Sunday’s New York Times had a long feature on the July 1967 Newark NJ riots. Interesting reading for one for whom news of these riots and the anxiety of family members (my grandfather’s factory was on the outskirts of Newark) is one of her earliest memories. The feature includes lots of photographs here.
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 has collected 100 oral histories about those five calamitous days. “I think for the first time Newark feels secure enough to turn back and look its history straight in the eye.”
Of course, that history is still open to interpretation.
The Newark riot (“disturbance” my foot–23 people don’t get killed in a “disturbance”) was a turning point in my family’s life. I was seven when it happened. My father owned a corner “candy store” (nowadays we’d call it a convenience grocery) in Newark. It was his first effort at running his own business. Someone burned it down that week, and my father never seemed to get over it. He went back to his former work as a machinist, and rarely afterward showed much initiative or interest in making more of himself. Needless to say, I don;’t look back on the summer of love with fondness.
According to my mother, my dad drove through Newark during the riots en route to teaching at the American Institute of Banking. I was a mere child then, days shy of my 11th birthday, but I can say that the turmoil in Newark reached other parts of NJ, and then well beyond NJ through the news coverage.
Sad! NJ Historical Society President Epp’s assertion that there is “not one truth, and your view depends on your race, your age and where you lived,” smacks of moral relativity at its worst. If she’s right about the divisibility of truth, there can be little reconciliation and little agreement on the basis for a common civic existence. There only remains, in Epps’s scheme of things, a violent struggle for power and turf with, I suppose, the moral highground automatically going to the victor.
Sorry, that should be “…President Epps’s assertion… .”
#3, that “there is not one truth” line struck me as well
Sounds like ECUSA and former PB Griswold’s frequent sermons on pluriform truths.
The other section that struck me, and reminded me of ECUSA and caused great sadness was this on the background to the riots:
[blockquote]Mr. Williams, a law student at Yale University, was part of this army of organizers who flocked to Newark, the state’s largest city, inspired in part by Tom Hayden, a founder of Students for a Democratic Society, who made it his base. “I came here to be on the cutting edge of the movement,†said Mr. Williams, 63[/blockquote]
I found the idea of an army of organizers and being on the cutting edge all too reminiscent of what happened in the diocese of Newark under Spong. And sadly, the legacy is the same: spiritual violence, destruction and having become a watchword for a ruined city.
Of course Newark the city has rebounded to some extent. I pray that Newark the diocese might as well through repentance and returning to Christ.