The 1960s Return

I feel this weekend that I am reliving painful parts of my youth.  Urban riots, to use the contemporary term, were the first anomalous event to shatter the optimism of the early 1960s, still the most hopeful period that I can remember in American life.  The civil rights movement had unleashed plenty of violence in the South, but that seemed to be the last gasp of a dying old order, and civil rights in the summer of 1964 won the huge victory of the great civil rights act.  Lyndon Johnson was about to consign (or so it seemed) Barry Goldwater's anti-New Deal conservatism to the scrap heap of history.  The escalation of the Vietnam War had not yet begun.  The first great urban riot of the 1960s began on July 16, 1964, in Harlem, and lasted for six days.

It is rather chilling to return to accounts of these events because they sound so familiar. An off-duty NYPD police lieutenant came across an altercation between some black male teen-agers and an apartment house superintendent who was using a hose to try to drive them off a building's steps.  He challenged 15-year old James Lynch, a Bronx youth whom he claimed tried to attack him with a knife, and shot and killed him.  Black groups held demonstrations over the weekend that followed.  They escalated into riots that lasted several days. An estimated 500 persons were injured, 465 were arrested, but only one more died.  Property damage from looting was estimated at between half a million and a million dollars.  A smaller riot occurred in Phladelphia later that summer.

The triumphal mood of the mid-1960s reached its peak in the middle of 1965, as Lyndon Johnson pushed through Medicare and much of the rest of the Great Society program, and the Voting Rights Act followed the Civil Rights Act of the year before.  On August 11, 1965, in the black Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts, a motorcycle cop pulled a black driver over for reckless driving.  The driver's brother, a passenger, summoned their mother from their house nearby, a crowd gathered, more police arrived, and altercations broke out.  The police arrested the whole family, rumors spread, crowds gathered, and police fought with the crowds all night.  Rioting, arson, and looting lasted for six days and nights.  Governor Pat Brown called out several thousand National Guardsmen, who imposed a curfew along with police, and decided on mass arrests.  Arrests eventually totaled 35,000, and 34 people died, 16 shot by policemen and 7 by national guardsmen.    This time nearly a thousand commercial buildings were burned, looted, or seriously damanged, and property damage was estimated at $40 million.  Together with the disturbances at UC Berkeley that had started in the fall of 1964 and continued for years to come, the riots helped sweep Ronald Reagan to a landslide victory in the gubernatorial race in 1966, which got him on the path to the White House.

Despite some violence in various major cities, nothing comparable to Harlem or Watts occurred during 1966.  1967, when the Vietnam War was in full swing, was another matter. On the evening of July 12, two Newark, New Jersey police stopped a black cab driver, and wound up beating him.  A crowd gathered outside the police station and began throwing rocks and bottles at police, and looting began.
Within days, a protest march turned into an orgy of arson and looting, and national guardsmen and state troopers came in to quell it. The death toll reached 27, the injured topped 700, and arrests neared 1500.  Property damage was estimated at $10 million.  In succeeding years the white and black middle class rapidly fled the city, which has never recovered. 

The same script played out on an even larger scale in Detroit from early Sunday morning, July 23, to July 27.  This time the triggering event was a raid on an illegal after-hours bar in a black neighborhood, that brought an angry crowd into the street. Within two days, looting and arson were taking place over a wide area.  Eventually the 82nd Airborne Division joined the state police and National Guard troops, who had proven very trigger happy.  In both Detroit and Newark, detailed studies of the killings during the riots found most of them to be totally innocent bystanders hit by stray bullets.  In one notorious incident, however, three Detroit police officers gunned down three black youths in cold blood in a the Algiers Motel, an incident later chronicled in detail by the novelist John Hershey.  This time the death toll reached 43, with almost 1200 injured and more than seven thousand arrested.  412 buildings were burned or damaged, 2509 buildings reported damage or looting, and 388 families lost their homes to fires.  The riots triggered massive white flight from Detroit, which has never been the same since.   President Johnson appointed the Kerner Commission to study the causes of these disorders, and it reported in early 1968 that racial discrimination was turning the United States into two nations, separate and unequal.

The last chapter in this story began when Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated on April 4, 1968.  One major riot generally seemed to be enough to release the anger and tension in any urban ghetto during the 1960s, and neither New York, nor Los Angeles, or Newark or Detroit had a big disturbance that week.  Now it became the turn of Washington, D. C.--where I was spending my spring vacation at the time.  Arson and looting  destroyed 1200 buildings and wiped out huge business districts for decades to come, but police and national guardsmen were under strict orders not to intervene, and there were almost no deaths or injuries.  A multi-day riot in Chicago resulted in 11 deaths, 500 injuries and 2150 arrests, and $10 million in property damage.  Riots also hit Baltimore, where federal troops were dispatched, 6 people died, 700 were injured, and 5800 arrested, and $12 million in property went up in flames.   Freshman Governor Spiro Agnew made a name for himself and got the attention of GOP front runner Richard Nixon by blasting a meeting of civil rights leaders for failing to stop the outbreak. A few months later Nixon selected Agnew as his running mate. Similar disturbances, albeit on a lesser scale, took place in Kansas City, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Trenton, Wilmington, Delaware, and Louisville. Several of them also had very serious long-term impacts on the neighborhoods in which they occurred.  No major riot, interestingly enough, ever struck a Deep South city in the mid to late 1960s.  Reeling under the twin impacts of the endless Vietnam War and racial turmoil in the cities, the Democratic Party saw its popular vote shrink from 60% in 1964 to about 43% in 1968.  It has never fully recovered.

In the five subsequent decades, urban outbreaks of arson and looting had occurred on numerous occasions, most notably in Los Angeles in 1992, when the riots following the acquittal of the police who arrested and beat Rodney King were larger by some measures than the  Watts riot.  We are now suffering the most widespread series of such outbreaks that we have seen, I believe, since 1968, although we have not as yet seen arson, or deaths, or even looting on a comparable scale.  Now as then, commentators see both a response to a specific event--in this case, the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis--and a reaction to decades of discrimination and inequality.  In one critical difference, these disturbances coincide with the worst unemployment since the Great Depression, whereas the late 1960s saw the end of a very long economic boom, albeit one that did not completely reach the inner cities.   On the other hand, the riots in the late 1960s took place as a very large and very long crime wave began, whereas serious crimes have been declining now for well over a decade. 

 Floyd's death, like King's, has triggered protests and violence all over the country.  Once again, mayors and governors, most of them Democrats, are torn between the desire to identify with the rioters' grievances and the need to keep public order.  This time, in an interesting development, the protests are so integrated that the movement, if such it is, seems more generational than racial.  White youth also rioted in 1968 and in the next two years in dozens of universities and on the streets of Chicago during the Democratic convention, but rioting, for the most part, was segregated in those days.  At Kent State in 1970, black student leaders kept black students in their dorms when the National Guard arrived on campus, not wishing to see a repeat of Newark and Detroit.

History, at any rate, does not suggest that the current protests will do much good.  They are yet another illustration of the people's loss of confidence in our institutions, which in different ways affects nearly the whole population.  Many of us are wondering whether Donald Trump, like Reagan in 1966 and Richard Nixon in 1968, will ride resentment of the rioters into an election victory marked, among other things, by Minnesota's passage into the Republican column.  Already, for good or ill, the disturbances are pushing Joe Biden to select a black running mate.  Today's young people, as the rapper Killer Mike stressed yesterday, need to show that they can use their outrage to strategize and mobilize in order to avoid another national catastrophe.