Between 1963 and 1972 America experienced over 750 urban revolts. Upwards of 525 cities were affected, including nearly every one with a black population over 50,000. The two largest waves of uprisings came during the summer of 1967 and during Holy Week in 1968 following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. In these two years alone, 125 people were killed, nearly 7,000 were injured, approximately 45,000 arrests were made, and property damage topped $127 million or approximately $900 million in 2017 dollars. And this does not take into account a large wave of prison revolts and racially oriented unrest at the nation's high schools. Considered collectively and with the advantage of hindsight, these revolts constituted a “Great Uprising,” a term neither contemporary pundits and social scientists nor historians have employed. Like the Great War and the Great Depression, the Great Uprising was one of the central developments of modern American history.Footnote ¹

While estimates of the number of people who were impacted by the revolts vary widely, in the least the Great Uprising affected millions of Americans, from those who took to the streets and whose businesses were looted or burned to the ground, to those who responded to the unrest, either directly or indirectly. As contemporaries, from Martin Luther King Jr. to H. Rap Brown, observed, and as most historians have agreed, the Great Uprising demonstrated the inadequacies or shortcomings of the civil rights movement, waking up the nation to the fact that the enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 did not signify the fulfillment of the black freedom struggle. In recognition of these shortcomings, King, SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee), and others reoriented their efforts in an attempt to speak to and for those who had participated in the revolts. The Great Uprising challenged the primacy of nonviolence as a means to overcoming racial inequality and boosted the fortunes of both the Black Power movement and the New Right. Moreover, the revolts provided cover or additional justification for a variety of repressive measures, from the expansion of COINTELPRO (Counter Intelligence Program) to the enactment of gun control, all of which helped lay the groundwork for the war on crime and the rise of the carceral state. Just as significantly, the uprisings demonstrated, for those who continued to believe otherwise, that race was not a Southern problem but rather one that knew no regional bounds.

Given the abundance of scholarship on the civil rights movement one would think that the urban revolts of the 1960s would have attracted considerable attention. After all, historians of the civil rights years have pushed the boundaries of the movement back in time, expanded the field of subjects well beyond national figures and organizations, incorporated women into their narratives, produced a startling array of community studies, explored the intersection of the black freedom struggle and the Cold War, and grappled with the role of armed self-defense in the nonviolent movement. Nonetheless, the Great Uprising has achieved far less attention than the “heroic stage” of the civil rights movement and/or the student/youth rebellions of the latter half of the 1960s. Illustratively, Taylor Branch's exhaustive three volume work on the civil rights years ends with Martin Luther King Jr.'s death, thus providing only minimal discussion of the major wave of rebellions that followed. And narratives of the 1960s continue to privilege protests at Columbia and Chicago in 1968 over those catalyzed by King's assassination.Footnote ²

This is not to argue that historians have ignored the urban revolts of the 1960s; rather it is to suggest that they deserve still more attention. Numerous fine studies of individual revolts exist, including examinations of those in Watts, Newark, and Detroit.Footnote ³ Scholars have written a handful of insightful comparative works and more specialized studies that focus on a broad range of questions from whether riots caused “white flight” to how they impacted local politics.Footnote ⁴ Recently, books have been published on the riots of the long hot summer of 1967 and the wave of unrest that took place following Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination in the spring of 1968.Footnote ⁵ They have also probed the uniqueness of revolts in the Midwest and considered the role played by black anti-rioters.Footnote ⁶ Central to many of these works has been a set of straightforward questions – essentially the same as those posed by President Johnson when he established the National Commission on Civil Disorders (Kerner Commission) in the immediate aftermath of the long hot summer of 1967: What happened? Why did it happen? And what could have been done to prevent them from happening? Or, from a historical perspective, what was or was not done?Footnote ⁷

From the start, analysts fell into roughly two schools of thought. On one side stood those who argued that the disturbances were caused by “riot makers” or “agitators” (generally outside agitators) and that most of the rioters were composed of the “riff raff” of society who were “seeking the thrill and excitement occasioned by looting and burning.” Rioters, in other words, were opportunists who looted and burned for “profit and fun.”Footnote ⁸ On the other side were those like the Kerner Commission, which argued that the “disorders” grew out of conditions of life faced by blacks who lived in America's ghettos and that “white institutions [which had] created…maintain[ed]…and condone[d]” the ghettos in the first place. Unlike the first school of thought, the second one did not find that rioting was limited to the riffraff or evidence that the unrest was caused or planned by outside agitators. On the contrary, most revolts, this school asserted, were sparked by a single incident (real or rumored) involving the police.Footnote ⁹ While the bulk of scholarly works subsequently written by social scientists supported the latter interpretation, no consensus emerged regarding why some cities experienced revolts while others did not and why some revolts were more severe than others.Footnote ¹⁰ Nor did a consensus emerge regarding the impact or legacy of the revolts. Some claimed that “disorders” resulted in the collapse of the New Deal or liberal coalition; others argued that the liberal coalition had been weak all along, especially when it came to racial matters; and still others contended that cities that experienced the revolts enjoyed a surge of black power, including the election of blacks to leadership positions.Footnote ¹¹ A third variant or school of thought cast the urban revolts as rational political developments, aimed at fostering deep structural and political change. This argument often built upon historical and theoretical studies of collective action, such as the works of Charles Tilly and George Rudy, and at times paralleled contemporary arguments made by black radicals, who celebrated the revolts, and by a cluster of social scientists and historians, some of whom briefly worked for the Kerner Commission and crafted an unpublished study entitled “The Harvest of American Racism.”Footnote ¹²

To an extent, both the Kerner Commission's findings and this third variant echoed James Baldwin's prescient observation that black Americans simply wanted to be “treated like men” and that the nation should not act befuddled when “everything blows up.” “Northerners,” Baldwin cautioned in 1960, should not “indulge” in the false belief “that because they fought on the right side during the Civil War, and won, they have earned the right merely to deplore what is going on in the South…and…ignore what is happening in Northern cities.” Jim Crow resided on both sides of the Mason–Dixon line, Baldwin emphasized, and suggesting that prejudice and racial discrimination might be worse in the South than the North did not justify the perpetuation of inhuman conditions that so many of America's ghetto residents were compelled to endure. Nor, Baldwin warned, would the fact that things might be worse in the Deep South than in the North inure it from the risk of a great uprising. Indeed, in the spring of 1963, in the immediate aftermath of a riot in Birmingham, Alabama, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy (RFK) got Baldwin to organize a special meeting at the Kennedy family's apartment at the Plaza Hotel. Presumably, RFK wanted to meet with Baldwin and other blacks outside the moderate mainstream so that he could better understand this violent turn of events. At the meeting, Kennedy sought to dismiss warnings that the Negro masses were on the verge of “kissing nonviolence goodbye.” But as urban uprisings spread across the nation in the mid-1960s, Robert Kennedy came to recognize the truthfulness of Baldwin's warnings and the urgency of addressing their root cause.Footnote ¹³

The different terms contemporaries and scholars used to describe the “collective violence” of the 1960s and early 1970s illustrated these different interpretations. Writes Thomas Sugrue: those who employed the term “‘civil disorder’” or “disturbance” sought to occupy an “ostensibly neutral” stance and suggest that the nation had experienced only a temporary disruption of an otherwise tranquil state of affairs. “Riot,” in contrast, emphasized the irrationality of the mobs’ actions. “‘Uprisings’ was the least used but perhaps most accurate expression of discontent,” adds Sugrue, “something with political content, but short of a full-fledged revolutionary act,” while “‘rebellion described a deliberate insurgency against an illegitimate regime, an act of political resistance with the intent of destabilizing or overturning the status quo.” Indeed, Sugrue has probably done a better job of incorporating these various studies and views into a single synthetic than anyone else. In Sweet Land of Liberty he argued that the uprisings generally began with a police incident, targeted property, not people, though rarely if ever “white dominated institutions,” such as schools, government buildings, churches, factories, or sports stadiums, and did not spread into white neighborhoods, white fears notwithstanding. Finally, Sugrue explains, officials failed to uncover persuasive evidence that radicals had organized the riots, proclamations by politicians and pundits and widely held public sentiments notwithstanding.Footnote ¹⁴

While this work will build on the insights of Sugrue and others, it adopts a different methodological approach and suggests several revisions to both the conventional and revisionist canons. Rather than focus on a single city or conduct statistical analysis on hundreds of riots, it examines revolts in three places: Cambridge and Baltimore in Maryland and York in Pennsylvania. These three cities were selected due to personal circumstances and because collectively and individually they offer keen insights into the Great Uprising. Although I was raised in California and went to graduate school in New York City, over twenty years ago I conducted and completed a history of the long civil rights movement in Cambridge, Maryland. Based upon this research, I was invited to participate in a remarkable collaborative investigation and commemoration of the fortieth anniversary of Baltimore's 1968 revolt sponsored by the University of Baltimore (UB). Meanwhile as part of my duties as a professor, both before and after my participation in the UB project, I oversaw several student research papers on York's revolt, the city where I teach, and subsequently conducted my own independent research on the same. Put somewhat differently, it made sense for me to build on my research strengths on the three cities that I knew best.Footnote ¹⁵

At the same time, as I discovered while doing my research, especially when it comes to considering the geography, chronology, and typology of the Great Uprising, these three cities offered several overlapping advantages. As noted above, uprisings took place in over five hundred communities. Some of these places were big, like Baltimore, some small, like Cambridge, and many more in between, like York. Yet, too much of our understanding of the race revolts of the 1960s has been shaped by studies of Watts, Newark, and Detroit. In fact, the majority of revolts took place in cities with populations between 25,000 and 100,000 residents, not large cities. One of the dangers of skewing the geography of the urban race revolts of the 1960s is that it misleads us into believing that we only need to think about race as a problem associated with the nation's inner cities, those with large ghettos, often large enough to have their own name, like Watts and Harlem. Put somewhat differently, for years Americans mistakenly conceived of race as a “Southern problem” and believed that Jim Crow only resided south of the Mason–Dixon Line. The uprisings of the 1960s rudely awakened the nation to the speciousness of this belief. Yet, ironically, we have tended to replace this false paradigm with a new one, namely one that considers race primarily as a “problem” of our large cities and their inner city ghettos, when, in fact, racism is a national problem that transcends simple geographic categories. In other words, by examining Cambridge, Baltimore, and York, three cities that are regionally proximate yet demographically different, both in terms of their absolute size and the relative and absolute size of their black populations, we can transcend the narrow geographic confines of much of the existent scholarship.Footnote ¹⁷

In addition, these three cases allow us to reconsider the chronology of the Great Uprising. Too often, historians cast Watts (1965) as the beginning of the “urban rebellions” and Newark and Detroit (1967) as its apex, with the post-King riots as an afterthought. This temporal narrowing of the Great Uprising is particularly apparent in secondary works which often ignore and/or downplay the uprisings that took place prior to 1965 or after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. As Table I.1 suggests, the uprisings peaked in 1968 and continued at a steady pace through the early 1970s; and this chart does not even include data on prison and high school revolts, both of which grew in number and frequency after 1967. Nor does this chart include data on revolts prior to 1964 because no reliable data on such risings exists. Yet, as we shall see, Cambridge experienced revolts as early as 1963 – so too did Birmingham, Alabama.

Beyond simply getting the years of the Great Uprising wrong, this truncation of the chronology of the Great Uprising may lead to another problematic assumption. Most simply, by placing the race revolts, chronologically speaking, after the “heroic stage” of the civil rights movement (roughly 1954 to 1965), contemporaries and many historians reinforced the notion that the struggle for racial equality can and should be broken into two distinct phases: a nonviolent, southern, and constructive phase, followed by a violent, northern, and destructive one. Recent works on the existence of armed self-defense alongside “nonviolent” movements in the south during the earlier phase of the movement, along with an increasing number of studies on battles against Jim Crow in the north, raise questions about this temporal configuration. Along the same lines, by ending their discussions of the civil rights years with King's assassination, too many studies reinforce the belief that the movement collapsed with an orgy of violence following King's death, which, as we shall see, was not the case.Footnote ¹⁸

In addition, these three case studies allow us to refine our understanding of what took place and why. Regarding the former, Cambridge and York suggest that the Kerner Commission and many others have mischaracterized the wave of urban revolts of the 1960s as “commodity riots,” ignoring the numerous instances of “community (interpersonal) riots.” As most explicitly spelled out by Morris Janowitz, “commodity riots” involved attacks on property but not persons – looting and arson – while “communal riots” were characterized by interpersonal and interracial violence.Footnote ¹⁹ Cambridge's initial revolts, in 1963 and 1964, were clearly communal. Its better known “Brown riot,” of 1967, consisted primarily of a large fire and hence appears to fit the definition of a commodity riot; yet, as we shall see it too was interpersonal in character. While Baltimore experienced a “typical” commodity riot, one with much looting and arson but few if any direct clashes between white and black residents, York experienced virtually no looting, a smattering of fires (arson), and a bevy of gunfire and assaults, including shots exchanged between black and white citizens and repeated incidences of attacks on persons and property, leading one commentator to contend that York did not experience a riot but rather a “war.”Footnote ²⁰

All three studies demonstrate that the revolts were not caused by radicals or riot makers; instead, they lend weight to the Kerner Commission's interpretation that social and economic conditions underlay them. Yet, at the same time, by placing each community within historical context, by chronicling the long course of their struggles for racial equality and white resistance to altering the racial status quo, these three studies suggest a richer framework for understanding the causes of the Great Uprising. Put somewhat differently, this book will demonstrate that the Great Uprising was a product of the long civil rights movement, the Great Migration, and the political economy of the postwar era, which raised but left unfulfilled the expectations of black migrants, who expected that by changing their geographic place (i.e., moving from the rural south to the north), they would change places socially and economically. This view contrasts with the classic presentation of the urban race revolts of the 1960s as spontaneous explosions of anger which, even if understandable, failed to present constructive solutions and, to make matters worse, unleashed white backlash. This interpretive framework, Jeanne Theoharis has insightfully observed, allowed white people at the time and since to “demonize” black men and women “for the outpouring of anger during the uprising.” It simultaneously made it easier for society to “avoid responsibility” for the perpetuation of racial injustices and inequalities which black people outside of Dixie had protested against for years.Footnote ²¹

Of course, one of the reasons why the riots of the 1960s were perceived as spontaneous and/or unexpected, and one of the reasons why the public has seen them either as unrelated to the civil rights movement or as a betrayal of the goals of the movement, is, as suggested above, because of our temporal configuration of the movement. Orthodox histories of the movement, such as Eyes on the Prize, which rightfully received much acclaim when it premiered in 1987, began their discussions of the civil rights movement in the mid-1950s and ended them with the triumphant march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, in the spring of 1965. They essentially treated the riots of the 1960s as epilogues of the movement. For instance, only in the last few shots of this six part series did the producers of Eyes on the Prize present a brief montage of images of the Watts riot accompanied by a statement that this revolt startled the nation out of its complacency. In other words, Eyes, like many other standard works, treated the riots as representing a rupture from the past, marking a sharp break from a movement that was conceived as confined to the South, aimed at integrating American institutions and winning basic civil rights, such as the vote, and doing so through nonviolent protest. Yet, to a large extent the producers of Eyes should not be faulted because they built on standard journalistic treatments of the civil rights movement, stretching back to Anthony Lewis's Portrait of a Decade, which omitted or minimized descriptions of racial protests in the North, exaggerated the predominance of nonviolence, and overlooked the call for jobs, housing, and other basic human rights. Furthermore, not until fairly recently have historians begun to produce an alternative telling of the black freedom struggle and it remains unclear if their revisionist works have had much of an impact on the public's memory of the civil rights years.Footnote ²²

Somewhat paradoxically, Cambridge, Baltimore, and York afford another advantage, namely the opportunity to see how this faulty interpretation of the race revolts took hold. The notion that radicals and culturally permissive liberals caused the riots and that the rioters were apolitical riffraff who, as Edward Banfield put it, had no connection whatsoever to the civil rights movement, did not evolve naturally. Rather, it was constructed by public figures: politicians, pundits, and scholars. A number of the most important figures who constructed this framework drew heavily on Cambridge's “Brown riot” of 1967 to make the case that radicals caused the revolts and on Baltimore to finger cultural liberalism as an underlying cause. Spiro Agnew's rapid rise from obscurity to the vice presidency, as we shall see, grew out of response to these two uprisings. Fortuitously, Cambridge and Baltimore provide us with the opportunity to explore how conservatives, often with the complicit support of liberals, deflected responsibility away from themselves, while simultaneously ignoring and/or repressing alternative understandings of the causes of the revolts and attendant recommendations for radically restructuring the racial status quo. Finally, this study affords us the opportunity to consider the impact of the Great Uprising on the lives of ordinary men and women more fully than most existent works. It does so because exceptionally rich sources for studying them exist, in the form of nearly one hundred transcribed oral histories in the case of Baltimore and thousands of pages of riot-related trial transcripts in the case of York.

A note about the structure of and terms used in this work. The book is broken into three parts, one each on Cambridge, Baltimore, and York, and a conclusion which returns to the original questions posed in the introduction and offers some summative findings. Each part begins with a discussion of the history of the long black freedom struggle, then turns to the revolts themselves and concludes with an examination of their impact both locally and, in the case of Cambridge and Baltimore, nationally. This approach was adopted to counter the tendency to see riots as spontaneous and apolitical explosions of violence disconnected from long-standing locally based efforts to alter the racial status quo.

This study will use the terms revolt, uprising, and riot interchangeably, although, as I hope will become apparent, I consider the terms revolt and uprising a more accurate description of the events being described. Nonetheless, since so much of the public, at the time and since, used the term riot, I chose not to eliminate it from this work.