BUILD, BABY, BUILD: WHY THE SUMMER WAS QUIET

In the hot Paris summer of 1794, the fall of Robespierre signaled the end of the Reign of Terror and opened a fresh era of calm and consolidation. It was the year II in the new French revolutionary calendar, and the month was named Thermidor. In his classic analysis, The Anatomy of Revolution, the late Harvard historian Crane Brinton called Thermidor "a convalescence from the fever of revolution."

THE American racial revolt of the 1960s has in no sense been a full-scale upheaval like the French Revolution. Yet it can be said that in the relatively cool American summer of 1969, a Thermidor convalescence from the long fever of racial tumult seems to be under way. There has been no wholesale rioting in the black ghettos of the U.S. since the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in April 1968. By a Department of Justice count, the number of racial disturbances of all sizes has fallen off sharply in 1969 from the two previous summers (see chart, next page). The 1965 holocaust of Watts left 34 dead and $40 million in property damage; 43 died in the Detroit riots of 1967 and damage there was also $40 million. This summer's biggest outbreak was a three-night June melee without fatalities in Omaha that destroyed $750,000 worth of property.

There were disturbing Labor Day incidents last week in Hartford, Conn., Camden, N.J., and Fort Lauderdale, Fla. In the present calm context, they seem somehow atavistic--only smaller recurrences in lesser cities of the convulsions that racked major metropolises much earlier. The whites and blacks of minor urban centers are still learning the lessons that have brought a hopeful Thermidor transformation to cities already tempered in destructive flames. For New York, Newark, Chicago, Los Angeles, Cleveland and Detroit, it was the fire last time--and those cities may have profited from the experience.

Temporary Immunization. It is perhaps only coincidence that none of the cities inoculated by major riot have yet suffered a second big outbreak; in the curious chemistry of violence, they seem to have achieved at least a temporary kind of immunization. No one pretends that the problems of the nation's blacks have been solved, and no one yet dares predict what may come after the Thermidor pause is over.* But governments and ghettos alike have become more sophisticated and skillful at handling their common difficulties. Expressing a widespread view, Jack Meltzer, director of the University of Chicago Center for Urban Studies, observes: "The black community realizes that riots hurt them more than help them."

There are good reasons for guarded hope. Many new elements, some constructive, some negative, explain the relative quiescence of the black ghetto this summer. Among them:

sb A NEW SENSE OF RESPONSIBILITY has emerged within the black community. The big outbursts starting with Harlem, 1964, were riots of rising expectations, of frenzy at the gap between reality and the promise of the Civil Rights Acts. The riots showed blacks they were not impotent, but also that their best hopes resided in themselves, not in the white man's City Hall or in Washington. Explains Junius Williams, 25, black founder of the Newark Area Planning Association: "The rebellion kicked off something in a lot of people's minds. We've got power, they said, and let's do something about it." The cry shifted from "Burn, baby, burn!" to "Build, baby, build!"

The building has begun. There is a visible push for more education; more blacks than ever before are now in college, and more than 60% of male black students now finish high school. Around the land, Black Panthers have started ghetto clinics and breakfast and lunch programs for schoolchildren--not without criticism from more moderate blacks. Professor Barbara Solomon of the University of Southern California denounces the Panthers' Los Angeles Freedom School as "brainwashing children to hate the white man."

A New Orleans militant group called Thugs United has won financial aid from the city's staid Chamber of Commerce for black self-help programs. Milwaukee has a "Summerfest" of rock festivals and fashion shows. In Cincinnati, Richard Bedgood's black Checkmates group organized a series of summer leisure programs in the ghetto. Says Bedgood: "Everyone was real happy. Like man, they brought jazz groups in, they brought the symphony in, we had plays, we had rock groups. Practically every night they had something going. There was just no time to riot." Leon Atchison, assistant to Detroit's able black Representative John Conyers Jr., calls these bootstrap efforts "sort of a Reconstruction revisited." He adds: "After the violence of 1967, it became apparent to blacks that war and confrontation in the streets was not the answer. It's a no-win deal."

sb JOBS AND POLITICAL POWER have become the goal. "There is a more serious concentration now on the hard issues of economics and politics" says Vernon Jordan, director of the Southern Regional Council's Voter Education Project. Jordan finds it hopeful that blacks have elected mayors in Fayette, Miss., and Chapel Hill, N.C., and the sheriff of Macon County, Ala. Those successes are partly counterbalanced by such setbacks as the defeat of black Councilman Tom Bradley in the Los Angeles mayoral race and the landslide election of a tough law-enforcement mayor in Minneapolis.

What happens to New York's liberal Mayor John Lindsay in November, says Jordan, will be a weathervane for blacks. If he loses to Democrat Mario Procaccino, a hard-line candidate, black hopes for political participation will sag. Blacks in Newark plan to run a candidate for mayor next year against big odds. The election of right-wing white Anthony Imperiale would be a traumatic setback. Blacks are fielding Richard Austin for mayor this year in Detroit, where almost 40% of the registered voters are black. In Atlanta, nine blacks are running for alderman and at least three will probably be elected.

Milwaukee's militant Father James Groppi finds that "the black community has become a lot more sophisticated." One sign of that is a zeroing in on more jobs for blacks. Industry in Cincinnati has provided 1,800 places for the hard-core unemployed in the past 15 months--a stabilizing influence. William Chenault, a black city councilman, explains: "You give a guy who shrieks he needs a job some training, and he has less time to shriek. With a job, maybe he won't want to." Says Kansas City Councilman Earl Thomas, a black: "Government has provided a lot of words but little action. The confrontation will shift to the labor unions and industry too. That's where the power lies."

The construction industry has become a new, national target for blacks, because building-trade unions are notorious for keeping black membership to a token minimum; blacks hold only 2% of the nation's 800,000 high-paying skilled construction jobs. Last week Negro demonstrators in Pittsburgh forced the city's construction unions into negotiations presided over by a local judge and aided by state mediators. In Chicago, in mid-July, blacks closed down nearly $100 million worth of new construction on the South and West Side; an injunction ended the demonstrations after a month, but the blacks won the right to negotiate with the city's Building Trades Union Council.

Last week the N.A.A.C.P. filed suits in Buffalo and Chicago demanding a halt in Government building programs until blacks get a fair share of jobs, and asked the Department of Housing and Urban Development to stop the Model Cities program in Charlotte, N.C., until the city comes up with a plan giving blacks more of the work. Pending the outcome of negotiations, blacks are preparing demonstrations against the construction unions in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Milwaukee and St. Louis. Some white union members find these tactics irritating, but the blacks are simply using traditional and legal means to make their point and speed their climb up the economic ladder.

sb MONEY has helped too, flooding into the ghetto through both federal aid programs and private business. Though poverty-program appropriations have been shrinking, Government manpower training is on the rise, funding of Model Cities is getting under way, and the Small Business Administration tripled its loans to black businessmen in 1968. Many militants have been drawn onto the payrolls of local government. Besides governmental efforts, of course, many of the nation's biggest corporations are continuing and expanding their programs for hiring and training the hard-core unemployed. In Houston, 27 banks have lent $800,000 to 60 black businessmen and pledged $6.6 million more. "The total community," says the city's Business Resource Center director, Val McCoy, "is concerned with giving minorities a piece of the action." However, President Nixon's promised federal support for black capitalism has not materialized, and the movement is still in its infancy.

sb WHITE ATTITUDES toward the problems of the ghetto are becoming notably better informed in the larger cities. New York's Mayor Lindsay has wisely forborne forcing the issue with protesters harmlessly occupying a state building site in Harlem. Blacks give the mayor credit for New York's relative racial calm since 1964. Says Harlem's Episcopal Father Trevor Bentley: "The so-called white backlash is beginning to dissipate now. There is beginning to be a little more understanding." Many of the South's old-style red-neck policemen have been quietly retired or transferred from ghetto duty. Says Florida's Dade County Sheriff Wilson Purdy: "The root causes have not been solved, but I think the colored community and the police family have a better understanding and better dialogue than a year ago." Los Angeles cops in Watts this summer had orders: "You smile, no matter what."

Consider the remarkable case of John Rockel, 25, a patrolman who made 65 arrests during Cincinnati's June 1967 riots--20 of them in one swoop--and found himself the black community's most hated cop. Since then Rockel has studied black history at the University of Cincinnati and now works in the police community-relations division; today the city's blacks point to him as a paragon of maturity and judgment. "We have learned by our mistakes," Rockel admits. Police restraint and widespread effective use of police community-relations programs recommended by the Kerner Commission report on racial violence have done much to cool the ghetto scene. So much so, in fact, that Assistant HEW Secretary James Farmer, himself a veteran black militant, attributes last week's outbreaks in part to a possible relapse in police diplomacy. "The police have figured that the heat is off and they can go back to business as usual," says Farmer.

sb FEAR AND FRAGMENTATION have also worked to keep the ghettos quiet, even though police behavior has generally improved. The example of Chicago's police during the 1968 Democratic Convention gave blacks pause. What, many asked themselves, if that fury were directed at us? Many Detroit blacks believe that there are white men in the city who would happily level the ghetto if another uprising occurred. If they have learned how to smile, big city police are also better armed and equipped, and better trained now in the tactics of dealing with racial danger quickly and massively. Calling in the National Guard, once in effect an admission that a situation was getting out of control, is now early routine in almost any sizable disturbance. "Black people are painfully aware that they are a minority in this country," says Ben Holman, black director of the Justice Department's Community Relations Service. "They don't want to commit suicide."

Rock or Rifle. Added to that fear is disunity among black militants; the Panthers have engaged in bitter battle with Ron Karenga's US, a rival organization. What is more, white liberals are disaffected by the riots and by the increasing radicalization of black leadership. White radicals still in the Black Power movement are trying to regain a voice in its leadership. "Things are becoming localized and fragmented," says Los Angeles' R. C. Robinson, black president of the NARTRANS, a subsidiary of the giant North American Rockwell aerospace conglomerate. "We lack a national figure like Stokely Carmichael." Rap Brown is in jail, Eldridge Cleaver is in exile and Malcolm X is dead. The absence of national leadership has its positive side, however, for the vacuum has encouraged the growth of local strength and initiative.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Nixon's urban affairs adviser, believes that possibly the high point of violence has already been reached. "I would think we have passed that," he said last week. If he is right--and events going back through this summer to the Martin Luther King riots of 1968 indicate that he might be--it is an extraordinary and unexpected evolution within the black revolution. In the worst hours of the most reckless rioting, many white Americans feared that the fire next time would strike where the white man lives and works. This ugly vision of race war on the white man's doorstep led bridge-playing suburban housewives to sign up for marksmanship practice. It was a vision amply fueled by the unbridled rhetoric of black militants, but it has not come to pass.

What seems to be happening is that, more and more, the American black is reaching out for new and less violent tools to achieve his aims. This does not mean that a restless teen-ager with rock or rifle or a tactless and brutal policeman cannot still ignite a mob in any ghetto. But rioting is no longer the black community's instant, reflex response. Through a new alchemy of awareness, the word has passed on what Malcolm X called "the wire," the black grapevine: "Cool it." The internal sanctions of the ghetto now work against spontaneous combustion.

If the new black pride, and the efforts it has inspired, should be ultimately thwarted, the present mood could suddenly change, and all the old bitterness and violence could come back redoubled by a new sense of failure. If whites in industry, in labor unions, in government, indeed everywhere, decided that the relative calm in the ghetto meant that they could relax rather than press ahead with fresh help, welcoming the blacks into all parts of American society, then the result could be racial chaos far worse than any the U.S. has yet known.

* In France, the Thermidorian period ended with the establishment of the five-man Directory late in 1795, after the suppression of a public revolt by a young Corsican officer named Napoleon Bonaparte. Napoleon himself seized power in a 1799 coup d'etat.

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