REBEL

7. The Fire Next Time: July 1967

137 The Fire Next Time: July 1967 When the Newark riot began on July 12, 1967, I was playing football. This minor fact turned out to be quite important in saving me from a conspiracy indictment. The police were sure that an outside mastermind had to be manipulating events that week. They tried for weeks to blame me for the riot, but were stopped cold when a secretary, herself the wife of a policeman, confirmed that I indeed was playing football. She knew because her employer, attorney Leonard Weinglass, was throwing passes to me in front of his office. Besides football, my friend Len liked his human-scale law practice, teaching property law to Rutgers students, and his memories of Yale Law School and Air Force service in Greenland. We first met inside a Newark tenement building. A close friend of his, a VISTA volunteer who knew me slightly, brought us together in what became a long friendship. I persuaded him to take some court cases involving rent strikers and welfare mothers. He was a few years older than I was, balding and affable, a character out of a Philip Roth novel. His strong sense of morality, even guilt, combined with his sincerity and intelligence, made him a very effective courtroom advocate for unpopular clients. He might have made an excellent candidate for office, but he was never much for politics. He was good company. When downtown, I would often drop by his office— across the street from Rutgers Law School—for conversation, a break, some football in the street, as I did on that particularly hot night in July. While I kept trying to catch passes over my head by streetlight, a phone call came to Len’s office indicating that “trouble” was starting in the Central Ward. We jumped in his car and drove ten minutes to the lower economic pits of Newark’s ghetto. We parked amid the tall housing projects, which looked like a ghostly gathering of prisons, and walked quickly toward the Fourth Police Pre7 . 7. Rebel 138 cinct, an aging brick building, where hundreds of people were milling around. It looked like the Bastille during the French Revolution. Moments after we arrived, a Molotov cocktail hit the wall of the police station and broke into a long spiraling column of flame. The people cheered. Len gasped, half smiling in awe. It was the opening shot in a rebellion which, along with the one in Detroit the following week, would be the largest of those violent years. In five days, twenty-six people were killed, a thousand injured, fourteen hundred arrested and sixteen million dollars’ worth of damage done to property, as nearly six thousand police, state troopers, and national guardsmen tried to restore order. The roots of the violence lay tangled in years of blind neglect by the authorities. Newark’s officials were confident that their city was immune to the wave of urban riots occurring throughout America. In May, a city official told The New York Times that only a “few agitators” wanted any violence; in June, Mayor Hugh J. Addonizio declared that his “open-door” administration had the confidence of the black community. It was not the first time I would hear pompous proclamations from high officials blindly on the brink of their political graves. The immediate cause of friction was the behavior of Newark’s virtually all-white police department. The police force reflected tile white ethnic groupings—mainly Italian and Irish—that dominated Newark’s government in the generation before transition to a black majority. Seeing themselves as defenders of a way of life on the decline, many of the officers were overflowing with resentment.Their hostility and defensiveness was expressed in a five-day, five-thousand-strong demonstration in 1965 in response to local civil rights marches against police brutality. While fiercely opposing a civilian review board, the Newark police offered no convincing alternative for dealing with widespread citizen complaints against their officers. An in-house complaint-referral system lacked the confidence of the community and, when occasionally used, didn’t deter irresponsible behavior. Of a meager sixty complaints lodged against police in the six years before July 1967, the police investigators substantiated the claim of brutality only twice, meting out only minor discipline in both cases. Under increasing community pressure in 1965, the mayor agreed to forward certain complaints to the FBI; but of seven cases reported by July 1967, no action was taken by the federal authorities...