People's History of the United States_ 1492 to Present, A - Zinn, Howard [274]
In the summer of 1966, there were more outbreaks, with rock throwing, looting, and fire bombing by Chicago blacks and wild shootings by the National Guard; three blacks were killed, one a thirteen-year-old boy, another a fourteen-year-old pregnant girl. In Cleveland, the National Guard was summoned to stop a commotion in the black community; four Negroes were shot to death, two by troopers, two by white civilians.
It seemed clear by now that the nonviolence of the southern movement, perhaps tactically necessary in the southern atmosphere, and effective because it could be used to appeal to national opinion against the segregationist South, was not enough to deal with the entrenched problems of poverty in the black ghetto. In 1910, 90 percent of Negroes lived in the South. But by 1965, mechanical cotton pickers harvested 81 percent of Mississippi Delta cotton. Between 1940 and 1970, 4 million blacks left the country for the city. By 1965, 80 percent of blacks lived in cities and 50 percent of the black people lived in the North.
There was a new mood in SNCC and among many militant blacks. Their disillusionment was expressed by a young black writer, Julius Lester:
Now it is over. America has had chance after chance to show that it really meant “that all men are endowed with certain inalienable rights.” . . . Now it is over. The days of singing freedom songs and the days of combating bullets and billy clubs with love. . . . Love is fragile and gentle and seeks a like response. They used to sing “I Love Everybody” as they ducked bricks and bottles. Now they sing:
Too much love,
Too much love,
Nothing kills a nigger like
Too much love.
In 1967, in the black ghettos of the country, came the greatest urban riots of American history. According to the report of the National Advisory Committee on Urban Disorders, they “involved Negroes acting against local symbols of white American society,” symbols of authority and property in the black neighborhoods—rather than purely against white persons. The Commission reported eight major uprisings, thirty-three “serious but not major” outbreaks, and 123 “minor” disorders. Eighty-three died of gunfire, mostly in Newark and Detroit. “The overwhelming majority of the persons killed or injured in all the disorders were Negro civilians.”
The “typical rioter,” according to the Commission, was a young, high school dropout but “nevertheless, somewhat better educated than his non-rioting Negro neighbor” and “usually underemployed or employed in a menial job.” He was “proud of his race, extremely hostile to both whites and middle-class Negroes and, although informed about politics, highly distrustful of the political system.”
The report blamed “white racism” for the disorders, and identified the ingredients of the “explosive mixture which has been accumulating in our cities since the end of World War II”:
Pervasive discrimination and segregation in employment, education, and housing . . . growing concentrations of impoverished Negroes in our major cities, creating a growing crisis of deteriorating facilities and services and unmet human needs. . . .
A new mood has sprung up among Negroes, particularly the young, in which self-esteem and enhanced racial pride are replacing apathy and submission to the “system.”
But the Commission Report itself was a standard device of the system when facing rebellion: set up an investigating committee, issue a report; the words of the report, however strong, will have a soothing effect.
That didn’t completely work either. “Black Power” was the new slogan—an expression of distrust of any “progress” given or conceded by whites, a rejection of paternalism. Few blacks (or whites) knew the statement of the white writer Aldous Huxley: “Liberties are not given, they are taken.” But the idea was there, in Black Power. Also, a pride in race, an insistence on black independence, and often, on black