Eighty Years of Fergusons
http://www.buzzfeed.com/adamserwer/eighty-years-of-fergusons
That changed in Harlem in March 1935, when a black teenager named Lino Rivera attempted to steal a knife from a store on 125th Street. Rivera was caught by the manager, Jackson Smith. When the police came, they took Rivera to the back of the store to avoid a crowd that had gathered outside, but rumors began to spread that Rivera had been beaten or killed. When police refused to let the crowd see the boy, the incident took on a primal echo of the terror that Harlem’s black residents had come north to escape. Someone in the crowd threw something that shattered the store’s front window....
Harlem in 1935 would signal a shift in the nature of urban uprisings that would come full circle in the 1960s. Instead of whites massacring blacks, urban race riots evolved into blacks lashing out against symbols of white authority — and fighting for a full citizenship long denied — by targeting property more often than people. Harlem rioted again in 1943 after police officer James Collins shot black soldier Robert Bandy following a confrontation in which Collins attempted to arrest Bandy’s mother.
Like the Harlem riots, many 1960s uprisings were sparked by conflict between the community and the police. Los Angeles’ Watts neighborhood went up in flames in 1965, after three family members were arrested during a clash with police following a drunk-driving stop. St. Louis fell into chaos that same year after 19-year-old Donnell Dortch was shot and killed as he fled police officer Israel Mason, who said Dortch tried to grab his gun during a traffic stop. Detroit burned for five days in 1967 after police tried to arrest dozens of people during a raid of a speakeasy. “The primary period of black urban uprisings, which was 1963 to 1970, nearly all of them were sparked by confrontations between African-Americans and the police,” said Thomas Sugrue, a history professor at the University of Pennsylvania. “Almost every single one.”
And the same goes for the two weeks of demonstrations — sometimes featuring calculated violence — that manifested in Ferguson. The recipe for urban riots since 1935 is remarkably consistent and the ingredients are almost always the same: An impoverished and politically disempowered black population refused full American citizenship, a heavy-handed and overwhelmingly white police force, a generous amount of neglect, and frequently, the loss of black life at the hands of the police. Yet we’re always surprised at what they cook up.
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