With 40-Year Prism, Newark Surveys Deadly Riot

NY Times ^ | July 8, 2007 | ANDREW JACOBS

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NEWARK, July 6 — Four decades later, many people here still cannot agree on what to call the five nights of gunfire, looting and flames that disemboweled the geographic midsection of this city, leaving 23 people dead, injuring 700, scorching acres of property and causing deep psychic wounds that have yet to fully heal.

To the frightened white residents who later abandoned Newark by the tens of thousands, it was a riot; for the black activists who gained a toehold in City Hall in the years that followed, it was a rebellion. Those seeking neutrality have come to embrace the word disturbance.

“There is not one truth, and your view depends on your race, your age and where you lived,” said Linda Caldwell Epps, president of the New Jersey Historical Society.

The society has planned a series of panel discussions and film screenings to mark the 40th anniversary of the violence, which began the night of July 12, 1967, after false rumors spread that an African-American cabdriver had been killed by police officers after his arrest for a traffic infraction. Avoiding the semantic controversy, the society has titled a planned exhibit “What’s Going On? Newark and the Legacy of the Sixties.”

There are no public monuments to mark the episode that painted Newark as a national symbol of racial disparity, police brutality and urban despair, but there is a newfound willingness here to confront the past. City officials, who ignored previous anniversaries, will dedicate a plaque Thursday at the Fourth Precinct station house, where the first skirmishes erupted between residents and the police.

“It’s still a touchy and contentious subject, but the fact that there is dialogue taking place is highly positive and would not have happened 10 years ago,” said Max Herman, a sociology professor at Rutgers University who...

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no change in 40 years.