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Negro youths clambered onto the iron grilles shielding store fronts and, straining in unison, ripped them free. They sometimes spared stores whose windows bore the crayoned legend "Soul Brother," a sign of Negro ownership. In stores owned by "Whitey," clothing was stripped from mannequins, and the headless, pale pink forms soon dotted the length of Springfield Avenue, one of Newark's shopping streets, along with a fine, crunchy layer of window glass. Women pranced through supermarkets with shopping carts, picking and choosing with unwonted indifference to price tags. One young Negro mother was stopped by cops as she exited from a bicycle shop, her four children riding on shiny new tricycles. She was arrested, along with 350 other looters; countless others got away with the swag.
Springfield Rifles. One ransacked store near Springfield Avenue yielded rifles, shotguns and pistols. Soon shots were snapping from windows and rooftops, aimed at police patrols and firemen en route to battle the dozens of blazes that broke out. Over the police radio came cries of alarm. "We're sitting ducks out here—give us the word. Let us shoot." As Molotov cocktails exploded in stores and around police cars, one radio bleated: "We're getting bombed here. What should we do?" Replied the dispatcher, laconically: "Leave."
But it soon became clear that—as in Watts—leaving would only feed the mob's appetite for destruction and loot. Soon after midnight on the second night of rioting, the police were finally given the word: "Use your weapons." As could have been expected, police guns proved much more lethal than those in the hands of Negro rioters. Of those dead by racial violence in Newark last week, only two were white. Plainclothes Patrolman Frederick Toto, 34, a police hero cited for saving a drowning child in 1964, was shot through the chest by a sniper and died two hours later, despite heart surgery. A fireman was later shot in the back and killed. Among the Negro dead were children and women, looters and gunmen.
Fixed Bayonets. In response to an appeal from Newark Mayor Hugh Addonizio, Governor Hughes called up 2,600 National Guardsmen. Soon Jeeps, trucks and a clanking eleven-ton armored personnel carrier mounting machine guns roared into the ghetto. When several police were pinned down by Negro sniper fire, the APC rumbled up and began blazing away with its .30-cal. guns; unknown to the mob, they were loaded with blanks. The police got away. Simultaneously, Guardsmen and police patrols coursed through the streets—often behind fixed bayonets—picking up every Negro in reach. Black-Power Playwright LeRoi Jones, 32, was snatched from a Volkswagen with two loaded .32-cal. pistols in his pockets. Jones, who once urged Negroes to handle white men by smashing their "jelly white faces," ended up beat-up himself: a blunt weapon split his scalp, and he required seven stitches.