Abstract
In early October 1967, Joe Califano passed the President a report from Cincinnati, Ohio, one section outlined in red ink. It was the kind of report, he explained, that David Ginsburg, Director of the Kerner Commission, was beginning to receive from the “trouble spots” of some of the nation’s major cities. Back in August, three men from the Commission had met with a group of black revolutionaries in a room of a Cincinnati community center. And what they had heard was cause for concern in Washington.
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Notes
Fred R. Harris, Alarms and Hopes: A Personal Journey, A Personal View (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), 16.
Kenneth O’Reilly, Racial Matters: The FBI’s Secret File on Black America, 1960–1972 (New York: Free Press, 1989), 234.
See, for example, the testimony of Phillip Abbot Luce, FBI informer and author of the sensationalist The Road to Revolution: Communist Guerrilla Warfare in the USA (San Diego, CA: Viewpoint, 1967). Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall, Agents of Repression: The FBI’s Secret War Against the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement (Cambridge, MA: South End, 2002 (originally 1988)), 47. (89) 2351–1, Subversive, Part 1, 818. (89) 2351–1, Subversive, Part 2, hearings October 31 and November 1, 1967, 929–964 and 965–971. For further hearings, Watts (2351–1, Part 3 and 2377–9, Part 3-A); Newark, NJ (2377–9, Part 4); Buffalo, New York (2384–7, Part 5).
Komozi Woodard, A Nation within a Nation: Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) and Black Power Politics (Chapel Hill, NC: U North Carolina P, 1999), 80–82.
For the accounts of all three men, see their individual depositions NACCD, series 32, box 4, LBJ Library. For quotes, Tom Hayden, Rebellion in Newark: Official Violence and Ghetto Response (New York: Vintage Books, 1967), 12–13. For Malafronte, field team reports (Newark, NJ), NACCD, series 59, box 4 (25: 0552, NACCD microfilm).
David Boesel, “A n Analysis of the Ghetto Riots,” in David Boesel and Peter H. Rossi (eds), Cities Under Siege: An Anatomy of the Ghetto Riots, 1964–1968 (New York and London: Basic Books, 1971), 324–342.
“The Crisis in America’s Cities,” SCLC address, August 15, 1967, WHCF, Ex-HU2, box 7 (4: 0706–0712, WHCF microfilm, Part 1). For much the same sentiments, see King’s address to black realtors in San Francisco in 1967, quoted in David Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (New York: Morrow, 1986), 572.
For quotation, see King, Chaos or Community? (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), 12. See also Garrow, Bearing, 498–499.
Robert M. Fogelson, Violence as Protest: A Study of Riots and Ghettos (Garden City, NY: Greenwood Press, 1971), 74–97, 152.
For stones: memorandum, J. K. Scales to M. C. Miskovsky, January 29, 1968, NACCD, series E4, box 21, LBJ Library. Sidney Fine, Violence in the Model City: The Cavanagh Administration, Race Relations, and the Detroit Riot of 1967 (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State U P, 2007 (originally 1989)), 165.
E. L. Quarantelli and Russell R. Dynes, “Property Norms and Looting: Their Patterns in Community Crises,” in James A. Geschwender (ed.), The Black Revolt: The Civil Rights Movement, Ghetto Uprisings, and Separatism (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1971), 285–300; 293, 295.
E. P. Thompson, “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century,” Past & Present, 50 (1971), 76–136.
“The Moral Economy Reviewed,” E. P. Thompson, Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture (New York: New Press, 1993), 259–351; 340–341.
Francis Ward, “What’s Behind the Riots,” Jet, 30:17 (1966), 24.
Frank Besag, The Anatomy of a Riot: Buffalo, 1967 (Buffalo, NY: University Press, 1967), 136–138.
Robert M. Price, The Apartheid State in Crisis: Political Transformation in South Africa, 1975–1990 (New York and Oxford: OUP 1991), 190–203. Thanks are due to Jeremy Krikler for drawing my attention to Price’s work and to the potential scope for comparison.
See Boesel, “Analysis,” and David O. Sears, “Black Attitudes toward the Political System in the Aftermath of the Watts Insurrection,” in Boesel and Rossi (eds), Cities Under Siege: An Anatomy of the Ghetto Riots, 1964–1968 (New York and London: Basic Books, 1971), 324–342, 360–388. For Boesel quotation, 333; for Sears, 361.
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© 2014 Malcolm McLaughlin
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McLaughlin, M. (2014). Urban Uprising. In: The Long, Hot Summer of 1967. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137269638_5
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