act of racial violence triggered a major urban riot in Harlem in July 1964, after a controversial police shooting resulted in the death of fifteen-year-old James Powell. “Bottles, rocks and Molotov cocktails rained down from tenement rooftops and smashed in the littered streets,” the International Herald Tribune reported.7 It went on to note 116 civilian injuries (revised by historians to 118) and at least forty-five stores “broken into . . . looted or damaged.” The Harlem riot triggered a wave of similar uprisings in American cities over the next few weeks: first in Brooklyn, New York, then Rochester, New York, then several cities in New Jersey, and finally in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. That these events occurred after the signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and in northern cities, foreshadowed the dynamic that would plague the country in the years that followed: incidents of police or even suspected police abuse sparking powder kegs of socioeconomic frustrations, first in one city, then in adjacent cities. Rev. King, commenting on the Harlem riots, spoke of the need to eliminate “conditions of injustice that still pervade our nation and all of the other things which can only deepen the racial crisis.”8
Yet another wave of riots struck in 1965, the most notable coming after the passage of the Voting Rights Act, in the Watts section of Los Angeles. Another incident of police misconduct unleashed literal and figurative fires in one of the worst urban riots in American history. Over six days of violence, thirty-four people died, more than one thousand people were injured, and over six hundred buildings were damaged. “People said that we burned down our community,” Tommy Jacquette, then a twenty-one-year-old resident of South Central Los Angeles, recalled. “No, we didn’t. We had a revolt in our community against those people who were in here trying to exploit and oppress us.”9 King faced a difficult audience in young men like Jacquette when the reverend visited Watts, hoping to negotiate a “peace” between the residents and local leaders. At one point he addressed a crowd:
However much we don’t like to hear it, and I must tell the truth. I’m known to tell the truth. While we have legitimate gripes, while we have legitimate discontent, we must not hate all white people, because I know white people now . . . Don’t forget that when we marched from Selma to Montgomery, it was a white woman who died on that highway 80, Viola Liuzzo. We want to know what we can do to create right here in Los Angeles a better city, and a beloved community. So speak out of your hearts and speak frankly.10
The response Dr. King received symbolized what would become a growing schism within the civil rights movement. An unidentified attendee from the crowd insisted:
The only way we can ever get anybody to listen to us is to start a riot. We got sense enough to know that this is not the final answer, but it’s a beginning. We know it has to stop, we know it’s going to stop. We don’t want any more of our people killed, but how many have been killed for nothing? At least those who died died doing something. No, I’m not for a riot. But who wants to lay down while somebody kicks em to death? As long as we lay down we know we’re gonna get kicked. It’s a beginning; it may be the wrong beginning but at least we got em listening. And they know that if they start killing us off, it’s not gonna be a riot it’s gonna be a war.11
Dr. King did not see this warning as hyperbole. Having received a less-than-warm response in his Watts visit, and having failed to negotiate a truce between local black leaders and the white political establishment in Los Angeles, King briefed his political ally President Lyndon B. Johnson about the situation on the ground. In a private conversation, the Reverend King worried, “Now what is frightening is to hear all of these tones of violence from people in the Watts area and the minute that happens, there will be retaliation from the white community.” He added, ominously, “People have bought up guns so that I am fearful that if something isn’t done to give a new sense of hope to people in that area, that a full-scale race war can develop.”12
King said this in 1965, a year that saw only eleven urban riots. The Watts eruption accounted for the vast majority of the injuries, deaths, and arrests that year. In 1966, the number of riots shot up to fifty-three. None came close to matching the intensity of Watts, but Americans spent five times as many days rebelling against oppressive conditions.13 By 1966, King’s one-time supporters increasingly began to support Black Nationalist and militant groups, such as the Black Panthers. Dedicating a good deal of their activities to community uplift programs, such as free breakfasts, the Panthers’ ten-point platform appropriated the language of the late Malcolm X (assassinated in 1965), saying, “We will protect ourselves from the force and violence of the racist police and the racist military, by whatever means necessary.” They asserted their constitutionally protected Second Amendment rights and urged “all Black people . . . [to] arm themselves for self-defense.”14 One-time pacifist groups such as the SNCC, who previously enjoyed close if sometimes rocky relationships with King, placed violent resistance into their charters. Rejecting the practice of civil disobedience King popularized, SNCC spokesperson Stokely Carmichael asserted, in June 1966: “The only way we gonna stop them white men from whuppin’ us is to take over. What we gonna start sayin’ now is Black Power.”15 Carmichael clarified his position later: “When you talk about black power you talk about bringing this country to its knees any time it messes with the black man . . . any white man in this country knows about power. He knows what white power is and he ought to know what black power is.”16 H. Rap Brown, the leader of SNCC, famously asserted that “violence is as American as cherry pie.”17
Martin Luther King Jr. increasingly had to gear his prophetic mission toward calling his own community back to nonviolence. Black power, as defined by activists like Carmichael, he argued, implied something too exclusionary and too threatening. “Black supremacy or aggressive black violence is as invested with evil as white supremacy or white violence,” Rev. King asserted in October 1966. But he ultimately placed the blame for the growing stridency among his flock on a “new mood” rooted in “real, not imaginary causes.” He added:
The mood expresses angry frustration which is not limited to the few who use it to justify violence. Millions of Negroes are frustrated and angered because extravagant promises made less than a year ago are a shattered mockery today . . . In the northern ghettos, unemployment, housing discrimination and slum schools constituted a towering torture chamber to mock the Negro who tries to hope . . . Many Negroes have given up faith in the white majority because “white power” with total control has left them empty handed.18
King’s willingness to speak truth to power, and to challenge a national, rather than strictly Southern, audience, hurt his esteem among white audiences. He fell off Gallup’s list of America’s most admired people, and a poll showed his disapproval ratings among white Americans increasing from 46 percent in 1963 to 68 percent by 1966. He remained enormously popular with black Americans, but polls also began to highlight the schism among black Americans about how to best achieve social justice. Fifteen percent of black Americans told pollsters in 1966 that they would be willing to join a riot. Another poll reported that twice as many blacks said the recent riots improved their political position as said the riots undermined it.19
The factionalism and violence grew much deeper in 1967. It started that April in North Omaha, Nebraska. “Police in Omaha, Nebraska, said they could not pinpoint what started the trouble. But bottles and rocks were flying once again in the same part of town, mainly Negro, where 2 riots broke out last summer,” one Omaha newspaper reported. “An estimated 200 people took part—pelting cars, smashing windows, and looting stores.”20 The paper wondered “whether we’re facing another ‘long hot summer’ of racial violence—the 4th one in a row.” Many cities would, indeed, experience another year of social upheaval, and many more would experience it for the first time. The Congressional Quarterly composed a list of instances of civil unrest for 1967:
Nashville, Tenn., April 8–10—Several hundred Negro students from Fisk University and Tennessee A. and I. State University rioted on three nights after a Negro student at Fisk was arrested by a white policeman; at least 17 persons were injured and 94 arrested; the disturbance started a few hours after Stokely Carmichael spoke to Vanderbilt University students; two of his aides were arrested.
