Why Summer Was Mostly Cool

By last spring, a hot summer seemed inevitable in some of the nation's ghettos. Little had been done to rehabilitate the inner cities since the desperate rioting in the late 1960s; conditions, in fact, had deteriorated in many cities under the impact of the recession. Black unemployment had reached as high as 10% and the figure was considerably higher for teenagers, who are the ones most likely to go on a rampage. Fund cutoffs and cutbacks were the order of the day at nearly every level of government. It was not surprising that many civil rights leaders and observers worried about major explosions (TIME, May 31).

Happily, the Jeremiahs were wrong. There have been isolated outbreaks, but in keeping with the continued cooling of America, there has been no trouble approaching the mass thermal flare-ups of the past. It was the most trouble-free summer since 1965.

Nervous Governments. What went right? Nobody knows for sure, but luck was surely part of the answer--luck in not having the wrong incident explode at the wrong time. Another factor was the impact of the well-publicized predictions about violence, which had the effect of forcing nervous governments to cut loose the purse strings and do more than had been anticipated. Despite the cutback of summer programs, money was scraped up in many cities to provide employment for black youths. In Detroit, more than 11,000 jobs were made available in city agencies at $1.60 an hour. With more than 3,000 youngsters employed, Seattle Mayor Wes Uhlman's youth division had the biggest payroll of any city department. Congress supplied enough money to the anti-poverty agency in Boston so that it could double the number of summer jobs for minority groups.

Where local governments could not give bread, they sometimes offered circuses. In many cities, ghetto residents were regaled with a series of music and ethnic festivals, theater presentations and art shows. "We didn't have much money," says Phil Jourdan, an aide to the mayor of Detroit, "but we got the best out of the least expenditure." Soledad Brother George Jackson was killed during the sixth anniversary of Los Angeles' Watts riot. In the past, such an incident might have sparked an explosion, but Watts stayed quiet; that weekend, many of its residents were attending a festival of parades, games and displays.

Most city police have learned a lot since the major riots. This summer, they marshaled their forces far more effectively than they used to. In the past, when a disturbance broke out, they would wait until a mob formed before trying to intervene. After that, the use of too much force was usually predictable. Now they move in massively on an incident before it gets out of hand. And the show of force--or occasionally a calculated withdrawal as a gesture of confidence in local leaders--is usually enough. At the same time, police have established better relations with minority groups, and most big-city forces are trying to recruit more blacks. The percentage of blacks on police forces is still disproportionate to population figures, but most cities expect to achieve sharp increases. Detroit, for example, hopes to have a police academy enrollment that is 50% black by the end of 1980.

Aiding the police in keeping the peace this summer were a number of grass roots organizations that have sprung up in the ghetto since the late 1960s. When a black man was killed by a cop in the volatile Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, where rioting has been endemic, a group called Youth in Action put 150 people on the street to talk to residents and calm them down. The Justice Department has a community-relations service that sends a team into any area where racial trouble is brewing. When Mafia Leader Joe Colombo was shot by a black in June, tension between blacks and Italian Americans mounted in some New York neighborhoods. Community-relations officers rushed to the scene and patrolled the streets from dusk till dawn along with police.

Shift to Politics. Perhaps most important in keeping the summer relatively cool was a growing change in attitude on the part of the black community. The devastation of earlier riots had been confined for the most part to black neighborhoods, and black leaders quickly pointed out the futility of internalized violence that left blacks with burned-out homes. As one big-city police chief puts it: "The ghetto resident got fed up with the kids in the street. He no longer had a neighborhood store. He was afraid to leave his home. The insurance man and laundry man refused to come to his house. Crime became intolerable." Adds Charles Bowser, executive director of the Philadelphia Urban Coalition: 'The massive confrontations haven't produced anything. They haven't rebuilt buildings; there are no more jobs now, no more anything." This summer, many blacks have shifted from marches and demonstrations to more pragmatic political activity that often paid off in local elections; blacks have begun to take over many city offices. Says the Rev. Ed Reddick, director of research for Operation Breadbasket in Chicago: "There may have been an awareness that violence is self-defeating, that you have to work for political and economic power."

The relatively calm summer, however, is no cause for easy comfort. In many cases, the old anger has merely given way to despair or gone underground, surfacing in individual acts of terrorism. Several policemen--both black and white--were murdered in cold blood by blacks. Last month a police sergeant in San Francisco, John V. Young, was killed by a shotgun blast while he was sitting in the station house. Three days later, the San Francisco Chronicle received a note from "the George I. Jackson Assault Squad of the Black Liberation Army," which claimed to have committed the murder. "The rioters [of earlier years] were embittered and predisposed toward violence," notes James Q. Wilson, professor of government at Harvard, "but they had not dropped out of society. The present pattern seems more ideological and conspiratorial, involving people who live in society but who are no longer part of it."

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