Recipe for Riot

It was not a Harlem or a Watts or a Hough, or any of a dozen other big-city slums where rotting tenements and crestfallen store fronts can spell riot on sweltering summer nights. Yet Atlanta's Dixie Hills--600 cheap apartment units built within the last decade--had all of the classic ingredients for violence, and four nights of turmoil last week added Atlanta to the list of cities that have been hit by ghettomania this spring and summer.

The first night's unrest started with a scuffle in front of a Dixie Hills supermarket between a Negro security guard and a Negro youth with a can of beer; the second night's with the arrest of Black Power Leader Stokely Carmichael, 26, and four companions, for disregarding police orders to leave the area. Undaunted, Carmichael returned the next night to demonstrate his peculiar flair for inflammable oratory.

Raising his audience to the sought-for pitch, Carmichael claimed that the police had everybody marked and were ready to shoot. He asked his listeners not to clap for applause because that would only let off steam. "That's our trouble," he said. "We've been letting off steam when we should have slapped some heads." Rocks and bottles were soon whizzing through the air, windows of police squad cars were shattered, and eight persons were arrested. Carmichael, by this time, was dancing the boogaloo at a downtown nightclub.

"The Trouble Is . . ." Yet for all of Stokely's rabble-rousing, a band of youths similar to the "white hats" who proved so effective in Tampa and Dayton (see following story) was recruited the next day to help dampen any potential riot sparks. Dixie Hills looked as if it might avoid serious bloodshed. Shortly after dark, however, there was another brief flurry of rock throwing, and a Molotov cocktail landed at the feet of policemen patrolling the area. Almost instantaneously at least one shotgun blast was fired, killing an onlooker and injuring three others, one critically. Though police insisted that a sniper had fired the shot, all four victims were indisputably hit with the No. 00 shot used by police.

Whatever the direct cause of last week's bloodshed, the underlying malaise in Dixie Hills is obvious enough. Rats and roaches infest every building, plumbing is erratic, owners refuse to make repairs or even plant grass in the dusty, barren areas between buildings. Trash and garbage have been collected irregularly, gaping holes in the streets have gone unrepaired, and recreational facilities have been nonexistent. Most serious, more than half of the younger men are unemployed. "They just hang around the streets," says Richard Freeman, chairman of the board of aldermen's police committee. "The trouble is, nobody does anything until you have some trouble like this."

His point could not have been better underscored than by the bevy of city workers who descended on the area in the quiet days that followed. Trash was collected, potholes in the streets were repaired, an access road was started to a small park several blocks away. Unfortunately for Dixie Hills, action had come too late.

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