The People: A Time of Violence & Tragedy

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THE PEOPLE

"We have endured a week such as no nation should live through: a time of violence and tragedy." So said the President of the U.S. last week, as flames flickered above two score American communities. From Albany, N.Y., and Albion, Mich., to Waterbury, Conn., and Waukegan, Ill., the nation's black ghettos shuddered in paroxysms of rock-throwing, fire-bombing and looting.

With more than 45 dead in rioting across the nation last week, thousands injured, and upwards of $1 billion in cash and property losses, Americans groped for words to fit the failure. New York's Senator Robert F. Kennedy called it "the greatest domestic crisis since the War between the States."

More likely, the Great Depression of the 1930s still holds that dubious distinction. But the riots came distressingly close. They plunged the nation into its greatest racial crisis since Reconstruction, threatened to bring the civil rights movement to a dead standstill and raised new barriers of fear and hostility between blacks and whites that might not come down for years.

Frightened and resentful after a summer of hoodlumism and hatred, the nation's white majority might react by turning away from the Negro and deferring—or discarding—the dream of genuine equality. Should that be the outcome, America's cities would truly be beleaguered.

Even before the rioting began, an economy-minded Congress, contending with Viet Nam war costs, huge tax loads and Great Society programs, was rejecting or drastically trimming practically every new proposal aimed at upgrading urban life. Now, determined not to reward violence, it may well give top priority to law-and-order measures aimed at curbing riots and turn sharply unsympathetic toward new social legislation. But both kinds are essential, of course.

When? Though nobody has been able to figure out precisely what events will ignite one ghetto and leave another unsinged, nobody doubts that other cities will feel the heat. As one Washington policeman put it after completing arrangements to move his family out of the capital for a weekend—just in case trouble erupts—the question is no longer "Will it?" but "When?"

The profound question is still "Why?" Poverty, of course, is part of the answer. A survey released by the National Industrial Conference Board last week, for example, disclosed that fully one-fourth of U.S. families now earn at least $10,000 a year—a reminder to the Negro, whose median family income is $4,000, of the distance he still has to travel. Impatience is another ingredient. All the civil rights bills, the Supreme Court decisions and the Great Society programs of recent years led many a Negro to expect that equality and prosperity were just around the next corner. "It hasn't happened," said Michigan's Governor George Romney, "and a lot of people are frustrated and bitter about it." "Nothing is so unstable," said William V. Shannon in the New York Times, "as a bad situation that is beginning to improve." Outside agitation may play a role after riots get under way—but rarely has much to do with starting them in the first place.