The riots represented a different kind of political activism, says William S. Pretzer, the National Museum of African American History and Culture’s senior curator. “Commonly sparked by repressive and violent police actions, urban uprisings were political acts of self-defense and racial liberation on a mass, public scale. Legislative successes at the federal level with the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts were not reflected in the daily lives of African-Americans facing police misconduct, economic inequality, segregated housing, and inferior educations.” Black racial violence was not unique in 1960s American culture, Pretzer says: White Southerners set a precedent by viciously attacking Freedom Riders and other civil rights protesters.
President Lyndon Johnson constituted the Kerner Commission to identify the genesis of the violent 1967 riots that killed 43 in Detroit and 26 in Newark, while causing fewer casualties in 23 other cities. The most recent investigation of rioting had been the McCone Commission, which explored the roots of the 1965 Watts riot and accused “riffraff” of spurring unrest. Relying on the work of social scientists and in-depth studies of the nation’s impoverished black urban areas, or ghettoes as they were often called, the Kerner Commission reached a quite different interpretation about the riots’ cause.
In moments of strife, the commission determined, fear drove violence through riot-torn neighborhoods. During the Detroit mayhem, “the city at this time was saturated with fear. The National Guardsmen were afraid, the citizens were afraid, and the police were afraid,” the report stated. The commission confirmed that nervous police and National Guardsmen sometimes fired their weapons recklessly after hearing gunshots. Intermittently, they targeted elusive or non-existent snipers, and as National Guardsmen sought the source of gunfire in one incident, they shot five innocent occupants of a station wagon, killing one of them. Contrary to some fear-driven beliefs in the white community, the overwhelming number of people killed in Detroit and Newark were African-American, and only about 10 percent of the dead were government employees.
Finding the truth behind America’s race riots was a quest undertaken not just by the Kerner Commission: in late 1967 Newsweek produced a large special section reporting on the disturbances and offering possible solutions to racial inequality.