The City

Guerrilla Summer?

After five years of urban disturbances, the U.S. has become inured to grim box scores: the number of people killed, injured and arrested, the dollars lost from looting and arson. Recently, however, there has been a shift toward a different pattern of violence. The old-style, spontaneous and omnidirectional ghetto riots--such as those in Watts, Detroit and Newark--have been declining since 1967. Instead, city after city has seen a series of small-scale, sometimes premeditated and often fatal armed clashes. "Race-related disorders," reports Brandeis University's Lemberg Center for the Study of Violence, rose from 249 in 1967 to 671 in 1968.

As another summer has arrived, the most ominous fact is that many attacks are now consciously directed against people, not property. Sometimes it is a case of ambushes on police by small groups of black tenement tireurs. It is more likely to be a quick-draw response by blacks to what they consider--often with some justice--to be police oppression. Or else it is a shoot-out among militants or street gangs competing for primacy. A few years ago, the latter type of dispute was typically settled by fists and switchblade knives; now firearms are ubiquitous and fashionable.

Mystic Murderer. The pattern began to crystallize last summer, when Cleveland police were lured into an ambush led by Fred (Ahmed) Evans, a black mystic. Last month he was sentenced to death for the murder of three policemen and one civilian killed in the gunfight. In recent weeks, there have been shooting incidents involving police and snipers in Cairo, Ill., Portland, Ore., and Sacramento, Calif. Police were attacked by black snipers outside a Detroit church this spring and at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University. In Chicago, two white policemen were fired on after another cop shot a black youth. White toughs who fancy themselves vigilantes add to the unrest by threatening Negroes.

The increased number of attacks have made the police more nervous and more watchful. Police and FBI agents have also counterattacked by raiding militants' headquarters, ostensibly to look for weapons and sometimes to harass the members. Recently there have been forays against Black Panther haunts in Chicago, Denver, Salt Lake City and St. Louis. Sacramento police last week stormed Panther offices during a disturbance in which more than 100 shots were fired, wounding 12 cops and at least three other persons.

In Chicago, police relations with the ghetto are extremely tense. Patrol cars roam slum streets with shotgun muzzles visible. As hostility to them rises, police become more prone to overreact, as they did in the Detroit incident, when they invaded the crowded Detroit church, guns blazing, in search of the snipers.

Gang Warfare. Contributing to the mood of apprehension is the continuing problem of almost casual mayhem that police label "gang warfare." Violence among the city poor is neither new nor unique to blacks; even the affluent Mafia still practices assassination. But in the taut atmosphere of today's big city, such killings add to the tension, invite police crackdowns and make for scare headlines. This year alone in Chicago, 33 people have died and 252 have been injured in gang warfare. In Philadelphia, there were 30 such killings in all of 1968, and 24 so far this year.

Warring among black extremists is also becoming more virulent. Rivalry has sprung up over control of territory, recruitment of new members and access to antipoverty grants. Since New Year's, the feud between California's Black Panthers and Ron Karenga's US has left three dead and five wounded. In New York City, where Black Muslims and various splinter organizations compete, a former bodyguard for Malcolm X, Charles 37X Kenyatta, was critically wounded this month. Kenyatta leads the Harlem Mau Maus. Less than a week later, Kenyatta's friend, Clarence 37X Smith, head of a group called the Five Percenters, was shot down and killed. A suspected Black Panther informer, Alex Rackley, was found tortured and shot to death recently in a Connecticut swamp.

Bloody Momentum. Despite the similarities in style and revolutionary rhetoric found in black militant groups, there is no evidence of a nationwide black conspiracy. Rather, the manifestations of violence are similar from city to city because they stem from similar ghetto causes. Both the ambushes of police and the internecine black warfare have generally sprung from local, isolated circumstances. Black groups, including such ostensibly disciplined outfits as the Panthers, are too fragmented to achieve nationwide coordination even if they wanted to. With some of the best-known militant figures exiled, jailed or dead, there is no national leadership to hold the extremists together.

Also, it is only a tiny minority of the fringe, black and white, that perpetrates violence regularly. Most Negroes are still committed to the American system and striving for a full share of its benefits. Each new criminal incident, however, creates more animosity and hardens extreme attitudes. Each shooting causes more fear and political reaction, or gives new excuse for revenge. There is no tangible sign that U.S. society has yet found a way to reverse this bloody momentum.

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