How to Cool It

Something was in fact being done to avert racial violence in the slums this summer.

In Tampa, Fla., Dayton, Atlanta and Boston, all of them already scarred by riots this season, city officials and Negro community leaders have hit upon one device that is at least promising: the formation of "white hat" patrols, young Negroes enlisted to police their own neighborhoods, thus reducing hazardous friction between ghetto dwellers and police.

"Uncle Tom." At the height of the Tampa riots this month, Community Relations Commission Director James Hammond cannily located five Negro gang leaders, all but one of them with police records, outfitted them with white helmets and arm bands, and persuaded them to preach calm and restraint in the streets (TIME, June 23). As the volunteer patrol grew to 150, the leaders were astonished at its popularity. "In my neighborhood," said one, "as many as five or six guys would share one helmet. They'd say, 'Hey, man, it's my turn to wear that.'"

Inevitably, there were sneers of "Uncle Tom." In Atlanta, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee Chairman H. Rap Brown growled: "To the brothers putting on the white hats--you are to be regarded as traitors, and will be dealt with as traitors." But in Dayton, where the youth patrol of 30 effectively broke up disorderly crowds and performed liaison between their peers and police, many Negro residents told the white hats: "God bless you!"

Long Cold Winter. However successful the youth patrols may be in extinguishing ghetto explosions, they represent at best an expedient. "Everyone is worrying about the long hot summer," Martin Luther King Jr. observed last week. "We had a long cold winter when little was done about the conditions that create riots." Some cities are making a start. In Chicago, the Negro newspaper, Daily Defender, has launched an extensive "Keep a Cool Summer" campaign, prodding the city to extend evening playground hours and build public swimming pools, sponsoring a contest offering $1,000 for the best plan for peace in the ghetto, persuading thousands of residents to take a "Cool It" pledge.

While most major cities lean on federal poverty funds or routine municipal recreation and job-finding agencies to offer nonriotous outlets for the dissident and poor, New York has set out to spread much of the responsibility among its own conscientious citizens. Fifty-five businessmen have enlisted in Mayor John Lindsay's Citizens Summer Committee project, which is co-chaired by Metropolitan Museum of Art Director (and former City Parks Commissioner) Thomas Hoving and Time Inc. Board Chairman Andrew Heiskell. Some $500,000 in corporation cash has already poured in to pay for summer recreation programs. One project that got underway this month was the Clairol Caravan, a touring company that is bringing fashion shows, rock 'n' roll concerts and other entertainment to 30 small parks all over the country--including New York's Central Park. New York companies have "contributed" more than 5,000 jobs for the poor to augment the list of 14,000 jobs already filled by the Neighborhood Youth Corps. The Citizens Summer Committee's pitch: "Don't come around in August asking what went wrong."

Some members of the U.S. Congress, meantime, had a notion of where part of the trouble comes from. Last week a subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee rushed through a bill that would make it a federal crime, punishable by up to five years in jail and $10,000 in fines, to cross a state boundary to "incite, organize, promote or encourage" a riot.

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