Abstract
The long, hot summer of 1967 was the blistering height of an urban revolt that had begun in 1964 and which would forever change America’s understanding of what was often called “the race problem.” For over a decade before, “civil rights” had implied the South—campaigns against segregation and for voting rights, in which nonviolent protesters risked beatings, or worse, at the hands of white supremacists and police officers. That situation defined the federal government’s approach and, speaking in 1969, former Attorney General Ramsey Clark admitted that the cities had initially barely registered with the White House or the Department of Justice. They had been “consumed with the South,” he said, and “when we thought of the North we didn’t think of civil rights then really.”1 It was a telling oversight.
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Notes
Clark Interview II, February 11, 1969 (Harri Baker), 13. Referring to the same interview, Kenneth O’Reilly noted “Few people in the White House, the Department of Justice, or the FBI for that matter expected the ‘racial problem’ to jump the Mason-Dixon Line.” Kenneth O’Reilly, Racial Matters: The FBI’s Secret File on Black America, 1960–1972 (New York: Free Press, 1989), 231. See also transcript, Harry McPherson Oral History Interview V, April 9, 1969 (T. H. Baker), 1–2 (pdf, LBJ Library).
Letter to Editor, Mary St. John Villard, New York Times, June 17, 1964 (pdf).
Thomas J. Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (New York: Random House, 2008), 159.
For example, Gerald Horne, Fire This Time: The Watts Uprising and the 1960s (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo, 1995), 28–30.
John R. Rachal, “‘The Long, Hot Summer’: The Mississippi Response to Freedom Summer, 1964,” Journal of Negro History, 84:4 (1999), 315–339, 324.
Mary McGorty, “CORE Man Impressive,” Boston Globe, July 10, 1963, 7 (pdf ).
For example, James A. Colaiaco, “Martin Luther King, Jr, and the Paradox of Nonviolent Direct Action,” Phylon, 47:1 (1986), 16–28; 17.
Glenn Eskew, But for Birmingham: The Local and National Movements in the Civil Rights Struggle (Chapel Hill, NC: U North Carolina P, 1997), 301.
David C. Carter, The Music Has Gone Out of the Movement: Civil Rights and the Johnson Administration, 1965–1968 (Chapel Hill, NC: U North Carolina P, 2009) 12.
John Dittmer, Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi (Urbana and Chicago: U Illinois P, 1995), 166–167.
Charles Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle (Berkeley, CA: U California P, 1995), 289–290.
Timothy B. Tyson, Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power (Chapel Hill, NC: U North Carolina P, 1999), 262, 266–282.
Robert F. Williams, Negroes with Guns (Detroit, MI: Wayne State UP, 1998 (originally 1962)).
Stacy Kinlock Sewell, “The ‘Not Buying Power’ of the Black Community: Urban Boycotts and Equal Employment Opportunity, 1960–1964,” Journal of African-American History, 89:2 (2004), 135–151; 143.
Compare: Patrick D. Jones, The Selma of the North: Civil Rights Insurgency in Milwaukee (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2009), 150, 155–157.
Lawrence R. Samuel, The End of the Innocence: The 1963–1964 New York World’s Fair (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse UP, 2007), 33–35.
David Nevins, “The Show Goes on, the Spoilers Lose the Day,” Life, 56:18 (1964), 35; for photographic “panorama” of fair, see 26–34.
Harold Cruse ridiculed the idea of urging black people to wage revolutionary guerrilla war for the reformist goal of racial integration: Harold Cruse, Crisis of the Negro Intellectual: A Historical Analysis of the Failure of Black Leadership (New York: New York Review, 2005 (originally 1967), 359, 376, 392–393.
NBC Huntley-Brinkley Report, transcript, July 25, 1967, 2, NACCD, series 40, box 2, LBJ Library.
Thomas J. Sugrue and Andrew P. Goodman, “Plainfield Burning: Black Rebellion in the Suburban North,” Journal of Urban History, 33:4 (2007), 568–601; 569, 589–591, 594.
For quotation, Martin Luther King, Jr, Chaos or Community? (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), 12.
See also David J. Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr, and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (New York: W. Morrow, 1986), 498–499.
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr, Violence: America in the Sixties (New York: New American Library, 1968), ix–xii, 19.
Hannah Arendt, On Violence (New York: Harcourt, 1970);
Richard Hofstadter and Michael Wallace (eds), American Violence: A Documentary History (New York: Knopf, 1970).
Report of the President’s Commission on Campus Unrest (Washington, DC: GPO, 1970); Hugh Davis Graham & Ted Robert Gurr (eds), Violence in America: Historical and Comparative Perspectives. A Report Submitted to the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence (New York: Bantam Books, 1969); To Establish Justice, to Ensure Domestic Tranquility: Report of the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence (Washington, DC: GPO, 1969); Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (Washington, DC: GPO, 1968).
Christopher Strain, Pure Fire: Self-Defense as Activism in the Civil Rights Era (Athens, GA: U Georgia P, 2005), 127–128.
“‘Hot Summer’: Race Riots in North,” New York Times, July 26, 1964 (pdf). See also, Sydney H. Schanberg, “Buffalo: ‘Nothing’s Changed Since Riot,’” New York Times, September 18, 1967 (pdf). More generally, Kerner Report, 1.
For example, David Fort Godshalk, Veiled Visions: The 1906 Atlanta Race Riot and the Reshaping of American Race Relations (Chapel Hill, NC: U North Carolina P, 2005);
Mark Bauerlein, Negrophobia: A Race Riot in Atlanta, 1906 (San Francisco, CA: Encounter Books, 2001);
Roberta Senechal de la Roche, Sociogenesis of a Race Riot: Springfield, Illinois, in 1908 (Urbana, IL: U Illinois P, 1990);
Roberta Senechal de la Roche, In Lincoln’s Shadow: The 1908 Race Riot in Springfield, Illinois (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois U P, 2008);
Elliott M. Rudwick, Race Riot in East St. Louis, Illinois, July 2, 1917 (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois UP, 1964);
Charles L. Lumpkins, American Pogrom: The East St. Louis Race Riot and Black Politics (Athens, OH: Ohio U P, 2008);
Malcolm McLaughlin, Power, Community and Racial Killing in East St. Louis (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005);
William M. Tuttle, Race Riot: Chicago in the Red Summer of 1919 (New York: Atheneum, 1970);
Scott Ellsworth, Death in a Promised Land: The Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State UP, 1982);
Alfred L. Brophy, Reconstructing Dreamland: The Tulsa Riot of 1921 (Oxford and New York: OUP, 2002);
Michael D’Orso, Like Judgment Day: The Ruin and Redemption of a Town Called Rosewood (New York: Putnam, 1996).
For example, Thomas Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1996);
Arnold R. Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940–1960 (Cambridge and New York: CUP, 1983).
Cheryl Lynn Greenberg, Or Does it Explode? Black Harlem in the Great Depression (New York: OUP, 1991), 3–6, 212–214;
Dominic J. Capeci, Jr, The Harlem Riot of 1943 (Philadelphia, PA: Temple U P, 1977). For quotations, see James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1983 (originally 1955)), 111.
Paul Gilje, Rioting in America (Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1996), 1.
George Rudé, The Crowd in History: A Study of Popular Disturbances in France and England, 1730–1848 (London: Wiley, 1964), 6.
Gil Scott-Heron, “Small Talk at 125th and Lenox,” Ghetto Style (BMG, 1998). Originally appears on Small Talk at 125th and Lenox (Flying Dutchman Records/RCA, 1970).
First Arendt quote, Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2006 (originally 1963)), 220; second, Arendt, On Violence, 45.
Albert Camus, The Rebel (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975 (originally 1951)), 19.
Jacqueline Dowd Hall, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past,” Journal of American History, 91:4 (2005), 1233–1263; 1258.
Ira Katznelson, “Was the Great Society a Lost Opportunity?” Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle, The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930–1980 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1989), 185–211.
Van Gosse, “A Movement of Movements: The Definition and Periodization of the New Left,” in Jean-Christophe Agnew and Roy Rosenzweig (eds), Companion to Post-1945 America (Maldon, MA, and Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2002), 277–302;
Van Gosse, “Postmodern America: A New Democratic Order in the Second Gilded Age,” in Van Gosse and Richard Moser (eds), The World the Sixties Made: Politics and Culture in Recent America (Philadelphia, PA: Temple UP, 2003), 1–36; 5–9.
Bryant Simon, Boardwalk of Dreams: Atlantic City and the Fate of Urban America (Oxford and New York: OUP, 2004), 18.
Heather Ann Thompson, “Why Mass Incarceration Matters: Rethinking Crisis, Decline, and Transformation in Postwar American History,” Journal of American History, 97:3 (2010), 703–734.
Richard Lowitt, Fred Harris: His Journey from Liberalism to Populism (Lanham, MD and Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002), 49–50.
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© 2014 Malcolm McLaughlin
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McLaughlin, M. (2014). Introduction Long, Hot Summers. In: The Long, Hot Summer of 1967. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137269638_1
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