Mind Over Mayhem

For a while last week, it seemed as if the black-power fanatics were all too accurate in predicting anarchy in the nation's slums this summer. In cities as disparate as Tampa, Fla., and Prattville, Ala., Cincinnati and Los Angeles, fire bombs flared and mobs coursed the streets. Store fronts were smashed by looters, and the flames of riot blazed intermittently--but they never reached the roaring pitch of a Watts or a Harlem, a Chicago or a Hough. In most of the cities, cool tactics by police and city governments kept the flare-ups from becoming "the fire next time," and proved once again that riot is as much a state of mind as of mayhem.

The Real Heroes. Tampa's three-day upheaval began when a white patrolman shot and killed a 19-year-old Negro burglary suspect as the youth ran from him. The patrolman claimed that the youth was about to get away when he pulled the trigger at a distance of 25 ft. Negroes who were standing near by said it was a much closer shot; indisputably, the victim was shot in the back. With that, the mobs began gathering. Arsonists set fires in stores, a lumberyard, half a dozen vacant houses. After rioters broke into a gun store on Cass Street, firemen found slugs snapping around them; a white couple, attracted by the flames, were dragged out of their car and beaten.

For their part, the police and National Guardsmen kept their gunfire to a minimum (two Negroes were treated for minor gunshot wounds). The real heroes of Tampa were the members of the "City Youth Patrol," a hastily organized band of 150 young Negroes--many of whom had hurled rocks and fire bombs the night before--who tramped the slums in white hard hats and warned the mobs to cool it. By midweek, thanks to their efforts, the temperature of violence had fallen enough for Governor Kirk to order the National Guard back to their homes.

Tin Badge. In neighboring Alabama, trouble was triggered not by shooting but by shouting. Black Power Prophet Stokely Carmichael started it with a wild argument at a voter registration meeting in Prattville, a reputed Ku Klux Klan stronghold ten miles from Montgomery. Stokely's target was Prattville Assistant Police Chief Kenneth Hill, who shot and killed a Negro early this year during a jailbreak attempt after a mistaken arrest for murder. When Hill showed up at the meeting, Carmichael yelled: "Take that tin badge off and I'll take care of you myself!" After getting reinforcements, the cops arrested Carmichael on the spot.

With that, Negro marchers took to the streets in nearby Montgomery, a city whose mayor, Earl James, prefers to handle civil rights demonstrators without violence. Although Alabama's Governor Lurleen Wallace sent in National Guardsmen, Mayor James's police gave the Negroes an escort and thus precluded a direct confrontation. Released on $500 bail, Carmichael tried to whip up the mob with black-power speeches, but its members--mostly youngsters--only cheered a bit and sang a few songs, then broke up and went home.

The Riot Act. Cincinnati's four-day outburst was the longest of the week, and in many ways the most ominous. Triggered by the arrest of a Negro demonstrator who was protesting a death sentence imposed upon his cousin, Posteal Laskey,* the riots raged not through a Negro slum, but in spacious, residential neighborhoods, where many of the city's 110,000 Negroes were moved when Cincinnati razed its ghetto as part of a $100 million urban-renewal program. After three days, during which more than 100 stores and businesses were firebombed, Mayor Walton Bachrach called in the National Guard. Police read the state riot act to the mobs over loudspeakers, then arrested 16 Negroes who were "congregating" in defiance of the act.

When Municipal Judge William S. Mathews sentenced a dozen Negro violators to a year in jail and a $500 fine each, rioting erupted in Cincinnati's workhouse, a fetid bastille built over a century ago to house Civil War prisoners. Inmates, both black and white, began hurling rotten bricks and the contents of their toilet pails (the workhouse has no lavatories) at the prison guards.

By week's end, after damages totaling more than $1.5 million, Cincinnati's tremors subsided toward an uneasy peace--but not before the riot mood had spread to Dayton, 50 miles to the north. There S.N.C.C. Chairman H. Rap Brown, fresh from the Prattville mob scene, urged Negroes to "take the pressure off Cincinnati," and advised them that "the honkey (white man) is your enemy. How can you be nonviolent in America, the most violent country in the world? You better shoot that man to death." As the pattern of burning and looting emerged in Dayton for the second time in a year, police lifted a page from Tampa and sent white-helmeted Negro youth patrols into the ghetto to talk other youths off the streets. Again the experiment worked.

Speed & Experience. Whereas Cincinnati's rioting was exacerbated by what Negroes considered harsh justice, the flare-up last week in Los Angeles' perennially explosive Watts area was extinguished by swift, steady police action. When a fire broke out in a military-surplus storage yard, it looked like the first spark. Soon rocks were winging at firemen, and Police Chief Thomas J. Reddin ordered a "tactical police alert"; he threw a cordon of 80 cops around the scene of the fire and snuffed out a potential riot.

In the midst of the week's melees, a score of Negro leaders representing every stripe, from the moderation of Roy Wilkins to the militance of Floyd McKissick, met outside New York City. Their agreed aim was to head off further racial eruptions this summer, and after the meeting Wilkins issued a "red alert" to the N.A.A.C.P.'s 1,500 chapters. "Don't just be against riots," Wilkins urged, "be active in preventing them." He announced that bumper stickers would be issued with slogans such as BRICKS THROUGH WINDOWS DON'T OPEN DOORS.

Senseless and cruel as the week's riots were, their resolution offered hopeful pointers for the future. Given levelheaded law enforcement, maintenance of open communication with local Negro leadership, and--above all, perhaps --the deployment of concerned and responsible Negroes like the Tampa and Dayton "white hats," city officials may well be able to avert full-scale conflagrations that can only scar their cities and needlessly inflame race relations.

*Convicted for stabbing a white secretary, Laskey was believed to be "the Cincinnati strangler" who killed five women in a year; no similar murders have been committed since his arrest last December.

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