These types of uprisings have been a nearly perennial occurrence in the United States for more than fifty years. In the month following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., black uprisings erupted in more than 125 cities, leading to 50 deaths and more than 15,000 arrests. In the years that followed (1968–72), at least 960 segregated black communities witnessed 2,310 separate incidents of what journalists and state security officials described as “disturbances,” “uprisings,” “rebellions,” “melees,” “eruptions,” or “riots.” As in Minneapolis today, this type of collective violence almost always started with contact between residents and the frontline representatives of the state—the police—and then quickly moved to other institutions. Indeed, following King’s murder, many black residents in cities across the United States responded to the process of criminalization and unanswered calls for greater socioeconomic inclusion by throwing rocks and punches at police officers, detonating firebombs, and plundering local stores.
Although this period of unrest remains marked in many people’s memories of the period, it was hardly the beginning of violent urban uprising by black Americans. In fact, U.S. cities had been beset with black rebellion since the enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Federal policymakers and officials blamed this earlier period of disorders (and the hundreds of millions of dollars in property damage it caused) primarily on the behavior of young black men. They sought to address it as a criminal problem, launching the War on Crime and passing the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968, which incentivized increased local policing and surveillance of black urban areas, as well as formal “riot control” training. However, a proper understanding of sixties-era urban rebellion—and similar rebellions now—depends on our ability to interpret it not as a wave of criminality, but as a period of sustained political violence.
Arguably, the success of King’s brand of nonviolent direct political action—so often valorized by pundits over and against “destructive” “rioting”—depended on the presence of this violent direct political action. As King recognized, the coercive power of mass nonviolence arose in part from its ability to suggest the possibility of violent resistance should demands not be met. Therefore, we should endeavor to see violent and nonviolent expressions of black protest as entwined forces that shaped the decade. In addition, and more challenging perhaps, we should attempt to understand violent rebellion on its own terms, as a form of direct political action that was just as integral to the decade.