July 13, 1967: The Newark Riots

July 13, 1967, 50 years ago: Riots break out in Newark, over racial injustice. There were 26 deaths, over 700 injuries, and over 1,400 arrests.

My parents both grew up in Newark, in the 1950s. My mother taught me that, up until the riots, Newark was fantastic, with a thriving downtown shopping and entertainment district. Those things were thriving.

But my father's 1964 yearbook from the Newark College of Engineering -- which merged with the New Jersey School of Architecture in 1973, forming the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) -- used these specific words to describe the city, 3 years before the riots: "Newark needs our help."

And Tom Hayden, in between writing The Port Huron Statement, the founding document of the Students for a Democratic Society in 1962, and his participating in the 1968 events that got him indicted as one of the Chicago Eight, worked in Newark with the Economic Research and Action Project (ERAP). His writing on the subject showed just how devastating urban poverty could be for black people -- and got him unwanted attention from the old version of the FBI run by J. Edgar Hoover, without which he probably wouldn't have been noticed in Chicago.

There had, of course, been racial disturbances in the years leading up to this. Birmingham, Alabama in 1963, except that wasn't the civil rights demonstrators doing the rioting, it was the police with their response. In 1964, New York's Harlem, and North Philadelphia. In 1965, the Watts section of Los Angeles. In 1966, the East Side of Cleveland and the West Side of Chicago.

At 9:40 PM on July 12, 1967, Newark Police officers John DeSimone and Vito Pontrelli pursued and pulled over a taxicab. It was driven by a black man, John William Smith. The officers discovered that he was driving with a revoked license. (Driver's license, not taxi license.) But he was desperate for money, and kept driving his cab.

Had he been white, he probably would have been let off with a warning. Instead, he was arrested, beaten on the scene, and taken to the 4th Precinct. A rumor went around that he had been beaten to death inside. There was no social media then, and a lot of Newark's slums didn't even have telephones, so this was mostly word of mouth. A crowd gathered outside the precinct, and began throwing things through the windows.

The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) was contacted. They demanded to see Smith, and upon seeing his injuries, demanded that he be taken to Beth Israel Hospital. This was done. Things began to calm down. If that had been the end of it, we wouldn't be talking about the Newark Riots for the last half a century.

On July 13, civil rights groups met with Mayor Hugh Addonizio. First elected to Congress in 1948, he first ran for Mayor of Newark in 1962, saying he wanted the job "because you can make a million dollars there."

The demands he received were as follows: Suspend the arresting officers, conduct an investigation, and promote the highest-ranking black person on the NPD, Lieutenant Eddie Williams, to Captain.

A reasonable man would have done all 3. Addonizio said he needed 48 hours to consider the demands. When word of that got out, a protest was set, and the organizers lost control. Again, the windows of the 4th Precinct were smashed, and a police car was set on fire. (No one was in it.) Then the rioters went down Springfield Avenue, the main drag of the Central Ward, and started smashing and looting things there.

All police were placed on emergency duty. At 1:00 AM on July 14, all officers were ordered to "fire if necessary. At 2:20, Addonizio called Governor Richard J. Hughes, calling for the New Jersey State Police to come as reinforcements. Ten minutes later, he called again, asking for the New Jersey National Guard. He got both. It took 3 days and change for it to be enough, until July 17. 

My father was in the U.S. Army, at this heightening point of the Vietnam War, stationed along the Demilitarized Zone -- not in Vietnam, but in the country of the last war, Korea. He knew that, at any moment, thousands of Communist soldiers could come pouring over the border, but they never did.

Meanwhile, my mother, who married him only 2 months earlier, had to get from home in the Forest Hill section in the North Ward to her job Downtown, and on the bus, she heard shooting. She was in more of a war zone than he was, and she had no way of knowing who was firing the shots she heard: The rioters, the people protecting their businesses, street vigilantes, the NPD, the State Police, or the National Guard.

The riots ended. Mom survived. Dad was discharged in August 1968, and as soon as they could, they got out of their hometown, and found a garden apartment in adjoining Bloomfield, close enough to the people and the things they loved, but safe. I was born a year after that.

The investigation into Addonizio's actions during the riots uncovered the fact that he certainly tried his best to make a million bucks as Mayor. He was indicted in 1969, and, in 1970, he lost his bid for re-election to Ken Gibson, who became Newark's 1st black Mayor.

Gibson ended up with the same fate: Under indictment in 1986, he lost his bid for re-election to Sharpe James, and went to prison. James, too, fell under criminal suspicion, chose not to run for re-election in 2006, went to prison, and the man who nearly beat him in 2002 before the charges against him were fully known, won the election. His name was Cory Booker, and he's now a U.S. Senator -- the 1st man to leave the office of Mayor of Newark while not under a cloud in over half a century.

The property damage amounted to about $10 million -- around $73 million in 2017 money. And, as I said, 26 people died. But what it did to the culture of Newark was incalculable. It left the Central Ward a scar on the city, and it wasn't until the 1990s that things like supermarkets and movie theaters began to come back to the neighborhood. The city, always the largest in the State of New Jersey, had a population of 460,000 in 1960. By 1990, it was down to 260,000.

The riots entered popular culture. In 1997, Philip Roth, a native of the Weequahic section of Newark, on the South Side, published American Pastoral, and mentioned the riots' effects. It was made into a movie in 2016.

In 1999, the North Jersey-based TV series The Sopranos aired an episode titled "Down Neck," which is a nickname for the Ironbound section of town, the East Side. It featured a flashback to 1967 and the riots. 

In spite of his corruption, Mayor Gibson was able to restore some of the city's pride in the 1970s, revamped the Police Department, and -- through methods above board, and some methods under the table -- was able to get people to invest in the city's Downtown again. James was able to do the same thing, but, like an old-time city political boss, only seemed to invest in those neighborhoods that had voted for him, like his native South Side.

The demographics of Newark began to change. Just as the G.I. Bill's housing provisions enabled "white flight" after World War II, making it a majority-black city, the Clinton Administration's crime bill and economic measures meant that crime and poverty eased enough in the 1990s than black families who could move to neighboring towns did so.

This led to poor Hispanics coming from other countries and moving in. Booker recognized that the city had become plurality-Hispanic, and that the things that Gibson and James had done that worked needed to be adapted to the new situation.

Newark wasn't the only city stricken by race riots in July 1967. The one in Detroit, 2 weeks later, was even worse. And those weren't the only cities stricken that Summer. In June, there were riots in Boston's Roxbury, Tampa's Central Park, Cincinnati's Avondale, Atlanta's Dixie Hills, and Buffalo's East Side. In July, in between Newark and Detroit, North Minneapolis broke out. At the same time as Detroit, possibly "inspired" by it, 60 miles to the south, Toledo, Ohio. After these, the West Side of Milwaukee.

It may have been a "Summer of Love" in San Francisco, but, in so many other places, it was "The Long Hot Summer" and "The Year of Living Dangerously." And it was all because of the lingering effects of what America's white aristocracy had done to black people. In 1968, the Kerner Commission released a report saying that it had resulted in an America that was "two societies, one white, one black, separate and unequal."

For most of my life, from various sources, I had heard that Newark was "coming back" -- or even that it had "come back." In 1999, I visited Detroit. One look at Detroit, which has become the byword for failed cities in America, and how much it hadn't come back, showed me just how much Newark had.

Today, under Mayor Ras Baraka, a more effective Police Department, and a population of about 285,000, Newark is better off now than it was before July 1967. That's the good news. The bad news is, it already wasn't as well off as it should have been.