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Whose Handiwork? Bad as the riots were, they were overplayed not only by most of New York's papers, but by the U.S. press as a whole. They did not hold a candle to recent insurgencies at Oxford, Miss., or Birmingham, or even to a 1943 riot in Harlem. Perhaps no more than 1% of the Negro population of New York was directly involved. One Negro was killed by a police bullet as he pelted officers with bricks from a rooftop; 140 people, including 48 cops, were injured, and 520 were arrested. The total cost in property damage and theft was yet to be determined, but it would certainly run into hundreds of thousands of dollars; more than 500 cases of property damage alone were reported.
President Johnson ordered 200 FBI agents into the Negro districts to investigate. There was little doubt that they would find evidence of Communist agitation behind the riots, but it was a mistake to assume that the week's violent handiwork was just a plot ordered by leftists and fire-eating Black Nationalists. The disorders were an outward symptom of a condition that runs so deep—through a maze of confused and ancient feelings—that even the most understanding hearts and minds find a solution difficult.
A Negro woman tried to explain her impulsive participation.
"I clean the white man's dirt all the time," she said. "I work for four families and some I don't care for, and some I like. And Saturday I worked for some I like. And when I got home and later when the trouble began, something happened to me. I went on the roof to see what was going on. I don't know what it was, but hearing the guns I felt like something was crawling in me, like the whole damn world was no good, and the little kids and the big ones and all of us was going to get killed because we don't know what to do. And I see the cops are white and I was crying. Dear God, I am crying! And I took this pop bottle and it was empty and I threw it down on the cops, and I was crying and laughing."
— Then again, maybe not: less than a week later, a man who was being arrested by another officer suddenly lashed out with a knife—and the cop ended up on the hospital critical list with a slit throat.