(6 of 7)
When displaced, the Newark Negroes, as in other Northern cities, generally move to another part of the slums. Rarely do they escape into the white suburban communities that ring the city, nor are they very welcome in most of the Italian, Ukrainian, Irish and Jewish communities in other parts of the city itself. For John Smith and the rest of Newark's Negroes, a current "soul music" hit called On a Dead-End Street summarizes the Negro's plight all too aptly.
They say this is a big rich town,
but I live in the poorest part;
I know I'm on a dead end street,
in a city without a heart.
"Criminal Insurrection." Real as the grievances may be, last week's outburst was violently out of proportion to the provocation—as many of Newark's Negroes realized. "Oh, Alice," said one elderly man to his wife, "this is a terrible day for our people." A young Negro woman with two small sons snapped: "They ought to shoot all them rioters. Who do they think they are anyway?" "We need the police," said another woman. "All of this mess about police brutality is nonsense." Clearly, the gravest suffering was endured by the Negroes themselves, though scores of white-owned shops in the Central Ward were gutted by fire or stripped by looters. The direst damage, on all sides, was psychological.
"The line between the jungle and the law might as well be drawn here as any place in America," said Governor Hughes after a motor tour of the riot-blighted streets. The thing that repelled him was the "holiday atmosphere" that he implied he had seen with his own eyes. Said he subsequently: "It's like laughing at a funeral." Hughes, whose record in civil rights support and anti-discrimination legislation is among the, most generous in U.S. politics, could not bring himself to believe that the Newark nightmare was purely racial. Unshaven, sleepless for 25 hours, he said at one point: "This is not a Negro rebellion. This is a criminal insurrection."
Once it flared, the most striking feature of Newark's riot—like those in a score of other cities—was that the young Negroes took it over. Some were seekers of kicks. Some, still in their teens, were already infected with hate. And some were, in an extreme fashion, reflecting a yawning generation gap—the sort of thing that high school student Byron Washington, 16, was talking about when he said in Waterloo, Iowa: "The whites got to face it, man. This is a new generation. We aren't going to stand for the stuff our mamas and fathers stood for."
Atmosphere for Violence. The outbursts of violence focused attention on an "antiriot bill" that reached the floor of the House last week and is expected to be passed before the month is out. Aimed principally at curbing the firebrand incendiarism of Black-Power Advocates Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown, the bill prohibits crossing state lines and using the mails or other interstate facilities to incite, organize, promote or carry out a riot.