LITMIR.BIZ

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then that Officer Gilligan appeared. Gilligan saw the retreating janitor, turned, and shot James Powell dead. The high school students screamed in pain and outrage. In the evening hundreds of residents gathered at the police precinct, where they encountered a solid wall of police. The officers charged the protesters, and the crowd responded with rocks and bottles. The police then attempted to rope off Harlem from 125th Street and Third Avenue to Eighth Avenue, but residents resisted by hurling garbage, stones, and anything else they could find at police. Some residents began to overturn cars and set buildings aflame. Police opened fire with live ammunition. By nightfall mass looting had ensued, and riots spread from Central and East Harlem and to the Brooklyn neighborhoods of Bedford-Stuyvesant and Brownsville.

      The next day civil rights groups led marches demanding that the city investigate and take action against the police department. When those efforts came to naught, the protests moved, as Sugrue notes:

      from peaceful picketing to violent retaliation. On July 16 hundreds of “screaming youths” pelted police officers with bottles and cans in Manhattan’s Yorkville neighborhood. The following day two hundred teenagers took to the streets of Harlem looting, burning, and attacking police officers. Over the next week, roving bands of youths and police clashed throughout the city. The uprising followed a pattern that would become commonplace during the mid-1960s—beginning with a police incident and ending with angry crowds in the streets.⁶²

      The protests continued for five days and nights.⁶³ Over five hundred people were seriously injured and (as described in the Introduction) one black man was shot dead by police. Activated racial boundaries, increasing police violence, and the police killing of a young unarmed youth were key ingredients. However, the first response to police violence was nonviolent. Only when the police responded to the nonviolent assembly with violence did the NAACP and CORE lose control of the crowds. As one journalist warned, “[I]t is not possible for even the most responsible Negro leaders to control the Negro masses once pent up anger and total despair are unleashed by a thoughtless or brutal act.”⁶⁴

      The riots were an expression of rage, a refusal to remain cowed in the face of police violence, and a defensive response to the violent policing of racial boundaries. A white man whom I interviewed told me that two black adolescent boys, whom he often hired to help him with yard work, had pelted him with stones during the riot. After the riot the two boys came by the house again to ask for work. “You just pelted me with stones,” the man said. “We didn’t throw stones at you,” they responded. “Of course you did.I saw you and you were looking right at me,” he retorted. “No,” they said, “we weren’t throwing them at you; we were throwing stones at ‘the man.’” In contrast, a black man I spoke with told me it was one of the happiest moments in his life (2009). “The most peaceful I ever felt was in the middle of the riot. None of the damn rules applied. You were absolutely free from the law.”

      In the aftermath of the riots, Mayor Wagner finally promised to investigate the shooting of Powell and others and to create a civilian review board. Yet again he did neither. By 1965 complaints of brutality had become more numerous than before.⁶⁵ Bertrand Russell stated, “[Harlem’s] inhabitants are brutalized at every moment of their lives by police, poverty and indignities.”⁶⁶ A journalist observed that Harlem had “rioted five times since 1935. Each time an incident with police lit the fuse, the police representing the face of the enemy, of economic and social repression” (emphasis mine).⁶⁷

      The Harlem riot initiated a wave of riots that would spread first to cities connected to Harlem through family and friendship ties, and subject to similar levels of police violence and brutality, and then to distant cities throughout the country. Nestled within the national wave of riots were smaller incidents of riots diffused through towns geographically connected to the major city riots.⁶⁸ Riots first spread from New York to the nearby towns of Nyack in Rockland County, New York, and to Montclair, Patterson, Jersey City, Rahway, Livingston, East Orange, and Irvington in New Jersey—towns with a similar history of police violence. Then Rochester residents reacted following police repression of a peaceful demonstration outside a Kodak plant. Philadelphians followed with “three days of disorder after the arrest of a [black] driver and rumors that police had killed a pregnant woman.”⁶⁹ Riots in six other cities exploded in 1964 and more followed in 1965, including one in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, where thirty-four people died, thirty-one of them black and shot by police.⁷⁰

      In 1966 new riots broke out in East New York, Brooklyn. They also broke out in Omaha, Baltimore, San Francisco, Jacksonville, and most fiercely in Cleveland and Chicago. “Nineteen sixty-seven was the most combustible with 163 uprisings, capped by deadly clashes between black residents of Newark and Detroit and the police, the National Guard and the U.S. Army. In Newark, thirty-four people died in a weeklong uprising that laid waste to large parts of the city’s central ward; in Detroit, forty-three people died in a weeklong uprising, three quarters of them rioters.”⁷¹ The year 1967 was the year of Latino riots—Puerto Ricans rioted in East Harlem, the South Bronx, and Chicago, Chicanos rioted in California and the Southwest.⁷²

       The 1967 Puerto Rican Riots in East Harlem and South Bronx

      As the decade progressed things grew steadily worse for Puerto Ricans in New York City. In the 1960s the city built inexpensive co-ops on the outskirts of the Bronx, which allowed working-class whites who could not afford to buy their own homes to buy apartments in these complexes. Few Blacks and Puerto Ricans could afford to buy co-ops. The construction of Co-op City in the northeastern Bronx, in particular, encouraged a mass exodus. Better-off whites fled to the suburbs, working-class whites moved to the northeastern Bronx co-ops. As the value of housing in the South Bronx declined, owners burned “their buildings once they had been milked of profitability and stripped of assets.”⁷³ Those who remained behind were left bereft.

      The sheer extent of demographic change would have overwhelmed even the most effective social movement organizations, but those that had played key roles in the 1930s and early 1940s had been decimated by the actions of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and Senator Joseph McCarthy. As Roberto P. Rodriguez-Morazzani notes, “The virtual outlawing of the Communist Party USA, with the passage of the McCarran Act in 1950 and the decline of the American Labor Party, closed off two important avenues for radicalism amongst Puerto Ricans in the United States. Moreover, mainstream politics was not generally open to Puerto Ricans. Neither the Democratic nor Republican parties were very much interested in having Puerto Ricans participate in the political process. In fact, exclusion from the political process was the experience of Puerto Ricans.”⁷⁴

      In 1967 the first major Puerto Rican riots broke out in New York City. They began after a police officer shot a Puerto Rican man he accused of wielding a knife. “For three nights, residents of East Harlem and the South Bronx attacked stores, looting and burning them. More than a thousand police, including many Tactical Patrol Force officers[,] were sent to contain the disorder but, according to news reports, this ‘only aggravated community resentment.’”⁷⁵ Once again the presence of the police, and particularly the new Tactical Patrol Force, prompted black and Latino radicals to equate the police with an occupying army.⁷⁶

      The precipitating incident occurred at noon. At 1:35 P.M. the police barricaded the block. At 8:30 the first bottles crashed over the crowd. Looting started around 10:00. At midnight one group of Puerto Ricans carrying a Puerto Rican flag tried to march to the 103rd Street precinct but was blocked by police. Others tried marching to city hall and were also blocked. The police grabbed one youth carrying a Puerto Rican flag. They grabbed another they claimed had thrown a Molotov cocktail.⁷⁷ In Mott Haven, South Bronx, “throngs of Puerto Ricans ran through the streets and broke some windows.”⁷⁸ Shortly after midnight, police herded a crowd into a housing project in East Harlem, and as the hostages tried to break free, the police charged at them with clubs. The police came under sniper fire on 112th Street between Second and Third, some papers reported, and a Puerto Rican youth’s neck was broken after the cease-fire. At Third and 110th Street someone drew a chalk line and scrawled “Puerto Rican border. Do not cross, flatfoot.” Media sources warned that some blacks from Harlem were also seen in the area (though it is difficult to know

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