Black Print with a White Carnation: Mildred Brown and the Omaha Star Newspaper, 1938-1989

7. Changing Strategies for Changing Times

143 7 Changing Strategies for Changing Times Music blared from the doorway of the dilapidated empty unit in the Logan Fontenelle Housing Project. It was the summer of 1969, the year following the Fair Housing Act, which finally gave northern Omaha residents open housing, the right to choose where they wanted to live in the city. However, like many other impoverished black residents , the parents of Vivian Strong did not have the financial means to leave their low-income government housing. Mildred Brown, like most residents of the Near North Side, originally thought the Fontenelle apartment buildings “were a good idea, but [they became] a den of criminals.” It was like “assigning people to a dead end.” The violence in this project was sporadic and created uneasiness; residents called it “Vietnam.” Project dwellers lived in an atmosphere of terror, afraid to report crimes or testify in court. On the fateful warm evening of June 24, 1969, white officer James L. Loder was driving his police cruiser through the black neighborhood toward the project. He was responding to a public disturbance call of loud music. As the police officer approached the partially vacant dwellings, several black children ran out of a doorway. One of them was fourteen-year-old Vivian Strong. Loder did not shout at her to stop. According to him, “she was running away from the scene, [and] we were supposed to shoot.” He aimed his gun at the back of her head and pulled the trigger. Strong’s sister Carol, who was nearby, will forever remember seeing her older sibling crumpled on the ground. Vivian died instantly. The death of this “skinny little girl” started a riot, the third of its kind in three years, and the worst racial disturbance in Omaha’s history. Approximately fifty predominantly white-owned businesses and numerous parked 144 Changing Strategies for Changing Times automobiles sustained extensive fire damage. The looting, destruction, and burning of the Near North Side’s Twenty-Fourth and Lake Streets central business district resulted in one fatality, twenty-seven injuries, sixty-six arrests of black residents, and $925,000 worth of damage.1 Keeping Omaha’s black community uplifted and informed between the mid-1960s and late 1970s proved a challenging task for Mildred Brown. As a woman in her later sixties, Brown did not identify with the new generation of assertive black male leaders in the black power movement. Their nationwide separatist, militant, and occasionally violent campaigns for political, economic, and cultural control of the black community were already driving a deeper wedge into the black generational gap. “We Shall Overcome” was fast becoming “We Shall Overrun.” To a certain degree Brown supported northern Omaha’s Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, but she steadfastly maintained that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s nonviolent approach to change was the best for the black community. Nevertheless, she persevered by revising her strategies to fit the changing times. She used the Star to encourage and unify black residents during Omaha’s three race riots and campaigned against a freeway project that would physically divide the already isolated black community. Keeping the black and white communities informed on a weekly basis was her greatest black power contribution to the people of Omaha. The Star was “command central,” and Brown strategically operated it during the city’s most emotionally tense decade. She assigned herself to the helm of the newspaper instead of participating in rallies. After all, she stated, “you do not put your generals on the front line.” She used her access to the powerful white and black men managing the city of Omaha and northern Omaha to promote nonviolent solutions to the problem of black inequality.2 Omaha’s third racial disturbance was just one of the 239 riots that rocked the United States in the turbulent 1960s. Before the decade a race riot had meant whites lynching blacks and destroying black properties, but in this era a race riot came to mean black residents attacking white owners and destroying their businesses in the ghetto. Changing Strategies for Changing Times 145 Hugh Davis Graham’s study, “On Riots and Riot Commissions: Civil Disorders in the 1960s,” concluded that isolated black ghettos were the foundation of unrest. However, he contended, not only did white institutions maintain the ghettos but also white society as a whole condoned the ghettos. It was a classic case of organized white supremacy fusing...