President responds to Baltimore riots: 'What did you expect? I don’t know why we’re so surprised'

[bigtree]

ThinkProgress ‏@thinkprogress
How Lyndon Johnson responded to Baltimore’s last riots http://thkpr.gs/3652006

Baltimore broke out in violent riots Monday night, prompting Maryland Governor Larry Hogan (R) to declare a state of emergency and activate the National Guard. This is not the first time Baltimore has seen this sort of eruption. After the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in April of 1968, similar swaths of the city were blanketed by protests, looting, and violent clashes with law enforcement — as were other cities around the country.

The April 1968 riots came months after President Lyndon Johnson’s National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, known as the Kerner Commission, released a report that examined the cause of race riots in 1967 and warned that the nation was “moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.” Its recommendations — “programs on a scale equal to the dimension of the problems,” aimed for “for high impact in the immediate future in order to close the gap between promise and performance” and “new initiatives and experiments that can change the system of failure and frustration that now dominates the ghetto and weakens our society,” were largely ignored as the Vietnam War continued to drain government resources.

As Baltimore and other cities exploded, many public officials and Baltimore citizens described the riots as an inevitable outgrowth of vast racial injustice, in a segregated city with an African American population struggling with poverty and legal discrimination — triggered by a tragic death.

President Lyndon Johnson:

What did you expect? I don’t know why we’re so surprised. When you put your foot on a man’s neck and hold him down for three hundred years, and then you let him up, what’s he going to do? He’s going to knock your block off.

read more: http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2015/04/28/3652006/baltimore-race-riots-1968/

related:

President Obama today:

"This is not new, and we shouldn't pretend that it's new," he said.

"If we think we're going to send police to do the dirty work of containing the problems that arise there — without as a nation and society saying what can we do to change those communities, to help lift up communities, and give those kids opportunity — then we're not going to solve this problem,"

[HassleCat]

1. LBJ Was Right

I worked in a program that enrolled young people from Baltimore, DC and Philadelphia. This was one of those programs that was supposed to give them a chance to change direction, transform their lives, etc. In some cases, it did. We always had a few young people who really wanted a shot at getting out of the environment that held them down and held them back. Unfortunately, they were surrounded by others who saw the program as an opportunity to continue their gang activity, loan sharking, extortion, stealing, drug sales, etc. Their objective was to spend a year or so in the program, then go back to the neighborhood and pick up where they left off. When kids grow up in a bad environment, you're not going to "save" them by feeding them milk and cookies and talking about self-esteem. All you can do is identify those with some promise, those who are smart enough and willing to change, and make sure they get what they need to leave the past behind. Our program had a success rate of maybe 5 to 10 percent. That is, 90 to 95 kids out of 100 went back to sleeping on grandma's couch and getting high. If I saw pictures of all the Baltimore rioters, I'm sure I would recognize at least a couple faces, and I would not be surprised by which faces they were.

Obama is right about offering young people opportunities, but there's another part nobody wants to mention. For every kid who wants an opportunity, there is another kid who will try to wreck things for others. The police can't seem to tell the difference, which is not surprising when I consider that many of the staff in our program could not tell the difference. Some people become such good con artists by age 16, they could convince the staff they were upstanding examples of American youth. You will see them on TV when there's a riot. They're the ones claiming they weren't doing anything wrong, just standing on the street doing beats or something, when the police suddenly charged them. The media present this as a racial thing, a black vs. white thing, but there's more to it than that. Much more. It's going to require time and money to fix things, and the failures will far outnumber the successes, but it has to be done.

[Downwinder]

2. Johnson set up the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO)

under Sargent Shriver, then Rumsfeld and Cheney under Nixon tore it down.

[Hutzpa]

3. The Man is right once again

everyone including those in the media are acting shock when a CVS store is burnt down but are ignoring the very definition that created this intense atmosphere in Baltimore.

[mountain grammy]

4. I just read this and came here to post, but found you, bigtree.

This is good. I remember when Johnson said this and I agreed with him then and now. Nothing was ever done to repair the damage of slavery followed by decades of terror against black Americans.

[bigtree]

5. amazing how much of that destructive legacy has persisted

...I remember that time as a 8 year-old in D.C.; smoldering, demolished brick structures, blocks strewn with broken glass. Much of that area that was destroyed (once thriving blocks of neighborhood businesses) is still undeveloped and derelict. Truly a generational challenge.