Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (98 page)

A
LL THESE CONFRONTATIONS PALED
before the outbreak of urban riots in 1966 and 1967. There were thirty-eight riots in 1966, the most serious in Chicago, Cleveland, and San Francisco. They killed seven people, injured 400, and led to 3,000 arrests. Burning and looting caused an estimated $5 million in property damage. The turmoil reached all-time highs in 1967. During the first nine months of the year there were 164 insurrections; thirty-three of these were frightening enough to require the intervention of the state police, and eight brought in the National Guard. The two biggest riots, in Newark and Detroit in July, lasted for almost a week in each instance and left twenty-three and forty-three people dead. Hundreds were injured. Thousands of buildings were burned or looted, and thousands of people were left homeless. When the riot finally died down in Detroit, Mayor Jerome Cavanaugh remarked, "It looks like Berlin in 1945."
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Many Americans, including prominent conservatives like Governor Reagan of California, reacted angrily to the violence by blaming radical agitators and "riffraff" who engaged in looting just to rip off stores.
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Others laid the blame at the feet of unsettled new migrants, many of them from the South. Television coverage came in for a good deal of condemnation: black people, critics thought, observed on TV that police and bystanders stood around and did nothing while looters and rioters went freely about their business. Emboldened, the TV-watchers then went out and emulated the rampages of others. There was some validity in these critiques. An almost carnival-like atmosphere pervaded some of the riots. Scenes on television did little if anything to discourage people from joining in. Looters were central to the disturbances. Unlike the "community" riots that had erupted following World War I, which had involved a good deal of fighting between blacks and whites, the disturbances of the 1960s were "commodity" riots featuring stealing and burning. This change resulted in part from the great expansion over time in the size of virtually all-black ghettos: whites in the 1960s were much less likely than they had been in 1919 to live or work among blacks, and they feared to walk through their neighborhoods. Interracial fighting was therefore rare—save between blacks and police—in 1967.

Other observers emphasized poverty and class grievances as a source of the outbreaks. This was true, but mainly in a relative sense. Save for the most down-and-out in the ghettos, urban black people lived more comfortably on the average than they had in the 1950s or early 1960s, when the central cities had been relatively quiet. Moreover, there was no clear correlation between the incidence or depth of poverty and disorder: the black ghetto in Detroit (as in Watts) was generally better-off than those in other cities. Other desperately poor ethnic groups, such as Puerto Ricans in New York, did not riot. Still, there was no doubting the anger fueled by the sense of relative deprivation. Most of the rioters were poor or working-class; non-rioting blacks were likely to be better-off. In Detroit, angry class feelings seem to have driven some poor whites as well as blacks. Of the 8,000 who were arrested in the Motor City, 700 were white.
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Still another liberal view held that rage against racial discrimination inspired the riots. This argument found its most enduring statement in the report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders named by President Johnson. Known as the Kerner Report after its chairman, Governor Otto Kerner of Illinois, it called in March 1968 for massive expansion of government programs to soften the bitter heritage of "white racism" in employment, housing, welfare, education, and every other walk of life. Research by the commission and by others in the aftermath of the riots confirmed the key role of racial feelings, noting that thousands of black people, not just the poor or a handful of agitators, took part. Most were young. They were likely to be high school dropouts but nonetheless better educated than the average for blacks in the central cities, and to be long-term residents—not "riffraff" or recent migrants. High percentages—40 percent in some places—were unemployed and angry about job discrimination. Looters tended to converge purposefully on white-owned stores, leaving black-owned establishments unscathed. Most of the major disturbances occurred following incidents between white police and local black residents. These incidents were mostly minor—the sorts of confrontations that happened every day. But that was the point. News of the incidents, distorted by rumors or spread by outraged local residents, tore like wildfire through a population harboring explosive resentments against police and escalated into riots when the police handled situations badly.

The racial tension that blew up into riots had deep urban roots, especially in residential discrimination. Confrontations between blacks seeking housing and whites, mostly working-class, who were determined to keep them out, had long afflicted race relations and urban politics in many northern cities and had intensified in the wake of black migrations in the 1940s and 1950s. Many of them had even then erupted in violence, which nervous white politicians and business leaders had tried to keep out of the news. These antagonisms reached a breaking point by the mid-1960s, infuriating many blacks and frightening local whites.
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Although such conflicts most commonly pitted blacks against whites, they were also beginning to involve Hispanic-Americans as well. In San Antonio the Mexican-American Youth Organization and in Los Angeles the Brown Berets, a Chicano group, were mobilizing vigorously against residential discrimination—and by extension school segregation.
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By the time the biggest waves of riots swelled forth in 1966–67, Americans generally were growing edgy about ever-higher levels of unrest, disorder, and violence in the culture. The national homicide rate doubled between 1963 and 1970—from 4.6 per 100,000 people to 9.2 per 100,000.
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The carnage in Vietnam, never far from people's minds, provided a gory backdrop for violent behavior.
Bonnie and Clyde
, a film celebrating violence, appeared in August 1967 and appeared to reflect a contemporary mood. Violence was rising especially rapidly at the time in black central city areas, in part because of demographic changes: the coming of age of the baby boom generation and the peaking of south-to-north migrations. For these reasons the ghettos by the mid-1960s were home for an unprecedentedly huge population of young men, increasing percentages of whom came from broken homes without strong discipline. Young men, moreover, are always the group most susceptible to crime and violence.
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The decline in the number of manufacturing jobs in many of these areas further exacerbated racial tensions. The special demographics and economics of the mid-1960s, and the incapacity of hard-pressed cities to cope with them, were generating what Americans were later to call a black "underclass" and creating extraordinarily unsettling conditions.
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Many black and poor people, moreover, had become politicized by the civil rights movement and had begun to develop higher expectations from life. Some joined a newly formed National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO). Following in the path blazed by civil rights workers, NWRO leaders engaged in sit-ins and other forms of non-violent direct action. Later, NWRO activists took over welfare offices. Other local residents organized to protest against urban redevelopment that threatened to disrupt their neighborhoods.

Most of the blacks who took part in the riots of 1966 and 1967 apparently did not expect much in the way of tangible results. Fired up by conflicts with the police, they started disturbances that exploded suddenly, raged out of control, and then stopped before participants could develop much of a program. Rather, the rioters rampaged so as to express themselves against long-simmering injustices and to be noticed, at last. Although they damaged their own already blighted neighborhoods, they often felt that the rampage had been worth it. As one rioter had said in Watts, "We won, because we made them pay attention to us."
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Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., of Harlem added in 1967, "Violence is a cleansing force. It frees the native from his inferiority complex."
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Some Americans reacted to the riots by calling on LBJ and Congress to do something to improve life in the ghettos. Atlanta Mayor Ivan Allen, Jr., insisted, "This is a great national problem. Congress can't wait for local governments to try to cope with problems that can be met only on a national level." The
New York Times
editorialized, "There are at least two conclusions to be drawn. . . . One is that if Detroit is an example of America's best efforts to solve the racial and other problems confronting the cities, the best is not nearly good enough. The other is that even if progress is achieved on a broad front, the United States must be prepared to contend with serious turbulence in its cities for a long time to come."
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The New
York Times
, like the Kerner Commission, was correct that the ills lay deep. Liberals, however, did not have a very clear idea of what to do to cure them. Great Society programs, after all, had failed to ensure peace. And hostilities across the color line seemed implacable. What then to do? Should programs attempt to pump money into the ghettos, perhaps by aiming it at black entrepreneurs, perhaps by offering tax breaks or other incentives to businesses that would agree to locate there? Should resources be set aside to increase the recruitment of blacks into police forces, so as to temper the incendiary feelings that ignited confrontations? Or should government and private initiative focus on ways of helping blacks to get
out
of the ghettos? That would involve truly tough actions to eradicate housing and job discrimination in white neighborhoods. It might also require the spending of greatly increased sums on job-training and education programs. These, in turn, would surely take a long time to make much difference. Neither in 1967 nor later was there a consensus among liberals in the United States on what to do. Instead, there was widespread bewilderment and panic.

Conservatives, by contrast, scored political points by denouncing agitators. Reagan noted accurately that "the first victims . . . are the good, responsible members of the Negro community." He added, however, that rioters were "the lawbreakers and the mad dogs against the people." Eisenhower hinted at the existence of conspiracy: "A lot of people think there is definitely a national planning system because they [the riots] seem to follow such a definite pattern."
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Polls indicated that many Americans agreed with him. One showed that 45 percent of whites blamed outside agitators (including Communists); another poll indicated that only one-sixth of whites acknowledged the existence of police brutality.
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Sustained by popular responses such as these, conservatives in Congress mobilized to attack an administration effort then pending to exterminate rats in the ghettos. One denounced the measure as a "civil rats bill." Another suggested that the President "buy a lot of cats and turn them loose." Others wondered if Johnson would next seek legislation to do away with snakes, squirrels, bugs, and blackbirds.
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It was not only white conservatives, however, who were appalled at what had happened. Wilkins and Young, called to the White House for advice, were shocked and baffled. Bayard Rustin proclaimed, "The rioting must be stopped. Whatever force is necessary should be used. . . . If the rioting continues, an atmosphere will be created in which the established civil-rights leadership will be robbed of standing. . . . The movement could be destroyed and the leadership passed over to the hands of the destructive elements of the ghettos."
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President Johnson, absorbed by the war in Vietnam, had mixed reactions. Unlike others who blamed a few zealots for the troubles, he understood the pain that discrimination had wrought in black people, and he persevered with his rat control program (which ultimately passed) and his open housing bill.
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Still, he was angered by the lawlessness and hurt by the barrage of criticism that people were flinging at him. Stung by assertions that the government had not done enough to alleviate racial problems in the cities, he ignored the Kerner Commission's report when it appeared in 1968.

T
HE ESCALATING DEMANDS
for rights after 1965, and especially the riots, did more than bewilder people. They also aroused significant backlash, the most vivid of the many reactions that arose amid the polarization of the era. It long outlasted the 1960s.
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Some of those who lashed back carried with them the fervor of religious commitment. These included a few blatant racists who belonged to groups such as the KKK. Much more numerous, however, were rising numbers of white people who followed evangelists like Billy Graham; disciples of fundamentalist Protestants such as Oral Roberts, who had established his own university and medical school in Oklahoma; and adherents of student organizations such as the Campus Crusade for Christ. Devout and politicized Catholics also denounced the outrageous excesses, as they saw them, of blacks and other minority groups.