The Summer: Cloudy, Occasional Storms

IN a largely black enclave of Miami called Brownsville, the trouble began when the white manager of a Pic 'N' Pay supermarket charged a woman $1.25 to cash her $157 welfare check. There had already been complaints that black customers were often addressed as "nigger" and that the store was selling rotten meat. State inspectors had ordered more than 500 Ibs. of meat destroyed because it was spoiling as a result of poor refrigeration, but the move was too late. Early last week, blacks hit the streets, stoning passing cars on Northwest 27th Avenue, beating up white motorists, sniping and fire-bombing

Dade County Sheriff E. Wilson Purdy slapped on an 8:30 p.m.-to-5 a.m. curfew, but many ignored it. For three nights, young blacks roamed the area. They smashed windows, looted and tossed fire bombs; by the end, it seemed like organized guerrilla warfare. On the fourth day, police agreed to withdraw extra forces, permitted a black mass meeting and allowed black volunteers to patrol the district themselves. In the rioting 15 blacks and three whites were wounded by gunfire, and another 47 Miamians were otherwise injured.

Largest Losers. In Des Moines last week, several hundred blacks and whites mixed in a melee that started after a black escaped convict, Lewis Stephen Wheeler, died after a gun battle with police. Recently angry blacks in Brooklyn burned uncollected garbage and stoned firemen who fought more than 100 separate fires in one night; Puerto Ricans in East Harlem flared up over the arrest of one of the militant Young Lords. Smaller cities are at or past the flash point. Black and white youngsters in the steel town of Aliquippa, Pa., have been battling sporadically since their confrontations forced the closing of their schools in May. In Wilmington, Del., where National Guard troops were kept on duty for more than nine months after the rioting that followed the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, black tension remains high. Says Wilmington's Mayor Hal Haskell: "No mayor in his right mind would predict right now that there won't be trouble in his city. There is a potential for trouble in every city in the U.S."

Indeed there is. Outbreaks of race violence are now more limited than they were in Harlem in 1964 or Detroit and Newark three years later. They are also generally shorter and less widespread. Yet, while police in many cities have become more skillful, and blacks have come to recognize that they are the largest losers when their own neighborhoods blow up, no one dares say flatly that the era of the long hot summer is ended. For 1970, the cautious expert forecast is: cloudy, with occasional thunderstorms.

Among the possible storm centers this summer:

NEW ENGLAND. A. Reginald Eaves, a black who heads the mayor's human rights office in Boston, worries that a large number of the city's young blacks "have become far more militant than we anticipated--the whole 'Off the pigs!' atmosphere is getting thicker." The Connecticut River towns of Springfield, Mass., and Hartford, Conn., have had outbreaks before and may again. In Springfield, blacks and whites armed with chains and baseball bats have faced off in hostile groups after high school classes: the atmosphere in Hartford has changed little since a Labor Day eruption last year. Police and National Guard officers are edgy about the chance of flare-ups during the trial of Black Panther Bobby Scale in New Haven. NEW YORK. In the nation's largest city, Mayor John Lindsay, who has not had to face a major riot since he took office in 1966, is unusually concerned this summer. His past success came from personal sympathy and community programs for the blacks, but that has an gered working-class whites. Barry Gottehrer, a Lindsay aide for race relations, says: "You know that you're going to have about seven things every summer. If you do everything right, you gain the night--and that's something." PENNSYLVANIA. Philadelphia, which did not have a major riot in the 1960s, may escape again through a combination of elaborate recreational programs and a tough but well-trained police force under Commissioner Frank Rizzo. The city of York (pop. 50,000), near the Maryland border, has had nasty troubles in the past two summers, and 1970 looks no better; last month a 14-year-old black was grabbed off the street, allegedly by six white men, then taken out of town, where he was beaten and partially scalped. Pittsburgh and the surrounding mill towns have seen black-white confrontations in the high schools like those in Aliquippa. A threatened statewide cut of 75% in some welfare payments has increased unrest among Pennsylvania blacks.

MIDWEST. While Chicago had a minor incident in the uptown section of the North Side last week, Deputy Police Su; perintendent Samuel Nolan is "not anticipating any serious problems--though > we recognize the possibilities at any given time." The Rev. Calvin Morris, a J, black who is Chicago director of Operation Breadbasket, disagrees: "We're 1 in store for a lot of trouble. People are I tense and mistrustful, and the police are tense and mistrustful." In the De-L- troit area, Wayne County Sheriff William Lucas expects some flare-ups in the inner city but worse incidents in suburbs with smoldering racial problems; River Rouge had three nights of racial disturbances in April. In Indianapolis, law enforcement men expect things to be quiet. St. Louis police say they are keeping their fingers crossed. THE SOUTH. The Miami eruption may not be typical since the outlook across the South is for outbreaks in the smaller cities--where police are often openly hostile and ill-equipped to handle dangerous situations between blacks and whites. Blacks in the South, for their part, are arriving at a level of political consciousness ominously parallel to that of Northern ghetto blacks a few years ago, when the era of the big riots began. In mid-May, six blacks died of gunshot wounds during a fiery night in Augusta, Ga., that brought back sickening memories of Watts and Newark. Atlanta, for the moment, is more concerned with the Peachtree Street community of hippies than it is with blacks.

Unpredictable. There are other possible trouble spots, of course--among them the black ghettos of Oakland, Richmond and East Palo Alto in the San Francisco Bay area. One disturbing factor, which strikes the U.S. across the board, is a shortage of jobs this summer. Government programs will provide only 440,000 jobs in 1970 v. 505,000 a summer ago. Worse, the state of the economy is so bad that many companies that have gone out of their way to hire young blacks in previous summers say they can no longer afford to do so. There are only 15,000 summer jobs for 75,000 teen-agers in Detroit, no more than 3,000 jobs for 15,000 youngsters in San Francisco. Unemployment is already high among adult blacks. Asks one California state job placement officer: "If fathers can't find work, how in the hell are you going to find jobs for their sons?"

"The high unemployment among young blacks is not helping," said James Farmer, once head of the Congress of Racial Equality and now an Assistant Secretary at HEW. Farmer also pointed last week to a further unsettling factor within the nation's black communities: lack of confidence in the Nixon Administration, in which Farmer himself is one of the highest-ranking blacks. "The blacks started out mistrusting the President, and nothing has happened to change that," Farmer added. "There's an absence of hope--a hopelessness among blacks. I am very much worried about this summer. The Administration is sitting on a powder keg."

Many black communities around the land seem sufficiently quiescent on the surface, but that does not mean that their frustrations have vanished. "It's like a volcano," says New York's Ted Gross, a Lindsay aide. "Underneath, it's bubbling." Guerrilla warfare may replace open rioting in the larger cities, as black militants zero in on selected targets in the white community and then retreat to the ghetto. Bombings of police stations by radicals, white or black, have already become a big-city fact of life. Violence is unpredictable: Chicago's blacks did not revolt when police killed Black Panther Fred Hampton, but a minor grocery-store dispute set off last week's Miami rioting. A random incident can either pass almost unnoticed or set off a riot that endures for days.

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