Spreading Fire

Even as the fury of Newark abated last week, other Negro ghettos flared like gunpowder dropped in a fire.

Fifteen miles to the southwest, a Negro mob in Plainfield, N.J., surrounded a white policeman and stomped him to death. Trouble erupted in nearby Elizabeth, New Brunswick, Jersey City and Englewood. Halfway across the nation, gangs of young Negroes in Cairo, Ill., hurled fire bombs and sniped sporadically for two nights, until Illinois Governor Otto Kerner ordered in 50 National Guard troops. Six hundred guardsmen were mobilized in Minneapolis, whose Negro population is only 2%, after two nights of rock throwing and arson. Gangs in Des Moines and Cedar Rapids, Iowa, lobbed rocks and vitriol at Whitey. In West Fresno, Calif., Negro rioters set fire to a lumberyard, spent three nights bombarding the community with rocks and Molotov cocktails. Durham, N.C., Erie, Pa., and Nyack, N.Y., were the scenes of racial eruptions.

Rats & Riots. With the summer less than half gone, nobody can predict where the fire will strike next time. "It can't be graphed," said Attorney General Ramsey Clark. "The conditions have existed over many years." Already in 1967, the flames have blistered some 30 cities--Omaha, Houston, Chicago,

Nashville, Jackson, Boston, Tampa, Cincinnati, Atlanta, Buffalo, Kansas City, Hartford, and any place else where a spark has chanced to touch the volatile emotions of the ghetto.

In the face of the rioting, Congress --reflecting a widespread feeling of resentment and fear among white Americans--showed little inclination to waste time on civil rights bills. A $40 million program to help local communities exterminate rats--a serious problem in the slums--was pigeonholed in the House amid some hilarity (Iowa Republican H. R. Gross wanted to know if there would be a high commissioner for rats). At the same time, an antiriot act that would impose up to five years' imprisonment and a $10,000 fine on anyone who crosses state lines with the object of stirring up trouble zipped through the House by a 347-to-70 vote. "This bill," protested New York's Emanuel Celler, "will not allay but will rather arouse more deeply the Negro's anger and frustration."

While Newark swept its streets, assessed its losses (upwards of $30 million) and buried its dead (24 Negroes, two whites), Plainfield bordered on anarchy. Ghetto spokesmen warned during a meeting with city officials that unless looters and minor offenders were released on their own recognizance, "we will tear this town apart." "Is that a threat?" asked one reporter. "This is no threat, baby," replied a Negro. "It's a promise." Most minor offenders were duly sprung.

Two days later, the city of 48,500 (more than one-fourth Negro) nearly exploded anyway, when a force of 300 police and National Guardsmen rumbled into the 16-block riot area in a house-to-house search for 46 semiautomatic rifles that had been stolen from a nearby munitions plant. The searchers unearthed four weapons, and in the process left several houses a shambles.

Police-Negro tensions continued very high throughout the area. In Newark, police and National Guardsmen were accused of deliberately smashing windows of stores bearing the legend "Soul Brother"--a sign of Negro ownership. In one case, each letter of "soul" was stitched with bullets. Often, when snipers fired from rooftops or windows, lawmen responded by riddling the entire building with withering fusillades, despite commands to "know your target before firing." Mrs. Eloise Spellman, 41, mother of eleven, died when she stood up from her living room couch just as a police barrage began.

No Sheep. After a riot, complaints of "police brutality" are as inevitable as insurance claims. Often they are justified, for appallingly few U.S. cops are trained in riot control. In Newark, well-drilled state troopers took over in many places from the ineffective city police and National Guardsmen. During Cleveland's 1966 eruption, cops with inadequate training were alternately too lenient and too rough with the rampaging residents of Hough. New York's 28,000-man force, more than twice as big as any other in the nation, is also among the most thoroughly drilled in riot control. Commissioner Howard Leary was hired from Philadelphia after his men contained a potentially disastrous riot in 1964, with no deaths.

While Negroes blamed police for aggravating Newark's riot, the police blamed "outside agitators." Mayor Hugh Addonizio, for his part, blamed the absence of Negro leadership. "He assumes Negroes are sheep to be led by one man or one group," snapped Andrew Washington of the Newark-Essex Congress of Racial Equality. Another Negro, one of some 900 who assembled in Newark for a conference on black power, told the New York Times: "There was only one man who could have walked on Springfield Avenue and said, 'Brothers, cool it.' That was Malcolm X. We have no such leaders now. Whitey doesn't understand this. Some little Negro pork chop preacher who is hustling pot and girls in a storefront church goes to city hall and gets all sorts of promises. That's not grass-roots leadership, but Whitey thinks he's dealing with responsible Negroes."

The assembled leaders of black power couldn't have sounded responsible to Whitey--and they couldn't have cared less. The Student Nonviolent Coordinat ing Committee's H. Rap Brown urged Negroes to "wage guerrilla war on the honkie white man," added: "I love violence." Los Angeles Black Nationalist Ron Karenga remarked at the opening session: "Everybody knows Whitey's a devil. The question is what to do about it." Notably absent were the N.A.A.C.P.'s Roy Wilkins, the National Urban League's Whitney Young Jr., and Martin Luther King Jr. Harlem's Adam Clayton Powell, honorary co-chairman of the conference, decided to keep on fishing in Bimini. Conference leaders discouraged delegates from talking to reporters; one white newsman was pitched out of a ground-floor window and four others were roughed up when a gang of young Negro militants barged into a press conference screaming: "Get the Whitey press!"

Vindicating Violence. In Newark, the riot brought a spate of programs in its wake. The N.A.A.C.P. is launching a massive voter-registration drive, which could give the city, with a majority Negro population, a Negro mayor within a few years. (Some delegates to the black power conference did not want to wait that long, announced that they would seek a special election to recall Addonizio and elect a Negro.) The business community formed a committee to seek financial help for merchants whose shops were destroyed. Some 60 whites and Negroes established a Committee of Concern to examine problems of housing, voter registration, legal aid, welfare and education.

The trouble with such post-riot programs, of course, is that they seem to vindicate violence. "After a riot, it's difficult to know what to do," observes Harvard Sociologist Thomas Pettigrew. "If you go in immediately and do everything you haven't done for 50 years, you are rewarding the riot. If you do nothing, you are inviting another riot."

In Cairo, one Negro warned Sheriff Chesley Willis that if his demands were not met within 72 hours, the town "will go up in flames." Replied Willis: "If that happens, you'll find out how many white extremists there are here."

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