AFTER WATTS -— NEWARK
By Elizabeth Barnes
It took 5,000 national guardsmen, plus Newark city and New Jersey state police, to put down the Newark ghetto rebellion which raged for five days from July 13-17.
The area involved in the rebellion included over half the city. Before it was subdued, 26 people had been killed, 1,300 arrested, 1,200 injured, and over $15 million worth of property damaged.
The Newark uprising was the biggest and fiercest ghetto revolt in two years. It was exceeded only by the famous Watts rebellion of 1965.
Newark in the East, Watts in the West -- these have become the twin centers of large-scale mass resistance in the sharpening struggle of Afro-Americans for freedom and equality.
Throughout the spring and summer of this year, a series of conflicts between the white supremacist authorities and black dissidents has erupted in cities from one end of the country to the other.
The larger revolts have occurred in the ghettos of Boston, Mass.; Cincinnati, Ohio; Buffalo, N.Y.; Plainfield, N.J.3; Dayton, Ohio; and Tampa, Florida. In each case hundreds of police and/or guardsmen have had to be moved in before the area was pacified.
In addition, there have been numerous instances of lesser gun battles and rock and bottle throwing confrontations between cops and black people in other cities and towns. These are now so common that they often receive little or no coverage by the press.
Almost without exception, the ghetto eruptions in the last three years have been spearheaded by young people; and the poorest youths -- the dropouts and unemployed -- take the lead.
A new feature of the rebellions this spring is that black students have been involved in large-scale confrontations with the cops.
Before his assassination, Malcolm X repeatedly predicted that massive black revolts were coming. In April 1964, before the first big outburst in Harlen, Malcolm X told a Militant Labor Forum audience in New York:
"1964 will be America's hottest year; her hottest year yet; a year of much racial violence and much racial bloodshed...
"A couple of weeks ago in Jacksonville, Florida, a young teenage Negro was throwing Molotov cocktails. Well, Negroes didn't do this ten years ago. But what you should learn from this is that they are waking up.
"It was stones yesterday, Molotov cocktails today; it will be hand grenades tomorrow and whatever else is available the next day...
"There are 22 million Afro-Americans who are ready to fight for independence right here. When I say fight for independence right here, I don't mean nonviolent fight, or turn-the-other-cheek fight. Those days are gone. Those days are over."
In 1964 Malcolm X was called a hatemonger and racial fanatic for such foresighted utterances. Today, only three years later, some of the most conservative black leaders, who condemned Malcolm at that time for "preaching violence," are saying that violence will increase unless the intolerable conditions of black people are considerably changed.
Even such a moderate as Senator Brooke, a Negro Republican who supports the Vietnam war, has called the failure of the government to do anything "an invitation to violence."
The scope of the rebellion, which saw thousands of black people pitted against cops and guardsmen, induced a number of commentators to bemoan the prospect of fighting two wars at once -in Vietnam and in the ghettos at home.
This danger to the ruling class comes from the fact that the ghettos are strategically located in the centers of most major cities.
In Plainfield, New Jersey, not far from Newark, black people armed thenselves with 46 semiautomatic rifles taken from a nearby weapons factory. The possession of these weapons was sufficient to prevent state troopers from entering the West End ghetto of Plainfield for days.
Columnist Murray Kempton of the New York Post characterized the local situation as one of a short-lived "dual power."
He wrote on July 19: "There are two governments, on one side, the city
of Plainfield and the state of New Jersey, on the other the government of the 46 carbines."
John Harvard, the "nonviolent" black head of the Plainfield antipoverty program, told Kempton: "Look...This is something I could not say to these people. But if they've really got those guns, they'd better hang on to them a little while. Not to use them. But just to bargain with them, and not to give them up until they've got something real in return."
Many of the techniques used by the authorities to put down the ghetto revolts resemble those in Vietnam. In Newark, troops opened fire indiscriminately on apartment buildings filled with people, and armored troop-carrying tanks rumbled through the streets.
In Plainfield, there was a houseto-house search for weapons, where soldiers in some cases wrecked the property of the ghetto residents.
A first-hand report by a resident of the Newark ghetto in the July 24 Militant tells how guardsmen smashed the windows of stores owned by black "soul brothers" which had been left untouched by the rebels.
The need to bring in pacification forces a la Vietnam was justified in one sentence by the New York Times: "A ghetto will not fit into a jail house." This is certainly true of the Newark ghetto which includes over half of the city's population and land area.
Despite the large numbers of black people involved in the ghetto revolts, most city and state officials refused to acknowledge that the revolts were thing but "criminal disorders" which haa to be promptly and ruthlessly crushed.
Throughout the Newark events, Governor Hughes of New Jersey insisted that the revolt had "nothing to do with civil rights" and that the "decent" black people deplored the acts of the "criminal" ninority.
A survey of areas previously convulsed by revolts shows that little or nothing had been done to improve conditions after they were over.
In Watts the unemployment rate is still 13 percent compared to 4.2 percent for all of Los Angeles County. Thirty-one percent of all the residents receive some kind of welfare aid. Police brutality continues without one cop being disciplined in the past year.
Now black people have added a new grievance to the list -- the Vietnam war. Among other reasons, officials in Plainfield attributed the outbreak to the heavy drafting of black youth there for the army.
The war budget has cut into the meager funds planned for Johnson's popgun "war on poverty."
While officials offer excuses and soft soap about rectifying ghetto conditions, they aré acting to mobilize the federal and state machinery of repression against the rebels.
Police forces are being beefed up and trained in "riot control." In Cleveland, Ohio, the scene of black resistance last summer, the authorities announced a "pacification plan" which included floodlight equipped helicopters for nighttime surveillance over ghetto areas.
The policy of repression rather than concession and conciliation is being promoted on the national legislative level. On July 19 the House of Representatives passed a bill by a 347 to 70 vote making it a federal crime to use interstate facilities or cross state lines to incite a riot.
This weapon was so crassly unconstitutional and so discriminatory against the black population that it stirred Representative Celler, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, to object:
"This bill will not allay his [the Afro-American's] anger and frustrations... Instead it will arouse his anger and frustration more deeply. His leaders ask for better housing for their fellows. You offer them jails.
"His leaders ask for better facilities for education. You read them a riot act. They ask for decent living. You feed them a drastic statute. They ask for more employment. You give jobs in prison garb."
The fury of the irrepressible outbursts from coast to coast ~- and there are more to come -- indicates that more and more Afro-Americans are willing to risk their lives in the fight for a better life.
However, their struggles are localized and spasmodic. They lack unification, coordination, leadership and a program of clear objectives.
The popular slogan of black power has been the keynote theme of the current struggles. But this demand has yet to be implemented by any form of independent black political action and organization. This remains the major weakness of the present phase of the Afro-American freedom movement.