jan 1, 1967 - Riots in Detriot and Newark

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Black Power was not a fundamentally violent political ideology, but violence did play a decisive role in the politics of black liberation in the mid-1960s. Few middle-class white Americans understood the depth and immediacy of the discontent simmering in poor northern black neighborhoods. The product of decades of poverty, inequality, and unanswered grievances, black discontent boiled over in a wave of riots across the nation’s cities in mid-decade. The first of several “long hot summers” came in 1964. In July, a New York City police officer shot and killed a black teenager named James Powell. Rioting and looting followed the police violence — a pattern that would recur in unrest in dozens of cities over the next four years.

In August 1965, the arrest of a young black motorist in the Watts section of Los Angeles sparked six days of rioting that left thirty-four people dead. “There is a different type of Negro emerging,” one riot participant told investigators. “They are not going to wait for the evolutionary process for their rights to be a man.” The riots of 1967 were the most serious, engulfing twenty-two cities in July and August. Forty-three people were killed in Detroit alone, nearly all of them black, and $50 million worth of property was destroyed. President Johnson called in the National Guard and U.S. Army troops, many just returned from Vietnam, to restore order.

Johnson, who believed that the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act had immeasurably helped African Americans, was shocked by the rioting. Despondent at the news from Watts, “he refused to look at the cables from Los Angeles,” recalled one aide. Virtually all black leaders condemned the rioting, though they understood its origins in poverty and deprivation. At a meeting in Watts, Martin Luther King Jr. admitted that he had “failed to take the civil rights movement to the masses of the people.” His contrition appeased few. “We don’t need your dreams; we need jobs!” one heckler shouted at King.

Following the gut-wrenching riots in Detroit and Newark in 1967, Johnson appointed a presidential commission, headed by (and informally named after) Illinois governor Otto Kerner, to investigate the causes of the violence. The Kerner Commission’s official report landed in 1968, an unstinting and direct appraisal of how racial inequality had fed urban violence. “Our nation is moving toward two societies,” the Kerner Commission Report concluded, “one black, one white — separate and unequal.” The report did not excuse the brick-throwing, firebombing, and looting of the previous summers, but it did provide a sociological context for the rioting. Calling the American racial ghetto a “destructive environment,” the report concluded that “White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it.” Shut out of white-dominated society, impoverished African Americans felt they had no stake in the social order.

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