Black Rage in New Jersey

Like summer lightning, racial riots flashed across the North once again last week, this time striking two New Jersey industrial centers.

Trouble erupted first in Paterson, a city of 146,000 people (one-sixth of them Negroes), when a pack of carousing teen-agers in the slum Fourth Ward began pelting passing police cars with bottles and rocks. Soon hundreds of Negroes were racing through the streets, smashing windows and hurling debris at police. Almost simultaneously, 20 miles south of Paterson, hit-and-run bombers in Elizabeth, a city of 110,000 people (with 20,000 Negroes), pitched Molotov cocktails into three taverns. Before long, hundreds of Negroes were flinging bottles and bricks from rooftops and street corners.

Both cities had been braced for trouble. "Ever since the Harlem riots," said Paterson Mayor Frank X. Graves Jr., 40, a tough ex-tank commander, "we've been on pins and needles." For three nights, angry mobs shattered store windows and clashed with helmeted riot cops. On Elizabeth's waterfront, center of the rioting there, 300 Negro youths scuffled with the police and with 100 white toughs.

In Paterson a dozen punks boarded a bus, smashed windows and terrorized passengers. Negroes in a third-floor tenement rained debris down on a group of cops, then slammed the window. Firemen quickly scrambled up a ladder, smashed the window and seized two men and a woman. When bottles came hurtling out of another building, a flying wedge of cops charged in, flushed nine youths and arrested all but one--a child of seven or eight whom Mayor Graves whacked once on the behind and sent home.

All told, 20 people were injured and 83--many of them hoodlums with previous records--were arrested. One man charged with smashing windows in Paterson was swiftly convicted and sentenced to a year in jail.

Negro leaders laid the violence to the wrongs of ghetto life. Paterson's Mayor Graves conceded that Negroes in his city had just complaints, but he argued angrily that the riots were not a legitimate expression of their grievances. Said Graves, as he slapped a ban on all Fourth Ward public assemblies except weddings and funerals: "This was just plain old lousy lawbreakers who are using their color to say they can't be arrested."

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