Beware. We may be in for another “long hot summer.”
I refer not to climate change or the 120-degree days in Phoenix this month. 50 years ago, America broiled in the summer heat as riots broke out in Detroit and more than 150 other towns and cities. I fear this anniversary will be marked by a similar series of urban explosions.
From 1964 through the summer of 1967, urban riots and protests became more frequent and more violent. By the infamous “long hot summer” of 1967 the simmering had boiled over and the nation was in a state of constant racial upheaval. Lyndon Johnson initiated the Kerner Commission to study the cause of the unrest and, after 6 months of confirming the obvious, the Commission “determined” that the cause was white racism. Poverty, unemployment, police brutality and white flight from urban centers had left communities of color to cook in their own hot, dry hell. Like a tinderbox, the conditions were ripe for any small spark to ignite an inferno.
Increasing anger in communities of color included the fact that young black men bore the brunt of the consequences of America’s immoral imperialist aggression in Vietnam. I know. I got drafted with and trained with hundreds of poor black boys and men who lost their lives in the service of this shameful folly. I just got lucky.
But this is not a history lesson. It’s a warning. We are ripe again.
The latest or last straw was the vindication of the police officer who killed Philando Castile after pulling him over outside St. Paul, Minnesota. The officer claimed that Castile’s nose reminded him of a black man’s nose he saw in a video of an armed robbery. Ah, yes, “they” all look alike. A jury didn’t convict the shooter. They quickly confirmed the death sentence of Castile who, like so many black men and boys before him, was convicted of “existing while black” in a trial on the street that lasted only seconds. The several videotapes are unambiguous. Castile, a father and role model in his community, politely informed the officer that he had a legal weapon in the car and was then shot four times, observed by his horrified partner and daughter.
When he attempted to comply with the direction to produce license and registration, the police officer took his small motion of compliance to be an immediate threat. The video provides compounded evidence of the reality of being black in a racist nation. His wife, watching her husband die, was scrupulously polite in her outrage - “Yes sir” - lest she receive the remaining bullets from the officer’s handgun.
Alton Sterling, Walter Scott, Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Laquan McDonald, Freddie Gray . . . the list is much longer.
Castile and all these others died in large part because in our racist society it is unconsciously, subconsciously – unconscionably - assumed that a black man or boy is dangerous. Of course ordinary Americans, who claim colorblindness, don’t shoot at the slightest twitch. They just cross the street, avoid eye contact on the bus or follow the boy in the store because of the likelihood he will steal.
After the “long hot summer” and the Kerner Commission report, some sincere efforts were made to reinvigorate Johnson’s Great Society initiative. Communities of conscience worked to rebuild devastated cities. Fair housing laws and voluntary efforts to integrate communities created a surge of justice. Here too, I experienced it. My wife and I lived on the edge of the Ludlow community in Cleveland, where white folks, beginning in the 1950’s, refused to be complicit in the rapid segregation of their neighborhoods and schools and partnered with their new black neighbors to create a model for the nation to emulate.
And it wasn’t mere coincidence that the “long hot summer” was also the “summer of love,” when the hippie movement burst into a kaleidoscope of color and song. This movement merged with the urgency of black justice and a period of real social progress ensued.
The crushing effects of poverty and racism are as bad or worse now than in 1967, but the current administration is hell bent on adding to the load, not lifting it from the shoulders of the least fortunate among us.
Now we have a tinderbox without fire hoses nearby. Donald Trump is no Lyndon Johnson and there is no wave of justice cresting as injustice burns.