The Long Summer

As civil rights leaders split over philosophy and strategy, racial disturbances continued to break out in scattered spots throughout the U.S.--as they had nearly every other week this summer: P:Roving bands of Negro youths roamed through the Negro section of Dayton--looting, stoning buses and breaking store windows--after a Negro man was fatally wounded by shotgun blasts fired from a passing car containing three white men. Some 1,000 National Guardsmen and several hundred city policemen and sheriff's deputies sealed off the west-side area, which contains about 15,000 of Dayton's 70,000 Negroes, and arrested more than 100 rioters before order was restored. More than 20 persons were injured, most of them whites driving through the section before it was cordoned off. The rioting was the first for Dayton, which is about 25% Negro. "There is no question," said City Commissioner Don Crawford, a Negro, "that Dayton is having its moment of truth today." -- Negro mobs, continuing sporadic rioting started two weeks ago after the arrest of a Negro youth, threw fire bombs from buildings in Waukegan, Ill., a blue-collar community near Chicago, setting cars ablaze and burning seven people, two of them critically. After police quelled the riots, Mayor Robert Sabonjian, who has steadfastly rebuffed overtures to improve race relations, moved to cut off relief and unemployment benefits to the rioters, ordered the city housing authority to evict some of those arrested. The city also set bond so high that few could be released from jail. Sabonjian called the rioters "animals, junkheads, winos and scum," said that their actions were "not the acts of human beings."

-- The mayor of Benton Harbor, Mich., a fruit-marketing center of 19,000, declared a state of emergency and 350 Michigan National Guardsmen were put on alert after two nights of violence followed the fatal shooting of a Negro youth by a white man. Negroes had been complaining about lack of recreational facilities and what they called the discourtesy of local police.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.