COMPLETE TEXT

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_ WHAT HAPPENED? WHY DID IT HAPPEN? WHAT CAN BE DONE?

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SPECIAL INTRODUCTION BY TOM WICKER OF SV Neto ijork Simt*

WITH 32 PAGES OF SELECTED PHOTOGRAPHS

LSM*- OqA Slk^yf^

From the special introduction by Tom Wicker

". . . an extraordinary document. We are not

likely to get a better view of socially

directed violence — what underlies it, what

sets it off, how it runs its course,

what follows . . . What had to be said has

been said at last . . ."

This authoritative edition of the Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders which you are holding in your hands includes the complete text and specially selected photographs from the Commission's records that eloquently document the urgency of this report.

Through the up-to-date resources of modern mass-market paperback book-production technique, the first printing of this low-priced 700-page edition of the Report has been made available to the public a few days after President Lyndon B. Johnson re- leased it and weeks before the edition to be pub- lished by the Government Printing Office.

This vital, comprehensive report will be dis- tributed immediately across the United States and throughout the world, in order that it reach the largest number of people in the shortest possible time. It will thus be available also to legislators, police officials, religious leaders, civic groups, school officials, govern- ment and private poverty workers and others inti- mately involved and affected.

The book includes a special introduction by Tom Wicker of The New York Times which interprets the report and places it in proper perspective.

NOTE

This edition of the Report of the National Advisory Com- mission on Civil Disorders contains the entire text of the Report as originally released and later revised by the Commission for publication by the Government Printing Office. The Government Printing Office official publica- tion contains, in addition, an appendix on insurance recommendations and a section of socioeconomic tables. This edition is available for $2.00 from the Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C.

REPORT OF THE

NATIONAL ADVISORY

COMMISSION

ON CIVIL

DISORDERS

Special Introduction by Tom Wicker of The New York Times

With 32 pages of selected photographs

ffi

\ V* s

This book is available in a cloth edition

from E. P. Button & Co., Inc., 201 Park Avenue South,

New York, N.Y. 10003.

REPORT OF THE NATIONAL ADVISORY COMMISSION ON CIVIL DISORDERS

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Introduction

by Tom Wicker

This report is a picture of one nation, divided. It is a picture that derives its most devastating validity from the fact that it was drawn by representatives of the moderate and "responsi- ble" Establishment — not by black radicals, militant youth or even academic leftists. From it rises not merely a cry of out- rage; it is also an expression of shocked intelligence and violated faith.

President Johnson, in appointing his Commission on Civil Disorders on July 27, 1967, was severely criticized for its mod- erate character. Where, the critics demanded, were Stokely Carmichael, Floyd McKissick, Martin Luther King, such white radicals as Tom Hayden or such fiery evangelists as James Baldwin?

How could the Commission's report be comprehensive or acceptable without the participation of such men? The in- clusion of Senator Edward Brooke of Massachusetts and Roy Wilkins of the NAACP hardly answered the question; they represented inter-racial moderation, not radical militance.

But just as it sometimes takes a hawk to settle a war — Eisenhower in Korea, de Gaulle in Algeria — so did it take bona fide moderates to validate the case that had to be made. A commission made up of militants, or even influenced by them, could not conceivably have spoken with a voice so effective, so sure to be heard in white, moderate, responsible America. And the importance of this report is that it makes plain that white, moderate, responsible America is where the trouble lies.

The Commission seemed an unpromising group, when it was first convened in the Indian treaty room of the Old State, War and Navy Building — the room where Dwight Eisenhower held his news conferences and steadfastly insisted that it was none of the business of the President of the United States to endorse the Supreme Court's school desegregation decision. Even the staff director chosen by President Johnson, David Ginsburg, was a prosperous Washington attorney without visible qualifi- cations for understanding the uneasy ghetto.

Governor Otto Kerner of Illinois, the designated chairman, had done much to integrate his state's National Guard and a tenuous racial peace had generally been maintained in Chicago during his administration; but he was not a nationally re- nowned figure. John Lindsay, the Republican-Liberal Mayor of New York had exhibited a deep interest in civil rights matters during his several terms in Congress, and had worked long and hard to keep his city quiet; he was clearly an asset to the Commission, and its most glamorous member.

Senator Fred Harris, Democrat of Oklahoma; Rep. James Corman, Democrat of California; Rep. William M. McCul- loch, Republican of Ohio; Miss Katherine G. Peden, the former Commissioner of Commerce of Kentucky; I. W. Abel, President of the United Steel workers of America; Herbert Jenkins, Chief of Police in Atlanta, Ga.; Charles B. Thornton, the Chairman of Litton Industries, Inc.; Brooke and Wilkins — this did not seem to be a group likely to break new social ground. What, for instance, was Harris of Oklahoma likely to know of urban affairs?

But those acquainted with the Commission's work say that Harris of Oklahoma — who had served earlier in Senator Abraham Ribicoffs inquiry into the problems of cities — proved one of the ablest, most sensitive members. His long experience with underprivileged and ill-treated Indians in his home state gave him a depth of understanding that not all the other members reached.

On the other hand, Corman of California and McCullbch of Ohio, both of whom had excellent civil rights records in Con- gress, proved more cautious when discussion moved be- yond civil rights to the social and economic questions into which the Commission inevitably intruded. Jenkins, the police- man, surprised other members with his acute sensitivity to such matters, and his progressive and compassionate approach.

In general, a rough division often was visible among mem- bers of the Commission — Kerner, Lindsay, Harris, Jenkins, Wilkins and Brooke on the one hand, and Corman, McCulloch, Thornton and Miss Peden on the other. Accounts vary as to Abel and in fact such division as there was did not produce a hard-and-fast voting lineup.

It was rather that some members were more willing than others to recommend massive economic programs — for in- stance, 600,000 housing units in the next year were twice as many as proposed by President Johnson; and the more liberal group worked to give the over-all report a more militant tone, particularly on the urgency of the situation.

vi

Thus, one member of the Commission steadfastly resisted advocacy of Federal "open housing" legislation. Why, he kept asking, "can't a man sell his own house to whomever he pleases?" Ultimately, he supported the open housing section because it was softened somewhat, not because he had really changed his view. In such ways, the Commission itself reflected the inability of American society, dominantly white, to see and treat its Negro citizens fairly.

Yet, surely it must be a hopeful thing — perhaps the one hopeful note in recent years — that ultimately even such a divided and representative Commission could not and did not blink the fact that the single overriding cause of rioting in the cities was not any one thing commonly adduced — unemploy- ment, lack of education, poverty, exploitation — but that it was all of those things and more, expressed in the insidious and pervasive white sense of the inferiority of black men. Here is the essence of the charge : "What white Americans have never fully understood — but what the Negro can never forget — is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White in- stitutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it!' (italics added)

But if it is hopeful that a group of representatives of those institutions and that society could recognize unanimously this central and devastating fact, there is nothing hopeful at all about the fact itself. What kind of program can be advanced to cope with the sheer humanness of racism?

Conceivably the nation could continue its present failing efforts toward an integrated society, including the present pro- portion of its resources devoted to social and economic pro- grams; or it could abandon integration as a goal and commit increased resources to "enrichment" of life in the ghetto — thus presumably making it bearable without producing violence against white society.

The first of these is hopeless; not only will it tend to produce more and more ghetto violence but it is an obvious fraud, in terms of its ability to produce anything like integration. As the Commission points out, if achieving that goal is difficult now, what will it be when the Negro population of the central cities has risen from the present 12.5 million to the 21 million projected for 1985?

The second course is rejected here with equal frankness, as simply another method of producing a permanently divided society. For who can deny what is insisted upon in these pages: "In a country where the economy and particularly the re-

vii

sources of employment are predominantly white, a policy of separation can only relegate Negroes to a permanently inferior economic status."

Having thus disposed of both white "moderation" and black "separatism," the Commission concluded that the only pos- sible course for a sensible and humane nation was "a policy which combines ghetto enrichment with programs designed to encourage integration of substantial numbers of Negroes into the society outside the ghetto."

But — even with the best of will — what a monumental pre- scription this is. In 1910, 91 percent of American Negroes lived in the old South; by 1966, while the Negro population had doubled to 21.5 million, the number living in metropolitan areas had risen to 14.6 million and the number living outside the South had increased elevenfold to 9.7 million. That is what created the black ghetto but by now natural increase has replaced migration as the major cause of Negro population growth in the cities — and almost all Negro population growth is taking place in the cities.

In combination with an almost equally rapid white exodus from the cities, these statistics mean that one-third of American Negroes live in our 12 largest cities (two-thirds of non-South- ern Negroes).

Obviously, this is not a situation that can be reversed or even substantially changed in a short period of time; one has only to contemplate the controversies over bussing students from the ghetto to white neighborhoods, and vice versa, and the not infrequent white violence that results when a Negro moves into white man's country.

While the slow process of dispersing the residents of the ghetto — which, for all practical purposes, has not even been started — goes on, therefore, something also is going to have to be done about the grinding life of the urban poor — a life documented by this Report in terms both harsh and heart- breaking. Because the brutal fact is that for millions of Ne- groes now living, and perhaps for some unborn, the ghetto is all they are ever going to know.

What the Commission recommends — from specifics on jobs, housing, schools, police procedures, newspaper practices, to large abstractions like community attitudes — is best told in the Commission's own words, backed by its own accounts of its findings. But it is again of the highest importance that these recommendations come from the moderate Establishment.

That is because, whatever the fate of its specific proposals,

viii

the Commission has minced no words about the prime neces- sity:

"Only a commitment to national action on an unprecedented scale can shape a future compatible with the historic ideals of American society . . . The major need is to generate new will — the will to tax ourselves to the extent necessary to meet the vital needs of the nation."

That kind of recommendation gets little attention when it comes from "liberals" and "radicals" and "intellectual bleed- ing hearts"; but when it comes from men like Thornton and McCulloch and Abel and Jenkins, it is not easy to doubt the urgency of the case, the shock of the findings, the truth of the need.

And still — this report can only provide, as its profoundly disturbed authors concede, "an honest beginning" on a task that beggars any other planned social evolution known to human history.

It can only be a beginning because, patently, until the fact of white racism is admitted, it cannot conceivably be ex- punged; and until it is far more nearly eliminated than this Commission — or any fair man — could find today, how can that great commitment of money and effort here recommended even be approached, much less made?

And in the vicious circle in which the nation is so nearly trapped, how can the conditions of life in the ghetto be im- proved to the point — not merely of preventing violence — where its present and prospective victims can have the kind of education, housing, income and social experience that, prac- tically speaking, are the prerequisites of equality? Only by the great commitment that — even if there were no war in Vietnam, no gold drain, no Federal budgetary crisis — seems now so remote.

But a journey of a thousand miles, President Kennedy used to say, must begin with a single step. And perhaps that step has been taken in this Report — this indictment.

It is, at the least, an extraordinary document. We are not likely to get a better view of socially directed violence — what underlies it, what sets it off, how it runs its course, what fol- lows. There are novels here, hidden in the Commission's under- stated prose; there are a thousand doctoral theses germinating in its statistics, its interviews, its anecdotes and "profiles."

Myths, naturally, are exploded. There was not, after all, much evidence of Negro snipers in the 1967 rioting; most of the shooting came from scared guardsmen and policemen and some of it was only fireworks. Nor was there — as President

ix

Johnson was inclined to believe when he appointed the Com- mission— an organized conspiracy. The Commission staff even ran Stokely Carmichael's comings and goings through a com- puter in its effort to find conspiratorial traces; in the end, the staff found lots of "incitement" — mostly oratorical — and no conspiracy.

The report also disposes of white middle-class insistence that if immigrants from Europe could rise from the ghetto, so could today's Negroes. As that cliche is analyzed here, the unskilled labor the black immigrant from the cotton fields can offer is in nothing like the demand that once there was for the un- skilled labor of the arriving Italian, Irishman or eastern Euro- pean. Moreover, the power of the urban political machine has declined for many reasons, and today's ghetto resident can exert less organized political pressure than could yesterday's.

Above all, the ghetto today is black. Since white society is far more prejudiced against black men than against mere foreigners, jobs and social acceptance are harder for them to get. Thus, precisely because today's black immigrant has less chance to "get ahead" than his white predecessor, he also has less incentive to do so.

As for the rioters — those ominous looters and arsonists whose eruption into violence precipitated this massive study — they tended, curiously, to be somewhat more educated than the "brothers" who remained uninvolved. By and large, the rioters were young Negroes, natives of the ghetto (not of the South), hostile to the white society surrounding and repressing them, and equally hostile to the middle-class Negroes who accommo- dated themselves to that white dominance. The rioters were mistrustful of white jJolitics, they hated the police, they were proud of their race, and acutely conscious of the discrimination they suffered. They were and they are a time-bomb ticking in the heart of the richest nation in the history of the world.

But more than that, the rioters are the personification of that nation's shame, of its deepest failure, of its greatest chal- lenge. They will not go away. They can only be repressed or conceded their humanity, and the choice is not theirs to make. They can only force it upon the rest of us, and what this Report insists upon is that they are already doing it, and in- tend to keep on.

Thus, there is not really in these pages a rebuke to any president, any administration, any political party, any state or group of states. There is no finger pointed in scorn. Save for a tacit insistence upon the enormous role the Federal govern- ment, of necessity, must have in raising and spending the sums

required, there is no preference for any political philosophy.

The Commission's members insist that they had no guid- ance from the White House, and suffered no restrictions by it. They went out and saw for themselves; they heard the voices of the ghetto; in a basement in Cincinnati, Fred Harris and John Lindsay were spat upon. Through 24 full days of execu- tive session, most of them from nine in the morning until ten at night, they worked on this document.

In the end, not without dispute and travail and misgiving, in the clash and spark of human conflict and human pride, against the pressures of time and ignorance, they produced not so much a report on the riots as a report on America — one nation, divided.

Reading it is an ugly experience but one that brings, finally, something like the relief of beginning. What had to be said has been said at last, and by representatives of that white, mod- erate, responsible America that, alone, needed to say it.

March 1, 1968

REPORT OF THE

NATIONAL ADVISORY

COMMISSION

ON CIVIL

DISORDERS

.... The only genuine, long-range solution for what has happened lies in an attack — mounted at every level — upon the conditions that breed despair and vio- lence. All of us know what those conditions are: igno- rance, discrimination, slums, poverty, disease, not enough jobs. We should attack these conditions — not because we are frightened by conflict, but because we are fired by conscience. We should attack them because there is simply no other way to achieve a decent and orderly society in America. . . .

Lyndon Baines Johnson Address to the Nation July 27, 1967

Foreword

This report of The National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders responds to Executive Order 11365, issued by President Lyndon B. Johnson on July 29, 1967, and to the personal charge given to us by the President.

"Let your search," he said, "be free ... As best you can, find the truth and express it in your report."

We have sought to do so.

"This matter," he said, "is far, far too important for politics."

This was a bipartisan Commission and a nonpartisan effort.

"Only you," he said,, "can do this job. Only if you . . . put your shoulders to the wheel can America hope for the kind of report it needs and will take to its heart."

This has been a working Commission.

To our staff, headed by David Ginsburg, Executive Director, to his deputy, Victor H. Palmieri, and to all those in government and private life who helped us, we are grateful.

/s/ Otto Kerner /s/ John V. Lindsay

Chairman Vice Chairman

/s/ Fred R. Harris /s/ Edward W. Brooke

/s/ James C. Corman /s/ William M. McCulloch

/s/ I. W. Abel hi Charles B. Thornton

/s/ Roy Wilkins /s/ Katherine G. Peden /s/ Herbert Jenkins

xvi

THE NATIONAL ADVISORY COMMISSION ON CIVIL DISORDERS

Chairman

Otto Kerner

Governor of Illinois

Vice Chairman

John V. Lindsay

Mayor of New York City

Fred R. Harris

United States Senator Oklahoma

Edward W. Brooke United States Senator Massachusetts

James C. Corman

United States Representative

22nd District of California

William M. McCulloch United States Representative 4th District of Ohio

I. W. Abel President

United Steelworkers of America ( AFL-CIO)

Charles B. Thornton Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer Litton Industries, Inc.

Roy Wilkins Executive Director National Association for the

Advancement of Colored

People

Katherine Graham Peden Commissioner of Commerce State of Kentucky (1963-67)

Herbert Jenkins Chief of Police Atlanta, Georgia

xvu

ADVISORY PANELS TO THE COMMISSION

NATIONAL ADVISORY PANEL ON INSURANCE IN RIOT-AFFECTED AREAS

Chairman

Richard J. Hughes

Governor of New Jersey

Vice Chairman

William W. Scranton

Former Governor of Pennsylvania

Frank L. Farwell President, Liberty Mutual Insurance Company

A. Addison Roberts President, Reliance Insurance Company

Walter E. Washington Commissioner, District of Columbia

George S. Harris President, Chicago Metropolitan Mutual Assurance Company

Frank M. Wozencraft Assistant Attorney General

In charge of Office of Legal Counsel U. S. Department of Justice

ADVISORY PANEL ON PRIVATE ENTERPRISE

Chairman Charles B. Thornton

John Leland Atwood President and Chief

Executive Officer North American Rockwell

Corp.

Martin R. Gainsbrugh Senior Vice President &

Chief Economist National Industrial

Conference Board

Walter E. Hoadley Senior Vice President &

Chief Economist Bank of America

Louis F. Polk, Jr. Vice President — Finance International and Development General Mills, Inc.

Lawrence M. Stone Professor of Law University of California Berkeley

xvin

PROFESSIONAL STAFF

Executive Director David Ginsburg David L. Chambers, Spec. Asst.

Deputy Executive Director Victor H. Palmieri

John A. Koskinen, Spec. Asst.

Deputy Director for Operations Stephen Kurzman Lee A. Satterfield, Spec. Asst

General Counsel Merle M. McCurdy Nathaniel Jones,

Asst. Gen. Counsel

David E. Birenbaum,

Asst. Gen. Counsel

Roger L. Waldman,

Asst. Gen. Counsel

Assistant Deputy Director —

Research

Robert Shellow, Ph.D.

Associate Director for Public

Safety

Arnold Sagalyn

Paul G. Bower, Asst. Dir.

Associate Director for Program

Research

Richard P. Nathan, Ph.D.,

Director of Investigations

Milan C. Miskovsky

Stanley P. Hebert, Deputy

Director of Field Operations

Charles E. Nelson

Herman Wilson, Deputy George Trask, Spec. Asst.

Director of Congressional

Relations

Henry B. Taliaferro, Jr.

Director of Information

Alvin A. Spivak

Lawrence A. Still, Deputy Eric D. Blanchard, Informa- tion Officer

Director of Research Services Melvin L. Bergheim

Robert W. Moss, Assistant

Special Consultants Robert Conot Jacob Rosenthal

Executive Officer Norman J. McKenzie

James D. Arthur ♦Dennis E. Barrett Patricia Bennett Leslie Berkowitz David Boesel ♦John I. Boswell Harry M. Bratt Louis B. Brickman Anna Byus Sarah Carey Esther Carter Theodore Chamberlain John M. Christman Martin J. Connell Florence F. Conot Bernard Dobranski Walter Dukes, Jr. Harvey Friedman

Geraldine L. Furth Barbara Garcia-Dobles Lucy Gilbert Mildred Glasgow Louis Goldberg Melvin Goldstein Luis Guinot Harold H. Hair William H. Hayden William R. Hill, Jr. Richard B. Holcomb Andrew B. Horgan ♦Isaac Hunt Wilbur H. Jenkins Anthony L. Jones Hannah J. Kaiser Robert G. Kelly

xix

Charles E. King Jane Korff Karen Krueger Carol B. Liebman Eleanor J. McGee Phyllis K. Mensh Barbara P. Newman Constance Newman Lloyd Oliver William Oxley Jane Pasachoff Daniel Pearlman Haywood L. Perry Diane Phillips ♦Thomas Popp James Porter John Pride

♦Field Team Leaders

James Raschard Norbert C. Rayford Eleanor Robbins Salvador A. Romero Allen Ross Louise Sagalyn John K. Scales Suzanne Schilling Arlene Shadoan

♦Francis Sharp

♦Ira T. Simmons Shedd H. Smith

♦Bruce R. Thomas John Ursu Leona Vogt Steven Waldhorn Everett Waldo

♦B. J. Warren

Special Assistants to Commissioners

William L. Cowin Kyran McGrath William A. Smith Donald W. Webb Stephen S. Weiner

Personal Assistants

Doris Claxton:

Executive Director Vivian S. Bullock:

Deputy Executive Director Claudette Johnson:

The Commission

Student Assistants Rene Berblinger Gerold F. Berger John Davis Jesse Epstein Oliver Holmes Merry Hudson Elizabeth Jamison Richard Lane Norris D. Wolff

xx

Contents

Introduction by Tom Wicker v

Foreword xvi

The National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders xvii

Advisory Panels to the Commission xviii

Professional Staff xix

Summary 1

Preface 31

PART I. WHAT HAPPENED?

Chapter 1 / Profiles of Disorder 35

Introduction 35

I. Tampa 42

II. Cincinnati 47

HI. Atlanta 52

IV. Newark 56

V. Northern New Jersey 69

VI. Plainfield 75

VII. New Brunswick 82

VHI. Detroit 84

Methodology 108

Chapter 2 / Patterns of Disorder 109

Introduction 109

I. The Pattern of Violence and Damage 112

II. The Riot Process 116

III. The Riot Participant 127

IV. The Background of Disorder 135

V. The Aftermath of Disorder 151

Notes 158

Chapter 3 / Organized Activity 201

xxi

PART II. WHY DID IT HAPPEN?

Chapter 4 / The Basic Causes 203

Chapter 5 / Rejection and Protest: An Historical Sketch 207

Introduction 207

The Colonial Period 207

The Constitution and the Laws 208

Discrimination as Doctrine .209

The Path Toward Civil War 211

Civil War and "Emancipation" 212

Reconstruction 213

Segregation by Law 214

Protest in the Early 1900's 216

East St. Louis, 1917 217

World War I and Postwar Violence 218

The 1920's and the New Militancy 220

The Depression 221

The New Deal 222

World War U 223

The Postwar Period 224

Revolution of Rising Expectations 226

Student Involvement % 227

Organizational Differences 228

"Freedom Now!" and Civil Rights Laws 229

Failures of Direct Action 230

New Directions 231

"Black Power" 232

Old Wine in New Bottles 234

The Meaning 235

Chapter 6 / The Formation of The Racial Ghettos 236

Major Trends in Negro Population 236

The Growth Rate of the Negro Population 237

The Migration of Negroes from the South 239

The Concentration of Negro Population

in Large Cities 242

Chapter 7 / Unemployment, Family Structure, and Social Disorganization 251

Recent Economic Trends 251

Unemployment and Underemployment 252

The Low-Status and Low-Paying Nature of

Many Negro Jobs 253

The Magnitude of Poverty in Disadvantaged

Neighborhoods 258

The Social Impact of Employment Problems

in Disadvantaged Negro Areas 260

xxii

Note — Calculation of Nonwhite Subemployment in Disadvantaged Areas of All Central Cities 264

Chapter 8 / Conditions of Life in the Racial Ghetto 266

I. Crime and Insecurity 266

II. Health and Sanitation Conditions 269

III. Exploitation of Disadvantaged Consumers

by Retail Merchants 274

Chapter 9 / Comparing the Immigrant and Negro

Experience 278

The Maturing Economy 278

The Disability of Race 278

Entry Into the Political System 279

Cultural Factors 280

The Vital Element of Time 281

PART III. WHAT CAN BE DONE?

Chapter 10 / The Community Response 283

Introduction 283

Basic Strategy and Goals 288

Programs: First Phase Actions 289

Second Phase Actions 294

Conclusion 298

Chapter 11 / Police and The Community 299

Introduction 299

L Police Conduct and Patrol Practices 301

II. The Problem of Police Protection 307

III. The Problem of Grievance Mechanisms 310

IV. The Need for Policy Guidelines 312

V. Community Support for Law Enforcement 315

Chapter 12 / Control of Disorder 323

Introduction 323

L The Initial Incident 324

II. Control Capabilities 327

HI. The Use of Force 329

IV. Community Assistance in Disorder Control 331

V. Danger of Overreaction 334

VI. Funding of Recommendations for Prevention

and Control of Disorder 335

Chapter 13 / The Administration of Justice Under Emergency Conditions 337

I. The Condition in Our Lower Courts 337

xxiii

II. The Experience of Summer 1967 . . 338

HI. Guidelines for the Future 344

IV. Summary of Recommendations 357

Chapter 14 / Damages: Repair and Compensation 358

Amending the Federal Disaster Act 358

Compensating for Individual Losses — Insurance 360

Chapter 15 / The News Media and the Disorders 362

Introduction 362

I. News Coverage of Civil Disorders —

Summer 1967 368

II. A Recommendation to Improve Riot Coverage 378

HI. Reporting Racial Problems in

the United States 382

IV. Institute of Urban Communications 386

Chapter 16 / The Future of the Cities 389

Introduction 389

I. The Key Trends 390

II. Choices for the Future 395

III. The Present Policies Choice 396

IV. The Enrichment Choice 401

V. The Integration Choice 406

VI. Conclusions 407

Note on Negro Population Projections 408

Chapter 17 / Recommendations for National Action 410 Introduction 410

I. Employment 413

II. Education 424

m. The Welfare System 456

IV. Housing 4 .467

Conclusion 483

PART IV. SUPPLEMENT AND APPENDICES

Supplement on Control of Disorder 484

Introduction 484

I. The Police and Control of Civil Disorders 484

II. Fire Departments and Civil Disorders 493

III. State Response To Civil Disorders 496

IV. Army Response To Civil Disorders 506

V. Coordinating the Control Response 509

VI. Legal Needs For Riot Control 522

Exhibit A — Letter from the Attorney General to

the Governors 528

Appendices

A Executive Order 11365, Establishing a National Advisory

Commission on Civil Disorders, July 29, 1967 534

xxiv

B Remarks Of The President Upon Issuing an

Executive Order Establishing A National

Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders,

July 29, 1967 536

C Excerpts From President Lyndon B. Johnson's

Address To The Nation On Civil Disorders,

July 27, 1967 538

D Biographical Materials on Commissioners 542

E Witnesses Appearing At Hearings Of The

Commission 546

F Consultants, Contractors and Advisers 551

G Staff Assistants, Secretaries And Support 557

H Report To The Commission By The Advisory

Panel On Private Enterprise 558

I Special Interim Recommendations Of The

Commission: Letters To The President

On The National Guard And On Conferences

For Police And Mayors; Letters To FCC

And Department of Justice 570

J A Statement On Methodology 574

Charts on Levels of Violence and Negotiation 583

Index 633

xxv

SUMMARY

Introduction

The summer of 1967 again brought racial disorders to American cities, and with them shock, fear and bewilderment to the nation.

The worst came during a two-week period in July, first in Newark and then in Detroit. Each set off a chain reaction in neighboring communities.

On July 28, 1967, the President of the United States estab- lished this Commission and directed us to answer three basic questions:

What happened?

Why did it happen?

What can be done to prevent it from happening again?

To respond to these questions, we have undertaken a broad range of studies and investigations. We have visited the riot cities; we have heard many witnesses; we have sought the counsel of experts across the country.

This is our basic conclusion: Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white — separate and unequal.

Reaction to last summer's disorders has quickened the move- ment and deepened the division. Discrimination and segrega- tion have long permeated much of American life; they now threaten the future of every American.

This deepening racial division is not inevitable. The move- ment apart can be reversed. Choice is still possible. Our principal task is to define that choice and to press for a national resolution.

To pursue our present course will involve the continuing polarization of the^ American community and, ultimately, the destruction of basic democratic values.

The alternative is not blind repression or capitulation to lawlessness. It is the realization of common opportunities for all within a single society.

This alternative will require a commitment to national

1

action— compassionate, massive and sustained, backed by the resources of the most powerful and the richest nation on this earth. From every American it will require new attitudes, new understanding, and, above all, new will.

The vital needs of the nation must be met; hard choices must be made, and, if necessary, new taxes enacted.

Violence cannot build a better society. Disruption and dis- order nourish repression, not justice. They strike at the free- dom of every citizen. The community cannot — it will not— tolerate coercion and mob rule.

Violence and destruction must be ended — in the streets of the ghetto and in the lives of people.

Segregation and poverty have created in the racial ghetto a destructive environment totally unknown to most white Americans.

What white Americans have never fully understood — but what the Negro can never forget — is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it.

It is time now to turn with all the purpose at our command to the major unfinished business of this nation. It is time to adopt strategies for action that will produce quick and visible progress. It is time to make good the promises of American democracy to all citizens — urban and rural, white and black, Spanish-surname, American Indian, and every minority group.

Our recommendations embrace three basic principles:

• To mount programs on a scale equal to the dimension of the problems;

• To aim these programs for high impact in the immediate future in order to close the gap between promise and performance;

• To undertake new initiatives and experiments that can change the system of failure and frustration that now dominates the ghetto and weakens our society.

These programs will require unprecedented levels of funding and performance, but they neither probe deeper nor demand more than the problems which called them forth. There can be no higher priority for national action and no higher claim on the nation's conscience.

We issue this Report now, five months before the date called for by the President. Much remains that can be learned. Con- tinued study is essential.

As Commissioners we have worked together with a sense of the greatest urgency and have sought to compose whatever differences exist among us. Some differences remain. But the gravity of the problem and the pressing need for action are too clear to allow further delay in the issuance of this Report.

2

Part I — What Happened?

Chapter 1 — Profiles of Disorder

The report contains profiles of a selection of the disorders that took place during the summer of 1967. These profiles are designed to indicate how the disorders happened, who par- ticipated in them, and how local officials, police forces, and the National Guard responded. Illustrative excerpts follow:

NEWARK

... It was decided to attempt to channel the energies of the people into a nonviolent protest. While Lofton promised the crowd that a full investigation would be made of the Smith incident, the other Negro leaders began urging those on the scene to form a line of march toward the city hall.

Some persons joined the line of march. Others milled about in the narrow street. From the dark grounds of the housing project came a barrage of rocks. Some of them fell among the crowd. Others hit persons in the line of march. Many smashed the windows of the police station. The rock throwing, it was believed, was the work of youngsters; approximately 2,500 chil- dren lived in the housing project.

Almost at the same time, an old car was set afire in a parking lot. The line of march began to disintegrate. The police, their heads protected by World War I-type helmets, sallied forth to disperse the crowd. A fire engine, arriving on the scene, was pelted with rocks. As police drove people away from the station, they scattered in all directions.

A few minutes later a nearby liquor store was broken into. Some persons, seeing a caravan of cabs appear at city hall to protest Smith's arrest, interpreted this as evidence that the dis- turbance had been organized, and generated rumors to that effect.

However, only a few stores were looted. Within a short period of time, the disorder appeared to have run its course. »•■»'•*

... On Saturday, July 15, [Director of Police Dominick] Spina received a report of snipers in a housing project. When he arrived he saw approximately 100 National Guardsmen and police offi- cers crouching behind vehicles, hiding in corners and lying on the ground around the edge of the courtyard.

Since everything appeared quiet and it was broad daylight, Spina walked directly down the middle of the street. Nothing happened. As he came to the last building of the complex, he heard a shot. All around him the troopers jumped, believing themselves to be under sniper fire. A moment later a young Guardsman ran from behind a building.

The Director of Police went over and asked him if he had fired the shot. The soldier said yes, he had fired to scare a man away from a window; that his orders were to keep everyone away from windows.

3

Spina said he told the soldier: "Do you know what you just did? You have now created a state of hysteria. Every Guardsman up and down this street and every state policeman and every city policeman that is present thinks that somebody just fired a shot and that it is probably a sniper."

A short time later more "gunshots" were heard. Investigating, Spina came upon a Puerto Rican sitting on a wall. In reply to a question as to whether he knew "where the firing is coming from?" the man said:

"That's no firing. That's fireworks. If you look up to the fourth floor, you will see the people who are throwing down these cherry bombs."

By this time four truckloads of National Guardsmen had arrived and troopers and policemen were again crouched every- where looking for a sniper. The Director of Police remained at the scene for three hours, and the only shot fired was the one by the Guardsman.

Nevertheless, at six o'clock that evening two columns of National Guardsmen and state troopers were directing mass fire at the Hayes Housing Project in response to what they believed iVere snipers. . . .

DETROIT

• . . A spirit of carefree nihilism was taking hold. To riot and destroy appeared more and more to become ends in them- selves. Late Sunday afternoon it appeared to one observer that the young people were "dancing amidst the flames."

A Negro plainclothes officer was standing at an intersection when a man threw a Molotov cocktail into a business establish- ment at the corner. In the heat of the afternoon, fanned by the 20 to 25 m.p.h. winds of both Sunday and Monday, the fire reached the home next door within minutes. As residents use- lessly sprayed the flames with garden hoses, the fire jumped from roof to roof of adjacent two- and three-story buildings. Within the hour the entire block was in flames. The ninth house in the burning row belonged to the arsonist who had thrown the Molotov cocktail. . . .

* * *

• • . Employed as a private guard, 55-year-old Julius L. Dor- sey, a Negro, was standing in front of a market when accosted by two Negro men and a woman. They demanded he permit them to loot the market. He ignored them demands. They began to berate him. He asked a neighbor to call the police. As the argument grew more heated, Dorsey fired three shots from hispistol into the air.

The police radio reported: "Looters, they have rifles." A patrol car driven by a police officer and carrying three National Guards- men arrived. As the looters fled, the law enforcement personnel opened fire. When the firing ceased, one person lay dead.

He was Julius L. Dorsey . . .

* * *

... As the riot alternately waxed and waned, one area of the ghetto remained insulated. On the northeast side the residents of some 150 square blocks inhabited by 21,000 persons had, in 1966, banded together in the Positive Neighborhood Action Com-

4

mittee (PNAC). With professional help from the Institute of Urban Dynamics, they had organized block clubs and made plans for the improvement of the neighborhood. . . .

When the riot broke out, the residents, through the block clubs, were able to organize quickly. Youngsters, agreeing to stay in the neighborhood, participated in detouring traffic. While many per- sons reportedly sympathized with the idea of a rebellion against the "system," only two small fires were set — one in an empty building.

* * *

. . . According to Lt. Gen. Throckmorton and Col. Boiling, the city, at this time, was saturated with fear. The National Guardsmen were afraid, the citizens were afraid, and the police were afraid. Numerous persons, the majority of them Negroes, were being injured by gunshots of undetermined origin. The gen- eral and his staff felt that the major task of the troops was to reduce the fear and restore an air of normalcy.

In order to accomplish this, every effort was made to establish contact and rapport between the troops and the residents. The soldiers — 20 percent of whom were Negro — began helping to clean up the streets, collect garbage, and trace persons who had disappeared in the confusion. Residents in the neighborhoods re- sponded with soup and sandwiches for the troops. In areas where the National Guard tried to establish rapport with the citizens, there was a similar response.

NEW BRUNSWICK

• . . A short time later, elements of the crowd — an older and rougher one than the night before — appeared in front of the police station. The participants wanted to see the mayor.

Mayor [Patricia] Sheehan went out onto the steps of the station. Using a bullhorn, she talked to the people and asked that she be given an opportunity to correct conditions. The crowd was boisterous. Some persons challenged the mayor. But, finally, the opinion, "She's new! Give her a chance!" prevailed.

A demand was issued by people in the crowd that all persons arrested the previous night be released. Told that this already had been done, the people were suspicious. They asked to be allowed to inspect the jail cells.

It was agreed to permit representatives of the people to look in the cells to satisfy themselves that everyone had been released.

The crowd dispersed. The New Brunswick riot had failed to materialize.

Chapter 2 — Patterns of Disorder

The "typical" riot did not take place. The disorders of 1967 were unusual, irregular, complex and unpredictable social processes. Like most human events, they did not unfold in an orderly sequence. However, an analysis of our survey information leads to some conclusions about the riot process.

In general:

5

)

• The civil disorders of 1967 involved Negroes acting against local symbols of white American society, authority and property in Negro neighborhoods — rather than against white persons.

• Of 164 disorders reported during the first nine months of 1967, eight (5 percent) were major in terms of violence and damage; 33 (20 percent) were serious but not major; 123 (75 percent) were minor and undoubtedly would not have received national attention as riots had the nation not been sensitized by the more serious outbreaks.

• In the 75 disorders studied by a Senate subcommittee, 83 deaths were reported. Eighty-two percent of the deaths and more than half the injuries occurred in Newark and Detroit. About 10 per- cent of the dead and 38 percent of the injured were public em- ployees, primarily law officers and firemen. The overwhelming majority of the persons killed or injured in all the disorders were Negro civilians.

• Initial damage estimates were greatly exaggerated. In Detroit, newspaper damage estimates at first ranged from $200 million to $500 million; the highest recent estimate is $45 million. In Newark, early estimates ranged from $15 to $25 million. A month later damage was estimated at $10.2 million, 80 percent in inventory losses.

In the 24 disorders in 23 cities which we surveyed:

• The final incident before the outbreak of disorder, and the initial violence itself, generally took place in the evening or at night at a place in which it was normal for many people to be on the streets.

• Violence usually occurred almost immediately following the oc- currence of the final precipitating incident, and then escalated rapidly. With but few exceptions, violence subsided during the day, and flared rapidly again at night. The night-day cycles con- tinued through the early period of the major disorders.

• Disorder generally began with rock and bottle throwing and win- dow breaking. Once store windows were broken, looting usually followed.

• Disorder did not erupt as a result of a single "triggering" or "precipitating" incident. Instead, it was generated out of an in- creasingly disturbed social atmosphere, in which typically a series of tension-heightening incidents over a period of weeks or months became linked in the minds of many in the Negro community with a reservoir of underlying grievances. At some point in the mounting tension, a further incident — in itself often routine or trivial — became the breaking point and the tension spilled over into violence.

• "Prior" incidents, which increased tensions and ultimately led to violence, were police actions in almost half the cases; police ac- tions were "final" incidents before the outbreak of violence in 12 of the 24 surveyed disorders.

• No particular control tactic was successful in every situation. The varied effectiveness of control techniques emphasizes the need for advance training, planning, adequate intelligence systems, and knowledge of the ghetto community.

6

• Negotiations between Negroes — including young militants as well as older Negro leaders — and white officials concerning "terms of peace" occurred during virtually all the disorders surveyed. In many cases, these negotiations involved discussion of underlying grievances as well as the handling of the disorder by control authorities.

• The typical rioter was a teenager or young adult, a lifelong resi- dent of the city in which he rioted, a high school dropout; he was, nevertheless, somewhat better educated than his nonrioting Negro neighbor, and was usually underemployed or employed in a menial job. He was proud of his race, extremely hostile to both whites and middle-class Negroes and, although informed about politics, highly distrustful of the political system.

A Detroit survey revealed that approximately 1 1 percent of the total residents of two riot areas admitted participation in the rioting, 20 to 25 percent identified themselves as "by- standers," over 16 percent identified themselves as "counter- rioters" who urged rioters to "cool it," and the remaining 48 to 53 percent said they were at home or elsewhere and did not participate. In a survey of Negro males between the ages of 15 and 35 residing in the disturbance area in Newark, about 45 percent identified themselves as rioters, and about 55 per- cent as "noninvolved."

• Most rioters were young Negro males. Nearly 53 percent of arrestees were between 15 and 24 years of age; nearly 81 per- cent between 15 and 35.

• In Detroit and Newark about 74 percent of the rioters were brought up in the North. In contrast, of the noninvolved, 36 percent in Detroit and 52 percent in Newark were brought up in the North.

• What the rioters appeared to be seeking was fuller participa- tion in the social order and the material benefits enjoyed by the majority of American citizens. Rather than rejecting the Ameri- can system, they were anxious to obtain a place for themselves in it.

• Numerous Negro counter-rioters walked the streets urging rioters to "cool it." The typical counter-rioter was better educated and had higher income than either the rioter or the noninvolved.

• The proportion of Negroes in local government was substantially smaller than the Negro proportion of population. Only three of the 20 cities studied had more than one Negro legislator; none had ever had a Negro mayor or city manager. In only four cities did Negroes hold other important policy-making positions or serve as heads of municipal departments.

• Although almost all cities had some sort of formal grievance mechanism for handling citizen complaints, this typically was regarded by Negroes as ineffective and was generally ignored.

• Although specific grievances varied from city to city, at least 12 deeply held grievances can be identified and ranked into three levels of relative intensity:

7

First Level of Intensity

1. Police practices

2. Unemployment and underemployment

3. Inadequate housing

Second Level of Intensity

4. Inadequate education

5. Poor recreation facilities and programs

6. Ineffectiveness of the political structure and grievance mechanisms

Third Level of Intensity

7. Disrespectful white attitudes

8. Discriminatory administration of justice

9. Inadequacy of federal programs

10. Inadequacy of municipal services

11. Discriminatory consumer and credit practices

12. Inadequate welfare programs

• The results of a three-city survey of various federal programs — manpower, education, housing, welfare and community action — indicate that, despite substantial expenditures, the number of persons assisted constituted only a fraction of those in need.

The background of disorder is often as complex and difficult to analyze as the disorder itself. But we find that certain general conclusions can be drawn:

• Social and economic conditions in the riot cities constituted a clear pattern of severe disadvantage for Negroes compared with whites, whether the Negroes lived in the area where the riot took place or outside it. Negroes had completed fewer years of education and fewer had attended high school. Negroes were twice as likely to be unemployed and three times as likely to be in unskilled and service jobs. Negroes averaged 70 percent of the income earned by whites and were more than twice as likely to be living in poverty. Although housing cost Negroes relatively more, they had worse housing — three times as likely to be overcrowded and substandard. When compared to white suburbs, the relative disadvantage is even more pronounced.

A study of the aftermath of disorder leads to disturbing conclusions. We find that, despite the institution of some post- riot programs:

• Little basic change in the conditions underlying the outbreak of disorder has taken place. Actions to ameliorate Negro grievances have been limited and sporadic; with but few exceptions, they have not significantly reduced tensions.

• In several cities, the principal official response has been to train and equip the police with more sophisticated weapons.

• In several cities, increasing polarization is evident, with con- tinuing breakdown of inter-racial communication, and growth of white segregationist or black separatist groups.

8

Chapter 3 — Organized Activity

The President directed the Commission to investigate "to what extent, if any, there has been planning or organization in any of the riots."

To carry out this part of the President's charge, the Com- mission established a special investigative staff supplementing the field teams that made the general examination of the riots in 23 cities. The unit examined data collected by federal agencies and congressional committees, including thousands of documents supplied by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, gathered and evaluated information from local and state law enforcement agencies and officials, and conducted its own field investigation in selected cities.

On the basis of all the information collected, the Commission concludes that:

The urban disorders of the summer of 1967 were not caused by, nor were they the consequence of, any organized plan or "conspiracy."

Specifically, the Commission has found no evidence that all or any of the disorders or the incidents that led to them were planned or directed by any organization or group, interna- tional, national or local.

Militant organizations, local and national, and individual agitators, who repeatedly forecast and called for violence, were active in the spring and summer of 1967. We believe that they sought to encourage violence, and that they helped to create an atmosphere that contributed to the outbreak of disorder.

We recognize that the continuation of disorders and the polarization of the races would provide fertile ground for organized exploitation in the future.

Investigations of organized activity are continuing at all levels of government, including committees of Congress. These investigations relate not only to the disorders of 1967 but also to the actions of groups and individuals, particularly in schools and colleges, during this last fall and winter. The Commission has cooperated in these investigations. They should continue.

Part II — Why Did It Happen?

Chapter 4 — The Basic Causes

In addressing the question "Why did it happen?" we shift our focus from the local to the national scene, from the par-

9

ticular events of the summer of 1967 to the factors within the society at large that created a mood of violence among many urban Negroes.

These factors are complex and interacting; they vary sig- nificantly in their effect from city to city and from year to year; and the consequences of one disorder, generating new grievances and new demands, become the causes of the next. Thus was created the "thicket of tension, conflicting evidence and extreme opinions" cited by the President.

Despite these complexities, certain fundamental matters are clear. Of these, the most fundamental is the racial attitude and behavior of white Americans toward black Americans.

Race prejudice has shaped our history decisively; it now threatens to affect our future.

White racism is essentially responsible for the explosive mixture which has been accumulating in our cities since the end of World War II. Among the ingredients of this mixture are:

• Pervasive discrimination and segregation in employment, educa- tion and housing, which have resulted in the continuing exclu- sion of great numbers of Negroes from the benefits of economic progress.

• Black in-migration and white exodus, which have produced the massive and growing concentrations of impoverished Negroes in our major cities, creating a growing crisis of deteriorating facilities and services and unmet human needs.

• The black ghettos where segregation and poverty converge on the young to destroy opportunity and enforce failure. Crime, drug addiction, dependency on welfare, and bitterness and resent- ment against society in general and white society in particular are the result.

At the same time, most whites and some Negroes outside the ghetto have prospered to a degree unparalleled in the his- tory of civilization. Through television and other media, this affluence has been flaunted before the eyes of the Negro poor and the jobless ghetto youth.

Yet these facts alone cannot be said to have caused the disorders. Recently, other powerful ingredients have begun to catalyze the mixture:

• Frustrated hopes are the residue of the unfulfilled expectations aroused by the great judicial and legislative victories of the Civil Rights Movement and the dramatic struggle for equal rights in the South.

• A climate that tends toward approval and encouragement of violence as a form of protest has been created by white terrorism directed against nonviolent protest; by the open defiance of law and federal authority by state and local officials resisting desegre-

10

gation; and by some protest groups engaging in civil disobedience who turn their backs on nonviolence, go beyond the constitu- tionally protected rights of petition and free assembly, and resort to violence to attempt to compel alteration of laws and policies with which they disagree.

• The frustrations of powerlessness have led some Negroes to the conviction that there is no effective alternative to violence as a means of achieving redress of grievances, and of "moving the system." These frustrations are reflected in alienation and hos- tility toward the institutions of law and government and the white society which controls them, and in the reach toward racial consciousness and solidarity reflected in the slogan "Black Power."

• A new mood has sprung up among Negroes, particularly among the young, in which self-esteem and enhanced racial pride are replacing apathy and submission to "the system."

• The police are not merely a "spark" factor. To some Negroes police have come to symbolize white power, white racism and white repression. And the fact is that many police do reflect and express these white attitudes. The atmosphere of hostility and cynicism is reinforced by a widespread belief among Negroes in the existence of police brutality and in a "double standard" of justice and protection — one for Negroes and one for whites,

* * *

To this point, we have attempted to identify the prime com- ponents of the "explosive mixture." In the chapters that follow we seek to analyze them in the perspective of history. Their meaning, however, is clear:

In the summer of 1967, we have seen in our cities a chain reaction of racial violence. If we are heedless, none of us shall escape the consequences.

Chapter 5 — Rejection and Protest: An Historical Sketch

The causes of recent racial disorders are embedded in a tangle of issues and circumstances — social, economic, political and psychological — which arise out of the historic pattern of Negro-white relations in America.

In this chapter we trace the pattern, identify the recurrent themes of Negro protest and, most importantly, provide a perspective on the protest activities of the present era.

We describe the Negro's experience in America and the development of slavery as an institution. We show his per- sistent striving for equality in the face of rigidly maintained social, economic and educational barriers, and repeated mob violence. We portray the ebb and flow of the doctrinal tides — accommodation, separatism, and self-help — and their relation- ship to the current theme of Black Power. We conclude:

The Black Power advocates of today consciously feel that they are the most militant group in the Negro protest movement. Yet

11

they have retreated from a direct confrontation with American society on the issue of integration and, by preaching separatism, unconsciously function as an accommodation to white racism. Much of their economic program, as well as their interest in Ne- gro history, self-help, racial solidarity and separation, is reminis- cent of Booker T. Washington. The rhetoric is different, but the ideas are remarkably similar.

Chapter 6 — The Formation Of the Racial Ghettos1

Throughout the 20th century the Negro population of the United States has been moving steadily from rural areas to urban and from South to North and West. In 1910, 91 percent of the nation's 9.8 million Negroes lived in the South and only 27 percent of American Negroes lived in cities of 2,500 persons or more. Between 1910 and 1966 the total Negro population more than doubled, reaching 21.5 million, and the number living in metropolitan areas rose more than five- fold (from 2.6 million to 14.8 million). The number outside the South rose eleven-fold (from 880,000 to 9.7 million).

Negro migration from the South has resulted from the expectation of thousands of new and highly paid jobs for unskilled workers in the North and the shift to mechanized farming in the South. However, the Negro migration is small when compared to earlier waves of European immigrants. Even between 1960 and 1966, there were 1.8 million immi- grants from abroad compared to the 613,000 Negroes who arrived in the North and West from the South.

As a result of the growing number of Negroes in urban areas, natural increase has replaced migration as the primary source of Negro population increase in the cities. Nevertheless, Negro migration from the South will continue unless economic conditions there change dramatically.

Basic data concerning Negro urbanization trends indicate that:

• Almost all Negro population growth (98 percent from 1950 to 1966) is occurring within metropolitan areas, primarily within central cities.2

• The vast majority of white population growth (78 percent from 1960 to 1966) is occurring in suburban portions of metropolitan areas. Since 1960, white central-city population has declined by 1.3 million.

1The term "ghetto" as used in this report refers to an area within a city characterized by poverty and acute social disorganization, and inhabited by members of a racial or ethnic group under conditions of involuntary segrega- tion.

8 A "central city" is the largest city of a standard metropolitan statistical area, that is, a metropolitan area containing at least one city of 50,000 or more inhabitants.

12

• As a result, central cities are becoming more heavily Negro while the suburban fringes around them remain almost entirely white.

• The twelve largest central cities now contain over two-thirds of the Negro population outside the South, and one-third of the Negro total in the United States.

Within the cities, Negroes have been excluded from white residential areas through discriminatory practices. Just as sig- nificant is the withdrawal of white families from, or their refusal to enter, neighborhoods where Negroes are moving or already residing. About 20 percent of the urban population of the United States changes residence every year. The refusal of whites to move into "changing" areas when vacancies occur means that most vacancies eventually are occupied by Negroes.

The result, according to a recent study, is that in 1960 the average segregation index for 207 of the largest United States cities was 86.2. In other words, to create an unsegre- gated population distribution, an average of over 86 percent of all Negroes would have to change their place of residence within the city.

Chapter 7 — Unemployment, Family Structure, and Social Disorganization

Although there have been gains in Negro income nationally, and a decline in the number of Negroes below the "poverty level," the condition of Negroes in the central city remains in a state of crisis. Between 2 and 2.5 million Negroes — 16 to 20 percent of the total Negro population of all central cities — live in squalor and deprivation in ghetto neighborhoods.

Employment is a key problem. It not only controls the present for the Negro American but, in a most profound way, it is creating the future as well. Yet, despite continuing eco- nomic growth and declining national unemployment rates, the unemployment rate for Negroes in 1967 was more than double that for whites.

Equally important is the undesirable nature of many jobs open to Negroes and other minorities. Negro men are more than three times as likely as white men to be in low-paying, unskilled or service jobs. This concentration of male Negro employment at the lowest end of the occupational scale is the single most important cause of poverty among Negroes.

In one study of low-income neighborhoods, the "subemploy- ment rate," including both unemployment and underemploy- ment, was about 33 percent, or 8.8 times greater than the overall unemployment rate for all United States workers.

Employment problems, aggravated by the constant arrival of new unemployed migrants, many of them from depressed

13

rural areas, create persistent poverty in the ghetto. In 1966, about 11.9 percent of the nation's whites and 40.6 percent of its nonwhites were below the "poverty level" defined by the Social Security Administration (in 1966, $3,335 per year for an urban family of four). Over 40 percent of the nonwhites below the poverty level live in the central cities.

Employment problems have drastic social impact in the ghetto. Men who are chronically unemployed or employed in the lowest status jobs are often unable or unwilling to remain with their families. The handicap imposed on children grow- ing up without fathers in an atmosphere of poverty and de- privation is increased as mothers are forced to work to provide support.

The culture of poverty that results from unemployment and family breakup generates a system of ruthless, exploitative relationships within the ghetto. Prostitution, dope addiction, and crime create an environmental "jungle" characterized by personal insecurity and tension. Children growing up under such conditions ar£ likely participants in civil disorder.

Chapter 8 — Conditions of Life In the Racial Ghetto

A striking difference in environment from that of white, middle-class Americans profoundly influences the lives of resi- dents of the ghetto.

Crime rates, consistently higher than in other areas, create a pronounced sense of insecurity. For example, in one city one low-income Negro district had 35 times as many serious crimes against persons as a high-income white district. Unless drastic steps are taken, the crime problems in poverty areas are likely to continue to multiply as the growing youth and rapid urbanization of the population outstrip police resources.

Poor health and sanitation conditions in the ghetto result in higher mortality rates, a higher incidence of major diseases, and lower availability and utilization of medical services. The infant mortality rate for nonwhite babies under the age of one month is 58 percent higher than for whites; for one to 12 months it is almost three times as high. The level of sanitation in the ghetto is far below that in high income areas. Garbage collection is often inadequate. Of an estimated 14,000 cases of rat bite in the United States in 1965, most were in ghetto neighborhoods.

Ghetto residents believe they are exploited by local mer- chants; and evidence substantiates some of these beliefs. A study conducted in one city by the Federal Trade Commission showed that higher prices were charged for goods sold in ghetto stores than in other areas.

14

Lack of knowledge regarding credit purchasing creates spe- cial pitfalls for the disadvantaged. In many states garnishment practices compound these difficulties by allowing creditors to deprive individuals of their wages without hearing or trial.

Chapter 9 — Comparing the Immigrant and Negro Experience

In this chapter, we address ourselves to a fundamental ques- tion that many white Americans are asking: why have so many Negroes, unlike the European immigrants, been unable to escape from the ghetto and from poverty. We believe the fol- lowing factors play a part:

• The Maturing Economy: When the European immigrants arrived, they gained an economic foothold by providing the unskilled labor needed by industry. Unlike the immigrant, the Negro migrant found little opportunity in the city. The economy, by then ma- tured, had little use for the unskilled labor he had to offer.

• The Disability of Race: The structure of discrimination has strin- gently narrowed opportunities for the Negro and restricted his prospects. European immigrants suffered from discrimination, but never so pervasively.

• Entry into the Political System: The immigrants usually settled in rapidly growing cities with powerful and expanding political machines, which traded economic advantages for political sup- port. Ward-level grievance machinery, as well as personal repre- sentation, enabled the immigrant to make his voice heard and his power felt.

By the time the Negro arrived, these political machines were no longer so powerful or so well equipped to provide jobs or other favors, and in many cases were unwilling to share their in- fluence with Negroes.

• Cultural Factors: Coming from societies with a low standard of living and at a time when job aspirations were low, the immigrants sensed little deprivation in being forced to take the less desirable and poorer-paying jobs. Their large and cohesive families con- tributed to total income. Their vision of the future — one that led to a life outside of the ghetto — provided the incentive neces- sary to endure the present.

Although Negro men worked as hard as the immigrants, they were unable to support their families. The entrepreneurial op- portunities had vanished. As a result of slavery and long periods of unemployment, the Negro family structure had become ma- triarchal; the males played a secondary and marginal family role — one which offered little compensation for their hard and un- rewarding labor. Above all, segregation denied Negroes access to good jobs and the opportunity to leave the ghetto. For them, the future seemed to lead only to a dead end.

Today, whites tend to exaggerate how well and quickly they escaped from poverty. The fact is that immigrants who came from rural backgrounds, as many Negroes do, are only now,

15

after three generations, finally beginning to move into the middle class.

By contrast, Negroes began concentrating in the city less than two generations ago, and under much less favorable con- ditions. Although some Negroes have escaped poverty, few have been able to escape the urban ghetto.

Part III — What Can Be Done? Chapter 10 — The Community Response

Our investigation of the 1967 riot cities establishes that virtually every major episode of violence was foreshadowed by an accumulation of unresolved grievances and by wide- spread dissatisfaction among Negroes with the unwillingness or inability of local government to respond.

Overcoming these conditions is essential for community support of law enforcement and civil order. City governments need new and more vital channels of communication to the residents of the ghetto; they need to improve their capacity to respond effectively to community needs before they become community grievances; and they need to provide opportunity for meaningful involvement of ghetto residents in shaping policies and programs which affect the community.

The Commission recommends that local governments:

• Develop Neighborhood Action Task Forces as joint community- government efforts through which more effective communication can be achieved, and the delivery of city services to ghetto resi- dents improved.

• Establish comprehensive grievance-response mechanisms in order to bring all public agencies under public scrutiny.

• Bring the institutions of local government closer to the people they serve by establishing neighborhood outlets for local, state and federal administrative and public service agencies.

• Expand opportunities for ghetto residents to participate in the formulation of public policy and the implementation of programs affecting them through improved political representation, creation of institutional channels for community action, expansion of legal services, and legislative hearings on ghetto problems.

In this effort, city governments will require state and federal support.

The Commission recommends:

• State and federal financial assistance for mayors and city councils to support the research, consultants, staff and other resources needed to respond effectively to federal program initiatives.

16

• State cooperation in providing municipalities with the jurisdic- tional tools needed to deal with their problems; a fuller measure of financial aid to urban areas; and the focusing of the interests of suburban communities on the physical, social and cultural environment of the central city.

Chapter 11 — Police and the Community

The abrasive relationship between the police and the minor- ity communities has been a major — and explosive — source of grievance, tension and disorder. The blame must be shared by the total society.

The police are faced with demands for increased protection and service in the ghetto. Yet the aggressive patrol practices thought necessary to meet these demands themselves create tension and hostility. The resulting grievances have been further aggravated by the lack of effective mechanisms for handling complaints against the police. Special programs for bettering police-community relations have been instituted, but these alone are not enough. Police administrators, with the guidance of public officials, and the support of the entire com- munity, must take vigorous action to improve law enforce- ment and to decrease the potential for disorder.

The Commission recommends that city government and police authorities:

• Review police operations in the ghetto to ensure proper conduct by police officers, and eliminate abrasive practices.

• Provide more adequate police protection to ghetto residents to eliminate their high sense of insecurity, and the belief in the existence of a dual standard of law enforcement.

• Establish fair and effective mechanisms for the redress of grievances against the police, and other municipal employees.

• Develop and adopt policy guidelines to assist officers in making critical decisions in areas where police conduct can create tension.

• Develop and use innovative programs to ensure widespread community support for law enforcement.

• Recruit more Negroes into the regular police force, and review promotion policies to ensure fair promotion for Negro officers.

• Establish a "Community Service Officer" program to attract ghetto youths between the ages of 17 and 21 to police work. These junior officers would perform duties in ghetto neighbor- hoods, but would not have full police authority. The federal government should provide support equal to 90 percent of the costs of employing CSOs on the basis of one for every ten regular officers.

Chapter 12 — Control of Disorder

Preserving civil peace is the first responsibility of govern- ment. Unless the rule of law prevails, our society will lack

17

not only order but also the environment essential to social and economic progress.

The maintenance of civil order cannot be left to the police alone. The police need guidance, as well as support, from mayors and other public officials. It is the responsibility of public officials to determine proper police policies, support adequate police standards for personnel and performance, and participate in planning for the control of disorders.

To maintain control of incidents which could lead to dis- orders, the Commission recommends that local officials:

• Assign seasoned, well-trained policemen and supervisory officers to patrol ghetto areas, and to respond to disturbances.

• Develop plans which will quickly muster maximum police man- power and highly qualified senior commanders at the outbreak of disorders.

• Provide special training in the prevention of disorders, and pre- pare police for riot control and for operation in units, with adequate command and control and field communication for proper discipline and effectiveness.

• Develop guidelines governing the use of control equipment and provide alternatives to the use of lethal weapons. Federal sup- port for research in this area is needed.

• Establish an intelligence system to provide police and other public officials with reliable information that may help to pre- vent the outbreak of a disorder and to institute effective control measures in the event a riot erupts.

• Develop continuing contacts with ghetto residents to make use of the forces for order which exist within the community.

• Establish machinery for neutralizing rumors, and enabling Negro leaders and residents to obtain the facts. Create special rumor details to collect, evaluate, and dispel rumors that may lead to a civil disorder.

The Commission believes there is a grave danger that some communities may resort to the indiscriminate and excessive use of force. The harmful effects of overreaction are incalcul- able. The Commission condemns moves to equip police depart- ments with mass destruction weapons, such as automatic rifles, machine guns and tanks. Weapons which are designed to de- stroy, not to control, have no place in densely populated urban communities.

The Commission recommends that the federal government share in the financing of programs for improvement of police forces, both in their normal law enforcement activities as well as in their response to civil disorders.

To assist government authorities in planning their response to civil disorder, this report contains a Supplement on Control

18

of Disorder. It deals with specific problems encountered during riot-control operations, and includes:

• Assessment of the present capabilities of police, National Guard and Army forces to control major riots, and recommendations for improvement;

• Recommended means by which the control operations of those forces may be coordinated with the response of other agencies, such as fire departments, and with the community at large;

• Recommendations for review and revision of federal, state and local laws needed to provide the framework for control efforts and for the call-up and interrelated action of public safety forces.

Chapter 13 — The Administration of Justice Under Emergency Conditions

In many of the cities which experienced disorders last sum- mer, there were recurring breakdowns in the mechanisms for processing, prosecuting and protecting arrested persons. These resulted mainly from long-standing structural deficiencies in criminal court systems, and from the failure of communities to anticipate and plan for the emergency demands of civil disorders.

In part, because of this, there were few successful prosecu- tions for serious crimes committed during the riots. In those cities where mass arrests occurred many arrestees were de- prived of basic legal rights.

The Commission recommends that the cities and states:

• Undertake reform of the lower courts so as to improve the quality of justice rendered under normal conditions.

• Plan comprehensive measures by which the criminal justice sys- tem may be supplemented during civil disorders so that its deliberative functions are protected, and the quality of justice is maintained.

Such emergency plans require broad community participa- tion and dedicated leadership by the bench and bar. They should include:

• Laws sufficient to deter and punish riot conduct.

• Additional judges, bail and probation officers, and clerical staff.

• Arrangements for volunteer lawyers to help prosecutors and to represent riot defendants at every stage of proceedings.

• Policies to ensure proper and individual bail, arraignment, pre- trial, trial and sentencing proceedings.

• Adequate emergency processing and detention f acilities.

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Chapter 14 — Damages: Repair and Compensation

The Commission recommends that the federal government:

• Amend the Federal Disaster Act — which now applies only to nat- ural disasters — to permit federal emergency food and medical assistance to cities during major civil disorders, and provide long-term economic assistance afterwards.

• With the cooperation of the states, create incentives for the private insurance industry to provide more adequate property-insurance coverage in inner-city areas.

The Commission endorses the report of the National Ad- visory Panel on Insurance in Riot- Affected Areas: "Meeting the Insurance Crisis of our Cities."

Chapter 15 — The News Media and the Disorders

In his charge to the Commission, the President asked: "What effect do the mass media have on the riots?"

The Commission determined that the answer to the Presi- dent's question did not lie solely in the performance of the press and broadcasters in reporting the riots. Our analysis had to consider also the overall treatment by the media of the Negro ghettos, community relations, racial attitudes, and pov- erty— day by day and month by month, year in and year out

A wide range of interviews with government officials, law enforcement authorities, media personnel and other citizens, including ghetto residents, as well as a quantitative analysis of riot coverage and a special conference with industry rep- resentatives, leads us to conclude that:

• Despite instances of sensationalism, inaccuracy and distortion, newspapers, radio and television tried on the whole to give a balanced, factual account of the 1967 disorders.

• Elements of the news media failed to portray accurately the scale and character of the violence that occurred last summer. The overall effect was, we believe, an exaggeration of both mood and event.

• Important segments of the media failed to report adequately on the causes and consequences of civil disorders and on the under- lying problems of race relations. They have not communicated to the majority of their audience — which is white — a sense of the degradation, misery and hopelessness of life in the ghetto.

These failings must be corrected, and the improvement must come from within the industry. Freedom of the press is not the issue. Any effort to impose governmental restrictions would be inconsistent with fundamental constitutional precepts.

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We have seen evidence that the news media are becoming aware of and concerned about their performance in this field. As that concern grows, coverage will improve. But much more must be done, and it must be done soon.

The Commission recommends that the media:

• Expand coverage of the Negro community and of race problems through permanent assignment of reporters familiar with urban and racial affairs, and through establishment of more and better links with the Negro community.

• Integrate Negroes and Negro activities into all aspects of cov- erage and content, including newspaper articles and television programming. The news media must publish newspapers and produce programs that recognize the existence and activities of Negroes as a group within title community and as a part of the larger community.

• Recruit more Negroes into journalism and broadcasting and promote those who are qualified to positions of significant re- sponsibility. Recruitment should begin in high schools and con- tinue through college; where necessary, aid for training should be provided.

• Improve coordination with police in reporting riot news through advance planning, and cooperate with the police in the designa- tion of police information officers, establishment of information centers, and development of mutually acceptable guidelines for riot reporting and the conduct of media personnel.

• Accelerate efforts to ensure accurate and responsible reporting of riot and racial news, through adoption by all news gathering organizations of stringent internal staff guidelines.

• Cooperate in the establishment of a privately organized and funded Institute of Urban Communications to train and educate journalists in urban affairs, recruit and train more Negro jour- nalists, develop methods for improving police-press relations, re- view coverage of riots and racial issues, and support continuing research in the urban field.

Chapter 16 — The Future of the Cities

By 1985, the Negro population in central cities is expected to increase by 68 percent to approximately 20.3 million. Coupled with the continued exodus of white families to the suburbs, this growth will produce majority Negro populations in many of the nation's largest cities.

The future of these cities, and of their burgeoning Negro populations, is grim. Most new employment opportunities are being created in suburbs and outlying areas. This trend will continue unless important changes in public policy are made.

In prospect, therefore, is further deterioration of already inadequate municipal tax bases in the face of increasing de- mands for public services, and continuing unemployment and poverty among the urban Negro population:

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Three choices are open to the nation:

• We can maintain present policies, continuing both the proportion of the nation's resources now allocated to programs for the un- employed and the disadvantaged, and the inadequate and failing effort to achieve an integrated society.

• We can adopt a policy of "enrichment" aimed at improving dra- matically the quality of ghetto life while abandoning integration as a goal. *

• We can pursue integration by combining ghetto "enrichment" with policies which will encourage Negro movement out of cen- tral city areas.

The first choice, continuance of present policies, has omi- nous consequences for our society. The share of the nation's resources now allocated to programs for the disadvantaged is insufficient to arrest the deterioration of life in central city ghettos. Under such conditions, a rising proportion of Negroes may come to see in the deprivation and segregation they experience, a justification for violent protest, or for extending support to now isolated extremists who advocate civil disrup- tion. Large-scale and continuing violence could result, followed by white retaliation, and, ultimately, the separation of the two communities in a garrison state.

Even if violence does not occur, the consequences are un- acceptable. Development of a racially integrated society, extraordinarily difficult today, will be virtually impossible when the present black central city population of 12.1 million has grown to almost 21 million.

To continue present policies is to make permanent the divi- sion of our country into two societies; one, largely Negro and poor, located in the central cities; the other, predominantly white and affluent, located in the suburbs and in outlying areas.

The second choice, ghetto enrichment coupled with aban- donment of integration, is also unacceptable. It is another way of choosing a permanently divided country. Moreover, equality cannot be achieved under conditions of nearly complete sepa- ration. In a country where the economy, and particularly the resources of employment, are predominantly white, a policy of separation can only relegate Negroes to a permanently in- ferior economic status.

We believe that the only possible choice for America is the third — a policy which combines ghetto enrichment with pro- grams designed to encourage integration of substantial num- bers of Negroes into the society outside the ghetto.

Enrichment must be an important adjunct to integration, for no matter how ambitious or energetic the program, few Negroes now living in central cities can be quickly integrated.

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In the meantime, large-scale improvement in the quality of ghetto life is essential.

But this can be no more than an interim strategy. Programs must be developed which will permit substantial Negro move- ment out of the ghettos. The primary goal must be a single society, in which every citizen will be free to live and work according to his capabilities and desires, not his color.

Chapter 17 — Recommendations For National Action

INTRODUCTION

No American — white or black — can escape the conse- quences of the continuing social and economic decay of our major cities.

Only a commitment to national action on an unprecedented scale can shape a future compatible with the historic ideals of American society.

The great productivity of our economy, and a federal reve- nue system which is highly responsive to economic growth, can provide the resources.

The major need is to generate new will — the will to tax ourselves to the extent necessary to meet the vital needs of the nation.

We have set forth goals and proposed strategies to reach those goals. We discuss and recommend programs not to com- mit each of us to specific parts of such programs but to illustrate the type and dimension of action needed.

The major goal is the creation of a true union — a single society and a single American identity. Toward that goal, we propose the following objectives for national action:

• Opening up opportunities to those who are restricted by racial segregation and discrimination, and eliminating all barriers to their choice of jobs, education and housing.

• Removing the frustration of powerlessness among the disadvan- taged by providing the means for them to deal with the prob- lems that affect their own lives and by increasing the capacity of our public and private institutions to respond to these problems.

• Increasing communication across racial lines to destroy stereo- types, to halt polarization, end distrust and hostility, and create common ground for efforts toward public order and social justice.

We propose these aims to fulfill our pledge of equality and to meet the fundamental needs of a democratic and civilized society — domestic peace and social justice.

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EMPLOYMENT

Pervasive unemployment and underemployment are the most persistent and serious grievances in minority areas. They are inextricably linked to the problem of civil disorder.

Despite growing federal expenditures for manpower devel- opment and training programs, and sustained general economic prosperity and increasing demands for skilled workers, about two million — white and nonwhite — are permanently unem- ployed. About ten million are underemployed, of whom 6.5 million work full time for wages below the poverty line.

The 500,000 "hard-core" unemployed in the central cities who lack a basic education and are unable to hold a steady job are made up in large part of Negro males between the ages of 18 and 25. In the W\ gjfag whi^ W6 SVffYSYfid,, Negroes were three times as likely as whites to hold unskilled jobs, which are often part time, seasonal, low-paying and "dead ftfiH".

Negro males between the ages of 15 and 25 predominated among the rioters. More than 20 percent of the rioters were unemployed, and many who were employed held intermittent, low status, unskilled jobs which they regarded as below their education and ability.

The Commission recommends that the federal government:

• Undertake joint efforts with cities and states to consolidate existing manpower programs to avoid fragmentation and dupli- cation.

• Take immediate action to create 2,000,000 new jobs over the next three years — one million in the public sector and one million in the private sector — to absorb the hard-core unem- ployed and materially reduce the level of underemployment for all workers, black and white. We propose 250,000 public sector and 300,000 private sector jobs in the first year.

• Provide on-the-job training by both public and private employers with reimbursement to private employers for the extra costs of training the hard-core unemployed, by contract or by tax credits.

• Provide tax and other incentives to investment in rural as well as urban poverty areas in order to offer to the rural poor an alternative to migration to urban centers.

• Take new and vigorous action to remove artificial barriers to employment and promotion, including not only racial discrimi- nation but, in certain cases, arrest records or lack of a high school diploma. Strengthen those agencies such as the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, charged with eliminating discriminatory practices, and provide full support for Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act allowing federal grant-in-aid funds to be withheld from activities which discriminate on grounds of color or race.

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The Commission commends the recent public commitment of the National Council of the Building and Construction Trades Unions, AFL-CIO, to encourage and recruit Negro membership in apprenticeship programs. This commitment should be intensified and implemented.

EDUCATION

Education in a democratic society must equip children to develop their potential and to participate fully in American life. For the community at large, the schools have discharged this responsibility well. But for many minorities, and particu- larly for the children of the ghetto, the schools have failed to provide the educational experience which could overcome the effects of discrimination and deprivation.

This failure is one of the persistent sources of grievance and resentment within the Negro community. The hostility of Negro parents and students toward the school system is generating increasing conflict and causing disruption within many city school districts. But the most dramatic evidence of the relationship between educational practices and civil dis- orders lies in the high incidence of riot participation by ghetto youth who have not completed high school.

The bleak record of public education for ghetto children is growing worse. In the critical skills — verbal and reading ability — Negro students are falling further behind whites with each year of school completed. The high unemployment and un- deremployment rate for Negro youth is evidence, in part, of the growing educational crisis.

We support integration as the priority education strategy; it is essential to the future of American society. In this last summer's disorders we have seen the consequences of racial isolation at all levels, and of attitudes toward race, on both sides, produced by three centuries of myth, ignorance and bias. It is indispensable that opportunities for interaction between the races be expanded.

We recognize that the growing dominance of pupils from disadvantaged minorities in city school populations will not soon be reversed. No matter how great the effort toward de- segregation, many children of the ghetto will not, within their school careers, attend integrated schools.

If existing disadvantages are not to be perpetuated, we must drastically improve the quality of ghetto education. Equality of results with all-white schools must be the goal.

To implement these strategies, the Commission recommends:

• Sharply increased efforts to eliminate de facto segregation in our

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schools through substantial federal aid to school systems seeking to desegregate either within the system or in cooperation with \ neighboring school systems.

• Elimination of racial discrimination in Northern as well as i Southern schools by vigorous application of Title VI of the! Civil Rights Act of 1964.

• Extension of quality early childhood education to every disad- vantaged child in the country.

• Efforts to improve dramatically schools serving disadvantaged' children through substantial federal funding of year-round com- pensatory education programs, improved teaching, and expanded experimentation and research.

• Elimination of illiteracy through greater federal support for adult basic education.

• Enlarged opportunities for parent and community participation in the public schools.

• Reoriented vocational education emphasizing work-experience training and the involvement of business and industry.

• Expanded opportunities for higher education through increased federal assistance to disadvantaged students.

• Revision of state aid formulas to assure more per student aid to districts having a high proportion of disadvantaged school-age children.

THE WELFARE SYSTEM

Our present system of public welfare is designed to save money instead of people, and tragically ends up doing neither. This system has two critical deficiencies:

First, it excludes large numbers of persons who are in great need, and who, if provided a decent level of support, might be able to become more productive and self-sufficient. No fed- eral funds are available for millions of unemployed and under- employed men and women who are needy but neither aged, handicapped nor the parents of minor children.

Second, for those included, the system provides assistance well below the minimum necessary for a decent level of ex- istence, and imposes restrictions that encourage continued de- pendency on welfare and undermine self-respect.

A welter of statutory requirements and administrative prac- tices and regulations operate to remind recipients that they are considered untrustworthy, promiscuous and lazy. Resi- dence requirements prevent assistance to people in need who are newly arrived in the state. Searches of recipients' homes violate privacy. Inadequate social services compound the problems.

The Commission recommends that the federal government, acting with state and local governments where necessary, re- form the existing welfare system to:

• Establish, for recipients in existing welfare categories, uniform

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national standards of assistance at least as high as the annual "poverty level" of income, now set by the Social Security Ad- ministration at $3,335 per year for an urban family of four. ;• Require that all states receiving federal welfare contributions participate in the Aid to Families with Dependent Children — Unemployed Parents program (AFDC-UP) that permits assist- ance to families with both father and mother in the home, thus aiding the family while it is still intact.

Bear a substantially greater portion of all welfare costs — at least 90 percent of total payments.

• Increase incentives for seeking employment and job training, but remove restrictions recently enacted by the Congress that would compel mothers of young children to work.

• Provide more adequate social services through neighborhood centers and family-planning programs.

• Remove the freeze placed by the 1967 welfare amendments on the percentage of children in a state that can be covered by federal assistance.

• Eliminate residence requirements.

As a long-range goal, the Commission recommends that the federal government seek to develop a national system of in- come supplementation based strictly on need with two broad and basic purposes:

• To provide, for those who can work or who do work, any neces- sary supplements in such a way as to develop incentives for fuller employment;

• To provide, for those who cannot work and for mothers who decide to remain with their children, a minimum standard of decent living, and to aid in the saving of children from the prison of poverty that has held their parents.

A broad system of supplementation would involve substan- tially greater federal expenditures than anything now contem- plated. The cost will range widely depending on the standard of need accepted as the "basic allowance" to individuals and families, and on the rate at which additional income above this level is taxed. Yet if the deepening cycle of poverty and dependence on welfare can be broken, if the children of the poor can be given the opportunity to scale the wall that now separates them from the rest of society, the return on this investment will be great indeed.

HOUSING

After more than three decades of fragmented and grossly underfunded federal housing programs, nearly six million substandard housing units remain occupied in the United States.

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The housing problem is particularly acute in the minority ghettos. Nearly two-thirds of all non-white families living in tiie central cities today live in neighborhoods marked with substandard housing and general urban blight. Two major factors are responsible.

First: Many ghetto residents simply cannot pay the rent necessary to support decent housing. In Detroit, for example, over 40 percent of the non- white occupied units in 1960 required rent of over 35 percent of the tenants' income.

Second: Discrimination prevents access to many non-slum areas, particularly the suburbs, where good housing exists. In addition, by creating a "back pressure" in the racial ghettos, it makes it possible for landlords to break up apartments for denser occupancy, and keeps prices and rents of deteriorated ghetto housing higher than they would be in a truly free market.

To date, federal programs have been able to do compara- tively little to provide housing for the disadvantaged. In the 31 -year history of subsidized federal housing, only about 800,- 000 units have been constructed, with recent production averaging about 50,000 units a year. By comparison, over a period only three years longer, FHA insurance guarantees have made possible the construction of over ten million middle and upper-income units.

Two points are fundamental to the Commission's recom- mendations:

First: Federal housing programs must be given a new thrust aimed at overcoming the prevailing patterns of racial segrega- tion. If this is not done, those programs will continue to con- centrate the most impoverished and dependent segments of the population into the central-city ghettos where there is already a critical gap between the needs of the population and the public resources to deal with them.

Second: The private sector must be brought into the produc- tion and financing of low and moderate rental housing to sup- ply the capabilities and capital necessary to meet the housing needs of the nation.

The Commission recommends that the federal government:

• Enact a comprehensive and enforceable federal open housing law to cover the sale or rental of all housing, including single family homes.

• Reorient federal housing programs to place more low and mod- erate income housing outside of ghetto areas.

• Bring within the reach of low and moderate income families within the next five years six million new and existing units of decent housing, beginning with 600,000 units in the next year.

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To reach this goal we recommend:

• Expansion and modification of the rent supplement program to permit use of supplements for existing housing, thus greatly in- creasing the reach of the program.

• Expansion and modification of the below-market - interest rate program to enlarge the interest subsidy to all sponsors and pro- vide interest-free loans to nonprofit sponsors to cover pre-con- struction costs, and permit sale of projects to nonprofit corpora- tions, cooperatives, or condominiums.

• Creation of an ownership supplement program similar to present rent supplements, to make home ownership possible for low- income families.

• Federal writedown of interest rates on loans to private builders constructing moderate-rent housing.

• Expansion of the public housing program, with emphasis on small units on scattered sites, and leasing and "turnkey" programs.

• Expansion of the Model Cities program.

• Expansion and reorientation of the urban renewal program to give priority to projects directly assisting low-income households to obtain adequate housing.

CONCLUSION

One of the first witnesses to be invited to appear before this Commission was Dr. Kenneth B. Clark, a distinguished and perceptive scholar. Referring to the reports of earlier riot commissions, he said:

I read that report ... of the 1919 riot in Chicago, and it is as if I were reading the report of the investigating committee on the Harlem riot of '35, the report of the investigating committee on the Harlem riot of '43, the report of the McCone Commission on the Watts riot.

I must again in candor say to you members of this Commission — it is a kind of Alice in Wonderland — with the same moving picture re-shown over and over again, the same analysis, the same recommendations, and the same inaction.

These words come to our minds as we conclude this report.

We have provided an honest beginning. We have learned much. But we have uncovered no startling truths, no unique insights, no simple solutions. The destruction and the bitterness of racial disorder, the harsh polemics of black revolt and white repression have been seen and heard before in this country.

It is time now to end the destruction and the violence, not only in the streets of the ghetto but in the lives of people.

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Preface

The summer of 1967 brought racial disorder again to American cities, deepening the bitter residue of fear and threat- ening the future of all Americans.

We are charged by the President with the responsibility to examine this condition and to speak the truth as we see it. Two fundamental questions confront us:

How can we as a people end the resort to violence while we build a better society?

How can the nation realize the promise of a single society —one nation indivisible — which yet remains unfulfilled?

Violence surely cannot build that society. Disruption and disorder will nourish not justice but repression. Those few who would destroy civil order and the rule of law strike at the freedom of every citizen. They must know that the community cannot and will not tolerate coercion and mob action.

We have worked together these past months with a sense of the greatest urgency. Although much remains that can be learned, we have determined to say now what we have learned. We do this in the hope that the American public will understand the nature and gravity of the problem and that those who have power to act — at all levels of government and in all sections of the community — will listen and respond.

This sense of urgency has led us to consolidate in this single report the interim and final reports called for by the President. To accomplish this, it has been necessary to do with- out the benefit of some studies still under way which will not be completed for months to come. Certain of these studies — a 15-city survey of Negro and white attitudes, a special survey of attitudes of community leaders, elected officials, adminis- trators and teachers, a report on the application of mediation techniques, and a further analysis of riot arrestees — will be issued later, with other materials, as supplemental reports.

We believe that to wait until mid-summer to present our findings and recommendations may be to forfeit whatever

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opportunity exists for this report to affect this year the danger- ous climate of tension and apprehension that pervades our cities.

II

Last summer nearly 150 cities reported disorders in Negro — and in some instances, Puerto Rican — neighbor- hoods. These ranged from minor disturbances to major out- bursts involving sustained and widespread looting and destruc- tion of property. The worst came during a two-week period in July when large-scale disorders erupted first in Newark and then in Detroit, each setting off a chain reaction in neighboring communities.

It was in this troubled and turbulent setting that the Presi- dent of the United States established this Commission. He called upon it "to guide the country through a thicket of tension, conflicting evidence and extreme opinions."

In his charge, the President framed the Commission's mandate in these words:

"We need to know the answers to three basic questions about these riots: — What happened? — Why did it happen? — What can be done to prevent it from happen- ing again and again?"

The three parts of this report offer answers to these questions.

Part I tells "What happened?" Chapter 1 is a profile of the 1967 disorders told through a narrative of the summer's events in 10 of the 23 cities surveyed by the Commission. Chapter 2 calls on data from all 23 cities to construct an analytical profile. Chapter 3 is the report of the Commission on the issue of conspiracy.

Part II responds to the question "Why did it happen?" Early in our investigation it became clear that the disorders were not the result of contemporary conditions alone; Chapter

5 identifies some of the historical factors that are an essential part of the background of last summer's outbreaks. Chapters

6 through 9 deal with present conditions, examining the impact of ghetto formation, unemployment, and family structures, and conditions of life in the ghettos, and the differences between

32

the Negro experience and that of other urban immigrant groups.

Part III contains our answer to the question "What can be done?" Our recommendations begin with organizing the community to respond more effectively to ghetto needs and then proceed with police-community relations, control of disorders, the administration of justice under emergency con- ditions, compensation for property damage, the role of the news media, and national action in the critical areas of employ- ment, education, welfare and housing.

In formulating this report, we have attempted to draw on all relevant sources. During closed hearings held from August through December, we heard over 130 witnesses, in- cluding federal, state and local officials, experts from the military establishment and law enforcement agencies, univer- sities and foundations, Negro leaders and representatives of the business community. We personally visited eight cities in which major disturbances had occurred. We met together for 24 days to review and revise the several drafts of our report. Through our staff we also undertook field surveys in 23 cities in which disorders occurred during the summer of 1967, and took sworn testimony in nine of the cities investigated and from Negro leaders and militants across the country. Expert consultants and advisors supplemented the work of our staff in all the areas covered in our report.

in

Much of our report is directed to the condition of those Americans who are also Negroes and to the social and economic environment in which they live — many in the black ghettos of our cities. But this nation is confronted with the issue of justice for all its people — white as well as black, rural as well as urban. In particular, we are concerned for those who have continued to keep faith with society in the preser- vation of public order — the people of Spanish surname, the American Indian and other minority groups to whom this country owes so much.

We wish it to be clear that in focusing on the Negro, we do not mean to imply any priority of need. It will not do to fight misery in the black ghetto and leave untouched the reality of injustice and deprivation elsewhere in our society. The first priority is order and justice for all Americans.

In speaking of the Negro, we do not speak of "them."

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We speak of us — for the freedoms and opportunities of all Americans are diminished and imperiled when they are denied to some Americans. The tragic waste of human spirit and resources, the unrecoverable loss to the nation which this denial has already caused — and continues to produce — no longer can be ignored or afforded.

Two premises underlie the work of the Commission:

• that this nation cannot abide violence and disorder if it is to ensure the safety of its people and their progress in a free society.

• that this nation will deserve neither safety nor prog- ress unless it can demonstrate the wisdom and the will to undertake decisive action against the root causes of racial disorder.

This report is addressed to the institutions of government and to the conscience of the nation, but even more urgently, to the minds and hearts of each citizen. The responsibility for decisive action, never more clearly demanded in the history of our country, rests on all of us.

We do not know whether the tide of racial disorder has begun to recede. We recognize as we must that the condi- tions underlying the disorders will not be obliterated before the end of this year or the end of the next and that, so long as these conditions exist, a potential for disorder remains. But we believe that the likelihood of disorder can be markedly lessened by an American commitment to confront those con- ditions and eliminate them — a commitment so clear that Negro citizens will know its truth and accept its goal. The most im- portant step toward domestic peace is an act of will; this country can do for its people what it chooses to do.

The pages that follow set forth our conclusions and the facts upon which they are based. Our plea for civil order and our recommendations for social and economic change are a call to national action. We are aware of the breadth and scope of those recommendations but they neither probe deeper nor demand more than the problems which call them forth.

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PART I

what happened;

Chapter 1 / Profiles of Disorder

Introduction

The President directed the Commission to produce "a pro- file of the riots — of the rioters, of their environment, of their victims, of their causes and effects."

In response to this mandate the Commission constructed profiles of the riots in 10 of the 23 cities under investigation. Brief summaries of what were often conflicting views and perceptions of confusing episodes, they are, we believe, a fair and accurate picture of what happened.

From the profiles, we have sought to build a composite view of the riots as well as of the environment out of which they erupted.

The summer of 1967 was not the beginning of the current wave of disorders. Omens of violence had appeared much earlier.

1963-64

In 1963, serious disorders, involving both whites and Ne- groes, broke out in Birmingham, Savannah, Cambridge, Md., Chicago, and Philadelphia. Sometimes the mobs battled each other; more often they fought the police.

The most violent encounters took place in Birmingham. Police used dogs, firehoses and cattle prods against marchers, many of whom were children. White racists shot at Negroes and bombed Negro residences. Negroes retaliated by burning white-owned businesses in Negro areas. On a quiet Sunday morning, a bomb exploded beneath a Negro church. Four young girls in a Sunday school class were killed.

In the spring of 1964, the arrest and conviction of civil

35

rights demonstrators provoked violence in Jacksonville. A shot fired from a passing car killed a Negro woman. When a bomb threat forced evacuation of an all-Negro high school, the students stoned policemen and firemen and burned the cars of newsmen. For the first time, Negroes used Molotov cocktails in setting fires.

Two weeks later, at a demonstration protesting school segre- gation in Cleveland, a bulldozer accidentally killed a young white minister. When police moved in to disperse a crowd composed primarily of Negroes, violence erupted.

In late June, white segregationists broke through police lines and attacked civil rights demonstrators in St. Augustine, Florida. In Philadelphia, Mississippi, law enforcement officers were implicated in the lynch murders of three civil rights workers. On July 10 Ku Klux Klansmen shot and killed a Negro United States Army lieutenant colonel, Lemuel Penn, as he was driving through Georgia.

On July 16, in New York City, several young Negroes walk- ing to summer school classes became involved in a dispute with a white building superintendent. When an off-duty police lieutenant intervened, a 15-year-old boy attacked him with a knife. The officer shot and killed the boy.

A crowd of teenagers gathered and smashed store windows. Police arrived in force, and dispersed the group.

On the following day, the Progressive Labor Movement, a Marxist-Leninist organization, printed and passed out inflam- matory leaflets charging the police with brutality.

On the second day after the shooting, a rally called by the Congress of Racial Equality to protest the Mississippi lynch murders developed into a march on a precinct police station. The crowd clashed with the police; one person was killed, and 12 police officers and 19 citizens were injured.

For several days thereafter the pattern was repeated: despite exhortations of Negro community leaders against violence, protest rallies became uncontrollable. Police battled mobs in Harlem and in the Bedford Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn. Firemen fought fires started with Molotov cocktails. When bricks and bottles were thrown, police responded with gunfire. Widespread looting followed and many persons were injured.

A week later a riot broke out in Rochester when police tried to arrest an intoxicated Negro youth at a street dance. After two days of violence, the National Guard restored order.

During the first two weeks of August, disorders took place in three New Jersey communities: Jersey City, Elizabeth, and Paterson.

On August 15, when a white liquor store owner in the Chi- cago suburb of Dixmoor had a Negro woman arrested for

36

stealing a bottle of whiskey, he was accused of having man- handled her. A crowd gathered in front of the store, broke the store window, and threw rocks at passing cars. The police restored order. The next day, when the disturbance was re- newed, a Molotov cocktail set the liquor store afire. Several persons were injured.

The final violence of the summer occurred in Philadelphia. A Negro couple's car stalled at an intersection in an area known as "The Jungle" — where, with almost 2,000 persons living in each block, there is the greatest incidence of crime, disease, unemployment, and poverty occurs in the city. When two police officers, one white and one black, attempted to move the car, the wife of the owner became abusive and the officers arrested her. Police officers and Negro spectators gathered at the scene. Two nights of rioting, resulting in extensive damage.

1965

In the spring of 1965, the nation's attention shifted back to the South. When civil rights workers staged a nonviolent demonstration in Selma, Alabama, police and state troopers forcibly interrupted their march. Within the next few weeks racists murdered a white clergyman and a white housewife active in civil rights.

In the small Louisiana town of Bogalusa, when Negro demonstrators attacked by whites received inadequate police protection, the Negroes formed a self-defense group called the "Deacons for Defense and Justice."

As late as the second week of August, there had been few disturbances outside the South. But, on the evening of August 1 1, as Los Angeles sweltered in a heat wave, a highway patrol- man halted a young Negro driver for speeding. The young man appeared intoxicated, and the patrolman arrested him. As a crowd gathered, law enforcement officers were called to the scene. A highway patrolman mistakenly struck a bystander with his billy club. A young Negro woman, who was accused of spitting on the police, was dragged into the middle of the street.

When the police departed, members of the crowd began hurling rocks at passing cars, beating white motorists, and over- turning cars and setting them on fire. The police reacted hesi- tantly. Actions they did take further inflamed the people on the streets.

The following day the area was calm. Community leaders attempting to mediate between Negro residents and the police received little cooperation from municipal authorities. That evening the previous night's pattern of violence was repeated.

37

Not until almost 30 hours after the initial flareup did window smashing, looting, and arson begin. Yet the police utilized only a small part of their forces.

Few police were on hand the next morning when huge crowds gathered in the business district of Watts, two miles from the location of the original disturbance, and began loot- ing. In the absence of police response, the looting became bolder and spread into other areas. Hundreds of women and children from five housing projects clustered in or near Watts took part. Around noon, extensive firebombing began. Few white persons were attacked; the principal intent of the rioters now seemed to be to destroy property owned by whites, in order to drive white "exploiters" out of the ghetto.

The chief of police asked for National Guard help, but the arrival of the military units was delayed for several hours. When the Guardsmen arrived, they, together with police, made heavy use of firearms. Reports of "sniper fire" increased. Sev- eral persons were killed by mistake. Many more were injured.

Thirty-six hours after the first Guard units arrived, the main force of the riot had been blunted. Almost 4,000 persons were arrested. Thirty-four were killed and hundreds injured. Ap- proximately $35 million in damage had been inflicted.

The Los Angeles riot, the worst in the United States since the Detroit riot of 1943, shocked all who had been confident that race relations were improving in the North, and evoked a new mood in the Negro ghettos around the country.

1966

The events of 1966 made it appear that domestic turmoil had become part of the American scene.

In March, a fight between several Negroes and Mexican- Americans resulted in a new flareup in Watts. In May, after a police officer accidentally shot and killed a Negro, demonstra- tions by Negro militants again increased tension in Los Angeles.

Evidence was accumulating that a major proportion of riot participants were youths. Increasing race pride, skepticism about their job prospects, and dissatisfaction with the inade- quacy of their education, caused unrest among students in Ne- gro colleges and high schools throughout the country. Students and youths were the principal participants in at least six of the 13 spring and early summer disorders of 1966.

July 12, 1966, was a hot day in Chicago. Negro youngsters were playing in water gushing from an illegally opened fire hydrant. Two police officers, arriving on the scene closed the hydrant. A Negro youth turned it on again, and the police offi-

38

cers arrested him. A crowd gathered. Police reinforcements arrived. As the crowd became unruly, seven Negro youths were arrested.

Rumors spread that the arrested youths had been beaten, and that police were turning off fire hydrants in Negro neighborhoods but leaving them on in white areas. Sporadic window breaking, rock throwing, and firebombing lasted for several hours. Most of the participants were teenagers.

In Chicago, as in other cities, the long-standing grievances of the Negro community needed only minor incidents to trigger violence.

In 1961 when Negroes, after being evacuated from a burn- ing tenement, had been sheltered in a church in an all-white area, a crowd of residents had gathered and threatened to at- tack the church unless the Negroes were removed.

Segregated schools and housing had led to repeated picketing and marches by civil rights organizations. When marchers had gone into white neighborhoods, they had been met on several occasions by KKK signs and crowds throwing eggs and to- matoes. In 1965, when a Chicago fire truck had killed a Negro woman in an accident, Negroes had congregated to protest against the fire station's all-white complement. Rock throwing and looting had broken out. More than 170 persons were ar- rested in two days.

On the evening of July 13, 1966, the day after the fire hydrant incident, rock throwing, looting and fire-bombing began again. For several days thereafter the pattern of vio- lence was repeated. Police responding to calls were subjected to random gunfire. Rumors spread. The press talked in highly exaggerated terms of "guerrilla warfare" and "sniper fire."

Before the police and 4,200 National Guardsmen managed to restore order, scores of civilians and police had been injured. There were 533 arrests, including 155 juveniles. Three Negroes were killed by stray bullets, among them a 13-year-old boy and a 14-year-old pregnant girl.

Less than a week later, Ohio National Guardsmen were mobilized to deal with an outbreak of rioting that continued for four nights in the Hough section of Cleveland. It is probable that Negro extremists, although they neither instigated nor or- ganized the disorder, exploited and enlarged it. Amidst wide- spread reports of "sniper fire," four Negroes, including one young woman, were killed; many others, several children among them, were injured. Law enforcement officers were responsible for two of the deaths, a white man firing from a car for a third, and a group of young white vigilantes for the fourth.

Some news media keeping "tally sheets" of the disturbances

39

began to apply the term "riot" to acts of vandalism and rela- tively minor disorders.

At the end of July, the National States Rights Party, a white extremist organization that advocates deporting Negroes and other minorities, preached racial hatred at a series of rallies in Baltimore. Bands of white youths were incited into chasing and beating Negroes. A court order halted the rallies.

Forty-three disorders and riots were reported during 1966. Although there were considerable variations in circumstances, intensity, and length, they were usually ignited by a minor incident fueled by antagonism between the Negro population and the police.

Spring 1967

In the spring of 1967 disorders broke out at three Southern Negro universities at which SNCC (Student Non- Violent Co- ordinating Committee), a militant anti-white organization, had been attempting to organize the students.

On Friday, April 7, learning that Stokely Carmichael was speaking at two primarily Negro universities, Fisk and Tennes- see A&I, in Nashville, and receiving information that some per- sons were preparing to riot, the police adopted an emergency riot plan. On the following day Carmichael and others, includ- ing South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond, spoke at a sym- posium at Vanderbilt University.

That evening the Negro operator of a restaurant located near Fisk University summoned police to arrest an allegedly intoxi- cated Negro soldier.

Within a few minutes students, many of them members of SNCC, began to picket the restaurant. A squad of riot police arrived and soon became the focus of attention. Spectators gathered. When a city bus was halted and attacked by mem- bers of the crowd, a Negro police lieutenant fired five shots into the air.

Rocks and bottles were thrown, and additional police were called into the area. Officers fired a number of shots over the heads of the crowd. The students and spectators gradually dis- persed.

On the following evening, after negotiations between stu- dents and police broke down, crowds again began forming. Police fired over their heads, and shots were fired back at the police. On the fringes of the campus several white youths aimed shots at a police patrol wagon.

A few days later, when police raided the home of several young Negro militants, they confiscated a half dozen bottles prepared as Molotov cocktails.

40

About a month later, students at Jackson State College, in Jackson, Mississippi, were standing around after a political, rally when two Negro police officers pursued a speeding car, driven by a Negro student, onto the campus. When the officers tried to arrest the driver, the students interfered. The police called for reinforcements. A crowd of several hundred persons quickly gathered, and a few rocks were thrown.

On the following evening, an even larger crowd assembled. When police attempted to disperse it by gunfire, three persons were hit. One of them, a young Negro, died the next day. The National Guard restored order.

Six days later, on May 16, two separate Negro protests were taking place in Houston. One group was picketing a garbage dump in a Negro residential neighborhood, where a Negro child had drowned. Another was demonstrating at a junior high school on the grounds that Negro students were disci- plined more harshly than white.

That evening college students who had participated in the protests returned to the campus of Texas Southern University. About 50 of them were grouped around a 21 -year-old student, D. W., a Vietnam veteran, who was seeking to stimulate fur- ther protest action. A dispute broke out, and D. W. reportedly slapped another student. When the student threatened D. W. he left, armed himself with a pistol, and returned.

In response to the report of a disturbance, two unmarked police cars with four officers arrived. Two of the officers ques- tioned D. W., discovered he was armed with a pistol, and arrested him.

A short time later, when one of the police cars returned to the campus, it was met by rocks and bottles thrown by students. As police called for reinforcements, sporadic gunshots re- portedly came from the men's dormitory. The police returned the fire.

For several hours, gunfire punctuated unsuccessful attempts by community leaders to negotiate a truce between the students and the police.

When several tar barrels were set afire in the street and shooting broke out again, police decided to enter the dormitory. A patrolman, struck by a ricocheting bullet, was killed. After clearing all 480 occupants from the building, police searched it and found one shotgun and two .22 caliber pistols. The origin of the shot that killed the officer was not determined.

As the summer of 1967 approached, Americans, conditioned by three years of reports of riots, expected violence. But they had no answers to hard questions: What was causing the tur- moil? Was it organized and, if so, by whom? Was there a pat- tern to the disorders?

41

I. Tampa

On Sunday, June 11, 1967, Tampa, Florida, sweltered in the 94-degree heat. A humid wind ruffled the bay, where thousands of persons watched the hydroplane races. Since early morning the Police Department's Selective Enforcement Unit, designed as a riot control squad, had been employed to keep order at the races.

At 5:30 P.M., a block from the waterfront, a photo supply warehouse was broken into. Forty-five minutes later two police officers spotted three Negro youths as they walked near the State Building. When the youths caught sight of the officers, they ducked into an alley. The officers gave chase. As they ran, the suspects left a trail of photographic equipment scattered from yellow paper bags they were carrying.

The officers transmitted a general broadcast over the police radio. As other officers arrived on the scene, a chase began through and around the streets, houses, and alleys of the neigh- borhood. When Negro residents of the area adjacent to the Central Park Village Housing Project became aware of the chase, they began to participate. Some attempted to help the officers in locating the suspects.

R. C. Oates, one of 17 Negros on the 51 1-man Tampa police force, spotted 19-year-old Martin Chambers, bare to the waist, wriggling away beneath one of the houses. Oates called for Chambers to surrender. Ignoring him, Chambers emerged running from beneath the house. A white officer, J. L. Calvert, took up the pursuit.

Pursuing Calvert, in turn, were three young Negroes, all spectators. Behind one of the houses a high cyclone fence created a two-foot wide alley twenty-five feet in length.

As Chambers darted along the fence, Officer Calvert rounded the corner of the house. Calvert yelled to him to halt. Cham- bers ignored him. Calvert pointed his .38 revolver and fired. The slug entered the back of Chambers and passed completely through his body. Raising his hands over his head, he clutched at the cyclone fence.

When the three youths running behind Officer Calvert came upon the scene, they assumed Chambers had been shot stand- ing in the position in which they saw him. Rumor quickly spread through the neighborhood that a white police officer had shot a Negro youth who had had his hands over his head and was trying to surrender.

The ambulance that had been summoned became lost on the way. The gathering crowd viewing the bloody, critically in- jured youth grew increasingly belligerent.

42

Finally, Officer Oates loaded Chambers into his car and drove him to the hospital. The youth died shortly thereafter.

As officers were leaving the scene, a thunderstorm broke. Beneath the pelting rain, the spectators scattered. When an officer went back to check the area he found no one on the streets.

A few minutes after 7:00 P.M., the Selective Enforcement Unit, tired and sun-parched, reported in from the races. A half hour later a report was received that 500 persons were gathering. A police car was sent into the area to check the report. The officers could find no one. The men of the Selective Enforcement Unit were told to go home.

The men in the scout car had not, however, penetrated into the Central Park Village Housing complex where, as the rain ended, hundreds of persons poured from the apartments. At least half were teenagers and young adults. As they began to mill about and discuss the shooting, old grievances, both real and imagined, were resurrected: discriminatory practices of local stores, advantages taken by white men of Negro girls, the kicking in the face of a Negro boy by a white man as the Negro lay handcuffed on the ground, blackballing of two Negro high schools by the athletic conference.

Although officials prided themselves on supposedly good race relations and relative acceptance by whites of integration of schools and facilities, Negroes, composing almost 20 percent of the population,1 had had no one of their own race to repre- sent them in positions of policy or power, nor to appeal to for redress of grievances.

There was no Negro on the city council; none on the school board: none in the fire department; none of high rank on the police force. Six of every 10 houses inhabited by Negroes were unsound. Many were shacks with broken window panes, gas leaks, and rat holes in the walls. Rents averaged $50 to $60 a month. Such recreational facilities as did exist lacked equipment and supervisors. Young toughs intimidated the children who tried to use them.

The majority of Negro children never reached the eighth grade. In the high schools, only 3 to 4 percent of Negro seniors attained the minimum passing score on the State's college en- trance examination, one-tenth the percentage of white students.

A difference of at least three-and-a-half years in educational attainment separated the average Negro and white. Fifty-five

1 Throughout the report, in the presentation of statistics Negro is used inter- changeably with non-white. Wherever available, current data are used. Where no updating has been possible, figures are those of the 1960 census. Sources are the U.S. Bureau of the Census and other government agencies, and, in a few instances, special studies.

43

percent of the Negro men in Tampa were working in unskilled jobs. More than half of the families had incomes of less than $3,000 a year. The result was that 40 percent of the Negro children lived in broken homes, and the city's crime rate ranked in the top 25 percent in the nation.

About a month before, police-community relations had been severely strained by the actions of a pair of white officers who were subsequently transferred to another beat.

When Officer Oates returned to the area he attempted to convince the crowd to disperse by announcing that a complete investigation would be made into the shooting. He seemed to be making headway when a young woman came running down the street screaming that the police had killed her brother. Her hysteria galvanized the crowd. Rock throwing began. Police cars driving into the area were stoned. The police, relying on a previous experience when, after withdrawal of their units, the crowd had dispersed, decided to send no more patrol cars into the vicinity.

This time the maneuver did not work. From nearby bars and tawdry night spots patrons joined the throng. A window was smashed. Haphazard looting began. As fluid bands of rioters moved down the Central Avenue business district, stores whose proprietors were particularly disliked were singled out. A grocery store, a liquor store, a restaurant were hit. The first fire was set.

Because of the dismissal of the Selective Enforcement Unit and the lack of accurate intelligence information, the police de- partment was slow to react. Although Sheriff Malcolm Beard of Hillsborough County was in contact with the Department throughout the evening, it was not until after 11:00 P.M. that a request for deputies was made to him

At 11:30 P.M. a recall order, issued earlier by the police department, began to bring officers back into the area. By this time, the streets in the vicinity of the housing project were lighted by the flames of burning buildings.

Falling power lines whipped sparks about the skirmish line of officers as they moved down the street. The popping noise of what sounded to the officers like gunshots came from the direc- tion of the housing project.

The officers did not return the fire. Police announced from a sound car that anyone caught armed would be shot. The fir- ing ceased. Then, and throughout the succeeding two days, law enforcement officers refrained from the use of firearms. No officer or civilian suffered a gunshot wound during the riot.

Driving along the expressway, a young white couple, Mr. and Mrs. C. D., were startled by the fires. Deciding to investi- gate, they took the off-ramp into the midst of the riot. The

44

car was swarmed over. Its windows were shattered. C. D. was dragged into the street.

As he emerged from a bar in which he had spent the eve- ning, 19-year old J. C, a Negro fruit-picker from Arkansas, was as surprised by the riot as Mr. and Mrs. C. D. Rushing toward the station wagon in which the young woman was trapped, he interposed himself between her and the mob. Although rocks and beer cans smashed the windows, she was able to drive off. J. C. pushed through to where the white man lay. With the hoots and jeers of rioting youths ringing in his ears, J. C. helped him, also, to escape.

By 1:00 A.M., police officers and sheriffs deputies had surrounded an area several blocks square. Firemen began to extinguish the flames which, by this time, had spread to several other establishments from the three stores in which they had, originally, been set. No resistance was met. Control was soon re-established.

Governor Claude Kirk flew to Tampa. Since the chief of police was absent, and since the Governor regarded the sheriff as his "direct arm," Sheriff Beard was placed in charge of the combined forces of the police and sheriff's departments. For the next 12 hours the situation remained quiet but tense. By afternoon of Monday, June 12, the sheriffs and police forces both had been fully committed. The men were tired. There were none in reserve.

As a precaution, the Sheriff requested that a National Guard contingent be made available.

Late in the afternoon Governor Kirk met with the residents at a school in the Central Park Village area. It was a tense meeting. Most speakers, whether white or Negro, were booed and hissed. The meeting broke up without concrete results. Nevertheless, the Governor believed it had enabled the resi- dents to let off steam.

That evening, as National Guard troops began to supplant local forces in maintaining a perimeter and establishing roving patrols, anti-poverty workers went from door to door, urging citizens to stay off the streets.

A reported attempt by Black Muslims to incite further violence failed. Although there were scattered reports of trouble from several areas of the city, and a few fires were set — largely in vacant buildings — there were no major inci- dents. Several youths with a cache of Molotov cocktails were arrested. They were white.

All the next day false reports poured into Police Head- quarters. Everyday scenes took on menacing tones. Twenty Negro men, bared to the waist and carrying clubs were re-

45

ported to be gathering. They turned out to be construction workers.

Mayor Nuccio met with residents. At their suggestion that the man most likely to carry weight with the youngsters was Coach Jim Williams, he placed a call to Tallahassee, where Williams was attending a coaching clinic.

An impressive-looking man with graying hair, Williams ar- rived in Tampa almost 48 hours after the shooting of Martin Chambers. Together with another coach he went to an eatery called The Greek Stand, behind which he found a number of youngsters fashioning an arsenal of bottles, bricks, and Molotov cocktails. As in the crowds that were once more beginning to gather, the principal complaint was the presence of the National Guard, which, the residents asserted, gave them a feeling of being hemmed in. Williams decided to at- tempt to negotiate the removal of the National Guard if the people would agree to keep the peace and to disperse.

When Sheriff Beard arrived at a meeting called for the College Hill Elementary School, Robert Gilder of the NAACP was speaking to leaders of the Negro youth. Some were college students who had been unable to get summer jobs. One was a Vietnam veteran who had been turned down for a position as a swimming pool lifeguard. The youths believed that dis- crimination had played a part in their failure to find jobs.

The suggestion was made to Sheriff Beard that the National Guard be pulled out of the Negro areas, and that these young men, as well as others, be given the opportunity to keep order. The idea, which was encouraged by James Hammond, Di- rector of the Commission of Community Relations, made sense to the Sheriff. He decided to take a chance on the Youth Patrol.

In another part of the city, West Tampa, two Negro com- munity leaders, Dr. James O. Brookins and attorney Delano S. Stewart, were advised by acquaintances that, unless the in- tensive patrolling of Negro neighborhoods ceased, people planned to set fires in industrial districts that evening. Like Coach Williams, Dr. Brookins and Stewart contacted neigh- borhood youths, and invited Sheriff Beard to a meeting. The concept of the Youth Patrol was expanded. Participants were identified first by phosphorescent arm bands, and later by white hats.

During the next 24 hours 126 youths, some of whom had participated in the riot, were recruited into the patrol. Many were high school dropouts.

On Wednesday, the inquiry into the death of Martin Chambers was concluded. With the verdict that Officer Cal- vert had fired the shot justifiably and in the line of duty, ap-

46

prehension rose that trouble would erupt again. The leaders of the Youth Patrol were called in. The Sheriff explained the law to them, and pointed out that the verdict was in con- formance with the law. Despite the fact that the verdict was not to their liking, the White Hats continued to keep order.

II. Cincinnati

On Monday, June 12, before order had been restored in Tampa, trouble erupted 940 miles away in Cincinnati.

Beginning in October, 1965, assaults on middle-aged white women, several of whom were murdered, had generated an atmosphere of fear. When the "Cincinnati Strangler" was ten- tatively identified as a Negro, a new element of tension was injected into relations between the races.

In December, 1966, a Negro jazz musician named Posteal Laskey was arrested and charged with one of the murders. In May of 1967 he was convicted and sentenced to death. Two of the principal witnesses against Laskey were Negroes. Nevertheless, many Negroes felt that, because of the charged atmosphere, he had not received a fair trial.

They were further aroused when, at about the same time, a white man, convicted of manslaughter in the death of his girlfriend, received a suspended sentence. Although the cases were dissimilar, there was talk in the Negro community that the difference in the sentences demonstrated a double standard of justice for white and for black.

A drive began in the Negro community to raise funds for an appeal. Laskey's cousin, Peter Frakes, began walking the streets on behalf of this appeal carrying a sandwich board declaring: "Cincinnati Guilty — Laskey Innocent." After warn- ing him several times, police arrested Frakes on a charge of blocking pedestrian traffic.

Many Negroes viewed his arrest as evidence of police harassment, similar to the apparently selective enforcement of the city's anti-loitering ordinance. Between January, 1966, and June, 1967, 170 of some 240 persons arrested under the ordinance were Negro.

Frakes was arrested at 12:35 A.M. on Sunday, June 11. That evening, concurrently with the commencement of a Ne- gro Baptist Convention, it was announced in one of the churches that a meeting to protest the Frakes arrest and the anti-loitering ordinance would be held the following night on the grounds of a junior high school in the Avondale District.

Part of the significance of such a protest meeting lay in the context of past events. Without the city's realizing what was occurring, over the years protest through political and non- 47

violent channels had become increasingly difficult for Negroes. To young, militant Negroes, especially, such protest appeared to have become almost futile.

Although the city's Negro population had been rising swiftly —in 1967, 135,000 out of the city's 500,000 residents were Negroes — there was only one Negro on the city council. In the 1950's, with a far smaller Negro population, there had been two. Negroes attributed this to dilution of the Negro vote through abolition of the proportional representation sys- tem of electing the nine councilmen.

Although, by 1967, 40 percent of the school children were Negro, there was only one Negro on the Board of Education. Of more than 80 members of various city commissions, only three or four were Negro.

Under the leadership of the NAACP, picketing, to protest lack of Negro membership in building trades unions, took place at the construction site of a new city convention hall. It produced no results. When the Reverend Fred Shuttles- worth, who had been one of the leaders of the Birmingham demonstrations of 1963, staged a protest against alleged dis- criminatory practices at the County Hospital, he and his fol- lowers were arrested and convicted of trespassing.

Traditional Negro leaders drawn from the middle class lost influence as promises made by the city produced petty results. In the spring of 1967, a group of 14 white and 14 Negro business and community leaders, called the Committee of 28, talked about 2,000 job openings for young Negroes. Only 65 materialized. Almost one out of every eight Cincinnati Ne- groes was unemployed. Two of every five Negro families were living on or below the border of poverty.

A study of the West End section of the city indicated that one out of every four Negro men living there was out of work. In one public housing area two-thirds of the fathers were missing. Of private housing occupied by Negroes, one- fourth was overcrowded, and half was deteriorated or di- lapidated.

In the 90-degree temperature of Monday, June 12th, as throughout the summer, Negro youngsters roamed the streets. The two swimming pools available to them could accommo- date only a handful. In the Avondale section — once a pros- perous white middle class community, but now the home of more than half the city's Negro population — Negro youths watched white workers going to work at white-owned stores and businesses. One youth began to count the number of delivery trucks being driven by Negroes. During the course

48

of the afternoon, of the 52 trucks he counted, only one had a Negro driver. His sampling was remarkably accurate. Ac- cording to a study conducted by the Equal Employment Op- portunities Commission, less than 2 percent of truck drivers in the Cincinnati area are Negro.

Late in the afternoon the youths began to interfere with deliveries being made by white drivers. Dr. Bruce Green, president of the local NAACP chapter, was notified. Dr. Green asked his colleague, Dr. Robert Reid, the director of the Opportunities Industrialization Center, to go and try to calm the youngsters. Dr. Reid found several whom he knew, and convinced them to go with him to the Avondale Special Services Office to talk things over.

They were drawing up plans for a meeting with merchants of the Avondale area when word came of an altercation at a nearby drugstore. Several of the youths left the meeting and rushed over to the store. Dr. Reid followed them. The owner of the store was complaining to the police that earlier the youths had been interfering with his business; he declared that he wasn't going to stand for it.

Dr. Reid was attempting to mediate when a police sergeant arrived and asked the officers what was going on. One allegedly replied that they had been called in because "young nigger punks were disrupting deliveries to the stores."

A dispute arose between Dr. Reid and the sergeant as to whether the officer had said "nigger." After further discussion the sergeant told the kids to "break it up!" Dr. Reid, together with some of the youngsters, returned to the Special Services Office. After talking to the youngsters again, Dr. Reid left to attend a meeting elsewhere.

Soon after, some of the youngsters headed for the junior high school, where the meeting protesting the Frakes arrest and the anti-loitering ordinance was scheduled to take place.

The police department, alerted to the possibility of a dis- turbance, mobilized. However, the police were wary of be- coming, as some Negro militants had complained, an inciting factor. Some months earlier, when Ku KJux Klansmen had been attracted to the scene of a speech by Stokely Carmichael, a Negro crowd, reacting to the heavy police patrolling, had gathered about the car of a plainclothesman and attempted to overturn it. On Monday, June 12, the department decided to withhold its men from the immediate area of the meeting.

It appeared for a time as if this policy might be rewarded. Near the end of the rally, however, a Negro real estate broker arose to defend the police and the anti-loitering ordinance. The crowd, including the youngsters who had had the en-

49

counter with the police officers only a short time earlier, was incensed. When the meeting broke up, a missile was hurled through the window of a nearby church. A small fire was set in the street. A Molotov cocktail was thrown through the window of a drug store.

The police were able to react quickly. There was only one major confrontation between them and the mob. Little re- sistance was offered.

Although windows were broken in some two dozen stores, there was virtually no looting. There were 14 arrests, some unconnected with the disturbance. Among those arrested was a community worker, now studying for a doctorate at Brandeis University. When he went to the area to help get people off the streets, he was arrested and charged with loitering.

The next morning a judge of the Municipal Court, before whom most of the persons charged were to be brought, said he intended to mete out the maximum sentence to anyone found guilty of a riot-connected offense. Although the judge later told the Commission that he knew his statement was a "violation of judicial ethics," he said that he made it because the "city was in a state of siege," and he intended it to act as a deterrent against further violence.

Maximum sentences were, in fact, pronounced by the judge on all convicted in his court, regardless of the cir- cumstances of the arrest, or the background of the persons arrested. Police were charging most white persons arrested with disorderly conduct — for which the maximum sentence is 30 days in jail and a $100 fine. Many Negroes, however, were charged with violation of the Riot Act — for which the maxi- mum sentence is one year in jail plus a $500 fine. Consequently, a major portion of the Negro community viewed this as an example of discriminatory justice.

Tuesday morning Negro leaders presented a list of 11 de- mands and grievances stemming from the Monday night meet- ing to the municipal government. Included were demands for repeal of the anti-loitering law, release of all prisoners arrested during the disturbance, full employment for Negroes, and equal justice in the courts.

Municipal officials agreed that the city council would con- sider the demands. However, they rejected a suggestion that they attend an open-air meeting of residents in the Avondale section. City leaders did not want to give stature to the mili- tants by recognizing them as the de facto representatives of the community. Yet, by all indications, the militants were the only persons with influence on the people on the streets.

Mayor Walton H. Bachrach declared that he was "quite surprised" by the disturbance because the council had "worked

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like hell" to help Negroes. Municipal officials, whose contacts were, as in other cities, generally with a few middle-class Negroes, appeared not to realize the volatile frustrations of Negroes in the ghetto.

Early in the evening a crowd, consisting mostly of teenagers and young adults, began to gather in the Avondale District. When, after a short time, no one appeared to give direction, they began to mill about. A few minutes before 7:00 P.M. cars were stoned and windows were broken. Police moved in to disperse the gathering.

Fires were set. When firemen reached the scene they were barraged with rocks and bottles. A full-scale confrontation took place between police riot squads and the Negro crowd. As police swept the streets, people scattered. According to the chief of police, at approximately 7:15, "All hell broke loose."

The disorder leaped to other sections of the city. The con- fusion and rapidity with which it spread made it almost im- possible to determine its scope.

Many reports of fires set by Molotov cocktails, cars being stoned, and windows being broken were received by the police. A white motorist — who died three weeks later — and a Negro sitting on his porch suffered gunshot wounds. Rumors spread of Negro gangs raiding white neighborhoods, of shootings, and of organization of the riot. Nearly all of them were determined later to be unfounded.

At 9:40 P.M., following a request for aid to surrounding communities, Mayor Bachrach placed a call to the Governor asking for mobilization of the National Guard.

At 2:30 A.M., Wednesday the first Guard units appeared on the streets. They followed a policy of restraint in the use of weapons. Few shots were fired. Two hours later, the streets were quiet. Most of the damage was minor. Of 40-odd fires reported before dawn, only 1 1 resulted in a loss of more than $1,000. The fire department log listed four as having caused major damage.

That afternoon the city council held an open session. The chamber was jammed with Negro residents, many of whom gave vociferous support as their spokesmen criticized the city administration. When the audience became unruly, a detail of National Guardsmen was stationed outside the council chamber. Their presence resulted in a misunderstanding, caus- ing many of the Negroes to walk out, and the meeting to end.

Wednesday night there were virtually no reports of riotous activity until 9:00 P.M., when scattered incidents of violence again began to take place. One person was injured by a gunshot.

Despite fears of a clash between Negroes and SAMS — white

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Southern Appalachian migrants whose economic conditions paralleled those of Negroes — such a clash was averted.

H. "Rap" Brown, arriving in the city on Thursday, attempted to capitalize on the discontent by presenting a list of 20 "de- mands." Their principal effect would have been total removal of all white persons, whatever their capacity, from the ghetto area. Demand No. 18 stated that "at any meeting to settle grievances . . . any white proposal or white representative objected to by black representatives must be rejected auto- matically." No. 20 demanded a veto power over police officers patrolling the community.

His appearance had no galvanizing effect. Although scat- tered incidents occurred for three days after the arrival of the National Guard, the disorder never returned to its early inten- sity.

Of 63 reported injuries, 12 were serious enough to require hospitalization; 56 of the persons injured were white. Most of the injuries resulted from thrown objects and glass splinters. Of the 107 persons arrested Tuesday night, when the main disturbance took place, 75 were 21 years of age or younger. Of the total of 404 persons arrested, 128 were juveniles, and 338 were 26 years of age or younger. Of the adults arrested, 29 percent were unemployed.

III. Atlanta

On Saturday, June 17, as the National Guard was being withdrawn from Cincinnati, the same type of minor police arrest that had initiated the Cincinnati riot took place in At- lanta.

Rapid industrialization following World War II, coupled with annexations that quadrupled the area of the city, had made Atlanta a vigorous and booming community. Pragmatic busi- ness and political leaders worked to give it a reputation as the moderate stronghold of the Deep South.

Nevertheless, despite acceptance, in principle, of integration of schools and facilities, the fact that the city is headquarters both for civil rights organizations and segregationist elements created a strong and ever-present potential for conflict.

The rapidly growing Negro population, which, by the sum- mer of 1967 had reached an estimated 44 percent, and was scattered in several ghettos throughout the city, was maintain- ing constant pressure on surrounding white residential areas. Some real estate agents engaged in "blockbusting tactics"2 to

2 A block is considered to have been "busted" when one Negro family has been sold a home in a previously all-white area.

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stimulate panic sales by white homeowners. The city police were continually on the alert to keep marches and counter- marches of civil rights and white supremacist organizations from flaring into violence.

In September 1966, following a fatal shooting by a police officer of a Negro auto thief who was resisting arrest, only the dramatic ghetto appearance of Mayor Ivan Allen, Jr. had averted a riot.

Boasting that Atlanta had the largest KKK membership in the country, the Klan, on June 4, 1967, marched through one of the poorer Negro sections. A massive police escort prevented a racial clash.

According to Mayor Allen, 55 percent of municipal em- ployees hired in 1967 were Negroes, bringing their proportion of the city work force to 28 percent. Of 908 police department employees, 85 are Negro — a higher proportion of Negroes than in most major city police departments in the nation.

To the Negro community, however, it appeared that the progress made served only to reduce the level of inequality. Equal conditions for blacks and whites remained a hope for the future. Different pay scales for black and white municipal employees performing the same jobs had been only recently eliminated.

The economic and educational gap between the black and white populations may, in fact, have been increasing. The aver- age white Atlantan was a high school graduate; the average Negro Atlantan had not completed the eighth grade.

In 1960 the median income of a Negro family was less than half of the white's $6,350 a year, and 48 percent of Negro families earned less than $3,000 a year. Fifty percent of the men worked in unskilled jobs, and many more Negro women than men, 7.9 percent as against 4.9 percent of the respective work forces, held well-paying, white collar jobs.

Living on marginal incomes in cramped and deteriorating quarters — one-third of the housing was overcrowded and more than half substandard — families were breaking up at an in- creasing rate. In approximately four out of every 10 Negro homes the father was missing. In the case of families living in public housing projects, more than 60 percent are headed by females.

Mayor Allen estimated there were 25,000 jobs in the city waiting to be filled because people lacked the education or skills to fill them. Yet overcrowding in many Negro schools forced the scheduling of extended and double sessions. Al- though Negroes comprised 60 percent of the school population, there were 14 "white" high schools compared to 9 Negro.

The city has integrated its schools, but de facto segregation

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as a result of housing patterns has had the effect of continuing separate schooling of nearly all white and Negro pupils. White high school students attended classes 6V1 hours a day; Negroes in high schools with double sessions attended AVi .

One Atlanta newspaper continued to advertise jobs by race, and in some industrial plants there were "Negro" jobs and •'white" jobs, with little chance for advancement by Negroes.

Shortly after 8:00 P.M. on Saturday, June 17, a young Ne- gro, E. W., carrying a can of beer, attempted to enter the Fla- mingo Grill in the Dixie Hills Shopping Center. When a Negro security guard told the youth he could not enter, a scuffle en- sued. Police officers were called to the guard's aid. E. W. re- ceived help from his 19-year-old sister, who flailed away at the officers with her purse. Another 19-year-old Negro youth en- tered the fray. All three were arrested.

Although some 200 to 300 persons had been drawn to the scene of the incident, when police asked them to disperse, they complied.

Because the area is isolated from the city in terms of trans- portation, and there are few recreational facilities, the shopping center is a natural gathering place. The next night, Sunday, an even bigger crowd was on hand.

As they mingled, residents discussed their grievances. They were bitter about their inability to get the city government to correct conditions and make improvements. Garbage some- times was not picked up for two weeks in succession. Over- flowing garbage cans, littered streets, and cluttered empty lots were breeding grounds for rats. Inadequate storm drains led to flooded streets. Although residents had obtained title to several empty lots for use as playgrounds, the city failed to provide the equipment and men necessary to convert them.

The area lacked a swimming pool. A nearby park was inac- cessible because of the lack of a road. Petitions submitted to the mayor's office for the correcting of these and other con- ditions were acknowledged, but not acted upon.

Since only one of the 16 aldermen was a Negro, and a num- ber of black wards were represented by white aldermen, many Negroes felt they were not being properly represented on the city government. The small number of elected Negro officials appeared to be due to a system in which aldermen are elected at large, but represent specific wards, and must reside in the wards from which they are elected. Because of the quilted pat- tern of black-white housing, white candidates were able to meet the residency requirements for running from predomi- nantly Negro wards. Since, however, candidates are dependent upon the city-wide vote for election, and the city has a white majority, few Negroes had been able to attain office.

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A decision was made by the Dixie Hills residents to organize committees and hold a protest meeting the next night.

The headquarters of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) is located in Atlanta. Its former president, Stokely Carmichael, wearing a green Malcolm X sweatshirt, appeared, together with several companions. Approaching a police captain, Carmichael asked why there were so many police cars in the area. Informed that they were there to make sure there was no disturbance, Carmichael, clapping his hands, declared in a sing-song voice that there might have to be a riot if the police cars were not removed. When Carmichael refused to move on as requested, he was arrested.

Soon released on bail, the next morning Carmichael declared that the black people were preparing to resist "armed aggres- sion" by the police by whatever means necessary.

Shortly thereafter in the Dixie Hills Shopping Center, which had been closed down for the day, a Negro youth, using a broom handle, began to pound on the outside bell of a burglar alarm that had been set off, apparently, by a short circuit. Police officers responded to the alarm and ordered him to stop hitting the bell. A scuffle ensued. Several bystanders intervened. One of the officers drew his service revolver and fired, superficially wounding the young man.

Tension rose. Approximately 250 persons were present at that evening's meeting. When a number of Negro leaders urged the submission of a petition of grievances through legal chan- nels, the response was lukewarm. When Carmichael took to the podium, urging Negroes "to take to the streets and force the police department to work until they fall in their tracks," the response was tumultous.

The press quoted him as saying: "It's not a question of law and order. We are not concerned with peace. We are concerned with the liberation of black people. We have to build a revolution."

As the people present at the meeting poured into the street, they were joined by others. The crowd soon numbered an estimated 1,000. From alleys and rooftops rocks and bottles were thrown at the nine police officers on the scene. Windows of police cars were broken. Firecrackers exploded in the dark- ness. Police believe they may have been fired on.

Reinforced by approximately 60 to 70 officers, the police, firing over the heads of the crowd, quickly regained control. Of the 10 persons arrested, six were 21 years of age or younger; only one was in his thirties.

The next day city equipment appeared in the area to begin work on the long-delayed playgrounds and other projects de- manded by the citizens. It was announced that a Negro Youth

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Patrol would be established along the lines of the Tampa White Hats.

SNCC responded that volunteers for the patrol would be selling their "Black brothers out," and would be viewed as "Black Traitors," to be dealt with in the "manner we see fit." Nevertheless, during the course of the summer the 200 youths participating in the corps played an important role in preventing a serious outbreak. The police believe that establishment of the youth corps became a major factor in improving police-community relations.

Another meeting of area residents was called for Tuesday evening. At its conclusion 200 protesters were met by 300 police officers. As two police officers chased several boys down the street, a cherry bomb or incendiary device exploded at the officers' feet. In response, several shots were fired from a group of police consisting mostly of Negro officers. The discharge from a shotgun struck in the midst of several persons sitting on the front porch of a house. A 46-year old man was killed; a 9-year old boy was critically injured.

Because of the efforts of neighborhood and anti-poverty workers who circulated through the area, and the later appear- ance of Mayor Allen, no further violence ensued.

When H. "Rap" Brown, who had returned to the city that afternoon, went to other Negro areas in an attempt to initiate a demonstration against the shooting of the Negroes on the porch, he met with no response.

Within the next few days a petition was drawn up by State Senator Leroy Johnson and other moderate Negro leaders demanding that Stokely Carmichael get out of the community and allow the people to handle their own affairs. It was signed by more than 1,000 persons in the Dixie Hills area.

IV. Newark

The last outburst in Atlanta occurred on Tuesday night, June 20. That same night, in Newark, New Jersey, a tumultu- ous meeting of the Planning Board took place. Until 4 A.M., speaker after speaker from the Negro ghetto arose to denounce the city's intent to turn over 150 acres in the heart of the Central Ward as a site for the state's new medical and dental college.

The growing opposition to the city administration by vocal black residents had paralyzed both the Planning Board and the Board of Education. Tension had been rising so steadily throughout the northern New Jersey area that, in the first week of June, Colonel David Kelly, head of the state police, had met with municipal police chiefs to draw up plans for

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state police support of city police wherever a riot developed. Nowhere was the tension greater than in Newark.

Founded in 1666, the city, part of the Greater New York City port complex, rises from the salt marshes of the Passaic River. Although in 1967 Newark's population of 400,000 still ranked it thirtieth among American municipalities, for the past 20 years the white middle class had been deserting the city for the suburbs.

In the late 1950's the desertions had become a rout. Be- tween 1960 and 1967, the city lost a net total of more than 70,000 white residents. Replacing them in vast areas of dilapi- dated housing where living conditions, according to a promi- nent member of the County Bar Association, were so bad that "people would be kinder to their pets," were Negro migrants, Cubans and Puerto Ricans. In six years the city switched from 65 percent white to 52 percent Negro and 10 percent Puerto Rican and Cuban.

The white population, nevertheless, retained political control of the city. On both the City Council and the Board of Edu- cation seven of nine members were white. On other key boards the disparity was equal or greater. In the Central Ward, where the medical college controversy raged, the Negro con- stituents and their white councilman found themselves on opposite sides of almost every crucial issue.

The municipal administration lacked the ability to respond quickly enough to navigate the swiftly changing currents. Even had it had great astuteness, it would have lacked the financial resources to affect significantly the course of events.

In 1962, seven-term Congressman Hugh Addonizio had forged an Italian-Negro coalition to overthrow long-time Irish control of the City Hall. A liberal in Congress, Addonizio, when he became mayor, had opened his door to all people. Negroes, who had been excluded from the previous admin- istration, were brought into the government. The police de- partment was integrated.

Nevertheless, progress was slow. As the Negro population increased, more and more of the politically oriented found the progress inadequate.

The Negro-Italian coalition began to develop strains over the issue of the police. The police were largely Italian, the persons they arrested largely Negro. Community leaders agreed that, as in many police forces, there was a small minority of officers who abused their responsibility. This gave credibility to the cries of "Brutality!" voiced periodically by ghetto Negroes.

In 1965 Mayor Addonizio, acknowledged that there was "a small group of misguided individuals" in the department,

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declared that "it is vital to establish once and for all, in the minds of the public, that charges of alleged police brutality will be thoroughly investigated and the appropriate legal or punitive action be taken if the charges are found to be sub- stantiated."

Pulled one way by the Negro citizens who wanted a Police Review Board, and the other by the police, who adamantly opposed it, the mayor decided to transfer "the control and investigation of complaints of police brutality out of the hands of both the police and the public and into the hands of an agency that all can support — the Federal Bureau of Investi- gation;" and to send "a copy of any charge of police brutality . . . directly to the Prosecutor's office." However, the FBI could act only if there had been a violation of a person's federal civil rights. No complaint was ever heard of again.

Nor was there much redress for other complaints. The city had no money with which to redress them.

The city had already reached its legal bonding limit, yet expenditures continued to outstrip income. Health and welfare costs, per capita, were 20 times as great as for some of the surrounding communities. Cramped by its small land area of 23.6 square miles— one-third of which was taken up by New- ark Airport and unusable marshland — and surrounded by in- dependent jurisdictions, the city had nowhere to expand.

Taxable property was contracting as land, cleared for urban renewal, lay fallow year after year. Property taxes had been increased, perhaps, to the point of diminishing return. By the fall of 1967 they were to reach $661.70 on a $10,000 house — double that of suburban communities.3 As a result, people were refusing either to own or to renovate property in the city. Seventy-four percent of white and 87 percent of Negro families lived in rental housing. Whoever was able to move to the suburbs, moved. Many of these persons, as down- town areas were cleared and new office buildings were con- structed, continued to work in the city. Among them were a large proportion of the people from whom a city normally draws its civic leaders, but who, after moving out, tended to cease involving themselves in the community's problems.

During the daytime Newark more than doubled its popu- lation— and was, therefore, forced to provide services for a large number of people who contributed nothing in property taxes. The city's per capita outlay for police, fire protection and other municipal services continued to increase. By 1967 it was twice that of the surrounding area.

3 The legal tax rate is $7.76 per $100 of market value. However, because of inflation, a guideline of 85.27 percent of market value is used in assessing, reducing the true tax rate to $6,617 per $100.

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Consequently, there was less money to spend on education. Newark's per capita outlay on schools was considerably less than that of surrounding communities. Yet within the city's school system were 78,000 children, 14,000 more than 10 years earlier.

Twenty thousand pupils were on double sessions. The drop- out rate was estimated to be as high as 33 percent. Of 13,600 Negroes between the ages of 16 and 19, more than 6,000 were not in school. In 1960 over half of the adult Negro population had less than an eighth grade education.

The typical ghetto cycle of high unemployment, family breakup, and crime was present in all its elements. Approxi- mately 12 percent of Negroes were without jobs. An esti- mated 40 percent of Negro children lived in broken homes. Although Newark maintained proportionately the largest po- lice force of any major city, its crime rate was among the highest in the nation. In narcotics violations it ranked fifth nationally. Almost 80 percent of the crimes were committed within two miles of the core of the city, where the Central Ward is located. A majority of the criminals were Negro. Most of the victims, likewise, were Negro. The Mafia was reputed to control much of the organized crime.

Under such conditions a major segment of the Negro popu- lation became increasingly militant. Largely excluded from positions of traditional political power, Negroes, tutored by a handful of militant social activists who had moved into the city in the early 1960's, made use of the anti-poverty pro- gram, in which poor people were guaranteed representation, as a political springboard. This led to friction between the United Community Corporation, the agency that administered the anti-poverty program, and the city administration.

When it became known that the secretary of the Board of Education intended to retire, the militants proposed for the position the city's budget director, a Negro with a master's de- gree in accounting. The mayor, however, had already nomi- nated a white man. Since the white man had only a high school education, and at least 70 percent of the children in the school system were Negro, the issue of who was to obtain the secre- taryship, an important and powerful position, quickly became a focal issue.

Joined with the issue of the 150-acre medical school site, the area of which had been expanded to triple the original re- quest— an expansion regarded by the militants as an effort to dilute the black political power by moving out Negro residents — the Board of Education battle resulted in a confrontation be- tween the mayor and the militants. Both sides refused to alter their positions.

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Into this impasse stepped a Washington Negro named Albert Roy Osborne. A flamboyant, 42-year-old former wig salesman who called himself Colonel Hassan Jem-Ahmed and wore a black beret, he presided over a mythical "Blackman's Volun- teer Army of Liberation." Articulate and magnetic, the self- commissioned "Colonel" proved to be a one-man show. He brought Negro residents flocking to Board of Education and Planning Board meetings. The Colonel spoke in violent terms, and backed his words with violent action. At one meeting he tore the tape from the official stenographic recorder.

It became more and more evident to the militants that, though they might not be able to prevail, they could prevent the normal transaction of business. Filibustering began. A Ne- gro former state assemblyman held the floor for more than four hours. One meeting of the Board of Education began at 5:00 P.M. and did not adjourn until 3:23 A.M. Throughout the months of May and June speaker after speaker warned that if the mayor persisted in naming a white man as Secretary to the Board of Education, and in moving ahead with plans for the medical school site, violence would ensue. The city admini- stration played down the threats.

On June 27th, when a new secretary to the Board of Educa- tion was to be named, the state police set up a command post in the Newark armory.

The militants, led by the local CORE (Congress of Racial Equality) chapter, disrupted and took over the Board of Edu- cation meeting. The outcome was a stalemate. The incumbent secretary decided to stay on another year. No one was satisfied.

At the beginning of July there were 24,000 unemployed Negroes within the city limits. Their ranks were swelled by an estimated 20,000 teenagers, many of whom, with school out and the summer recreation program curtailed due to a lack of funds, had no place to go.

On July 8, Newark and East Orange Police attempted to disperse a group of Black Muslims. In the melee that followed, several police officers and Muslims suffered injuries necessi- tating medical treatment. The resulting charges and counter- charges heightened the tension between police and Negroes.

Early on the evening of July 12, a cab driver named John Smith began, according to police reports, tailgating a Newark police car. Smith was an unlikely candidate to set a riot in mo- tion. Forty years old, a Georgian by birth, he had attended college for a year before entering the Army in 1950. In 1953 he had been honorably discharged with the rank of corporal. A chess-playing trumpet player, he had worked as a musician and a factory hand before, in 1963, becoming a cab driver.

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As a cab driver, he appeared to be a hazard. Within a rela- tively short period of time he had eight or nine accidents. His license was revoked. When, with a woman passenger in his cab, he was stopped by the police, he was in violation of that revocation.

From the high-rise towers of the Reverend William P. Hayes Housing Project, the residents can look down on the orange- red brick facade of the Fourth Precinct Police Station and observe every movement. Shortly after 9:30 P.M., people saw Smith, who either refused or was unable to walk, being dragged out of a police car and into the front door of the station.

Within a few minutes at least two civil rights leaders re- ceived calls from a hysterical woman declaring a cab driver was being beaten by the police. When one of the persons at the station notified the cab company of Smith's arrest, cab drivers all over the city began learning of it over their cab radios.

A crowd formed on the grounds of the housing project across the narrow street from the station. As more and more people arrived, the description of the beating purportedly administered to Smith became more and more exaggerated. The descriptions were supported by other complaints of police malpractice that, over the years, had been submitted for investigation — but had never been heard of again.

Several Negro community leaders, telephoned by a civil rights worker and informed of the deteriorating situation, rushed to the scene. By 10:15 P.M. the atmosphere had be- come so potentially explosive that Kenneth Melchior, the senior police inspector on the night watch, was called. He arrived at approximately 10:30 P.M.

Met by a delegation of civil rights leaders and militants who requested the right to see and interview Smith, Inspector Mel- chior acceded to their request.

When the delegation was taken to Smith, Melchior agreed with their observations that, as a result of injuries Smith had suffered, he needed to be examined by a doctor. Arrangements were made to have a police car transport him to the hospital.

Both within and outside of the police station the atmosphere was electric with hostility. Carloads of police officers arriving for the 10:45 P.M. change of shifts were subjected to a gaunt- let of catcalls, taunts and curses.

Joined by Oliver Lofton, administrative director of the New- ark Legal Services Project, the Negro community leaders in- side the station requested an interview with Inspector Melchior. As they were talking to the inspector about initiating an in- vestigation to determine how Smith had been injured, the

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crowd outside became more and more unruly. Two of the Negro spokesmen went outside to attempt to pacify the people. There was little reaction to the spokesmen's appeal that the people go home. The second of the two had just finished speak- ing from atop a car when several Molotov cocktails smashed against the wall of the police station.

With the call of "Fire!" most of those inside the station, police officers and civilians alike, rushed out of the front door. The Molotov cocktails had splattered to the ground; the fire was quickly extinguished.

Inspector Melchior had a squad of men form a line across the front of the station. The police officers and the Negroes on the other side of the street exchanged volleys of profanity.

Three of the Negro leaders, Timothy Still of the United Community Corporation, Robert Curvin of CORE, and Lofton, requested they be given another opportunity to disperse the crowd. Inspector Melchior agreed to let them try, and provided a bullhorn. It was apparent that the several hundred persons who had gathered in the street and on the grounds of the hous- ing project were not going to disperse. Therefore, it was de- cided to attempt to channel the energies of the people into a nonviolent protest. While Lofton promised the crowd that a full investigation would be made of the Smith incident, the other Negro leaders urged those on the scene to form a line of march toward the city hall.

Some persons joined the line of march. Others milled about in the narrow street. From the dark grounds of the housing project came a barrage of rocks. Some of them fell among the crowd. Others hit persons in the line of march. Many smashed the windows of the police station. The rock throwing, it was believed, was the work of youngsters; approximately 2,500 children lived in the housing project.

Almost at the same time, an old car was set afire in a park- ing lot. The line of march began to disintegrate. The police, their heads protected by World War I-type helmets, sallied forth to disperse the crowd. A fire engine, arriving on the scene, was pelted with rocks. As police drove people away from the station, they scattered in all directions.

A few minutes later a nearby liquor store was broken into. Some persons, seeing a caravan of cabs appear at city hall to protest Smith's arrest, interpreted this as evidence that the dis- turbance had been organized, and generated rumors to that effect.

However, only a few stores were looted. Within a short period of time the disorder ran its course.

The next afternoon, Thursday, July 13, the mayor described it as an isolated incident. At a meeting with Negro leaders to

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discuss measures to defuse the situation, he agreed to appoint the first Negro police captain, and announced that he would set up a panel of citizens to investigate the Smith arrest. To one civil rights leader this sounded like"the playback of a record," and he walked out. Other observers reported that the mayor seemed unaware of the seriousness of the tensions.

The police were not. Unknown to the mayor, Dominick Spina, the director of police, had extended shifts from eight hours to 12, and was in the process of mobilizing half the strength of the department for that evening. The night before, Spina had arrived at the Fourth Precinct Police Station at approximately midnight, and had witnessed the latter half of the disturbance. Earlier in the evening he had held the regular weekly "open house" in his office. This was intended to give any person who wanted to talk to him an opportunity to do so. Not a single person had shown up.

As director of police, Spina had initiated many new pro- grams: police-precinct councils, composed of the police precinct captain and business and civic leaders, who would meet once a month to discuss mutual problems; Junior Crime- fighters; a Boy Scout Explorer program for each precinct; mandatory human relations training for every officer; a Citizens' Observer Program, which permitted citizens to ride in police cars and observe activities in the stations; a Police Cadet program; and others.

Many of the programs initially had been received enthu- siastically, but — as was the case with the "open house" — interest had fallen off. In general, the programs failed to reach the hard-core unemployed, the disaffected, the school dropouts — of whom Spina estimates there are 10,000 in Essex County — that constitute a major portion of the police problem.

Reports and rumors, including one that Smith had died, circulated through the Negro community. Tension continued to rise. Nowhere was the tension greater than at the Spirit House, the gathering place for Black Nationalists, Black Power advocates, and militants of every hue. Black Muslims, Ortho- dox Muslims, and members of the United Afro-American Association, a new and growing organization that follows, in general, the teachings of the late Malcolm X, came regularly to mingle and exchange views. Anti-white playwright LeRoi Jones held workshops. The two police-Negro clashes, coming one on top of the other, coupled with the unresolved political issues, had created a state of crisis.

On Thursday, inflammatory leaflets were circulated in the neighborhoods of the Fourth Precinct. A "Police Brutality Pro- test Rally" was announced for early evening in front of the Fourth Precinct Station. Several television stations and news-

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papers sent news teams to interview people. Cameras were set up. A crowd gathered.

A picket line was formed to march in front of the police station. Between 7:00 and 7:30 P.M. James Threatt, Execu- tive Director of the Newark Human Rights Commission, arrived to announce to the people the decision of the mayor to form a citizens group to investigate the Smith incident, and to elevate a Negro to the rank of captain.

The response from the loosely milling mass of people was derisive. One youngster shouted "Black Power!" Rocks were thrown at Threatt, a Negro. The barrage of missiles that fol- lowed placed the police station under siege.

After the barrage had continued for some minutes, police came out to disperse the crowd. According to witnesses, there was little restraint of language or action by either side. A number of police officers and Negroes were injured.

As on the night before, once the people had been dispersed, reports of looting began to come in. Soon the glow of the first fire was seen.

Without enough men to establish control, the police set up a perimeter around a two-mile stretch of Springfield Avenue, one of the principal business districts, where bands of youths roamed up and down smashing windows. Grocery and liquor stores, clothing and furniture stores, drug stores and cleaners, appliance stores and pawnshops were the principal targets. Periodically police officers would appear and fire their weapons over the heads of looters and rioters. Laden with stolen goods, people began returning to the housing projects.

Near midnight, activity appeared to taper off. The Mayor told reporters the city had turned the corner.

As news of the disturbance had spread, however, people had flocked into the streets. As they saw stores being broken into with impunity, many bowed to temptation and joined the looting.

Without the necessary personnel to make mass arrests, police were shooting into the air to clear stores. A Negro boy was wounded by a .22 caliber bullet said to have been fired by a white man riding in a car. Guns were reported stolen from a Sears, Roebuck store. Looting, fires, and gunshots were re- ported from a widening area. Between 2:00 and 2:30 A.M. on Friday, July 14, the mayor decided to request Governor Richard J. Hughes to dispatch the state police, and National Guard troops. The first elements of the state police arrived with a sizeable contingent before dawn.

During the morning the governor and the mayor, together with police and National Guard officers, made a reconnais- sance of the area. The police escort guarding the officials ar-

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rested looters as they went. By early afternoon the National Guard had set up 137 roadblocks, and state police and riot teams were beginning to achieve control. Command of anti- riot operations was taken over by the governor, who decreed a "hard line" in putting down the riot.

As a result of technical difficulties, such as the fact that the city and state police did not operate on the same radio wave- lengths, the three-way command structure — city police, state police and National Guard — worked poorly.

At 3:30 P.M. that afternoon, the family of Mrs. D. J. was standing near the upstairs windows of their apartment, watch- ing looters run in and out of a furniture store on Springfield Avenue. Three carloads of police rounded the corner. As the police yelled at the looters, they began running.

The police officers opened fire. A bullet smashed the kitchen window in Mrs. D. J.'s apartment. A moment later she heard a cry from the bedroom. Her 3 -year old daughter, Debbie, came running into the room. Blood was streaming down the left side of her face: the bullet had entered her eye. The child spent the next two months in the hospital. She lost the sight of her left eye and the hearing in her left ear.

Simultaneously, on the street below, Horace W. Morris, an associate director of the Washington Urban League who had been visiting relatives in Newark, was about to enter a car for the drive to Newark Airport. With him were his two brothers and his 73-year old step-father, Isaac Harrison. About 60 persons had been on the street watching the looting. As the police arrived, three of the looters cut directly in front of the group of spectators. The police fired at the looters. Bullets plowed into the spectators. Everyone began running. As Harri- son, followed by the family, headed toward the apartment building in which he lived, a bullet kicked his legs out from under him. Horace Morris lifted him to his feet. Again he fell. Mr. Morris' brother, Virgil, attempted to pick the old man up. As he was doing so, he was hit in the left leg and right fore- arm. Mr. Morris and his other brother managed to drag the two wounded men into the vestibule of the building, jammed with 60 to 70 frightened, angry Negroes.

Bullets continued to spatter against the walls of the build- ings. Finally, as the firing died down, Morris — whose step- father died that evening — yelled to a sergeant that innocent people were being shot.

"Tell the black bastards to stop shooting at us," the sergeant, according to Morris, replied.

"They don't have guns; no one is shooting at you," Morris said.

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"You shut up, there's a sniper on the roof," the sergeant yelled.

A short time later, at approximately 5:00 P.M., in the same vicinity a police detective was killed by a small caliber bullet. The origin of the shot could not be determined. Later during the riot a fireman was killed by a .30 caliber bullet. Snipers were blamed for the deaths of both.

At 5:30 P.M., on Beacon Street, W. F. told J. S., whose 1959 Pontiac he had taken to the station for inspection, that his front brake needed fixing. J. S., who had just returned from work, went to the car which was parked in the street, jacked up the front end, took the wheel off and got under the car.

The street was quiet. More than a dozen persons were sitting on porches, walking about, or shopping. None heard any shots. Suddenly several state troopers appeared at the corner of Springfield and Beacon. J. S. was startled by a shot clanging into the side of the garbage can next to his car. As he looked up he saw a state trooper with his rifle pointed at him. The next shot struck him in the right side.

At almost the same instant, K. G., standing on a porch, was struck in the right eye by a bullet. Both he and J. S. were critically injured.

At 8:00 P.M., Mrs. L. M. bundled her husband, her hus- band's brother, and her four sons into the family car to drive to a restaurant for dinner. On the return trip her husband, who was driving, panicked as he approached a National Guard roadblock. He slowed the car, then quickly swerved around. A shot rang out. When the family reached home, everyone began piling out of the car. Ten-year-old Eddie failed to move. Shot through the head, he was dead.

Although, by nightfall, most of the looting and burning had ended, reports of sniper fire increased. The fire was, ac- cording to New Jersey National Guard reports, "deliberately or otherwise inaccurate." Major General James F. Cantwell, Chief of Staff of the New Jersey National Guard, testified before an Armed Services Subcommittee of the House of Representatives that "there was too much firing initially against snipers" because of "confusion when we were finally called on for help and our thinking of it as a military action."

"As a matter of fact," Director of Police Spina told the Commission, "down in the Springfield Avenue area it was so bad that, in my opinion, Guardsmen were firing upon police and police were firing back at them ... I really don't believe there was as much sniping as we thought . . . We have since compiled statistics indicating that there were 79 specified instances of sniping."

Several problems contributed to the misconceptions regard-

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ing snipers: the lack of communications; the fact that one shot might be reported half a dozen times by half a dozen different persons as it caromed and reverberated a mile or more through the city; the fact that the National Guard troops lacked riot training. They were, said a police official, "young and very scared," and had had little contact with Negroes.

Within the Guard itself contact with Negroes had certainly been limited. Although, in 1949, out of a force of 12,529 men there had been 1,183 Negroes, following the integration of the Guard in the 1950's the number had declined until, by July of 1967, there were 303 Negroes in a force of 17,529 men.

On Saturday, July 15, Spina received a report of snipers in a housing project. When he arrived he saw approximately 100 National Guardsmen and police officers crouching behind vehicles, hiding in corners and lying on the ground around the edge of the courtyard.

Since everything appeared quiet and it was broad daylight, Spina walked directly down the middle of the street. Nothing happened. As he came to the last building of the complex, he heard a shot. All around him the troopers jumped, believing themselves to be under sniper fire. A moment later a young Guardsman ran from behind a building.

The director of police went over and asked him if he had fired the shot. The soldier said yes, he had fired to scare a man away from a window; that his orders were to keep everyone away from windows.

Spina said he told the soldier: "Do you know what you just did? You have now created a state of hysteria. Every Guards- man up and down this street and every State Policeman and every city policeman that is present thinks that somebody just fired a shot and that it is probably a sniper."

A short time later more "gunshots" were heard. Investigat- ing, Spina came upon a Puerto Rican sitting on a wall. In reply to a question as to whether he knew "where the firing is coming from?" the man said:

"That's no firing. That's fireworks. If you look up to the fourth floor, you will see the people who are throwing down these cherry bombs."

By this time four truckloads of National Guardsmen had arrived and troopers and policemen were again crouched every- where, looking for a sniper. The director of police remained at the scene for three hours, and the only shot fired was the one by the Guardsman.

Nevertheless, at six o'clock that evening two columns of National Guardsmen and state troopers were directing mass

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fire at the Hayes Housing Project in response to what they believed were snipers.

On the tenth floor, Eloise Spellman, the mother of several children, fell, a bullet through her neck.

Across the street a number of persons, standing in an apart- ment window, were watching the firing directed at the housing project. Suddenly several troopers whirled and began firing in the general direction of the spectators. Mrs. Hattie Gainer, a grandmother, sank to the floor.

A block away Rebecca Brown's 2-year old daughter was standing at the window. Mrs. Brown rushed to drag her to safety. As Mrs. Brown was, momentarily, framed in the win- dow, a bullet spun into her back.

All three women died.

A number of eye witnesses, at varying times and places, reported seeing bottles thrown from upper story windows. As these would land at the feet of an officer he would turn and fire. Thereupon, other officers and Guardsmen up and down the street would join in.

In order to protect his property, B. W. W., the owner of a Chinese laundry, had placed a sign saying "Soul Brother" in his window. Between 1:00 and 1:30 A.M., on Sunday, July 16, he, his mother, wife, and brother, were watching television in the back room. The neighborhood had been quiet. Suddenly B. W. W. heard the sound of jeeps, then shots.

Going to an upstairs window he was able to look out into the street. There he observed several jeeps, from which soldiers and state troopers were firing into stores that had "Soul Brother" signs in the windows. During the course of three nights, according to dozens of eye witness reports, law en- forcement officers shot into and smashed windows of busi- nesses that contained signs indicating they were Negro owned.

At 11.00 P.M., on Sunday, July 16th, Mrs. Lucille Pugh looked out of the window to see if the streets were clear. She then asked her 11 -year-old son, Michael, to take the garbage out. As he reached the street and was illuminated by a street light, a shot rang out. He died.

By Monday afternoon, July 17, state police and National Guard forces were withdrawn. That evening, a Catholic priest saw two Negro men walking down the street. They were carrying a case of soda and two bags of groceries. An un- marked car with five police officers pulled up beside them. Two white officers got out of the car. Accusing the Negro men of looting, the officers made them put the groceries on the sidewalk, then kicked the bags open, scattering their con- tents all over the street.

Telling the men, "Get out of here," the officers drove off.

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The Catholic priest went across the street to help gather up the groceries. One of the men turned to him: "I've just been back from Vietnam two days," he said, "and this is what I get. I feel like going home and getting a rifle and shooting the cops."

Of the 250 fire alarms, many had been false, and 13 were considered by the city to have been "serious." Of the $10,- 251,000 damage total, four-fifths was due to stock loss. Damage to buildings and fixtures was less than $2 million.

Twenty-three persons were killed — a white detective, a white fireman, and 21 Negroes. One was 73-year-old Isaac Harrison. Six were women. Two were children.

V. Northern New Jersey

Reports of looting, sniping, fire and death in Newark wove a web of tension over other Negro enclaves in northern New Jersey. Wherever Negro ghettos existed — Elizabeth, Engle- wood, Jersey City, Plainfield, New Brunswick — people had friends and relatives living in Newark. Everywhere the tele- phone provided a direct link to the scenes of violence. The telephoned messages frequently were at variance with reports transmitted by the mass media.

As reports of the excessive use of firearms in Newark grew, so did fear and anger in the Negro ghettos. Conversely, rumors amplified by radio, television and the newspapers — especially with regard to guerrilla bands roaming the streets — created a sense of danger and terror within the white communities. To Mayor Patricia Q. Sheehan of New Brunswick, it seemed "almost as if there was a fever in the air." She went on to say: "Rumors were coming in from all sides on July 17th. Negroes were calling to warn of possible disturbances; whites were calling; shop owners were calling. Most of the people were concerned about a possible bloodbath."

Her opinion was: "We are talking ourselves into it."

Everywhere there was the same inequality with regard to education, job opportunities, income, and housing. Every- where, partly because the Negro population was younger than the white, Negroes were under-represented on the local gov- ernment. In six New Jersey communities4 with sizeable Negro populations, of a total of 50 councilmen, six were Negro. In a half-dozen school systems in which Negro children com- prised as much as half of the school population, of a total of 42 members on boards of education, seven were Negro.

In each of the ghettos the Negro felt himself surrounded by an intransigent wall of whites. In four suburban cities —

* Jersey City, Elizabeth, Englewood, Plainfield, Paterson, New Brunswick.

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Bloomfield, Harrison, Irvington, and Maplewood — forming an arc about Newark, out of a total population of more than 150,000, only 1,000 were Negroes. In the six cities surround- ing Plainfield, out of a population of more than 75,000, only 1,500 were Negro.

Three northern New Jersey communities, Jersey City, Pat- erson, and Elizabeth, had had disorders in previous years, the first two in 1964, Elizabeth in both 1964 and 1965. In general, these seem to have developed from resentment against the police. The most serious outbreak had occurred in Jersey City after police had arrested a woman, and a rumor cir- culated that the woman had been beaten.

As early as May, 1967, the authorities in Jersey City and Elizabeth had started receiving warnings of trouble in the summer ahead. Following the Newark outbreak, rumors and reports, as in New Brunswick, became rampant. The police, relying on past experiences, were in no mood to take chances. In both Jersey City and Elizabeth patrols were augmented, and the departments were placed in a state of alert.

The view from Jersey City is that of the New York skyline. Except for a few imposing buildings, such as the high-rise New Jersey Medical Center, much of the city is a collection of factories and deteriorating houses, cut up by ribbons of super-highways and railroads.

As one of the principal freight terminals for New York City, Jersey City's decline has paralleled that of the railroads. As railroad lands deteriorated in value and urban renewal lands were taken off the tax rolls, assessed valuation plum- meted from $464 million in 1964 to $367 million in 1967. The tax rate, according to Mayor Thomas J. Whelan, has "reached the point of diminishing returns."

Urban renewal projects, which were intended to clear slums and replace them with low-cost housing, in fact, resulted in a reduction of 2,000 housing units. On one area, designated for urban renewal six years before, no work had been done, and it remained as blighted in 1967 as it had been in 1961. Ramshackle houses deteriorated, no repairs were made, yet people continued to inhabit them. "Planners make plans and then simply tell people what they are going to do," Negroes complained in their growing opposition to such projects.

Wooden sewers serve residents of some sections of the city. Collapsing brick sewers in other sections back up the sewage. The population clamors for better education, but the school system has reached its bonding capacity. By 1975 it is esti- mated that there will be a net deficit of 10 elementary schools and one high school.

Recently the mayor proposed to the Ford Foundation that

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it take over the operation of the entire educational system. The offer was declined.

Many whites send their children to parochial schools. Pos- sibly as a result, white residents have been slower to move to the suburbs than in other cities.

The exodus, however, is accelerating. Within the past 10 years the Negro population has almost doubled, and now comprises an estimated 20 percent of the total. The little Negro political leadership that exists is fragmented and in- decisive. The county in which Jersey City is located is run by an old-line political machine that has given Negroes little opportunity for participation.

Although the amount of schooling whites and Negroes have had is almost equal, in 1960 the median family income of whites was $1,500 more than that of Negroes.

The police department, like Newark's, one of the largest in the nation for a city of its size, has a reputation for tough- ness. A successful white executive recalled that in his child- hood: "We were accustomed to the Special Service Division of the Police Department. If we were caught hanging around we were picked up by the police, taken to a nearby precinct, and beaten with a rubber hose."

A city official, questioned about Negro representation on the 825-man police force, replied that it was 34 times greater than 20 years ago. Twenty years ago it had consisted of one man.

During the four days of the Newark riot, when Jersey City was flooded with tales of all description, Mayor Whelan an- nounced that if there were any disturbances he would "meet force with force." The ghetto area was saturated with police officers.

On Monday and Tuesday, July 17 and 18, when crowds gathered and a few rocks were thrown, mass arrests were made. Only one store was broken into, and pilferage was limited to items such as candy and chewing gum.

One man died. He was a Negro passenger in a cab into which a Negro boy threw a Molotov cocktail.

In Elizabeth, as in Jersey City, police had beefed up their patrols, and the very presence of so many officers contributed to the rising tensions. Residents of the 12-block by 3-block ghetto, jammed between the New Jersey Turnpike and the waterfront, expressed the opinion that: "We are being pun- ished but we haven't done anything."

"The community," another said later, "felt it was in a concentration camp."

Youths from the two high-density housing projects concen-

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trated in the area were walking around saying: "We're next, we might as well go."

Between 10:00 and 10:30 p.m. Monday, July 17, a window was broken in a drugstore across the street from a housing project. A businessman commented: "Down here in the port it's business as usual when one store window is broken each week. What is normal becomes abnormal at a time like this."

When the window was broken, three extra police cars were sent to the area. Shortly after 11:00 p.m., the field super- visor dispatched three more cars and, observing the crowd gathering at the housing project, requested an additional 30 patrolmen. The department activated its emergency recall plan.

Since there are almost no recreational facilities, on any sum- mer night scores of youths may be found congregating on the streets near the housing projects. As more and more police cars patrolled the streets, rocks and bottles were thrown at them.

Store windows were broken. Fires were set in trash cans and in the middle of the street. An expectation of impending violence gripped the crowd.

Arriving on the scene, Human Rights Commission Execu- tive Director Hugh Barbour requested that, in order to relieve tension, the extra police be withdrawn from the immediate vicinity of the crowd. The officer in command agreed to pull back the patrols.

Workers from the anti-poverty agency and the Human Re- lations Commission began circulating through the area, at- tempting to get kids off the street. Many of the residents had relatives and friends in Newark. Based on what had happened there, they feared that, if the disturbance were not curbed, it would turn into a bloodbath.

The peacemakers were making little headway when a chicken fluttered out of the shattered window of a poultry market. One youth tried to throw gasoline on it and set it afire. As the gasoline sloshed onto the pavement, the chicken leaped. The flames merely singed its feathers. A gangling six-foot youth attempted to stomp the chicken. The bird, which had appeared dead, reacted violently. As it fluttered and darted out of his way, the youth screamed, slipped, and tumbled against a tree.

The stark comedy reduced the tension. People laughed. Soon some began to drift home.

A short time later a Molotov cocktail was thrown against the front of a tavern. Fire engines met with no opposition as they extinguished the flames before they could do much dam- age.

The chief of police ordered the area cleared. As the officers moved in, the persons who remained on the street scattered. Within 15 minutes the neighborhood was deserted.

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Both municipal authorities and Negro leaders feared that, if the disorder followed the pattern of other disturbances, there would be an intensification of action by youths the next day. Therefore, the next evening, police patrolled the 36 square blocks with more than 100 men, some of them stationed on rooftops. Tension mounted as residents viewed the helmeted officers, armed with shotguns and rifles.

Early in the evening the mayor agreed to meet with a dele- gation of 13 community leaders. When they entered his office, the chief of police was already present. The mayor read him an order that, if he were faced with sniping or flagrant looting, his men were to: "Shoot to kill. . . . Force will be met with superior force." An officer's deviation from this order, the mayor said, would be considered dereliction of duty.

Some of the members of the delegation believed that the mayor had staged the reading of this order for their benefit, and were not pleased by his action. They proposed a "peace- keeper task force." The mayor agreed to let them try. One hundred stickers with the word "Peacekeeper" were printed.

One of those who agreed to be a peacemaker was Hesham Jaaber. Jaaber, who officiated at Malcolm X's funeral and has made two pilgrimages to Mecca, is a leader of a small sect of Orthodox Moslems. A teacher of Arabic and the Koran at the Spirit House in Newark, he is a militant who impressed the mayor with his sense of responsibility.

Although Jaaber believed that certain people were sucking the life blood out of the community — "Count the number of taverns and bars in the Elizabeth port area and compare them with the number of recreation facilities" — he had witnessed the carnage in Newark and believed it could serve no purpose to have a riot. Two dozen of his followers, in red fezzes, took to the streets to urge order. He himself traveled about in a car with a bullhorn.

As the peacekeepers began to make their influence felt, the police withdrew from the area. There was no further trouble.

Nevertheless, many white citizens reacted unfavorably to the fact that police had permitted Negro community leaders to aid in the dispersal of the crowd on the first night. The police were called "yellow," and accused of allowing the looting and damaging of stores.

In Englewood, a bedroom community of 28,000, astride the Palisades opposite New York, police had been expecting a riot by some of the city's 7,000 Negro residents since two weeks before Newark. As part of this expectation they had tested tear gas guns on the police firing range, situated in the middle of the Negro residential area. The wind had blown the

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tear gas into surrounding houses. The occupants had been enraged.

A continuing flow of rumors and anonymous tips to police of a riot in preparation had specified July 19 and July 28. However, the week following the Newark outbreak, the rumors began mentioning Friday, July 21, as the date. And it was on that day the chief of police became sufficiently concerned to alert the mayor, order mobilization of the police department, and request police assistance from Bergen County and nearby communities. The 160 officers who responded brought the total force in Englewood that evening to 220 men.

At approximately 9:00 p.m. a rock was thrown through a market in the lower class Negro area, resulting in the setting off of a burglar alarm at police headquarters. Two police cars responded. They were hit by rocks.

The tactical force of officers that had been assembled was rushed to the scene. A small number of persons, estimated in the official police report to be no more than 15 or 20, were standing in the street. When police formed a skirmish line, the loiterers, mostly youths, retreated into a large nearby park.

As the police remained in the vicinity, people, attracted by the presence of the officers, began drifting out of the park. Angry verbal exchanges took place between the residents and the police. The Negroes demanded to see the mayor.

The mayor arrived. The residents complained about the presence of so many police officers. Other grievances, many of them minor, began to be aired. According to the mayor, he became involved in a "shouting match," and departed. Shortly thereafter the police,