A little supplemental history to Cole’s latest post, from Rick Perlstein, at In These Times — “The riot is still ‘the language of the unheard’“:
It usually started with the police.
In July of 1964, barely hours after the close of the Republican National Convention that nominated Barry Goldwater, 15-year-old James “Little Jimmy” Powell was shot to death by an off-duty cop in an apartment building vestibule on East 76th Street in New York. Just as in the shooting of 25-year-old Kajieme Powell this past August 19 in St. Louis, the officer claimed that the victim had charged him with a knife, though eyewitnesses denied that. A bystander cried, “Come on, shoot another nigger!” Within hours, Harlem was ablaze.
That was the first in the wave of apocalyptic racial riots that swept American cities in the 1960s. Later that week, in Rochester, New York, the fires started after cops roughed up the very woman who’d called them in to break up a rowdy, drunken party. The next summer, in Watts, Los Angeles, the most famous of the 1960s riots kicked off after police hit people with batons at the scene of a drunk-driving arrest. In 1966, in Chicago, it began when cops turned off a fire hydrant in which kids were frolicking on the third straight day of 90-degree heat. In 1967, the most tumultuous year, the first riot came after cops in Newark beat a cabdriver because they thought he was a Black Muslim.
The parallels with this summer’s uprising in Ferguson, Missouri, following the shooting of Michael Brown, an unarmed 18-year-old, are undeniable…
Black Fergusonians have shown that they will vote when they have something to vote for and know that their vote will count. Seventy-six percent of them turned out in November 2012, when Missouri was a key swing state for Barack Obama’s reelection. When it comes to local elections, they might just be making the rational decision that a hike to the polls is a waste of time. Even that one black council member, Dwayne James, has baffled observers by remaining mum in the face of the single issue now galvanizing his constituency, Michael Brown’s killing. He’s said only, “Our city charter provides that our mayor is the spokesperson for the city.” I don’t want to be unfair to James—I don’t know his motives—but such quiescence recalls the behavior of Chicago’s “Silent Six”: the six African-American alderman, during the 1960s heyday of the Cook County Democratic Organization, who were so in thrall to Mayor Richard J. Daley that they didn’t even support a proposed anti-housing discrimination ordinance. (In response, wags dubbed the one alderman who forcefully advocated anti-discrimation, Leon Despres—who was white—the city’s “only black alderman.”)
Then as now, the national political context matters. Mainstream white liberal politicians of the 1960s, flummoxed that blacks would be rising up at the very moment when so much was “being done for them” (of course, the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act only affected the South) began making strikingly radical connections. Sen. Robert F. Kennedy said, “There is no point in telling Negroes to obey the law. To many Negroes, the law is the enemy.” Vice President Hubert Humphrey predicted that unless slum conditions improved, and quick, there would be “open violence in every major city and county in America.” He added a note of empathy, saying that if he lived in one of those slums, “I think you’d have more trouble than you have had already, because I’ve got enough spark left in me to lead a mighty good revolt.”
Conservatives didn’t want to hear it—and pivoted off such pronouncements to fuel a backlash. Rep. Howard Smith of Virginia replied to Humphrey, “The vice president will bear a grave responsibility in blood and lives if he tries to provoke minority group members to riot for rent supplements.” During a 1966 debate over an open housing bill, Sen. Sam Ervin of North Carolina said, “The record shows that the more laws that are passed in the nation on the national, state and local levels, the more rioting and looting we have.”
That soon became the conservative, and even the centrist, consensus: Laws to ameliorate misery, not the misery itself, were the problem…
Baud
One thing the past few years has taught me is to be skeptical of all conventionally received history from at least 1964.
Mnemosyne
@Baud:
You may need to revise back to about 1900 or so:
“The Impact of Racist Ideologies: Jim Crow and the Nuremberg Laws”
PurpleGirl
It was in the mid-1960s that I became a pinko-commie-bleeding-heart liberal to my family. Why? I tried putting the riots into a social/political context. Not condoning the violence but recognizing its roots, trying to understand why people would riot, put me in a bad position to my family.
ETA: I recently put my view of discrimination against African-Americans in terms of comparing it to how I was treated as a person who stutters. This experience formed my views on a great many things.
Jack the Second
I briefly assumed the topic was Gaelic inventors.
Sly
What interests me, in the same way that a four car pile-up on a highway “interests” me, is the shift in the public consciousness that the riots of the 1960s sparked.
Prior to that period, the history of the “race riot” was one of all-white mobs going on killing sprees in predominantly black spaces. The examples are almost too numerous to mention; from the Hardscrabble Riots in 1824 Rhode Island to the Cicero Riot of 1951 Illinois, the overwhelming number of race-related incidents of mob violence, probably numbering close to 100 separate instances, were perpetrated by white racists. After the state militia or, later, the National Guard, quelled the violence, indictments against rioters were few and convictions even fewer; except for the few riots waged by African-Americans, like the Camp Logan Riot of 1917, rioters tended to get away scott free. A slight degression: one of John Singleton’s greatest, and perhaps his most under-appreciated film, was Rosewood, a dramatization of the Rosewood Massacre of 1923.
Politicians, predictably, did little more than wring their hands about the breakdown of law and order, and those were the ones who weren’t dyed-in-the-wool white supremacists. One of the major purposes – perhaps the major purpose – of opposition to anti-lynching laws by figures like Ben Tillman was to maintain legal protection of white mob violence. The public response was just to forget they ever happened, and to just leave the bodies of the victims to rot in the burnt wreckage of their homes. There are literally millions of people in this country living on the sites of massacres who don’t even know it.
But once Watts happened… well… things clearly had to change.