The Battle for the Streets

  • Malcolm McLaughlin
Chapter

Abstract

To read some of the more vivid news reports of the summer unrest in 1967 is to be plunged into the heat of something akin to guerrilla war. Newark, if Time were to be believed, had been a battle zone in July: there had been “shots […] snapping from windows and rooftops, aimed at police patrols and firemen” and “Molotov cocktails explod[ing] in stores and around police cars,” its cover story reported. At one point, police officers were “cornered and […] pinned down by rooftop gunmen.” They desperately called back to headquarters: “We’re sitting ducks out here—give us the word. Let us shoot! […] We’re getting bombed here. What should we do?” Elsewhere, two state police officers were pictured, kneeling over an injured comrade. They “were finally given the order ‘Use your weapons,’” the caption explained.1

Keywords

Police Officer Black Community National Guard Guerrilla Warfare Race Riot 
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Notes

  1. 2.
    Martin Arnold, “Negroes Battle With Guardsmen,” New York Times, July 15, 1967, 1 (pdf); “The Battle of Detroit,” St. Petersburg Times, July 26, 1967, 16 (http://www.news.google.com/archivesearch, August 26, 2013).Google Scholar
  2. 8.
    Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Atheneum, 1992), 549–550.Google Scholar
  3. 10.
    F. Weigly, The American Way of War: A History of United States Military Strategy and Policy (Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1977) 149.Google Scholar
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  6. 11.
    Wittner and Russell Sackett, “Negro Revolt Echoes to the Ugly Crack of Sniper Fire,” Life, 63:4 (1967), 17–28; “Troops against snipers under cover of night,” Life, 63:5 (1967), 20–25.Google Scholar
  7. 12.
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  8. Michael Mok and Paul Schutzer, “In They Go to the Reality of This War,” Life, 59:22 (1965), 50–72.Google Scholar
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  12. 16.
    Thomas J. Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (New York: Random House, 2008), 68.Google Scholar
  13. See also Dominic J. Capeci and Martha Wilkerson, Layered Violence: The Detroit Rioters of 1943 (Jackson, MS: U Mississippi P, 1991).Google Scholar
  14. For discussion of these issues in relation to Tennessee, for example, see Gail Williams O’Brien, The Color of the Law: Race, Violence, and Justice in the Post-World War II American South (Chapel hill, NC: U North Carolina P, 1999).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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    Field team interviews (Plainfield, NJ), George C. Campbell and Daniel Hennessy, NACCD, series 59, box 5 (26: 0153–0154, NACCD microfilm). Thomas Sugrue and Andrew P. Goodman, “Plainfield Burning: Black Rebellion and the Urban North,” Journal of Urban History, 33:4 (2007), 568–601; 575, 584. See also field team interviews (Plainfield, NJ), “transcript of interviews in Negro community,” NACCD, series 59, box 5 (26: 0273, NACCD microfilm).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  18. 36.
    Tom Hayden, Rebellion in Newark: Official Violence and Ghetto Response (New York: Vintage Books, 1967), 41–42.Google Scholar
  19. 37.
    Russell Sackett, “In a grim city, a secret meeting with the snipers,” Life, 63:4 (1967), 27–28A.Google Scholar
  20. 39.
    Hubert G. Locke, The Detroit Riot of 1967 (Detroit, MI: Wayne State U P, 1967), 127–128.Google Scholar
  21. 40.
    Sidney Fine, Violence in the Model City: The Cavanagh Administration, Race Relations, and the Detroit Riot of 1967 (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State UP, 2007 (originally 1989)), 365.Google Scholar

Copyright information

© Malcolm McLaughlin 2014

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  • Malcolm McLaughlin

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