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Jewish World Review August 18, 2005 / 13 Av, 5765 Looking back at an era of riots By Clarence Page
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
Retired Black Panther leaders are trying to trademark the 1965-era riot phrase "Burn Baby Burn" to use on a barbecue sauce. That, to me, is the most bizarre filing since Fox News Channel tried to claim exclusive rights to the phrase "fair and balanced."
It is also an ironically appropriate move in an era that has Bob Dylan doing commercials for Victoria's Secret. Why shouldn't the Huey P. Newton Foundation, which also wants to trademark the phrase "Revolutionary Hot Sauce," cash in, too?
A further irony: "Burn, baby, burn," a street slogan during the 1965 riots in and near the Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts, came from an on-air catchphrase used by Magnificent Montague, a popular black Los Angeles disc jockey. The Newton Foundation, which is named for the late co-founder of the militant 1960s-era organization, is bringing the phrase back to the commercial pop-culture realm in which it began.
That's about as appropriate a way as any to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Watts riots, which marked what I call the end of innocence for the era of great black civil-rights protests.
It is important to remember that, contrary to some of the Watts retrospectives I have seen published and broadcast, the riot that erupted from Aug. 11 to 16 in Los Angeles 40 years ago was not an isolated eruption. It was only one of the earliest and most spectacular of dozens of riots that erupted on urban America's streets in the mid- to late 1960s. The riots brought long-overdue attention to the nation's urban racial divide, but also opened up new divides along lines of race and class from which cities are only beginning to recover.
A year before Watts, in 1964, summer racial violence blew up in the Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant sections of New York City and in Rochester, NY.
In 1966, July racial tensions erupted in Omaha, Chicago, Brooklyn, Cleveland and Jacksonville, Fla.
In 1967, President Johnson sent federal paratroopers to quell a riot in Detroit riot in which more than 40 civilians died and thousands of homes were destroyed.
In 1968, after the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., was assassinated, racial violence flared in more than 100 cities, including Chicago, Baltimore, Kansas City and Washington, DC.
President Johnson, according to various accounts, was baffled that riots followed the biggest breakthrough in civil rights since the end of slavery, the Civil Rights Act of 1964. He suspected numerous causes, including a communist plot engineered by Moscow. But a 1964 FBI report said there had been "no systematic planning or organization" behind the early riots. A later presidential riot commission headed by former Illinois Gov. Otto Kerner agreed, blaming the existence of "two nations," one black, one white, separate and unequal.
Explanations for the riot era then, as now, tend to reflect the prejudices of the person doing the explaining. The uprisings did bring badly needed attention to the undercovered frustrations of urban black life, where opportunities were limited by job discrimination, housing discrimination, abusive police, overpriced merchants and sellout politicians.
But the riots also fueled massive white flight to the suburbs, followed by merchants, employers and, eventually, those black families who could afford it. As urban activist Saul Alinsky put it, neighborhood integration became that brief period between the time the first black family moved in and the last white family moved out.
It took about three decades of simmering racial fears, suspicions and resentments before a new era of cooperation between city halls, downtown corporations and urban neighborhoods began to replace confrontations fueled by identity politics.
Blacks who once were prevented by redlining from obtaining reasonable mortgages or home insurance now have to defend themselves against the relentless and dubious easy-money offers from predatory lenders.
For African-Americans of my generation (I had just graduated from high school when Watts broke out) it has been dazzling to see how much has changed: We used to complain when white flight moved out; now we worry when white gentrifiers move in. We used to complain at being be redlined out of home loans; now we need to worry when lenders want to throw more money — and debt! — at us too easily.
Either way, it is better to invest in our neighborhoods than to set them on fire. History offers important lessons. Learn, baby learn.
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Comment on Clarence Page's column by clicking here. © 2005, TMS |
Arnold Ahlert | |||||||||||
