Reflections of the 60th Anniversary of Urban Uprisings in America

This post is part of our forum on the Urban Rebellions of the 1960s

On this momentous 60^th anniversary of the dramatic urban uprisings that rocked cities such as Rochester, Philadelphia, New York, and so many more, there is so much on which we might reflect–so much about this moment and its legacy that we now might consider. Chief among these, it seems to me, is how this moment of collective resistance was spun and reacted to at time, and, I would argue equally devastatingly, is too often understood today.

For Black Americans who had come of age in the immediate post-war 1940s and 1950s, or for their children, the early 1960s was a heady time of possibility. The previous decade had birthed a powerful collective, and deeply grassroots, challenge to this nation’s deeply entrenched system of apartheid. And that activism had made serious inroads in overturning legal barriers to equality of opportunity as well as access. These victories suggested, particularly to those on the front lines walking instead of riding the busses in Montgomery or insisting on police accountability in Milwaukee, that the freedom struggle was in fact changing history.

But the earliest years of the 1960s also spelled disappointment–both with the pace of change as well as when it became devastatingly clear that white supremacy was not going to die in the courtroom nor at the hands of a Civilian Review Board. It would not matter how clear a ruling might be nor how many times a police department might be called out by grassroots organizations, nor what liberal white mayors might promise to do. And as the regularity, and ubiquity of white violence—both spectacular and insidious, formal and informal, civilian or cop—did not abate, resistance became eruption.

Everyone who took to the streets of places such as North Philadelphia, or downtown Rochester, or the heart of Harlem, was crystal clear that eruption was indeed resistance. They made this obvious to the police, to the press, and to the President himself—a man who eventually would be compelled to ask for, and then to ignore, the Kerner Commission’s inquiry into urban upheaval across the nation. Protesters had stated unflinchingly that it was not enough to rule that racism was illegal. They called out the uselessness of merely police brutality. They made it clear that the deep inequalities and injustices wrought by ordinary whites remained a most serious crisis, especially because this sometimes subtle but always the most self-serving oppression in the realm of education and employment could be some of the most devastating. They repeatedly also shined a bright light on the myth that was “equal justice under the law.”

But the crystal clear explanations that urban rebels offered whenever asked, and that would have obvious to any who witnessed them in real time, were utterly ignored by the press that spun them and the politicians that responded to them. These were not the actions of a civil rights movement that had merely come of age for logical and legitimate reasons.  This was not a collective eruption against hollow promises and the remarkable hardiness of white supremacy in America.

This was, according to the nation’s largest media outlets and to politicians alike, a betrayal of the civil rights movement—a distortion of it. This was not a collective demand for actual change, but in fact an excuse for destruction and an embrace of a violence that unacceptable and downright un-American.

From 1964 onward, in fact, the effort expended on discrediting the urban uprisings of this period by divorcing it from its spark and saddling it with the descriptor “violent” was tireless and vast.

From the autopsies that newspaper headlines supplied regarding what had gone down in Philly, Rochester, and Harlem in 1964, to those that would follow regarding the even bloodier eruptions in Newark or Detroit in 1967, to the horror of Orangeburg in 1969, the nation was told again and again that protest was now both uncompromising and alarmingly violent because the civil rights movement had been corrupted.

And from the White House to state houses across the country, not only did that narrative keep getting pushed and that alarm bell keep getting rung, but it very quickly translated into policies that would undo countless civil rights gains such as, say, Brown v. Board, and that also would re-cement white power in ways even more insidious that had previously been imagined. The national embrace of a historically unprecedented and internationally unparalleled War on Crime was but one example of this.

But perhaps most significantly, that narrative—the one that explained urban upheaval to mainstream America as both irrational and violent—endured for the next six decades.

This was the narrative attached thereafter to all protests against injustice—from those against the Dakota Pipeline to those of Occupy Wall Street. It was, however, attached with particular vigor and vitriol to the collective protests against acts of white racial violence. From the urban uprisings in Ferguson to those of George Floyd summer and the Black Lives Matter movement writ large.  The long freedom struggle was violent, full stop.

This was, in fact, THE premise that every reporter began with when asking historians to help them make sense of George Floyd summer. “How would you characterize the violence of today’s protests compared with those of 1968?” they always asked.

This is the legacy of 1964 that we must now reflect on. How was it that a decade in which the preponderance of violence in the nation—from the spectacular to the subtle—was state violence and white racialized violence, came to be understood so completely as Black violence? How did “legitimate” protest movements come to be seen as having taken a most alarming turn when their original demands had so clearly not been met?

Indeed, how can it be that virtually every act of both spectacular and subtle violence that prompted every major urban uprising of the 1960s was perpetrated by whites, and that the bloodiest violence that unfolded during those rebellions was perpetrated by the state, the urban uprisings themselves came to be understood as the origin of the violence and the reason why the nation came to need more law and order? How can it be that the record levels of police violence and the violence of the white citizenry of the 1960s, that which sparked urban uprisings in the first place, led not to more pressure to rein in law enforcement nor to more efforts to beat back white supremacy but rather to a doubling down of support for the police and policies of white privilege?

The answer is, of course, complex. It is deeply rooted in our nation’s racialized past and in its ugliest and most enduring power inequities. But the occasion of the 60^th anniversary of the urban rebellions of 1964 allow us to reflect anew on a time when things might have, and should have, gone differently. Why they didn’t was not, necessarily, inevitable. This was a powerful moment, a moment not just of collective frustration but also of seemingly unstoppable collective action. But how this moment was spun, how it came to be so widely understood, mattered—perhaps more than we appreciated at the time. Indeed, 1964 allows us truly to understand the power of narrative and the significance who gets to tell what happened. It is a reminder, a wakeup call even, that it doesn’t just matter that there are people fighting to change history. It also matters who tells the story of why that fight was necessary, and how it went down. And shouting out the real story—insisting that the complexity and realities of who did what, why, and when gets told well beyond the academy—also matters.

Then, now, and always.