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Governor Hughes pretty much took over. Besides calling up the Guard, he closed all of Newark's liquor stores ("We'll dry this city out"), ordered all guns and ammunition confiscated from the stores that were selling them, imposed a curfew that advanced from midnight to 11 p.m., and finally to 10. He also worked long hours touring the riot area, and his task force arrested some 50 looters. Still the mob reveled in the curious exultation of the explosion. "Was the Harlem riot worse than this?" a Negro girl asked a reporter. When he assured her that it was not, she cried: "That's good; that's great!"
Harmony. John William Smith, the chance actor who started it all, grew up some years ago near Salisbury, N.C., during an era when many whites thought of Negroes (if at all) in Amos-'n'-Andy stereotypes. Smith was no Kingfish. He had a year of college (a predominantly Negro school: North Carolina A. & T.), where he studied-music and played the trumpet. Then came the post-World War II Army, in which he served as an enlisted infantryman in Japan, Korea (where he won a combat infantryman's badge) and the Philippines. But this was still the segregated Army and, for the Negro G.I., a discouraging morass of minor humiliations and kitchen routine.
A short (5 ft. 7 in.), stocky man with a mustache and goatee, Smith has been a cab driver for the past five years, paying a daily fee of $16.50 to use a "rent-a-cab." From that investment he can expect $100 a week—in a good week—as personal profit. He is unmarried ("I'm all alone in this jungle," Smith told his lawyer, Oliver Lofton, a former aide to Under Secretary of State Nicholas DeB. Katzenbach). He rents a one-room apartment in Newark's "Ironbound" district (so named for its wrap-around railroad lines), has a collection of 25 "cool" jazz records, and is saving for a plate to replace his missing front teeth (lost in an accident years ago). Says Smith, a quiet and articulate man: "I got to tighten up my upper register and study a little harmony." Before last week he had been ticketed five times—not much by cabby standards—for minor traffic violations.
Smith came up against a police force commanded by a tough, no-nonsense Italian-American named Dominick A. Spina, 56, who won repute on the virtues that mark the best of American law-enforcement officers: personal courage and political neutrality. A stocky, cigar-chomping man with steely grey hair and temperament, he heads a 1,400-man force that is heavily Italian, but—according to city officials—includes some 400 Negroes as well. Until last week, Spina could claim the ultimate satisfaction in police work: without undue harshness or permissiveness, merely by enforcing the law as it is written, his cops had kept the peace in a potentially turbulent city. Even when the Harlem riots of 1964 set off secondary explosions of racial strife in the neighboring cities of Jersey City, Paterson and Elizabeth, Newark managed to keep its cool.