"A Time of Violence & Tragedy"

THE PEOPLE

"We have endured a week such as no nation should live through: a time of violence and tragedy." So said the President of the U.S. last week, as flames flickered above two score American communities. From Albany, N.Y., and Albion, Mich., to Waterbury, Conn., and Waukegan, Ill., the nation's black ghettos shuddered in paroxysms of rock-throwing, fire-bombing and looting.

With more than 45 dead in rioting across the nation last week, thousands injured, and upwards of $1 billion in cash and property losses, Americans groped for words to fit the failure. New York's Senator Robert F. Kennedy called it "the greatest domestic crisis since the War between the States."

More likely, the Great Depression of the 1930s still holds that dubious distinction. But the riots came distressingly close. They plunged the nation into its greatest racial crisis since Reconstruction, threatened to bring the civil rights movement to a dead standstill and raised new barriers of fear and hostility between blacks and whites that might not come down for years.

Frightened and resentful after a summer of hoodlumism and hatred, the nation's white majority might react by turning away from the Negro and deferring--or discarding--the dream of genuine equality. Should that be the outcome, America's cities would truly be beleaguered.

Even before the rioting began, an economy-minded Congress, contending with Viet Nam war costs, huge tax loads and Great Society programs, was rejecting or drastically trimming practically every new proposal aimed at upgrading urban life. Now, determined not to reward violence, it may well give top priority to law-and-order measures aimed at curbing riots and turn sharply unsympathetic toward new social legislation. But both kinds are essential, of course.

When? Though nobody has been able to figure out precisely what events will ignite one ghetto and leave another unsinged, nobody doubts that other cities will feel the heat. As one Washington policeman put it after completing arrangements to move his family out of the capital for a weekend--just in case trouble erupts--the question is no longer "Will it?" but "When?"

The profound question is still "Why?" Poverty, of course, is part of the answer. A survey released by the National Industrial Conference Board last week, for example, disclosed that fully one-fourth of U.S. families now earn at least $10,000 a year--a reminder to the Negro, whose median family income is $4,000, of the distance he still has to travel. Impatience is another ingredient. All the civil rights bills, the Supreme Court decisions and the Great Society programs of recent years led many a Negro to expect that equality and prosperity were just around the next corner. "It hasn't happened," said Michigan's Governor George Romney, "and a lot of people are frustrated and bitter about it." "Nothing is so unstable," said William V. Shannon in the New York Times, "as a bad situation that is beginning to improve." Outside agitation may play a role after riots get under way--but rarely has much to do with starting them in the first place.

As many sociologists see it, the Negro (along with most Puerto Ricans, Mexican-Americans and Appalachian whites) is part of a "subculture of poverty," and his riots are mainly economic in origin. But a U.C.L.A. study of the 1965 Watts riots found that it was not just the poorest Negroes who were riot-prone. "A significant number of Negroes, successful or unsuccessful, are emotionally prepared for violence as a strategy or solution to end the problem of segregation, exploitation and subordination," said the report. For those who are "better off," it added, resentment may be vented by joining a riot.

To the rest of the world, the televised glimpses of unsheathed bayonets, rumbling tanks and fire-gutted blocks in the heart of Detroit made it look as if the U.S. were on the edge of anarchy. "The outbreak has become something more than a race riot," said the Stockholm newspaper Aftonbladet. "It threatens to become a revolution of the entire underclass of America."

Only a very small minority of Negroes are in active rebellion against "Whitey," and only a small minority loot, but many more--well into the millions--look on with tolerance and even admiration.

In Los Angeles, a black bartender confessed, "Older Negroes have a hell of a time with this new generation." But in the next breath he sympathized with the youthful militants. "Don't get me wrong," he said. "It's what the white man deserves for sitting on his ass for 200 years. If he had taught these kids how to read and given them a job, then they wouldn't be a problem."

Wrongs & Disabilities. It is to the Los Angeles bartender and others in this ambivalent and genuinely torn sector of Negro opinion that Negro leaders, at the local as well as national levels, must address themselves. Last week, four of the nation's best known Negro leaders* spoke up. "Killing, arson, looting are criminal acts, and should be dealt with as such," they said. Noting that most damage inflicted by Negro rioters is at the expense of other Negroes, they added: "There is no injustice which justifies the present destruction of the Negro community and its people. This does not mean that we should submit tamely to joblessness, inadequate housing, poor schooling, humiliation and attack. It does require a redoubling of efforts to end these wrongs and disabilities."

The wrongs and disabilities have, in fact, been significantly reduced, certainly not ended. "We've come a long, long way," preaches Martin Luther King, "we've got a long, long way to go." The limited progress has come in many kinds of ways: long-ago philanthropies of Northern white idealists who financed many of the Negro colleges; the verve, bounce and guts of Negro athletes and entertainers; the quieter achievements of Negro professional and business people; the great national economic surges that have pulled millions of Negroes into Northern industrial employment; and in the past 13 years, since Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, a whole train of new laws and judicial decisions.

Of course it is not enough. The hope of Detroit, if there can be hope in such a landscape, is that lessons may have been learned, and new resolves taken.

*Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the Urban League's Whitney Young Jr., N.A.A.C.P. Executive Director Roy Wilkins and New York's aging A. Philip Randolph, 78, who helped organize the 1963 "March on Washington."

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