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Some Negroes, to be sure, were among the most insistent in demanding that the police start shooting looters. But the eruption, if not a "civil rights" riot, was certainly a Negro riot. It was fed by a deep well of nihilism that many Negroes have begun to tap. They have despaired finally—some this summer, others much earlier—of hope in white America. Last week at Newark's black-power conference, which met as that city was patching up its own wounds, Conference Chairman Nathan Wright put it succinctly: "The Negro has lived with the slave mentality too long. It was always 'Jesus will lead me and the white man will feed me.' Black power is the only basis for unity now among Negroes."
The new aggressiveness of black power is particularly attractive to the young. The 900 conference delegates in Newark, most of them in their 20s, whooped their approval of resolutions that called for, among other things: an investigation of the possible separation of the U.S. into distinct black and white countries (which curiously suggests the South African divisions of apartheid); a boycott of all sports by Negro athletes; and a protest against birth-control clinics on the grounds that they represent a white conspiracy to eradicate the black race.
"No Conspiracy." Disturbed by this angry mood, some Congressmen suggested that Negro militants with kingsize chips on their shoulders might be directly responsible for the rash of riots. Detroit Police Commissioner Girardin, however, said he could find "no evidence of conspiracy involved in the riots." The Justice Department minimized the theory that U.S. racial uprisings are fomented and organized by Communists, black nationalists or other "outside agitators." Still, there is no doubt that once a riot is touched off, Black Panthers, RAMs (for Revolutionary Action Movement), and other firebrands are active in fanning the flames.
Arriving in Havana last week to be lionized by Fidel Castro, Stokely Carmichael, coiner of the black-power slogan, left no doubt that this was true. Declared Carmichael: "In Newark, we applied the war tactics of the guerrillas. We are preparing groups of urban guerrillas for our defense in the cities. The price of these rebellions is a high price that one must pay. This fight is not going to be a simple street meeting. It is going to be a fight to the death."
"Bad Man." Cambridge, Md., got a sample of those war tactics last week when H. "Rap" Brown (ne Hubert Geroid Brown), 23, Carmichael's successor as head of the inappropriately named Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, turned up at a Negro rally. When Carmichael introduced Brown to reporters in Atlanta last May as the new S.N.C.C. chairman, he chuckled: "You'll be happy to have me back when you hear from him. He's a bad man."