to Montclair, Patterson, Jersey City, Rahway, Livingston, East Orange, and Irvington in New Jersey—towns with a similar history of police violence. Then Rochester residents reacted following police repression of a peaceful demonstration outside a Kodak plant. Philadelphians followed with “three days of disorder after the arrest of a [black] driver and rumors that police had killed a pregnant woman.”69 Riots in six other cities exploded in 1964 and more followed in 1965, including one in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, where thirty-four people died, thirty-one of them black and shot by police.70
In 1966 new riots broke out in East New York, Brooklyn. They also broke out in Omaha, Baltimore, San Francisco, Jacksonville, and most fiercely in Cleveland and Chicago. “Nineteen sixty-seven was the most combustible with 163 uprisings, capped by deadly clashes between black residents of Newark and Detroit and the police, the National Guard and the U.S. Army. In Newark, thirty-four people died in a weeklong uprising that laid waste to large parts of the city’s central ward; in Detroit, forty-three people died in a weeklong uprising, three quarters of them rioters.”71 The year 1967 was the year of Latino riots—Puerto Ricans rioted in East Harlem, the South Bronx, and Chicago, Chicanos rioted in California and the Southwest.72
The 1967 Puerto Rican Riots in East Harlem and South Bronx
As the decade progressed things grew steadily worse for Puerto Ricans in New York City. In the 1960s the city built inexpensive co-ops on the outskirts of the Bronx, which allowed working-class whites who could not afford to buy their own homes to buy apartments in these complexes. Few Blacks and Puerto Ricans could afford to buy co-ops. The construction of Co-op City in the northeastern Bronx, in particular, encouraged a mass exodus. Better-off whites fled to the suburbs, working-class whites moved to the northeastern Bronx co-ops. As the value of housing in the South Bronx declined, owners burned “their buildings once they had been milked of profitability and stripped of assets.”73 Those who remained behind were left bereft.
The sheer extent of demographic change would have overwhelmed even the most effective social movement organizations, but those that had played key roles in the 1930s and early 1940s had been decimated by the actions of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and Senator Joseph McCarthy. As Roberto P. Rodriguez-Morazzani notes, “The virtual outlawing of the Communist Party USA, with the passage of the McCarran Act in 1950 and the decline of the American Labor Party, closed off two important avenues for radicalism amongst Puerto Ricans in the United States. Moreover, mainstream politics was not generally open to Puerto Ricans. Neither the Democratic nor Republican parties were very much interested in having Puerto Ricans participate in the political process. In fact, exclusion from the political process was the experience of Puerto Ricans.”74
In 1967 the first major Puerto Rican riots broke out in New York City. They began after a police officer shot a Puerto Rican man he accused of wielding a knife. “For three nights, residents of East Harlem and the South Bronx attacked stores, looting and burning them. More than a thousand police, including many Tactical Patrol Force officers[,] were sent to contain the disorder but, according to news reports, this ‘only aggravated community resentment.’”75 Once again the presence of the police, and particularly the new Tactical Patrol Force, prompted black and Latino radicals to equate the police with an occupying army.76
The precipitating incident occurred at noon. At 1:35 P.M. the police barricaded the block. At 8:30 the first bottles crashed over the crowd. Looting started around 10:00. At midnight one group of Puerto Ricans carrying a Puerto Rican flag tried to march to the 103rd Street precinct but was blocked by police. Others tried marching to city hall and were also blocked. The police grabbed one youth carrying a Puerto Rican flag. They grabbed another they claimed had thrown a Molotov cocktail.77 In Mott Haven, South Bronx, “throngs of Puerto Ricans ran through the streets and broke some windows.”78 Shortly after midnight, police herded a crowd into a housing project in East Harlem, and as the hostages tried to break free, the police charged at them with clubs. The police came under sniper fire on 112th Street between Second and Third, some papers reported, and a Puerto Rican youth’s neck was broken after the cease-fire. At Third and 110th Street someone drew a chalk line and scrawled “Puerto Rican border. Do not cross, flatfoot.” Media sources warned that some blacks from Harlem were also seen in the area (though it is difficult to know how they made that identification). More than one hundred residents offered to go with the police in an attempt to cool the crowds, and several Latino leaders spoke to the crowds and urged them to remain calm.
Desperate to avoid further conflagration, city officials reached out to Puerto Rican and community leaders. Forty East Harlem residents met with the police inspector and hammered out the following: 1) the appointment of a Puerto Rican as a deputy police commissioner for community relations; 2) the appointment of one or two Puerto Rican professors at the police academy to educate police to the problems of the Puerto Rican community; 3) the appointment of a Puerto Rican precinct captain in East Harlem; 4) a departmental investigation of racial bigotry among the police.
The Great Society and Black and Puerto Rican Power: 1969–1973
The Presidential Commission on Civil Disorders (popularly called the Kerner Commission) concluded its investigation into the cause of the pre-1967 race riots by warning of the ramifications of ongoing police violence: “To many Negroes police have come to symbolize white power, white racism, and white repression.”79 Similarly a New York City journalist noted that “neither New York nor any [other] American city is normal as long as thousands of black people are penned in, developing the prisoner’s mentality of hate for his keepers.”80 Yet in the South where police violence was even more brazen, riots were rare. Strong social movement organizations channeled anger into established repertoires of nonviolent action. Only after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., the leader of the nonviolent movement, did riots erupt in southern cities.
In the years that followed the great race riots intense organizing efforts by both the left and the right changed the complexion of northern and western cities and the way black and Latino residents would respond to police violence in the future. Conservative groups used racial fears to win over a newly detachable sector of the electorate and gain ascendency in the Republican Party to challenge the bipartisan consensus that had existed since the New Deal. As Joe Soss and his coauthors note,
Racial conservatives, galvanized by the civil rights victories, began to pursue a “law and order” campaign that identified social protest, civil disobedience, urban riots, street crime, and deviant behaviors in poor neighborhoods as related parts of a single problem: the breakdown of social order. Together, these groups formed a powerful coalition, pushing an agenda rooted in order, discipline, personal responsibility, and a moral state. As conservative and business interests mobilized, they sought more than immediate policy victories. Adopting a longer view, they invested in efforts to transform the intellectual and organizational landscape of American politics.81
These groups used racially coded appeals for law and order (as will be discussed later in this chapter), linking the civil rights movement to riots and crime. The onslaught would eventually pay big dividends for the conservative movement. Yet the first attempt of a conservative Republican (Barry Goldwater) to use the civil rights movement to win election to national office was unsuccessful. Lyndon Johnson beat him by a landslide. Although Johnson rejected the findings of the report he himself had commissioned, he adopted a number of the commission’s recommendations, most notably the War on Poverty and the Great Society. Johnson made millions of dollars in federal aid available to cities for community-based organizations in conflict-ridden communities. The aim, notes Katznelson, was “to take the radical impulse away from the politics of race by the creation of mechanisms of participation at the community level that had the capability to limit conflicts to a community orientation, to separate issues from each other, and to stress a politics of distribution—in short, to reduce race to ethnicity in the traditional community bound sense…. [As popular power]
