Christmas Book Supplement

I am tired of books like Race Riots New York 1964, published soon after an event for the sole purpose of selling copies. Fred C. Shapiro and James Sullivan have produced the almost inevitable hodge-podge of decent reporting, vignettes both tired and telling, and banal analysis that rarely moves beyond the superficialities of a Time cover story. Thomsa Y. Crowell Company, the publisher, might just as well have reprinted old newspaper articles with an appendix of personal reminiscences from policemen, reporters, and others present during the ricts.

Images Recreated...

The book does succeed in recreating the images New Yorkers saw on television and read in the newspapers. Race Riots also (unconsciouslv, I suspect), introduces a new motive, one that at the time seemed unthinkable: for some the riots were simply a release (like a Pogo, diploma, or sycamore riot), a chance to use individual conscience in mass consciousness.

Shapiro and Sullivan tell the story of the "sleek, middle-aged man in Bermuda shorts" who told them, "These are not the real people of Harlem. These are not the people who make Harlem great. Tell your readers there is a good element in Harlem." A few minutes later they saw the same man "his bare knees pumping and his fists waving in the air as he screamed, 'Kill the mother--whiteys!'"

But Issues Ignored

Even as a simple recapitulation the book leaves several questions unanswered--some even unmentioned. The authors rather glibly say the riots were unorganized, and probably they are right. But I can remember seeing a widely-distributed pamphlet describing how to make Molotov cocktails; and I have heard innumerable stories: riot schools organized by Black Muslims and others, young people brought in busses from the Lower East Side to reinforce the rioters, money being passed out in Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant bars, a comment supposedly made by H.L. Hunt that you only need $50,000 to start a riot.

Perspective Lost

At times Shapiro and Sullivan seemingly lose perspective. At the start they admit the riots covered only a small area and involved only a small number--estimated at a maximum of 8,000. Then they talk as if rioting consumed the passions of a vast proportion of New York's Negroes. It did not. Significantly, those who rioted were primarily youths, and they cared little for their community's leaders. They booed Bayard Rustin as he tried to pull them off the streets; they did the same to James Farmer as he belatedly asked for responsibility.

Personally I believe the riots (not only in New York but in Rochester, Chicago, Philadelphia, etc.) were an almost inevitable complement to the March on Washington. The March was the expression of the organized Negro community -- of those who found hope in the Movement and purpose in the words of ministers and civil rights leaders. The riots represented an outcry, defiant and general, of the outsiders, the genuinely alienated.