Abstract
After the hair-raising events of summer 1967—the sheer number of riots that year, the death and destruction in Newark and Detroit, the President’s intervention, and the spectacle of federal troops on the streets—there was no denying the nation was in the grip of a serious crisis. Yet, as the smoke began to clear over Detroit, the causes of that crisis, its precise meaning, and the remedy, still seemed uncertain. “The profound question” being asked, Time magazine told its readers in early August, “is still ‘Why?’” By mid-August, the worst of the storm seemed to have passed, but a thought hung in the air: “What of next week and next summer?”1
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Respectively: “A Time of Violence and Tragedy,” Time, 90:5 (1967), 12; “What Next?” Time, 90:6 (1967), 11.
Henry Raymont, “Riot Report Book Big Best Seller,” New York Times, March 14, 1968 (pdf), 49;
John Herbers, “Decade After Kerner Report: Division of Race Persists,” New York Times, February 29, 1978 (pdf), 1;
Andrew Kopkind, “White on Black: The Riot Commission and the Rhetoric of Reform,” in David Boesel and Peter H. Rossi (eds), Cities Under Siege: An Anatomy of the Ghetto Riots, 1964–1968 (New York and London: Basic Books, 1971), 226–259, 226.
Martin Luther King, Chaos or Community? (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), 14; Kerner Report, 1.
Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (New York: Harper, 1944), 2 vols. Kerner Report, 123–141; for quotations, see 130.
Irwin Unger, Best of Intentions: The Triumphs and Failures of the Great Society Under Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon (New York: Doubleday, 1996), 229.
Also: Joseph A. Califano, The Triumph and Tragedy of Lyndon Johnson: The White House Years (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991), 219;
Robert Dallek, Flawed Giant: Lyndon Johnson and His Times (New York and Oxford; OUP, 1998), 415.
For the Ribicoff hearings, Jeff Shesol, Mutual Contempt: Lyndon Johnson, Robert Kennedy, and the Feud That Defined a Decade (New York and London: Norton, 1997), 245–246.
Kopkind, “White on Black,” 229; 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), 209.
Donald Jackson, “Racism, Not Poverty or Cynicism, Caused the Riots,” Life, 64:10 (1968), 97.
Arnold R. Hirsch, “Massive Resistance in the Urban North: Trumbull Park, Chicago, 1953–1966,” Journal of American History, 82:2 (1995), 522–550;
Thomas J. Sugrue, “Crabgrass-Roots Politics: Race, Rights, and the Reaction against Liberalism in the Urban North, 1940–1964,” Journal of American History, 82:2 (1995), 551–578.
For example, Arnold R. Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940–1960 (Cambridge and New York: CUP, 1983);
Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton, NJ: Princeton U P, 1996).
Bruce H. Douglas, “Post-war Public Health Problems in a Large American City,” American Journal of Public Health, 38 (1948), 214–218. Through the 1960s, African Americans accounted for 88.9 percent of urban population growth. Kerner Report, 215, 259. In addition, Hirsch, Making, 274–275.
Kenneth B. Clark, Dark Ghetto: Dilemmas of Social Power (London: Gollancz, 1965), 12, 27.
William H. Whyte, Jr, “Introduction,” Fortune (ed.), The Exploding Metropolis (New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1958), vii–xx; viii–ix.
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr, Kennedy or Nixon: Does It Make Any Difference? (New York: Macmillan, 1960), 39.
Arthur M. Schlesinger, The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1949).
For the significance of The New Yorker, see Unger, Best of Intentions, 65–67; Michael B. Katz, The Undeserving Poor: From the War on Poverty to the War on Welfare (New York: Pantheon, 1989), 82.
Michael Harrington, The Other America: Poverty in the United States (Baltimore, MD: Penguin, 1963).
“Notes on Crime in the Cities,” September 1964, Aides — White, box 5, LBJ Library. See also Michael W. Flamm, Law and Order: Street Crime, Civil Unrest, and the Crisis of Liberalism in the 1960s (New York: Columbia U P, 2005), 36–37.
Kenneth O’Reilly, Racial Matters: The FBI’s Secret File on Black America, 1960 –1972 (New York: Free Press, 1989), 230–231.
Harry McPherson, A Political Education: A Washington Memoir (Austin, TX: U Texas P, 1995 (originally 1972)), 377.
Martin Luther King, Chaos or Community? (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), 11.
Joseph A. Califano, The Triumph and Tragedy of Lyndon Johnson: The White House Years (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991), 59–63.
Also, Robert Dallek, Flawed Giant: Lyndon Johnson and His Times, 1961–1973 (New York and Oxford: OUP, 1998), 223.
For Weaver’s career, Wendell E. Pritchett, Robert Clifton Weaver and the American City (Chicago: U Chicago P, 2008), 53–115, 211–262.
For Weaver’s writings, see, for example, Robert C. Weaver, “Racial Policy in Public Housing,” Phylon, 1:2 (1940), 149–156;
Robert C. Weaver, “Non-White Population Movements and Urban Ghettos,” Phylon, 20:3 (1959), 235–241;
Robert C. Weaver, The Negro Ghetto (New York: Harcourt, 1948), 307–321, 336–339; The Urban Complex: Human Values in Urban Life (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1964); Dilemmas of Urban America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard U P, 1965). For Weaver’s early use of the term ghetto: transcript, Robert C. Weaver, Oral History Interview, November 19, 1968 (Joe B. Franz), 10 (pdf, LBJ Library).
Robert C. Weaver, “Recent Developments in Urban Housing and Their Implications for Minorities,” Phylon, 16:3 (1955), 275–282; 275. Weaver, Urban Complex, 46–93, and 47 and 53 for “lip service” and “Negro removal,” respectively.
Allen Freeman Davis, Spearheads for Reform: The Social Settlements and the Progressive Era, 1890–1914 (New York: OUP, 1967).
Edward Banfield, The Unheavenly City: The Nature and Future of Our Urban Crisis (New York, 1968), 126; Katz, Undeserving Poor, 35.
E. Franklin Frazier, The Negro Family in the United States (New York, 1948).
The Negro Family: The Case for National Action reproduced in Lee Rainwater and William L. Yancey, The Moynihan Report and the Politics of Controversy (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1967), 75 and 76. Also: Katz, Undeserving Poor, 24.
Allan Silver, “Official Interpretations of Racial Riots,” in Boesel and Rossi (eds), Cities Under Siege: An Anatomy of the Ghetto Riots, 1964–1968 (New York and London: Basic Books, 1971), 259–271.
Robert M. Fogelson, Violence as Protest: A Study of Riots and Ghettos (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1971), 26–27, 49;
Robert M. Fogelson, “White on Black: A Critique of the McCone Commission Report on the Los Angeles Riots,” Political Science Quarterly, 82:3 (1967), 337–367; 342.
Memorandum, Fred Bohen to Joseph Califano, August 24, 1967, WHCF, FG690, box 386, LBJ Library. Letter, James C. Corman to Governor Otto Kerner, January 13, 1968, WHCF, FG690, box 386, LBJ Library. Harris later published a book, going further, politically, than the Kerner Commission would allow: Fred R. Harris, Alarms and Hopes: A Personal Journey, A Personal View (New York: Harper & Row, 1968).
See also Robert Dallek, Flawed Giant: Lyndon Johnson and His Times (New York and Oxford; OUP, 1998), 416.
Copyright information
© 2014 Malcolm McLaughlin
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
McLaughlin, M. (2014). An Explosive Mixture. In: The Long, Hot Summer of 1967. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137269638_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137269638_2
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-44401-4
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-26963-8
eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)