How did Americans respond to the Great Uprising of the 1960s, the term I use in my recently published book by the same name to describe the race riots of the 1960s? Why were they taking place and how should (and did) the nation respond? To answer these questions, I examine three demographically distinct communities, Cambridge Maryland, a small town of 10,000 on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, Baltimore, Maryland, one of the nation’s largest industrial cities during the 1960s, and York, Pennsylvania, a mid-sized city whose riot received little attention until 2001 when its two-term mayor, Charlie Robertson, was arrested for allegedly helping to murder a black woman during its 1969 revolt—he was a city policeman at the time.
As I suggest on page 99, Americans were not of one mind when it came to answering the aforementioned questions. “Statements made by a wide variety of officials, from Cambridge Police Chief Brice Kinnamon to Maryland Governor Spiro Agnew, reinforced by sensational media coverage, which highlighted the fiery rhetoric of black radicals like H. Rap Brown … [emphasized] that radicals had caused the revolts and that those who had rioted had done so for fun and profit, not political reasons (p. 99).” In contrast, the Kerner Commission concluded that the “social and economic conditions of the nation’s urban ghettos, not radicals and/or moral failings on the part of blacks (p. 99)” had caused the riots. “Or as the Commission declared in its oft-cited summation of its five hundred plus page report, ‘What white Americans have never fully understood—but what the Negro can never forget—is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it (pp. 99-100).”
For the full blog see: http://page99test.blogspot.com (blog forthcoming)