Tomorrow (Thursday) marks the 50th anniversary of the worst outbreak of civil unrest in the modern history of Philadelphia. The three-day Columbia Avenue riot in the predominantly black neighborhood of North Philadelphia was marked by looting and mayhem, including clashes between residents and cops. The events of Aug. 28-30, 1964, shook the city -- a brief era of moderate-liberal consensus seeking gave way to the nightstick-wielding "law-and-order" white ethnic politics of Frank Rizzo (in tandem with the rise of first Nixon, then Reagan on the national stage) and a countervailing push for black empowerment.
I spent my summer researching the riots and talking to eyewitnesses for a magazine-style, "long read" piece in today's Philadelphia Daily News. Here's how it starts:
Richard Watson still remembers the moment he woke up.
It was August 28, 1964 – a Friday night wrapped in a moist blanket of late summer heat. Watson was 18 – a budding art student, thin and, in his own words, “geeky.” He could have been out on what folks called “Jump Street” or “The Ave” – a thriving commercial strip of Columbia Avenue in the heart of North Philly, where weekend crowds scurried between shows at the Rex or the Liberty movie houses and a neon string of pool halls and taverns. But as midnight approached, Watson was simply trying to get some sleep, a couple of blocks away from the strip in his family’s apartment at 22nd and Master.
Then something approached, like a gathering storm.
“I heard a distant sound, like a rally of noise and people -- like when people fight, with cheering and jeering, and it seemed far away,” recalled Watson, now 68, grey-haired and soft-spoken. “Then I heard breaking glass. Then I heard more breaking glass, and it sounded like it was on my block!
“That’s when I said, ‘Whoa, what’s going on here?’ Then I heard the sirens.”
What Watson heard that August night – exactly 50 years ago, tomorrow – were the first stirrings of the worst outbreak of civil unrest in modern Philadelphia history, a full-blown riot that lasted for three hellish nights as roving bands of looters methodically went from the butcher to the liquor store to the appliance store and to every merchant in between, smashing in windows and running down Ridge Avenue with TV sets or even sofas on their backs, while others rained down bricks and rooftop debris on the outnumbered cops.
Like I said, it's a long read -- but I'd be flattered if you
took a few minutes to check out the story. After all, the shocking events in Ferguson have reminded us that the seeds of civil unrest in America didn't all vanish with the winds of the 1960s. Indeed, although I've long considered myself a student of history, and especially modern American history, I was shocked to see the extent that the fuses that set off so many cities, including Philadelphia, during the "long hot summers" of the '60s are the same fuses that exist in so many communities today.
Just as black citizens of Philadelphia felt that that didn't have a civic voice in 1964, African-Americans see voter ID and other political games that continue to limits their influence (resulting in predominantly black communities like Ferguson with mayors and police chiefs that don't look like them). Just as African-Americans 50 years ago suffered a 60 percent rate of youth unemployment and the fear that the Industrial Revolution was dying down, in 2014 the factories are all gone and the inner cities have seen few new opportunities outside of flipping burgers or cleaning bedpans,
But here's the worst part. The biggest driver of the urban riots of the 1960s was police misconduct -- the day-to-day corruption of the rank-and-file cops, broken up by shocking episodes of police brutality, as well as the non-stop harassment that today we know as "stop-and-frisk," or "driving while black." The unfair and unequal treatment under law was what caused black neighborhoods from Rochester to Watts to erupt -- and now those conditions have been re-created a half-century later, thanks to a bogus "war on drugs" and the mass incarceration of young black males.
In 1966, or two years after the riot, the American Jewish Committee commissioned a Philadelphian, the late Lenora Berson, to study the causes in depth. Some of her findings -- especially the sense among black Philadelphians that they were policed unfairly -- ring shockingly true for 2014 as well. She wrote:
Citizen support for law enforcement is basic to a democratic society. With citizen support, the police are the community's right arm in fighting the evils that make city living difficult; without it, the same police force can degenerate into what many Negroes consider "an occupation army."
There hasn't been a large riot in Philadelphia for 50 years because people have actively worked to make sure another one didn't happen.
Five long decades later, we all need to keep working.