The Cities: What Next?

Detroit was a burned-out volcano, and although Milwaukee trembled, its authorities hammered down an iron lid that saved the city from massive hurt. Still, there was little peace in the nation's cities. From Providence, R.I., to Portland, Ore., communities large and small heard the sniper's staccato song, smelled the fire bomber's success, watched menacing crowds on the brink of becoming mindless mobs. The only consolation was that, compared with the agony of Newark and Detroit, last week's racial convulsions were more of a threat than a storm.

But what of next week and next summer? To a nation searching for explanations, reassurance and—most of all—a permanent end to violence and the fear of it, Washington offered little real solace. Lyndon Johnson's new commission to study civil disorder was still getting organized, and its chairman, Illinois Governor Otto Kerner, doubted that it could even meet a deadline for an interim report next March. In closed session, the group heard a number of witnesses, including J. Edgar Hoover, who repeated previous conclusions to the effect that while outside agitators contribute to some riots, there was still no proof of large-scale conspiracy.

Vulnerable Funds. Nevertheless, Congress seemed more disposed to search for scapegoats than for solutions. The House Un-American Activities Committee received a staff study saying that extremists helped foment some disorders and that Communists produced hate propaganda; the committee promised a full investigation. The Senate Investigations Subcommittee scheduled its own inquiry, while the Judiciary Committee, which was already considering a bill to make itinerant riot rousing a federal crime, heard police officials from seven cities testify that extremists rather than social and economic deprivation cause riots.

South Carolina's Strom Thurmond blamed the disturbances on "Communism, false compassion, civil disobedience, court decisions and criminal instinct." When a Nashville police captain insisted that federal poverty money was paying the salary of a local Black Power agitator—a charge that poverty officials in Nashville and Washington denied—Committee Chairman James Eastland proposed an additional investigation to determine if poverty funds "are being used to promote policies that have a tendency to produce riots."

Appropriations for the poverty program seemed more vulnerable than ever, although Labor Secretary Willard Wirtz said that out of 35,000 youths taking job training in cities hit by riots, only 20 had been arrested. Of the 12,000 students in Office of Economic Opportunity programs in the affected cities, according to Sargent Shriver, only six had been arrested. Senator Edward Brooke pointed out what everyone in

Washington knows, or should know:

"The reason this is happening is because the conditions are there. The conditions are such that it can be set off."