Introduction

On a cold Monday at the start of February, Joseph McNeil, Franklin McCain, Ezell Blair Jr., and
David Richmond sat down at a whites-only lunch counter at Woolworth’s in Greensboro, North
Carolina. A waiter refused to serve the young men and suggested they order take-out instead.
The four North Carolina A&T students remained at the counter. The store manager approached
and asked them to leave. Still they did not move. A police officer arrived, slapping his nightstick
in his hand in an attempt to intimidate. Rather than allow the students’ offense against Jim
Crow to continue, the manager of the store closed it for the day. Two dozen Black students
returned on Tuesday. Over fifty Black students and three white students participated in the sit-
in the next day, Wednesday, February 3, 1960.

News of the protest spread, and soon the sit-in movement had expanded to fifty-five cities and
thirteen states. By April, over fifty thousand students were involved. Conceived and organized
entirely by young people, the sit-in movement ultimately led to the founding of the Student
Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which was run by activists such as John Lewis and
Stokely Carmichael. As a Fisk student, Lewis participated in the sit-ins in Nashville, Tennessee,
and he would go on to steer the Freedom Rides in the summer of 1961 and speak at the March
on Washington in 1963. Carmichael joined the sit-in movement as a high school student and
would famously call for “Black Power” at an SNCC rally in Greenwood, Mississippi, in 1966.
Together Lewis, Carmichael, and tens of thousands of other young Black Americans signaled
that their generation was prepared to risk their lives for freedom and equality. From
Greensboro onward, the sit-ins helped build momentum and support for racial justice.1

The students in Greensboro engaged in a nonviolent protest to demand full integration, the
right to vote, equal educational opportunities, decent jobs, protection against white
supremacist terrorism, and an end to police violence. These were the central aims of the civil
rights movement more broadly. By the end of the decade, Black students at North Carolina A&T
State University were still protesting, but now they were destroying property, assaulting police
officers, and shooting in the direction of law enforcement, if not coming close to killing cops in
self-defense. In May 1969, after Black students at Greensboro’s James B. Dudley High School
were arrested, brutalized, and tear-gassed by police during a series of protests against arbitrary
disciplinary measures, A&T students came to the teenagers’ defense. The confrontations
between local police and Black high school and college students led authorities to call the
National Guard to A&T’s campus, unleashing violence and repression that ended in the killing of
sophomore Willie Grimes.

A pivotal stop on the road to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, by
the end of the decade Greensboro was a site of sustained violence. It was far from unique in
this regard. Between 1964 and 1972, but especially between 1968 and 1972, the United States
endured internal violence on a scale not seen since the Civil War. Every major urban center in
the country burned during those eight years. Violence flared up not only in archetypal ghettoes
including Harlem and Watts, and in majority-Black cities such as Detroit and Washington, DC; it
appeared in Greensboro, North Carolina, in Gary, Indiana, in Seattle, Washington, and countless
places in between—every city, small or large, where Black residents lived in segregated,
unequal conditions. In the north and the south, the east and the west, the rust belt and the
Sunbelt, Black people threw rocks and bottles at police, shot at them with rifles, smashed the
windows of businesses and institutions, hurled firebombs, and plundered local stores. These
events—what we commonly call “riots,” or what people who are to the left-of-center
sometimes refer to as “civil disturbances”—caused hundreds of millions of dollars of property
damage. Most immediately, they shaped the lives of the storeowners whose businesses were
destroyed, of the parents who lost their teenage sons to the police, and of the firefighters and
cops who were harmed or killed. But ever since, Americans have been living in a nation and a
national culture created in part by the extreme violence of the 1960s and early 1970s.

The aftershocks of that era have, at times, taken the form of mass violence to which all
Americans have been witness: in Miami in 1980, in Los Angeles in 1992, in Cincinnati in 2001,
and in more recent years in Ferguson, Missouri; Baltimore, Maryland; and Minneapolis,
Minnesota. The enduring impact of the violence of the 1960s and 1970s has been felt more
regularly, and more acutely, by Black people in American cities who faced new policing
practices that emerged under the banner of the War on Crime: the routine stop and frisks that
attacked people’s dignity, the breaking up of community gatherings, the presence of armed,
uniformed officers in the hallways of under-resourced public schools, and more. While such
strategies helped repress mass violence as a regular phenomenon, they ironically made further
“riots” inevitable. These strategies remain in place today.

Mass incarceration is one consequence of the draconian police ethos born in the 1960s and
1970s in response to mass violence. Another consequence is a semantic habit that hides a
deeper reality. A central contention of this book is that the term “riot” is a misnomer. Due to
the rhetoric of politicians, media coverage, and much of the academic research on the subject,
Americans have become accustomed to think of these moments of mass violence—from
Harlem in 1964 to Minneapolis in 2020—as misguided at best, and meaningless or irrational at
worst. In either case, these incidents are often seen as being devoid of any political motivation
or content. Sympathetic liberals may have believed then, and believe now, that the anger and
discontent behind the violence was legitimate. Yet they often concluded that “rioting” was a
pathological impulse, rooted in spontaneous, uncontrollable emotion. In this view, the “riots”
were ultimately counter-productive: the violence only alienated allies and intensified anti-Black
sentiment. Proponents of “law and order” from across the political spectrum, in partial
contrast, believe that “riots” should be seen as nothing other than events of mass criminality.

President Lyndon B. Johnson championed the latter view when responding to the first urban
“riots” in the 1960s. “The riots—as well as other criminal and juvenile delinquency problems in
our cities—are closely connected,” Johnson announced following the release of an FBI report
on the violence that swept through eight cities in the summer of 1964. “Each riot began with a
single incident and was aggravated by hoodlums and habitual lawbreakers,” he added. Three
years later, Johnson told the nation during a televised address delivered in the middle of the
unprecedented violence in Detroit in 1967, which ended in more than forty deaths, a thousand
injuries, at least 7,200 arrests, and the destruction of hundreds of buildings: “There is no
American right to loot stores, or to burn buildings, or to fire rifles from the rooftops. That is
crime.”2

The 1960s produced an image of “riots” as fundamentally Black. Yet historically, most instances
of mass criminality have been perpetrated by white vigilantes hostile to integration and who
joined together in roving mobs taking “justice” into their own hands, often with the support of
local police. The Jim Crow era was defined by riots. In August 1908, a lynch mob as large as five
thousand people, many of them from out of town, descended on the Black community of
Springfield, Illinois, wantonly destroying Black businesses, driving Black families from their
homes, and executing two Black men. Mobs in East St. Louis, in 1917, forced Black wartime
factory workers and their families to choose between being burned alive or shot to death in
one of the bloodiest riots of the twentieth century.3 White supremacist mass violence only
escalated as Black migrants fled the terror of the segregationist south in greater numbers
during and after the First World War, searching for better opportunities and safety from the
white mob—only to meet it again in the North, Midwest, and West. White vigilante violence
was a means to police the activities of Black people and to limit their access to jobs, leisure, the
franchise, and to the political sphere.

During the Red Summer of 1919, Black Americans—including many veterans of the First World
War—exercised their right to defend themselves. White and Black residents fought and killed
each other on the streets of Chicago and Washington, DC. Elsewhere, the massacres of Black
people continued. In the rural community of Phillips County, Arkansas, where Black
sharecroppers were attempting to unionize, white “emergency posses” murdered at least two
hundred Black people. Approximately another two hundred would be killed in Tulsa, Oklahoma,
two years later, in a massacre carried out by two thousand white men, some of whom were
deputized to commit various atrocities against the Black Greenwood community with the full
backing of the county government. “Race riots” appeared again in major cities during the
Second World War. The worst occurred in Detroit in 1943, when federal troops were deployed
to contain the warfare in the streets.4

It was only when white people no longer appeared to be the driving force behind rioting in the
nation’s cities, and when Black collective violence against exploitative and repressive
institutions surfaced, that “riots” came to be seen as a purely criminal, and completely
senseless, acts. “Law and order” became the main response from the white establishment. As
local police began to assume many of the previous functions of the white mob, the terms of
urban violence were set.

In the view of President Johnson and others, rioting and crime were two strains of the same
disease in Black communities—and could only be cured by more police. “These riots were each
a symptom of a sickness in the center of our cities,” the McCone Commission determined in its
December report on the Watts uprising that took place in Los Angeles in August 1965. Eight
days after the violence had subsided, California Governor Edmond G. “Pat” Brown had formed
the commission to investigate the “riot” and appointed former CIA director John A. McCone as
its chairman. Echoing the famous conclusions of Daniel Patrick Moynihan in The Negro Family:
The Case for National Action, in March 1965, the commission identified the cause of the
“sickness” as “disintegrating” Black families, who set in motion a “spiral of failure” for their
children, dooming them to lives of crime and welfare dependency. “At the core of the cities
where they [Negroes] cluster, law and order have only tenuous hold; the conditions of life itself
are often marginal; idleness leads to despair and finally, mass violence supplies a momentary
relief from the malaise.”5 It was the riffraff of the ghetto who fueled the violence, so the theory
went: the criminals, the young, the unskilled, and the jobless. They burned and looted, seeking
momentary thrills as a break from their tedious lives. Such diagnoses focused on personal and
group pathology—a framework government authorities rarely used for understanding white
terrorism—and justified lawmakers’ decision to enlist the police to manage the disorder.

These views are not artifacts of the past; they are very much still with us. But the diagnosis was
wrong then, and it is wrong now. The so-called urban riots from the 1960s to the present can
only be properly understood as rebellions. These events did not represent a wave of criminality,
but a sustained insurgency. The violence was in response to moments of tangible racism—“a
single incident,” as Johnson said—almost always taking the form of a police encounter. Yet the
tens of thousands of Black Americans who participated in this collective violence were rebelling
not just against police brutality. They were rebelling against a broader system that had
entrenched unequal conditions and anti-Black violence over generations. Convinced that
rebellion was an attack on existing American institutions rather than an appeal for inclusion
within them, Johnson and many other officials dismissed the possibility that the “hoodlums”
who “rioted” shared most if not all of the same grievances as the college students who started
the sit-in movement in Greensboro in 1960.

Recently, some scholars who have examined Black communities’ responses to the crime control
programs of the second half of the twentieth century have argued that Black Americans called
for more police on the streets, at schools, and in housing projects. But the history of Black
rebellion adds another, dynamic layer and set of actors to the story of the “Black silent
majority.”6 Some segments of the Black middle class, political leaders, and clergy did join the
clamor for “law and order,” yet other Black people—many of whom do not appear in the
archives of traditional civil rights organizations, and many of whom were too young to vote—
collectively pushed back against the crime wars that targeted their communities. The violent
turn in Black protest was often led by Black pastors and sustained through Black churches,
which have been vital to the success of the freedom movement historically. In the immediate
post–civil rights period, many Black leaders used both the threat and reality of collective
violence to make demands for structural change, and to advocate for community control of
resources in Black communities.

While the Black Panther Party, the Black Liberation Army, the Weather Underground, and other
revolutionary groups aimed to dismantle capitalism and overthrow the government,
community-based Black rebellions sought redress from authorities in the form of employment,
housing, education, and law enforcement, as well as a reordering of the status quo so that
Black people would no longer be treated as second-class citizens in their cities and in their
country. Those well-known radical organizations are frequently seen as the sole source of
political violence during this period, an assumption that has helped prevent an understanding
of the larger, continuous, and community-based rebellions as participants of a related, but
different, kind of political violence of their own. Rebellion served as a message to the nation
that the civil rights reforms of the mid-1960s, the equal-opportunity and self-help programs of
the War on Poverty, and ongoing nonviolent protest were inadequate to solving the problem of
racial inequality and its countless manifestations and consequences. Something else was
needed.

Johnson himself recognized, in the same July 1967 speech about the rebellion in Detroit, that
“the only genuine, long-range solution for what has happened lies in an attack—mounted at
every level—upon the conditions that breed despair and violence.”7 The president’s rhetoric
indicated that he favored social programs as the means of attack, but in practice he increasingly
looked to law enforcement as a short-term solution to rebellion. Conservatives had favored a
tough police response to Black protest through the postwar period, but many liberals started to
back Johnson’s similar stance in the second half of the 1960s, and as the rebellions only
increased in intensity and frequency alongside the rollout of civil rights legislation and new job
training, remedial education, and community action programs. Obsessed with “riots,” Johnson
and other liberals never seriously asked whether the War on Crime, launched one year after the
War on Poverty, may have exacerbated the violence. Instead they embraced the expansion of
American law enforcement—of surveillance and militarized police in communities of color, as
well as the increasing professionalization of officers through training and technology—as the
best strategies to handle “race relations.” A short-term solution became the long-term reality.

The decision to respond to the rebellions with more police was not a foregone conclusion. As
Sargent Shriver, who directed the Office of Economic Opportunity, pointed out to President
Johnson in a memo in early 1968: “for all their destructiveness, I can but read the riots as a
terrible call. The Negroes want equal access to the fruits of participating citizenship—the
opportunity both to earn and to control their destiny.” Shriver’s observation and the logical
remedies were broadcast to a national audience by Johnson’s own National Advisory
Commission on Civil Disorders, known popularly as the Kerner Commission, which offered an
unpursued alternative to the escalation of policing and punitive policies in general. In its final
report of February 1968 (which went on to become a national bestseller as a mass-market
paperback), the commission warned federal policymakers and the nation that absent a massive
investment into poor Black communities, rebellion and “white retaliation” would entrench
racial inequality as a permanent feature of American life.

Federal policymakers did not heed the warnings of officials like Shriver and members of the
Kerner Commission. Nor did they truly listen to residents of the rebelling communities, who
explained to politicians, reporters, and researchers how rebellion could be prevented in the
future. The response was not the result of oversight and nor was it a blind spot; the alternatives
were clearly presented. But time and time again, the decision was made to pursue a set of
policies that were self-defeating at best, and grievously harmful at worst.
The peak of the violence appeared to last from the summer of 1967 through the 137 separate
incidents that followed the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in April 1968. Yet public
memory of these incidents largely stops in 1968, even though regular rebellions continued for
years afterward. Between May 1968 and December 1972, some 960 segregated Black
communities across the United States witnessed 1,949 separate uprisings—the vast majority in
mid-sized and smaller cities that journalists at the time and scholars since have tended to
overlook. Most of the violent encounters involving Black residents during this period began in
response to the policing of ordinary, everyday activity. Over these four years, nearly 40,000
people were arrested, more than 10,000 were injured, and at least 220 people were killed.
These figures do not take into account the hundreds of prison rebellions in this era, including
the protests stemming from the killing of revolutionary icon George Jackson by San Quentin
guards in August 1971, and the Attica uprising that garnered national attention just weeks
later.9

Even less remembered than this second wave of Black rebellion are the Mexican Americans and
Puerto Ricans who similarly turned to violence in an effort to secure equal rights, improve
unequal conditions, and challenge the emerging crime control apparatus. Although this book
focuses primarily on political violence in segregated Black communities, at least two hundred
rebellions were carried out by Latinx residents after King’s murder, the majority of them in
Puerto Rican communities in the Northeast (twenty-one in New Jersey alone) that were often
seen and treated as Black in a way Mexican American communities, generally, were not.10

The largely forgotten, post-King rock throwing, arson, and window breaking that shook more
than a thousand Black, Mexican American, and Puerto Rican communities began after
Johnson’s Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968 went into effect in June.
Johnson had called for a “War on Crime” in March 1965, one week after he sent the Voting
Rights Act to Congress. The “war” consisted of an unprecedented investment in local law
enforcement. As the United States waged the Vietnam War abroad, federal policymakers built a
pipeline to deliver surplus army weapons and technologies to local law enforcement in order to
put down domestic political radicalism and Black rebellion.

City officials took full advantage of the newly available federal resources. From the beginning of
the War on Crime in 1965 to the signing of the Safe Streets Act in 1968, the federal government
allocated a total of $20.6 million to 359 separate programs that modernized police
departments. Riot-control training, military-grade weapons such as AR15s and M4 carbines,
steel helmets, three-foot batons, masks, armored vehicles, two-way radios, tear gas—these and
other techniques, weapons, and tools flowed into cities, even small ones, across the United
States. The federal government funded a handful of low-cost, police–community relations
initiatives, too, for good measure. The Los Angeles Police Department, still recovering from the
Watts rebellion in 1965, received the second-largest grant, as well as a helicopter, in 1967.11 As
Johnson’s “first line of defense,” police would be prepared to face the domestic enemy within.

Black communities had long been subject to targeted surveillance, frequent encounters with
police, mass arrests, illegal searches, and outright brutality, but after the Safe Streets Act, which
marked the extreme escalation of the War on Crime, residents in segregated, low-income
neighborhoods in big cities such as New York, mid-sized cities such as Phoenix, and smaller
cities such as Waterloo, Iowa, would be patrolled by police departments with veritable arsenals
at their disposal. The 1968 legislation, with its additional $400 million outlay (or about $3 billion
today) for crime control, allowed cities to flood with police those urban areas that seemed
prone to rebellion. By 1970, federal policymakers had allocated some $40 million worth (or
about $300 million today) of military-grade equipment for local law enforcement.

The images of National Guardsmen on the scene in Los Angeles in 1965, in Detroit and Newark
in 1967, and in Washington, DC, in 1968, made those rebellions particularly sensational. Yet the
passing of the Safe Streets Act left law enforcement authorities capable of handling unrest on
their own. Calling in the National Guard when several hundred teenagers hurled rocks and
bottles at police officers and smashed the windows of police cruisers was no longer necessary.

This new self-reliance helps explain why the later moment of rebellion, between 1968 and
1972, has been overlooked: the uprisings often remained local, and of only local interest.
Conventional accounts of this period tend to focus on national developments and on major
metropolitan centers, particularly on the East Coast. But the lesser-known cities where
rebellion frequently occurred, in the plains and in the heartland, declining industrial towns and
in the urban south, open up a more comprehensive understanding of American social relations
and the contours of racism and inequality.

The crucible period of rebellion in the late 1960s and early 1970s matters not because it has
been largely forgotten. It matters because despite being forgotten, it has defined freedom
struggles, state repression, and violence in Black urban America down into our own time.

The rebellions of the late 1960s and early 1970s were led, by and large, by young people, not
just of high school age, but as young as ten and twelve years old. The four North Carolina A&T
students who started the sit-ins in Greensboro were their predecessors, in this sense. Yet at the
end of the 1960s, the young people rebelling understood their predecessors to have failed.
They looked back on the heyday of the civil rights movement, and they looked at the conditions
they were currently living in, with police watching them from the other side of the park, and
they rebelled.

The persistence of Black rebellion in the late 1960s and early 1970s and into the present forces
us to reconsider the accomplishments of the sit-ins and of the civil rights movement overall.
The so-called Second Reconstruction, which promised to realize the unfulfilled promises of the
Civil War and its aftermath, was supposed to integrate American society and extend full
citizenship to those who had long been denied it. The movement secured for Black Americans
the rights to an education, to shop at any stores, to eat in any restaurants, and to vote. It made
flagrant racism unacceptable in American public discourse and allowed for the emergence of a
Black middle class. But the movement’s achievements did not fully secure basic needs for most
Black people and quickly came up against the War on Crime and its new programs of social
control. As the Reverend Charles Koen, a prominent activist who preached the politics of armed
self-defense and community control in Cairo, Illinois, pointed out: “voting rights could not be
eaten or made into clothing and shelter.”14 The response, by Koen and many other Black
people, was not more nonviolence, but violence.

Koen and the rising generation that led the rebellions in segregated urban communities had
spent their childhoods witnessing the civil rights movement unfold and were now approaching
adulthood in the era of Black Power. The Black Panthers, in particular, provided a new script for
resistance.15 “Pig,” the derogatory term the Black Panthers used for police officers, was
frequently yelled or muttered during rebellions and in everyday life. Black popular culture had
long seen defiance of the police as heroic. Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights heroes
made defiance of the police legitimate, but the Black Panthers and other militant groups helped
validate violent antagonism toward the police, at least among young Black Americans and other
young people of color.

It can be difficult to imagine the children and teenagers who threw rocks at police or who
looted local businesses as political actors, and this bias has influenced the writing of the history
of this era. Even scholars and activists who focus on resistance to systemic racism have been
reluctant to take seriously the political nature of Black rebellion. This is, in part, because there
were few manifestos or dramatic claims about intentions, from the rebels. But collective action
should be understood as political if it is intended to shape the interests of government.16 As
much as nonviolent direct action, with its august lineage going back to Gandhi and others,
violent rebellion offered a means for people of color to express collective solidarity in the face
of exploitation, political exclusion, and criminalization. Both traditions continue to ground
movements for racial justice. Yet the violent conditions that have shaped the Black experience
have made violent responses and the politics that fueled them inevitable.

This book centers on the people who participated in violent political rebellions themselves and
takes their grievances seriously. Part I focuses on the crucible period of rebellion—from 1968 to
1972—in order to illuminate the mostly forgotten resistance to the escalation of police power
during the early years of the War on Crime, and to highlight the evolution of Black protest in
the immediate post–civil rights period. Set in secondary cities that are often overlooked in the
struggle for racial justice, the chapters in Part I examine dominant patterns of police violence
and Black rebellion, the politics of white supremacy and Black self-defense, and the housing
projects and public schools where rebellions frequently occurred. This Part draws heavily from
the records of the Lemberg Center for the Study of Violence, which was established
immediately after President John F. Kennedy’s assassination. The Center collected clippings
from local news sources, conducted oral interviews with residents in areas that experienced
unrest, and analyzed various data sets from 1967 to 1973. These records—previously closed to
the public and available now to only a small group of researchers—comprise one of the book’s
primary source bases. Part I closes with an account of the failed attempts by politicians and
officials to explain and address the violence taking place across the nation.

Part II traces the legacies of the crucible period in the nationally televised moments of mass
political violence of the past forty years: Miami in 1980, Los Angeles in 1992, and Cincinnati in
2001. Each was set off by an instance of police violence. Each drew calls for more “law and
order.” Each involved heavily militarized police confronting residents who were fighting against
a larger system of oppression. When examined in the context of earlier rebellions, these
eruptions can be understood anew, as examples of historical trends that began in the late
1960s. Yet the differences between this later era and the crucible years are instructive. For one,
the violence reached a truly unprecedented scale, especially in Miami and Los Angeles. The
main difference, though, is that these later rebellions now occurred in reaction to exceptional
instances of police violence, which is to say, police killings. There are no longer rebellions
against everyday policing practices, a sign that the status quo has become accepted, however
bitterly. In this sense, at least, national and local authorities won the War on Crime.

The history of Black rebellion across regions and decades demonstrates a fundamental reality:
police violence precipitates community violence. This reality escaped policymakers and many of
the scholars they consulted then, and it continues to be ignored by them today. Authorities
have funneled billions of taxpayer dollars into the War on Crime, the War on Drugs, and the
prison system. Rather than contend with underlying causes, this nation’s leaders further
criminalized entire communities, guaranteeing that rebellions would only continue.

Black rebellion clearly has a future; it also has a long history. That Black people might rise up in
violence has been a widespread fear among white Americans for centuries. Slave owners were
terrified their human property would defend themselves by running away, or that groups of
enslaved Africans would take bloody revenge on their white masters. Slave patrols, America’s
first system of organized, civilian-based law enforcement, were charged with suppressing
potential insurrection by raiding slave dwellings, dispersing gatherings, and patrolling the areas
around plantations and towns.17 Here was the foundational logic of American policing:
maintaining the social order though the surveillance and social control of people of color.

Under the terms of the Declaration of Independence, enslaved Africans were justified in
rebelling against the forces that kept them in bondage. As its primary author, Thomas Jefferson,
understood: “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot
sleep for ever.” Jefferson went on to observe in his Notes on the State of Virginia, from 1781,
that an “exchange of situation” was on the horizon—that slaves were “rising from the dust.” He
hoped that their “total emancipation” would be realized “with the consent of the masters,
rather than by their extirpation.”

Black rebellion was a self-fulfilling prophecy, a menace that would persist as long as state
violence was used to preserve racial hierarchy. Paraphrasing Jefferson some 180 years later,
Lyndon Johnson remarked of the “riots” that followed the assassination of Martin Luther King
Jr.: “What did you expect? I don’t know why we’re so surprised. When you put your foot on a
man’s neck and hold him down for three hundred years, and then you let him up, what’s he
going to do? He’s going to knock your block off.”19 Racial hierarchy, inequality, and violence
are among the oldest American stories. What follows is the most recent act in a saga that goes
back to this country’s beginnings.