that vented itself on others in the community, and a volatile, building frustration that often destroyed the self as well as others. Roy Wilkins and the NAACP and Whitney Young and the National Urban League did not speak to the problem of pride; they spoke of integration. The philosophy of integration encouraged the black person to get rid of his ghetto accent, to speak like white people, dress like them, and accept their values and aspirations. Hopefully the white society would then accept the black person, and the end result would be a world of equality and brotherhood. But the means to that goal did not work. In fact, the means never were accepted by the majority of black people. Blackness and poverty, not integration, were the issues for the man and woman in the ghetto.
By 1964, a new voice was commanding attention. Malcolm X’s message of black pride and self-determination rapidly gained adherents, particularly among northern urban blacks. In February 1965 Malcolm was assassinated while giving a speech at the Audubon Ballroom in New York City. But his message found new ears and minds, and thousands began to advocate his ideas.
Meanwhile, the civil rights movement grew stronger. In 1964 the Mississippi Summer Project sent hundreds of students into the belly of the beast to register voters. By the end of the project, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner had been murdered, one thousand people had been arrested, eighty people had been beaten, three people had been wounded by shotguns, thirty-five churches had been torched, and thirty-one homes and stores had been burned to the ground. But the project was successful, and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party sent delegates to the National Democratic Convention and forever changed the racist face of southern politics.
That same summer, the Harlem section of New York erupted in violence after a thirteen-year-old boy named James Powell was killed by a policeman. This was the first of five years of black uprisings, usually referred to as riots by the media and the government. Race riots were not new in America. After a white police sergeant was killed in 1917 in East St. Louis, mobs of whites marched on the ghetto, and thirty-nine blacks and nine whites were killed. That same year, in Chicago, a seven-day riot left twenty-three blacks and fifteen whites dead. In 1920 in Elaine, Arkansas, eighteen blacks and five whites were killed in racial fighting. In 1921 in Tulsa, Oklahoma, twenty-one blacks and ten whites died. In Detroit, on June 20, 1943, a fight started between a couple of black youths and a white man. Soon white sailors joined in and within hours a major race riot was in progress. White mobs, estimated at over a thousand people, attempted to march into the black ghetto but were turned back. When the violence ended two days later, twenty-four blacks and nine whites had been killed. In the same month in Los Angeles, large groups of white soldiers and sailors attacked Mexican Americans and blacks in what was described by the media as the “zoot-suit riots.” Fifty people were seriously injured and some four hundred Mexican Americans were jailed. All these riots were marked by intensive fighting between people of different races. The Harlem uprising of 1964 was different, however, because it did not involve fighting between black people and white mobs. Rather, it was distinguished by blacks attacking the most visible signs of their oppression—police and merchants. It was a difference that would become clearer in the next few years.
In 1965, one year after the Harlem uprising, the ghetto of Watts, California, exploded to the cry of “burn, baby burn.” Millions of dollars worth of property was destroyed. Thirty-three blacks were killed as police, the National Guard, and the Army surrounded and marched into Watts. Only two whites died in the violence.
In 1966 there was a large civil rights march in Mississippi. At the march, one of the nation’s young civil rights leaders, Stokely Carmichael, coined the slogan “black power.” The television news showed images of young black people shouting “black power” as they marched through Mississippi for twenty-one days.
In the spring of 1967 black uprisings occurred around the country, including five days of violence in Cleveland and four in Boston. In July, Newark, New Jersey, broke loose with a fury that caused the governor to describe it as an “open rebellion” and “criminal insurrection.” One month after Newark, a storm of fire and violence hit Detroit. In many sections of the city, poor whites and poor blacks looted side by side; more than seven thousand people were arrested. During that summer there were over a hundred days of uprisings. The National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders summed up five years of violence: “While the civil disorders of 1967 were racial in character, they were not interracial. The 1967 disorders, as well as earlier disorders of the recent period, involved action within Negro neighborhoods against symbols of white American society—authority and property—rather than against white persons” (emphasis in original).
In 1968 Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, where he had gone to support sanitation workers in their quest for better working conditions and higher wages. Integration into white society, melting into white America, would never again be the overwhelming focus of black politics.
In 1970 a book was published that had a transformative impact on millions of people of all races. Its title was Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson. This was a book about the raw, ugly, brutal experience of prison. It was also about the strength, rage, and courage of one young black man. When he was eighteen years old, George Jackson had pled guilty to robbing a gas station of seventy dollars. He was sentenced to one year to life under California’s indeterminate sentencing law. He spent over seven years in solitary confinement. He became a symbol of resistance for prisoners throughout the country. In his letters we find words that could just as easily have expressed the anguish of William Freeman in Auburn State Prison:
If I leave here alive, I’ll leave nothing behind. They’ll never count me among the broken men, but I can’t say that I’m normal either. I’ve been hungry too long, I’ve gotten angry too often. I’ve been lied to and insulted too many times. They’ve pushed me over the line from which there can be no retreat. I know that they will not be satisfied until they’ve pushed me out of this existence altogether. I’ve been the victim of so many racist attacks that I could never relax again. . . . I can still smile now, after ten years of blocking knife thrusts, and the pick handles of faceless sadistic pigs, of anticipating and reacting for ten years, seven of them in solitary. I can still smile sometimes, but by the time this thing is over I may not be a nice person.
Seething anger in the prisons, on the streets. The anger has always been there, since the first young African man and woman were ripped from their families, kidnapped, and forced to cut cotton without pay. Resentment, bitterness, hostility, vehemence, and madness had been there for hundreds of years. Now, white America was for the first time forced to listen to this anger in its purest form—BLACK RAGE.
In the midst of these changes, on July 15, 1970, a workday like any other, black autoworker James Johnson walked into the dirty, hazardous Eldon Avenue Gear and Axle Plant in Detroit, Michigan. He walked strangely, hindered by the M-i carbine he had hidden in the pant leg of his overalls. He stepped over the oil slicks on the plant floor, the deafening noise from the machinery hammering in his head. Stalking the black foreman who had illegally suspended him earlier that day, he raised the M-i and fired. As the foreman fell and then struggled to get up Johnson stood over him firing again and again. Johnson then began to look for Jim Rhoades, the general foreman who had called him “boy” and had told the gate guard to take away the badge that allowed Johnson to come into the plant. Unable to find Rhoades he entered a room and began firing. When the M-i ran out of bullets two white men, a foreman and a job setter, lay dead. As Johnson walked out of the plant two union stewards approached him. He gave one of them his empty rifle. A few minutes later, he quietly gave up to the police.
Six months later, Steven Robinson, a twenty-nine-year-old black man, walked into a bank in the Fillmore district of San Francisco and pulled an unloaded .22 caliber derringer out of his overalls. He lined up the four women tellers against the wall and emptied each cash drawer into a striped laundry bag. As he went from drawer to drawer, two police officers, Jordan and Johnson, responding to the bank’s silent alarm, arrived on the scene. Officer Jordan slowly moved into the bank, aimed his service revolver at Robinson, and ordered
