The Long, Hot Summer

Picketers at City Hall, Newark, New Jersey, July 16, 1967

A riot is the language of the unheard.

— Martin Luther King, Jr.

Summer '67 still lodges in my memory. It won't move out.

I was 15 and lived two miles from Springfield Avenue, ground zero of the week-long riots that, until quelled, rocked the once-placid and pretty city of Newark. 

I remember the troops and the half-tracks, the smoke and the barricades, the sniper-fire and skyward nightly blazes. I also remember all the tough talk of pals and neighbors and the gang at the barber shop (always my conduit to the adult world). Nixon and George Wallace were sounding pretty good of a sudden and the government had better crack down hard on the blootches or we're all fucked.

But at home—our still-tolerant, FDR-democrat stronghold—not a syllable of criticism for the rioters was uttered that week; and I'm glad for that.

Newark was the worst of the 159 "race riots" that combusted across the US during The Long, Hot Summer, a phrase coined in 1940 by William Faulkner in The Hamlet and made popular by the steamy 1958 movie based on his novel.

Faulkner's 1949 Nobel Prize had made him an important spokesman for civil-rights moderates who endorsed "gradualism." the notion that, for society to improve, blacks need only wait—to sit tight until whites come to around to their point-of-view. Just you wait and see, things will get better.

Faulkner revealed his middle-of-the-road stripes (I'm mixing metaphors) in a March 1956 letter to Life Magazine, published as a commentary on the recent arrest in Montgomery of the ringleader of the Bus Boycott, Martin Luther King, Jr. 

In the letter, Faulkner made clear that, though he loathed Jim Crow, he equally hated the prospect of compulsory integration: "So I would say to all the organizations and groups which would force integration on the South by legal process: ‘Stop now for a moment. You have shown the Southerner what you can do and what you will do if necessary; give him a space in which to get his breath and assimilate that knowledge."

To which King the next week replied, “We can’t slow up. We can’t slow up and have our dignity and self respect. We can’t slow up because of our love for democracy and our love for America. Someone should tell Faulkner that the vast majority of the people on this globe are colored."

And although Montgomery made integration the law of the land, Newark boiled over eleven years later. The July '67 riots began after two white cops beat and arrested a black cabbie for passing their double-parked cruiser. Within a day, the molotov cocktails were flying. The six days of riots left 26 dead and hundreds injured. Property damage exceeded $77 million. White flight escalated and once-placid and pretty Newark entered an ugly  downward spiral it has yet to reverse.

The morning after the riots ended, the Springfield Avenue precinct police chief assembled his officers on the steps of the precinct house to give them a pep talk. 

“Just return it to normal," he said. "Don’t treat it as a situation. Because once you begin to look at problems as problems, they become problems.”

PS: Go here to see a gallery of photos from The Long, Hot Summer.