1967, in that brief recitation of time, we find history’s echo of an era of rebellion, resistance, fear, and hope. It was emblematic of what we’ve come to call “the long hot summer,” for in 1967, cities across the nation went up like kindling; fires waved their reddish orange fingers into the night air and white fear, usually echoed in the corporate media, gave voice more to fancy than to fact. Reporters wrote stories based not on their knowledge, but on their suppositions. Come to think of it, not very different from what passes today for the media, huh?
Cities exploded like popcorn on an oily griddle. Roxbury first, in June, between the second and the fifth, then Tampa, Florida. Days later, Cincinnati exploded. Before two weeks had passed, Buffalo, New York, had a rebellion. Of course, many here know that Newark went into rebellion right in the midst of these events. From July 12th to the 17th, almost half of the city was the site of rebellion. Over 1,500 people were injured; 1,300 arrested; 26 people were killed. Newark came to stand for the Watts of the East Coast, and a symbol of how widespread was the fever of Black discontent. Of course, folks in the Garden State know that Newark wasn’t alone. It lit the flame that spread to New Brunswick, Inglewood, Patterson, Elizabeth, Palmyra, Passaic, and Plainfield, New Jersey. Before the fires were extinguished in Newark, the sparks flamed in Cairo, Illinois, then Durham, North Carolina, then Memphis, Tennessee, then Minneapolis. Before the month passed, Detroit exploded, bigger than Newark, with federal troops instead of National Guard called out to attempt to quell rebellion. Some 43 people died in Detroit alone, and the month of July, 1967, still had not passed.
What were the sparks, and how do we look at that era, four decades later? The sparks were those that caused rebellion and conflict virtually anywhere in the country, and that still marks our present: police mistreatment, brutality and violence against Black people. If we think that this was a distant reality, we need only look at 1992, when the Rodney King verdicts of acquittal came down. Hell, we ain’t gotta go to LA. For just days ago, a few miles north of Newark, we saw the police beatings of two Black lawyers, Michael Tariff Warren and his wife, Evelyn. Their beatings came as they tried to stop the cop beating of a handcuffed Black youth outside a McDonald’s restaurant in Brooklyn. So much for how “things have changed.”
The question isn’t whether repression has changed—because we know it hasn’t—but whether our forms of resistance have changed. The answer, of course, is an unequivocal yes: for change only comes when people fight for it. To quote our honored ancestor, Frederick Douglass, “Power concedes nothing without demand. It never has and never will.” People didn’t rebel all across America during 1967 for a Black boxing champ. They didn’t rebel because they wanted a Black mayor. They didn’t rebel because they wanted Adam Clayton Powell returned to his seat in Congress, or because they wanted a Congressional Black Caucus. They rebelled because they wanted power—the power to better their lives. They also wanted an end to the violent repression of the cops.
Out of that year of fire and rebellion came the first National Black Power Conference, where people from all walks of life tried to grapple with ways to gain true social, cohesive, communal power. Shortly thereafter came several other such conferences, in various cities. Among them—and perhaps best known—was the National Black Political Assembly in Gary, Indiana, in 1972. It is almost painful to read what those delegates described there, and to contrast it with our miserable present. It shows us, in ways we cannot deny, how much things simply have not changed. In the Gary Declaration, the following words were used as part of the call to the people, “Let there be no mistake, we come to Gary in a time of unrelieved crisis for our people. From every rural community in Alabama to the high-rise compounds in Chicago, we bring to this convention the agonies of the masses of our people. From the sprawling Black cities of Watts and Nairobi in the west, to the decay of Harlem and Roxbury in the east, the testimony we hear is the same: we are witnesses to social disaster.”
The Gary Declaration went on to decry the woes of unemployment and the impact it had on Black lives, especially Black youth. It critiqued the failure of the prison system, pollution in the environment, and called for Gary to become an important part of the Black liberation movement. They recognized something that we—or, many of us—seem to have forgotten: the American system does not work for the masses of our people, and it cannot be made to work without radical, fundamental, change. It also called for Black, independent politics, not a dependence on either of the major political parties. That dream, the fruit of the year of fire and rage, is, 40 years later, as distant as Mars.
As cultural workers, poets, organizers, and activists, Amiri and Amina Baraka have tried to be forces for social change in the city, and both have made deep and abiding impacts on Newark. But for most of us, the rebellion of 1967 seems to be the rebellion betrayed. For while it may be said that there are certainly more politicians now than then, is there truly more political power? Have Black politicians come to represent the system or their constituencies? The answer is written in the spreading fields of desperation that dot our communities all across the land. The educational system converges to destroy young minds, not enlighten them. There is a need, now more than ever, to add new life to the spirit of rebellion and resistance in our people’s long march to liberation. Let us all be a part of that march. From death row, this is Mumia Abu-Jamal.
These commentaries are produced by Noel Hanrahan for Prison Radio.
