Everyone who took to the streets of places such as North Philadelphia, or downtown Rochester, or the heart of Harlem, was crystal clear that eruption was indeed resistance. They made this obvious to the police, to the press, and to the President himself—a man who eventually would be compelled to ask for, and then to ignore, the Kerner Commission’s inquiry into urban upheaval across the nation. Protesters had stated unflinchingly that it was not enough to rule that racism was illegal. They called out the uselessness of merely police brutality. They made it clear that the deep inequalities and injustices wrought by ordinary whites remained a most serious crisis, especially because this sometimes subtle but always the most self-serving oppression in the realm of education and employment could be some of the most devastating. They repeatedly also shined a bright light on the myth that was “equal justice under the law.”
But the crystal clear explanations that urban rebels offered whenever asked, and that would have obvious to any who witnessed them in real time, were utterly ignored by the press that spun them and the politicians that responded to them. These were not the actions of a civil rights movement that had merely come of age for logical and legitimate reasons. This was not a collective eruption against hollow promises and the remarkable hardiness of white supremacy in America.
This was, according to the nation’s largest media outlets and to politicians alike, a betrayal of the civil rights movement—a distortion of it. This was not a collective demand for actual change, but in fact an excuse for destruction and an embrace of a violence that unacceptable and downright un-American.
From 1964 onward, in fact, the effort expended on discrediting the urban uprisings of this period by divorcing it from its spark and saddling it with the descriptor “violent” was tireless and vast.
From the autopsies that newspaper headlines supplied regarding what had gone down in Philly, Rochester, and Harlem in 1964, to those that would follow regarding the even bloodier eruptions in Newark or Detroit in 1967, to the horror of Orangeburg in 1969, the nation was told again and again that protest was now both uncompromising and alarmingly violent because the civil rights movement had been corrupted.