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81 “As American as Cherry Pie” Civil Rights, 1965–1969 A N EW PH A SE of the American civil rights movement began with a DWI. On Wednesday, August 11, 1965, only five days after Lyndon Johnson had signed the Voting Rights Act, Ronald Frye was celebrating his discharge from the Air Force by doing some midday drinking with his brother. Frye’s car was clearly moving erratically when it was pulled over to the side of the road by the California Highway Patrol just outside the city limits of Los Angeles. What began as a simple stop for drinking and driving soon escalated into a full-blown neighborhood confrontation. Frye’s mother, who had run to the scene, was screaming at both her sons for being so stupid and was immediately arrested; Frye’s brother refused a police order to follow the truck that towed away his brother’s car, shrieking at the police “Go ahead, kill me.” As the arrests grew even more confrontational, the crowd of onlookers grew. The arresting officers brandished shotguns and billy clubs, and all three Fryes sustained injuries. The crowd, by then numbering around fifteen hundred, began to pelt the now reinforced police with rocks. The rocks found their targets, and soon the mob turned its artillery on civilian cars and shop windows. The police withdrew, leaving the rioters to wreak havoc on a cordoned-off neighborhood known as Watts. The riots continued into the next day, leaving some seventy-five people injured. Los Angeles mayor Sam Yorty and his chief of police, William Parker, believed that the worst was over. But on Friday evening, crowds gathered again near the original site of Frye’s arrest, and once again they exploded into a spree of rioting that eventually covered an area of 46.5 square miles. Sixteen thousand national guardsmen had arrived in Watts before the riots 82 A M E R I C A I N T H E S I X T I E S dispersed three days later. Thirty-four were dead, four thousand arrested, one thousand injured, and there had been $35 million in property damage, with 250 buildings burned to the ground. The rioters stood back to observe their handiwork and chanted “Burn, Baby, Burn,” and “Get Whitey.” Parker publicly blamed the Black Muslims for the carnage, and on Tuesday, August 17, about one hundred police officers shot up a nearby Nation of Islam mosque and arrested the inhabitants for conspiracy and attempted murder. For his part, Martin Luther King had resisted the temptation to fly to Watts immediately after the riots. He only did so when he learned that Reverend Billy Graham had surveyed the smoking city from a helicopter. When he arrived in Watts on Wednesday, August 18, the day after the destruction of the Muslim mosque, he faced the pent-up anger of the American ghetto. When he tried to speak, his black audience shouted him down with “Get out of here, Dr. King.” And when King tried to argue that all Americans should attack the problems by joining hands, a man interrupted King and interjected, “And burn.” It was the beginning of three years of what the press soon dubbed the “long hot summers” of northern urban destruction. Historian Douglas Miller estimates that between 1965 and 1968 there were close to three hundred race riots in American cities, involving close to a half-million blacks. Riots occurred in Cleveland, Dayton, Milwaukee, Rochester, Tampa, Boston, Newark, Buffalo, Wilmington, and San Francisco. Scenes of urban Armageddon became a staple of the nightly television news—as footage from the jungles of Vietnam was becoming just as ubiquitous. By far, the worst riot occurred in Detroit in the summer of 1967. On Sunday, July 23, a routine raid on five illegal nightclubs (“blind pigs”) led to an explosion of violence and arson. Twelve hours after the bust, the city was burning, and the response was largely in the hands of seven thousand national guardsmen who had no training in riot control. Within twenty-four hours, there were twelve dead, two of whom had died in fires. Michigan governor George Romney pleaded with Johnson to send in federal troops; fearing an even greater escalation, Johnson dragged his feet. But the rioting escalated, and the president soon had no choice. By Monday, forty-seven hundred paratroopers had arrived in Detroit with orders to carry only unloaded weapons; they were largely ineffectual in the next three days of rampage. Ultimately forty...

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