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The Los Angeles ghetto of Watts went berserk in 1965 after an unemployed high school dropout named Marquette Frye was arrested for drunken driving. In six days of rioting, 35 died, 900 were injured. In 1966, the Cleveland ghetto of Hough erupted when a white bartender denied a glass of ice water to a Negro patron. And in Newark, N.J., a trumpet-playing Negro cab driver by the name of John Smith last week became the random spark that ignited the latest—and one of the most violent—of U.S. race riots.
Smith was driving his cab through winding, brick-paved streets in Newark just after dusk one evening. Ahead of him, moving at a maddeningly slow pace, was a prowl car manned by Officers John DeSimone and Vito Pontrelli, on the lookout for traffic violators, drunks, and the angry brawls that often mar a summer's night in a Negro neighborhood. In the stifling heat, Smith grew impatient and imprudent. Alternately braking and accelerating, flicking his headlights on and off, Smith tailgated the police car. Finally, after a quarter-mile of tailgating, Smith tried to swing past the police. They cut him off. Who the hell? . . . Goddam . . . Son of a bitch! There was a short scuffle, and Smith was trundled into the squad car.
It might have ended there, like any one of a thousand police-blotter items. But Smith's arrival at the station house happened to be seen by scores of Negro residents of the red brick Hayes Homes housing development across the street and by other cab drivers as well. Out over the cabbies' crackling VHP radio band went the rumor that white cops had killed a Negro driver. Within minutes, cabs and crowds were converging on the grey stone headquarters of the Fourth Precinct in the heart of Newark's over crowded, overwhelmingly Negro Central Ward. By midnight, the first rocks and bottles were clattering against the station-house walls; by the next day, the tinkle of broken glass was counterpointed by cries of "Beat drums, not heads!" Out charged a phalanx of police to break up the crowds. After three hours calm returned, but not for long. Along the ghetto grapevine, the word was passed: "You ain't seen nothin' yet." By that evening, New Jersey's largest city (pop. 405,000) was caught up in the fiercest race riot since Watts.
Four nights running, and even during the heat of the day, snipers' bullets spanged off sidewalks, night sticks crunched on skulls, and looters made off with the entire inventory of scores of stores (one small Negro boy was seen carrying table lamps his own size). New Jersey's Governor Richard Hughes proclaimed Newark a "city in open rebellion," declared a state of emergency, and called out the National Guard. More than 4,000 city police, state troopers and Guardsmen patrolled the city's debris-littered streets.
The toll in human suffering mounted hourly. Before the week was out, at least 21 people were dead, more than 1,000 injured, another 1,600 arrested. Property damage soared into the millions.