The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) had purged all of its white (mostly Jewish) members in 1967 and was now under the control of H. Rap Brown, a murderous militant who was emblematic of the changes that had taken place in the black rights movement since the focus shifted to the major cities. From his large platform, Brown openly called on black people to launch a Viet Cong-style guerilla war against white America.
(I wonder how this picture of, and these quotes from, General Sherman got here)?
People who lived in or near the riot zones didn’t need to consult the newspapers to know what was coming. Violence - small-scale, random street corner violence - was proliferating in every major city in America. Detroit’s infamous Halloween Eve “Devil’s Night” had been known since the 1940s as a night when the city’s youth engaged in minor pranks and acts of vandalism - egging, toilet papering, leaving rotten vegetables or bags of dog crap on someone’s porch. By the late ‘60s, Devil’s Night was used each year by youth gangs to set fire to buildings, and to rob, beat, and sometimes kill locals unlucky enough to be caught outside. The murder rate nearly tripled during the decade, in New York and other cities across the country. Things were falling apart, and to many people it was not inconceivable that the violence could spiral into a real insurgency - if not like Vietnam, then at least like Algiers, or maybe Northern Ireland.
Working and middle class whites fled the increasingly-black neighborhoods where most of the violence was concentrated as fast as their incomes allowed. Private schools proliferated as parents sought to protect their children from dangerous public schools. By 1967, school violence was so bad in New York that the United Federation of Teachers went on strike for two weeks to defend its members’ right to discipline seriously disruptive students, and to demand a police presence in the worst schools (a measure against which teachers had previously fought). They were opposed by the African-American Teachers’ Association (ATA), which argued that “the very concept of the disruptive child was an expression of white middle-class cultural bias against black culture.”
(Editor's note: nothing ever
fucking changes with these people).
ATA member teachers were using their classrooms to radicalize and indoctrinate their students into the ideology of black nationalism. Politics was used as an excuse for violence, as when a gang of Puerto Rican students “rampaged” (NYT) through Eastern District High School in Brooklyn after accusing a Jewish teacher of harassing them. School district bosses, fearful of being tagged as racists, ignored the teachers’ pleas for help. Students got the message that their teachers and principals were powerless, and any semblance of order evaporated in many schools.
(I repeat myself).
