Introduction

Half a century ago, the civil rights movement and its allies won stunning victories with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Together, these bills overturned a legal order sustaining generations of segregation and disfranchisement and transformed life for African Americans—indeed, all Americans—in the years that followed. Yet while these far-reaching laws were being enacted, American cities, north and south, exploded. In 1964, rioting broke out in Harlem. The following year, shortly after the signing of the Voting Rights Act, rioting followed the arrest of a young black man, ending days later after thirty-four had been killed, over a thousand people injured, and four thousand arrested. “The events of 1966 made it appear that domestic turmoil had become part of the American scene,” a federal commission concluded,¹ with violence occuring in perhaps forty cities, including Chicago, Cleveland, Dayton, and Omaha. The year 1967 only saw “urban disorders” intensify, with major conflicts in Detroit and Newark and, in the aftermath of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in April 1968, violence again erupted across urban America.

What were the causes of the violence? The solutions? What did it all mean? How should the riots have been understood or interpreted? Americans were hardly of one mind when it came to debating these questions; today, historians, too, differ on their understandings of the racial violence of the 1960s.

To conservatives, the answer was simple: the violence signaled a breakdown of law and order, a civil rights movement gone too far, and radicals running amok. “I don’t think you need any more legislation,” the Mississippi Democratic representative Thomas G. Abernethy declared in 1967. “What you need now are some judges who will convict, a Justice Department that will prosecute, and a president who will turn his lawyers loose—that’s all.”² To the columnist Victor Riesel, the cause of the unrest was no mystery. “The hard core of rioters are a new breed,” he explained. “This kind of warfare doesn’t take manpower. It takes tightly knit disciplined cells. They’re all over the big eastern cities . . . . If the President and his civil disorders committee seek an answer, they will have to concentrate on the new revolutionists and cage them before the cells coalesce and crush those who want to see the open blue sky as they reach upward—not the terrorists, snipers and clouds of smoke.”³

To those in the Black Power movement and on the white New Left, the urban violence demonstrated the shallowness of American reform and represented a potentially revolutionary political upsurge captured in the terms rebellion and insurrection. Tom Hayden did not think that the aftermath of the Newark “rebellion” was a “time for radical illusions about ‘revolution,” but he did believe that the “conditions slowly are being created for an American form of guerrilla warfare based in the slums.”⁴ In their 1967 book Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America, Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton identified the “core problem within the ghetto” as “the vicious circle created by the lack of decent housing, decent jobs and adequate education.” Urban conditions created “dynamite in the ghettos,” leading to “explosions of frustration, despair and hopelessness.”⁵ The larger society’s responses hardly helped: it “becomes indignant and utters irrelevant clichés about marinating law and order,” they added. “Blue ribbon committees of ‘experts’ and ‘consultants’ are appointed to investigate the ‘causes of the riot.’ They then spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on preparing ‘authoritative’ reports.” But when the “dynamite does go off,” they advised, “pious pronouncements of patience should not go forth” and blame shouldn’t be placed on “‘outside agitators’ or on ‘Communist influence’ or on advocates of Black Power. That dynamite was placed there by white racism and it was ignited by white racist indifference and unwillingness to act justly.”⁶ On more than a few occasions, however, activists were willing to play the role of provocateur. The chair of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, H. Rap Brown, captured headlines when he declared at a rally in Cambridge, Maryland...