ANOTHER "LONG HOT SUMMER" BEGINS IN THE U.S.
By Evelyn Sell
"You can name any major metropoli-~ tan area in this country and I'm saying that it is in danger of blowing up." This April 10 statement by Wilfred Ussery, associate national chairman of the Congress of Racial Equality, was typical of many predicting racial explosions in orergee black ghettoes during the summer of 1967.
The predictions were denounced by various government and conservative Negro leaders as contributing to racial tensions. When the Detroit Commission on Community Relations warned of possible civil unrest and called for government and private help in warding off trouble, Council President Ed Carey told Commission Director Richard Marks, "I think you are generating unrest where it does not now exist." In the June issue of the FBI's law enforcement bulletin, Director J. Edgar Hoover stated:
"To publicly pinpoint certain cities where riots and violence may occur seems to be inconsistent with the doctrine of nonviolence. Rather, it is more like an open invitation to hotheads and rabble rousers in those areas to move into action on cue. It puts them on notice that they are expected to riot."
Dr. Martin Iuther King, Jr.,had pinpointed Cleveland and Stokeley Carmichael had cited Washington, D.C.,as potentially explosive spots. After having given the back of his hand to King and Carmichael, Hoover called on state and local officials to "speak out and let everyone know that law and order must prevail."
In the "Hoover spirit," Chicago Mayor Richard Daley gave civil-rights activists notice that he would not allow militant marches or demonstrations this summer. Despite the denunciations of Hoover and his like, the predictions of trouble continued because it was generally recognized that the conditions which had produced the explosions of 1964, 1965 and 1966 not only still remained but had actually worsened. The high rates of unemployment among black workers and youth, discrimination in schools and other institutions, unrelenting police brutality and the frustrations inherent within big city slums continue to force ghetto residents to rebel.
In addition, the glittering pronmises of Johnson's War on Poverty have not come true so that the high hopes raised have now turned into bitterness. The recent ouster of Harlem congressman Adam Clayton Powell further deepened this bitterness.
A Chicago social worker who counsels street-gang members explained, "We had pointed to Adam as someone who had joined the mainstream, rose to the top and as a symbol of what every Negro could do. Now our youngsters -- some of them -- are telling us that a ‘nigger's just a nigger as far as the power structure is concerned’ and what's worse is that they are feeling there's no need to try to make it."
All year long nationally and locally prominent government figures have been announcing special programs designed to keep the summer "cool" despite the sizzling hot ingredients within the major urban ghettoes. In March, President Johnson appointed Vice-President Humphrey as chairman of the President's Council on Youth Opportunity. "The President's Council," Humphrey explained to the National League of Cities legislative conference, "will give special emphasis to summer programs which contribute to the sound development of youth through special education, employment, recreation and health services."
He told the assembled municipal officials that it was cheaper to provide such facilities than to replace "broken windows and burned-out buildings." He cautioned the city officials to keep the youth busy playing and studying this summer.
In April, Secretary of Labor Wirtz announced a "concentrated" program for the hard-core unemployed in the slums of major U.S. cities.
Census figures showed that the nonwhite unemployment figure was about three times the white unemployment rate in eight major U.S. areas. The worst unemployment is among fourteen- to nineteen-year-old nonwhites.
At the same time this program was announced at a national level, the Michigan Civil Rights Commission initiated a program to secure jobs for all Detroit high-school students graduated in June. Called "Jobs for Detroit Workbound High School Graduates," the program was designed to "relieve community tension."
In New York, Mayor Lindsay appointed a Summer Task Force of top city officials to coordinate recreation and communitydeveloped programs.
In May, Roy Wilkins, the executive director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, stated,
"Thousands of young Negroes will be turned loose from schools this summer with muscles in their arms and mischief in their minds. We must find jobs for them or we are going to have trouble." (The negative sentiments expressed about black youth explain why militants are antagonistic towards Wilkins.) He urged cooperation at all levels of government and business to make jobs available on a massive scale to Negro youth.
There have been increasing pleas towards big business to play a major role in funding programs to "cool-off" the summers. It was announced earlier this year that congressional cutbacks on funds meant there would be less money available for the special summer "antiriot" programs. In his role as chairman of the President's Council on Youth Opportunity, Vice-President Humphrey has attempted to get business, industry and organized labor to provide jobs and open up play areas for 2,000,000 youths across the country. In May, Humphrey announced that out of 900,000 requests he had succeeded in getting commitments from 28,813 enployers for 221,615 jobs. Several congressmen have proposed "pre-apprenticeship" categories for young workers so that they could be paid below union scales -- poverty program benefits for youths breaking into jobs!
In New York, key elements of the business community joined the city administration in a fine-sounding seventeen-point program to combat ghetto explosions. The Kinney System Rent-A-Car pledged $8,920 to provide 1,000 sprinkler caps which would transform fire hydrants into play showers for ghetto children. Restaurant Associates has guaranteed 500 summer jobs for underprivileged youths plus $10,000 worth of food for summer outings. The New York Telephone Co. set up a special training and job program for 100 boys and also plans to underwrite the costs of supplying all-day supervised recreation and cultural activities ina ghetto block.
On June 3 President Johnson appointed an eighteen-member committee to survey how the resources of private business and labor can be mobilized for a broad attack on city slums. The committee is headed by Edgar Kaiser, president of Kaiser Industries, and includes leaders of labor unions, local government and the civil-rights movement.
Ghetto residents have not waited, however, to find out the results of surveys (they've made their own life-long surveys). Nor have they waited to be fooled again by antipoverty programs which sound wonderful but always turn out to be too little and too late.
The predicted eruptions had already begun, weeks before the calendar officially proclaimed summer. As early as the first week of April black students in the South rebelled. Struggles against police were reported at Fisk University, Meharry College and Tennessee Agricultural and Industrial in Nashville. Later in the month, other outbursts occurred at Texas Southern University in Houston, Southern University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and Jackson State College in Mississippi and Howard University in Washington, D.C.
On June 2 a silent vigil by fifty women in a Boston welfare office sparked an explosion in that city. The group called Mothers for Adequate Welfare tmaw] were objecting to "hostile social workers" and to having their welfare checks cut off “without warning or investigation."
When welfare employees attempted to get the women to leave and lock up for the weekend, the group insisted on seeing welfare director Daniel Cronin. MAW fastened bicycle chains to inside doors thus effectively preventing people from leaving or entering the office.
The police were called and tried to gain access through a window but a group of youth outside the building began a chant to stop them and the officers halted their efforts to get inside. However, one group of police succeeded in cutting through the chains on the front doors and burst in, clubs swinging. Mothers were hit and arrested.
This was the spark which led to a full-scale fiery outburst. Rocks and bottles were thrown at police, stores were looted, fires broke out in buildings and a home-made bomb injured one man during an almost week-long series of incidents. Police roamed the area armed with submachine guns, bayonets and dogs.
The Commission on Church and Race in Massachusetts criticized police tactics and the Rev. Virgil A. Wood, director of the Blue Hill Christian Center, stated, "Literally, war was declared on the black people by the police force last night and in all likelihood this will happen again until the whole attitude of the administration changes."
The long hot summer (referred to as LHS now because it has become a part of the American scene) has begun. There will be more LHS "until the whole attitude of the administration (national, state and local) changes." And that attitude won't change and has never changed in the past except when change was forced upon America's rulers by mass actions of the working people.
BERTRAND RUSSELL