rape Mrs. Thomas, cut the wires on their car so they could not leave, and then shot Mr. Thomas three times, killing him and causing Ms. Thomas to miscarry. Six of the whites were arrested, but only one was charged, and he was eventually let off by a jury. In fact, at that time, no white had ever been found guilty of murdering a black person in Detroit. On July 1, Vivian Williams, a young black prostitute, was killed, and rumors circulated that she had been killed by a policeman.
A police raid of a “blind pig” bar on Twelfth Street had sparked the outbreak. Blind pigs were important social institutions in Detroit’s black communities dating back to the early twentieth century. When white establishment bars started ad
mitting blacks after 1948, the blind pigs were “underground” bars that mostly served blacks after 2:00 A.M., when state laws forbade the sale of liquor. Police customarily took protection bribes from the operators and raided those that refused to pay, creating resentment among many in the black community. In the early hours of July 23, the blind pig in the dingy second-floor apartment at 9125 Twelfth Street hosted a raging party for two black veterans returning from Vietnam and another soldier departing for the war.
As the eighty or so patrons, almost all of them black, were arrested and brought down to the street to be loaded into paddy wagons, a crowd began to gather. Word spread, and soon onlookers greatly out-numbered the police. Several people saw the police dragging the men down the stairs. Many in the gathering crowd believed that the police were using excessive force, and tensions rose. A young black nationalist began to shout “Black Power, don’t let them take our people away; look what they are doing to our people. . . . Let’s kill them whitey motherfuckers . . . let’s get the bricks and bottles going. . . . Why do they come down here and do this to our neighborhood? If this happened in Grosse Pointe [an affluent white neighborhood], they wouldn’t be acting this way.”50 Someone threw a beer bottle, and the crowd went wild.
Even before this episode, there had been a strong black nationalist presence in Detroit that provided an anticolonial assessment of conditions in the black community and called for rebellion. In addition to RAM and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, these activists included Uhuru, Reverend Albert Cleage and the Black Christian Nationalist Movement, the Afro-American Unity Movement, radical activists and authors Grace Lee and James Boggs, and the Malcolm X Society. A SNCC delegate from Cincinnati at the Second Black Arts Conference in late June said, “We already had our riot and we’re here to show you how it’s done.”51 The Afro-American Unity Movement was already preparing for urban rebellion and had already had several confrontations with police before the Detroit uprising. RAM had developed plans for seizing control of the city’s industries should a rebellion take place.
During the rebellion, representatives from the Malcolm X Society contacted the mayor of Detroit and the governor of Michigan, claiming they would bring a cessation of “all hostilities” if the officials would meet a number of key demands, including those for community control over the police, the school board, and urban renewal. After the uprising, several newspapers published allegations that RAM was responsible for systematic burning and sniping, but these allegations were never proven.
Unlike the young black nationalists whose politics coincided with those of the rebels on the streets, black political leaders who attempted to quell the rebellion were booed and chased out of the neighborhood. This division between established leadership and young militants became clear in one community meeting during the uprisings. A young black steelworker from the Twelfth Street neighborhood told the politicians, “You leaders have failed the black community . . . . The black leadership brought it [the rebellion] on the black people.”52
While liberal politicians’ rhetoric about the Detroit rebellion emphasized the poor conditions blacks faced and the need for an ameliorative response, on the ground the state response was repressive. When the local police was unable to contain the rebellion, the mayor and the governor called in the National Guard and Michigan State Police and asked President Johnson to send in the army, which he eventually did. Soon, the police not only had bayonets and armored personnel carriers but were also backed up by tanks, army choppers, and machine guns. When the National Guard arrived on July 23, the troops were instructed “to shoot any person seen looting.” By that evening, the police, the guardsmen, and the state police were all firing at fleeing looters. The next day, with backup from the National Guard, the police unleashed their full repressive force against the rebels, attempting to reestablish their “dominance and control” and to “teach the bastards a lesson.” Many law enforcement officers believed their job was to put blacks back in their place. “I’m gonna shoot anything that moves and that is black” said a guardsman. White firemen shouted to guardsmen while they frisked two blacks on July 25, “Kill the black bastards! Control those coons. Shoot ’em in the nuts!”53
The rebels had no illusions that the government would act in their favor. Many explicitly saw their rebellion as an assertion of Black Power. One rebel confronted a cop with the words “You can’t do anything to me White man. Black Power!”54 As the government brought down increasingly repressive force, the rebels responded in kind.
At its height, the rebellion can best be described as an insurrection. Large crowds of looters in the early part of July 23 gave way to roving bands of looters and fire bombers, who were much harder to control. Some coordinated their tactics by shortwave radio. Apparently, the rebels saw all government officials as the enemy, and they attacked firemen as well as policemen.
By 4:40 P.M. on July 24, rebels had stolen hundreds of guns from gun shops. As police began to shoot at the looters, black snipers started shooting back. Hubert Locke, executive secretary of the establishment Committee for Equal Opportunity, called it a “total state of war.” Police officers and firemen reported being attacked by snipers on both the east and west sides of the city. Snipers made sporadic attacks on the Detroit Street Railways buses and on crews of the Public Lighting Commission and the Detroit Edison Company. Police records indicate that as many as ten people were shot by snipers on July 25 alone. A span of 140 blocks on the west side became a “bloody battlefield,” according to the Detroit News. Government tanks and armored personnel carriers “thundered through the streets and heavy machine guns chattered. . . . It was as though the Viet Cong had infiltrated the riot blackened streets.” The mayor said, “It looks like Berlin in 1945.”55
The black uprisings in Detroit and Newark were the largest of 1967 but by no means the only ones. Urban rebellions rocked cities large and small all across America. According to the Kerner Commission, 164 such rebellions erupted in the first nine months of the year.56
The urban uprisings marked a significant shift in Black America’s relationship both to the Civil Rights Movement and to white-controlled law enforcement. Since the urban conflicts during World War II, the United States had seen few such disturbances until the Harlem rebellion in 1964. But by the summer of 1967, Black America was approaching full-scale violent revolt. The promise of full rights and upward mobility had helped contain the aspirations of Black America since the war. However, in the ghettos of the North and West, despite the achievement of citizenship rights, black subordination not only persisted but all too often expanded. With white flight and the desertion of the inner cities to blacks, urban governments sought to address the problems of their swelling ghettos through containment, relying increasingly on police force.
According to the Kerner Commission, the urban rebellions of 1967 responded to the “accumulation of unresolved grievances and . . . widespread dissatisfaction among Negroes with the unwillingness or inability of local government to respond.”57 Among the factors contributing to this dissatisfaction, according to the commission, were pervasive discrimination and segregation, black in-migration and white exodus, the convergence of segregation and poverty in the ghettos, disappointment with the Civil Rights Movement, violence by white vigilante groups reacting against black civil disobedience, frustration and powerlessness, a new mood of enhanced racial pride, and emerging views of the police as a symbol of white power—offering protection for white citizens while oppressing blacks with impunity.58 The commission assigned special importance to police actions, believing that law enforcement’s overstepping of power had not only triggered the rebellions but also generated the tensions that preceded them.59
As the censured analysis by the commission’s research director Robert Shellow suggests, these conditions are best understood not as psychological factors prompting individual “rioters” to act but rather as the impetus for political acts of black rebellion. Rebellion reemerged as a political avenue
precisely because of the limitations of the civil rights victories. These victories left untouched the economic and material dimensions of black subordination. With persistent racial subordination in the face of rhetorical freedom, pressures mounted. In the summer of 1967, the floodgates lifted, and the dream of black nationhood poured through the channels of urban rebellion.
VANGUARD OF THE BLACK REVOLUTION
Despite its early influence, the Black Panther Party started as just one of many small Black Power organizations. But coupled with the attention garnered from Sacramento, the wave of urban rebellions in the summer of 1967 confirmed the Party leaders’ confidence in their political program. When Black America rebelled, Huey P. Newton and the Black Panther Party were prepared to seize the time. They were no mere ideologues giving lip service to the sentiments of the rebels. They had seen the wave of black revolt approaching. They had recognized its power and analyzed its character, and they had prepared the Party to organize it—to become its leading force. They had begun to position themselves as the vanguard of the black revolution.
Tentative No More
The Party’s first assertions of its vanguard status were tentative. When the Black Panthers first published their ten-point platform and program at the beginning of the summer, they included this disclaimer above it: “To those poor souls who don’t know black history, the beliefs and desires of the Black Panther Party for Self Defense may seem unreasonable. To black people, the ten points covered are absolutely essential to survival. We have listened to the riot producing words ‘these things take time’ for 400 years. The Black Panther Party knows what black people want and need. Black unity and self defense will make these demands a reality.”60 In the statement, the Party appeared to be trying to explain itself and did not yet seem confident of its growing influence. This disclaimer also appeared in several subsequent issues of the newspaper. Yet as urban rebellions spread, the confidence of the Party’s leadership grew.
