by Jon Meacham
A poll can only begin to suggest what so traumatic a train of events meant to Negro America. But the Newsweek survey figures were nevertheless revealing as a post mortem on five riot summers:
Americans—for all their revolutionary beginnings as a nation—grew up believing that no level of grievance, however broadly based or acutely felt, could justify resorting to violence. Negroes share that article of democratic faith with whites; it was accordingly less startling that 48 per cent of them said the rioting was not justified than that 31 per cent felt it was—a riot constituency equivalent to nearly 4 million of America’s 12.5 million adult blacks. For a comparable fraction of the nation’s whites to feel pressed to the point of rebellion would surely be recognized as a disaster demanding the most drastic relief measures; the New Deal did not wait for the cities to start burning. No such effort has yet been mounted in the ghettos, however, and the ideology of rioting as a legitimate expression of discontent could only be strengthened as a result. That notion by 1969 had already become the prevailing view among Northern middle-income blacks—the leadership class in the ghetto. And there was evidence in other surveys that many Negroes who did not consider rioting justified were in fact deploring the acts of war—not its underlying motives. A 30 per cent minority of the Watts Negroes spoke favorably of the riot there in a UCLA poll, but majorities of two and three to one thought that it had been a purposeful act of protest and that its targets—police, merchants and whites in general—deserved whatever they got. “People want recognition,” a Watts filling-station worker told Newsweek long afterward, “and the only way they were gone get it was riot. The only way. See, we don’t want to overthrow the country—we just want what we ain’t got.”
White people, as one of UCLA’s riot-study papers accurately observed, have squandered a good deal of time and energy constructing a mythology of “bad Negroes” (a tiny minority who make riots) and “good Negroes” (the vast long-suffering majority who are said to cower before them). This comfortable fantasy ought to have been punctured by warfare on the scale of Watts, Newark and Detroit, in which at least 10 to 20 per cent of the ghetto actually tasted combat and many more were approving or at least acquiescent spectators. The rioters, as psychiatrist Alvin Poussaint once put it, “range from the plain damn angry to those with fantasies of taking over, to those who want a TV set, to those angry at their father and mother, to those caught up in hysteria, to those who will act only when they see the cops shoot someone . . . Rage is common to all of them.” That is a far cry from dismissing them as the dregs of black society—a view indulged by many whites and few blacks. Who riots? A fourth of the Negroes blamed mostly hoodlums. But fully as many thought that the rioters were mainly “good people”—and 41 per cent guessed that both sorts were involved. What this collective verdict announces to white America is that conditions of life in the ghetto are so oppressive that the law-abiding as well as the lawless—the “good Negro” as well as the “bad”—may feel driven to rebel. Ernest D., a foundry worker at decent wages and with no criminal record, was driving home in Milwaukee’s ghetto when a pride of rioters swirled by. “I got out of my car,” he recounted later, still plainly surprised at the fact, “and asked ’em what was goin’ on. They said they wanted their freedom. I asked what kind of freedom and they said black power. So I just started fightin’ too.”
“This nation,” Bayard Rustin once remarked sadly, “is teaching the poor that they ought to riot lest they get nothing. Tell them in the spring that you are going to riot in the summer and they will vote money. Or after a riot. In Watts they wanted a hospital. They didn’t get it. They rioted. Now they have one; it’s not up yet and it’s not very good, but after the riot they came in with plans. In Chicago, the children wanted sprinklers on the fireplugs. Riots. Then Mayor Daley came along personally with eight-dollar sprinklers.” The victories, as Rustin went on to note, are usually cheap and often meaningless, and every riot increased the risks of bringing down repression on the heads of the blacks. But the balance of sentiment in Negro America in 1969 was that, like them or not, the riots had not hurt and probably had helped the cause. The feeling was by no means unanimous. The poorest blacks, contrary to much of the folklore of the day, felt rather strongly that the rioting had done more harm than good. But the relatively affluent were even more firmly convinced that it had advanced the struggle, and their view prevailed, 40 to 29 (with an additional 16 per cent doubtful that rioting made much difference one way or the other). That their optimism bore so little tangible relation to reality did not shake those who shared it; some notice from white people, and some attention to the problems of the blacks, was for them clearly better than nothing—even if it had to be bought at the great pain and the greater peril of insurrection. “Black people,” Watts community worker Ferman Moore said cheerlessly, “now know that if you burn down a city or two, the power structure is going to dump a bushel basket of money on top of you to try to quiet you down. And they realize that the white boy who built the power structure did it by violence and force—by kicking the shit out of the British, then the Indians and now the black and brown people. Yes, sir, we have a fine example to follow, and who can fault us? It’s in the finest American tradition.”
The under-30 generation in the ghetto came of age during a decade of black revolt. They were witness to the televised affluence of white people and the real-life defeat of their own fathers; they were exposed daily to the bright promise and the bitter disappointments of the Negro revolution; they were schooled in the work ethic and then graduated into a job market frozen at depression unemployment levels; they lived in a milieu where racial hatreds and revanchist passions that had been suppressed for decades were suddenly out in the open. They were precisely the blacks who had, in Clark’s phrase, passed beyond desperation to what-the-hell. “I can’t lose by rioting,” said one of them, an Oakland gang kid. “Done lost. Been lost. Gonna be lost some more. I’m sayin’ to The Man, ‘You includin’ me in this game or not?’ An’ I know his answer, so I’m gettin’ ready to get basic.” He might have been speaking for a generation. The under-30 Northern blacks believed by 47 to 32 that the riots were justified; by 74 to 18 that the rioters were partly or principally “good people”; by 50 to 20 that rioting helped the cause. And one in six said he would join a riot if it happened—an extraordinarily large pool of combatants waiting for a war and utterly reckless of the odds against winning it. “I don’t mind gettin’ killed,” a street-corner kid in Chicago told Newsweek’s Marvin Kupfer. “When I’m dead, they’ll tell my kid, ‘He died for a good cause.’ ”
So, in sum, the poll reveals sizable numbers in every sector of the black community—and most of all in the volatile age group that makes riots—who see the street mutinies of the late ’60s in something quite like revolutionary terms: a series of explosions that were broadly based, purposeful, rooted in real grievances and helpful in the common cause of Negroes everywhere. What polls cannot tell about riots is their emotional content for the individuals and the communities who actually experience them—a psychic dimension even more disturbing than the statistics in what it told about the state of mind of black men in white America. “At the level of individuals,” Frantz Fanon once wrote, discussing the Algerian rebels, “violence is a cleansing force. It frees the native from his inferiority complex, and from his despair and inaction; it makes him fearless and restores self-respect.” The vices and virtues of comparing the situation of Negroes in America with the lot of colonials in Africa can, of course, be debated inconclusively forever. Yet there is eye-witness evidence aplenty that rioting, for many American blacks, may in fact have been an exhilarating and even a liberating experience—an expression of power by the powerless, an act of revenge by the vanquished, an assertion by the Invisible Man that he really exists.
New Jersey’s Governor Hughes glimpsed that inner reality in the carnival gaiety of the Newark looters; what he saw as laughing at a funeral may have been more like rejoicing at a birth. Er
nest D., the Milwaukee foundry worker, experienced it when he poked his fist through a shattered store window in search of an intangible piece of goods called freedom. And Dr. Frederick J. Hacker, a white psychiatrist from the University of Southern California, recorded it in a remarkable report on the Watts riots in the West Coast magazine Frontier. “For the Negroes,” said Hacker, who interviewed some of them before and after the riot, “what happened . . . was justified legally and morally. Where the police saw black criminals tearing apart law and order with a cascade of Molotov cocktails, the Negroes of Watts watched freedom fighters liberating themselves with blood and fire.” Hacker found widespread acknowledgment that burning, looting and lawbreaking are bad things to do—and surprising little shame, guilt or regret about having done them. Quite to the contrary, the riot in important ways was “psychologically analogous to the Hungarian Revolution and the Boston Tea Party.” It was plain damned fun (“Violence makes you feel good—at least for a while”) and far more: “It was the metamorphosis of the Negroes of southeastern Los Angeles from victims—historical objects—to masters . . . The people of Watts felt that for those four days they represented all Negroes; the historical plight of the Negroes; all the rebellions against all injustice.” Most of them, Hacker wrote, knew that they couldn’t win; all that mattered to them was the exercise of their will and their stunted pride. “What must be understood by the rest of America,” he said, “is that, for the lower-class Negro, riots are not criminal but a legitimate weapon in a morally justified civil war.”
The exhilaration, as Hacker noted, is a function of action and does not long survive the war. But the pride does. Watts Negroes began throwing an annual summer festival on the anniversary of their rebellion well before Rap Brown suggested it, and independence was precisely what they were celebrating. And in postwar Detroit, with the acrid scent of smoke still souring the air, Newsweek’s John Dotson found a few of the children of the city of destruction sitting on a rail and staring idly across Dexter Avenue into a solid block of charred ruins.
“Those buildings goin’ up was a pretty sight,” said one of them, a lanky spidery-legged kid whose hand-me-down pants ended a shin’s length short of his shoes. “I sat right here and watched ’em go. And there wasn’t nothin’ them honkies could do but sweat and strain to put it out.”
“Yeah, man,” a pal chimed in, “it’s about time those honkies started earnin’ their money in this neighborhood.”
“You know,” the long-legged kid said, “we made big news. They called this the worst race riot in history.”
“Yeah,” another boy, mountainously beefy, echoed, “we got the record, man. They can forget all about Watts and Newark and Harlem. This where the riot to end all riots was held.”
They were silent for a moment.
“That little girl that got shot, man,” the long-legged boy said. “She shouldn’t of got shot.”
“That’s the breaks, brother,” the beefy youth replied, absently patting at the deep waves in his processed hair. “We in a war—or haven’t anybody told you that?”
Everyone laughed.
The language of war, by the end of the 1960s, was common currency in the ghetto—and so was a deep, fatalistic assumption that acts of war would keep recurring in the years to come. Would there be more riots? Two-thirds of the nation’s blacks thought so—a level of expectation verging on that point where possibility can become probability. And there was talk everywhere of a turn from the spontaneous violence of the riots to the strategic violence of revolution. Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, Rap Brown and the Black Panthers successively urged Negroes to take up arms; by 1969, no fewer than a fourth of all Negroes—and a third of the ghetto young—agreed that they ought at least to have guns, whether or not they used them. Police periodically aborted what they said were terrorist plots—one to blow the head off the Statue of Liberty, another to dynamite Macy’s, still another to assassinate Negro moderates like Whitney Young and Roy Wilkins. Street battles broke out with all the surface appearances of guerrilla warfare—the worst and most notorious of them a summer 1968 shoot-out between police and a little troop of armed nationalists led by a half-hinged street astrologer named Fred (Ahmed) Evans. Three cops and seven blacks died; Evans was sentenced to the electric chair for murder; tales flew, in and out of print, that the blacks had gulled police into a carefully plotted ambush.
It mattered little that the evidence for this theory was flimsy, or that most of the proliferating reports of sniping by supposed ghetto guerrilleros in the late 1960s proved on close examination to have been minor or plain fictitious. What mattered was what people believed was happening, and the combination of incendiary black rhetoric and inflamed white imaginations was quite enough to lead them to believe the worst. “May the deaths of ’68 signal the beginning of the end of this country,” Rap Brown wrote his followers from jail early that year. “Resistance is not enough. Aggression is the order of the day.” Blacks as well as whites took such prophecies at face value. Were newer, more exotic forms of violence on the way? “There couldn’t be any more, could there?” an elderly Houston man replied. “Lord have mercy on all of us if something else happen.” But the widespread expectation was that something else would. “Racial war,” said a Philadelphia electronics plant foreman, 34 years old. “Suicide squads,” said a 28-year-old Harlem housewife. “Real revolution,” a Denver schoolteacher ventured. “Sabotage,” a middle-aged Pittsburgh woman predicted, “and whites intimidating Negroes, and child, all hell will break loose when that happens—bombings, shooting, fires . . .”
Tactical violence remained a possibility for the 1970s; whites tended greatly to overestimate the number of practicing revolutionaries in the ghetto, but a very few plastiqueurs could wreak very considerable havoc. Neither was the nation safely past the riot era. The rebellions percolated down in the latter 1960s from the big cities into small-to-middling towns and suburbs; they spread from the streets into the schools; they started earlier and died out later until the “long hot summer” stretched from winter to winter. And tensions tightened dangerously between militants and the police. The militants, said Terry Ann Knopf, research associate at Brandeis University’s Lemberg Center for the Study of Violence, “really believe the police are out to kill them all. They stockpile arms. The police infiltrators learn of the stockpiles and law enforcement gets nervous. They begin surveillance. The spying makes militants more nervous and more sure of extermination. The stage is set for battle.” And battles flared in the late 1960s: the Evans shoot-out in Cleveland, a duel between the cops and a group of black separatists meeting at a ghetto church in Detroit, the running and generally lopsided combat between police and the Panthers.
Yet there were signs by the decade’s end that rioting on the cataclysmic scale of Watts, Newark or Detroit might at last be passing into history. The riots over King’s assassination were like some last furious Walpurgisnacht in the ghetto—a transcontinental firestorm on a scale with the trauma that set it going. Street disorders in the days and months thereafter were at least as numerous and as widespread as in the summers before. But their intensity was considerably banked; it was almost as if the worst of the fury had spent itself in those terrible April days and nights after King died. The Newsweek Poll a year later asked blacks whether or not they would join a riot. Eleven per cent said they would. That is, of course, a startlingly large number to confess so violently angry a cast of mind to strangers. But the more telling fact may be that the number was down significantly from the 15 per cent who said yes in the days three years earlier when insurrection in the ghetto was still relatively new.
There were a number of theories as to why this should be so, each with some claim to credibility. Among them were these:
All of these elements no doubt were at play in the ghetto by the end of the 1960s, operating at least temporarily as a check on mass violence where the normal restraints had been overrun by events. None of them, naturally, guaranteed that the danger had run i
ts course, or would so long as grievance remained the norm of the ghetto. J.T., a wasted young man of 23, came home from Vietnam to Chicago’s West Side with no skills, no job, no future and so no vista beyond the street corner where he spends his days and nights jiving with his friends. “All you guys want to give is a dollar an hour,” he said bitterly. “Man, I can beg more than that right on this corner. They didn’t tell me I was going to be just another nigger when I got back home.” So J.T. was indeed a keg of dynamite waiting for a match. “I want to burn down every building in this town,” he said. “Let me do that and I’ll be grateful to The Man for the rest of my life.”
There are thousand of J.T.’s in the ghetto; they are bitter, alienated and potentially destructive, and, as Rap Brown once noted, matches only cost a penny. Yet the evidence is that their numbers are diminishing—at least partly because the riots turned out, in one important sense, to have worked after all. They scarred black America, to be sure, and they carried the very real risk of white backlash and white reprisal. But they created even as they destroyed, wakening a sense of community among the blacks—and giving many of them, often for the first time, a sense that they actually did have something to lose by rioting. Whites have always had a tendency somewhat to overstate the disorganization of the ghetto; blacks over the centuries have been forced by the fact of exclusion and the hard necessities of survival to develop their own parallel structure of churches, colleges, fraternal orders, burial societies and black betterment organizations. But their history in white America has always encouraged a sort of atomization of the Negro community—an ethos of Making It in which the object has been the escape of the talented few from the ghetto and from the shame of blackness.
