Posted on 08/22/2014 7:21:40 AM PDT by Kaslin
Continued violence in Ferguson, Missouri, brings back memories of the urban riots of the 1960s.
As it happens, I had a front-row seat back then, as an intern in the office of Detroit Mayor Jerome Cavanagh during the six-day riot in July 1967. At one point I was alone in the so-called command center with Cavanagh and Michigan Gov. George Romney.
Forty-three people died in that riot. Many were bystanders who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. One was a deaf man who did not heed a policeman's command, which he couldn't hear.
Sadly, nearly 50 years later we're still facing rioting by blacks purportedly protesting police behavior. But there are some differences of varying significance between the riots of the 1960s and Ferguson today.
First, Ferguson is much tinier than the cities hit by 1960s riots. Ferguson had 21,203 people in 2010; Detroit had about 1.6 million in 1967.
In the 25 years between 1940 and 1965, nearly one-third of American blacks moved from the mostly rural and segregated South to the big cities of the North. Detroit's black population increased from 150,000 in 1940 to 600,000 in 1967.
Detroit's riot started when in the wee hours of Sunday morning police raided a "blind pig" -- an after-hours drinking place. No one was shot at the scene, but after a passive police response to looting, arson and violence continued for five successive nights.
The almost all-white Detroit Police and Michigan National Guard were unable to cope. Only after well-trained 82nd Airborne troops were sent in did the rioting end.
Detroit then, like Ferguson today, had an almost entirely white police force. Blacks in Detroit complained, with some basis, that police were hostile and often failed to distinguish between harmless and harmful behavior.
But there was no demand for specific punishment for an officer, as Ferguson residents and out-of-town rioters have demanded punishment for Officer Darren Wilson, who shot Michael Brown.
Those demands have seemed increasingly unjustified, as evidence -- videotape of Brown's theft at the convenience store, eyewitness accounts of the confrontation -- has appeared.
Agitators Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson have treated this unhappy incident as emblematic of a larger problem, as if white policemen were shooting innocent blacks frequently.
But as the Wall Street Journal's Jason Riley and Fox News contributor Juan Williams have pointed out, 90 percent of black homicide victims are killed by other (civilian) blacks.
Ferguson is an example of suburban communities that have seen racial change in recent years. But they are not large in numbers, and incidents of this sort are happily rare. Census data make it clear that, unlike the 1960s, black Americans are able to move to suburbs when they wish, and there's not much evidence that suburban police departments treat them unfairly.
In contrast, Detroit in 1967 was the nation's fifth-largest city, and most other major cities had experienced similarly huge influxes of blacks over the previous generation. The frictions unfortunately generated by this enormous demographic change were of national significance.
There is another difference between then and now. The late 1960s saw a vast increase in violent crime in cities across the nation, to high levels that continued until the 1990s, when New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and his police commissioners adopted neighborhood policing tactics that cut crime rates enormously.
Similar policies were adopted elsewhere, with great success. As a result, we live in an America with vastly lower crime rates today.
The Ferguson rioting has already gone on longer than in Detroit in 1967 or Los Angeles in 1992. In both those cases, violence ended shortly after more than 10,000 National Guard and federal troops were sent in.
Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon has not, at this writing, asked for federal troops. President Obama has promised to dispatch Attorney Gen. Eric Holder.
Nixon has called for the "vigorous prosecution" of Wilson. That sounds, as liberal blogger Josh Marshall has noted, like prejudgment of a case about which the facts still seem unclear.
Many Americans seem to have an urge to re-experience the 1960s. But the numbers don't fit. Ferguson is tiny compared to Detroit. The peak U.S. troop strength in Vietnam (536,000) was nearly three times the peak in the last decade in Iraq and Afghanistan (188,000).
Our problems today may seem daunting. But things were much worse in the 1960s.
Give it time............
Not really. In the 1960s, most Americans shared common values about the importance of liberty, the rule of law and the Constitution. Most high school graduates had at least a basic understanding of American history, the founding documents, and the major events in our past.
Most Americans were proud to be American, and the communist far left was the lunatic fringe.
Now we live in a legally mandated "diverse" society in which all cultures are equally beautiful except American culture, which is routinely trashed as our nation is vilified in our public schools, universities, the media and our politicians.
We have a president and an attorney general who are outright anti-American leftists, as are far too many congressional reps and senators.
Most Americans have no understanding of American history, and far too many don't even know who we fought against in the American revolution.
Our founders are dismissed as archaic dead white slaveholders who have little wisdom to offer our "modern" society.
Our nation is staggering under unpayable debt, which our politicians believe is the path to our economic salvation, while our credit rating is pretty much trashed.
We are the laughing stock of the world and our enemies no longer fear or respect us, and our long-standing allies no longer trust us -- with good reason.
I could go on, but I'm getting too depressed.
So why were they violent back then if there was no welfare state established yet?
It’s interesting to contrast where we are with how things were back then.
But Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, et. al. are all full of it.
As far as issues of complaint, such as police brutality, how police treat blacks, etc. we are a world away from how things were decades ago.
If anything, in today’s politically correct world, police bend over backwards when dealing with blacks, so as not to see situations blow up into confrontations.
More and more comes out, and we see Michael Brown was not a choir boy, had a physical confrontation with the cop, beat up the cop, and he was killed as a result. We still need to wait for all the evidence to come out.
However, it is clearly NOT a case of a random white cop, who has nothing better to do, than shoot an innocent young black man who was minding his own business. Yet the media and Sharpton and Jackson would have us believe that is exactly what happened here. They are all liars.
Most everything was more daunting in the 1960s than now. The difference is the lack of capacity to cope now.
I have been telling my kids these punks don’t know how to riot. It seems their “heart is not into it.”
Bring back the draft.....you’ll see some enthusiastic mayhem.
in the Detroit riot, 600,000 blacks were confined to living in a very small area of the city, literally living on top of each other. L.B.J. promised them the world, and when it didn’t materialize, a lot of Major cities went up. Detroit Police also had a special unit called the “Big 4”...they really cracked heads....
Uh...No! The verdict is preordained...the fix is in. Anyone who really believes that “Justice” is involve will soon learn “Just Us” is the coin of the realm...OJ!
Spot on. Slipping and falling is a minor thing if you’re 18, it can be fatal if you’re 90. America is weak. Little events can have much bigger consequences.
If the cop is smart he will leave the country after he gets out of the hospital.
Maybe you don't realize it, but that's a damning indictment of the culture surrounding the (illegal) saloon. "Say 'no' to us and we'll riot." That's a sick culture.
William Ayers and his band of marry marxists were 30 miles away in Ann Arbor.
That's the other key ingredient, and the one ignored by most commentators on the topic. The '60s race riots were ALL engineered, fomented, and driven by professional out of town agitators. They were most certainly not 'spontaneous'.
One of my favorite cartoons from back then was...A white man is cleaning is double barrel shotgun in anticipation of the riot. His wife says..
“For heaven’s sake John, lets just put a SOUL BROTHER sign in the window!”
I got pulled over by the ‘big four’ once on the way to a softball game with most of the team crammed in the car. They thought we were going to a gang fight. The two big harness cops pulled the seats out of the car while the two ‘dicks’ grilled us about the ball bats in the trunk. When they found balls, mitts and catchers’ gear too, they climbed back in their plain black Buick sedan and left us with the job of reassembling my car.
“Most Americans were proud to be American, and the communist far left was the lunatic fringe. “
The communists were much more prevalent than a lunatic fringe. We were only taught about the communists in Russia, not the ones in the US.
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