CITIES: Why Summer Was Mostly Cool

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Aiding the police in keeping the peace this summer were a number of grass roots organizations that have sprung up in the ghetto since the late 1960s. When a black man was killed by a cop in the volatile Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, where rioting has been endemic, a group called Youth in Action put 150 people on the street to talk to residents and calm them down. The Justice Department has a community-relations service that sends a team into any area where racial trouble is brewing. When Mafia Leader Joe Colombo was shot by a black in June, tension between blacks and Italian Americans mounted in some New York neighborhoods. Community-relations officers rushed to the scene and patrolled the streets from dusk till dawn along with police.

Shift to Politics. Perhaps most important in keeping the summer relatively cool was a growing change in attitude on the part of the black community. The devastation of earlier riots had been confined for the most part to black neighborhoods, and black leaders quickly pointed out the futility of internalized violence that left blacks with burned-out homes. As one big-city police chief puts it: "The ghetto resident got fed up with the kids in the street. He no longer had a neighborhood store. He was afraid to leave his home. The insurance man and laundry man refused to come to his house. Crime became intolerable." Adds Charles Bowser, executive director of the Philadelphia Urban Coalition: 'The massive confrontations haven't produced anything. They haven't rebuilt buildings; there are no more jobs now, no more anything." This summer, many blacks have shifted from marches and demonstrations to more pragmatic political activity that often paid off in local elections; blacks have begun to take over many city offices. Says the Rev. Ed Reddick, director of research for Operation Breadbasket in Chicago: "There may have been an awareness that violence is self-defeating, that you have to work for political and economic power."

The relatively calm summer, however, is no cause for easy comfort. In many cases, the old anger has merely given way to despair or gone underground, surfacing in individual acts of terrorism. Several policemen—both black and white—were murdered in cold blood by blacks. Last month a police sergeant in San Francisco, John V. Young, was killed by a shotgun blast while he was sitting in the station house. Three days later, the San Francisco Chronicle received a note from "the George I. Jackson Assault Squad of the Black Liberation Army," which claimed to have committed the murder. "The rioters [of earlier years] were embittered and predisposed toward violence," notes James Q. Wilson, professor of government at Harvard, "but they had not dropped out of society. The present pattern seems more ideological and conspiratorial, involving people who live in society but who are no longer part of it."