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9
Statement on the Research Study
The Commission was directed to "go as far as
man's knowledge takes" it in searching for the causes
of violence and the means of prevention. These
studies are reports to the Commission by independent
scholars and lawyers who have served on task forces
and study teams; they are not reports by the Commis-
sion itself. Publication of any of the reports should
not be taken to imply endorsement of their contents
by the Commission, or by any member of the Com-
mission staff, including the Executive Director and
other staff officers, not directly responsible for the
preparation of the particular report. Both the credit
and the responsibility for the reports lie in each case
with the directors of the task forces and study teams.
The Commission is making the reports available at
this time as works of scholarship to be judged on
their merits, so that the Commission as well as the
public may have the benefit of both the reports and
informed criticism and comment on their contents.
Milton S. Eisenhower
Chairman
THE POLITICS
OF PROTEST
A Report Submitted by
JEROME H. SKOLNICK, Director
Task Force on Violent Aspects
of Protest and Confrontation
of the National Commission
on the Causes and Prevention of Violence
<§
A Clarion Book
PUBLISHED BY SIMON AND SCHUSTER
CB736 135
All rights reserved
including the right of reproduction
in whole or in part in any form
Published by Simon and Schuster
Rockefeller Center, 630 Fifth Avenue
New York, New York 10020
FIRST PRINTING
SBN 671-20381-9 Trade edition
SBN 671-20416-5 Clarion paperback edition
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 75-91304
Manufactured in the United States of America
Staff
Director: Jerome H. Skolnick
General Counsel
Ira M. Heyman
School of Law
University of California
Berkeley
Asst. General Counsel
Edmund C. Ursin
Office of the General Counsel
Department of the Air Force
Accountant
Herbert Kalman, C.P.A.
Research Asst. to Director
Richard Speiglman
Research Assistants
Charles Carey
Howard Erlanger
Nancy Leonard
Sam McCormick
Alan Meyerson
Supporting Research Assts.
Susan Currier
Howard Schechter
Nelson Soltman
H. Frederick Willkie, III
Associate Director
Anthony Piatt
School of Criminology
University of California
Berkeley
Assistant Director
Elliott Currie
Department of Sociology
University of California
Berkeley
Staff Administrator
Sharon Dunkle Marks
Asst. Staff Administrator
Lee Maniscalco
Office Staff
Kathleen Courts
Gabriella Duncan
Emily Knapp
Wendy Mednick
Sharon Overton
Charlotte Simmons
Mary Alden
Jayne Craddock
Judy Dewing
Sally Duensing
Sue Feinstein
Supporting Office Staff
Judy Foosaner
Vera Nielson
Elizabeth Okamura
Melba Sharp
Betty Wallace
Staff Consultants
David Chalmers
Kermit Coleman
Thomas Crawford
Frederick Crews
Amitai Etzioni
Richard Flacks
Joseph Gusfield
Irving Louis Horowitz
Marie-Helene leDivelec
Martin Liebowitz
Sheldon Messinger
Richard Rubenstein
Rodney Stark
Advisory Consultants
Richard Albares
Isaac Balbus
Herman Blake
Robert Blauner
Ed Cray
Harold Cruse
Caleb Foote
Allen Grimshaw
Max Heirich
David Matza
Henry Mayer
Phillipe Nonet
Thomas Pettigrew
Robert Riley
J. Michael Ross
Peter Scott
Charles Sellers
Philip Selznick
Contents
Staff v
Staff Consultants vi
Advisory Consultants vi
Preface xv
Summary xix
Part One: Introduction 1
Chapter I. Protest and Politics 3
Problems of Definition 3
Political Violence in American History 8
Contemporary American Protest 21
Part Two: The Politics of Confrontation 25
Chapter II. Anti-War Protest 27
The Disorganization of the Anti-War
Movement 30
Why the Movement Grew 35
The Social Bases of the Anti-War
Movement 5 8
Tactics and the Question of Violence 65
Chapter III. Student Protest 79
American Student Protest in International
Perspective 8 1
American Student Activism in the 1960's 87
The Politics of Confrontation 1 05
Black and Third World Student Protest 109
Colleges and Universities in Crisis 111
Response to Student Protest 120
Chapter IV. Black Militancy 125
The Roots of Contemporary Militancy 128
The Impact of Riots 145
The Direction of Contemporary
Militancy 1 49
Conclusion 171
Part Three: White Politics and Official Reactions
177
Chapter V. The Racial Attitudes of White
Americans 179
Decline in Prejudice 181
The Validity of Racial Attitudes Surveys 1 83
The Widening Racial Gap: Social
Perception in the "Two Societies" 201
Chapter VI. White Militancy 210
Vigilantism and the Militant Society 211
The South 218
The Urban North 224
White Paramilitarism 231
Conclusion 239
Chapter VII. The Police in Protest 241
The Police and Mass Protest: The
Escalation of Conflict, Hostility,
and Violence 241
The Predicament of the Police 249
Resources of the Police 252
The Police View of Protests and
Protesters 258
Militancy as a Response to the Police
Predicament: The Politicization
of the Police 268
Activism in Behalf of Material Benefits 272
Activism in the Realm of Social Policy 274
Conclusion 288
Chapter VIII. Judicial Response in Crisis 293
The Lack of Preparation: An Overview 295
The Role of Lawyers in Crisis 297
High Bail as Preventive Detention 300
Some Causes and Implications of Judicial
Response 308
The Lower Court as an Agency of Law
Enforcement 313
Recommendations 324
Part Four: Conclusion 327
Chapter IX. Social Response to Collective
Behavior 329
Theories of Collective Behavior 330
Official Conceptions of Riots 339
Social Control of Riots 342
Appendix: Witnesses Appearing at Hearings 347
Notes 349
Bibliography 397
Index 408
Foreword
by
Price M. Cobbs, M.D.
and
William H. Grier, M.D.
Authors of Black Rage
The National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of
Violence has a grave task. If violence continues at its present
pace, we may well witness the end of the grand experiment
of democracy. The unheeded report of the Kerner Commis-
sion pinpointed the cause of our urban violence, and this
Report presents the tragic consequences when those in power
fail to act on behalf of the weak as well as the powerful. The
Director and staff of this Task Force will have served the
country well if this Report furnishes the Commissioners with
that information needed for them to demand that the country
institute solutions and not merely further studies.
This volume shows that an understanding of violence does
not mean that it will be condoned, but that the better informed
will be in a better position to remove its causes. This docu-
ment further reminds us that if violence is to be eliminated
in our society, then we must broaden its definition.
Our country seems only to respond to a visible domestic
violence where people are killed or injured and property is
destroyed. In the wake of this type of violence there are de-
mands for law and order, and then promptly forgotten are
the victims and causes of such violence.
As social psychiatrists we know that violence comes in
many forms and that the psychological violence the nation
inflicts is usually ignored. To debase a segment of the
population on the basis of skin color is to do irreparable
harm to them. To allow millions of Americans to remain
hungry, to subsist in poverty and to live in unfit housing is
as destructive to them as actual physical violence. If students
burn draft cards and cite the war in Southeast Asia as an
example of the hypocrisy of this country, are they being as
violent as the military or the mayor of a city who says "shoot
to kill?" To continue our brutality to the people of Vietnam
and to our soldiers is to be violent. All of this must cease if
our country is to reduce the level of violence and repair our
national schisms.
Our hope is that Americans will read this book and initiate
positive actions. A society solves a problem only when a
majority of its people involves itself in the process of reso-
lution. This country can no longer tolerate the divisions of
black and white, haves and have-nots. The pace of events has
quickened and dissatisfactions no longer wait for a remedy.
There are fewer great men among us to counsel patience.
Their voices have been stilled by the very violence they sought
to prevent. Martin Luther King, Jr., the noble advocate of
nonviolence, may have been the last great voice warning the
country to cancel its rendezvous with violence before it is
too late.
The truth is plain to see. If the racial situation remains
inflammatory and the conditions perpetuating poverty remain
unchanged, and if vast numbers of our young see small hope
for improvement in the quality of their lives, then this coun-
try will remain in danger. Violence will not go away because
we will it and any superficial whitewash will sooner or later
be recognized.
It has been said that this is a country with a tradition of
violence, but we still wonder what is so special about the
time in which we live that again we must struggle to maintain
peace inside our nation. This analysis tells us that the kind
of violence now involving us has occurred with regularity
whenever a population committed to social change has con-
fronted people committed to a defense of the status quo.
FOREWORD xi
It seems that we never learn.
In colleges and universities, many educators have frequently
acknowledged archaic admission standards and outdated cur-
riculums, but they have done little to change them. Teachers,
it has been said, should teach more and schools should relate
to surrounding communities and involve themselves in the
resolution of the problems of a modern world. Yet when
black students ask for these same things, they are met with
indifference and hostility. Who is to blame for the ensuing
abrasions?
Over the past decade, black Americans have undergone
profound changes in their conceptions of themselves and the
world in which they live. It is ironic how many of these
changes have remained unnoticed by many whites, even those
white Americans purporting to make scientific inquiries into
the thoughts, feelings and behavior of. black people. Black
Americans are undergoing a psychological revolution and,
considering its implications, the wonder is that up to now it
has been so peaceful.
In a short period we have seen a significant segment of
Americans move from calling themselves colored, to Negro,
to black, and now Black-American. A militant challenging pos-
ture has become a commonplace among blacks. They are de-
termined to make America a better place for themselves and
for all disenfranchised.
We take the position that the growth of this country has
occurred around a series of violent upheavals and that each
one has thrust the nation forward. The Boston Tea Party was
an attempt by a few to alter an oppressive system of taxation
without representation. The validation of these men rested on
their attempts to effect needed social change. If the Boston
Tea Party is viewed historically as a legitimate method of
producing such change, then present-day militancy, whether
by blacks or students, can claim a similar legitimacy.
Understood or not, this country is now in the midst of a
major social revolution. Revolution suggests a drastic change
and this is what black Americans are experiencing. A revolu-
tion turns from peaceful reform to violence when it encoun-
ters brutal, mindless resistance to change. If the black segment
of our population is undergoing a maturing psychological and
social change, and these maturing changes are not matched
in white Americans, then the seeds of violence are sown. And
if truth is the goal of any scholarly inquiry, we must conclude
that too few white Americans are changing fundamental be-
liefs and behavior.
It is a contemporary tragedy that many leaders are in reality
preaching the very violence they profess to deplore. They are
inviting violence if they urge one part of the citizenry to stand
pat while others are in transformation. Men who govern this
country have a strange sense of leadership if they make ap-
peals to law and order which are in effect thinly disguised
messages to white Americans telling them they do not need to
change their attitudes and actions. College administrators who
respond to student demands as reactionary politicians rather
than as progressive educators seem to ask to preside over in-
stitutions inviting more violence rather than less.
The way to avoid disorder is to appeal to the idealism of
America; to facilitate change rather than resist it. If there
is a streak of violence in the national character, then it is
precisely that streak which sets itself in opposition to change.
To resist necessary and healthy change in today's America
is to invite social tumult and lay responsibility for it at the
feet of black or student militancy.
Our history is filled with examples of the powerless deter-
mined to bring their grievances to a just hearing. We forget
that many now powerful and entrenched social institutions
were once engaged as a minority, and at times violently, in
pressing claims to legitimacy.
Any American with union membership and a sense of fair-
ness, who recalls the early stormy days of American unionism,
should have immediate understanding of the struggles of con-
temporary black people.
While the communications media concentrate on the so-
called excesses of students, this report shows clearly that most
of the violence at universities is attributable to the policies
of those in power — trustees, politicians, administrators, and
finally, the unlawful actions of police called to campuses.
If the true instigators of violence are to be eliminated, how
can we bypass the Police Establishment? In a few short years
the ranks of law enforcement have become an ultraconserva-
FOREWORD xiii
tive social force which shrilly protests positive change. We
submit that the violence done by this group will decrease
only when every member of a minority group, whether racial
or political, knows that the police will protect him as diligently
as his white counterpart.
The Commission on Violence could serve no higher func-
tion than to commend this volume for reading by high gov-
ernment officials who seem determined to make violence much
more a reality by appeals to rigidity and the "good old days."
Men in high places must answer to history as well as con-
science when they cite the black militant's style as an excuse
for ignoring his just demands. They must live with their stupid-
ity if they pander to a white bigotry which advocates resistance
to any change that might threaten the status quo. Our country
has achieved greatness by its ability to respond and grow, and
history will deal harshly with those who block this growth
by refusal to learn from the past.
Black Americans are now responding to their time in his-
tory and can no more be stopped than any idea whose time
has come. They have been bred on the words of freedom, but
immersed in bigotry and oppression, and their moment has
arrived. Those who cannot see this are guilty of an inat-
tention to the social ripenings that have enriched this land.
There should be no mystery why students and antiwar pro-
testors use the songs and style of black protest. Their own
cause is strengthened when they share the momentum of a
movement so eminently right and so certainly in the Amer-
ican tradition.
Violence is sure to increase if those who are responsible
for the management of our country do not understand the
driving force behind current protest. Our hope is that this
Report will make more people see that there is a clear and
present danger to our survival as a free society if fundamental
changes are not made in American thought and institutions.
Justice has aligned itself with those who have been patient.
The strivings of Blacks are on the side of democracy. Those
who oppose these strivings, whether by appeals to law and
order, states rights, or outright hatred, flirt with danger and
with fascism.
Our clinical work has convinced us that all black Americans
are angry. All are asking for social change. There is a rage
in black people which is a rage for justice. It demonstrates a
passion for humanity at a time when few others are passionate.
And now there are stirrings among Spanish-speaking Amer-
icans, forgotten Indians, and poor and alienated whites, stir-
rings that tell us that a recalcitrant America has more than
blacks to contend with.
We think that Americans can avert violence both in this
country and the world by siding with rapid social evolution.
If the relevant issues are race and poverty and peace, then
we must move people to face these issues honestly and take
action to reduce conflict. For those who doubt that many can
change, we would say only that change is most rapid when
the situation is most desperate.
We must abandon hypocrisy and aim for honesty. Can one
find the answer to the question of poverty in a land of af-
fluence by going to the poor alone, or must not inquiries be
directed to the rich and powerful who are responsible for an
unequal distribution of wealth and a system of taxation which
subsidizes the affluent? Can we determine why the poor are
sick by asking only them, or must we not go also to the major
centers of medical care?
The leadership of this country has a solemn duty not to let
this be another in a long series of such reports. The patriotism
of our leaders must be called into question if the facts about a
problem are clearly spelled out and people continue to suffer
because no action is taken.
This Report clearly reveals that Americans must at last
confront grievous wrongs and set swiftly to right them. The
situation is critical and alternatives to violence must be found.
Our leaders have a noble opportunity to demonstrate that
change must not be feared but welcomed and embraced.
Price M. Cobbs, M. D.
William H. Grier, M. D.
San Francisco, California
May 15, 1969
Preface
This report is not an investigation, it is an analysis. It is
based on facts collected from many sources over many years,
plus some original field research begun and completed in a
period pf less than five months. The contract for the report
was signed on August 28, 1968, and the final draft of the re-
port was sent to the Commission on March 21, 1969. It is an
attempt to understand the nature and causes of protest and
confrontation in the United States, and their occasional erup-
tion into violence. Our aim has been as much to describe
what contemporary protest is not as to determine what con-
temporary protest is. The public response to protest is sur-
rounded by misconceptions concerning the extent, nature,
and goals of contemporary protest and the composition of
protest groups. A major goal of our analysis, therefore, has
been to challenge these misconceptions in order that responsi-
ble discussion may take place unencumbered by misunder-
standing and distortion.
The assignment we were given was far-ranging, as the
Table of Contents indicates. We have tried to be as objective
as possible in our analysis, but objectivity is not synonymous
with a lack of perspective. Our analysis makes no pretense at
being "value-free." Our operating bias may be made explicit;
we are partial to the values of equality, participation, and le-
gality — in short, to those values we think of as the values of
a constitutional democracy. We believe in due process of law
and look toward a society in which order is achieved through
consent, not coercion.
As social analysts we recognize, however, that violence has
often been employed in human history, in America as else-
where, to obtain social, political, and economic goals, and
that it has been used both by officials and by ordinary citi-
zens. For us, it is not enough to deplore violence — we seek to
understand what it is and what it is not, as well as its nature
and causes. Our title reflects our emphasis. This point of view
was recently expressed in an article by Bruce L. R. Smith,
coincidentally titled "The Politics of Protest." He writes:
Violence has always been part of the political process. Pol-
itics does not merely encompass the actions of legislative as-
semblies, political parties, electoral contests and the other
formal trappings of a modern government. Protest activities
of one form or another, efforts to dramatize grievances in a
fashion that will attract attention, and ultimately the destruc-
tion or threatened destruction of life and property appear as
expressions of political grievances even in stable, consensual
societies. In one sense, to speak of violence in the political
process is to speak of the political process; the ultima ratio of
political action is force. Political activity below the threshold
of force is normally carried on with the knowledge that an
issue may be escalated into overt violence if a party feels suf-
ficiently aggrieved.
The intellectual freedom offered to us was absolute. Except
for agonizing limitations of time, we were offered the best
conceivable terms under which to do the job. In addition, the
Commission staff was generous with its encouragement. No
institution or affiliated organization, nor the Commission it-
self, nor the Task Force staff, is to be held responsible for the
final report as it appears here. That responsibility rests solely
with the Director of the Task Force.
The question of responsibility aside, however, whatever
merit the report may have, and that it was completed on
time, is to be attributed to a tireless and devoted staff and
group of consultants. Five people should be singled out. Ira
M. Heyman bore principal responsibility for organizing and
PREFACE xvii
conducting hearings before the Commission, and contributed
wise counsel throughout the writing of the report. Elliott
Currie, Anthony Piatt, and Edmund C. Ursin were the work-
horses of the staff. They not only drafted major portions of
the report, they also were companions in the development of
the tone and direction of the report as a whole. Sharon Dun-
kle Marks' title of staff administrator does not wholly indi-
cate her contribution. In addition to administration, she made
an intellectual contribution through discussion, writing, and
interviewing. Besides, she brought some badly needed charm
to the whole enterprise.
There were two classes of consultants: those who submit-
ted papers (staff consultants), and those who submitted cri-
tiques (advisory consultants). The contributions of consul-
tants to particular chapters were as follows: Chapter I drew
heavily upon a paper by Richard Rubenstein and was in-
formed by Amitai Etzioni's research; Chapter II drew heavily
from a paper by Frederick Crews, and was further informed
by a research contribution from Irving Louis Horowitz; both
of them, moreover, contributed wise counsel at different
times in the enterprise. Chapter III relied heavily upon the
research of Richard Flacks and Joseph Gusfield and also
drew upon a paper by Marie-Helene leDivelec; Chapter IV
was informed by interviews conducted by, and in consultation
with, Kermit Coleman; Chapter VI was informed by a paper
submitted by David Chalmers. Thomas Crawford's paper
served as the basis for Chapter V. Chapter VII drew upon a
paper submitted by Rodney Stark and made use of materials
collected by Ed Cray. Chapter VIII relies upon a variety of
materials on courts during crisis, as well as some written
materials prepared by Sheldon Messinger. Chapter IX was in-
formed by a contribution from Martin Liebowitz.
Our base of operations was the Center for the Study of
Law and Society, University of California, Berkeley. Its
Chairman, Philip Selznick, and its Vice-Chairman, Sheldon
Messinger, were gracious and generous with the facilities of
the Center. As guests we were made to feel not merely wel-
come, but at home. Moreover, Drs. Selznick and Messinger
were significant consultants throughout the development of
the manuscript. Nine seminars on chapters and consultant pa-
pers were attended by Center Associates and guests. The sem-
inars ranged in size from twenty to fifty persons, and espe-
cially valuable comments were made by Howard Becker,
Herbert Blumer, Robert Cole, Sanford Kadish, William
Kornhauser, David Matza, Neil Smelser, and Allen Grim-
shaw, among others. The seminars were an enormously valu-
able experience, and all the participants listed and unlisted
deserve our gratitude.
Our advisory consultants are listed on a separate page.
Opinion research organizations generously provided helpful
advice, numerous reports and tables summarizing opinion
polls, and permission to publish data and tables: American
Institute of Public Opinion; Louis Harris and Associates;
Louis Harris Political Data Center; National Opinion Re-
search Center; Roper Research Associates; and the University
of Michigan Survey Research Center. Naturally, these organi-
zations and their representatives are not responsible for the
conclusions and interpretations we have drawn that may have
differed from theirs.
Other members of the staff worked tirelessly to finish on
time: Charles Carey, Howard Erlanger, Sam McCormick,
and Richard Speiglman. Nancy Leonard was our Washing-
ton, D.C., research assistant, and was invaluable in getting
necessary materials to the Berkeley staff. Our office staff was
tireless, devoted, intelligent, and tolerant. Given our dead-
lines, we needed tolerance most of all.
Finally, my wife, Dr. Arlene Skolnick, served as a consul-
tant on social psychology, helped with the editing, and, best
of all, gave birth to Michael's brother, Alexander, on Septem-
ber 29, 1968.
Jerome H. Skolnick,
Center for the Study of Law and Society
University of California
Berkeley, California
March 21, 1969
Summary
Chapter I: Protest and Politics
There are three critical points about protest and violence in
America:
— There has been relatively little violence accompanying
contemporary demonstration and group protest.
It is often difficult to determine who was "responsible" for
the violence when it does occur. The evidence in the Walker
Report and other similar studies suggests that authorities
often bear a major part of the responsibility.
— Mass protest, whether or not its outcome is violent, must
be analyzed in relation to crises in American institutions.
For these reasons, serious analysis of the connections be-
tween protest and violence cannot focus solely on the charac-
ter or culture of those who protest the current state of the
American political and social order. Rather, our research
finds that mass protest is an essentially political phenomenon
engaged in by normal people; that demonstrations are in-
creasingly being employed by a variety of groups, ranging
from students and blacks to middle-class professionals, public
employees, and policemen; that violence, when it occurs, is
usually not planned, but arises out of an interaction between
protesters and responding authorities; that violence has fre-
quently accompanied the efforts of deprived groups to
achieve status in American society; and that recommenda-
tions concerning the prevention of violence which do not ad-
dress the issue of fundamental social and political change are
fated to be largely irrelevant and frequently self-defeating.
Chapter II: Anti-War Protest
Reasons for the existence of a broadly based and durable
Vietnam peace movement must be sought in the reassessment
of Cold War attitudes; in the absence of a "Pearl Harbor" to
mobilize patriotic unity; and in the gradual accumulation of
public knowledge about the history of America's involvement
in Vietnam. Other sustaining factors have been the "credibil-
ity gap," the frustrating progress of the war, reports of ex-
traordinary brutality toward civilians, and reliance on an un-
popular system of conscription. In particular, critics of the
war have been most successful in pointing up the relation be-
tween the war and the American domestic crisis; the need to
"reorder priorities" has been a repeated theme. Anti-war feel-
ings have been sustained by criticism of administration policy
from highly placed sources in this country and abroad.
The movement's main base of support has been among
white professionals, students, and clergy. A segment of the
movement has been drifting towards "confrontationism";
physical injuries, however, have more often resulted from
the actions of authorities and counter demonstrators. The
most meaningful grouping of protesters separates those for
whom tactics are chiefly a moral question from those who
see tactics chiefly as the means to political ends. Most of the
latter, though not ethically committed to nonviolence, have
repeatedly turned away from possible bloody encounters.
Having no single ideology or clearly formulated goals beyond
an end to the war, the movement is dependent on govern-
ment policy for its survival, growth, and tactical evolution.
Still, the political consequences of the war may be profound
since, in its wake, there has been a continuing reassessment
of American politics and institutions, especially among stu-
dents at leading colleges and universities.
SUMMARY xxi
Chapter III: Student Protest
The current student generation is more morally and politi-
cally serious and better educated than the generation of the
1950's. Its participation in the civil rights movement, in the
Peace Corps, and in university protest reflects an idealism ex-
pressed in direct action. The increasing disaffection of student
activists, their pessimism over the possibility of genuine re-
form in the university and larger society, and their frequent
resort to tactics of confrontation cannot be explained away
by referring to personality problems or to youthful intransi-
gence or delinquency. On the contrary, research indicates
that activists have usually been good students with liberal
ideals not unlike those of their parents.
Stridency has increased with political frustration related to
civil rights and the Vietnam War. Campuses have become the
headquarters of anti-war protest. Not only have students
challenged the war on its merits; they have also questioned
whether a free society should force young men to fight a war
they do not support, and whether school attendance and
grades should be criteria for exemption from military service.
They have been especially critical of the university's coopera-
tion with the Selective Service System and of that system's
policy of "channeling" students into careers and occupations
deemed to be in the national interest by the director of Selec-
tive Service.
They have come to see the university as implicated in the
industrial, military, and racial status quo. Disaffection has
been intensified by the response of certain university adminis-
trations, which have been perceived as more susceptible to
conservative pressures than to underlying issues. The intro-
duction of police onto the campus, with its attendant vio-
lence, usually has reinforced these perceptions and aggra-
vated campus conflict while decreasing support for the uni-
versity outside the campus and diverting attention from sub-
stantive issues.
Chapter IV: Black Militancy
Black militants today — including black college students, a
group that only a few years ago was individualistic, assimila-
tionist, and politically indifferent — are repudiating conven-
tional American culture and values. The theme of "inde-
pendence" is stressed rather than "integration," and the
concept of "non-violence" is being replaced by a concept of
"self-defense."
Four factors have influenced this transition. First, the fail-
ure of the civil rights movement to improve significantly the
social, economic, and political position of most Negro Ameri-
cans has led to doubts about the possibility of meaningful
progress through law. Second, urban riots in the 1960's,
which symbolized this frustration, have been met with
armed force, which in turn has mobilized militant sentiment
within black communities. Third, the worldwide revolution
against colonialism has induced a new sense of racial con-
sciousness, pride, and affirmative identity. Fourth, the war in
Vietnam has diverted resources away from pressing urban
needs and reinforced the prevailing skepticism about white
America's capacity or interest in addressing itself to the so-
cial, economic, and political requirements of black communi-
ties.
As a result, there has been increasing dissatisfaction with
the United States and its institutions, and increasing identifi-
cation with nonwhite peoples who have achieved indepen-
dence from colonial powers. In response to the challenge of
black militancy, Negroes of all occupations and ages are
becoming increasingly unwilling to accept the assumptions
of white culture, white values, and white power. The thrust
toward militancy is especially pronounced among black
youth, who tend to view the more militant leadership as
heroic figures. As college students, these youth provide a
fertile base for campus militancy.
SUMMARY xxiii
Chapter V: The Racial Attitudes of White Americans
Recent studies indicate a long-term decrease in anti-Negro
prejudice since the 1940's. While the social roots of prejudice
are complex, it is especially characteristic of the less edu-
cated, older, rural segments of the population. Major trends
in contemporary society, including urbanization and increas-
ing educational opportunity, have undermined the roots of
prejudice and may be expected to have a continuing effect in
the future.
Although surveys show continuing rejection by many
whites of the means by which blacks attempt to redress their
grievances, most whites express support of the goal of in-
creased opportunity for black Americans. Not surprisingly,
blacks express less satisfaction with the quality of their lives,
and are less optimistic about their opportunities, than are
whites. Correspondingly, whites feel the need for change less
urgently than do blacks. Nevertheless, recent studies show
that a clear majority of whites would support federal pro-
grams to tear down the ghettos and to realize the goals of full
employment, better education, and better housing for blacks,
even if they would have to pay more taxes to support such
programs.
Chapter VI: White Militancy
The most violent single force in American history outside of
war has been a minority of militant whites, defending home,
family, or country from forces considered alien or threaten-
ing.
Historically, a tradition of direct vigilante action has joined
with racist and nativist cultural themes to create intermittent
reigns of terror against racial and ethnic minorities and
against those considered "un-American." It is difficult to ex-
aggerate the extent to which violence, often aided by com-
munity support and encouragement from political leaders is
embedded in our history.
Although most white Americans repudiate violence and
support the goals of increased opportunity for blacks, there
has been a resurgence of militant white protest, largely di-
rected against the gains of the black communities.
The roots of such protest lie in the political and economic
sources of white marginality and insecurity. In this sense,
white militancy — like student, anti-war, and black protest —
reflects a fundamental crisis of American political and social
institutions. White protest is not simply the work of "extrem-
ists" whose behavior is peripheral to the main currents of
American society. Similarly, capitulation to the rhetoric of
white militancy, through simplistic demands for "law and
order," cannot substitute adequately for concrete programs
aimed at the roots of white discontent.
Chapter VII: The Police in Protest
The policeman in America is overworked, undertrained, un-
derpaid, and undereducated. His job, moreover, is increas-
ingly difficult, forcing him into the almost impossible position
of repressing deeply felt demands for social and political
change. In this role, he is unappreciated and at times de-
spised.
His difficulties are compounded by a view of protest that
gives little consideration to the effects of such social factors
as poverty and discrimination and virtually ignores the possi-
bility of legitimate social discontent. Typically, it attributes
mass protest instead to a conspiracy promulgated by agita-
tors, often Communists, who mislead otherwise contented
people. This view leaves the police ill-equipped to understand
or deal with dissident groups.
Given their social role, the police have become increas-
ingly frustrated, alienated, and angry. These emotions are
being expressed in a growing militancy and political activism.
The police are protesting. Police slowdowns and other
forms of strike activity, usually of questionable legality, have
been to gain greater material benefits or changes in govern-
mental policy (such as the "unleashing of the police"). Di-
SUMMARY xxv
rect police challenges to departmental and civic authority
have followed recent urban disorders, and criticisms of the
judiciary have escalated to "court-watching" by police.
These developments are a part of a larger phenomenon —
the emergence of the police as a self-conscious, independent
political power. In many cities and states the police lobby ri-
vals even duly elected officials in influence. Yet courts and
police are expected to be neutral and nonpolitical, for even
the perception of a lack of impartiality impairs public confi-
dence in and reliance upon the legal system.
Police response to mass protest has often resulted in an es-
calation of conflict, hostility, and violence. The police vio-
lence during the Democratic National Convention in Chicago
was not a unique phenomenon. We have found numerous
other instances where violence has t?een initiated or exacer-
bated by police actions and attitudes, although violence also
has been avoided by judicious planning and supervision.
Police violence is the antithesis of both law and order. It
leads only to increased hostility, polarization, and violence —
both in the immediate situation and in the future. Certainly it
is clear today that effective policing ultimately depends upon
the cooperation and goodwill of the policed, and these re-
sources are quickly being exhausted by present attitudes and
practices.
Chapter VIII: Judicial Response in Crisis
The actions of the judicial system in times of civil crisis are
an important test of a society's capacity to uphold democratic
values and protect civil liberties. Our analysis, as the Kerner
Commission found, finds that during recent urban riots de-
fendants were deprived of adequate representation, sub-
jected to indignities in overcrowded facilities, and held in
custody by the imposition of high bail amounting to preven-
tive detention and the suspension of due process. This was
done under a "feedback to riot" theory that both lacks evi-
dence and is implausible.
The inability of the courts to cope with civil emergencies
encourages a further decline in respect for legal authority.
Black, student, and anti-war protesters have come to share a
common view that legal institutions serve power and are inca-
pable of remedying social and political grievances.
The crisis in the courts is explained by three considerations.
First, the quality of justice in the lower criminal courts dur-
ing routine operations is quite low; one would not expect
more during emergencies. Second, in response to community
and political pressures for immediate restoration of order, the
counts tend to adopt a police perspective on "riot control,"
becoming in effect an instrument of social control, relatively
unrestrained by considerations of legality. Finally, the courts
are not suited to the task of resolving the political conflicts
which occasion civil crisis and mass arrests.
Thus, reforms in the operations of the courts during crisis
are only a temporary palliative, leaving untouched the politi-
cal crisis. We nevertheless urge such reform to protect the
constitutional rights of defendants and to increase the dignity
and influence of the courts. We are especially concerned that
the present trend toward devising "emergency measures" not
become routinized as the main social response to crises that
go deeper than the need to restore order.
Chapter IX: Social Response to Collective Behavior
Governmental responses to civil disorder have historically
combined long-run recommendations for social change with
short-run calls for better strategy and technology to contain
disruption. We offer the following reasons for questioning
such a two-pronged approach to the question of violence:
1. American society urgently requires fundamental social
and political change, not more firepower in official hands. As
the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders stated,
"This nation will deserve neither safety nor progress unless it
can demonstrate the wisdom and the will to undertake deci-
sive action against the root causes of racial disorder."
2. We must set realistic priorities. Historical experience
suggests that firepower measures — so seemingly simple, prac-
ticable, and programmatic — will receive favorable considera-
tion over reform measures. We believe that the law must be
SUMMARY xxvii
enforced fairly, and that the machinery of law enforcement
needs upgrading; but we must carefully distinguish between
increased firepower and enlightened law enforcement.
3. Police, soldiers, and other agents of social control have
been implicated in triggering and intensifying violence in riots
and other forms of protest. Sophisticated weaponry will not
solve the social problems of America. To the young man in
the ghetto, the "nonlethal" weapon is not seen as a humane
response to his condition; to him it is still a weapon — aimed
at him — and is viewed with hostility.
4. Evidence shows that it is incorrect to interpret riots
merely as pathological behavior engaged in by riffraff. Nei-
ther are they "carnivals." More accurately, they are spon-
taneous political acts expressing enormous frustration and
genuine grievance. Forceful control techniques may channel
grievances into organized revolutionary and guerrilla pat-
terns, promising a cycle of increased military force and
covert surveillance.
5. In measuring the consequences of domestic military es-
calation, we must add the political and social dangers of de-
pending on espionage as an instrument of social control, in-
cluding its potential for eroding constitutional guarantees of
political freedom.
If American society concentrates on the development of
sophisticated control techniques, it will move itself into the
destructive and self-defeating position of meeting a political
problem with armed force, which will eventually threaten
domestic freedom. The combination of long-range reform
and short-range order sounds plausible, but we fear that the
strategy of force will continue to prevail. In the long run this
nation cannot have it both ways: either it will carry through
a firm commitment to massive and widespread political and
social reform, or it will become a society of garrison cities
where order is enforced with less and less concern for due
process of law and the consent of the governed.
Part One
Introduction
Chapter I
Protest and Politics
Problems of Definition
We began the work of this Task Force by considering the
relation between protest and group violence. Discussion and
consultation with a variety of scholars made clear to us that
the posing of the question biased the answer. As posed, the
question seemed to imply that protest itself is the critical so-
cial problem demanding investigation and action.
Furthermore, as our factual material grew, we began to
recognize three critical points about protest and violence in
America, all of which will become more apparent in the
chapters that follow:
1. One of our consultants examined every incident of pro-
test reported in the New York Times and the Washington
Post from September 16 to October 15, 1968. Of 216 inci-
dents, 35 percent reportedly involved violence. Since protests
resulting in violence are more likely to be reported, the actual
proportion of violent incidents is doubtless much lower.1
2. It is often difficult to determine who was "responsible"
for the violence. The reports of our study teams, however,
clearly suggest that authorities bear a major responsibility.2
The Kerner Commission findings reveal a similar pattern.3 Of
4 INTRODUCTION
the violent incidents reported above, in only half did the vio-
lence seem to have been initiated by the demonstrators, i.e.,
in only 17.5 percent of the total number of demonstrations.4
3. Mass protest, whether or not violence occurs, must be
analyzed in relation to crises in American institutions. On all
of these counts it may be suggested that a serious analysis of
the connections between protest and violence cannot focus
solely on the character or culture of those who protest the
current state of the American political and social order. Nor
does it appreciably advance our understanding to suggest, as
has one commentator, that "the decisive seat of evil in this
world is not in social and political institutions, and not even,
as a rule, in the will or iniquities of statesmen, but simply in
the weakness of the human soul itself." 5 Rather, the results
of our research suggest that mass protest is an outgrowth of
social, economic, and political conditions; that such violence
as occurs is usually not planned, but arises out of an interac-
tion between protesters and the reaction of authorities; and
that recommendations concerning the prevention of violence
which do not address the issue of fundamental social, eco-
nomic, and political change are fated to be largely irrelevant
and frequently self-defeating.
We have found the political character of these phenomena
to be evident for at least five reasons. First, "violence" is an
ambiguous term whose meaning is established through politi-
cal processes. The kinds of acts that become classified as "vi-
olent," and, equally important, those which do not become so
classified, vary according to who provides the definition and
who has superior resources for disseminating and enforcing
his definitions. The most obvious example of this is the way,
in a war, each side typically labels the other side as the ag-
gressor and calls many of the latter's violent acts atrocities.
The definition of the winner usually prevails.
Within a given society, political regimes often exaggerate
the violence of those challenging established institutions. The
term "violence" is frequently employed to discredit forms of
behavior considered improper, reprehensible, or threatening
by specific groups which, in turn, may mask their own violent
response with the rhetoric of order or progress. In the eyes of
those accustomed to immediate deference, back talk, profan-
PROTEST AND POLITICS 5
ity, insult, or disobedience may appear violent. In the South,
for example, at least until recently, the lynching of an "up-
pity" black man was often considered less shocking than the
violation of caste etiquette which provoked it.
In line with the tendency to see violence as a quality of
those individuals and groups who challenge existing arrange-
ments, rather than of those who uphold them, some groups
today see all instances of contemporary demonstration and
protest as "violent." Such an equation obscures the very sig-
nificant fact that protest takes various forms: verbal criti-
cism; written criticism; petitions; picketing; marches; nonvi-
olent confrontation, e.g., obstruction; nonviolent lawbreaking,
e.g., "sitting-in"; obscene language; rock-throwing; milling;
wild running; looting; burning; guerrilla warfare. Some of
these forms are violent, others are not, others are hard to
classify. Some protests begin peacefully and, depending on
the response, may end violently. Most protest, we have
found, is nonviolent.
Second, the concept of violence always refers to a disrup-
tion of some condition of order; but order, like violence, is
politically defined. From the perspective of a given state of
"order," violence appears as the worst of all possible social
conditions and presumably the most costly in terms of human
values. We have found this to be a questionable assumption.
Less dramatic but equally destructive processes may occur
well within the routine operation of "orderly" social life. For-
eign military ventures come quickly to mind. Domestically,
many more people are killed or injured annually through fail-
ure to build safe highways, automobiles, or appliances than
through riots or demonstrations. And as the late Senator
Robert Kennedy pointed out, the indifference, inaction, and
slow decay that routinely afflict the poor are far more de-
structive than the bomb in the night.6 High infant mortality
rates or rates of preventable disease, perpetuated through dis-
crimination, take a far greater toll than civil disorders.
It would not be implausible to call these outcomes "institu-
tional violence," the overall effect of which far outweighs
those of the more immediately observable kinds of social vio-
lence. For the sake of some precision, however, we have
come to employ a less comprehensive definition of violence:
violence is the intentional use of force to injure, to kill, or to
destroy property. Protest may be quite forceful without being
violent, as the occupation of dozens of French factories in
the summer of 1968 or the occupation of many campus facil-
ities in America during the last few years testifies. This obser-
vation is not intended to applaud or condone the use of
force; merely to recognize that it differs from violence — the
point, after all, of an important legal distinction. Such a dis-
tinction should be helpful in separating violent and nonvi-
olent forms of collective protest. There is a difference be-
tween a nonviolent "sit-in" and rock-throwing. But whatever
the definition, there will always be marginal cases.
Third, even as here defined, "violence" is not always for-
bidden or unequivocally condemned in American society. Ex-
uberant football crowds or fraternal conventions frequently
produce considerable property damage, yet are rarely con-
demned. The violence of the poor against each other is sub-
stantially ignored until it spills out into the communities of
the more comfortable, where it is called "crime in the
streets." Generally, American society tends to applaud vio-
lence conducted in approved channels, while condemning as
"violent" lesser actions which are not supportive of existing
social and political arrangements. In contrast to the findings
of the Chicago Study Team, a majority of the American peo-
ple did not perceive the Chicago police as violent during the
days of the recent Democratic National Convention.7 A
young black man setting fire to a Vietnamese hut is consid-
ered a dutiful citizen; the same man burning a grocery store
is a dangerous criminal, condemned for "resorting to vio-
lence" and subject to the lawful exercise of deadly force. Vio-
lence, then, is proscribed or condoned through political pro-
cesses and decisions. The violence of the warrior in the ser-
vice of the state is applauded; that of the rebel or insurgent
against the state condemned.
Fourth, the decision to use or not to use such violent tac-
tics as "deadly force" in the control of protest is a political
one. The interplay of protest and official violence, therefore,
cannot be understood solely through an analysis of demon-
strators and police. It must be seen in the light of the sur-
PROTEST AND POLITICS 7
rounding structure of authority and power and the concep-
tions that authorities hold of the nature of protest and the
proper uses of official violence.
Official violence is frequently overlooked. Through abstrac-
tion, the technical and instrumental elements of official vio-
lence are emphasized and its moral and political aspects ob-
scured. Thus, "crowd control" may mean splitting open the
heads of bystanders; a "looter" may in fact be an ordinary
ghetto resident involved in a collective act of expropriating a
pair of shoes or case of beer, or an ordinary ghetto resident
trying to get off the street. By invoking the concept of
"looter," however, public officials can conjure the picture of
heinous crime, can sidestep the normal penalty structure of
the criminal law, call for the use of deadly force, and be ap-
plauded for a firm stand on "law and order."
This consideration prompted us to adopt a general metho-
dological position. Instead of accepting at face value the
meaning of such terms as "police," "looters," "demonstra-
tors," and "social control," we have found it wise to review
the attitudes and behavior suggested by these abstractions.
Too often, analyses of protest and disorder arbitrarily follow
the analyst's preconception of motivation and purpose. We
have tried to avoid this error. Therefore, we have tried to pay
close attention to the viewpoints and the actual behavior of
the participants in protest situations, whether demonstrators
or police.
When the viewpoint of participants is taken seriously, a
fifth aspect of the political character of protest becomes evi-
dent. Almost uniformly, the participants in mass protest
today see their grievances as rooted in the existing arrange-
ments of power and authority in contemporary society, and
they view their own activity as political action — on a direct
or symbolic level — aimed at altering those arrangements. A
common theme, from the ghetto to the university, is the re-
jection of dependency and external control, a staking of new
boundaries, and a demand for significant control over events
within those boundaries. This theme is far from new in
American history. There have been violent clashes over insti-
tutional control in this country from its beginnings. In the
following section, we will examine some of these clashes in
the hope that they will throw historical light on the political
problems that now confront us.
Political Violence in American History8
Many commentators continue to write as if domestic politi-
cal violence were a creation of the 1960's, as if the past had
nothing to say to the present. It seems, as Clifford Geertz has
said, that
... we do not want to learn too much about ourselves too
quickly. The fact is that the present state of domestic disor-
der in the United States is not the product of some destruc-
tive quality mysteriously ingrained in the substance of Ameri-
can life. It is a product of a long sequence of particular
events whose interconnections our received categories of
self-understanding are not only inadequate to reveal but are
designed to conceal. We do not know very well what kind of
society we live in, what kind of people we are. We are just
now beginning to find out, the hard way. . . .9
Leading scholars of the 1950's believed that the United
States was the one nation in which diverse groups had
learned to compromise differences peaceably. American soci-
ety had somehow succeeded in blurring divisions among a
multiplicity of economic, social, political, and ethnic groups.
For one reason or another (either because the land was fer-
tile and the people hard-working, or because no true aristoc-
racy or proletariat ever developed on American soil, or be-
cause the two-party system worked so well), any sizable
domestic group could gain its share of power, prosperity, and
respectability merely by playing the game according to the
rules. In the process, the group itself would tend to lose
coherence and to be incorporated into the great middle class.
The result, these scholars argued, was something unique in
world history: genuine progress without violent group con-
flict. In such an America there was no need — there never had
been a need — for political violence. Rising domestic groups
had not been compelled to be revolutionary, nor had the
"ins" generally resorted to force to keep them out.10 The con-
PROTEST AND POLITICS 9
elusion drawn by many was that America, having mastered
the art of peaceful change, could in good conscience presume
to lead the Free World, if not the whole world.
This was the myth of peaceful progress, which, since the
racial uprisings beginning in 1964, has spawned a corollary
myth — that community violence is a uniquely Negro phe-
nomenon— for clearly the only way to explain what hap-
pened in Watts, Newark, or Detroit, without challenging any-
one's belief in the essential workability of established ma-
chinery for peaceful group advancement, was to assume that
black people were the great exception to the law of peaceful
progress. A "conservative" could emphasize black laziness,
loose morality, and disrespect for law. A "liberal" could dis-
cuss the weakness of Negro family structure inherited from
slavery, the prevalence of racial discrimination or the culture
of poverty. Either way, it was assumed that the existing polit-
ical and economic system could make good on its promise to
blacks without radical institutional change.11 The situation
could be salvaged, white faith in America confirmed, and vio-
lence ended without any great national political upheaval,
provided the government was willing to spend enough money
on both reform programs and law enforcement.
"This then is the mood of America's absolutism," wrote
Louis Hartz, "the sober faith that its norms are self-
evident." 12 What if the black community were not unique,
however, but rather the latest of a long line of domestic
groups motivated to resort to political violence? What if the
institutions designed to make economic and political advance-
ment possible had broken down frequently in the past, and
other groups had embraced the politics of violence? What if
political violence on a large scale was, as H. Rap Brown
stated, "as American as cherry pie"? Then, clearly, the myth
of peaceful progress — and the immunity of hallowed political
institutions from fundamental criticism — would be in danger.
Especially if prior outbreaks of violent revolt in the United
States fell into a pattern, the suspicion would arise that not
just "violence-prone" or "exceptional" groups were responsi-
ble, but rather American institutions themselves — or, at least,
the relationship between certain groups and certain institu-
tions. In such an event, modern Americans might be com-
10
pelled to wonder whether something fundamental was wrong
— something not merely capricious and temporary, but so-
cially structured and predictable. That this has not yet hap-
pened testifies to the remarkable tenacity of the myth of
peaceful progress. We are therefore compelled to analyze in
more detail the ways in which this myth has shaped Ameri-
can attitudes toward political violence, in order to clear away
some of the ideological underbrush which has so hampered
exploration in the past.
Whether in Congress or in the streets, reactions to modern
outbreaks of political violence have demonstrated a widely
held belief that such outbreaks were "un-American": that
they had occurred infrequently in the past, and that they bore
little relationship to the way past domestic groups had suc-
ceeded in gaining political power, property, and prestige.
(Those most vociferous in denouncing the violent were often
those who believed, rightly or wrongly, that their ethnic, eco-
nomic, or occupational groups had "made it" in American so-
ciety without resorting to violent conduct.) Historical study,
on the other hand, reveals that under certain circumstances
the United States has regularly experienced episodes of mass
violence directly related to the achievement of social, politi-
cal, and economic objectives. The following is a partial list of
major groups which have been involved in violent political
movements: 13
1. Beginning early in the seventeenth century, American
Indians engaged in a series of revolts aimed at securing their
land and liberty against invasion by white settlers supported
by colonial, state, and federal governments. In the eighteenth
century, following Britain's victory over France, Eastern
tribes participated in such uprisings as Pontiac's Conspiracy,
Little Turtle's War, the Blackhawk War, the Revolt of the
Creeks and Cherokees, and the Seminole War — a series of
unsuccessful resistances to white settlement and "removal" to
Indian territories west of the Mississippi. For the Indians of
the West who fought in the post-Civil War rebellions of the
Sioux, Sac and Fox, Navajo, Apache, and others, the price of
defeat was imprisonment on reservations and the loss not
only of land but also of liberty and livelihood. Calling these
conflicts "wars" against Indian "nations" does not, of course,
PROTEST AND POLITICS 11
alter their character; they were armed insurrections by
domestic groups to which the United States had determined
to deny the privileges of citizenship as well as the perquisites
of nationhood. The suppression of Indian revolts was the
chief occupation of the U.S. Army for more than a century
after its creation.
2. Appalachian farmers living in the western regions of the
Eastern Seaboard states participated in civil disorder from the
1740's, when Massachusetts farmers marched on Boston in
support of a land bank law, until the 1790's, when farmers
and mountain men fomented the Whiskey and Fries Rebel-
lions in Pennsylvania. The series of revolts now known as the
Wars of the Regulators (North and South Carolina), the
War of the New Hampshire Grants (New York-Vermont),
Shays's Rebellion (Massachusetts), and the Whiskey Rebel-
lion (Pennsylvania) were the principal actions engaged in by
debtor farmers protesting half a century of economic exploi-
tation, political exclusion, and social discrimination by the
East Coast merchants, shippers, and planters who were in
substantial control of the machinery of government. In state
after state, civil disobedience of hated laws was followed by
intimidation of, or physical attacks on, tax collectors and
other law enforcers, by the closing down of courts to prevent
indictments and mortgage foreclosures from being issued, by
the rejection of halfway compromises proffered by Eastern
legislatures, and finally by military organization to resist the
state militia. Although most insurgent groups were finally de-
feated and dispersed by superior military force, the rebellions
did not end until Jefferson's election provided access for
Westerners to the political system, and new land created fresh
economic opportunity. Where political and economic systems
were especially rigid, as in New York's Hudson Valley, agita-
tion and sporadic violence continued well into the nineteenth
century.
3. American colonists, as we know, gained their indepen-
dence from Britain after a decade of civil strife and eight years
of revolutionary war. What is now becoming clearer is the
extent to which the struggle pitted Americans against Ameri-
cans, with the insurgents resorting to political violence and
the authorities to repression. This pattern was repeated again
12
and again in American history. The decade beginning in 1765
with the Stamp Tax controversy saw a steady rise in civil dis-
order in the forms of massive civil disobedience, urban riot-
ing, economic boycotts, sabotage of government property,
terrorism of government officials, and finally military organi-
zation— paralleled, of course, by simultaneous escalation of
attempts at suppression by the colonial authorities and their
local supporters. Such groups as the Sons of Liberty, operat-
ing chiefly out of East Coast cities, organized campaigns
against British colonial legislation, directing both economic
and physical coercion against Tories, merchants who refused
to participate in boycotts of British goods, and other "collab-
orators." With the outbreak of hostilities against the British,
civil strife increased in both intensity and scope, spreading
into rural areas such as New Jersey and South Carolina,
where roving guerrilla bands played nightmare games of
armed hide-and-seek with the Tories. The violence of the re-
bellious guerrillas resulted in a massive Tory emigration. In-
deed, it seems likely that this emigration, which began in the
last years of the war, probably saved the United States from
the sort of prolonged revolutionary violence and emigre retal-
iation which characterized the French Revolution.
4, 5. In the years between 1820 and 1860, white Southern-
ers became a conscious minority. This was the period in
which Southerners committed themselves economically to an
agricultural system based on slave-breeding and plantation
farming; in which the dream of emancipation fled the South
and became the exclusive property of Northern abolitionists;
and in which thinkers such as John C. Calhoun constructed
vain theoretical defenses against increasing Northern eco-
nomic and political power, while Southerners, with a pride
born of increasing desperation, dreamed the "purple dream"
of a Southern Empire stretching from the Mason-Dixon Line
to Tierra del Fuego. How Southerners moved from abortive
civil disobedience (the Nullification Controversy of 1828 to
1830) to war by proxy (in "bleeding Kansas" during the
1850's) and finally to outright secession is well known, as is
the parallel movement of Northern abolitionists from dis-
obedience of the Fugitive Slave laws to the fielding of a settler
army in Kansas, support of John Brown's raid on Harpers
PROTEST AND POLITICS 13
Ferry, and (in coalition with Northern Whigs) the election
of a President committed to the preservation of the Union
by force.
Less well known, however, is the guerrilla war waged after
the surrender at Appomattox by terrorist groups (principally
the Ku Klux Klan) supported by the mass of white Southern-
ers. The purposes of this struggle — to prevent freed Negroes
from voting or participating in politics; to restore the sub-
stance of the prewar Southern social and economic systems;
and to drive "carpetbagger" officials and their "scalawag" col-
laborators out of office and out of the South — were largely
realized by 1876, when President Hayes withdrew the last of
the Northern troops. This was not the end of Southern vio-
lence, however; continued racial domination was maintained
in postwar years by the lynching of great numbers of blacks,
the driving of dissenting whites out of the South, and the
meting out to "outside agitators" of painful and sometimes
deadly punishment.
6, 7. White, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant Americans (WASPs)
engaged in a long series of riots, lynchings, mob actions, and
abuses of power in their effort to protect their political pre-
eminence, property values, and life-styles against the immi-
grant onslaught. WASPs, organized politically as "Native
Americans," tore apart the Irish section of Philadelphia in
1844; similar riots occurred in Baltimore, Boston, and other
port cities. On the West Coast, Chinese and Japanese immi-
grants were victims of both riots and discrimination. Italians
were lynched in New Orleans and Jews attacked in New
York, and WASPs resorted to fierce violence in collaboration
with other American groups against German-Americans dur-
ing World War I (riots, intimidation, boycotts, etc.) and
against Japanese during World War II (internment in con-
centration camps, regardless of citizenship or alienage).
For their part, later immigrant groups sometimes re-
sponded in kind, although their hostility was more often di-
rected socially downward, toward the blacks and newer-ar-
rived immigrants who were often the "scabs" in labor dis-
putes.
During the terrible New York Draft Riots in 1863, for ex-
ample, the Irish of New York not only burned draft offices
14
and Yankee homes but went on a rampage against the blacks,
numbers of whom were left swinging from New York lamp-
posts. Following the Civil War, attacks on ghetto blacks in
border state cities became frequent, and when, in the present
century, race riots struck Northern cities like Chicago, more
recent immigrant groups fearful of the black "invasion" were
in the forefront of the white attackers.
8. Beginning in the 1870's, workingmen attempting to
organize for collective action engaged in more than half a
century of violent warfare with industrialists, their private
armies, and workers employed to break strikes, as well as
with police and troops. The anthracite fields of western Penn-
sylvania were Molly Maguire territory during the 1870's;
after losing a coal strike early in the period, the Mollys
sought to regain control of the area by systematic use of vio-
lence, including sabotage and assassination, and were success-
ful until penetrated and exposed by a Pinkerton spy. In 1877,
when a railroad strike spread throughout the nation, unorga-
nized workers engaged in a series of immensely destructive
riots to protest wage cuts, the use of scabs, and probably loss
of jobs during a depression. Baltimore and Pittsburgh were
hardest hit; although the total cost in life and property has
never been estimated accurately, one commentator has re-
ported that the destruction in Pittsburgh alone was greater
than that experienced during all the labor and racial riots of
1919. The Haymarket Square bombing and retaliation against
anarchists in 1886 followed the railroad strike of 1877; the
Homestead Strike at the Carnegie Steel plant was followed
by an anarchist attempt to kill Henry Clay Frick in 1892;
the Pullman Strike became particularly violent after Presi-
dent Grover Cleveland called in troops over the protest of
the Governor of Illinois in 1894; the Los Angeles Times
was bombed by persons associated with the AFL in 1910; the
IWW led a textile strike at Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1912;
and there were national strikes against railroads and steel,
with troops called out in several cities, in 1919. These are
just a few of the major battles.
Meanwhile, in the mining and timber industries of the
West, an initial blowup in the Coeur d'Alene region of Idaho
(1892) was followed by twenty years of the most intense and
PROTEST AND POLITICS 15
sanguinary struggle, ranging from Goldfields, Nevada, and
Ludlow, Colorado, to the West Virginia— Kentucky border.
On the eve of passage of the New Deal's pro-union Wagner
Act, CIO auto workers were engaging in sit-down strikes in
Michigan auto plants and fighting pitched battles with strike-
breakers and police. Legislative transformation of labor-man-
agement relations, especially provisions for grievance and ar-
bitration machinery, ended this principal period of labor war
in the United States, although continued skirmishes accompa-
nying hard-fought strikes seem now a part of our way of life.
9. Black Americans participated during the years of slav-
ery in at least 250 abortive insurrections and were, after the
end of the Civil War, the victims of white attacks in dozens
of cities ranging from Cincinnati (1866) to East St. Louis
(1917). Blacks retaliated violently against white attacks in
the Chicago and Washington, D.C., race riots of 1919 and in
the Detroit riot of 1943.
10. Prior to the passage, in 1920, of the Nineteenth
Amendment granting female suffrage, women engaged in mil-
itant action to protest their exclusion from American politics.
The idea of women gaining a voice in politics was widely
considered to amount to a radical assault not only on the po-
litical order but on the very fabric of society. "Were our
state a pure democracy," wrote Thomas Jefferson, "there
would still be excluded from our deliberations . . . women,
who, to prevent deprivation of morals and ambiguity of is-
sues, should not mix promiscuously in gatherings of men." 14
Although the struggle for woman suffrage did not include
mass political violence of the kind that marked the struggles
of many other groups for a share of political power, it fre-
quently involved aggressively militant tactics. In 1917, for ex-
ample, militant women engaged in hunger strikes, picketed
the White House, and burned copies of Presidential
speeches.15
This list, although incomplete,16 does provide a historical
background against which to test the most important implica-
tion of the myth of peaceful progress — the idea that political
violence in the United States is, and always has been, rela-
tively rare, needless, without purpose, and irrational. The
proposition that domestic political violence has been unneces-
16
sary to achieve political goals is ambiguous, but it is histori-
cally fallacious no matter how one interprets it. If it means
that the established machinery has permitted major "out-
groups" to move nonviolently up the politicoeconomic ladder,
it is demonstrably false. On the contrary, American institu-
tions seem designed to facilitate the advancement of talented
individuals rather than of oppressed groups. Groups engaging
in mass violence have done so only after a long period of
fruitless, relatively nonviolent struggle.
Similarly, the proposition is false if it means that the estab-
lished order is self -transforming, in that groups in power will
always or generally share that power with newcomers without
the pressure of actual or potential violence. The Appalachian
farmer revolts, as well as tumultous urban demonstrations in
sympathy with the French Revolution, were used by Jefferso-
nians to create a new two-party system over the horrified pro-
tests of the Federalists. Northern violence ended Southern
slavery, and Southern terrorism ended radical Reconstruction.
The transformation of labor-management relations was
achieved during a wave of bloody strikes, in the midst of a
depression and widespread fear of revolution. And black peo-
ple made their greatest political gains, both in Congress and
in the cities, during the racial strife of the 1960's.
All this does not mean, however, that violence is always
effective or always necessary. Such a belief would merely cre-
ate a new myth — a myth of violent progress — which could
easily be refuted by citing examples of violence without prog-
ress (such as the American Indian revolts) and progress
without violence (such as the accession of Jews to positions
of influence).
The point, really, is to understand the inertia of political
and economic power, which is not as easily shared or turned
over to powerless outsiders as the myth of peaceful progress
suggests. The demands of some domestic groups for equality
and power have been impossible to meet within the existing
political and economic systems. The admission of Indian
tribes, members of labor unions, or the mass of oppressed
black people to full membership in American society would
have meant that existing systems would have had to be trans-
formed, at least in part, to make room for the previously ex-
PROTEST AND POLITICS 17
eluded and that, in the transformation, land-hungry settlers,
large corporations, or urban political machines and real estate
interests would have had to give ground. Transformation and
concomitant power realignments were refused to the Indians;
were granted, at least partially and after great social disorder,
to workers; and are currently in question for black people in
American society. The moral is not that America is a "sick
society" but that, like all other societies, it has to confront the
oldest problem of politics — the problem of the nonviolent
transfer of power.
Disposing of the myth of peaceful progress may also shed
some light on another current illusion: the notion that
domestic ethnic groups that escaped from their ghettos nonvi-
olently are somehow superior to those that did not. In the
first place, "nonviolence" is a misleading term. European im-
migrants participated, at various times and in differing pro-
portions, in political movements often productive of disorder
— socialist, anarchist, populist, and fascist. Whether German,
English, Irish, Italian, East European, or Russian, their strug-
gle to unionize implicated them deeply in labor-management
warfare. Immigrants in urban areas fought each other for
control of the streets, participated in race riots, and engaged
in a kind of politics not meant for those with weak stomachs
or weak fists. They sometimes used criminal activity both as a
way of exercising community control and as a method of
economic advancement when other routes were closed.17 And
they did not hesitate, once some power had been obtained, to
employ official violence through control of local governments
and police forces against emerging groups as militant as they
had once been.
Second, it is clear that those groups which rose rapidly up
the politicoeconomic ladder (and not all immigrant groups
did) were the beneficiaries of a happy correspondence be-
tween their group characteristics (including economic skills)
and the needs of a changing economic and political system.
To put it baldly, they were lucky, since collective virtues
which are an advantage at one stage of national development
may be irrelevant or disadvantageous at another. Were immi-
grants of rural peasant stock, such as the Irish or the south-
ern Italians, to come to the United States today, they would
18
find themselves in a position very similar to that of rural
Southern blacks and whites now entering Northern cities,
their skills almost valueless and their traditional social institu-
tions irrelevant. Even immigrants with crafts or commercial
skills and an urban outlook, such as the Jewish arrivals of
1890-1920, would find themselves less mobile today, small
entrepreneurs in an age of corporate concentration and post-
industrial automation, like the Puerto Ricans of present-day
New York. Politically, earlier immigrants reaped the bene-
fits of decentralization — the possibility of taking over an
urban machine or a state legislature — and were the chief ben-
eficiaries of the political realignment created by the Great
Depression. In short, the steady pace of national centraliza-
tion and unification on all levels, political as well as eco-
nomic, has made it progressively more difficult for powerless
groups to break into the power structure.
The myth of peaceful progress offers intellectual support
for existing political arrangements and validates the suppres-
sion of protest. It also serves to conceal the role of official
violence in the maintenance of these arrangements.
Official violence has been a major element in the pattern of
domestic mass violence discussed thus far. Ever since the
eighteenth century, those wishing to justify individual in-
stances of revolt on grounds of self-defense have pointed to
prior acts of violence by those in authority. In the midst of
the Green Mountain Boys' uprising, for example, Ethan
Allen wrote the Governor of New York, "Though they style
us rioters for opposing them and seek to catch and punish us
as such, yet in reality themselves are the rioters, the tumul-
tuous, disorderly, stimulating factors . . ." 18
Once mass revolt has begun, the most common question is
whether "official violence," reform, or some combination of
force and reform will end it. Military suppression has ended
some rebellions, such as those of the Indian peoples; capitula-
tion to the insurgents, as in the case of the Klan during Re-
construction, terminated others. At most times during their
history, however, Americans confronted by violent uprisings
have responded ambiguously, alternating the carrot of moder-
ate reform with the stick of mild suppression. During the
ghetto uprisings of the past few years, police and troops
PROTEST AND POLITICS 19
called in to suppress disorders have often used excessive vio-
lence, as in Newark and Detroit, but have not committed
massacres — for example, by machine-gunning looters. With a
few exceptions (such as the U.S. Army's treatment of the In-
dians) this has been the recurrent pattern of attempted
suppression of domestic revolts: frequent excesses of official
violence without mass murder. And along with suppression
has gone moderate reform, from the offers of state and colo-
nial legislatures to remedy some of the grievances of the Ap-
palachian farmers to the civil rights legislation of the 1960's,
enacted almost directly in response to Southern sit-ins and
Northern rioting. The problem, however, is that these meth-
ods are seldom effective. The historical data suggest that once
law-abiding Americans reach the point of mass disobedience
to law, their revolts will be ended neither by moderate force
nor by moderate reform.
Both techniques were attempted during the eighteenth-cen-
tury farmer uprisings; revolts in New Jersey, the Carolinas,
Pennsylvania, New York, and Massachusetts were squelched
in relatively bloodless battles, while legislatures held out the
olive branch of compromise on such issues as legislative ap-
portionment, taxation, and court procedure. Still, until the
Jeffersonian accession, the revolts continued. Similarly, the
North-West axis which came to control Congress in the dec-
ades before the Civil War attempted to end Southern insur-
gency by combining law enforcement (e.g., Jackson's Force
Act, passed in response to South Carolinian "nullification"
of the Tariff of 1828) with a series of famous compromises
on the issue of slavery. Despite the offer of the Crittenden
Compromise of 1860, the South seceded. Even during the la-
bor-management warfare of the later nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, the pattern persisted. The force used to
suppress strikes and riots was not massive enough to destroy
the entire labor movement; reforms achieved in the form of
recognition of some unions, victory in some strikes, and a
pro-labor attitude on the part of the Wilson administration
were not sufficient to meet the movement's demands and
needs. At present, it appears that gentle enforcement of civil
rights laws and court decisions in the South will not integrate
Southern schools or alter fundamental patterns of racial dis-
20
crimination, while a similar combination of police action and
legislative reform is proving ineffective to end the revolt of
ghetto blacks in the North.
Whether on the frontier on in the factory, in rural South-
ern communities or in urban ghettos, what rebels have de-
manded is the satisfaction of their group interests, including
interests in exercising political and economic power and in
controlling their own social systems. Metaphorically, these
desires translate into "independence" — the integration into
American society not just of scattered members of the group
but of the entire group considered as a cultural, economic,
political, and occasionally territorial unit. Prior to and during
their struggle for greater autonomy, insurgent groups experi-
ence a sharp increase in collective pride and in political
awareness. They reject old-style leaders and choose new ones
reflecting this new awareness. Old links with outside society
are discarded as obsolete; new ones are forged in the heat of
revolt. The achievement of a greater degree of local auton-
omy makes possible the creation of group economic institu-
tions, more rapid internal modernization, and an increase in
national political power based on group solidarity (e.g., the
"bloc vote"). Therefore, paradoxically, revolts or insurrec-
tions seen by those in power as divisive, separatist, or even an-
archic have often had the effects of restoring social order to
the group and reuniting the insurgents on a new basis with
the larger body politic. "Independence," then, implies a new
interdependence, based no longer on favors asked and re-
ceived but on the respect which power owes to power. It may
be argued, of course, that this is not a final state but a phase
of group development. Even so, it would seem to be an essen-
tial phase; all successful American groups, including WASPs,
have passed or are passing through it on their way to matur-
ity and power. At the same time, the official approach to the
problem of violent mass revolt has been to offer the rebels
the benefits of individualism — reforms which promise mem-
bers of the insurgent group fairer treatment, more votes,
more jobs, and so on — provided only that they give up "un-
realistic" demands for control of territory, recognition of col-
lective political and economic interests, and the like. Natu-
rally, such offers are rejected by the insurgents.
PROTEST AND POLITICS 21
This compromise has been repeatedly acted out. American
colonists, Western farmers, Southern secessionists, labor
union men, urban blacks, and others have all been offered the
benefit of integration as individuals into a preexisting social
system, provided that they renounce the goal of exercising in-
dependent, collective power. In each case, rejection of such
compromises paved the way for escalated conflict. In each
case, what finally terminated the conflict was either massive
military suppression or some collection of events which so
transformed the preexisting social system as to permit inte-
gration of the insurgent group, not just some of its members
individually, into American society.
It is worth noting that, as a rule, the means of such inte-
gration have been either accidental or improvised, since our
individualistic political and economic systems have lacked the
machinery for advancing the interests of groups qua groups.
Methods of group advancement which now seem "tradi-
tional"— e.g., political parties, political machines, business
corporations, labor unions, and community organizations —
were all considered at their inception as dangerous and un-
American. Moreover, the integration of large out-groups into
American society generally took place not as a result of in-
group generosity or reform but in the wake of system-trans-
forming "explosions," such as westward expansion, civil or
world war, and depression. That the great immigration waves
of 1880-1920 coincided with the transformation of the
United States from an agricultural-rural to an industrial-ur-
ban society goes far to explain why some groups were able to
achieve integration fairly quickly and with a minimum of or-
ganized violence, although even among these immigrants both
the pace of integration and the frequency of recourse to vio-
lence varied significantly from group to group.
Contemporary American Protest
The number of participants in demonstrative protest seems
to be increasing and includes an ever larger proportion of the
members of society. Anti-war demonstrations in the United
States, for example, are estimated to have grown almost con-
22
tinuously from the spring of 1965 to the spring of 1968.19
The student population, castigated in the 1950's as the "silent
generation," produced at least 221 demonstrations in 101 col-
leges between January 1 and June 15, 1968, involving 38,911
participants, according to a study conducted by the National
Student Association.
Demonstrations are often viewed as the political tool of
only a few dissident factions, such as students and Negroes.
Actually, the number and variety of social groups resorting to
this mechanism seem to be increasing. Various middle-class
groups as well as "respectable" professionals have been in-
volved in demonstrations. Teachers have picketed schools in
New York City.20 Doctors, nurses, researchers, and others
from the medical profession have demonstrated against the
war in Vietnam.21 Clergymen have similarly protested. On
several Sundays in September and October, 1968, parishion-
ers demonstrated near Catholic churches in Washington,
D.C., to protest sanctions against priests who did not support
the Pope's edict against artificial birth control. Even the staffs
of law enforcement agencies have not refrained from demon-
strating. For instance, on October 1, 1968, one hundred "wel-
fare patrolmen" picketed New York City's Social Services
Department.
Nor are the demonstrators all of one particular political
persuasion. Among those who have resorted to this mode of
expression are students who demonstrated for Humphrey
(urging Senator Eugene J. McCarthy to support him) outside
the San Francisco Civic Center Auditorium on October 15,
1968, against the sit-in at Columbia University, for the war
in Vietnam, and for stricter enforcement of the law.
Wide segments of the public condemn protest indiscrimi-
nately. James Reston observed that "the prevailing mood of
the country is against the demonstrators in the black ghettos
and the universities," even though most of the demonstrations
are peaceful.22 Life magazine states, "Certainly it is a matter
of concern when Americans find the ordinary channels of
discussion and decision so unresponsive that they feel forced
to take their grievances to the street." 23 The majority of the
citizenry tends to focus its attention on the communicative
PROTEST AND POLITICS 23
acts themselves, condemning both them and their partici-
pants. For instance, 74 percent of the adult public in a Cali-
fornia poll expressed disapproval of the student demonstra-
tions at Berkeley in 1964,24 although those demonstrations
were actually nonviolent. Perhaps media reports of the
"Berkeley riots" shaped public opinion.
Asked explicitly about the right to engage in "peaceful"
demonstrations ("against the war in Vietnam") 40 percent of
the people sampled in both December, 1966, and July, 1967,
felt that the citizenry had no such right. Fifty-eight percent
were prepared to "accept" such demonstrations "as long as
they are peaceful." So a major segment of the public seems
unaware that such demonstrations have the same legal status
as writing to a congressman or speaking up at a town
meeting.25
The situation is somewhat similar to the first appearances
of organized labor strikes. Not only the owners and managers
of industrial plants but also broad segments of the public at
the beginning of the century did not recognize the rights of
workers to strike and to picket factories if their grievances
were unheeded. Strikes are more widely accepted now, even
though they* have frequently been associated with violence by
workers, management, and the police. According to a Harris
poll, "The majority (77 percent of those sampled) feel that
the refusal to work is the ultimate and legitimate recourse for
union members engaged in the process of collective bargain-
ing. . . ,"26
It is important to note that as more of the public learned
to accept strikes, they erupted less frequently into violent
confrontations; the most important factor seems to have been
an increased readiness to respond to the issues raised by the
strikers rather than merely responding to the act of striking.
Perhaps contemporary social protest will provoke similar
transformations both in the public mind and in social institu-
tions.
In the chapters that follow, we present a social history of
anti-war, student, and black protest. Our analysis is intended
to illuminate the reasons for the development of these protest
movements, with the hope that such an exposition will both
24
contribute to increasing understanding of how and why these
movements came about, and serve as background for consid-
eration of what society's response to these movements ought
to be.
Part Two
The Politics of Confrontation
Chapter II
Anti-War Protest
In the past three years, protest against American involve-
ment and conduct in Vietnam has become so familiar to our
national life that it has almost acquired the status of an insti-
tution. Few people today would think of asking why this so-
cial force came into existence or how it has sustained itself
and grown; even the movement's opponents seem resigned to
its inevitability. In many respects, however, the very existence
of a broadly based, militant opposition to foreign policy
marks a sharp departure from long-standing and deeply
embedded traditions, and future historians will probably
marvel at the outpouring of protest and seek to explain it by
reference to unprecedented conditions.
In some advanced countries, such as Japan, protest has
been virtually ritualized over the years. Attendant street vio-
lence is predictable and the issues are likewise stable — mili-
tary pacts, foreign bases on native soil, delay in the return of
confiscated territory, hospitality to nuclear submarines, and
so forth. American war protest, by contrast, has until recently
been a marginal, easily ignored phenomenon. The 1863 anti-
draft riots had more to do with ethnic rivalries than with
27
28
principled objections to the Civil War, and in other wars a
magnified patriotism has obscured the voices of dissent.1 Once a
war has gotten under way, those who formerly counseled
against participation in it have sometimes emerged as its
staunchest champions; World War II is perhaps the best ex-
ample of this. Furthermore, although American wars have
varied in the enthusiasm of their reception at home, nothing like
the Vietnam protest movement has previously appeared.
It is especially interesting that the wars most closely resem-
bling the current one did not generate a comparable reaction.
In the 1840's the United States annexed a large portion of
Mexico and suppressed a "native uprising" under the cover of
dubious legal arguments. Few listened to Henry Thoreau's
protests against this action, and when Abraham Lincoln rose
in the House of Representatives to detail the President's soph-
istries, he doomed his chances for reelection. In the 1890's
the United States aligned itself temporarily with Philippine
nationalism in order to destroy Spain's colonial power, and
then turned to suppression of the nationalists themselves. De-
spite the fact that there were more than 100,000 Filipino cas-
ualties, mostly civilians, no concerted protest was heard; in-
deed, American historians are still reluctant to see the Philip-
pine episode as the cynical and brutal adventure described by
Mark Twain.2 A similar mental blackout has accompanied
the numerous American incursions into Latin America, first
by private filibustering expeditions and later by the Marines.
There were no significant protests when Secretary of State
Knox remarked, upon the sending of Marines into Cuba in
1908, that "The United States does not undertake first to con-
sult the Cuban Government if a crisis arises requiring a tem-
porary landing somewhere." 3
Turning to recent history, we must note that the chief
public objection to the invasion-by-proxy of Cuba in 1961
was that the invasion failed. And President Johnson was able
to mobilize congressional and public support for the invasion
of the Dominican Republic in 1965, first on grounds of pro-
tecting American civilians and then with the retrospective jus-
tification that the "Sino-Soviet military bloc" had been behind
the Dominican revolution.4 This support was mobilized de-
ANTI-WAR PROTEST 29
spite organized opposition that may have been a precursor to
the anti- Vietnam war movement.
There have actually been significant exercises of American
power that the American public has hardly noticed at all:
few Americans are aware of the United States' invasion of
Russia after World War I, coups in Iran and Guatemala, the
intervention of U.S. troops in Lebanon, the attempted over-
throw of the neutralist government of Laos, and the quiet de-
ployment of 55,000 troops in Thailand. Finally, in seeking to
explain recent protest it is especially useful, for purposes of
contrast, to recall the Korean War, which resembled the Viet-
nam War in several respects and occurred within the memory
of many current protesters. Though the similarities between
South Korea under Syngman Rhee and South Vietnam under
Ngo Dinh Diem were extensive and profound, no mass pro-
test against intervention occurred. Even today, fifteen years
after the Panmunjom Truce, few Americans know about, and
fewer question, the presence of more than 50,000 American
troops in South Korea. It is thus evident that a tradition of
anti-interventionism is not in itself a significant factor in the
shaping of American public opinion. Obviously, something
more is required to account for the growth of a broad protest
movement in this country.
The case of Vietnam would thus appear to be a unique ex-
ception to the support which the American public habitually
grants its leaders in matters of national security. There is, of
course, a correlation between the degree of our military in-
volvement and the size of protest; the first significant dissent
against the war was heard in the spring of 1965, when the
first "nonretaliatory" air attacks against North Vietnam began
and the first acknowledged combat troops were landed in
South Vietnam. Since then, the scope of protest has grown
with the scope of hostilities. But the Korean example reminds
us that the degree of American involvement and sacrifice
cannot account for the level of protest; it was not until the
spring of 1967 that American casualties in Vietnam surpassed
those in Korea, and the total number of American combat
deaths is still (November, 1968) lower for this war than for
its predecessor.5 Whereas the high casualties in Korea chiefly
30
served the arguments of those who wanted to extend the war
into China, the high casualties in Vietnam have chiefly been
emphasized by proponents of negotiation or withdrawal.
It is plain, therefore, that an unprecedented constellation of
factors must have gone into the making of the anti-war senti-
ment that prevails today. In analyzing these factors, we begin
with an examination of the organization of the anti-war move-
ment. This examination indicates that organizational structure
per se is of little value in accounting for its growth. Indeed,
the movement is best understood as a result of events, not as a
generator of future actions. These events, which were widely
communicated, led to a deep skepticism about the war among
wide segments of the American public and also led an amor-
phous set of organizations to oppose the war. Thus our analy-
sis turns to an examination of these events and why they had
the effect they did.
The Disorganization of the Anti-War Movement
There is little general agreement about the makeup and na-
ture of the Vietnam protest movement. From within, the
movement seems disorganized to the point of chaos, with lit-
erally hundreds of ad hoc groups springing up in response to
specific issues, with endless formation and disbanding of co-
alitions, and with perpetual doubts as to where things are
headed and whether the effort is worthwhile at all. From
without, as in the view taken by some investigating commit-
tees and grand juries, the movement often looks quite dif-
ferent— a conspiracy, admittedly complex but single-minded
in its obstruction of American policy. In the latter interpreta-
tion, leaders and ideology are of paramount importance; in
the former, the movement is simply people "doing their own
thing."
The interpretation offered here will be that the peace
movement does have some broad continuities and tendencies,
well understood by the most prominent leaders, but that its
loosely participatory, unstructured aspect can scarcely be over-
estimated. Would-be spokesmen can be found to corrobo-
ANTI-WAR PROTEST 31
rate any generalization about the movement's ultimate pur-
poses, but the spokesmen have few constituents and they are
powerless to shape events. Tom Hayden's influence on the de-
velopments outside the Democratic Convention in Chicago,
for example, was probably minuscule compared to that of the
Chicago authorities; and Hayden's subsequent call for "two,
three, many Chicagos" has no status as a strategical commit-
ment. If there are to be more "Chicagos" it will require simi-
lar occasions, similar attitudes on the part of civic and police
authorities, similar causes for political desperation, and simi-
lar masses of people who have decided on their own to risk
their safety. No one, not even Tom Hayden, is likely to show
up for ideological reasons alone or because someone told him
to.
The more one learns about the organizational structure and
development of the peace movement, the more reluctant one
must be to speak of its concerted direction. As the following
pages will show, the movement has been and remains in a
posture of responding to events outside its control; the chief
milestones in its growth have been its days of widespread
outrage at escalations, bombing resumptions, draft policies,
and prosecutions. As Chart II- 1 shows, the size of demonstra-
tions varies directly with the popular opposition to the war
during the period 1965 to 1968. Thus, the strength of the
movement would seem to be causally related to widespread
American attitudes and sentiments toward the war.
When we reflect on the variety of the critics of the war, we
can well understand why the movement has never yet had the
luxury, or perhaps the embarrassment, of defining either its
parameters or its long-term aims. There is a widespread feel-
ing among those who participate in active criticism of the
war that the movement would collapse without the presence
of a worsening military situation and a domestic social crisis,
and this feeling gains credence from the slackening of protest
after President Johnson's speech of March 31, 1968, and the
preoccupation with "straight" politics during the McCarthy
and Kennedy campaigns. Although it may seem tautological
to say so, one must bear in mind that the chief sustaining ele-
ment in the Vietnam protest movement has been the war in
32
Chart ll-l: Size of Anti-War Demonstrations and Percentage of Anti-War
Sentiment
400
^ 300
If
•a I
^200
bo W
5 100
s
3
1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1
0 Percent disapproval
-
□ Numbers demonstrating
-
_
D
-
/ D
i i i i i i i i
' '
-80
70 |
-60
-50
-40
-30
SFWSFWSFWS
1965 1966 1967 1968
20 £
10 3:
si
a
&
2
Source of data: Percent disapprovals, Gallup Polls; numbers of partici-
pants in anti-war demonstrations involving 1,000 or more persons, New
York Times Index and Facts on File.
S = Spring
F =Fall
W = Winter
ANTI-WAR PROTEST 33
Vietnam. Not even the most avid partisans of the movement
can guarantee its continued growth when the issues become
less immediate and dramatic.
This fact needs to be emphasized repeatedly in view of the
widely divergent political opinions of people who must be
counted as having served the movement. The Chinese-ori-
ented Progressive Labor Party has been part of the move-
ment, but so have United States senators. The Communist
journalist Wilfred Burchett has had less impact than Harrison
Salisbury, and the Republican Blue Book on Vietnam proba-
bly contributed more than Bertrand Russell's International
War Crimes Tribunal. For that matter, it is unlikely that any
demonstration mobilized American opinion as effectively as
Premier Ky did when he declared his only hero was Adolf
Hitler.6 Innumerable small events such as that casual remark
drew great numbers of normally apolitical American citizens
into signing petitions, participating in vigils and marches, and
supporting peace candidates. One must resist the tendency,
fostered both by would-be leaders of the movement and by
those who want to blame them as the source of all trouble, to
identify the movement with its most radical and estranged
segment, or to take too seriously the political impact of dem-
onstrations. The anti-war movement is not a fixed group of
people; it is something that has been happening to America.
And demonstrations are typically an outcome of events un-
controlled by the movement, rather than a generator of fu-
ture actions. Moreover, it is usually the response to the dem-
onstration that catapults it, as in the Chicago demonstration,
into the status of an "event."
Several other considerations reinforce an attitude of cau-
tion about describing the peace movement in terms of its or-
ganizational structure. The most effective groups in marshal-
ing mass protest, such as the National Mobilization Commit-
tee to End the War in Vietnam and the Students for a Demo-
cratic Society, have extremely fluid membership and virtually
no national control over their membership's behavior. In fact,
the former committee has no real membership at all; it is
merely a coalition of "leaders" from various smaller groups
who would disagree with one another on a number of funda-
mental points but are willing to appear in the same march or
34
demonstration. The very name of the most prominent group
in New York City, the "Fifth Avenue Peace Parade Commit-
tee," expresses the prevailing subordination of ideology to co-
alition tactics. It is only a small exaggeration to say that the
role of organizational leadership in the movement is re-
stricted to applying for permits, holding press conferences, an-
nouncing the time and place of demonstrations, and mailing
appeals for funds.
Again, it should be understood that anti-war groups tend to
spring up to give focus to activities that already exist. A few
pacifists picket the Naval Weapons Depot at Port Chicago,
California, they decide to stay there indefinitely, as the Port
Chicago Vigil, and the vigil rallies support from the anti-war
community. Draft cards are destroyed by individuals, prose-
cutions begin, the press takes notice, and, in response, an or-
ganization called The Resistance is formed. The Resistance in
turn poses a challenge to draft-ineligible sympathizers who
see their young friends being treated as criminals, and so ad-
ditional organizations like RESIST and the Committee for
Draft Resistance are formed. Businessmen, VISTA volun-
teers, writers and artists, clergymen, doctors, student body
presidents, and so forth typically get together in ad hoc
groupings whose sole aim may be to place an advertisement
in a newspaper; the political work of forming common atti-
tudes has been done in advance by the mass media and a
general awareness of facts about the war.
There are, of course, very many groups that do have
long-range purposes and articulated leftist ideologies, but
none of them is especially influential, and they have learned
over the past few years that their only hope of broad support
is to participate in such paper mergers as the National Mobi-
lization Committee and the Student Mobilization Committee
and to get their names associated with large and dramatic ral-
lies. One must also realize that the participatory style of deci-
sion-making epitomized in the Students for a Democratic So-
ciety has gained much currency, thus further limiting the
meaningfulness of an analysis in terms of leadership struc-
ture. "Party discipline" has vitually disappeared as a code of
behavior. Indeed, a dilemma facing the movement is its lack
of discipline; in exchange for spontaneity and political auton-
ANTI-WAR PROTEST 35
omy, it forfeits control over the smallish elements whose de-
meanor is provocative of violence. It is significant in this light
that the American Communist Party has been among the
most peripheral and least noticed components of the peace
movement, and also among the least spirited in tactics.
A partial exception to the rule that organizations can be
either ideological or effective, but not both, can be found in
groups like the American Friends Service Committee, the
Committee for Nonviolent Action, and the Committee for a
Sane Nuclear Policy. The ideology in question is, to be sure,
merely peace and nonviolence, but one could defend calling
this an ideology on the grounds that it is a fully thought-out
commitment that is not negotiable and not dependent on the
existence of any particular crisis. These three groups have
achieved significant results in shaping opinion among people
who are resistant to traditional political rhetoric, and they
have also formed an important bridge between the peace
movement and such critical institutions as the U.S. Congress
and the United Nations. Their very commitment to nonvio-
lence has given them a political weight that the more "politi-
cal" groups have found difficult to acquire. Furthermore, the
nonviolent activists developed innovative tactics of protest in
the 1950's and focused interests on the issues of militarism
and the nuclear arms race that have subsequently entered the
national political dialogue.
Why the Movement Grew
So the reasons for the growth of the anti-war movement
must be found outside the organization of that movement,
and the movement is best understood as a result of events.
Accordingly, we now turn to an examination of these events
and the multitude of factors which conditioned their impact
and which lent the movement its occasional capacity for des-
peration and fury.
A War with Time to Think
One of the most telling of those factors was tne prolonged
public attention given to Vietnam before the battle was fully
36
joined. In this respect Vietnam stands in marked contrast to
Korea.
The Korean War broke into public consciousness all at
once with an invasion from the Communist North; the public
had no more time to reflect than did President Truman. Few
Americans had given any thought to the complexities of Ko-
rean politics — particularly, to the nature of the Syngman
Rhee regime, its degree of popular support in South Korea,
or the manner in which it had been placed in power under
American direction. The intellectual climate in 1950 was not
conducive to detached thought concerning the war; there
were hardly any Americans who questioned the Cold War
policy of containment, except, of course, for those who fa-
vored "rollback" and "liberation" of Communist-occupied ter-
ritories. The rise of Communist China abroad and of Mc-
Carthyism at home did not allow for the development of a
respectable anti-war segment of opinion.
Vietnam was different. The American public had become
increasingly aware of the country and its issues over a period
of years. Americans had been vaguely aware of the fall of
Dienbienphu in 1954, the Geneva Accords and the establish-
ment of the Diem regime in the same year, and the alleged
success of Premier Diem in establishing a "democratic one-
man rule." Until his deposition and assassination in Novem-
ber, 1963, Diem was portrayed favorably in American press
releases. The State Department White Paper of 1961 sup-
ported his claim that South Vietnam was a victim of unpro-
voked aggression from without. Numerous statements from
high government officials promised an early end to the Com-
munist threat in Vietnam. At the same time, Diem's treat-
ment of dissenting political factions, the failure of the strate-
gic hamlet program, the Buddhist protests beginning in May,
1963, and the self-immolations beginning in the following
month, together with the colorful and newsworthy deport-
ment of the Premier's sister-in-law, Mme. Nhu ("I would
clap hands at seeing another monk barbecue show"), all
served to focus American interest on Vietnam. This interest
could hardly be characterized as protest, but when the Diem
regime was replaced by a succession of strongmen, juntas,
and shadow governments and the war continued to grow, the
ANTI-WAR PROTEST 37
American public was aware and becoming increasingly dis-
turbed.
The Promises of the 1964 Campaign
The American Presidential election campaign of 1964 can
hardly be overrated as a precondition of the protest move-
ment. In that campaign President Johnson recommended
himself as the candidate of peace, as opposed to a man who
would defoliate forests, bomb the North, and "supply Ameri-
can boys to do the job that Asian boys should do." 7 It seems
fair to say that the anti-Vietnam War movement has been en-
ergized in part by a deep personal bitterness against the
speaker of those words, and without the promises of 1964 the
movement might have assumed a milder character. President
Johnson's 1964 victory was overwhelming and was widely de-
scribed as a "landslide." Certainly, he was perceived as a man
of enormous executive ability. Perhaps because of the confi-
dence given him in 1964, large numbers of normally apoliti-
cal citizens have felt misled or even betrayed, and this feeling
was exacerbated by the insistence of the Johnson administra-
tion that its policies merely honored commitments made by
Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy.
President Roosevelt, too, campaigned as a peace candidate
and then made war, but the public felt no contradiction;
America had been "stabbed in the back" by other powers.
World War II and the Korean War as well conformed to the
national expectation that conflicts are always begun by others.
Only a vague and dubious analogue to this claim could be
made in the case of the Vietnam War, and doubts about it
could incubate for months and years as the government reiter-
ated its position. The Tonkin Gulf incidents of August 2-4,
1964, and the Pleiku airbase attack of February 7, 1965, were
no substitute either for a "Pearl Harbor" or a northern inva-
sion. The very effort to minimize American involvement low-
ered morale, not only because the assertions were regularly
disputed but also because the absence of official jingoism dis-
couraged formation of the patriotic myopia that often prevails
in a fully mobilized country. Public ambivalence and dismay
only increased as escalations were denied and assessments of
38
the strength of the South Vietnamese regime were shown to
have been fanciful. In short, the American people had to cope
with some of the risks and anxieties of war without benefit of
a "wartime emergency" mentality.
The Failure of Administration Arguments —
Factual and Legal
At any given phase the majority of protesters claimed
readiness to be reconciled to the government if certain ques-
tions could be satisfactorily answered. The mood of injury
and estrangement that has increasingly characterized the
anti-war movement has had much to do with the failure to
provide answers which satisfied them. Protesters who read the
Geneva Accords of 1954 expressed puzzlement at President
Johnson's description of the aim of U.S. policy as "obser-
vance of the 1954 agreements which guaranteed the indepen-
dence of South Vietnam," s since the Geneva Accords make
no mention of South Vietnam and indeed provide a timetable
for the reunification of the northern and southern parts of the
country.9 Similarly, the government claim that we are in
Vietnam to guarantee self-determination has not proved cred-
ible to many students of the post-Geneva period, in which
Premier Diem explicitly refused to follow the election proce-
dures laid down in the Accords.10 Students of the Vietnam
situation who observed that the 1965 State Department White
Paper omitted any mention of the elections pointed out that
the Department's Blue Book of 1961 had praised the South
Vietnamese government for avoiding the "well-laid trap" of
the proposed elections.11 The 1965 version did not even look
consistent with itself, since the claim of massive North Viet-
namese military involvement over a five-year period was
backed with only twenty-three biographical sketches of
"North Vietnamese" prisoners, seventeen of whom were, in
fact, born in South Vietnam. As books about the war prolif-
erated, growing numbers of Americans began to learn how
the current Vietnamese situation had evolved from the unsta-
ble conclusion of the Indochinese War, in which the United
States had openly supported French colonialism against the
Vietnamese. As more and more facts fell into place, increas-
ANTI-WAR PROTEST 39
ing numbers of American citizens began to question whether
their government was being truthful about its real purposes in
Vietnam.
The most important part of the government's case for in-
tervention— that it was opposing a clear case of aggression
from Hanoi — looked less impressive when the fact emerged
that in 1963 the 16,000 American "advisors" were opposing a
revolutionary movement that was at least 98 percent indige-
nously South Vietnamese.12 As regime after regime in Saigon
fell, it seemed more and more likely that it was the ARVN,
rather than the Viet Cong, which survived only as a result of
outside support. As a Saigon official reportedly told New
York Times correspondent Charles Mohr:
Frankly, we are not strong enough now to compete with
the Communists on a purely political basis. They are organ-
ized and disciplined; the noncommunists are not — we do not
have any large, well organized political parties and we do not
yet have unity.13
As for the political nature of the NLF, and its relation to
Communism, the Buddhist Thich Nhat Hanh wrote:
The majority of the people in the Front are not Commu-
nists. They are patriots, and to the extent that they are under
the direction of the Communists, it is an unconscious accep-
tance of control, not allegiance to Communist ideology. I
know it is a hard fact for Americans to face, but it is a fact
that the more Vietnamese their troops succeed in killing, and
the larger the force they introduce into Vietnam, the more
surely they destroy the very thing they are trying to build.
Not only does the Front itself gain in power and allegiance,
but Communism is increasingly identified by the peasants
with patriotism and takes an increasingly influential role in
the direction of the Front.14
While most peace advocates were willing to concede the
NLF's dependency on the North Vietnamese government,
few, if any, could accept the theory, reiterated by Secretary
Rusk and others, that the insurgents in South Vietnam were
carrying out a master plan drawn up in Peking.15 Too much
was known about indigenous grievances behind the fighting:
the refusal to implement the Geneva Accords, the American
40
replacement of French power in protection of the old Viet-
namese ruling class, the excesses of the Diem regime in the
internment and torture of dissenters, the persecution of non-
Catholics, and the restoration of a feudal landholding struc-
ture. There were, to be sure, comparable factors in the South
Korea of Syngman Rhee, but they had seemed insignificant
when set against North Korea's aggression. Moreover, in
Korea the United States fought as part of a United Nations
force which lent moral and political support that was notably
absent in Vietnam.
Moreover, in the years since 1950 Communism had lost
the image of a monolithic force of conquest. The Sino-Soviet
dispute, the fragmentation of the East European bloc, the
U.S. government's own efforts at detente with Russia, all
served to undermine the official picture of Diem's opponents
as an invading army equipped and dispatched by "world
communism." Indeed, the statistics offered in the 1965 White
Paper, "Aggression from the North," left an implication that
nearly all the enemy's military equipment must have been in-
troduced into Vietnam (in disregard of the Geneva terms) by
the United States.16
The issue of the legality of American intervention in
Vietnam 17 has been a continual irritant to American war
protesters, and the government's claims in this area have been
repeatedly challenged. President Johnson's repeated assertion
that "three Presidents . . . have committed themselves and
have promised to help defend this small and valiant
nation" 18 seemed to many students and protesters to be a se-
rious misrepresentation of the attitude of President Eisen-
hower toward the Diem government and at best an allusion
to informal plans rather than to binding commitments.19 In-
stead of satisfying critics of the war, government appeals to
the Geneva settlement focused attention on our refusal to
sign the Accords and our installation of the Diem regime in
the hope of preventing the implementation of their provi-
sions. Nor have critics been placated by retroactive citations
of the SEATO pact, which does not seem to them to justify
the unilateral measures taken in defense of the South Viet-
namese regime.20 The administration's references to the U.N.
ANTI-WAR PROTEST 41
Charter have similarly failed to placate critics who saw in-
consistencies between the document and American actions.
Opponents of the Vietnam War have long argued that it
violates the U.S. Constitution, which grants Congress the sole
authority to make war. One possible retort is that made by
Under-Secretary of State Nicholas Katzenbach, who told the
Senate Foreign Relations Committee on August 17, 1967,
that the constitutional clause at issue "has become outmoded
in that international arena." 21
The more usual line of reasoning, however, is that Con-
gress granted the President full power to make war in the
Tonkin Gulf Resolution of August 7, 1964, when he was au-
thorized "to take all necessary measures to repel any armed
attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent
further aggression." 22 This broad interpretation of the resolu-
tion's meaning has been explicitly repudiated by some of the
senators who voted for it (e.g., Senator Gaylord Nelson) 23
and the floor sponsor of the resolution, Senator Fulbright,
who subsequently described his sponsoring role as something
"I regret more than anything I have ever done in my life." 2i
War critics have been fortified by the researches of Senator
Fulbright and others into obscurities surrounding the back-
ground and nature of the Tonkin Gulf incidents.25 These crit-
ics concluded that the attacks on the Maddox and the Turner
Joy were not wholly unprovoked, and that the administration
suppressed a good deal of compromising knowledge in press-
ing for immediate passage of the resolution. Furthermore, it
has been widely reported that the substance of the Tonkin
Resolution had been drafted long before the Tonkin incidents
occurred, thus giving rise to speculation that the subsequent
acts of escalation had been decided upon earlier — in fact,
during the period when President Johnson was denouncing
Senator Goldwater's "reckless" recommendation of the same
measures.26 Whatever the merits of this obscure case, the
anti-war segment of American opinion has had ample incen-
tive to depreciate the Tonkin Resolution.
Thus anyone seeking to understand the anti-war movement
and the occasional willingness of peace activists to defy the
law should bear clearly in mind the widely held opinion in
42
the anti-war movement that the war itself is illegal: a viola-
tion of the Constitution, the U.N. Charter, and numerous
treaties.
Implicit in all above is the fact that the embittered atmo-
sphere of the peace movement must also be seen in the con-
text of the so-called credibility gap. On every aspect of the
war — the explanation of its origins, characterization of our
role, praise of the South Vietnamese regime and its progress
toward democracy, description of the unfailing success of all
American military operations, minimization of civilian cas-
ualties, astronomical "body counts," -7 and denials of enemy
and neutral gestures toward negotiation — the American govern-
ment has been charged with duplicity by many of those who
disagree with its policies. And this effect was heightened by
the coupling of American assurances of willingness to negoti-
ate with renewed escalations. James Reston expressed the
confusion of many Americans when he asked, "Do these pol-
icies complement one another or cancel each other out? Does
half a war offensive and half a peace offensive . . . add up to
a whole policy or no policy?" 2S When all shades of misgiving
about the war were scorned as cowardly and unpatriotic — the
timidity of "nervous nellies" and "cussers and doubters" "9 —
the effect was to turn disagreement into rage.
Opinion Leaders, the Media, and the Spread of
Anti-War Sentiment
It may well be asked how the peace movement was able to
sustain confidence in its own view of the war when the ad-
ministration consistently challenged that view. One important
part of the answer is that television thrust the citizenry into
vicarious attendance on the battlefield every day. The docu-
mentary material gathered by reporters and cameramen has
been consistently more eloquent than the military dispatches
(known in the Saigon press corps as "The Five O'Clock Fol-
lies" and recently referred to by an "American official" as
"vaudeville performances ... so often producing] antago-
nism and incredulity" 30). This is the most fully reported war
in history; one could go further and say that this is the only
war in which millions of citizens in their homes have been
granted access to immediate experience and background
ANTI-WAR PROTEST 43
knowledge that would enable them to doubt their own gov-
ernment's version of what was happening.
Another factor favoring the movement's growth has been
the refusal of many highly placed persons to go along with
the administration policies and assertions. Senate "doves"
such as Fulbright, Morse, Hatfield, McGovern, Gruening,
Gore, Kennedy, Mansfield, Hartke, and McCarthy provided
continual incentive to further dissent, and they were some-
times joined in criticism by "hawks" like Symington, Stennis,
and Russell. While some members of the Kennedy adminis-
tration stayed in office under President Johnson and helped to
make war policy, many others did not; men like Galbraith,
Reischauer, Kennan, Schlesinger, Sorenson, and Hilsman
strengthened the widespread feeling that President Kennedy
would have handled things differently. Influential war corre-
spondents like Neil Sheehan, Malcolm Browne, David
Schoenbrun, Richard Halberstam, Peter Arnett, and the late
Bernard Fall also had an important hand in shaping public
opinion, as did the columns of Walter Lippmann. Disillu-
sioned veterans like Don Duncan, rebels within the armed
services like Ronald Lockman and Howard Levy, young draft
resisters facing jail, firsthand observers of the Vietnamese
countryside like former International Voluntary Services di-
rector Don Luce, clergymen and scholars at home, and dis-
tinguished foreigners like U Thant, Pope Paul, Gunnar Myr-
dal, and Arnold Toynbee, all gave encouragement to critics
of the war. By 1968 the opinion polls declared that the dis-
senting minority had become a majority (see Chart II-2).
This is not to say, however, that advocates of negotiated or
unilateral withdrawal had become a majority. Charts II-2
and II-3 show that while "doves" came very close to out-
numbering "hawks," they could not by themselves have pro-
duced the overwhelmingly negative popular judgment that
American involvement in Vietnam was mistaken. This is a
point of some consequence, since it shows that the movement
was temporarily aided by segments of opinion that could not
have been counted on for continued support if the war had
been waged more successfully. The "anti-war majority" is
thus not what it seems, for many citizens who disapprove of
the government's policies might welcome an intensification of
44
the same policies if they believed that more efficient results
would be forthcoming. More people believe the war to have
been "mistaken" than regard themselves as "doves."
Chart 11-2: Gallup Poll Answers to the Question, "In view of the develop-
ments since we entered the fighting in Vietnam, do you think the U.S.
made a mistake sending troops to fight in Vietnam?"
Yes
No
No Opinion
August '65
24%
61%
15%
March '66
25
59
16
May '66
36
49
15
September '66
35
48
17
November '66
31
51
18
February '67
32
52
16
May '67
37
50
13
July '67
41
48
11
October '67
46
44
10
December '67
45
46
9
February '68 (early)
46
42
12
March '68
49
41
10
April '68
48
40
12
August '68
53
35
12
October '68 (early)
54
37
9
Chart 11-3: Gallup Poll Answers to the Question, "How would you describe
yourself, as a 'hawk' or a 'dove'?"
Hawk Dove No Opinion
December '67
52%
35%
13
January '68
56
28
16
February '68 (early)
61
23
16
February '68 (late)
58
26
16
March '68
41
42
17
April '68
41
41
18
October '68 (early)
44
42
14
It was not altogether coincidental that dissent reached its
peak in the election year of 1968. The Senate Republican
Policy Committee decided in early 1967 that peace sentiment
would be a decisive factor in the next Presidential election;
accordingly, a ninety-one-page Republican Blue Book, The
War in Vietnam, was issued in May, 1967, embracing nearly
all the contentions of the peace movement. Instead of repeat-
ing the customary calls for early victory, the Blue Book
frankly located the source of the Vietnam War in Premier
Diem's refusal to hold free elections, his religious and politi-
ANTI-WAR PROTEST 45
cal persecutions, and his abolition of village elections. "Many
of the revolutionists in the South," it stated, "were not neces-
sarily Communist to begin with, but rather anti-Saigon and
anti-Diem." It challenged the administration's account of the
Tonkin Gulf incidents, tracing them, as earlier anti-war crit-
ics had, to an American-sponsored naval raid by South Viet-
namese ships against North Vietnamese radar and naval in-
stallations. And it spelled out the costs of the war — the actual
money costs, such as $300,000 for each dead Vietnamese
alleged to be an enemy soldier, and the costs in American
casualties, the devastation of Vietnam, and the weakening of
domestic unity and morale. Many activists were startled to
find the Republican Party on their side, but this was within
the logic of the American political calendar.
On the same day that the Blue Book appeared, the Wall
Street Journal declared the war unwinnable and likened it to
an "incurable disease." And indeed, the New York stock
market responded with great enthusiasm when President
Johnson announced his revision of bombing policy on March
31, 1968. In record trading, the market rose sharply. Finan-
cial analysts estimated that the President's decision not to run
for reelection was probably less important than the prospect
of lower interest rates and a redress of the balance-of-pay-
ments difficulties which the war had exacerbated.31 " 'Peace is
bullish,' summed up the general response of the executives
interviewed." 32
The Course of the War
Of all ingredients of anti-war sentiment, there can be little
doubt then that one has been paramount: the course of the
war itself. Presumably a brief and successful assault against
the enemy in Vietnam could not have aroused sustained criti-
cism in this country; there is nothing in the previous history
of American interventions to suggest otherwise. Never before
had the American public been offered so many official predic-
tions not borne out by events or been given so much docu-
mentary evidence of military and political frustration. Even-
tually, government optimism produced a deep skepticism in
the public. Critics like Robert F. Kennedy commented that in
46
view of statistics released by this country, "it would seem that
no matter how many Viet Cong and North Vietnamese we
claim to kill, through some miraculous effort of will, enemy
strength remains the same. . . . Who, then, is doing the
fighting?" 33 Others asked why, if the war was so one-sided,
was it lasting so long? Why were South Vietnamese desertions
in the order of 100,000 a year?34 Why were the provinces
and even cities becoming less instead of more secure? Clare
Hollingworth, writing in the conservative London Daily Tele-
graph on November 2, 1968, estimated that the enemy had
by then gained administrative control of 1,800 of South Viet-
nam's 2,500 villages and over 8,000 of its 11,650 hamlets.
"Indeed, Saigon administers less than eight million of the
total population of 17 million and of this eight million some
four-and-a-half million are soldiers and civil servants paid by
the state." Senator Kennedy pointed out that it was an illu-
sion to unswervingly pursue military victory in the interest of
the people of Vietnam:
Their tiny land has been devastated by a weight of bombs
and shells greater than Nazi Germany knew. . . . More than
two million South Vietnamese are now homeless refugees. . . .
it is the people we seek to defend who are the greatest
losers.35
Understandably, the greater part of American public inter-
est was centered on the vicissitudes of our own troops. Great
heroism was displayed in the successful defense of Con Thien
in the fall of 1967 and again of Khe Sanh in the eight
months preceding July, 1968; but the strategic significance of
these costly outposts was challenged by critics. Two hundred
eighty-seven Americans were reported to have died in the
November, 1967, "Battle of Dak To," including the cele-
brated capture of Hill 875; the hill was abandoned ten days
later. Newspapers were full of bitter comments from GI's
who had lived through the ordeal and wondered why it had
been necessary.
As the war dragged on, media commentators began to
strike a gloomy note. Lou Cioffi's ABC Forecast for 1967
stated that "The American people must get used to the idea
of American troops there for the next five, ten or eighteen
ANTI-WAR PROTEST 47
years. The South Vietnamese army is badly trained and badly
equipped, and its officers are more interested in politics and
graft." U.S. News and World Report, on March 6, 1967, de-
scribed the failure of such massive sweeps as Operation Junc-
tion City, and asked rhetorically, "Is victory possible?" In
August of 1967, R. W. Apple of the New York Times wrote
an extraordinarily pessimistic series of evaluative essays
under such headings as "Growing Signs of a Stalemate."
Most analysts agreed that the Tet Offensive of early 1968
called for a serious reassessment of the American position in
Vietnam. Beverly Deepe remarked in the Christian Science
Monitor (February 3, 1968), "The Communists' three-day
blitz war . . . has opened up the possibility of the United
States losing its first major war in history." The Tet Offensive
seems to have marked the nadir of official credibility in the
public mind, after which the government's statements about
the war gradually became more modest. The American public
was profoundly upset, as Chart II-4 makes plain. Public skep-
ticism was epitomized in the Herblock cartoon showing an
American officer turning out communiques ("We now have
the initiative. . . . The enemy offensive has been foiled. . . .
Besides, we knew about it in advance") in the wrecked head-
quarters of the American mission. "Everything's okay," he
says on the phone, " — they never reached the mimeograph
machine." Conceivably the skepticism was wrong, but its ex-
istence helps to show why the domestic peace movement con-
tinued to gather strength.
The Plight of Draft- Age Men
Everything that has been said thus far is pertinent to an
understanding of the way many draft-eligible young men felt
and feel about the war. For them, however, the overriding
question was not merely whether to lend approval to the
American effort, but whether to lend it their bodies and per-
haps their lives. There have always been conscientious paci-
fists, but the Vietnam War has been the first to produce a siz-
able number of draft resisters, men willing to spend several
years in federal prison rather than fight in a particular war
that they considered immoral. The attitude of Congress, the
48
Chart 11-4: Gallup Poll's Correlation Between Hawk/Dove Sentiment and
Key Military Events (December, 1967, to April, 1968)
Percent of Self-Designated Hawks, Doves
60
55
50
45
40
35
30
25
20
<>
Dec.
Communist offensive
in S. Vietnam
LBJ's decision to
limit bombing of
N. Vietnam
Jan.
Feb.
ir-.
/
, "Dove"
March
60
55
50
45
40
35
30
25
20
April
The proportion of self-designated hawks increased immediately after
the Tet Offensive in late January, but decreased somewhat in late Feb-
ruary. A tremendous drop in the number of hawks was recorded in early
March.
ANTI-WAR PROTEST 49
Selective Service System, and the courts has been that such
persons are indeed criminals; as the prosecutor of George
Dounis, who received four years in prison for draft refusal,
stated, "Crimes of conscience are more dangerous than
crimes of greed and passion." Conscientious objection was re-
spected only if the objector could swear that he opposed war
in any form, as a result of convictions arising from religious
training and belief.36 On October 26, 1967, the national di-
rector of Selective Service recommended that local draft
boards issue punitive reclassifications to unruly peace
demonstrators.37 The effect of such measures, when combined
with the impression made by the war itself, was to drive some
young men into open resistance, others out of the country,
and still others into seeking occupational and educational de-
ferments.
The announcement in early 1968 that most such defer-
ments would be cancelled made the issue of cooperation or
noncooperation inescapable for large numbers of youths who
opposed the war. Even before that announcement, 22 percent
of the respondents to a survey of Harvard senior men said
they would go into exile or jail rather than serve in the army;
94 percent disapproved of the conduct of the war.38 And the
posture of such young men forced many of their elders to
choose whether to lend them moral support or allow them to
be generally regarded as disgraced felons. It is often alleged
that men like Dr. Spock, the Reverend Mr. Coffin, and the
brothers Berrigan have urged resistance upon the young, but
their actions can also be interpreted as having been taken in
response to such resistance and in sympathy with it. The con-
viction and sentencing of these men has served to multiply
support for their position. Here again the Vietnam War has
introduced a new and surprising element into American
public life.
Military Tactics and the War Crimes Issue
In attempting to understand how such a reversal of tradi-
tional attitudes could have been effected, historians of this pe-
riod will surely put stress on the peculiarly vivid impression
that the tactics of the Vietnam War have made on the public,
50
chiefly through television films. Napalm in particular has
touched the imagination of the public, as in the following de-
scription by Martha Gellhorn in the Ladies Home Journal,
January, 1967:
In the children's ward of the Qui Nhon provincial hospital
I saw for the first time what napalm does. A child of 7, the
size of our 4-year olds, lay in the cot by the door. Napalm
had burned his face and back and one hand. The burned skin
looked like swollen, raw meat; the fingers of his hand were
stretched out, burned rigid. A scrap of cheesecloth covered
him, for weight is intolerable, but so is air. His grandfather,
an emaciated old man half blind with cataract, was tending
the child. A week ago napalm bombs were dropped on their
hamlet. The old man carried his grandson to the nearest
town. . . . Destitute, homeless, sick with weariness and de-
spair, he watched every move of the small racked body of his
grandson.30
Or again, the account by Richard E. Perry, M.D., in Red-
book, January, 1967:
The Vietcong do not use napalm; we do. ... I have been
an orthopedic surgeon for a good number of years. . . . But
nothing could have prepared me for my encounters with
Vietnamese women and children burned by napalm. It was
sickening, even for a physician, to see and smell the black-
ened flesh. One continues for days afterward getting sick
when he looks at a piece of meat on his plate because the
odor of burned flesh lingers so long in memory. And one
never forgets the bewildered eyes of the silent, suffering na-
palm-burned child.40
Widely available reports like these may help to explain
why the manufacture and use of napalm became almost as
great an issue for anti-war activists as the total war policy to
which it contributed. Moreover, dissenters were particularly
infuriated by their perception that government responses to
their allegations of civilian bombing, use of gas and fragmen-
tation bombs, and the depopulating of whole districts usually
consisted in denial of the facts — followed later by partial or
full concession when, as in the case of Harrison Salisbury's
New York Times dispatches from Hanoi in December, 1966,
further denial would no longer be believable. The seriousness
ANTI-WAR PROTEST 51
and importance of these allegations to the anti-war movement
cannot be underestimated. Dissenters pointed to treaties ban-
ning warfare, and to numerous international conventions re-
garding mistreatment of prisoners, use of chemical warfare,
"ill treatment or deportation ... of civilian population from
occupied territory . . . wanton destruction of cities, towns or
villages," etc.41 Indeed, the "war crimes" issue has been of
central importance in the drift of many protesters toward a
stance of personal resistance — appealing to the principle of
the Charter of the Nuremberg Tribunal that "The fact that
[a] defendant acted pursuant to the order of his Government
or of a superior shall not free him from responsibility." 42
Harrison Salisbury's reports of the effect of American
bombing on the population of North Vietnam constituted one
of the major episodes in the growth of the anti-war move-
ment. But the much greater devastation of South Vietnam
was a subject of public concern as soon as major American
operations began in 1965. As Charles Mohr remarked from
Saigon in the New York Times of September 5, 1965, "This
is strategic bombing in a friendly, allied country. Since the
Viet Cong doctrine is to insulate themselves among the popu-
lation and the population is largely powerless to prevent their
presence, no one here seriously doubts that significant num-
bers of innocent civilians are dying every day in South Viet-
nam." The same article continued:
In [a] delta province there is a woman who has both arms
burned off by napalm and her eyelids so badly burned that
she cannot close them. When it is time for her to sleep her
family puts a blanket over her head. The woman had two of
her children killed in the air strike which maimed her last
April and she saw five other children die. She was quite dis-
passionate when she told an American, "More children were
killed because the children do not have so much experience
and do not know how to lie down behind the paddy
dikes." 43
It was no secret that peasant villages were more often de-
stroyed by explicit command than by mistake; as Secretary of
the Navy Paul Nitze explained in defense of village-burning,
"Where neither United States nor Vietnamese forces can
maintain continuous occupancy, it is necessary to destroy
52
those facilities." 44 The same tactical considerations in part
dictated the policy of occasional "sweeps" such as Operation
Cedar Falls and Operation Junction City. The Iron Triangle
campaign of January, 1967, was explicitly designed to make
an inhabited section of the countryside uninhabitable. The
effect was described vividly in Jonathan Schell's book, The
Village of Ben Sue, and more succinctly by prizewinning cor-
respondent Peter Arnett: "Burning homes, crying children,
frightened women, devastated fields, long lines of slowly
moving refugees." 45 A later A.P. report from Saigon de-
scribed the general strategy of which such episodes partook:
The United States high command, preoccupied for two
years with hunting down North Vietnamese regulars, now is
looking more toward the populated valleys and lowlands
where the enemy wields potent political influence and gets his
sustenance. Quick gains are hoped for by forced resettlement
of chronically Communist areas, followed up with scorched-
earth operations that deny enemy troops all food, shelter, and
material support. Central highland valleys are being denuded
of all living things; people ringing the Communist war zones
in the South have been moved. Some American observers re-
cently in the Mekong Delta say that the Vietnamese Army,
long hated and feared, now is regarded as less of a threat to
the countryside than the Americans.40
There was, of course, terrorism on both sides of the Viet-
nam War, but the domestic peace movement did not regard
the enemy's practices as justifying our own. Indeed, there ap-
peared to be a qualitative difference. That the enemy could
blend into the population necessarily resulted in more indis-
criminate assaults from the American side. Whereas the NLF
might assassinate a village chief, the Americans would be
more likely to destroy the village itself with 500-pound
bombs, helicopter gunships, riot gas to smoke the inhabitants
out of hiding, and cluster bomb units to finish them off.
A dispassionate and expert account of air weaponry and
tactics can be found in Frank Harvey, Air War — Vietnam, a
book written with the cooperation of U.S. Navy and Air
Force officers.47 One learns from Harvey not only the range
of the American arsenal and the manner in which targets are
chosen by forward air controllers, but also the sort of atti-
ANTI-WAR PROTEST 53
tudes that pilots and helicopter gunners need to cultivate.
Thus:
... it was fortunate that young pilots could get their first
taste of combat under the direction of a forward air control-
ler over a flat country in bright sunshine where nobody was
shooting back with high-powered ack-ack. He learns how it
feels to drop bombs on human beings and watch huts go up
in a boil of orange flame when his aluminum napalm tanks
tumble into them. He gets hardened to pressing the fire but-
ton and cutting people down like little cloth dummies, as
they sprint frantically under him. He gets his sword bloodied
for the rougher things to come.48
Such information as this, widely disseminated in a paperback
book, understandably contributed to the peace movement.
Similarly, the revelation of the use of chemical and gas
warfare strengthened the movement. "Dr. Jean Mayer, a
Harvard nutrition expert reported that crop-poisoning chemi-
cals had little effect on mobile enemy soldiers, but the tactics
of starvation worked effectively against small children, preg-
nant women, the aged, and the sick." 49 The AAAS and other
scientific groups expressed concern over the impact of large-
scale use of herbicides, especially in Vietnam. The Depart-
ment of Defense commissioned and published a report on the
Vietnam defoliation and crop destruction program which was
designed to silence its critics.50 This report provoked the fol-
lowing response from Thomas O. Perry of the Harvard Uni-
versity Forest:
Through the simple process of starvation, a land without
green foliage will quickly become a land without insects,
without birds, without animal life of any form. News photo-
graphs and on-the-spot descriptions indicate that some areas
have been sprayed repeatedly to assure a complete kill of the
vegetation. There can be no doubt that the DOD is, in the
short run, going beyond mere genocide to biocide. It com-
mandeered ... a sufficient amount [of chemicals] to kill 97
per cent of the aboveground vegetation on over 10 million
acres of land (about 4 million hectares) — an area so big that
it would require over 60 years for a man to walk on each
acre.51
The use of poisonous chemicals to destroy civilian crops is in
54
the class of prohibited belligerent actions recognized by the
U.S. Army's own Field Manual, FM 27-10, Sect. 37. And the
New York Times pointed out in an editorial of March 24,
1965, that the "nonlethal" gas which Secretary McNamara
belatedly announced we were using in Vietnam "can be fatal
to the very young, the very old, and those ill with heart and
lung ailments." r'2 (The use in war of "asphyxiating, poison-
ous, or other gases" is prohibited by a number of interna-
tional agreements, notably the Geneva Protocol of 1925,
which the United States signed but did not ratify.53) Even
placid Americans were affected when, during the early weeks
of 1968, American forces attempted to dislodge guerrillas
from Hue, Ben Tre, and Saigon itself by saturation bombard-
ments of heavily populated areas. "We had to destroy the city
in order to save it," said one American officer in a much-
quoted remark about Ben Tre.
The South Vietnamese Regime
The fact that the South Vietnamese government (or gov-
ernments— there have been ten since 1963) lent encourage-
ment to such assaults against the South Vietnamese popula-
tion directed interest to the question of which social forces
were being favored by the American presence. Despite the
rapid turnover at the top, critics saw the faction best pro-
tected by U.S. power to be that which was opposed to full
Vietnamese independence in the days of the Indochinese
War. The New York Times, in an editorial of October 11,
1966, raised the possibility that "if the United States 'wins'
this war, it will be for the old ruling classes," 54 and Asian
scholar George McT. Kahin has discussed "the understand-
able tendency for many South Vietnamese to regard an
American-supported Saigon regime as having a good deal in
common with its French-supported predecessor — particularly
when almost every senior army officer and the overwhelming
majority of top civilian officials collaborated with the
French." 55 Most Americans who were disturbed about the
war stressed certain features of the Saigon regime: religious
persecution, corruption and inefficiency, reluctance to under-
take full mobilization or to participate in dangerous opera-
ANTI-WAR PROTEST 55
tions, eagerness to have the war extended by the Americans,
rigged elections, press censorship, laws forbidding advocacy
of neutralism, arbitrary imprisonment of dissenters, summary
executions, etc. Most important than any of these tendencies,
however, was the relationship of the regime to the peasant
farmers who make up an overwhelming majority of the pop-
ulation. To some peasants, "pacification" meant death. To
most peasants, it meant the American-sponsored return of ab-
sentee landlords who would collect rents as high as 60 per-
cent of a rice crop and "extort back rents for the time they
fled the Viet Cong." 56 Indeed, American backing of the
hated landlords may, in the final analysis of this war, turn out
to have been more decisive for its outcome than all the mili-
tary engagements taken together.
The reason this aspect of the war deserves mention in a
study of the American peace movement is that a negative as-
sessment of the Saigon government has formed part of the
political education of many demonstrators. If, as Representa-
tive Gerald Ford charged, Americans were being asked to
"pay more to make Saigon interests richer and the Viet-
namese people more completely dependent on us," 5T and if
Premier Ky was correct in saying that the Communists "are
closer to the people's yearnings for social justice and an inde-
pendent national life than our Government," 5S then it was
natural for large numbers of Americans to ask themselves
why we were willing to deliver and receive so much suffering
to keep that government from being overthrown. Even Secre-
tary Clifford has recently criticized the Saigon government.
His impatience was felt much earlier by critics of the war,
and for reasons previously discussed, the official explanations
in terms of fostering self-determination, honoring commit-
ments, and preventing world conquest left many citizens un-
satisfied. In the absence of government arguments acknowl-
edging our support of Vietnamese feudalism or our long-
range interests in Southeast Asia, dissenters were left to draw
their own inferences. Some concluded that we were preparing
for war with China. Some, taking note of our $1,600,000,000
base construction program in Vietnam, decided that we had
no intention of abandoning such an investment in the event
of a truce.
56
Young Americans began paying attention to those "Old
Leftists" who had been saying for years that the United
States, with its vast foreign investments and its deployment of
troops around the globe, was, in fact, the expansionist power
to be most feared. Even a respected leader like Senator Ful-
bright suggested that "America is showing some signs of that
fatal presumption, that over-extension of power and mission
which brought ruin to ancient Athens, to Napoleonic France
and to Nazi Germany." 59 And the late Martin Luther King,
Jr., felt compelled to call his government "the great purveyor
of violence in the world today." 60 For many, disapproval of
the American role in Vietnam spilled over into scrutiny of
our attitude toward numerous oligarchies in Latin America,
Asia, and southern Europe. The concept of a "Free World"
devoted to "democracy" began to look faulty, and the history
of the Cold War was reassessed as a power struggle rather
than as a morality play.
Even the term "imperialism," once the exclusive property
of sloganeers of the left and right, gained currency as a re-
spectable characterization of American behavior. It was
argued that we had become the world's major counterrevo-
lutionary power, prepared, as Secretary Rusk announced, to
intervene anywhere with or without treaty commitments. The
Secretary's exact words, spoken before the Senate Prepared-
ness Committee on August 25, 1966, were as follows: "No
would-be aggressor should suppose that the absence of a de-
fense treaty, Congressional declaration or U.S. military pres-
ence grants immunity to aggression." 61 Many observers inter-
preted the Secretary's statement as implying that no legal re-
straints would prevent the United States from forcefully im-
posing its will on other nations to prevent internal change.
The same observers argued that this influence was being con-
stantly exercised already in the form of economic and mili-
tary subsidies to fascist regimes, counterinsurgency training
programs, and actual infiltration of other governments — as,
for example, in the successful placing of admitted CIA agent
Antonio Arguedas in the Bolivian cabinet as Minister of the
Interior.
ANTI-WAR PROTEST 57
The Domestic Scene
During the period of the Vietnam War there were other
developments within the structure of American society that
gave impetus to radical dissent. The racial polarization de-
scribed in the report of the Kerner Commission assumed
frightening proportions, and was worsened by the diversion
of "Great Society" funds into war spending. The major politi-
cal parties did not prove very responsive to sentiment for
peace, and when a strong third party arose it drew strength
from race hatred and sword-rattling. The Vietnam expendi-
tures, which had possibly averted a recession in 1965, later
contributed to a serious inflation. Moreover, critics felt that
because of war expenditures, problems of conservation, traf-
fic, and pollution were neglected. Assassination haunted our
public life and contributed to the feeling of despair and frus-
tration which affected many in the anti-war movement. Uni-
versities, the unofficial headquarters of the peace movement,
were hampered by federal research cutbacks and shaken by
student protest which often focused on such war-related ac-
tivities as the development of biological warfare weapons.
The anguish of many protesters was summed up in Senator
Fulbright's remark that we have become a "sick society."
"Abroad we are engaged in a savage and unsuccessful war
against poor people in a small and backward nation," he told
the American Bar Association. "At home — largely because of
the neglect resulting from twenty-five years of preoccupation
with foreign involvements — our cities are exploding in violent
protest against generations of social injustice." 62
These facts and these feelings, then, provide the basis for
understanding how the anti-war movement emerged and grew
— why there was great skepticism about the war and why this
skepticism might yield to frustration, anguish, and even des-
peration. The significance of such an alienation from the pre-
vailing national policy is made even more apparent when one
considers that the anti-war movement is largely composed of
persons who, prior to Vietnam, would not have been thought
to hold such feelings. Thus we turn now to an examination of
the social bases of the anti-war movement.
58
The Social Bases of the Anti-War Movement
Insofar as the anti-war movement has an ongoing member-
ship, it can best be characterized along social as opposed to
organizational lines. The most striking fact about the move-
ment, and its most obvious handicap, is that it has had to rely
largely on middle-class professionals and preprofessional stu-
dents. The worker-student collaboration that surfaced in
France in the spring of 1968 seems remote from the Ameri-
can scene. Labor officials such as George Meany and Jay
Lovestone have taken more "hawkish" positions than the
Johnson administration, and the AFL-CIO is known to be
working closely with government agencies in such projects as
the surreptitious combating of leftism in affiliated Latin
American unions. With notable exceptions, rank-and-file
American workingmen have not supported the peace move-
ment, either because they felt that the war was necessary and
justified or because they disliked the style of the most color-
ful protesters, or because they were outside the institutions
where an anti-war consensus was allowed and encouraged, or
because they had friends or relations in the service whom
they felt they had to "support" by supporting the war, or sim-
ply because they have in a fundamental way become the most
conservative of political actors — they tend to follow the lead
of government, especially if the government is supported by
the unions. Workingmen, like businessmen, were made un-
easy by such side effects of the war as inflation and high
taxes, but they were largely indifferent to arguments couched
in terms of disillusionment with the Cold War or violations in
international law. To the degree that the peace movement
emphasized disarmament, sympathy with foreign guerrillas,
and self-consciously anti-bourgeois styles of protest, it ac-
tually drove the labor movement away. The confusion of
many workers was revealed by the finding that some of them
who had supported Robert Kennedy in the 1968 primary
elections intended to vote for George Wallace in November.63
Within its middle-class and relatively well-educated base of
strength, the peace movement seems to have drawn most
ANTI-WAR PROTEST 59
heavily from teachers, students, and clergy. It would be facile
to call these categories the movement's mind, body, and con-
science, respectively, but there is some truth to such a de-
scription. The teachers were instrumental in learning and
making known the history of American involvement in Viet-
nam and in engaging government spokesmen in debate. Stu-
dents performed this function, too, and in addition they pro-
vided the confrontational tactics and the sheer numbers of
demonstrators that could keep up continual pressure on
public opinion. And the clergy raised moral issues and often
dramatized them with bold acts of individual protest. Each of
these three groups deserves extra comment because of their
distinctive contributions.
The role of teachers and of intellectuals generally has been
prominent from the beginning of the movement. Although
there was a good deal of scattered protest in 1964, many ob-
servers feel that the movement properly started with the
spring, 1965, undertaking of college teach-ins — a tactic still
in use, but which seems to have been especially appropriate
to that period when less was known about the war and when
more militant forms of protest were unpalatable to many dis-
senters. The teach-in was by nature a form of hesitation be-
tween respectful inquiry and protest, and its campus setting
emphasized that objections to the war were still mostly on the
intellectual plane. The failure of government "Truth Teams"
to satisfy their college audiences, and sometimes their failure
to appear at all, gave a strong impetus to the further evolu-
tion of campus protest. The enlistment of professors in ra-
tional dialogue about the war was an ideal way of introduc-
ing them into the movement's work.
Although intellectuals in America are not reputed to enjoy
the popular influence possessed by counterparts in Europe,
several factors favored their prominence in the Vietnam pro-
test movement. The movement itself consisted largely of peo-
ple who do pay attention to intellectuals, and the movement
conceived its first task to be a scholarly one: to expose the
contradictions and half-truths in the standard government ac-
count of the war. The absence of widely respected left-of-
center political spokesmen made for a vacuum into which the
intellectuals were drawn. Professors like Noam Chomsky,
60
Staughton Lynd, Franz Schurmann, and Howard Zinn not
only disseminated information but also helped define the
movement's consciousness — as, for example, in Professor
Chomsky's influential essay, "The Responsibility of
Intellectuals." 64 Other academics who had held high posts
within the Kennedy administration made less sweeping cri-
tiques of the war but had a large impact on public opinion by
virtue of their defection from the official view; the same was
true of former policy advisers such as Marcus Raskin and
Hans Morgenthau. And literary figures like Norman Mailer,
Mary McCarthy, and Robert Lowell became increasingly
conspicuous as they participated in significant acts of protest
and shared their reflections with readers who had followed
their earlier work.
The centrality of college students to the growth of anti-war
sentiment is generally recognized, and much effort has been
put into the task of explaining why this should be so. Reveal-
ing investigations have been made into the rearing, family at-
titudes, and social background of the student generation
which first entered American political life in the civil rights
movement of the early sixties and then turned to agitation
against the war and the universities.65 But such an emphasis
should not be used to undervalue the determinative influence
of the war itself. While justice for blacks has been a deeply
held theme of conscience for a vanguard of middle-class
white students, it has been outside the normal scope of their
lives; they have had to seek out battlefields in the Deep South
or in unfamiliar ghettos. The Vietnam War, by contrast, has
directly affected them in several respects. Most obviously, stu-
dents have been subject to the draft; their academic studies
have been haunted by the prospect of conscription and possi-
ble death for a cause in which few of them believe. When the
manpower needs of the war eventuated in the cancellation of
many graduate deferments in early 1968, the anti-war move-
ment was naturally strengthened. From the beginning, how-
ever, the war had been an on-campus reality by virtue of the
presence of military and war-industry recruiters, the extensive
cooperation of university institutes and departments with
Pentagon-sponsored research, the tendency of universities to
award honorary degrees to public officials who are also
ANTI-WAR PROTEST 61
official spokesmen for the war, and, of course, the normal
campus atmosphere of controversy and debate. By 1968, as
for example in the Columbia rebellion, it was becoming diffi-
cult to distinguish the anti-war effort from the effort to re-
make the internal structure of the universities.
Clergymen have been especially prominent in the peace
movement in contrast to their relative silence during former
wars. Partly as a result of the decline of abstract theology
and the humanizing influence of figures like Pope John,
partly because of their experience with nonviolent protest in
the civil rights movement, but above all because they found
difficulty in reconciling the claims of religious doctrine with
the demands of the Vietnam War, religious leaders have in-
creasingly placed themselves in the opposition. As the most
active group, Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Vietnam,
declared in a position paper of early 1967:
Each day we find allegiance to our nation's policy more
difficult to reconcile with allegiance to our God. . . . We add
our voice to those who protest a war in which civilian casual-
ties are greater than military; in which whole populations are
deported against their will; in which the widespread use of
napalm and other explosives is killing and maiming women,
children, and the aged. . . .
Such well-known clerics as William Sloane Coffin, Robert
McAfee Brown, Philip and Daniel Berrigan, and even Martin
Luther King, Jr., associated themselves with the cause of
draft resistance,*5'1 while Cardinal Spellman was picketed by
fellow Catholics for his enthusiastic support of United States
policy in Viet Nam.67 Even President Johnson could not at-
tend church without risking exposure to an anti- Vietnam
sermon — a new vicissitude among the many burdens of the
Presidency.
Another component of the peace movement deserves spe-
cial consideration, not so much for its decisive role as for its
future potential. The effort of white radicals to enlist black
Americans in their ideological ranks is a long-standing fea-
ture of American leftism, and has become a subject of gen-
eral concern in the wake of the serious urban uprisings of the
62
past few years. People both within and outside the anti-war
movement would like to assess the degree to which black po-
litical consciousness has been altered by participation in the
movement and by exposure to the war. This interest often
has to do with the long-range prospect of black insurrection
rather than with any immediate hope of bringing the Viet-
nam War to an end. The question is not whether blacks will
turn out in large numbers to demonstrate and march, but
whether the issues of war protest will feed naturally into the
so-called black liberation movement, as the issue of racial in-
tegration (insofar as it concerned white activists) to some de-
gree laid the groundwork for the anti-war movement itself.
There are two opposite and perhaps equally plausible in-
terpretations. If attention is restricted to the overt involve-
ment of blacks in the anti-war issues as denned by white radi-
cal and pacifists, little evidence can be found to indicate real
coalition. Insofar as they are militant, black Americans are
unsympathetic to the nonviolent ethic of the pacifists; insofar
as they are economically deprived, they desire the material
goods which the radicals despise as tokens of an unjust eco-
nomic system; and insofar as movement tactics court expo-
sure to police billy clubs, blacks cannot work up the requisite
enthusiasm. Unlike the alienated middle-class whites, they al-
ready know what it means to be dealing with antagonistic po-
lice on a daily basis, and they find it difficult to appreciate
the value of getting publicly clubbed so as to expose the sys-
tem's latent violence. Nor, by and large, have blacks rushed
willingly into open and principled draft resistance. Many of
them have been willing to risk death in Vietnam in exchange
for the squalor and indignity of American ghetto life, and
others who have preferred not to serve have not cared to pass
two to five years in federal prison for this reason. Those who
are oppressed from birth onward do not seek out occasions to
prove their oppression.
Many instances could be shown of the white movement's
failure to enlist blacks on a mass basis. In Oakland, Califor-
nia, to take one example, Stop the Draft Week (October
16-20, 1967) was planned to involve the ghetto community
ANTI-WAR PROTEST 63
in "white" confrontation tactics, but the blacks ended by hav-
ing their own separate rally and by largely avoiding the
planned showdown with the Oakland police, with whom they
were already well acquainted. One should not be misled by
the fact that CORE and SNCC were among the earliest or-
ganizations to oppose the war; positions taken in those days
were usually representative of a consensus reached among
black and white activists.68 As blacks developed their own
themes of protest and began disaffiliating themselves from the
white movement, it became clear that Vietnam was a rela-
tively minor issue, distant from the emergency of the Ameri-
can cities although, of course, related to it in numerous intan-
gible ways.
There is, however, another side to this question. The ab-
stention of black masses from white-sponsored rallies seems
less noteworthy when one considers that the white working
class has also been poorly represented; it could well be that
the movement, with its dominant strain of moral outrage and
intellectuality, has neglected issues that would touch deprived
Americans generally. Certainly there have been numerous
signs from prominent blacks that Vietnam could become a
major focus for ghetto discontent. Consider the fact that the
most beloved black man of modern times, Martin Luther
King, Jr., found that in order to sustain his self-respect and
the momentum of his organization (SCLC) he had to de-
nounce the war and its racist aspects.6" Consider also that one
of the most prominent black athletes of the 1960's, Muham-
mad Ali, having been denied the status of a conscientious ob-
jector, has chosen draft resistance and faces a long prison
term. And Malcolm X, whose influence was not stilled by as-
sassination any more than Dr. King's was, spoke out forth-
rightly against the Vietnam War in 1965 and drew lessons
from it about the guerrilla's strategic advantages over the col-
onizer.
There have been several highly significant instances of
black anti-Vietnam protest, but their significance seems
largely to have been appreciated by "movement" whites
rather than by great numbers of blacks. A typical example
64
was the appearance of Private Ronald Lockman at the New
Politics convention in 1967, where he electrified the white ac-
tivists with the following statement:
I am to report to Oakland, California, September 13 to
leave for Vietnam. My position on my orders is simply no. I
won't go. I can't go. I will not be used any longer. My fight-
ing is back home in Philadelphia's ghettos where I was born
and raised. I will not be sent 10,000 miles away from home
to be used as a tool of the aggressors of the Vietnamese peo-
ple. I feel that it is time to follow my own mind and do what
I know is right. I think most of the fellows in my company,
white and black, fear the war but they also fear the military
structure. I think most of the guys in my company support
what I am doing. But they are afraid to take a stand, so I am
asking for the support of people all over the nation and espe-
cially black people, the black brothers and sisters, to join me
and support me in my struggle.70
Private Lockman was greeted with a tumultuous ovation, and
he was indeed given extensive support during and following
his court-martial. However, despite similar individual in-
stances, black resistance to the war has not materialized on a
large scale.
Nevertheless, there are certain moments in the history of
the anti-war movement that bear mention as possibly indicat-
ing an emergent trend for blacks. One might add to the fore-
going instances the expressions of resentment at Secretary of
Defense McNamara's August, 1966, "salvage" plan for ghetto
residents through military discipline, the refusal of Howard
University students to allow General Hershey of the Selective
Service System to address them in March, 1967, Eartha Kitt's
challenge to Mrs. Johnson at a White House luncheon, and
perhaps most importantly, the refusal of forty-three black sol-
diers to be transported to Chicago in anticipation of possible
rioting at the time of the Democratic National Convention.71
It remains to be seen whether resistance of this sort will
spread, but there seems to be reason to doubt that blacks will
be only too happy to choose Vietnam over unemployment
and discrimination at home. Black radicals from Malcolm X
and Robert Williams through Stokely Carmichael and El-
dridge Cleaver have told their brothers that they are in effect
ANTI-WAR PROTEST 65
the colonized Viet Cong of America. If that perspective is
adopted by great numbers of blacks, it could well prove to be
the most serious of the Vietnam War's domestic effects.
Tactics and the Question of Violence
From Dialogue to Resistance: A Qualifying Analysis
Violence within the current anti-war movement has been a
focus of considerable attention on the part of reporters and
analysts, and pro-movement theorists have sharpened this at-
tention with a good deal of talk about the necessary passage
"from dialogue to protest to resistance." In a rough and
ready way this outline of the movement's changes in attitude
is serviceable, but only if certain reservations are kept in
mind.
First, much of what is called resistance has taken the form
of nonviolent civil disobedience by individuals or groups
whose purpose has been moral witness. Individual draft resist-
ters have engaged in a form of noncooperation which has
dramatized their outrage at the war but has not impeded its
implementation. And nearly all the violence that has occurred
in mass demonstrations has resulted, not from the demonstra-
tors' conscious choice of tactics, but from the measures cho-
sen by public authorities to disperse and punish them. Even
after the bloody "battle of Chicago" it can be said that the
American anti-war movement has not yet deliberately em-
braced violence. Peace demonstrators are still going through
a mental adjustment to the physical precariousness of protest.
It is less than the whole truth to say that the movement has
been drifting toward confrontationism. This does apply to
some long-standing activists, but many have recently given
their energies to conventional electoral politics. The Mc-
Carthy and Kennedy campaigns, the "abdication" of Presi-
dent Johnson on March 31, 1968, and the subsequent Paris
negotiations renewed, at least for a while, the traditional ten-
dency of dissent to express itself through established chan-
nels. The enthusiasm and energy with which many college
protesters joined the "Children's Crusade" of the McCarthy
campaign should serve as a reminder that there is nothing
66
final about a posture of resistance. America remains, as it has
always been, a country in which genuinely revolutionary or
even obstructionist activity is rejected by the great majority
of dissenters. Significantly, the first serious incident of anti-
war violence following the President's March 31 speech oc-
curred outside the Democratic Convention in August, and the
Chicago Study Team's report clearly points to the contribu-
tion of the city administration and the police in the develop-
ment of the violence.
One must also note numerous exceptions to the apparent
rule that "resistance" tactics have come later than the tactics
of mere protest. Significant instances of draft resistance oc-
curred as early as 1964,72 and recently some young men who
were formerly intending to refuse induction have decided to
accept it and "bore from within." 73 Examples of obstruction-
ist action on the part of pacifists were plentiful as early as
1965 and seem to have fallen off somewhat in 1968. And
even the pattern of developing confrontation between street
demonstrators and police is far from simple. The march on
the Pentagon on October 21, 1967, and the Chicago clashes
seem to mark peaks of militancy, before and after which the
movement has adopted different stances, and even in those in-
stances the issue of violence is not simple. There was no
planned violence in the Pentagon march: off-limits territory
was symbolically invaded, but property and persons were not
attacked, and in any case the great majority of demonstrators
abstained from even this token defiance. Before the Chicago
convention, public authorities rejected permit applications for
peaceful assembly, even though they might have known from
a clash four months previously that this would lead to
violence.71 Between April and August the demonstrators had
become more willing to reach an accommodation with city
officials; it was the latter who ensured that on both occasions
heads would be cracked.75
Violence Directed at Protesters
In this connection it is essential to note that, while there
have been scattered acts of real violence committed by anti-
war activists, by far the greater portion of physical harm has
ANTI-WAR PROTEST 67
been done to demonstrators and movement workers, in the
form of bombings of homes and offices, crowd-control mea-
sures used by police, physical attacks on demonstrators by
American Nazi Party members, Hell's Angels, and others,
and random harassment such as the Port Chicago Vigil has
endured. Counterdemonstrators have repeatedly attacked and
beaten peace marchers, sometimes with tacit police
approval.76 Sometimes, as in the San Francisco Police Tacti-
cal Squad assault on demonstrators and bystanders picketing
Secretary Rusk on January 11, 1968, and in Chicago, a mi-
nority of demonstrators have provoked police violence with
violent or provocative acts.77 In such cases the unstructured
and undisciplined nature of the demonstration unfortunately
permits the confrontationists on both sides to have their way,
and both demonstrators and police have been injured. It must
be said, however, that while militant demonstrators do have
the power to ensure that brutal police tactics will be used,
they do not have the power to prevent them. Persons aware
of the events of the past year in Chicago should also be
aware by now that when police are encouraged by public of-
ficials to regard free assembly as subversive, they do not need
much provocation in order to attack even innocent bystand-
ers. When, as at Chicago, it appears that police provocateurs
mingle among the demonstrators and "incite" their fellow of-
ficers to violence by such acts as helping to lower the Ameri-
can flag, it is even less likely that the spirit of nonviolence
will prevail.78
Rights in Conflict, the report of the Commission's Chicago
Study Team, not only provides ample documentation for
what the study group called the "police riot" at Chicago; it
also offers a paradigm of the way in which violence can
emerge, not from the schemes of individuals, but from the
volatile mixture of elements that are drawn together in such
an event. The report makes clear that there were indeed pro-
vocative tactics on the part of some demonstrators — tactics
that were intended to "expose the inhumanity, injustice, prej-
udice, hypocrisy or militaristic repression" of the society.™
Few, if any, demonstrators anticipated or welcomed the ex-
tent to which the forces of law were in fact provoked to vio-
lence, and it is clear in retrospect that such violence was in-
68
herent in the attitudes of police and civic authorities toward
the demonstrators. The Chicago Study Team's report also doc-
uments the largely futile efforts of National Mobilization
Committee leaders to arrive at tactical ground rules that
would be honored by all demonstrators.80 The inability of
leaders to give guarantees of peaceable behavior was a factor
in the denial of parade permits, which in turn was a factor in
the brutal excesses committed by the police. In retrospect, it
would appear that the most critical decision leading to vio-
lence was the denial of Lincoln Park to the demonstrators.
Once the police and city officials decided to clear the park of
some 1,500 to 2,000 people, violence was a certainty.
Thus, much of what passes for the violence of the anti-war
movement is done to rather than by protesters, and much of
the tactical debate within the movement itself has not been
about whether to commit violence but whether to expose one-
self to it. The issue is not whether to be violent; it is whether
nonviolence shall be cooperative or provocative. The stated
purpose of those advocating this exposure is educational — to
reveal the brutality and hypocrisy of a system that has main-
tained democratic forms.
Varieties of Protesters and Protest
In order to make sense of the great variety of tactics em-
ployed within the peace movement, one must bear in mind a
primary distinction between two broad groupings of protest-
ers: those for whom tactics are chiefly a moral question and
those who see tactics chiefly as means to political ends.
Nearly all pacifists fall into the first of these categories. For
them, the ethical posture of nonviolence is no less important
than the cause for which they may be agitating. Believing in
a government of law, they insist on making themselves liable
to the law's penalties; they hope to persuade others by the ex-
ample of their sacrifice. Most nonpacifists, in contrast, are
more interested in impeding the war than in achieving a "cor-
rect" moral posture, and they are not bothered — or not so
deeply bothered — by the idea of tactics which "hurt the
enemy" while enabling the protester to avoid arrest. This is
not to say that this group's tactics actually are more politi-
ANTI-WAR PROTEST 69
cally effective than the pacifists'; that is a matter of continual
debate within the movement. The point is that in studying the
movement's tactical evolution we must recognize the in-
fluence of a serious philosophical disagreement which pre-
vents that evolution from being simple or wholly explainable
in pragmatic terms.
The difference was epitomized in Stop the Draft Week of
October 16 to 20, 1967. The organizers of this series of dem-
onstrations found that they could not agree among them-
selves on the best means of "shutting down the Oakland In-
duction Center." As a result, October 16 and 18 were given
over to those of pacifist orientation, who sat in the doorway
of the induction center in small, orderly groups, and allowed
themselves to be peaceably arrested, while October 17 and 20
were given over to the mass-mobile tactics of the "militants."
These demonstrators, along with newsmen and spectators,
were severely beaten and sprayed with MACE as they
blocked the arrival of busloads of inductees, and they retal-
iated with harassing tactics. They attempted, on the whole
successfully, to avoid arrest, although their leaders were later
prosecuted for "conspiracy to commit misdemeanors." The
pacifists were more successful in literally preventing the in-
duction center from functioning, but the militants argued that
their operation made a greater impact on the public. Assum-
ing, however, for the purposes of argument that both sides
could agree on the superior effectiveness of one approach or
the other, it is still unlikely that the two groups would then
have coalesced. Radical militants are as averse to the posture
of meekly courting arrest as the pacifists are to hit-and-run
vandalism. Both parties, therefore, are inhibited by their life-
styles from adopting a certain range of tactics, and their
means of protest are bound to diverge.
There are, of course, many tactics that both groups can
agree on, such as peaceful marches, mass rallies, ballot initia-
tives, picketing, agitation against the draft, and community-
organizing projects like Vietnam Summer. Recognizing this,
movement coordinators have increasingly turned to unstruc-
tured demonstrations in which ideological lines are not in-
sisted upon and protesters are free to take the sort of action
that suits them individually. The movement as a whole has
70
been singularly relaxed in this respect, drifting with events in-
stead of following a fixed timetable, placing more reliance on
a developing consensus of anti-war feeling than on the adop-
tion of a "correct" political line. There have been quarrels
and tensions, but they have been minor in consideration of
the vast differences that would appear within the movement
if it ever had to set forth its positive vision of the good life.
There can be no simple equation of militancy and violence
or of pacifism and nonviolence. The truth is that neither wing
of the peace movement has been violent in comparison with
comparable movements in other times and countries. Surpris-
ingly, the tactics of obstruction have been most richly ex-
plored by the pacifists, whose record of personal and small-
group confrontation with the military extends back into the
days of Pacific nuclear testing, before Vietnam was an issue.
Sit-downs before the White House and the Senate and war
factories, the tying of canoes to troopships and munitions
ships, the boarding of destroyers, the chaining of demonstra-
tors to AWOL soldiers, the destruction of draft files, the sail-
ing of medical supplies into Haiphong harbor under Ameri-
can aerial bombardment — these gestures have all been con-
ducted by pacifists. No "militant," furthermore, has done
anything so extreme as the Quaker Norman Morrison's self-
immolation before the Pentagon on November 2, 1965.81
The attention of public authorities is nevertheless concen-
trated on the non-pacifist militants, and understandably so, for
they are the ones who are not prevented by ethical scru-
ples from passing into a more "revolutionary" phase. Like the
blacks, they arouse interest more for what they might later
decide to do than for anything that has happened yet. Within
this grouping there has certainly been a development — hap-
hazard and halting and always subject to reconsideration — to-
ward confrontationism. This trend, moreover should not be
obscured by the fact that confrontation tactics could be
found quite early, as in the blocking of troop trains in Oak-
land and Berkeley in August, 1965. That action grew out of
the peculiarly radical traditions of the Berkeley campus and
the San Francisco Bay Area, whereas later militancy has
sprung up in every section of the country, with new recruits
each year. This is especially evident in campus protest, which
ANTI-WAR PROTEST 71
began at Berkeley but rapidly spread across the country,
affecting small private schools and large public universities
alike. Today the anti-war movement is still not wedded to
confrontation as a favorite style of action, but the number of
protesters who find it philosophically acceptable and politi-
cally meaningful has been increasing.
The reason for this trend is plain. The movement at its
best has only succeeded in producing negative effects, such as
President Johnson's announcement, two days before the Wis-
consin primary, that he would not stand for reelection. The
snubbing by government spokesmen, the accusations of cow-
ardice and betrayal, the relative unresponsiveness of Congress
to anti-war sentiment, and especially the clubbings by consti-
tuted law enforcement officials have bred desperation. It is
safe to say that by now the only effective countermeasure
against the bitterness that leads to violence would be a termi-
nation of the war in Vietnam. Until that occurs, the more
moderate element within the movement will find itself in-
creasingly out of touch with the small minority who actually
seek violence and can claim that milder tactics have proved
unsuccessful. Curiously enough, the very achievement of the
movement in finally obtaining majority support for peace has
played into the hands of the supermilitants, who point out
that the warmakers have not capitulated merely because of
public opinion. In the eyes of many of those opposing the
Vietnam War, recent events — such as the nomination of two
champions of President Johnson's war policy — point to a se-
rious defect in the democratic process. As in the "black liber-
ation" movement, time may be running out for those who
counsel prolonged patience and trust.
It must be stressed, however, that even when movement
spokesmen have counseled "resistance," they have not meant
such things as the bombings of draft boards and ROTC
buildings, but rather acts of obstruction such as mill-ins, the
blocking of traffic, the temporary and symbolic "seizure" of
university buildings, the "imprisonment" of CIA or Dow re-
cruiters, the granting of "sanctuary" to discontented soldiers,
and the harassment of pro-government speakers. One can
disapprove of such acts and still recognize that they do not
constitute the instrumental use of force to conquer political
72
opposition. They have a symbolic and expressive character
that is less violent than the use of nightsticks and MACE and
rifle butts. This has been true even of the most colorful acts
of defiance, such as pouring blood on draft files or even na-
palming them, as was done by the "Milwaukee Fourteen"
and the "Catonsville Nine." 82 These religious activists were
willing to mutilate some pieces of property and incur long
prison terms to raise moral issues about the violence of the
Vietnam War. They were not literally attacking an enemy,
but dramatizing what they felt to be the intolerable savagery
of the military system.
By far the greater part of movement obstructionism has
been conducted by college students, usually on their own
campuses and in response to university cooperation with the
war effort. Significantly, most of the agitation has had to do
with the draft, first over the question of releasing class rank-
ing to the Selective Service System, then over the punitive re-
classification of protesters, and then over the cancellation of
whole categories of deferment. Other draft-related activities
— such as protests at induction centers and the organizing of
"Vietnam Commencements" to dramatize the plight of grad-
uating seniors who were to be conscripted into a war they
found abhorrent — were fed by discontent with the entire
draft structure and its announced purpose of "channeling"
deferred men into defense-related work.83 Similarly, a general
malaise over the gradual militarization of national life con-
tributed to the obstructionist mood that prevailed on dozens
of campuses in the 1967-68 harassment of Dow and CIA re-
cruiters. Students justified their tactics by referring to the vio-
lence of the war and their inability to stop that violence
through ordinary means.84 Many people within the move-
ment, including nonpacifists, thought that the students were
jeopardizing their own academic freedom in resorting to
abridgements of free assembly and speech, but the students
replied that university and national administrators had shown
themselves indifferent to more decorous forms of dissent.85
For many protesters the phrase "from protest to resis-
tance" has nothing to do with physical obstruction of any
sort; it means instead that individuals, having exhausted nor-
mal channels of dialogue and petition, feel they must take a
ANTI-WAR PROTEST 73
personal stance of noncompliance with the war. Tax refusal,
the declaration of medical students that they would refuse to
serve, the turning down of government grants and prizes and
invitations to the White House are all examples of such resis-
tance. The overridingly important categories, however, have
been draft resistance and the association of draft-ineligible
persons with draft resisters. It is reasonable to suppose that
this has been the point of maximum common focus between
the peace movement and its antagonists. Nothing has aroused
greater anxiety and outrage among people outside the move-
ment than the burning of draft cards and the willingness of
eminent citizens to stand beside resisters and applaud their
patriotism. The Justice Department and local grand juries
and prosecutors have been similarly absorbed in this aspect of
the peace movement; perhaps the most widely noticed and
debated event in the movement's history has been the Boston
trial of Dr. Benjamin Spock. Reverend William Sloane Coffin,
Jr., Marcus Raskin, Mitchell Goodman, and Michael Ferber
for "conspiracy" to aid draft resistance.
In a technical sense the "Spock trial" has so far been a suc-
cess; four of the five defendants were convicted. If, however,
the main purpose of the trial was to prevent draft resistance
and its adult support, the effect produced was exactly the op-
posite. The Spock case became a rallying point for the entire
movement, an inducement for thousands of wavering dissent-
ers to throw in their lot with the defendants by declaring
their "complicity," and a subject of national misgiving over
the use of a figurative notion of conspiracy to inhibit acts
thought by many to be real and symbolic speech. The second
thoughts inspired by this trial were best summarized by one
of the jurors, Frank Tarbi, who later wrote:
How and why did I find four men guilty? All men of cour-
age and individuals whom I grew to admire as the trial devel-
oped. As I searched my conscience, I had to admit I pro-
foundly agreed with these defendants. . . . Just as a gang of
dissenters dumped a cargo of tea into the drink and were de-
clared patriots for their action, so were these men protesting
against a war they termed unjust and brutal. . . . These four
men were trying to save my sons whom I loved dearly. Yet I
found them guilty. To hell with my ulcer. After four or five
74
stiff hookers (I lost count) I began to cry bitterly, locked up
in my room. Maybe it was temporary insanity? Or was it re-
morse for a world gone mad? s,i
Another lengthy quotation, from one of the defendants,
spoken before the indictments were handed down, will per-
haps help to explain why the "Boston Five" acted as they did
and why neither they nor their supporters have abandoned a
posture of resistance:
If there is such a thing as a just war, then there is such a
thing as an unjust war; and whether just or unjust is finally a
matter of individual conscience, for no man can properly sur-
render his conscience to the State. Our Puritan fathers came
to these shores because they were committed to this principle.
At the Nuremberg trials we faulted an entire nation for not
accepting it.
Now let us suppose that a man has conscientiously done
his homework on the war in Vietnam, and that his homework
has led him to the following conclusions: that while it is true
that we are fighting communists, it is more profound to say
that we have been intervening in another country's civil war;
that despite the billions of dollars of aid, the heroic labor
and blood of many Americans, the Saigon government from
Diem to Ky has been unable to talk convincingly to his peo-
ple of national independence, land reform, and other forms
of social justice; that the war is being waged in a fashion so
out of character with American instincts of decency that it is
seriously undermining them (which is not to say the V.C.'s
are Boy Scouts, which they clearly are not); that the strains
of the war have cut the funds that might otherwise be ap-
plied to anti-poverty efforts at home and abroad (which is
the intelligent way to fight communism); and finally, that the
war would have a good chance of being negotiated to an end
were we to stop the bombing in North Vietnam.
If a man's homework leads him to these conclusions, then
surely it is not his patriotic duty to cheer or stand silent as
good Americans die bravely in a bad cause.
Surely, too, he does not engage in civil disobedience — not
as a first resort. Rather he speaks out, writes letters, signs pe-
titions, attends rallies, stands in silent vigils — all in the best
American tradition. But now let us suppose he has done all
this, many times and for years. Does he then tuck his con-
science into bed with the comforting thought, "Well, I have
done my best, the President continues to escalate the war,
and the law of the land is clear"? Or does he decide that
ANTI-WAR PROTEST 75
having chosen the road of protest he has to choose to pursue
it to the end, even if this means going to jail?
Which decision he makes clearly depends on how wrong
he thinks the war is and how deeply he cares.
My own feeling is that the war is so wrong, and that we
are so wrong in not seeking to end it by the serious bombing
pause suggested by Senator Kennedy, that it is time for those
of us who feel this way to come out from behind exemptions
and deferments, take our medicine like men, or as the more
recent expression goes, "put our bodies on the line."
I feel this is particularly true of religious people, who have
a particular obligation to a higher power than that of the
State. I therefore proposed in Washington on February 21
that seminarians and younger clergy opposed to the war sur-
render their 4-D exemption and declare themselves Conscien-
tious Objectors to this war, which is against the present law
of the land. I further proposed that older clergy publicly ad-
vocate their doing so that all might be subject to the same
penalties. Finally, I suggested that students opposed to the
war consider organizing themselves to do likewise.
Now let us be very clear: this is not to advocate violence.
I am against violence, as I am against draft card burning,
which I consider an unnecessarily hostile act. This is also not
to advocate anarchy, for when a man accepts the legal pun-
ishment he upholds the legal order. This is not even to advo-
cate withdrawal. I am against withdrawal, for negotiation.
But this is to advocate — as a last resort — a form of civil
disobedience which I view as a kind of radical obedience to
conscience, to God, and I would add to the best traditions of
this country which won for us the respect of allies we no
longer have in this venture. So if in the eyes of many this be
subversion, then may it at least be understood as an effort to
subvert one's beloved country into its former ways of justice
and peace.
Finally, let me say that I would hope that such an action
would stir the uninformed citizens of today to become better
informed citizens tomorrow. For this war is not being waged
by evil men. In our time all it takes for evil to flourish is for
a few good men to be a little bit wrong and have a great
deal of power, and for the vast majority to remain indifferent."
Resistance within the military services has also been of
growing importance to the anti-war movement. Considerable
support has been mustered for noncooperators like "the Fort
Hood Three," Private Lockman, and Captain Howard Levy.
Court-martialed and sentenced to military prison, these men
76
are nevertheless heroes to the movement — all the more so be-
cause they stood up to the system after they had foregone the
protection of civilian law. Repugnance for the war has be-
come so strong that retired officers like Admiral Arnold True
and former Marine Corps Commandant General David M.
Shoup have spoken freely against it; and veterans have been
prominent in anti- Vietnam activities.88 Deserters in Sweden
and elsewhere have been greeted with sympathy, reservists
have made legal challenges to their activation, AWOL sol-
diers have been given sanctuary in churches and universities,
and others have participated in pray-ins and peace marches
as well as flocking to "GI coffee houses" and reading anti-war
newspapers sponsored by the movement. These acts hardly
constitute an insurrection against American policy. They do,
however, indicate that it is becoming increasingly difficult to
instill a "proper" attitude of unthinking obedience into Amer-
ican conscripts.
The Future of the Anti-War Movement
This raises the large question of where the peace move-
ment is heading next. Everything that has been said here
should inspire caution on this matter, for we have seen that
the movement's options have been continually defined by un-
anticipated events, and this will surely remain the case. The
most one can do is extrapolate from recent tendencies and
add that American society at large — and especially the mak-
ers of national policy — will finally determine whether the
movement's desperation will be accentuated or overcome. As
in the past, the movement can be counted on to respond
more according to its temporary mood than according to ide-
ology or a strategic plan.
Having made that caveat, we can perhaps suggest that two
lines of development within the peace movement are espe-
cially likely to flourish. One is the increasing preference for
structural analysis as opposed to moral protest. After a cer-
tain number of months and years of begging their elected
leaders to take mercy on the people of Vietnam and to meet
the crisis at home, protesters inevitably begin asking them-
selves whether they have been conceiving the problem truly.
ANTI-WAR PROTEST 77
Why, protesters ask, has the United States become, in Robert
Hutchins' words, "the most powerful, the most prosperous,
and the most dangerous country in the world"? 89 Is it possi-
ble that our Vietnam involvement is "not a product of emi-
nent personalities or historical accidents, [but] of our devel-
opment as a people"? 90 Many protesters are questioning
whether the war might not be a natural result of the bureau-
cratic welfare state, with its liberal rhetoric, its tendency to
self-expansion, its growing military establishment, and its pa-
ternalism toward the downtrodden. Doubts like these have
been gradually eroding party loyalties and creating a broad
public for radical thought and dialogue. The result will not
necessarily be a swelling of the ranks of Marxists, but almost
certainly a thorough questioning of current institutions and
political style. As John McDermott has remarked, the move-
ment's own tactics have produced "a growing appreciation of
the creative role of social conflict, and accordingly a growing
rejection of the pluralist consensus views which have domi-
nated American political and social theory for so long." 91
The second development has to do with the question of
violence versus nonviolence. A minority of alienated activists
may flirt with terrorism, but they are unlikely to cause seri-
ous damage to the "war machine" or even to gain the support
of other dissenters. There seem at present to be built-in limi-
tations on the possibilities for effective movement-initiated
violence; American society is simply unready for revolution-
ary bloodshed. Nonviolence, on the other hand, has been
making some unexpected converts within the peace move-
ment, not because of a rising tide of pacifism, but because
activists have begun to understand that their first target must
be the psychology that acquiesces and delights in war. The
use of "guerrilla theater" — radical sentiments expressed in
songs and skits — and the bringing of anti-military culture to
American soldiers in the form of coffee houses and newspa-
pers and "GI teach-ins" thus have an importance beyond
their current degree of effectiveness; they suggest that major
figures in the peace movement are turning from despairing
gestures to attempts to convert those who must be converted
if the movement is to grow. In David Dellinger's words:
78 THE POLITICS OF CONFRONTATION
We will come closer to achieving our goals of subverting
an inhuman system and undermining its ability to rely on
fascist methods when we conduct teach-ins for the police and
soldiers and fraternize with them rather than insulting them
by calling them "pigs" or raising their wrath by stoning them.
We must make a distinction, both philosophical and tactical,
between institutions and the people who have been misled
into serving them. . . . The traditional pacifist has been mis-
led by the gentility and gentleness of the men who order out
armies, napalm, bombs and Mace. The unthinking revolution-
ist is misled by the crudity of the actions that police and sol-
diers can be conditioned into performing.92
There is nothing to guarantee that the peace movement
will evolve further in the directions pointed here, and there is
a residue of bitterness which nothing will easily erase. Yet if
the Vietnam War is sustained by policy-makers in the face of
worldwide indignation and the apparent apathy of the sol-
diers who must fight it, it seems reasonable to suppose that
the movement's current mood of disenchantment with exist-
ing institutions will both generate new forms of militancy and
spread into new segments of the American public, creating
possibilities for social changes which neither the movement's
supporters nor its opponents have yet imagined. The anti-war
movement is tied inextricably to the student and black protest
movements, even as its historical roots lie with the symbolic
confrontations of the pacifists. And as we will discuss in the next
two chapters, the war has been a significant spur to each of
these movements — it has become a primary rallying point of
campus protest, and it has compounded the difficulties of ful-
filling promises of progress made to the black communities of
America earlier in the decade.
Chapter III
Student Protest
The Berkeley student rebellion of 1964 sent shock waves
through the academic community and puzzled the nation.
Today, campuses throughout the country have been rocked
by student protest, and the major campus that has not experi-
enced a certain amount of turmoil and disruption is the ex-
ception. According to the National Student Association, dur-
ing the first half of the 1967-68 academic year there were 71
separate demonstrations on 62 campuses — counting only
those demonstrations involving 35 or more students. By the
second half of the year, the number had risen to 221 demon-
strations at 101 schools.1 On several campuses, massive stu-
dent demonstrations have become a familiar and almost
banal occurrence. Moreover, there has been a discernible es-
calation of the intensity of campus conflict, in terms of both
student tactics and the response of authorities. Indeed, the
early months of 1969 were characterized by a hardening of
official response to student protest on many campuses, as evi-
denced by the presence of bayonet-wielding National Guard
troops at the University of Wisconsin and the declaration of
a "state of extreme emergency" at Berkeley.2
79
80
Further, student protest now involves a wider range of
campuses and a wider range of students. The past few
months have seen the rise of intense protest by black and
other Third World students, on both "elite" and "commuter"
campuses.
The scope and range of contemporary student protest
make certain kinds of explanation grossly inadequate. To ex-
plain away student protest as the activity of an insignificant
and unrepresentative minority of maladjusted students is in-
accurate on two counts. First, as a recent Fortune magazine
survey suggests, roughly two fifths of the current college-stu-
dent population express support for some "activist" values.3
Second, fact-finding commissions from Berkeley to Columbia
tend to present a rather favorable group portrait of student
activists. In the words of the Cox Commission report on the
Columbia disturbances:
The present generation of young people in our universities
is the best informed, the most intelligent, and the most ideal-
istic this country has ever known. This is the experience of
teachers everywhere.
It is also ttoe most sensitive to public issues and the most
sophisticated in political tactics. Perhaps because they enjoy
the affluence to support their ideals, today's undergraduate
and graduate students exhibit, as a group, a higher level of
social conscience than preceding generations.
The ability, social consciousness and conscience, political
sensitivity, and honest realism of today's students are a prime
cause of student disturbances. As one student observed dur-
ing our investigation, today's students take seriously the
ideals taught in schools and churches, and often at home, and
then they see a system that denies its ideals in its actual life.
Racial injustice and the war in Vietnam stand out as prime
illustrations of our society's deviation from its professed
ideals and of the slowness with which the system reforms it-
self. That they seemingly can do so little to correct the
wrongs through conventional political discourse tends to pro-
duce in the most idealistic and energetic students a strong
sense of frustration.4
Empirical research into the personalities and social back-
grounds of student activists tends to confirm this portrait.
These studies recurrently find student activists to have high or
STUDENT PROTEST 81
at least average grades, to come from politically liberal fami-
lies whose values can be described as "humanist," and to be
better informed about political and social events than
nonactivists.5
The dimensions of student protest must be understood as
part of a worldwide phenomenon. At the same time, the
American student movement developed in the context of
American institutions in general and of the American univer-
sity in particular. Accordingly, in the first section of this
chapter, we examine American student activism in interna-
tional perspective. Next, we trace the development of student
activism in America in the 1960's, giving special attention to
the rise of the Students for a Democratic Society; and briefly,
to black and Third World student protest. We then consider
the organization of colleges and universities in the United
States in relation to campus conflict. Finally, we consider
some implications of our analysis for administrative response.
American Student Protest in International Perspective G
Our understanding of the current American student move-
ment can perhaps be advanced by analyzing some of the
ways in which it resembles or differs from student movements
in other nations.
To the casual observer it is clear that student protest is
now a worldwide phenomenon. In 1968 alone, student dem-
onstrations and strikes paralyzed universities in nations as far
apart, geographically and culturally, as Japan, France, Mex-
ico, West Germany, Czechoslovakia, Italy, and Brazil. In-
deed, a recent study commissioned by the United Nations es-
timated that those in the 12-25 age group now number 750
million and will total a billion by 1980. At that time, the
study predicted, "Youth of the world will begin to predom-
inate in world affairs.
"World opinion is going to become increasingly the opin-
ion of the world's youth and the generational conflict will as-
sume proportions not previously imagined.
"Young people in all walks of life," they add. "are pre-
82
pared to march, to demonstrate and to riot if necessary in
support of views which may not be those of the electorate,
nor of the majority; nor yet of the government." '
Conventional wisdom is much given to the view that youth
is "naturally" rebellious. We are not surprised when young
persons experiment with adult ways and criticize those who
enforce constraints, because we know that youth is "impa-
tient." Nor are we unduly shocked when young persons pro-
test the failure of adults to live up to their professed values,
since we know that youth is "idealistic." Such views, what-
ever their ultimate truth, have the virtue of providing com-
fort for adults and, no doubt, for many young people. Such
views assume that young people will outgrow their impa-
tience and will experience the difficulties of actualizing ideals.
Moreover, adults who hold these views need feel no special
responsibility or guilt over the rebelliousness of youth, since
it is "inevitable." And, equally inevitably, it will pass away.
As S. M. Lipset has pointed out, nearly every country has a
version of the saying: "He who is not a radical at twenty
does not have a heart; he who still is one at forty does not
have a head." s
Unfortunately, conventional wisdom neglects the salient
fact that widespread student movements, such as we are wit-
nessing in the United States today, do not occur at all times
and places, nor do they exhibit the same characteristics and
orientations everywhere.
First, student idealism has not always been revolutionary.
Students were very active in the right-wing movements that
led the rise of fascism in Western Europe in the 1930's. Far
from demanding basic social change, they were concerned
with the defense of tradition and order against the threats
and insecurities of change.
Second, even where they are oriented toward progress and
change, student movements do not always express an autono-
mous rebellion against the larger society. A good example is
the contemporary Czechoslovakian student movement, which
is more directly linked to liberalizing movements in Czecho-
slovakian society as a whole than to any distinct student radi-
calism.
Third, historically the phenomenon of revolutionary stu-
STUDENT PROTEST 83
dent movements has been primarily a feature of transitional
societies — that is, societies in which traditional, agrarian-
based cultures breaking down and modern values conge-
nial to industrialization were becoming influential. Thus, stu-
dent revolutionary activity was a constant feature of Russian
life during the nineteenth century; it played a major role in
the revolutions of 1848 in Central Europe; the Communist
movements in China and Vietnam grew out of militant stu-
dent movements in those countries; and, in Latin America,
student movements have been politically crucial since the
early part of this century.
Such societies tend to promote the formation of autono-
mous student movements for several reasons. First, tradi-
tional values, transmitted by the family, are increasingly irrel-
evant to participation in the emergent industrial occupational
structure. Students are acutely aware of this irrelevance in
the relatively cosmopolitan atmosphere of the university and
in their training for occupations which represent the emerg-
ing social order. Second, although students are ostensibly
being trained to constitute the future, more modern elite, it is
usually true that established elites continue to represent tradi-
tional culture, resist modernizing reform, and refuse to redis-
tribute power. Paradoxically, established elites typically spon-
sor the formation of the university system to promote techni-
cal progress while simultaneously resisting the political, so-
cial, and cultural transformations such progress requires. In
this situation, students almost inevitably come into conflict
with established institutions.
If any generalization can be made, it would be that student
movements arise in periods of transition, when, for example,
the values inculcated in children are sharply incompatible
with the values they later need for effective participation in
the larger society, or when values which are prevalent in uni-
versities are not supported by established political elites in the
larger society. As S. M. Lipset writes:
Historically . . . one would learn to expect a sharp increase
in student activism in a society where, for a variety of rea-
sons, accepted political and social values are being ques-
tioned, in times particularly where events are testing the via-
bility of a regime and where policy failures seem to question
84
the legitimacy of social and economic arrangements and insti-
tutions. And more observation shows that in societies where
rapid change, instability, or weak legitimacy of political insti-
tutions is endemic, there is what looks like almost constant
turmoil among students.9
In other words, the formation of student movements in
general may be a reflection of technological, cultural, and
economic changes that require new forms and mechanisms
for distribution of political power. Political expressions of
discontent arise if political authorities are identified as the
agents of the status quo. Intellectuals and students are most
likely to criticize established authorities because they, more
than any other stratum of society, are concerned with the
problem of creating and articulating new values. When an ex-
isting political order loses its legitimacy, the young intellec-
tuals search for alternative forms of authority, new grounds
for legitimacy, and ideological rationales for their attack on
the established order. Characteristically (and both the "classi-
cal" and "new" student movements are similar in this re-
spect) , the emergent ideology of the student movement is pop-
ulist, egalitarian, and romantic. That is, it justifies its attack
on established authority by asserting that the true repository
of value in the society is the people rather than the elites; it
seeks to undermine deferential attitudes toward authority by
asserting anti-hierarchical and democratic principles; it de-
fends the rejection of conventional values by celebrating the
idea of free expression and individualism; and it provides in-
spiration to its participants by emphasizing that the conflict
of generations must be won by the young, since the old must
die.
This analysis might lead one to expect that advanced in-
dustrial societies of the West would be the least likely places
for radical student movements to emerge. In these societies, it
is said, the move to modernity has been made, and sharp
value conflicts are absent; Western nations are not ordinarily
seen as "developing" or "in transition." Yet such movements
have appeared with increasing frequency in Western societies
during the past decade. How can we understand this? The
American situation differs from classical ones in that it does
not arise from the standard problems of modernization. But
STUDENT PROTEST 85
the existence of a student movement in America and other
advanced industrial societies forces on us the conjecture that
these societies, too, are "transitional" — not in the same terms
as developing countries, and perhaps more subtly, but just as
meaningfully. While educated youth in developing countries
experience the irrelevance of traditional, religious, prescien-
tific, authoritarian values for modernization, industrialization,
and national identity, educated youth in the advanced coun-
tries perceive the irrelevance of commerical, acquisitive, ma-
terialistic, and nationalistic values in a world that stresses
human rights and social equality and requires collective plan-
ning. Politicized young people in the developing countries
were usually absorbed by socialist, communist, or other
working-class movements, since these appeared to be offering
opposition to the old society and culture and to be addressing
the problems of modern society. But in advanced industrial
societies, the organized left has moved toward integration
into the established political system and abandoned its radical
vision. In the United States the labor movement became simi-
larly integrated, purged itself of radical influence, and organ-
ized radicalism slid into obscurity. Thus it has devolved upon
students in the West to reconstitute radical political action
and ideology. In so doing, they adopt the populist, egalita-
rian, romantic, and generational rhetoric and style which
characterized the . classical student movements in the early
stages of their development. But they also reject the ideologi-
cal orientations and modes of action that were characteristic
of the revolutionary left in earlier phases of industrialization
and modernization.
Of all the new student movements, that among white
American students shows the least resemblance in its origins
to the classical model. The French student movement, al-
though it probably has some of the same roots as the Ameri-
can, resembles the classical case in some respects: it is in part
a call for modernization, and a rebellion against traditional
culture and the archaic forms of authoritarianism that still
pervade French society and the organization of its universi-
ties.
West Germany's student movement has similar characteris-
tics. On the one hand, West Germany, like the United States,
86
is dominated by giant corporate bureaucracies, by increasing
centralization of political life, by an absence of organized and
effective political opposition to corporate capitalism, and by
militarization; on the other hand, it is also marked by a
greater persistence of traditional cultural and political values.
Like its American counterpart, the German student move-
ment appeals to an idealized conception of democracy in
modern society; it differs in its emphasis on the rejection of
the archaic forms of authority and status distinctions Europe
has inherited from its feudal past. It is aware that many of
the cultural and political factors that contributed to Hitlerism
have not been eradicated, while it is itself imbued with a pro-
found hatred of the legacy of Nazism.
Thus the current wave of student protest throughout the
world is, in part, the result of coincidence: on the one hand,
the student movements in Latin America and Asia continue
to function as part of a relatively long tradition of student
activism; on the other hand, new student movements in the
West have emerged in response to rather different problems
and issues. Despite the differences among student movements
in developed and underdeveloped countries, however, it is
clear that a process of mutual influence is at work among
them. For example, the white student movement in America
received inspiration in its early stages from dramatic student
uprisings in Japan, Turkey, and South Korea. More recently,
American activists have been influenced by street tactics
learned from Japanese students and by ideological expres-
sions emanating from France and West Germany. The
French students were certainly inspired by the West Ger-
mans, and the Italians by the French. The symbols of "alien-
ated" youth culture, originating in Britain and the United
States, have been adopted throughout Eastern and Western
Europe. The spread of ideology, symbols, and tactics of pro-
test is, of course, powerfully aided by television and other
mass media and also by the increased opportunities for inter-
national travel and study abroad available to European and
American students. The increasing cross-fertilization and mu-
tual inspiration which are certainly occurring among student
movements are, then, the outcome of mass communication
and informal contact. Whatever similarity exists among stu-
STUDENT PROTEST 87
dent movements around the world is thus neither completely
spontaneous nor centrally coordinated.
American Student Activism in the 1960's
Those who believe that disorder and conflict are unique to
the campuses of the 1960's are unacquainted with the history
of American colleges. Dormitory life in nineteenth-century
America was marked by violence, rough and undisciplined
actions, and outbreaks of protest against the rules and regula-
tions through which faculties and administrations attempted
to govern students.10 Although collegiate life became more
peaceful after the turn of the century, protest, activism, and
collective action continued to be part of college life. The
depression of the 1930's and the pre-World War II period of
the 1940's were marked by protest, often of a political char-
acter. An examination of college and university disruption
even during the 1950's provides a notable record of activity.
Student activism during the 1960's appears, however, to
have unprecedented qualities. Compared to earlier activism,
that of the 1960's involves more students and engages them
more continuously, is more widely distributed on campuses
throughout the country, is more militant, is more hostile to
established authority and institutions (including radical politi-
cal organizations), and has been more sustained. Such activ-
ism seems better considered as part of a student movement,
something largely unknown before in the United States,
rather than as a collection of similar but unconnected events.
And although it involves issues of special interest to students,
the movement has usually integrated student concerns with
political issues of wider currency.
The emergence of such a movement in the 1960's is partic-
ularly striking. The ten previous years — despite outbreaks of
campus disruption — were notable mainly as a period of polit-
ical indifference or privatized alienation among students.11
Campus observers at that time remarked on student confor-
mity to conventional values and private goals. Social scientists
hardly anticipated that large numbers of students would be-
come engaged in substantial social action.
88
Still, the student movement in the sixties does have some
roots in the previous decade. During the late 1950's, liberal
and radical dissenters became increasingly active at several
universities. At Berkeley a campus political party, SLATE,
challenged the domination of student government by more
conservative, fraternity-oriented students. In particular,
SLATE expressed opposition to restrictions of freedom of
speech and argued for student participation in off-campus po-
litical activity.12
Although SLATE's activity seems prophetic of what was to
happen nationally, it had little impact beyond the Berkeley
campus. In February of 1960, however, Negro students
began to attack segregation in public facilities by "sitting-in"
at segregated Southern dime-store lunch counters. Northern
students supported these demands by picketing and boycott-
ing Northern branches of Woolworth's and Kresge's. The
success of the Southern sit-ins led to the formation of the
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).
Northern white student groups formalized their organizations
to support the Southern movement.
At the same. time, other issues emerged. At Berkeley, stu-
dents demonstrated to protest the execution of Caryl Chess-
man. In a particularly dramatic instance, Bay Area students
protested hearings of the House Un-American Activities
Committee in San Francisco. The anti-HUAC demonstrations
received national publicity. HUAC itself publicized a film of
the protest, intended to expose "Communist influence" among
the youth. Instead, the film turned out to be self-caricature
and dramatized to many students that demonstrations and di-
rect action could have positive effects in challenging hostile
authority.
By late 1961, students consciously began to use civil rights
techniques of nonviolent direct action — marches, vigils, and
pickets — to protest aspects of American foreign policy. Stu-
dent concern over the nuclear arms race, nuclear testing, and
civil defense prompted the first national student demonstration
in several decades — the Washington Peace March of Febru-
ary, 1962.13
Students who participated in these activities saw them pri-
marily as moral responses to specific issues, yet some began
STUDENT PROTEST 89
to perceive general political implications. Most activists read
widely, and they were influenced by radical social criticism in
the United States and Western Europe. The work of C.
Wright Mills on the power elite and the Cold War was espe-
cially influential. By 1962, "little" student magazines critically
examined the classic doctrines of radicalism.14 They called
for a new radical ideology, stressing links between civil rights,
disarmament, and poverty. Meanwhile, in England, univer-
sity-based intellectuals formed what they called a "new left,"
which broke with communist and social democratic orthodox-
ies and sought to regenerate socialist thought.
According to data collected by Richard Peterson of the
Educational Testing Service, there were, in 1965, "student
left" organizations on 25 percent of American campuses; by
1968, the number had grown to 46 percent.15 Students for a
Democratic Society has become the most widely publicized
and perhaps the most influential of student political groups
formed in the early 1960's. SDS now claims about 7,000
"national" (i.e., dues-paying) members and at least 35,000
members in its several hundred local chapters.16 SDS began
in competition with other new and old left groupings; by
now, however, SDS vastly overshadows in size and reputation
the other left-wing groups (such as the DuBois Clubs, the
Young Socialist Alliance, and Progressive Labor).
From its inception, SDS's primary purpose was to develop
a new radical movement to significantly affect American poli-
tics. Although its founders and members were students, their
ultimate concern was not with student issues as such, but
rather with the organization of students for social change in
the larger society. To this end, SDS envisioned an invigora-
tion of the democratic process in America. This could result,
they believed, if universities could become centers of contro-
versy and arenas for active discussion of alternatives to pres-
ent policies; if the civil rights and anti-war movements could
succeed in activating large numbers of people at the grass-
roots level; and if established reform groups, such as the
labor movement, liberal organizations, and religious bodies,
would join forces with the civil rights, peace, and student
movements to offer new alternatives to the electorate at the
local and national levels.
90
A major hope of many members of SDS was for a political
"realignment" in which the Democratic Party would become
the voice of the rising social movements. Under these condi-
tions, they hoped, a majority coalition could be constructed
to move the country away from its commitment to the Cold
War and toward a policy of disarmament, relaxation of inter-
national tensions, and a domestic program aimed at ending
poverty and racial inequality.
In addition to these short-range political goals, SDS, at its
convention at Port Huron, Michigan, in June, 1962, an-
nounced a further vision — a society based on "participatory
democracy." In a society that was becoming increasingly cen-
tralized, SDS leaders argued, men were less and less capable
of controlling decisions affecting their lives. Technological de-
velopment and mass education could, however, create new
forms of decentralization and local democracy in neighbor-
hoods, factories, schools, and other social organizations. SDS
urged disenfranchised and powerless people to organize them-
selves and press their interests in opposition to the already
powerful. Such local insurgency should have two effects:
immediately, to generate a climate for reform of national pol-
icy; in the longer run, to teach the possibility and meaning of
participation.17
As this brief history suggests, the emerging thrust of the
student movement in the early sixties was toward the reform
of society rather than the university as such. Even prominent
"on-campus" issues show this impulse: there were rallies and
protests concerned with removing university restraints on po-
litical expression and activity, such as bans on controversial
speakers. (In 1956, for example, Adlai Stevenson was not
permitted to speak on the Berkeley campus under the then
prevailing interpretation of political "neutrality.") So-called
campus concerns also had broader meaning. Students saw
that protest against racial and ethnic discrimination in frater-
nity systems and against compulsory ROTC had a wider po-
litical significance. By and large, the university itself re-
mained a neutral, or even positively valued, base of opera-
tions. For many student activists, the university represented a
qualitatively different kind of social institution, one in which
STUDENT PROTEST 91
radical social criticism could be generated and constructive so-
cial change promoted.
It should also be noted that between 1960 and 1964, stu-
dent campaigns either employed such "normal channels" as
student government or invoked such conventional protest
techniques as petitions, picketing, and public meetings. Al-
though many students sympathized with the use of civil dis-
obedience and other forms of direct action in behalf of racial
equality and peace, the use of these techniques on campus
during the period was decidedly uncommon, and student rad-
icals regarded them as means of bringing issues to the atten-
tion of persons who would then pursue them through conven-
tional political processes. It seems evident that, on balance,
the student movement began with a firm commitment to non-
violence and with considerable optimism regarding the re-
sponsiveness of authorities.
The summer of 1963 marked a high point of optimism.
The signing of a nuclear test-ban treaty and a pending civil
rights march on Washington augured well for passage of sig-
nificant legislation. Student activists projected new civil rights
work, particularly in the area of voter registration. In addi-
tion, such books as Michael Harrington's The Other America
had developed in young activists an awareness of economic
as well as racial inequality. During that summer, SDS began
to mobilize students for community organization among poor
whites and other minorities, in much the same way as the
Southern civil rights movement had been working among
poor Negroes. This new commitment to off-campus work in
poverty areas was undertaken in a relatively optimistic spirit:
if the poor could be organized in their own interest, then the
national climate of reform could be moved beyond the issue
of segregation and voting rights to an effective attack on pov-
erty and unemployment.18
The period of optimism began to wane with the assassina-
tion of President Kennedy in November, 1963. Still, in
1963-1964, the student movement engaged in an effort to
draw students into volunteer and full-time work in the South-
ern black belt, Appalachia, and Northern urban slum areas.
By the summer of 1964, thousands of students were involved
92
in such activities, their legitimacy bolstered by President
Johnson's announcement of a "war on poverty." In Missis-
sippi, nearly one thousand volunteers aided in the effort to
build the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party.
The Mississippi experience was an extraordinary one for
many of its participants. Three young men were murdered,
and many others saw at first hand the character of Southern
repression.10 The experience intensified feelings of urgency
about justice, social and legal, for Negroes; it demonstrated
the complicity of the legal order in perpetuating repression of
Negroes; and it produced profound discontent with the in-
difference and superficiality of white middle-class life, includ-
ing collegiate life. Many returned to campus with strong con-
victions about the necessity of direct action and confrontation
for bringing change.
The Mississippi summer culminated with the Freedom
Democratic Party's effort to unseat the segregationist Missis-
sippi delegation at the Democratic Party National Conven-
tion in Atlantic City. Their failure, particularly the refusal of
white liberal Democrats to support wholeheartedly the Mis-
sissippi challenge, proved deeply disillusioning to the leaders
of SNCC and their black and white supporters. The Atlan-
tic City compromise seemed of a piece with the reluctance of
the federal government to enforce existing laws protecting
civil rights workers in the South. The events of that summer
in the South led SNCC to a profound revaluation of its
commitment to building a nonviolent grass-roots protest
movement, since that commitment depended on the belief
that the national authorities would be responsive to and sup-
portive of the movement. Just as SNCC's initial program had
helped spark the white student movement in the North, so its
disillusionment deeply affected Northern students.20 Despite
these events, SDS in the fall of 1964 announced that it sup-
ported Lyndon Johnson in preference to Barry Goldwater
and issued a button, "Part of the Way with LB J," which sig-
nified its continued though partially disillusioned connection
to conventional political processes.21
Shortly after classes began at Berkeley in the fall of 1964,
the campus was rocked by a series of massive protest demon-
strations, culminating in December in a large-scale sit-in at
STUDENT PROTEST 93
the administration building, mass arrests, and a strike. The
Free Speech Movement began, conventionally enough, over
suddenly imposed restrictions on students who used the cam-
pus "to support or advocate off-campus political or social
action." 22 Although removal of these restrictions remained a
prominent issue, as the struggle on campus developed, a
larger issue, with strong ideological overtones, took promi-
nence: the Berkeley demonstrations became not simply a pro-
test against particular violations of students rights, but rather
an expression of an underlying conflict between students as a
class and the "multiversity" and its administration — a struggle
between two fundamentally opposed interests in and orienta-
tions toward higher education.
The Free Speech Movement had a special importance in
the history of the student movement. Although there were
precedents — for example, University of Chicago students
held a sit-in at the administration building to protest alleged
discrimination against Negroes in the rental of university-
owned housing, and New York City College students staged a
strike to protest a ban against communist speakers on cam-
pus, both before 1964 — the Berkeley protest, which was
widely publicized, demonstrated the feasibility of involving
large numbers of students in direct action techniques on cam-
pus. It also suggested that such techniques might be necessary
to effect campus reforms — and that they might be successful
for this end.23
Moreover, Berkeley events focused attention on the poli-
cies, programs, and organization of the university — both in-
ternally and in its connections with the larger society. Student
activists, before the Free Speech Movement, had viewed cam-
pus issues as trivial compared to the civil rights struggle. The
only way for white students to display their commitment to
social change, to put themselves "on the line," was to move
off the campus. The Free Speech Movement showed how the
campus itself might become a front line. Students now saw
that what happens on campus could really matter politically,
and that a local campus uprising could have national and in-
ternational importance.
It seems fair to say that the Free Speech Movement at
Berkeley in 1964 marked a turning point in the American
94
student movement. Other events, of course, contributed to the
change. By 1965, the era of white student participation in the
Southern civil rights movement was drawing to a close. The
period of concern with nuclear war had culminated in an ap-
parently firm agreement between the United States and the
Soviet Union to stop atmospheric nuclear tests, relax ten-
sions, and control the pace of the arms race. President John-
son had been elected with a massive mandate to avoid ex-
panding the war in Vietnam and to preserve and enlarge the
welfare state program. The Berkeley uprising gave the stu-
dent movement a new prominence and evoked a new interest
among students and others in university reform and educa-
tional innovation.
In this atmosphere, SDS and other activist groups searched
for new programmatic directions. These groups preferred to
work in local urban situations in grass-roots community orga-
ization among the poor; the involvement of students in this
kind of action rose steadily, but the war in Vietnam became
increasingly important. In December, 1964, SDS abandoned
its practice of concentrating only on domestic issues by decid-
ing to call for a national student march in Washington
against the war, to be held in April, 1965. Six weeks later,
the bombing of North Vietnam began; the Administration re-
iterated its refusal to negotiate an end to the war; and sup-
port for the April march began to build rapidly. Some 20,000
students and others participated in the first nationally visible
protest against U.S. policy in Vietnam. SDS was catapulted to
national prominence, receiving wide coverage in the media;
its membership grew rapidly, and by the end of the school
year it had achieved wide recognition as the nationally or-
ganized expression of the student movement.24
After the April, 1965, march, hundreds of campuses wit-
nessed "teach-ins" and other organized activities concerning
Vietnam; during this period no sector of the American public
received as much information about and analysis of the war
as the student body. Vietnam soon became the central, over-
riding preoccupation of activist students. New waves of dem-
onstrations were held in the fall, largely at the initiative of
the Berkeley Vietnam Day Committee; they were organized
STUDENT PROTEST 95
locally by SDS chapters and by the scores of ad hoc "com-
mittees to end the war in Vietnam" which had sprung up
around the country in the preceding months.
Early anti-Vietnam War activity was characterized by the
use of conventional forms of protest and by the encourage-
ment of debate and discussion through such forms as the
teach-in. Some draft cards were burned, and some Berkeley
students tried to block troop trains in September, 1965, but,
generally, "legal" techniques of opposition were used, or civil
disobedience was employed in order to dramatize the move-
ment's cause. The majority of SDS members even refused to
endorse a national program of opposition to the draft, the
aim of which was merely to increase the number of young
men seeking conscientious objector status.
But there was increasing disillusionment during the year
with the efficacy of such protests; each major march had
more participants but was shortly followed by some new es-
calation of the war. Many disillusioned students argued that
the main function served by peace marches was to maintain
America's image as a democratic society permitting dissent,
so that the war effort could continue without significant inter-
nal or external opposition. Meanwhile, depictions in the
media of the effect of the war on civilians in Vietnam, of the
corrupt and unrepresentative character of the South Viet-
namese regime, of Administration failure to seize opportuni-
ties for negotiation, and of the ways in which the rising costs
of the war hampered domestic reform programs in the
United States were widely discussed on the campus and
heightened the urgency of the student protests.25
In the spring of 1966, General Lewis Hershey announced
that some students would have to be drafted, and that student
deferments would be terminated for those whose class stand-
ings were poor or who failed to reach a certain level of per-
formance on a soon-to-be administered Selective Service
Qualification Test. The reaction on the campus was sharp and
immediate. Professors protested against the use of grades for
Selective Service purposes. There was rising tension at many
schools; some students became anxious about the possibility
of being drafted, others upset about competing with their
96
peers to avoid the draft; students and faculty resented the
cooperation of universities with the draft in supplying class
standings and facilities for the administration of the test.
At several schools, SDS chapters demanded that universi-
ties withold such cooperation. At the University of Chicago,
five hundred students, led by SDS, staged a sit-in at the ad-
ministration building, seizing control of the building for three
and one-half days. Similar seizures and sit-ins occurred at
Wisconsin, City College of New York, Oberlin College, and
other institutions. The Chicago action was the first successful
closing of a university administration building and the first
time that SDS had undertaken a direct confrontation with a
university administration. The "anti-ranking" protests thus
signified the spread of the "Berkeley situation" to other cam-
puses. As at Berkeley, the confrontation developed when stu-
dent activists perceived university administrators as cooperat-
ing actively with outside agencies in opposition to student in-
terests and democratic values, and undertaking such coopera-
tion without prior consultation of students. As at Berkeley,
the Chicago students had attempted to use regular channels
to change policy before resorting to a sit-in. As at Berkeley,
widespread support for the demands of the protest was evi-
dent among nonparticipating students. And, as at Berkeley,
the Chicago and other anti-ranking protests won immediate,
widespread attention from the mass media.
The Chicago sit-in did not elicit punitive action by the uni-
versity administration, and the students eventually abandoned
the building. Nor did it have an immediate effect on univer-
sity policy concerning the draft (although the faculty senate
voted to support punitive action in the event of further dis-
ruptive protest, and a year later the faculty council voted to
end the transmission of "male class ranks" to draft boards).
But the anti-ranking actions at Chicago and other universities
did spark a nationwide debate on the draft, did lead some
schools to refuse to send class rank information to draft
boards, and did help popularize the concept of refusing to
cooperate with the draft as a means of resisting the war.26
For SDS, these sit-ins provided a new strategic orientation
and a new phase in its development. This new phase was in-
augurated at an SDS convention in June, 1966. At that meet-
STUDENT PROTEST 97
ing, a new generation of leadership came into office. For the
first time since its formation, SDS was to be run largely by
people without ties to the original founders of the organiza-
tion. The "new guard" were students who had joined SDS
after the inception of its anti-Vietnam program, and who
came from schools without much tradition of student activ-
ism. They tended to conceive of SDS as a student organiza-
tion, and they believed its greatest promise lay in reaching
uncommitted students on issues that concerned them, rather
than in simply working against the war or working on gen-
eral political programs without specific relevance to the cam-
pus. The new thrust was at first called "student syndicalism,"
a term borrowed from the European student movement and
its tradition of organizing students along trade unionist lines.
The new orientation demonstrated a desire to build on the ex-
perience of Berkeley, the anti-rank protests, and similar con-
frontations, by working for what eventually came to be called
"student power" — that is, organized student unions or parties
working for such reforms as the abolition of grades, smaller
classes, and greater student participation in shaping curricula.
It was not a program to disrupt the universities, but rather
an effort to increase the "class-consciousness" of students and
break down what SDS saw as the bureaucratic quality of uni-
versity life, the paternalistic treatment of students, and the
authoritarian pattern of education, which, they alleged, was a
source of student discontent and also produced widespread
political apathy and passivity. To implement this program,
SDS created a team of traveling campus organizers who were
to assist in the formation of chapters, and, as the year wore
on, various forms of "student syndicalist" activity emerged.
On a number of campuses, SDS leaders, running on plat-
forms advocating "student power," were elected as student
body presidents. Across the country, there were more and
more demands for liberalization of dormitory rules and of
the grading system, for free speech, and the like. These de-
mands had been building up before SDS's new programmatic
thrust; probably the main effect of SDS was to enhance the
skill with which these demands could be made.27
But "student syndicalism" was not a stand which SDS
could maintain for very long. Although demands for student
98
power were consonant with SDS's orientation to participatory
democracy, they were not well suited to deal with the general
political situation, particularly the continued escalation of the
war and the intensification of black rebellion in the cities. Be-
sides, many SDS members were convinced that university re-
form was futile, that the universities could not be substan-
tially changed until there was basic change in the society as a
whole.
Then, in December, 1966, Berkeley activists tried to set up
an anti-draft literature table next to a Navy recruiting table
in the Student Union. A massive sit-in and student strike en-
sued as a result of efforts by the administration to eject the
protesters from the Student Union and to defend the ejection
on the grounds that, as a state university campus, Berkeley
had to offer government agencies the special privilege of set-
ting up recruiting tables in areas of the Student Union where
students were forbidden to set up their tables. A month later,
SDS members at Brown University organized the first protest
against Dow Chemical Company recruiters. During the fol-
lowing spring, scores of demonstrations and sit-ins occurred
protesting the presence of military, CIA, and Dow recruiters
on the campus. At Columbia, SDS and its followers engaged
in physical battle with other students as a result of their pro-
tests against Marine recruiters.
The anti-rank sit-ins and the anti-recruiter demonstrations
provided a way for SDS to combine its opposition to the war
and to militarism with its interest in approaching students on
their own ground. On the one hand, these demonstrations and
some disruptive effect on the military machine by impairing
the ease of its relations with the university. On the other
hand, unlike general protests against the war, these demon-
strations could more easily affect uncommitted students, since
they protested a war that was increasingly relevant to the stu-
dent body as a whole. Moreover, such demonstrations could
be linked to student power concerns, since the university-mili-
tary connections were undertaken without consulting stu-
dents.
Similar strategic considerations underlay the even more
militant anti-Dow demonstrations in the fall of 1967 28 and
the SDS-led protests against university involvement in the In-
STUDENT PROTEST 99
stitute for Defense Analyses which culminated in convulsive
rebellion at Columbia in the spring of 1968. By 1967-68, the
organization of on-campus confrontations, especially those
concerning university involvement with military agencies, be-
came a central purpose of SDS. After several years of oscil-
lating between university reform and student power versus
general political issues, SDS had at last found an issue — the
military connections of the university — that could mobilize
both students primarily concerned with campus reform and
students primarily interested in general politics.
But the reason for SDS's turn toward confrontation with
university authority lay deeper than its discovery of new stra-
tegic and tactical possibilities.29 The history of the student
movement in general and SDS in particular reveals that un-
derlying the changes in strategies and tactics and the shifts in
the issues which motivated protest were more fundamental
changes in the way student activists perceived authority in the
nation and in the university and in the way they defined their
relation to it. What happened in the eight years we have just
briefly reviewed was a precipitous decline in the degree to
which active participants in the student movement attributed
legitimacy to national authority and to the university.
The two general phases of the movement — before and
after 1965 — may be viewed as follows: In phase one, the stu-
dent movement embodied concern, dissent, and protest about
various social issues, but it generally accepted the legitimacy
of the American political community in general and espe-
cially of the university. In those years, many students be-
lieved that the legitimacy of the existing political structure
was compromised by the undue influence of corporate inter-
ests and the military. They made far-reaching criticisms of
the university and of other social institutions, but their criti-
cisms were usually directed at the failure of the American
political system and of American institutions to live up to
officially proclaimed values. Thus, despite their commitment
to reform and to support for civil disobedience and direct ac-
tion, the student activists in the first half of this decade gener-
ally accepted the basic values and norms of the American po-
litical community. And despite their discontent with the uni-
versity, they usually operated within the confines of academic
100
tradition and felt considerable allegiance to the values of the
academic community.
In phase two of the student movement, a considerable
number of young people, particularly the activist core, expe-
rienced a progressive deterioration in their acceptance of na-
tional and university authority. The ideology of this phase of
the movement was recently stated by Mark Rudd, leader of
the local SDS during the Columbia crisis:
Many have called us a "student power" movement, im-
plying that our goal is student control over the "educational
process," taking decision-making power away from the ad-
ministrators and putting it in the hands of "democratic" stu-
dent groups. . . . Student power used to be the goal of S.D.S.,
but as our understanding of the society has developed, our
understanding of the university's role in it has also changed.
We see the university as a factory whose goal is to pro-
duce : ( 1 ) trained personnel for corporations, government
and more universities, and (2) knowledge of the uses of busi-
ness and government to perpetuate the present system. Gov-
ernment studies at Columbia, for example, attempt to explain
our society through concepts of pluralism and conflicting
group interest, while the reality of the situation is quite dif-
ferent.
In our strike, we united with many of the people who have
been affected by the university's policies — the tenants in Co-
lumbia-owned buildings, the Harlem community, the univer-
sity employees. Many other people throughout the world saw
us confront a symbol of those who control the decisions that
are made in this country.
In France, the workers and students united to fight a com-
mon enemy. The same potential exists here in the United
States. We are attempting to connect our fight with the fight
of the black people for their freedom, with the fight of the
Mexican-Americans for their land in New Mexico, with the
fight of the Vietnamese people, and with all people who be-
lieve that men and women should be free to live as they
choose, in a society where the government is responsive to
the needs of all the people, and not the needs of the few
whose enormous wealth gives them the political power. We
intend to make a revolution.30
The process of "delegitimation" and "radicalization" was
gradual, and it may be useful to suggest key events and ex-
periences contributing to it.
STUDENT PROTEST 101
1. The Nonviolent Southern Civil Rights Movement. The
treatment of civil rights workers and Negroes seeking to exer-
cise constitutional rights by Southern police officials and ra-
cist groups was seen as brutal by civil rights organizers and
their student allies, and as never adequately responded to by
federal authorities. Instead, the latter were thought to be pri-
marily interested in "cooling off" the movement rather than
in achieving full implementation of political rights. These
events marked the beginning of the sharp split between the
student left and established liberal leadership and organiza-
tion, and disillusionment with the idea that the federal gov-
ernment could be a major agency for protection of rights and
promotion of equality and welfare. This disillusionment in-
creased with the failure of the Democratic Convention to
grant recognition to the Mississippi Freedom Democrats, and
the associated unwillingness by prominent liberal Democrats
to wage a floor fight in their behalf.
2. The "War on Poverty." Young people saw the rhetoric
of public officials as overstated and unfulfilled. Young pov-
erty workers alleged that political machines and other estab-
lished agencies used federal funds to preserve existing power
relationships, saw the erosion of the promise of "maximum
feasible participation by the poor" as a basic element of the
new programs, regarded public bureaucracies as callous to-
ward the poor, and saw local police being used to attack
legitimate protest activity by indigenous organizations of the
poor. SDS and other student groups that had embarked on
anti-poverty activities had hoped that the new federal pro-
grams signified the beginning of significant reform efforts,
and that the new programs would facilitate the political orga-
nization of deprived groups. The failure of these expectations
was a severe disillusionment.
3. The Events at Berkeley. These marked a change in the
perception of university administrators by campus activists.
Administrators came to be seen as actively interested in pre-
venting students from effectively organizing for off-campus
protest, as more responsive to political pressure from con-
servative interests than to student concerns or traditional
principles of civil liberties, and as devious and untrustworthy
102
in negotiating situations. Moreover, President Clark Kerr, in
his book The Uses of the University, supplied ideologically
oriented activists with an image of the university as funda-
mentally hostile to humane values, to undergraduate educa-
tion as such, to internal democratic functioning — and as nec-
essarily involved in servicing the needs of powerful interest
groups. The combination of actual experience with university
authority at Berkeley with exposure to administrators' self-
proclaimed values helped to change students' perception of
the university from an essentially congenial institution — need-
ing reform — to an institution whose primary functions were
directly opposed to the needs, interests, and values of activist
and intellectual students.
4. The Escalation of the War in Vietnam. Escalation oc-
curred despite campaign promises of President Johnson.
Peaceful protest activity had no discernible impact on policy,
which continued to harden while students became increas-
ingly aware of the diverse moral, legal, and practical argu-
ments for disengagement from Vietnam. Administration
officials often refused to participate in campus debates on the
war; when spokesmen for the President's policy were present,
their arguments were often based on historical and political
grounds which many students and professors regarded as
questionable. Particularly damaging were the frequent in-
stances of deceitfulness on the part of Administration spokes-
men— the mass media providing much documentation for the
view that the Administration was misrepresenting the facts
about the war and the diplomatic situation. Many students
were as deeply affected by the "credibility gap" as they were
by the war itself.
5. Cooperation by Academic Institutions with the War
Effort and with Military Agencies Generally. An early revela-
tion was the fact that faculty members at Michigan State
University had worked with U.S. intelligence agencies in
South Vietnam to bolster the regime of Ngo Dinh Diem.
Shortly thereafter, an extensive research operation concerning
biological warfare was publicized at the University of Penn-
sylvania. Finally, there were widely publicized revelations of
the covert sponsorship of research by the Central Intelligence
STUDENT PROTEST 103
Agency, operating through a variety of bona fide and "paper"
foundations, and the concomitant subsidy by the CIA of var-
ious student, labor, religious, and educational organizations in
their overseas operations. These revelations, plus the obvious
fact that major universities depended on Defense Department
funds for large portions of their budgets, raised deep ques-
tions in the academic community about the intellectual inde-
pendence of universities and of the scholarly enterprise in
general. For student activists, they provided further evidence
of the untrustworthiness and bias of the universities, and pro-
vided easy targets for politically effective protest against uni-
versity authority. The involvement of the universities and the
scientific and scholarly disciplines in the war effort and with
the defense establishment, while continuing to proclaim their
"nonpartisanship," "neutrality," and insistence on academic
values, has been a severe and continuing reason for the ero-
sion of university authority for many students and academics.
6. The Draft. Student immunity from the draft began to
weaken in 1966, with General Hershey's announcement of re-
strictions on student deferments. This announcement focused
students' attention on the possibility that they themselves
would have to participate in the war; it also made them
aware of the fact that young men were in competition to
avoid the draft, and that their student status had provided
them with a special privilege — one that was not available to
lower-income, noncollege youth. Many students entertained
doubts about a system of compulsory service in a society that
celebrated individualistic and voluntaristic values: many had
doubts about the use of conscription for a war that had not
been declared and for which no general mobilization had
been undertaken. Of course, many had strong moral objec-
tions to participation in or support for the war in Vietnam in
particular, or to war in general; the Selective Service law's
narrow definitions of conscientious objection, however, pre-
vented most pacifists and other moral objectors from achieving
exemption for their claims of conscience. Moreover, the legit-
imacy of the draft was weakened by the frank admission by
Selective Service, in a widely circulated document, that the
threat of the draft was useful in "channeling" young men into
104
"socially useful" careers, that avoiding the draft by legitimate
means involved a considerable amount of self-deception as
well as deception of others, that in fact the very course of
one's youth and young adulthood was shaped and distorted
by either the fear of the draft or officially encouraged calcu-
lation to avoid it. At the same time, many middle-class stu-
dents deeply resented the interruption of career and the frus-
tration of plans and aspirations which the draft represented,
especially if they felt that no adequate justification for this in-
terruption had been provided. Considerable cynicism about
the operations of the system prevailed as a result of widely
disseminated folklore about techniques for evading the draft
through the faking of disabilities. Finally, many young people
resented the imposition of the draft by a political system in
which they had no voice or representation and which seemed
entirely unresponsive to their opinions regarding the war.
Further resentment was encouraged by the use of the draft to
punish anti-war dissenters.
7. Race, Poverty, and Urban Decline. The failure of the
political system to deal effectively with these problems has
been a continuing source of student disaffection. Students in
large numbers saw the war as a major barrier to effective ac-
tion on domestic problems; in addition, they saw considerable
hypocrisy in the efforts of the government to "preserve free-
dom" in and "pacify" a remote country when these goals
could not be achieved in America's cities. For white activists,
whose original interest in social action had been sparked by
the civil rights movement, the increasing militance of black
youth created new problems, especially when ghetto rebel-
lions were met with massive police repression. For many
white activists, the moral and political choices had narrowed
to that of siding with black revolutionaries or remaining iden-
tified with white authority, which was increasingly defined as
"colonial" in nature. Black militants constantly, and under-
standably, challenged the commitment and seriousness of
whites who claimed to be their allies; in this context, tactics
of aggressive resistance seemed the only morally commensu-
rate response for white radical students. Thus, for example,
at Columbia, the SDS-led protest turned into a serious effort
to seize control of university buildings only after black stu-
STUDENT PROTEST 105
dents openly expressed doubt that the white students were
prepared to take serious action. Similar events occurred on
many campuses.
8. Police on Campus. Unquestionably, a major source of
disaffection — perhaps especially for moderate or previously
uncommitted students — has been the nature of campus en-
counters with the police. Even commentators who are unsym-
pathetic to the goals of the Columbia SDS have agreed that
police violence contributed greatly to the radicalization of the
Columbia student body during the 1968 crisis. Daniel Bell,
for example, describes this process as follows :
In all, about a hundred students were hurt. But it was not
the violence itself that was so horrible — despite the many pic-
tures in the papers of bleeding students, not one required
hospitalization. It was the capriciousness of that final action.
The police simply ran wild. Those who tried to say they were
innocent bystanders or faculty were given the same flailing
treatment as the students. For most of the students, it was
their first encounter with brutality and blood, and they re-
sponded in fear and anger. The next day, almost the entire
campus responded to a call for a student strike. In a few
hours, thanks to the New York City Police Department, a
large part of the Columbia campus had become radicalized.31
Thus, however one may criticize the strategic and tactical
responses of the student radicals, their ranks are characteris-
tically enlarged by a sense of moral outrage at what students
take to be the ineffectiveness, insincerity, and finally tactics of
harsh repression on the part of the authorities. Therefore, a
"politics of confrontation" has become the most effective
strategic weapon of student radicals, thrusting such groups as
SDS into positions of campus leadership when they can de-
velop a sense of outrage in students and faculty, and isolating
them, in numerous instances, when they cannot.
The Politics of Confrontation
During the past three years, "resistance" and "confronta-
tion" have come to occupy an increasingly prominent posi-
tion in the strategy and tactics of the student movement. "Re-
106
sistance" and "confrontation" refer to such forms of direct
action as deliberate disruption of or interference with normal,
routine operations of persons or institutions by large masses
of persons; deliberate violation of authoritative orders to dis-
perse; forceful retaliation against police use of clubs, chemi-
cals, or other force; the use of barricades or "mobile tactics"
to prevent or delay police efforts to disperse a crowd; the use
of ridicule, rudeness, obscenity, and other uncivil forms of
speech and behavior to shock, embarrass, or defy authorities;
refusal to comply with orders or to accept authoritative com-
mands or requests as legitimate.
Even so, confrontations arranged by students have been
usually more "symbolic" than "disruptive" or "destructive."
Much rhetoric flows in university circles, and elsewhere,
about "interference with institutional functioning." Whatever
the intent of radicals, however, they have usually not been
successful in disrupting the routines of most university mem-
bers— until massive police formations were called to campus.
Doubtless some student radicals hope for physical confron-
tations with the police. But there is little evidence that such a
hope is widespread. Further, there is little evidence that many
students are willing (much less able) to disrupt functioning,
attack persons, or destroy property in the university. But they
are willing to engage in symbolic protest — to symbolically
"throw their bodies on the machine." This leads to show-
downs with the police, and then to violence from the police
— and retaliation by some students.
Many observers who have tried to understand the student
movement and who express sympathy for many of its objec-
tives find the turn toward confrontation, disruption, and inci-
vility highly irrational and self -destructive. Increasingly, SDS
and the "new left" are criticized for the style of their actions
and rhetoric. Although many such critics can understand the
frustration which contributes to extreme militancy, they
argue that the strategy of confrontation serves only to defeat
the aims of the movement, and that student radicals ought to
exercise self-restraint if they sincerely wish to achieve their
political and social ends. For example, it is frequently argued
that confrontation tactics accomplish little more than the
arousal of popular hostility, thus fueling the fires of right-wing
STUDENT PROTEST 107
demogoguery and increasing the likelihood of government
repression. Confrontation tactics in the university, the critics
argue, do not promote reform; they mainly achieve the weak-
ening of the university's ability to withstand political pressure
from outside, and consequently they threaten to undermine
the one institution in society that offers dissenters full free-
dom of expression. Some critics conclude their arguments by
assuming that since in their view the main effect of new left
activity is to create disorder, intensify polarization, increase
the strength of the far right, and weaken civil liberties, then
these must be the results actually desired by the student radi-
cals.
We have interviewed new left activists in an effort to un-
derstand the basis for their actions from their point of view.
The following is an attempt to present the case for confronta-
tion tactics as the militants themselves might make it.32
1. Confrontation and militancy are methods of arousing
moderates to action. The creation of turmoil and disorder can
stimulate otherwise quiescent groups to take more forceful
action in their own ways. Liberals may come to support radi-
cal demands while opposing their tactics; extreme tactics may
shock moderates into self-reexamination. Student radicals can
claim credit for prompting Senator McCarthy's Presidential
campaign, for increased senatorial opposition to the Vietnam
War, and for the greater urgency for reform expressed by
such moderate bodies as the Kerner Commission.
2. Confrontation and militancy can educate the public. Di-
rect action is not intended to win particular reforms or to in-
fluence decision-makers, but rather to bring out a repressive
response from authorities — a response rarely seen by most
white Americans. When confrontation brings violent official
response, uncommitted elements of the public can see for
themselves the true nature of the "system." Confrontation,
therefore, is a means of political education.
3. Confrontation, militancy and resistance are ways to pre-
pare young radicals for the possibility of greater repression.
If the movement really seriously threatens the power of politi-
cal authorities, efforts to repress the movement through police
state measures are inevitable. The development of resistant at-
titudes and action toward the police at the present time is a
108
necessary preparation for more serious resistance in the fu-
ture. Fascism is a real possibility in America; and we don't in-
tend to be either "Jews" or "good Germans."
4. Combative behavior with respect to the police and other
authorities, although possibly alienating "respectable" adults,
has the opposite effect on the movement's relationships with
nonstudent youth. Educated, middle-class, nonviolent styles of
protest are poorly understood by working-class youth, black
youth, and other "dropouts." Contact with these other sectors
of the youth population is essential and depends upon the
adoption of a tough and aggressive stance to win respect from
such youth. Militant street actions attract a heterogeneous
group of nonstudent youth participants who have their own
sources of alienation from middle-class society and its institu-
tions.
5. The experience of resistance and combat may have a
liberating effect on young middle-class radicals. Most mid-
dle-class students are shocked by aggressive or violent behav-
ior. This cultural fear of violence is psychologically damaging
and may be politically inhibiting. To be a serious revolution-
ary, one must reject middle-class values, particularly defer-
ence toward authority. Militant confrontation gives resisters
the experience of physically opposing institutional power, and
it may force students to choose between "respectable" intel-
lectual radicalism and serious commitment to revolution, vi-
olent or otherwise.
6. The political potency of "backlash" is usually exagger-
ated. Those who point to the possibility of repression as a
reaction to confrontation tactics wish to compromise de-
mands and principles and dilute radicalism. Repression will
come in any case, and to diminish one's efforts in anticipation
is to give up the game before it starts.
Some movement spokesmen would add that the possibili-
ties of polarization, repression, and reaction do require more
careful attention by the movement if it wishes to win support
and sympathy among middle-class adults. They would argue
that such support can be obtained, even as militant action is
pursued, by concerted efforts at interpretation to and educa-
tion of such adult groups. The Chicago convention demonstra-
tions are cited as an instance in which adult moderate and
STUDENT PROTEST 109
liberal sympathy was enhanced by militant action, because
some care was taken to maintain good relations with these
groups, and because the actual events in the street were di-
rectly observable by the general public.
We have no way of knowing how many participants in
such actions share these perspectives; many rank and file par-
ticipants may engage in militant or violent action for more
simple and direct reasons: they have been provoked to anger,
or they feel moral outrage. The rationale we have tried to de-
pict is at least partly the result of student outbursts rather
than the cause — after an event (e.g., Columbia), movement
stategists try to assimilate and rationalize what occurred.
Nevertheless, when movement participants maintain that
confrontation and resistance are politically necessary, the ar-
guments described above are those most frequently used.
To a large extent, acceptance of the moral or practical va-
lidity of these arguments depends on one's view of the nature
of American society and of the university as an institution.
Radical activists base their commitment to a politics of con-
frontation on a kind of negative faith in the repressive and illib-
eral character of American institutions, including the uni-
versity. These perceptions have been augmented by an in-
creasing sense that the American university is deeply impli-
cated in the perpetuation of racial injustice. The increasing
protest of nonwhite students has brought the issue to the fore-
ground of campus conflict in recent months.
Black and Third World Student Protest
Without doubt, the most far-reaching challenge to the
moral authority of the university has begun to emerge from
nonwhite students. We have had little to say about this
phenomenon.33 It is of recent origin and is not ordinarily un-
derstood as coextensive with the student movement, although
the latter, as we have suggested, emerged in part as an effort
to extend the gains of Southern black student civil rights ac-
tivists. Black Student Unions and Afro-American Associa-
tions exist on most campuses that have significant numbers of
black students. Until a few years ago, black students tended
110
to be individualistic, assimilationist, and politically indif-
ferent; the drive for black power, however, has offered a
clear opportunity for educated blacks to give collective
expression to their grievances and to identify with the black
community.
Black student protest cannot be understood outside the
framework of the historical status of the black man in Amer-
ican society or without reference to contemporary protests
against that status burgeoning within the black communities
of America. In the following chapter we examine these is-
sues. Yet any speculation on the origins of black student pro-
test must look to two sources that have increasingly been
converging. One important source has been the Negro col-
leges in the South. In a recent book tracing the history of the
black liberation movement, James Forman 34 has shown how
the original Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
began as a response by middle-class, young, Southern black
men and women against what they perceived to be their so-
cial distance from the black lower classes and the compla-
cency evidenced by their own parents. (In this respect, the
black student movement seems akin to features of genera-
tional criticism characteristic of white radicals.) Moreover, as
the civil rights movement became an increasingly "black"
movement, rejecting first the leadership and then the compan-
ionship of whites, black students in the movement also be-
came increasingly conscious of parallel movements of protest
within the urban black communities of the North. Thus there
seem to be two streams feeding into contemporary black stu-
dent protest. One is from the middle classes of the Southern
black community; the second, and increasingly more domi-
nant stream, is from the urban ghettos of the North. In re-
cent years, both sources of black protest have converged and
found a congenial response among high school youth. It is
these youth, with roots in the urban black communities,
steeped in the ideas and ideals of black militancy, who are
now beginning to attend the universities and colleges of
America in greater numbers.
Black student spokesmen are at least as militant as white
radicals, especially in the tactics they advocate and use. But
black student organizations have been more oriented toward
STUDENT PROTEST 111
negotiating specific reforms and concessions than have white
radicals. At the same time, the militant stance of black stu-
dents has been a factor in increasing the militancy of white
students, whose expressions of commitment to justice and
equality are often greeted with skepticism and derision by
blacks.
At San Francisco State College, black militants and stu-
dents of Asian- and Mexican-American background have
joined together to form a "Third World Liberation Front,"
reflecting the identification with Africans and Asians that is
increasingly coming to characterize nonwhite university
students.35 A Third World Liberation Front is also pressing a
list of demands at the University of California at Berkeley.
Nonwhite student protest — with its demands for an au-
tonomous nonwhite faculty, curriculum, student body, and
self-governed standards of admission — constitutes at least
symbolic protest from nonwhite communities as a whole, and
thus involves wider interests and concerns than the campus.
Presumably, a university embodies and transmits the funda-
mental traditions and values of the society. At its heart, mili-
tant black and Third World student protest challenges those
values and ideas as they are currently embodied in curricula,
admissions, and hiring practices, and accordingly demands a
separate line of authority over resources to develop its own
distinctive values and traditions. In effect, it questions the
fundamental and unstated assumption underlying much of
higher education: the cultural superiority of Western civiliza-
tion.
Ultimately, black and Third World student protest de-
mands that the university reassess its currently institution-
alized aims and purposes, and maintains that its present goals
are not relevant to the needs of modern urban society. With
this in mind, we turn to a brief examination of the structure
of the contemporary American university.
Colleges and Universities in Crisis
Student protest has turned many American campuses into
arenas of political conflict. To many people both in and out
of the universities, the very idea of the politicization of the
112
campus is abhorrent, for it conflicts sharply with a cherished
image of the university as a forum for free inquiry, academic
values, and "civility": in short, an institution whose funda-
mental concerns transcend politics. The conception of the
university as a community, sharing common values and cul-
ture and standing apart from both internal political conflict
and external political influence, is embedded in academic tra-
dition and, not infrequently, in law. Tradition has conferred a
kind of sanctity on the special character of the university as
an institution. To many people concerned with the university,
the character of student protest in the 1960's marks an un-
warranted and inappropriate assault on this sanctity; an injec-
tion of profane concerns into what is felt to be a sacred insti-
tution.
Indeed, an insistence on the profane character of the uni-
versity characterizes contemporary student activism and, as
we have suggested, is basic to the radical tactics of the late
1960's. The radical image of the university is that of an insti-
tution which functions as an integral part of the "system,"
providing that system with the skilled personnel and technical
assistance required for the furthering of its political objec-
tives.
In fact, most* universities and colleges can best be seen as
falling somewhere between these two conceptions. The uni-
versity has long since ceased to be — if indeed it ever was —
purely a community of shared values; on the other hand, it
has become deeply involved in the larger political community
without conscious direction and occasionally without intent,
and without careful consideration of the problematic charac-
ter of its enlarged commitments. This is the context of its
current crisis.
The Changing Role of Higher Education
In 1900, approximately 1 percent of the college-age popu-
lation attended academic institutions; by 1939 this had grown
to 15 percent. It nevertheless remained true that both private
and public institutions of higher learning largely served up-
per-income groups in the United States. The plenitude of de-
nominational colleges in the United States is evidence of the
STUDENT PROTEST 113
ways in which colleges served specific ethnic or religious pop-
ulations. Public universities were hardly different: state
schools largely served the agricultural and business needs of
local and state groups.
In recent years the American university has become a na-
tional institution; its students are likely to be drawn into oc-
cupational groups and communities outside the local confines
of its formally designated clientele. Denominational colleges
have lost a great deal of their special cultural character. Re-
search has become diverse as the populations served have ex-
tended through many institutional areas of society and as fed-
eral needs have become a major competitor with state and
local demands. The University of California at Berkeley cur-
rently lists 101 departments in 15 colleges and schools and has
89 separate research institutes, centers, and laboratories. Pri-
vate universities draw significant proportions of their funds
from federal and private foundation research monies, and
large state universities depend heavily on the same sources.
Behind these nationalizing and homogenizing trends lies
the central role which education and research have come to
play in the American economy. The development of new
products, new procedures, and new programs is a major dy-
namic in an economic structure geared to scientific advance-
ment. In addition, welfare and human relations programs
have created an intense demand for training and research in
social sciences. These technological trends are reinforced by
the capacity of an affluent economy for distributing more and
more education as a consumer good. By 1970, it is expected
that approximately 50 percent of college-age persons will be
attending institutions of higher learning. The present college
and university population of 6,500,000 includes representa-
tives of most social levels in the population, although it is still
true that children of laborers and nonwhites are underrepre-
sented. Whether they wish it or not, American universities,
both public and private, are deeply embedded in the social in-
stitutions of American life and have become greatly affected
by public policy and public interests.
Most universities, indeed, have developed an ethos of ser-
vice to community and nation. The provision of technical
services and trained personnel by centers of higher learning is
114
indispensable in an advanced society at a high level of tech-
nological development. So too is the extension of higher edu-
cation to wider and wider segments of the community. These
services, however, necessarily and substantially increase the
university's involvement in matters of political significance.
The model of the university as a "neutral" institution proba-
bly described its pretensions more closely than its uses, even
in the past. In our time, at any rate, it is clear that the uni-
versity is not and cannot be "neutral" if this means, as some
seem to think, not at the service of any social interests. Nor,
clearly, is the university, as presently constituted, "neutral" in
the sense of being equally at the service of all legitimate so-
cial interests. In our time, the university is an important cul-
tural and economic resource; it is also much more fully in
the service of some social interests than others. The provision
of defense research, for example, necessarily aligns the uni-
versity with the course of national foreign policy and military
strategy. In thus entering the service of the political order,
the scientific and technological functions of the university be-
come politicized. Given these circumstances, it is understand-
able that the university has become the scene of conflict and
protest focused on control over the nature and direction of
the services it provides, or fails to provide, to actual and po-
tential publics.
Moreover, the extension of higher education to lower-in-
come and minority groups usually means the attempt to ex-
tend norms and values of privileged classes and cultures.
Lower-income and minority groups may find it difficult to as-
similate the cultural artifacts of the privileged, at least on a
competitive basis. Moreover, the established culture may con-
flict with the claims of minority groups for cultural auton-
omy. Under these conditions, the accepted values of the uni-
versity— including its norms defining the nature of compe-
tence and academic qualification — become contested political
issues.
In thus extending their sphere of interest, influence, and in-
volvement, American universities have gained neither clarity
of purpose nor direction. They are not necessarily willing or
able to assess the relative importance and value of their
greatly extended interests, or the problematic character of
STUDENT PROTEST 115
certain of their own value premises and standards. Few
would deny that the basic "service" the university offers to
society is understanding and criticism. Yet the university's
independence from outside agencies, political powers, and in-
terest groups may be seriously compromised by the high cost
of both education and research, which requires the university
to seek financial support from the very groups which its
scholars are obliged to study and criticize. As a recent study
of university governance suggests :
We have imperceptibly slumped into a posture in which
the demands of external interests — strongly reinforced by
economic lures, rewards of prestige and status, and other
powerful resources which only those with power can marshall
and wield — have increasingly dominated the ethos of the uni-
versity and shaped the direction of its educational activities.36
The Fragmentation of University Interests
These basic problems in the relation of the university to
the society at large are compounded by the development of
different bases of interest and influence among the various
segments of the university community. Put simply, the uni-
versity barely resembles a community at all, if by community
is meant a group sharing common interests and values. Given
this fragmentation of interests, the university is unable to deal
effectively with conflict, whether internal or external; it has
been unable to develop new modes of governance in line with
its increased and disparate commitments. Whether it can de-
velop effective modes of governance while retaining its pres-
ent commitments is a matter of considerable doubt. It is cer-
tain that it cannot do so without substantial alteration of its
structure of power. This is evident from an analysis of the
nature of the internal divisions within the university.
Trustees
The governing boards of colleges and universities vary
greatly in composition, attitudes, and interests, depending on
the type and quality of the institution. Nevertheless, a recent
survey by the Educational Testing Service of over 5,000 col-
lege and university trustees sheds some light on the character-
116
istics of trustees as a group. From these data, a troubling pic-
ture emerges; the trustees tend to be strikingly indifferent to
academic values and uninformed about issues and problems
in contemporary higher education, and very much convinced
of the inappropriateness of student and faculty decision-mak-
ing power on crucial academic issues.37
The average trustee is in his fifties; over 98 percent are
white; over half have yearly incomes exceeding $30,000; over
35 percent are business executives. The majority regard
themselves as politically "moderate." Their attitudes toward
certain issues involving academic freedom reflect their fre-
quent distance from campus concerns.
Over two thirds of the trustees surveyed, for example, ad-
vocate a screening process for campus speakers. Thirty-eight
percent agreed that it is reasonable to require loyalty oaths
from faculty. Twenty-seven percent disagreed with the state-
ment that "faculty members have a right to free expression of
opinions." Many trustees — especially those with business con-
nections— agreed that running a university is "basically like
running a business."
The attitudes of trustees concerning the location of univer-
sity decision-making tend to be strongly at variance with
those of many students and faculty. Trustees tend to feel that
student decision-making, to the extent that it should exist at
all, should concern only "traditional" student concerns such
as fraternities and sororities, student housing regulations, and
student cheating. Seventy percent of the trustees surveyed be-
lieved that students and faculty should not have major au-
thority in choosing a university president; 64 percent felt that
students and faculty should not have major authority on ten-
ure decisions; 63 percent felt students and faculty should not
have major authority in appointing an academic dean.
It should be stressed again that these attitudes vary consid-
erably depending on the type of university represented. Still,
the overall picture is inconsistent with a conception of the
university as an integrated academic community. Distant in
values and interests from most faculty and students, the aver-
age trustee has little conception of the problematic nature of
campus issues. For that matter, as the ETS data make clear,
most trustees rarely bother to remain well-informed about
STU DENT PROTEST 1 1 7
trends and problems in higher education; the vast majority
have not read many major books on higher education, and
are unfamiliar with most of the relevant periodicals.
Faculty and Administration
In using the term "multiversity," Clark Kerr indicates the
fragmented character of the contemporary American institu-
tion of higher learning, its separation into specialized units
united in nothing save connection to a central adminis-
tration.38 One important cause of this fragmentation is
the development of professors and graduate students from
generalists into specialists.39 This process, made necessary by
a veritable explosion of information in all fields of study, has
resulted in a trend toward professionalism — that is, identi-
fying oneself more with one's colleagues everywhere and less
with one's local community. Increasingly, it is according to
the demands of his field of study, not those of the local cam-
pus community, that a scholar's values, success, and accep-
tance are determined. Only a few universities, such as Har-
vard and Chicago, have traditions of sufficient prestige to as-
sure the loyalty of their faculties. Then, too, the members of
these faculties come from all over the world. In general, the
prestige of any institution comes from the eminence of its in-
dividual scholars rather than from the mystique of the institu-
tion itself.40
This derivation of prestige from the faculty makes for an
academic seller's market, with sellers whose interests are
professional and national, if not international, and buyers
whose interests are largely organizational and local. Such dis-
parity of interests is a major source of conflict, in which the
faculty opposition is more effective today than it has been in
the past.41 Whatever their sources, mistrust and animosity be-
tween faculties and administrations are very much in evidence
at many American universities, and this hostility is very little
assuaged by a sense of common commitment to the univer-
sity as a repository of unique values and traditions.
Studies of student activists indicate that they have close ties
to faculty; activists are not unknown and anonymous faces in
the classroom.42 But outside the classroom, faculty have little
118
effect on rules governing student conduct. At Columbia there
was no senate or single body in which the undergraduate fac-
ulty met regularly to consider policy of any kind. The dis-
tance of the faculty from decisions related to student life —
especially the final say in disciplinary proceedings — has led to
mistrust and resentment of administration by both students
and segments of the faculty.
In most student confrontations and protest actions on cam-
pus, the administration is singled out as the target. Students
tend to accept the premise that these officials can, at will, de-
velop and carry out policies in major areas of political con-
cern. For example, "new left" critiques of universities imply
that research policy and use of government funds is largely a
matter of administrative decision rather than of faculty de-
sire. Yet the administration's capacity for controlling the con-
tent of faculty research is greatly limited by the universities'
need for capable research personnel. At major institutions,
significant portions of the faculty adopt a research-oriented
perspective that stresses the requirements of their particular
discipline. Appointments and promotions typically stress abil-
ity within the discipline, rather than teaching or university
service. The result is that faculty tend to follow the reward
structure, which they themselves have created.
University policy is usually arrived at by a series of com-
promises, committees, and balancings of interests. University
officials are severely limited in both power and authority by
faculty values and interests.
Faculty interests fail to generate bonds with the university
as an institution. There is no definition of what the university
"stands for" around which to rally the university "commu-
nity" when crises occur. There are few shared criteria of uni-
versity operation to which appeals can be made.
The lack of power or authority of administrators within
their faculties makes the faculties in turn seem capricious and
irresponsible while the administration seems intransigent and
unresponsive. When officials do speak, it is difficult to know
whether they represent faculty or students, trustees, or other
interested parties. The "double-talk" and evasion about which
students so often complain is a standard defense against clear
commitments in situations where great constraints exist.
STUDENT PROTEST 119
Students
The existence of powerful student movements has meant a
significant increase in the power and influence of students on
American campuses. Such power is not entirely new.
Throughout the history of higher education in the United
States, students have wielded some influence. At times they
have developed activities which, while extracurricular, served
as important sources of new educational content. Student cul-
ture, whether congruent or not with faculty or administrative
goals, has influenced curriculum, university regulations, and
policy through informal pressures.43 But this influence has
rarely amounted to genuine and formal participation in uni-
versity governance. That students are beginning to be heard
and considered in university policies is largely a result of the
political activity and organization of students in recent years.
Out of the agitation and activism of nonacademic issues, stu-
dent power within academic and campus affairs has grown.
The activism of students may be seen as one response to
situations in which student opinion and influence have been
ignored in the administration of colleges and universities.
Lacking effective representation for the expression and alle-
viation of grievances, students have resorted to more militant
measures. In this sense, the character of contemporary stu-
dent protest can be seen as one consequence of the lack of
genuine political mechanisms within the university. As is the
case with any social institution, where "normal channels" for
participation and influence are underdeveloped, political ac-
tion tends to take place outside those channels. In the pro-
cess, hostility and conflict over the style of protest and re-
sponse tends to displace substantive issues as the focus of
concern.
It is particularly at this critical point that the fragmenta-
tion of interests within the university becomes most signifi-
cant. A distant governing board, uncommitted to academic
values, may invoke simplistic calls for order on the campus,
perhaps backed by threats of punitive action. A managerial
administration, under pressure and fearful of conservative
community reaction, may respond to protest with force and
120
bureaucratic intransigence. A faculty concerned with profes-
sionalism may retreat from serious involvement in the issues.
Under these conditions, the university drifts further and fur-
ther away from the possibility of constructive change.
Response to Student Protest
It should be clear that there are no programmatic solutions
to the problems raised by contemporary campus conflict. As
Morris B. Abram, President of Brandeis University, has re-
cently observed, the mere application of conventional means
of social control is a hopelessly inadequate response:
Handling campus disruptions is a herculean task. Univer-
sity security forces are generally limited, and, historically, the
use of outside police is abhorrent to the campus community
and leads to a divisiveness that may be irreparable. Nor is it
easy to apply conventional university disciplinary measures,
especially harsh ones. Like the use of outside police, these
tend to evoke sympathy for the offenders and escalate the
problem. (This is especially true in the case of expulsion,
which is tied up with draft deferment and which, because of
student feeling toward the Vietnam war, is emotionally
equated — morally and literally — with a death sentence.)
Yet a community of several thousand people including a
majority of young adults cannot survive without discipline
and order ... to attempt to maintain order, what courses are
open to it? I see three:
1. The university can surrender to every whim to avoid
confrontation — but if it does, it will not long be a place of
excellence or, indeed, an institution of learning.
2. The university can resist by using outside force — which
probably would result in it becoming both bitter and divided.
3. The university can attempt to set agreed limits as a
community, and try internally to enforce this code. Such
rules must originate primarily with the students and faculties.
They must be a statement of necessities as seen by the per-
sons to be governed, and they will, it is hoped, have an inter-
nal validity which makes them almost self-enforcing.44
In short, if order is to be restored to the university commu-
nity, the university must first take major steps toward devel-
oping forms of governance appropriate to its increased impli-
cation in the wider social and political order. This involves
STUDENT PROTEST 121
attention to the delicate balance between the need for auton-
omy and the need for responsiveness to the surrounding com-
munity.
We have argued that the fundamental problems of the uni-
versity lie in two directions: one external, in the university's
erratic and unexamined excursions into the political order;
the other internal, in a disputed and largely anachronistic
structure of power and authority. It follows that an adequate
response to campus conflict requires substantial alterations in
both of these areas.
A thorough discussion of these matters is beyond the scope
of this report, but a few general comments are appropriate.45
First, as we previously suggested, it seems doubtful that the
university can expect a substantial reduction of conflict as
long as it continues its present commitments to supplying re-
search in certain politically contested areas. This is particu-
larly true in the case of war-related government research. We
have already indicated the complexity of the university's
commitment to this kind of enterprise; it is not simply a
question of administrative intransigence, but also of faculty
interests and, therefore, involves issues of professional auton-
omy and academic freedom. Thus a demand for the removal
of this kind of research from the campus is overly simplistic;
but universities must develop means for assessing the rele-
vance of such research to the values and purposes of an aca-
demic institution.
Second, if the university is to function academically, seri-
ous questions must be raised concerning its structure of
power. Foremost is the problem of the attenuation of the uni-
versity's autonomy from distant interests, as manifested in the
location of decision-making power in the hands of trustees
whose values and interests so frequently conflict with those of
an academic community. Any serious attempt to come to
grips with the issues raised by contemporary student protest
must consider the problematic character of this form of gov-
ernance. It may be that trustee government has lost its use-
fulness; as Riesman and Jencks have argued, boards of trus-
tees "seem in many ways to cause more trouble than they are
worth." i6 On the other hand, the answer may lie in the direc-
tion of structuring boards into closer accordance with the so-
122
cial and political makeup of the community as a whole. The
overriding issue is whether an educational system can endure
without the consent and support of faculty and students, and
whether such higher authorities as trustees, boards of regents,
and legislatures can expect tranquillity on a campus that is
governed on controversial issues by remote authorities whose
understanding of academic values is minimal and who are
empowered to undercut academic and administrative deci-
sions with which they disagree. Reform of the present condi-
tion of university governing boards is a prerequisite to cam-
pus order in the future.
Another prerequisite is the increased participation of stu-
dents in university decision-making and policy-making. The
inclusion of students in campus policy-making is a recogni-
tion that formal political means are necessary to provide ade-
quate representation. It is neither realistic nor justifiable to
expect contemporary students to remain content as second-
class citizens within the university. When the university was
less important, both in terms of its social and political signifi-
cance and in terms of its decisive influence on the student's
life-chances, such representation was correspondingly less
critical. Today, the university — like other large social institu-
tions— commands such critical importance in those areas
that it has in effect made of students a new kind of group
with new kinds of legitimate interests, and it must revise its
structure of representation accordingly.
Similar considerations apply to the need for reformation of
current disciplinary standards and procedures. Most of the
disciplinary procedures in American universities were devel-
oped when students were themselves committed primarily to
traditional roles; such procedures were designed to deal with
the excesses of student highjinks. Issues of drinking, curfew
hours for girls, cheating on examinations, and other aspects
of housekeeping and student privacy were then major con-
cerns before disciplinary boards.17 When universities sought
to promote "character education," and students were tied to
the university by extracurricular bonds fashioned out of ath-
letics and "student activities," a quasi-informal disciplinary
body with vague standards and even vaguer procedures could
nevertheless command the allegiance of students.
STUDENT PROTEST 123
This concept of authority is fast becoming anachronistic in
American higher education. In line with the changing charac-
ter of the university, the basis of the internal legal order of
the campus must undergo a difficult and complex transition
from the concept of "discipline" to that of "due process." 48
The development of workable internal mechanisms of
order and justice is critical, since the alternative is recurrent
outside intervention. The reduction of campus disorder seems
unlikely unless universities possess the means to commit
themselves decisively and consistently to the autonomous reso-
lution of political disputes. Resort to force and the unleashing
of official violence against student protesters is the clearest
way for an administration to effectively destroy an academic
community. In this regard, Daniel Bell has commented:
It was SDS which initiated the violence at Columbia by in-
sisting that the university was the microcosm of the society,
and challenging its authority. After some confusion, the ad-
ministration, in its actions, accepted this definition and sought
to impose its authority on the campus by resorting to force.
But in a community one cannot regain authority simply by
asserting it, or by using force to suppress dissidents. Author-
ity in this case is like respect. One can only earn the authori-
ty— the loyalty of one's students — by going in and arguing
with them, by engaging in full debate and, when the merits
of proposed change are recognized, taking the necessary steps
quickly enough to be convincing.49
The remarks of a University of Chicago official after the re-
cent student occupation of the University's administration
building are instructive:
We were prepared to lose that building or any other build-
ing by occupation or by arson right down to the last stone
rather than surrender the university's ability to govern itself
without the police, the courts, or the Guard.50
Particularly in the case of public universities, this kind of
administrative response requires a similar commitment on the
part of outside authorities to the value of campus self-gover-
nance. Nothing is more destructive of a university's efforts to
resolve conflicts than simplistic demands for "law and order
124
on the campus" and indiscriminate use of police and troops
by public officials.51
A final issue is raised by the themes of Third World stu-
dent protest. Again, we have no simple answers to the aca-
demic problems attendant on the thrust toward cultural au-
tonomy and educational self-determination. It is clear that a
simple call for campus autonomy does not adequately encom-
pass these problems. As we suggested previously, Third World
protest is at bottom a community protest, aimed toward the
extension of the resources and services of the university to
new communities and on new terms. In a perceptive comment
on the meaning of the Columbia gymnasium dispute, Roger
Starr writes:
The question asked of the Columbia gymnasium by the
most potent of its adversaries is whether a gymnasium incor-
porating the standards of Ivy League sport and physical
training is relevant to the needs of the people who live near-
est it. And if the gymnasium is not, as they put it, "relevant,"
can the institution itself be relevant? When Columbia faculty
and administrators are asked why there are so few (report-
edly, six) Negro faculty members, the answer comes back
that it is hard to find qualified faculty. The militants then
pose the question as to whether the qualifications should not
be adjusted to the human candidates, not merely by lowering
the standards for acceptance, but by changing the taught subject
matter, changing the curriculum, changing the student body,
changing — perhaps entirely — the value system of the univer-
sity. Perhaps, in the atmosphere of the new cities, a univer-
sity must become an educational institution with wholly dif-
ferent aims: to teach race pride, applied sociology, pedagogic
reform, small business techniques, revolutionary strategy.52
These issues transcend the university; they involve the
larger questions of race, culture, and power in America. Ac-
cordingly, in the following chapter we examine the meaning
of black protest in the 1960's.
Chapter IV
Black Militancy
We begin this chapter with a number of misgivings. This is
by no means the first official commission to investigate violent
aspects of black protest in America. On the contrary, official
treatments of the "racial problem" may be found far back in
American history, and official investigations of racial violence
have been with us since 1919.1 Occasionally, these investiga-
tions have unequivocally condemned the participants in racial
disorder, both black and white, while neglecting the impor-
tance of their grievances. More often, their reports have
stressed that the resort to violence is understandable, given a
history of oppression and racial discrimination. All of these
reports, nevertheless, have insisted that violence cannot be tol-
erated in a democratic society. Some have called for far-reach-
ing programs aimed at ending discrimination and racism; all
have called for more effective riot control. None of them ap-
pear to have appreciably affected the course of the American
racial situation.
The cycle of protest and response continues. Violence oc-
curs; it is again investigated, again understood, and again de-
plored.
125
126
There are grounds for skepticism, therefore, concerning yet
another report on black militancy. And we are faced with a
number of more specific problems. Our subject is too vast
and complex to the dealt with adequately in a single chapter.
Black protest cannot be properly studied apart from the
larger political and social structure and trends of American
society. We have not been able to do a measurable amount of
field research (although we have done some interviewing)
due to time limitations and also to the suspicion with which
this Commission is viewed by many militant black leaders.
Finally, it is difficult to add much to the recent and exhaus-
tive Kerner Report.
Consequently, our analysis is limited to certain specific is-
sues. We have avoided generalizations about the "racial
problem" and its solutions. Those wishing to understand the
broad social and economic conditions of black Americans,
and the kinds of massive programs needed to remedy those
conditions, should look to the Kerner Report and to the vast
body of literature on the subject. Much of this has been said
before, and we see little point in saying it again. Our general
aim, rather, is to examine the events of the past several years
to understand why many black Americans believe it increas-
ingly necessary to employ, or envision, violent means of
effecting social change.
This chapter is divided into three main sections. In the
first, we examine the interaction between black protest and
governmental response which caused many participants in the
civil rights movement to reject traditional political processes.
Our analysis considers the importance of anti-colonialism in
providing new meaning and ideological substance for contem-
porary black protest. We have found it particularly important
to stress that, for many black militants, racial problems are
international in scope, transcending the domestic issue of civil
rights. The urban riots have been a second major influence on
contemporary militancy, and this section concludes with an
analysis of the meaning of riots for the black community and
for black organizations.
The second section considers some major themes in con-
temporary black protest, and examines their origins in the
history of black protest in America, the anti-colonial move-
BLACK MILITANCY 127
ment, and the present social situation of black Americans.
Many of these themes are most clearly expressed in the ac-
tions of militant youths in the schools. The final part of this
section analyzes the nature and extent of this increasingly sig-
nificant youth protest.
We conclude with an analysis of the extent and direction of
ghetto violence since the publication of the Kerner Report,
and the future implications of the political response to that
violence.
Two related points should be understood. First, this chap-
ter does not attempt to encompass the entire spectrum of
black protest in America. Rather, it is concerned with new
forms of political militancy that have recently assumed in-
creasing importance in black communities. Its general out-
lines are fairly clear, even though, as we write, new militant
perspectives are being generated. We regard what follows as
an introduction to a phenomenon whose importance has been
inadequately appreciated.
Second, it is important to keep the violent aspects of black
protest in perspective. The connection between black mili-
tancy and collective violence is complex and ambiguous.
There has so far been relatively little violence by militant
blacks in this country — as compared to nonviolent black pro-
test— despite the popular impression conveyed by the empha-
sis of the news media on episodes of spectacular violence (or
threats of violence). This is true historically, and it is largely
true for the contemporary situation. It must also be remem-
bered that much of the violence involving blacks has origi-
nated with militant whites (in the case of the early race riots
and the civil rights movement) or from police and troops (in
the case of the recent ghetto riots). On the other hand, we
cannot be optimistic about the future. Recent developments
clearly indicate that black Americans are no longer willing
to wait for governmental action to determine their fate. At
the same time, we find little that is reassuring in the character
of the present governmental response to black protest. We
can only agree with the Kerner Commission that "this nation
will deserve neither safety nor progress unless it can demon-
strate the wisdom and the will to undertake decisive action
against the root causes of racial disorder." 2
128
The Roots of Contemporary Militancy
Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agita-
tion, are men who want crops without plowing up the
ground. *
Frederick Douglass
You show me a black man who isn't an extremist and I'll
show you one who needs psychiatric attention.4
Malcolm X
Black men in America have always engaged in militant ac-
tion. The first permanent black settlers in the American
mainland, brought by the Spanish explorer Lucas Vasquez de
Ayllon in 1526, rose up during the same year, killed a num-
ber of whites, and fled to the Indians.5 Since that time, black
protest has never been altogether dormant, and militant
blacks have experimented with a wide variety of tactics, ide-
ologies, and goals. No simple linear or evolutionary model
covers the complexity of those developments.6
It is inaccurate, for example, to suggest that black protest
has moved from peaceful use of orderly political and legal
processes to disorderly protest and, finally, to rejection of
nonviolent means. Leaving aside the history of Southern slave
insurrections,7 a number of black writers before the Civil
War called for violent action. David Walker, in his An Ap-
peal to the Coloured Citizens of the World (1829), called
white Americans "our natural enemies" and exhorted blacks
to "kill or be killed." 8 The abolitionist Frederick Douglass,
discussing the kidnapping of escaped slaves and their return
to the South under the Fugitive Slave Act, argued that "the
only way to make the fugitive slave law a dead letter, is to
make half a dozen or more dead kidnappers." In supporting
John Brown's armed raid at Harpers Ferry, Douglass advo-
cated the use of any and all means to secure freedom: "Let
every man work for the abolition of slavery in his own way. I
would help all, and hinder none." 9 There is a remarkable
similarity between Douglass' statement and the more recent
dictum of Malcolm X: "Our objective is complete freedom,
BLACK MILITANCY 129
complete justice, complete equality, by any means
necessary." 10
At the same time, the use of legal argument and of the bal-
lot is far from dead in the contemporary black protest move-
ment. The history of black protest is the history of the tem-
porary decline, fall, and resurgence of almost every conceiv-
able means of achieving black well-being and dignity within
the context of a generally hostile polity, and in the face of
unremitting white violence, both official and private. Where
black protest has moved toward the acceptance of violence, it
has done so after exhausting nonviolent alternatives and a
profound reservoir of patience and good faith.
This is the case today. In this section, we examine the
events leading up to the most recent shift in the general di-
rection of militant black protest — the shift from a "civil
rights" to a "liberation" perspective.
Civil Rights and the Decline of Faith
From the decline of Garveyism 1X in the 1920's until quite
recently, the dominant thrust of black protest was toward po-
litical, social, economic, and cultural inclusion into American
institutions on a basis of full equality. Always a powerful
theme in American black militancy, these aims found their
maximum expression in the civil rights movement of the
1950's and early 1960's. Today, these aims, while actively
pursued by a segment of militant blacks, are no longer at the
forefront of contemporary militancy. Several features of this
transition stand out:
1. The civil rights movement was largely directed at the
South, especially against state and local laws and practices,
and, in general, it saw the federal government and courts as
allies in the struggle for equality. The new movement for
black liberation, while nationwide in scope, is primarily cen-
tered in the black communities of the North and West, and is
generally antagonistic to both local and federal governments.
2. The civil rights movement was directed against explicit
and customary forms of racisim, as manifested in Jim Crow
restrictions on the equal use of facilities of transportation,
public accommodations, and the political process. The libera-
130
tion movement focuses on deeper and more intractable
sources of racism in the structure of American institutions,
and stresses independence rather than integration.
3. The civil rights movement was largely middle-class and
interracial. The liberation movement attempts to integrate
middle- and lower-class elements in rejection of white leader-
ship.
4. The civil rights movement was guided by the concepts
of nonviolence and passive resistance. The liberation move-
ment stresses self-defense and freedom by any means neces-
sary.
For the civil rights movement, the years before 1955 were
filled largely with efforts at legal reform, with the NAACP,
especially, carrying case after case to successful litigation in
the federal courts. Among the results were the landmark de-
cisions in Shelly v. Kraemer,12 striking down restrictive cove-
nants in housing, and the series of cases leading up to Brown
v. Board of Education,1* declaring that the doctrine of "sep-
arate but equal" was inherently discriminatory in the public
schools. The Supreme Court directed Southern school juris-
dictions to desegregate "with all deliberate speed," but in the
following years little changed in the South. The great major-
ity of black children remained in segregated and markedly in-
ferior schools; blacks sat in the back of the bus, ate in segre-
gated facilities, and were politically disenfranchised through
the white primary and the poll tax. Southern courts and po-
lice continued to act as an extension of white caste interests.
Established civil rights organizations, lulled by judicial suc-
cess in the federal courts, lapsed into a state of relative
inactivity.14 There was a considerable gap, however, between
the belief of the NAACP and other groups that major politi-
cal changes were in sight and the reality of the slow pace of
change even ^in the more "advanced" areas of the South. The
gap was even greater between the conservative tactics and
middle-class orientation of the established civil rights organi-
zations and the situation of the black ghetto masses in the
North. ,
Since the NAACP, the Urban League, and other estab-
lished groups continued to operate as before, new tactics and
new leaders arose to fill these gaps. In 1955, Mrs. Rosa Parks
BLACK MILITANCY 131
of Montgomery, Alabama, refused to give up her bus seat to
a white man, and a successful boycott of the bus system ma-
terialized, led by the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.
Around the same time, with less publicity, another kind of
organization with another kind of leadership was coming into
its own in the Northern ghettos. Elijah Muhammad and the
Nation of Islam gained wide support among those segments
of the black community that no one else, at the moment, was
representing: the Northern, urban, lower classes.
Neither the direct-action, assimilationist approach of the
Reverend Dr. King nor the separatist and nationalist theme
of the Nation of Islam was new. Both were traditional themes
which had been adopted in response to specific situations. Di-
rect action was used by the abolitionists prior to the Civil
War,15 by left-wing ghetto organizers in the 1930's, and by
CORE in the early 1940's; it had been threatened by A. Phil-
ip Randolph in his March on Washington in 1941, but called
off when President Roosevelt agreed to establish a Federal
Fair Employment Practices Commission.16 The roots of sep-
aratism are equally deep, beyond Marcus Garvey to Martin
Delaney and the American Colonization Society in the eigh-
teenth century.17
The move to direct action in the South brought civil rights
protest out of the courts and into the streets, bus terminals,
restaurants, and voting booths, substituting "creative dis-
order" 18 for litigation. Nevertheless, it remained deeply
linked to the American political process and represented an
innate faith in the protective power of the federal govern-
ment and in the moral capacity of white Americans, both
Northern and Southern. It operated, for the most part, on
the implicit premise that racism was a localized malignancy
within a relatively healthy political and social order; it was a
move to force American morality and American institutions
to root out the last vestiges of the "disease."
Nowhere were these premises more explicit than in the
thought and practice of Martin Luther King, Jr. Nonviolence
was for him a philosophical issue rather than the tactical or
strategic question it posed for many younger activists in
SNCC and CORE.19 The aim was "to awaken a sense of
moral shame in the opponent." 20 Such a philosophy pre-
132
sumed that the opponent had moral shame to awaken, and
that moral shame, if awakened, would suffice. During the
1960's many civil rights activists came to doubt the first and
deny the second. The reasons for this did not lie primarily in
white Southern terrorism as manifested in the killing of
NAACP leader Medgar Evers, of three civil rights workers in
Neshoba County, Mississippi, of four little girls in a dyna-
mited church in Birmingham, and many others. To a large
extent, white Southern violence was anticipated and
expected.21 What was not expected was the absence of strong
protective action by the federal government.
Activists in SNCC and CORE met with greater and more
violent Southern resistance as direct action continued during
the sixties. Freedom Riders were beaten by mobs in Montgom-
ery; demonstrators were hosed, clubbed and cattle-prodded
in Birmingham and Selma. Throughout the South, civil rights
workers, black and white, were victimized by local officials as
well as by night-riders and angry crowds. It was not surpris-
ing, then, that student activists in the South became increas-
ingly disillusioned with nonviolent tactics of resistance. Fol-
lowing the shotgun murder in 1966 of Sammy Younge, Jr., a
black civil rights activist at Tuskegee Institute, his fellow stu-
dents organized a protest march:
We had no form, which was beautiful. We had no pattern,
which was beautiful. People were just filling the streets, and
they weren't singing no freedom songs. They were mad. Peo-
ple would try and strike up a freedom song, but it wouldn't
work. All of a sudden you heard this, "Black Power, Black
Power." People felt what was going on. They were tired of
this whole nonviolent bit. They were tired of this organized
demonstration-type thing. They were going to do
something.22
Despite the passage of civil rights legislation and legal sup-
port for integration, Southern courts continued to apply caste
standards of justice. Official violence of the past — beating,
shooting, and lynching — was supplemented and sometimes re-
placed by official violations of the law. Judges, prosecutors,
and local bar officials explicitly attempted to suppress the
civil rights movement, without any pretense of harmonizing
BLACK MILITANCY 133
competing interests within the ambit of the law.23 Many cele-
brated aspects of democracy, the jury system, for instance,
worked to maintain terrorist racism instead of prosecuting
and punishing it. In the same manner the constitutional inhi-
bitions on federal intrusion into state sovereignty became
from the black viewpoint a mockery of democracy instead of
a keystone.
The problems of white violence and Southern judicial in-
transigence were compounded by political constraints on the
federal government, such that it failed to move decisively to-
ward radically altering the Southern situation.
White liberals and government officials did not deny the le-
gitimacy of the activist's claims; on the contrary, they af-
firmed them. Nevertheless, in practice, field operatives of the
government, especially agents of the FBI, were accused of
vacillation, particularly in protecting civil rights workers.
"Maintaining law and order," said a Justice Department
official, "is a State responsibility." 24 Later, in the aftermath
of ghetto riots and riot commissions, militants were to ask
why law and order was a state responsibility when white
Southerners rioted, but a problem needing massive federal in-
tervention when black Northerners did. At the time, many
activists — and even some "established" members of older or-
ganizations— began questioning the integrity of a government
which praised its own sponsorship of civil rights legislation
while failing to challenge Southern violence.
The deepest or most entrenched meaning of racism began
to emerge, and it made considerable sociological as well as
historic sense: a society that has been built around racism
will lack the capacity, the flexibility, the institutions to com-
bat it when the will to change belatedly appears. The major
American institutions had developed standards, procedures,
and rigidities which served to inhibit the Negro's drive for
equality. It was as if a cruel joke had been played; the most
liberally enshrined features of democracy served to block the
aspirations to equality — local rule, trade unionism, referen-
dums, the jury system, the neighborhood school. And to com-
plete the irony, perhaps, the most elitist aspect of the consti-
tutional system— the Supreme Court — was for a time the cut-
134
ting edge of the established quest for equality, for which it
came under considerable populist fire.
At the March on Washington in 1963, John Lewis of
SNCC voiced the growing lack of enthusiasm for more civil
rights bills. "This bill will not protect young children and old
women from police dogs and fire hoses for engaging in
peaceful demonsrations ..." 25 Federal policy also began to
show less enthusiasm for the civil rights movement. Federal
government officials were often unable to obtain a strong
popular or congressional consensus, even for their moderate
efforts at enforcement, and responded accordingly. In Al-
bany, Georgia, the federal government prosecuted civil rights
demonstrators who picketed a local grocery, while local po-
lice officials who attacked and severely beat the demonstra-
tors were not prosecuted under available federal law.26
Events like these led many militants to ask, with Lewis,
"Whose side is the government on?" 27 Howard Zinn wrote:
The simple and harsh fact, made clear in Albany, and rein-
forced by events in Americus, Georgia, in Selma, and Gads-
den, Alabama, in Danville, Virginia, and in every town in
Mississippi, is that the federal government abdicated its re-
sponsibility in the Black Belt. The Negro citizens of that area
were left to the local police. The U.S. Constitution was left
in the hands of Neanderthal creatures who cannot read it,
and whose only response to it has been to grunt and swing
their clubs.28
Even many moderates agreed with the Urban League's
Whitney Young that the government was "reacting and not
acting" 29 in the drive for Negro rights. Activists who had
been in the South were inclined to agree with a white ob-
server that the American government seemed "uncommitted
emotionally and ideologically to racial equality as a first-level
value."30 In 1963, some civil rights workers were beginning
to lose faith in that government and in the major political
parties. "We cannot depend on any political party, for both
the Democrats and the Republicans have betrayed the basic
principles of the Declaration of Independence." 31
Faith in the political process, and especially in the tradi-
tional alliance between blacks and the liberal elements in the
BLACK MILITANCY 135
Democratic Party, suffered another blow in the failure to seat
the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party delegation at the
1964 Democratic convention.32 The MFDP represented both
a rejection of Southern white-only Democratic politics and a
fundamental belief in the good offices of liberal Democrats,
whose compromise offer of two seats among the regular Mis-
sissippi delegation was seen as an insult.
The MFDP episode climaxed a growing disillusionment
with the white liberal. As a black commentator wrote in
1962, "Negroes are dismayed as they observe that liberals,
even when they are in apparent control, not only do not rally
their organizations for an effective role in the fight against
discrimination, but even tolerate a measure of racial discrimi-
nation in their own jurisdictions." 33 The recognition that civil
rights laws would not suffice to bring blacks into full equality
in American society furthered the search for more intractable
causes of disadvantage in American institutions. Militants
begin to examine the reasons why discriminatory practices
remained in such traditionally "liberal" institutions as labor
organizations, schools, and civil service. The liberal's motives
became suspect. Suspicion extended to another traditionally
"friendly" institution — academic social science, and its repre-
sentatives in the federal welfare "establishment." The Moyni-
han Report, which many blacks took as an affront, was inter-
preted as an attempt to place the blame for continued dis-
crimination in the Negro community and not on the structure
of racism.34
The increased criticism of liberals, academics, and federal
bureaucracies was part of a broader turn to a renewed cri-
tique of the situation of blacks in the North. To a large ex-
tent, and despite such evidence as the Harlem uprisings of
1935 and 1943, most white Northerners had congratulated
themselves on the quality of their "treatment" of the Negro
vis-a-vis that of the South. But with the explosion of Harlem
again — along with several other Northern cities — in 1964, at-
tention began shifting to the problem of institutional racism
in the North, and this shift was accelerated by the Watts riot
the following year. In a real sense, the riots surprised not
only liberal and academic whites, but civil rights leaders as
well. While undermining the moral credibility of liberal
136
Northerners, the riots deprived most civil rights leaders of a
vocabulary for expressing the deeper problems of the North-
ern ghettos. There was a widespread sense that civil rights
leaders either could not or would not speak to the kinds of
issues raised by the riots, and that a wide gulf separated those
leaders — mostly of middle-class background — from the black
urban masses. During the 1964 Harlem riot, for example,
Bayard Rust in and other established civil rights leaders were
booed and shouted down at rallies and in the streets, while
crowds shouted for Malcolm X.35
By the mid-1960's, then, civil rights activists had petitioned
the federal government and the white liberals and found
them wanting. They also found themselves increasingly out of
touch with the vocal ghetto masses. At the same time, an-
other issue began to emerge. Militants began to ask whether
there was not a contradiction between the lack of action at
home and American commitments overseas: "How is it that
the government can protect the Vietnamese from the Viet
Cong and the same government will not accept the moral re-
sponsibility of protecting people in Mississippi?" 36
For some blacks, this contradictory performance further
indicated the government's lack of concern for the Negro. In
1965, the McComb branch of the Mississippi Freedom Dem-
ocratic Party issued a leaflet which caught the mood of disil-
lusionment and suspicion:
1. No Mississippi Negroes should be fighting in Vietnam
for the White Man's freedom, until all the Negro people are
free in Mississippi. . . .
2. No one has a right to ask us to risk our lives and kill
other colored people in Santo Domingo and Vietnam, so that
the white American can get richer. . . . We don't know any-
thing about Communism, Socialism, and all that, but we do
know that Negroes have caught hell right here under this
American Democracy.87
Concern with the war and its implications for black people
intensified along with the war itself. In January, 1966, SNCC
issued a statement on Vietnam:
We believe the United States government has been decep-
tive in claims of concern for the freedom of the Vietnamese
BLACK MILITANCY .137
people, just as the government has been deceptive in claiming
concern for the freedom of colored people in such other
countries as the Dominican Republic, the Congo, South Af-
rica, Rhodesia, and in the United States itself.
We of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
have been involved in the black people's struggle for libera-
tion and self-determination in this country for the past five
years. Our work, particularly in the South, taught us that the
United States government has never guaranteed the freedom
of oppressed citizens and is not yet truly determined to end
the rule of terror and oppression within its own borders.38
A few months later, when Stokely Carmichael of SNCC
brought the new direction of civil rights activists into the
public eye with the slogan of "Black Power," it became clear
that a shift of major importance had occurred.
This change of direction away from the established politi-
cal process toward a critique of larger American policy at
home and abroad did not occur in a vacuum. The civil rights
movement had been organized on an assumption of the re-
sponsiveness of American institutions and especially of the
federal government. As these assumptions were viewed more
critically, as the movement began looking at the North as well
as at the South, and as it became clear that racism was not
simply a localized phenomenon confined to the Southern
bigot, activists began to look harder in two directions: inward
toward the social structure of the urban ghetto and the in-
creasing protests of those caught within it, and outward to-
ward American foreign policy and to the emerging anti-colo-
nial movement. In looking inward to the urban ghetto, many
civil rights activists met and merged with the voices of black,
Northern, urban, lower-class protest. In looking toward the
anti-colonial struggle, black militants acquired a new concep-
tion of their role in the world and new models of collective
action.
The Impact of Anti-Colonialism 39
Throughout most of the past century the world was domi-
nated by whites. The domination was political, economic, so-
cial, and cultural; it involved nothing less than the reclassifi-
cation of the majority of the world's population as somewhat
138
less than human. "Not very long ago, the earth numbered
two thousand million inhabitants; five hundred million men,
and one thousand five hundred million natives." 40
Today this is no longer true. The great majority of lands
formerly under colonial domination have gained at least for-
mal autonomy. The impact of this development has yet to be
completely assessed, but it is clear that no discussion of the
character of racial conflict in America can ignore it.
Black militants in America have frequently looked to Af-
rica for recognition of common origins and culture, and the
influence has been reciprocal. W. E. B. DuBois saw that the
"problem of the color line" was international in scope and
was a guiding force behind the movement for Pan-African
unity. The ideas of Marcus Garvey and other American and
West Indian black nationalists stimulated the development of
African nationalism and informed the intellectual develop-
ment of such African leaders as Kwame Nkrumah.41 The
successful revolt against colonialism in Africa and other non-
white regions has created, in many American black militants,
a heightened sense of the international character of racial con-
flict. Beyond this, it has stimulated a reexamination of the na-
ture of the American racial situation and of the links between
black subordination in Africa and in the United States. As
LeRoi Jones has put it: "The kind of unity I would like to
see among black Americans is a unity that would permit
most of them to understand that the murder of Patrice Lu-
mumba in the Congo and the murder of Medgar Evers were
conducted by the same people." 42 Jones' analysis reflects an
undeniable fact — that the situation of black men everywhere
has been conditioned by the expansion of white European
politics, commerce, and culture over several hundred years.
By defining nonwhites and their beliefs as inferior, wherever
they were found, white domination laid the groundwork for
the current international consciousness of common interest
among blacks. "The Negroes of Chicago," wrote Frantz
Fanon, "only resemble the Nigerians or the Tanganyikans in
so far as they were all defined in relation to the whites." 43
The revolt against colonialism has affected American black
protest in three ways. It has substantially overthrown the
image of blacks as people without culture or history; it has
BLACK MILITANCY 139
created a host of new states run by nonwhites, whose in-
fluence in the world increases daily; and it has provided at-
tractive models of ideology and action.
Culture
Colonialism operates on several different levels: as a politi-
cal order, an economic system, and a set of cultural arrange-
ments. In conjunction with its political and economic aims,
colonialism attempted to deny, depreciate, or destroy indige-
nous cultures. The revolt against colonialism, therefore, is in
part a revolt against cultural dispossession.
The white man's intervention in Africa and Asia was ra-
tionalized as a "civilizing mission." Thought to be lacking in
history and culture, and certainly lacking in Christianity, "na-
tives" were held to be in desperate need of cultural and spirit-
ual tending. Colonialism was not entirely a system of raw ex-
ploitation; it is better conceived as "an association of the phil-
anthropic, the pious, and the profitable." 44 Like all philan-
thropy, the colonial concern for the native was predicated on
the idea of the social and sometimes innate inferiority of the
recipient vis-a-vis the donor. "The nonexistence of Negro
achievements was fundamental to colonial ideology." 45 The
conception of Africa as a land peopled by cultureless savages
was fostered by colonialism and elevated to scientific status in
the doctrines of "scientific racism." It was assimilated by
many American Negroes, who were inclined to look down on
their African origins and to minimize their connection with
the "Dark Continent." 46
These conceptions of black culture and of Africa had been
attacked by scholars like Basil Davidson and Melville Her-
skovits prior to the Second World War. Herskovits, arguing
that their acceptance functioned only to justify racial preju-
dice, exhaustively demonstrated the sophistication of early
African religious, political, and economic systems, showing
them to have been comparable in complexity to European so-
ciety at the same period in history. He placed special empha-
sis on the link between black culture in America and in Af-
rica. Nevertheless, the conception of the Negro as "a man
without a past" 4T dominated racial contacts here and abroad,
140
and the denial that blacks possessed anything of cultural
value shaped many aspects of colonial policy.
The assimilationist policy of the French, Portuguese, and
Belgian colonial administrations allowed black men to attain
legal rights by becoming as nearly white, in culture and man-
ner, as possible, Thus the advancement of blacks to full legal
rights in Portuguese colonies, for example, meant taking a
test to prove that the candidate had transcended his cultural
origins.48 These arrangements, and the white cultural hegem-
ony which they reflected, have obvious parallels in the
American situation, and their effects cut deeply into the self-
image of blacks. The rejection of color, hair and facial fea-
tures could be found wherever these policies against black
people developed, in Brazil and in West Africa as well as
Chicago.19 "The first attempt of the colonized is to change his
condition by changing his skin." 50
A limited rebellion against this cultural and historical dis-
possession has long been an undercurrent of black protest in
America and Africa. The concept of black self-affirmation
which was present in Garveyism and Pan-Africanism came
alive in the post-World War II drive for African indepen-
dence. This resulted in part from the limitations of assimila-
tionist policy itself. "The candidate for assimilation almost al-
ways comes to tire of the exorbitant price which he must pay
and which he never finishes owing." r>1 The thrust toward
black self-affirmation was also encouraged by questioning the
monolithic character of European culture and values:
". . . as time went on, African intellectuals began to ask
. . . why it should automatically be assumed that it is an un-
adulterated virtue to accept Western values." n2
The assault on the dominance of Western culture was
deeply implicated in the quest for political independence
from white rule. After the Second World War, African na-
tionalist movements began a process of reconstruction of Af-
rican history and reevaluation of African culture which con-
tinues today. Much scholarship is devoted to charting and an-
alyzing the growth of early African civilizations, and affirm-
ing their high level of cultural and technological develop-
ment. The strength of these efforts at cultural reconstruction
reflects the pervasiveness of white stereotypes of black inferi-
BLACK MILITANCY 141
ority. Cultural autonomy is important because it has only
been recently and precariously attained.
Nevertheless, the cultural impetus of anti-colonialism has
substantially reversed for many blacks, especially for the new
militants, the negative stereotypes which suffused Western
thought for centuries and which still linger in white concep-
tions of black culture and black achievements. The signifi-
cance of black independence is inestimable. If nothing else, it
has involved a reappraisal by American black militants of the
potential of nonwhites, and hence of themselves. Malcolm X,
a central figure in promoting the new international outlook of
American black militancy, found himself deeply moved by
the very existence of a technological society in Egypt: "I be-
lieve what most surprised me was that in Cairo, automobiles
were being manufactured, and also buses. . . ." 53 "I can't
tell you the feeling it gave me. I had never seen a black man
flying a jet." r>4
Power
The successful revolt against colonialism has changed the
structure of power in the world, and this fact has not been
lost on black militants in America. It demonstrated that peo-
ples supposed to be culturally and technologically "back-
ward" can triumph over ostensibly superior powers; and it
has developed in many militants a consciousness that, in
global terms, nonwhites represent the majority.
Successful anti-colonial movements are evidence that the
military and technological supremacy of the major Western
powers is incapable of containing movements for national lib-
eration. The eventual victories of such movements in Algeria
and Kenya, and the inability of a massive and costly Ameri-
can effort to deflect the course of the national liberation
movement in Vietnam, are not lost on American blacks. If
nothing else, these facts demonstrate that should urban insur-
gency come to this country, it would require a massive and
frustrating effort to control, at enormous costs to all involved.
Perhaps above all, the aura of invulnerability which may
have surrounded the technologically powerful white nations
has substantially crumbled: "Two-thirds of the human popu-
142
lation today," wrote Malcolm X, "is telling the one-third mi-
nority white man, 'Get out.' And the white man is leaving." 55
Perhaps most significantly, the recognition that whites are
an international minority necessarily changes the meaning for
many black militants of their national minority position. Mal-
colm X emphasized this point repeatedly: "There are whites
in this country who are still complacent when they see the
possibilities of racial strife getting out of hand. You are com-
placent simply because you think you outnumber the racial
minority in this country; what you have to bear in mind is
wherein you might outnumber us in this country, you don't
outnumber us all over the earth." 56
Beyond the question of mere numbers, the political and
technological achievements of nonwhite countries produce a
sense of pride and optimism: "For the Negro in particular, it
has been a stirring experience to see whole societies and polit-
ical systems come into existence in which from top to bottom
... all posts are occupied by black men, not because of the
sufferance of white superiors but because it is their sovereign
right." 57
American Negroes across the political spectrum, according
to one observer, uniformly showed a certain amount of pride
in response to the successful explosion of a nuclear device by
China.58 Again, the partial identification with Oriental nations
is not completely new; there were elements of ambivalence
among some Negroes about fighting the "colored" Japanese
in World War II.5'9 What is new is the sense of pride in the
growing power of the nonwhite nations.
There were four African and three Asian nations in the
UN in 1945; twenty years later there were thirty-six African
and fifteen Asian countries represented.60 The rise of these
new states, especially when coupled with the exigencies of
Cold War diplomacy, has meant that since World War II
American leaders have been well aware that the way blacks
are treated at home has important ramifications for world
affairs. A number of American black militants have looked to
the UN specifically as an arena for bringing black grievances
before the world. Malcolm X urged African leaders to bring
up the plight of Afro-Americans in UN meetings 61 and
urged American Negro leaders to visit nonwhite countries,
BLACK MILITANCY 143
where they "would find that many nonwhite officials of the
highest standing, especially Africa, would tell them — private-
ly— that they would be glad to throw their weight behind the
Negro cause, in the UN and in other ways." 62 As colonialism
disappears, the previously unquestioned authority of the
white world likewise disintegrates, and with it the capacity of
a predominantly white society to maintain its privileges.
Black militants are aware of this, and recognize the impact it
may have: ". . . the first thing the American power struc-
ture doesn't want any Negroes to start," wrote Malcolm X,
"is thinking internationally." 63
Politics, Ideology, and Violence
Anti-colonialism provided, directly or indirectly, a cultural
resurgence and a sense of international influence among
American blacks. It also provided new models of ideology
and action which, with greater or lesser relevance, could be
applied to the American situation. Two themes especially
stand out: the politicization of conflict and the redefinition of
the meaning and uses of violence.
White domination of nonwhites shared with other forms of
political domination an attempt to define the situation in non-
political terms. In Africa, as previously suggested, political
domination was cloaked in philanthropic or religious sanc-
tions. As a result, early expressions of anti-colonial conflict
tended to take forms which were not explicitly political:
Every colonial administration has aimed at establishing a
depoliticized regime or has emphasized maximum depolitic-
ization of all the expressions of native life. . . . Consequently,
political reactions against the colonial situation were ex-
pressed indirectly at first, for example, through new syncretist
religious movements loaded with revolutionary implications.64
Again, the American parallels are not hard to find. Black reli-
gious movements of this kind — best typified by the Nation of
Islam — have generally drawn recruits from the most op-
pressed sectors of the American black population.65
The success of the movements for political independence
in the colonial countries required a recognition that the plight
144
of the "native" was a political problem, and that political ac-
tion was the most effective vehicle of major social change.
Early nationalist movements in Africa, therefore, sought to
turn nearly every aspect of life into a political issue.66 This
was especially true of the area of culture. The quests for po-
litical and for cultural autonomy had a reciprocal influence;
the rebuilding of culture served as a basis of political organi-
zation. The political importance of culture lay in the fact that
"natives," as people without history or culture, were also seen
as people without political claims of their own, and therefore
as people to be dealt with from above — benevolently or oth-
erwise. Black culture was — and still remains — a "contested
culture" 67 whose very existence is a political issue of the
greatest importance, in the United States as in Africa.68
Through the same process of politicization, instances of
black resistance in history were redefined as precursors of
contemporary political struggles. "Native" crime was rede-
fined as early revolutionary activity; instances of rebellion
were sought in the past and their significance amplified.69
In viewing history as an arena of white violence and native
resistance, the anti-colonial perspective stressed the intrinsi-
cally violent character of colonial domination. Colonialism
was seen as dependent on the routinization of violence, both
physical and psychological, against the native. Consequently,
revolutionary violence against the colonial regime was
deemed not only necessary, but justifiable, on both political
and psychological grounds. Colonialism, wrote Frantz Fanon,
"is violence in its natural state, and it will only yield when
confronted with greater violence." 70 Further, "at the level of
individuals, violence is a cleansing force. It frees the native
from his inferiority complex, and from his despair and inac-
tion; it makes him fearless and restores self-respect." 71
Anti-colonial writers defined the situation of nonwhites as
one of subordination under a political, social, economic, and
cultural order intrinsically hostile to the interests of non-
whites, and therefore not susceptible to change through or-
derly political processes; "revolt is the only way out of the
colonial situation, and the colonized realizes it sooner or
later. His condition is absolute and calls for an absolute solu-
tion; a break and not a compromise." 72 The rejection of
BLACK MILITANCY 145
compromise meant a corresponding rejection of the native
middle class, which was seen as parasitical, timid, and gener-
ally antagonistic to the struggle of the native masses for
liberation.73 The motive force of the anti-colonial revolution,
for these writers, lay in the lumpenproletariat of the cities.
Through revolutionary violence, Fanon wrote, "these work-
less less-than-men are rehabilitated in their own eyes and in
the eyes of history." 74
The Impact of Riots
Although it is difficult to assess accurately the various in-
fluences on contemporary black militancy, the Northern
urban riots are surely important. Whereas anti-colonialism
provided, directly or indirectly, a model of cultural identity
and a sense of international influence, riots both dramatized
the failure of the American polity to fulfill the expectations
of the civil rights movement, and demonstrated the gap be-
tween black leaders and the prevailing sentiments of their
constituencies.75 The urban riots, then, have had important
consequences for black leaders as well as for governmental
action. Newer and younger faces and organizations have
emerged in recent years to represent the interests of the
urban lower classes, and the older representatives of the civil
rights movement have been required to redefine their political
programs to accommodate these new forms of militancy. A
recent statement by Sterling Tucker, Director of Field Serv-
ices of the National Urban League, indicates that established
black leaders are well aware of the new militancy:
I was standing with some young, angry men not far from
some blazing buildings. They were talking to me about their
feelings. They talked out of anger, but they talked with re-
spect.
"Mr. Tucker," one of them said, "you're a big and impor-
tant man in this town. You're always in the newspaper and
we know that you're fighting hard to bring about some
changes in the conditions the brother faces. But who listens,
Mr. Tucker, who listens? Why, with one match I can bring
about more change tonight than with all the talking you can
ever do."
146
Now I know that isn't true and you know that isn't true. It
just isn't that simple. But the fact that we know that doesn't
really count for much. The brother on the street believes
what he says, and there are some who are not afraid to die,
believing what they say.70
The "Riffraff' Theory
Until recently, riots were regarded as the work of either
outsiders or criminals. The "riffraff" theory, as it is known,
has three assumptions — that a small minority of the black
population engages in riot activity, that this minority is com-
posed of the unattached, uprooted, and unskilled, and that
the overwhelming majority of the black population deplores
riots.77 This theory helps to dramatize the criminal character
of riots, to undermine their political implications, and to up-
hold the argument that social change is possible only through
lawful and peaceful means. If riots can be partly explained as
the work of a few agitators or hoodlums, it is then much eas-
ier to engage wide support in repudiating violent methods of
social protest.
Official investigations generally publicize the fact that nor-
mal, ordinary, and law-abiding persons do not instigate riots.
According to the FBI, riots are typically instigated by a
"demagogue or professional agitator" or by "impulsive and
uninhibited individuals who are the first in the mob to take
violent action or to keep it going when it wanes." 78 Thus,
"hoodlums" were responsible for the 1943 riot in Detroit,
"marauding bands" of criminals in Watts, "a small fraction
of the city's black population" in Chicago in 1968, and "self-
appointed leaders, opportunists, and other types of activists"
in Pittsburgh.79 The recent Chicago Commission noted that
the riot was an "excuse for lawlessness, destruction and vio-
lence" on the part of some "leaders and followers." They also
suggested that "irresponsible advocates are encouraging the
black youth of this city to join in a wholesale rejection of our
national traditions, our public institutions, our common goals
and way of life. Advocates of black racism encourage politi-
cal rebellion in the place of political participation, violence in
the stead of non-violence, and conflict rather than coopera-
tion." s0 Implicit in the "riffraff" theory is the idea that riots
BLACK MILITANCY 147
are unilaterally violent, that public officials and agencies
merely respond in defense against the violence of "irresponsi-
ble advocates," and that the riots have little wider meaning in
the black community.
The "riffraff" theory has been challenged by various stud-
ies. As long ago as 1935, the Harlem Commission reported
that "among all classes, there was a feeling that the outburst
of the populace was justified and that it represented a protest
against discrimination and aggravations resulting from
unemployment." 81 More recently, a study of participants in
the Watts riot suggests that 46 percent of the adult popula-
tion in the curfew zone were either actively or passively sup-
porting the riot. The riot had a "broad base" of support and
was characterized by "widespread community involvement." 82
Although participants in the Watts riot were predominantly
male and youthful, support for rioting was as great from the
better-educated, economically advantaged, and long-time res-
idents as it was from the uneducated, poor, and recent mi-
grants.83
The Kerner Report provided further evidence to contradict
the "riffraff" theory, but its significance was lost in the mass
of facts and figures. The most convincing attack on this
theory came from Fogelson and Hill's study of participation
in the 1967 riots which was published at the end of the Ker-
ner Commissions supplemental studies. The authors found
that (1) a substantial minority, ranging from 10 to 20 per-
cent, participated in the riots, (2) one half to three quarters
of the arrestees were employed in semiskilled or skilled occu-
pations, three fourths were employed, and three tenths to six
tenths were born outside the South, and (3) individuals be-
tween the ages of fifteen and thirty-four and especially those
between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four are most likely to
participate in riots.84
Riots are generally viewed by blacks as a useful and legiti-
mate form of protest. Survey data from Watts, Newark, and
Detroit suggest that there is an increasing support, or at least
sympathy, for riots in black communities. Over half the peo-
ple interviewed in Los Angeles responded that the riot was a
purposeful event which had a positive effect on their lives.85
Thirty-eight percent of the population in the curfew area said
148
that the riot would help the Negro cause. "While the majority
expressed disapproval of the violence and destruction," writes
Nathan Cohen in the Los Angeles Riot Study, "it was often
coupled with an expression of empathy with those who par-
ticipated, or sense of pride that the Negro has brought world-
wide attention to his problem." 8G
That riots are seen by many as a legitimate and instrumen-
tal method of protest has drastic implications for the
"riffraff" theory. Fogelson and Hill ask:
Is it conceivable that . . . several hundred riots could have
erupted in nearly every Negro ghetto in the United States
over the past five years against the opposition of 98 or 99
percent of the black community? And is it conceivable that
militant young Negroes would have ignored the customary
restraints on rioting in the United States, including the com-
mitment to orderly social change, unless they enjoyed the
tacit support of at least a sizeable minority of the black
community? 87
Studies of riot participation suggest that "rioters" represent a
cross section of the lower-class community. The young people
who participate are not known to be psychologically impaired
or especially suffering from problems of masculine identity.
Juveniles arrested in the 1967 Detroit riot were found by a
psychological team to be less emotionally disturbed and less
delinquent than typical juvenile arrestees.88 Furthermore, the
recent riots have served to mobilize the younger segments of
the black community and to educate them to the realities of
their caste position in American society:
Today it is the young men who are fighting the battles,
and, for now, their elders, though they have given their ap-
proval, have not joined in. The time seems near, however, for
the full range of the black masses to put down the broom
and buckle on the sword. And it grows nearer day by day.
Now we see skirmishes, sputtering erratically, evidence if you
will that the young men are in a warlike mood. But evidence
as well that the elders are watching closely and may soon
join the battle.89
BLACK MILITANCY 149
The Direction of Contemporary Militancy
By the mid-1960's, many militant black leaders had be-
come convinced that the aims and methods of the civil rights
movement were no longer viable. The failures of the federal
government and of white liberals to meet black expectations,
the fact of the urban revolts, and the increasing American in-
volvement overseas all served to catalyze a fundamental
transformation in black perceptions of American society. The
anti-colonial perspective, rather unique when expressed by
Malcolm X in 1964, now provided many blacks with a struc-
tured world-view. For the Black Panther Party, for example,
it provided the "basic definition":
We start with the basic definition: that black people in
America are a colonized people in every sense of the term
and that white America is an organized Imperialist force
holding black people in colonial bondage.90
Many articulate black spokesmen saw the final hope of black
Americans in identification with the revolutionary struggles
of the Third World. Even political moderates began pointing
to the discrepancy between the massive commitment of
American resources abroad and the lack of a decisive com-
mitment to end racism at home. Martin Luther King won-
dered why "we were taking the black young men who had
been crippled by our society and sending them 8,000 miles
away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had
not found in Georgia or East Harlem." 91 He also questioned
the official condemnation of the ghetto poor for their "resort
to violence":
As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry
young men I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles
would not solve their problems. . . . But they asked — and
rightly so — what about Vietnam? . . . Their questions hit
home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice
against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without
having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of vio-
lence in the world today — my own government.92
150
By the mid-1960's, then, criticism of fundamental Ameri-
can policies at home and abroad was widespread among intel-
lectuals in the black community. The dominant themes in
contemporary black protest reflect this basic mood. Three
major themes stand out: self-defense and the rejection of
nonviolence; cultural autonomy and the rejection of white
values; and political autonomy and community control.
These trends do not exhaust the content of contemporary
militancy, and they are held in varying combinations and in
varying degree by different groups and individuals. All of
them, however, share a common characteristic: they are at-
tempts to gain for blacks a measure of safety, power, and
dignity in a society that has denied them all three.
Self-defense
Traditionally, Americans have viewed self-defense as a
basic right. The picture of the armed American defending his
home, his family, his possessions, and his person has its ori-
gins in frontier life but is no less a reality in modern subur-
bia. In that picture, however, the armed American is always
white. The idea of black men defending themselves with
force has always inspired horror in whites. In some of the
early slave codes, black slaves were not permitted to strike a
white master even in self-defense.93 In the caste system of the
Southern states, Negroes were expected to accept nearly any
kind of punishment from whites without retaliation; openly
showing aggression meant almost certain violent retaliation
from whites.94 Still, individual blacks occasionally fought
back in the face of white violence in the South; and blacks
collectively resisted attacking whites in the race riots of 1917,
1919, and 1943.95
The civil rights movement, under the leadership of Martin
Luther King, and the sit-ins and freedom rides of the 1960's
stressed nonviolence and what some called "passive resis-
tance." As a result of the failure of local and federal officials
to protect civil rights workers in the South, however, a num-
ber of activists and their local allies began to arm themselves
against attacks by the Ku Klux Klan and other white terrorist
groups. It was only too obvious that local police and sheriffs
BLACK MILITANCY 151
in the South were at best only halfheartedly concerned with
the welfare of rights workers, and at worst were active partic-
ipants in local terrorist groups. The latter was the case in
Neshoba County, Mississippi, for example, where the local
sheriff's department was deeply implicated in the killing of
three civil rights workers. More often, civil rights groups
found they could not depend on Southern officials for protec-
tion. In 1959, the head of the NAACP chapter in Monroe,
North Carolina, had organized local blacks into a rifle club as
an armed defense against repeated assaults by the Ku Klux
Klan.96 A notable result was that "the lawful authorities of
Monroe and North Carolina acted to enforce order only
after, and as a direct result of, our being armed." 97
Following the bloody Southern summer of 1964, local de-
fense groups sprang up in several black communities in the
South. Their primary purpose was to protect nonviolent civil
rights workers in the absence of police protection and to end
white terrorism against black communities. As a rule, they fa-
vored nonviolence as a civil rights tactic, but felt that it could
only operate where nonviolent demonstrators were protected
from assault.9S A study of one such group in Houston, Texas,
concluded that the overall effect of an organized showing of
armed force by blacks was to decrease the level of violence in
the community. White vigilantes were deterred from action,
and police were forced to perform an effective law enforce-
ment role.99
During this period, the focus of attention began to shift
to the ghettos of the North. The dramatic episodes of police
harassment of demonstrators in the South had overshadowed,
for a time, the nature of the routine encounters between po-
lice and blacks in the ghetto. The ghetto resident and those
who spoke for him, however, had not forgotten the character
of the policeman's daily role in the black community, or the
extent of private white violence against Northern blacks in
history. The writings of Malcolm X spoke from Northern,
rather than Southern, experience in demanding for blacks the
right to defend themselves against attack:
I feel that if white people were attacked by Negroes — if
the forces of law prove unable, or inadequate or reluctant to
152
protect those whites from those Negroes — then those white
people should be able to protect themselves against Negroes
using arms if necessary. And I feel that when the law fails to
protect Negroes from white attack, then those Negroes should
use arms, if necessary, to defend themselves.
"Malcolm X Advocates Armed Negroes!" What was wrong
with that? I'll tell you what was wrong. I was a black man
talking about physical defense against the white man. The
white man can lynch and burn and bomb and beat Negroes
— that's all right. "Have patience" . . . "The customs are en-
trenched" . . . "Things are getting better." 10°
After the Watts riot of 1965, local blacks formed a Com-
munity Action Patrol to monitor police conduct during ar-
rests. In 1966, some Oakland blacks carried the process a lit-
tle farther by instituting armed patrols. From a small group
organized on an ad hoc basis and oriented to the single issue
of police control, the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense
has grown into a national organization with a ten-point pro-
gram for achieving political, social, and economic goals.101 In
the process, the name has been condensed to the Black Pan-
ther Party, but the idea of self-defense remains basic: "The
Panther never attacks first, but when he is backed into a cor-
ner, he will strike back viciously." 102
The Black Panther Party has been repeatedly harassed by
police. After the conviction of the party's leader, Huey P.
Newton, for manslaughter in the death of a white policeman,
Oakland police fired into the Black Panther office with rifles
and shotguns presumably because they felt that a conviction
for first-degree murder would have been more appropriate.103
On September 4, a group of 150 whites, allegedly including a
number of off-duty policemen, attacked a group of Panthers
and their white supporters in the Brooklyn Criminal Court
building.104 The confrontation between the Panthers and
some elements of the police has become a feud verging on,
open warfare. This warfare highlights the fact that for the
black citizen, the policeman has long since ceased to be — if
indeed he ever was — a neutral symbol of law and order.
Studies of the police emphasize that their attitudes and be-
havior toward blacks differ vastly from those taken toward
whites.105 Similar studies show that blacks perceive the police
BLACK MILITANCY 153
as hostile, prejudiced, and corrupt.106 In the ghetto disorders
of the past few years, blacks have often been exposed to in-
discriminate police assaults and, not infrequently, to gratui-
tous brutality. Many ghetto blacks see the police as an occu-
pying army; one of the Panthers' major demands is for sta-
tioning UN observers in the ghettos to monitor police
conduct.107
In view of these facts, the adoption of the idea of self-de-
fense is not surprising. Again, in America self-defense has al-
ways been considered an honorable principle, and the refusal
to bow before police harassment strikes a responsive chord in
ghetto communities, especially among the young. In Oakland,
ghetto youths emulate the Panthers; the Panthers, in turn, at-
tempt to direct youth into constructive channels :
We have the Panther Youth Corps, kids from the age of
about ten to thirteen. And after school I would teach them
history and tutor them in mathematics, and it all started be-
cause the kids have always been very enthusiastic, and they
always identify with the Panther. We have this office . . . and
the kids would gather up outside because I wouldn't let them
inside the office because we had weapons inside, and because
I didn't want them hurt or fooling around with the weapons.
... So finally I organized them ... as a Panther group, but
to get in, they would have to show that they were working
very industrious in school, because Panthers always get the
highest grades in school. ... I would have them every report
card period give me their report cards to see how they were
progressing.108
The Black Panther Party has remained defensive and has
been given credit for keeping Oakland cool after the assassi-
nation of Martin Luther King, but this has not stemmed from
any desire on their part to suppress black protest in the com-
munity. Rather, it has stemmed from a sense that the police
are waiting for a chance to shoot down blacks in the streets.
Continued harassment by the police makes self-defense a nec-
essary element of militant action for the Panthers and for
similar groups, such as the Black Liberators in St. Louis.
Beyond this, society's failure to commit itself to ending
racism leads many militants to feel that there is no end in
sight to the long history of white violence and repression. Ad-
154
vocates of self-defense can easily point to instances of official
violence employed at one time or another against a variety of
groups in the United States. With the approval of the govern-
ment in Washington, Southern whites militarized their entire
society between 1830 and 1860, terminated the education of
Negro slaves and deprived them of all human rights, re-
stricted their movements, and punished real or alleged revolts
by summary execution of suspects. Mob violence tacitly sanc-
tioned by the government was employed with terrible effect
against West Coast Chinese as well as against Southern blacks
in the decades following the Civil War. Systematic political
persecution by the government, using techniques of discrimi-
natory legislation, nighttime raids, mass deportation, officially
condoned mob violence, and jailing of political prisoners, was
employed against rebellious political minorities like the IWW
and socialists of 1917 to 1922. During the First World War,
most resident Germans were suspected of disloyalty and
many were physically attacked or had property destroyed by
mobs; during the Second World War, virtually the entire
West Coast Japanese community was removed by the United
States government to concentration camps in the West. Most
prominent in these allusions to violence is the 250-year cam-
paign of suppression waged against the American Indians, the
one example in United States history of official violence
raised to a genocidal scale. For some militants, the history of
this struggle deserves particular attention in the light of con-
temporary events, for it provides a scenario for massive
suppression of a large racial minority.109
As a militant black leader argues, "We have been assaulted
by our environment." 110 For some American militants, this
neutralizes all restraints against the use of counterviolence,
seen not as aggression but as defensive retaliation. And as a
Seattle Panther recently stated, "You see, we've been backed
into a corner for the last 400 years, so anything we do now is
defensive." X11
Cultural Autonomy
The strain toward black liberation mixes indigenous and
international influences. The resurgence of interest in cultural
BLACK MILITANCY 155
autonomy reflects both of these influences, as well as the
unique problems confronting black Americans during the
mid-1 960's. Three elements of that situation are especially sig-
nificant.
First, with the rise of an international outlook and a con-
comitant recognition of America's role in supporting oppres-
sive regimes overseas, black Americans found themselves in a
society that appeared to be bent on suppressing nonwhite am-
bitions on a worldwide, as well as a domestic, scale. "A rising
tide of consciousness that we are Africans," writes James
Forman, "an African people living in the United States and
faced with the problem of sheer survival, dominates the
thoughts of many black college students today." 112 Looking
backward at the long history of white domination in this
country, and outward at American neocolonialism, militants
questioned the cultural basis of American values: "I do not
want to be a part of the American pride. The American pride
means raping South Africa, beating Vietnam, beating South
America, raping the Philippines, raping every country you've
been in." 113
The exclusion of blacks from the mainstream of American
culture has made rejection of that culture less difficult, for as
James Baldwin suggests:
The American Negro has the great advantage of having
never believed that collection of myths to which white Amer-
icans cling; that their ancestors were all freedom-loving
heroes, that they were born in the greatest country the world
has ever seen, or that Americans are invincible in battle and
wise in peace, that Americans have always dealt honorably
with Mexicans and Indians and all other neighbors or inferi-
ors, that American men are the world's most direct and vir-
ile, that American women are pure.114
The thrust toward cultural assimilation became considerably
weakened or reversed by these understandings. As Baldwin
put it, "Do I really want to be integrated into a burning
house?" 115 Unimpressed by the performance of this country
under the dominance of white, Western culture, blacks
looked to their own cultural heritage as a source of affirma-
tion of a different set of values. "We reject the American
156
Dream as defined by white people and must work to con-
struct an American reality defined by Afro-Americans." 11G
A second element of the situation was intrinsic. Supported
by the revival of awareness of African history and culture ac-
companying the anti-colonial movement, blacks grew more
and more impatient with the attempt of the American cul-
tural apparatus — especially the schools and mass media — to
enforce cultural standards which either ignored or depre-
ciated the independent cultural heritage of Afro-Americans.
The systematic destruction of our links to Africa, the cul-
tural cut-off of blacks in this country from blacks in Africa
are not situations that conscious black people in this country
are willing to accept. Nor are conscious black people in this
country willing to accept an educational system that teaches
all aspects of Western Civilization and dismisses our Afro-
American contribution . . . and deals with Africa not at all.
Black people are not willing to align themselves with a West-
ern culture that daily emasculates our beauty, our pride and
our manhood.117
In addition to demanding recognition of a rich cultural
heritage, militant blacks resented the policy implications of
the rejection of that heritage by whites. American social sci-
ence has traditionally — with the exception of men like Her-
skovits — argued that the Negro is only "an exaggerated
American" 118 without values of his own; "the Negro is only
an American and nothing else. He has no values and culture
to guard and protect." 119 Two corollary notions, both of
which have important implications for social policy, flow from
this conception. On the one hand, the current cultural ar-
rangements become relatively immune from independent crit-
icism by blacks; on the other hand, the distinctness of black
behavior comes to be seen as pathological.
Yesterday's rural Negro may have had something like a
folk culture, so the myth goes, but today's urban Negro can
be found only in a set of sociological statistics on crime, un-
employment, illegitimacy, desertion, and welfare payments.
The social scientists would have us believe that the Negro is
psychologically maladjusted, socially disorganized and cultur-
ally deprived.120
BLACK MILITANCY 157
This elitist perspective implies that something must be
done to bring blacks up to the cultural standards of the
"community" or, at the extreme, that blacks themselves have
to clean their own houses — literally and figuratively — before
"earning" admittance into the American mainstream.121 A
long-term result of the denial of black culture was the entire
set of conceptions centering around the notion of "cultural
deprivation": black children failed in schools because they
came from a "cultureless" community, not because the
schools did not teach.122 Central to this perspective was the
ideology of American public welfare, with its commitment to
raising the moral standards of the poor and its public intru-
sions into the family arrangements of ghetto blacks.123
The drive toward cultural autonomy, therefore, was in part
a rejection of the cultural vacuum of "welfare colonialism"
into which the black community has been thrown. It was also
an organizational response to the failure of white liberals to
fulfill the promise of the civil rights movement of the 1950's.
For the most part, white supporters of the movement for civil
rights thought in assimilationist terms. Their object was to
open opportunities for the Negro to enter the mainstream of
American life. Many blacks, however, questioned the cost in-
volved in aiming for inclusion on terms that were irrevocably
the terms of white culture. Many whites, too, tended to as-
sume that their function in the movement for civil rights was
to guide, instruct, and otherwise lead the movement from the
top. These facts, coupled with the rise of identification with
nonwhites on an international basis and increased contact
with the black masses in the North, led black activists to
move toward limiting the role of whites in their organiza-
tions. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee ex-
cluded whites from leadership positions in 1966, citing these
reasons:
The inability of whites to relate to the cultural aspects of
Black society; attitudes that whites, consciously or uncon-
sciously, bring to Black communities about themselves (west-
ern superiority) and about Black people (paternalism); ina-
bility to shatter white-sponsored community myths of Black
inferiority and self -negation; inability to combat the views of
the Black community that white organizers, being "white,"
158
control Black organizers as puppets; . . . the unwillingness of
whites to deal with the roots of racism which lie within the
white community; whites though individually "liberal" are
symbols of oppression to the Black community — due to the
collective power that whites have over Black lives.124
The rejection of white leadership was mistakenly viewed as
a form of "racism in reverse" by many white and some black
commentators.125 But this rejection was not necessarily or
consistently a withdrawal from whites qua whites. Rather, it
was an assertion of the ability of blacks to control their own
organizations, and a rejection of white claims, symbolic or
explicit, of political leadership. As such, it represented one
aspect of a general thrust toward black political indepen-
dence.
Political Autonomy and Community Control
The movement of black militants toward a concern for po-
litical autonomy, with a corresponding rejection of traditional
political avenues and party organizations, is a result of sev-
eral influences. One we have already noted — the failure of
traditional politics to play a meaningful part in the drive for
black dignity and security. Passing civil rights legislation is
not the same as enforcing it. Pleading for goodwill and racial
justice from the relative sanctuary of Congress, the courts, or
the White House is a good deal easier than committing a
massive federal effort to eradicate institutional racism. On a
local level, it occasions no great difficulty to appoint a few
Negroes to positions of some influence; the crucial test is
whether local government acts decisively to correct the prob-
lems of the ghetto and to provide a genuine avenue of black
participation in community decision-making. On all of these
counts, most local governments have failed or, more accu-
rately, have hardly tried. The result is that local government
has become, to those beneath it, oppressive rather than repre-
sentative. Certainly, there are "differences within the system,"
the structure of political power in a given community is
usually less monolithic than it appears from below, and there
may be several loci of influence rather than an organized and
cohesive "power structure." But these points are only mean-
BLACK MILITANCY 159
ingful to those who enter the system with some preestablished
influence. A critical fact about the black ghettos of the cities,
and of the black belt communities of the South, is their tradi-
tional lack of such a base of influence. Without this, blacks
have participated in the political process as subjects rather
than citizens.126 Traditionally, black political leaders have
been less a force for black interest than middlemen in a sys-
tem of "indirect rule": "In other words, the white power
structure rules the black community through local blacks who
are responsive to the white leaders, the downtown, white ma-
chine, not to the black populace." 127
A recent study of decision-making positions in Chicago il-
lustrates the extent of black exclusion from the centers of in-
fluence. Of a total of 1,088 policy-making positions in federal,
state, and local government in Cook County, only 58, or 5
percent, were held by Negroes in 1965. Yet, blacks made up
at least 20 percent of the county's population. Blacks were
especially underrepresented in local administrative positions,
including city and county governments, the Board of Educa-
tion, and the Sanitary District, as well as in Federal Civil Ser-
vice and Presidential appointive positions.128 There was no
black representation at all in the decision-making positions in
the Metropolitan Sanitary District, for example, and only 1
percent of local administrative positions were held by
blacks.129 Further, "Not only were Negroes grossly underrep-
resented in Chicago's policy-making posts, but even where
represented they had less power than white policy -makers.
The fact is that the number of posts held by Negroes tended
to be inversely related to the power vested in these positions
— the more powerful the post, the fewer the black policy-
makers." 13° And the study concludes:
. . . even where represented their actual power is restricted,
or their representatives fail to work for the long-term inter-
ests of their constituency. It is therefore safe to estimate that
Negroes really hold less than 1% of the effective power in
the Chicago metropolitan area. Realistically, the power struc-
ture of Chicago is hardly less white than that of Mississippi.131
The critical character of the lack of black participation in
decision-making is obvious; control over the centers of deci-
160
sion-making means control over the things about which deci-
sions are made. This includes, of course, such traditional civil
rights issues as housing, employment, and education, as well
as newer focal points of black protest like the police and the
welfare apparatus. As the civil rights movement showed,
blacks cannot expect major changes in their political interests
when control over the speed, direction, and priorities of
change is held by whites who are at best less urgently com-
mitted, and at worst openly hostile, to black aims.
A major factor influencing the thrust for black political au-
tonomy is the fact that racism itself has created the conditions
for effective black political organization. Residential segrega-
tion has meant that, in the black belt South as well as the
urban North and West, blacks occupy whole districts en bloc.
With the growing influx of blacks to the central cities, and
the corresponding exodus of whites to the suburbs, larger and
larger areas of the inner cities are developing black majori-
ties. This fact is critical since, as the Chicago study shows,
". . . Negroes simply do not hold legislative posts in city, state,
or federal government unless they represent a district that is
mostly black. No district with Negroes in the minority had a
Negro representative, even when Negroes constituted the sin-
gle largest ethnic group." 132
In light of these facts, black political organization is both
feasible and imperative. Historically, blacks have responded
to their political exclusion in America in a variety of ways.
There has been a traditional strain of separatism, manifested
in schemes for removal to Africa or for setting aside certain
areas in the United States for all-black control; several mili-
tant groups express similar aims today.133 For the most part,
however, contemporary black protest is oriented to the idea
of black community control and/ or the development of inde-
pendent black political bases and a black political party. The
response to the idea of "Black Power" has ranged from accu-
sations by black intellectuals of liberal pragmatism and anti-
intellectualism,134 to white criticism of its inherent racism and
retreat from the goals of integration. The Kerner Report
argued that advocates of Black Power had "retreated into an
unreal world," that they had "retreated from a direct con-
frontation with American society on the issue of integration
BLACK MILITANCY 161
and, by preaching separatism, unconsciously function as an
accommodation to white racism." 135 This argument consti-
tutes a misinterpretation of American political history, of the
decline of the civil rights movement, and of the goals of con-
temporary black protest.
As we suggest in several places in this report, the interpre-
tation of American political history as one of peaceful and
orderly inclusion of diverse groups into the polity is inaccu-
rate. We need not recapitulate here. Many groups have used
violence as an instrument of social change; some minorities
have been forcibly repressed. It is highly unrealistic to de-
pend on the mere goodwill of the larger society to meet black
grievances. As James Forman has observed, "Those in power
do not concede or relinquish their position without a fight, a
skirmish, a struggle, a war in which violence and force will
be used to keep the powerless oppressed." 136 The idea of
black political organization is based on the hard fact that no
political order transfers its power lightly and that if blacks
are to have a significant measure of political control they
must organize into a position of bargaining strength:
Before a group can enter the open society, it must first
close ranks. By this we mean that group solidarity is neces-
sary before a group can operate effectively from a bargaining
position of strength in a pluralistic society. Traditionally,
each new ethnic group in this society has found the route to
social and political viability through the organization of its
own institutions with which to represent its needs within the
larger society.137
The notion that advocates of black autonomy have "re-
treated from a direct confrontation" with white society "on
the issue of integration" is misleading. It ignores both the fact
that the decline of the goals of the early civil rights move-
ment came about as the direct result of societal, and espe-
cially governmental, inaction, and that blacks may be ex-
pected to modify their tactics after decades of such inaction.
It also fails to appreciate the fact that black protest now
aims, at least in theory, at a transformation of American insti-
tutions rather than inclusion into them.
Thus we reject the goal of assimilation into middle-class
America because the values of that class are in themselves
162
anti-humanist and because that class as a social force perpet-
uates racism. . . . Existing structures . . . must be challenged
forcefully and clearly. If this means the creation of parallel
community institutions, then that must be the solution. If this
means that black parents must gain control over the operation
of the schools in the black community, then that must be the
solution. The search for new forms means the search for insti-
tutions that will, for once, make decisions in the interests of
black people.138
This is not separatism, nor is it racism. Militant leaders from
Malcolm X to Huey P. Newton have stressed the possibility
of coalitions with white groups whose aim is radical social
change.139 The Black Panther Party has links with the Peace
and Freedom Party, and its candidate, Eldridge Cleaver, ran
for President on the Peace and Freedom ticket. For the most
part, the new black stance is better described as a kind of
militant pluralism, in which not whites, but traditional poli-
tics and politicians of both races, are rejected.
Militant Youth
It is for young blacks that the "new spirit of revolutionary
militancy" lt0 has had special relevance. The Kerner Report
observed that there was enough evidence by 1966 to indicate
that a large proportion of riot participants were youths. It
also suggested that "increasing race pride, skepticism about
their job prospects, and dissatisfaction with the inadequacy of
their education, caused unrest among students in Negro col-
leges and high schools."111 The events of 1968 support and
go beyond this finding. The schools are more and more be-
coming the locus of a whole spectrum of youthful protest,
from negotiation to violence. This section attempts to describe
the nature of this phenomenon and to account for its signifi-
cance and apparent increase in the last few years.
The transition from a "civil rights" perspective to a "liber-
ation" perspective has had a profound impact on the ideology
and activities of black youth. The following changes are the
most significant:
1. The civil rights movement was for the most part nonvi-
olent, directed at Southern racism, and recruited its most ac-
tive members from the colleges. The new movement has
BLACK MILITANCY 163
shifted its focus to cities in the North and West, regards non-
violence as only one of many tactics for achieving power and
autonomy, and recruits its most active members from high
schools as well as colleges.
2. The civil rights movement was concerned with integrat-
ing schools, eliminating de facto segregation, and providing
equal educational opportunities for blacks. The new move-
ment stresses cultural autonomy, community control of
schools, and the development of educational programs which
are relevant to black history and black needs.
3. During the civil rights movement, high school youth
often participated in demonstrations, sit-ins, and marches.
But this participation was limited in terms of activity and re-
sponsibility. In recent years, however, youth have become in-
tegrated into the liberation movement, often in leadership
roles. One of the most significant features of the new mili-
tancy is the increasing political consciousness of black youth;
this trend is reflected in the formation of Afro-American or-
ganizations in high schools and in the proliferation of youth
chapters of militant political organizations.
Since 1960, there have been dramatic changes in the char-
acter and quantity of high school protests. Even allowing for
varying fashions in news reporting and the tendency of the
press to underreport nonviolent protest, it is nevertheless evi-
dent that there has been a significant increase in militant ac-
tion among black (and white) high school youth.142 There
are two significant aspects to this new militancy: first, young
blacks are now engaging in collective political action and are
less involved in internal gang warfare; and second, the educa-
tional system is intrinsically important to the movement for
liberation because, as it is argued, cultural autonomy and
black dignity are only possible if children are taught by per-
sons responsible and sympathetic to the black community.
It is only recently that students have begun to regard them-
selves as potential power holders in the institutions which
they attend. Youthful militants have focused on the school,
for it is here that for the first time expectations are cruelly
raised and even more cruelly crushed.143 Whereas the last
year has seen increasing protests by middle-class black stu-
dents in colleges and universities, the high school has been
164
the main target of militant action for lower-class urban youth
and for a significant segment of middle-class youth as well.
The protests raise many issues: black student unions, curricu-
lum reforms, black teachers, democratic disciplinary proce-
dures, "soul" food, bussing, boycotts, amnesty for "political"
offenders, community control, police brutality, and many oth-
ers.
In the last two years, most urban school systems have been
disrupted by militant protest. In 1967, 17 percent of civil
disorders involved schools to some degree. In January
through April, 1968, 44 percent involved school. Of the April
disorders following Dr. King's death, nearly half took place
entirely in schools or adjacent grounds, while nearly another
third began in schools and spread to surrounding areas.144
Most of these school disorders were connected in one way or
another with the assassination of Dr. King. But, according to
the Lemberg Center for the Study of Violence, "a continua-
tion of the rate of civil disorders involving schools was un-
covered irrespective of the King tragedy, which served to in-
tensify the trend." 145
This finding is supported by a cursory examination of
school disorders unrelated to riots. At the beginning of the
1967 school year, police and students fought outside Manual
Arts High School, in Los Angeles, in October of 1967; the
school was boycotted by over half the student body on Octo-
ber 23, while the president of the faculty association peti-
tioned the Board of Education for "adequate personnel to
maintain supervision and security in order that the teachers
may teach." 146 New Jersey schools were disrupted when in-
terracial fighting, vandalism, and strikes occurred at Barrin-
ger High School in Newark and at Trenton High School.147
Chicago was the scene of two major school disturbances in
1967. A rally to protest police brutality, held outside Forrest-
ville High School on the South Side, ended in fifty-four ar-
rests and twelve injuries.148 A local gang leader was credited
with clearing the street when the police were ready to use
force.149 Nevertheless, the police were required to fire warn-
ing shots in order to disperse the rally. The next day, a
spokesman for Students for Freedom, a militant group within
the high school, promised to "initiate a boycott . . . unless
BLACK MILITANCY 165
the police and others who patrol the school as if it were a
prison are removed." 150
The second Chicago disturbance occurred in the middle-
class suburb of Maywood after it became known that no
black girl was on the list of five homecoming queen finalists.
Blacks make up about 20 percent of Proviso East High
School's enrollment of 3,700 students. Black and white stu-
dents boycotted the school for over a week; at one point, at-
tendance was down to less than 30 percent; city officials im-
posed a 9:00 p.m. curfew after incidents of sniper fire and
looting; sixty adults were arrested over the weekend; the
school's security force was tripled and plainclothes policemen
patrolled the corridors; at the end of the week, police were
required to use tear gas to disperse crowds.151
Maywood's black students were represented by local
officials of the NAACP who presented a list of grievances to
the superintendent of schools. "There was pressure from
many sources, some of the school board, to have uniformed
police with riot sticks and helmets in the building," the super-
intendent said, "but I absolutely refused. A public school that
has to be turned into an armed camp has reached the lowest
point in desperation. It presents an image of pupils that we
can't afford to have." During the middle of the boycott,
school officials agreed to a number of demands, including
(1) an in-service program in human relations for teachers,
(2) adequate teaching of black history, (3) abolition of cor-
poral punishment except in self-defense, and (4) investiga-
tion of complaints about cafeteria service. The school board
and Proviso East's superintendent worked out an agreement
despite the hostility of local whites who, like the Mayor's
wife, felt that the "rioters" should have been "put down.
They haven't anything to cry about. What hurts me is that
the few spoil it for the good ones." 152 To school officials,
however, the grievances seemed to be widely supported in the
local black community. "We have responded," said the super-
intendent, "to some legitimate needs that were presented with
impact."
The significance of the Maywood disturbance lies in the
participation of middle-class youth and NAACP officials.
Maywood is a middle-class suburb with a substantial percent-
166
age (almost 30 percent) of Negro residents. Its median fam-
ily income is $9,450 and the median home value is almost
$18,000. One quarter of the forty-man police force is black
and two of the town's six trustees are Negroes,153 The suc-
cessful protest at Proviso East seriously contests the idea that
school disorders are limited to a minority of poor, lower-
class, delinquency-prone youth.
School protests by black students escalated in 1968. In
Cincinnati, sit-ins and demonstrations in six of the city's eight
high schools resulted in the suspension of 1,300 and arrests
of 100 students, most of whom were black. Racial antago-
nism in East St. Louis forced the closing of a number of
schools in late April. In South Bend, Indiana, seventy-two ad-
ults and fifty-nine juveniles were arrested after a sit-in at the
school system's administration building. The sit-in was a pro-
test against the use of armed guards in two high schools and
an elementary school in a predominantly black community.
In Pittsburg, California, all of the city's eleven schools were
closed on April 18 after a day of racial violence. Police were
called into Central High School in Flint, Michigan, to break
up a sit-in protesting the selection of only one Negro among
six cheerleaders.154
Militant protest was resumed with greater intensity in the
fall. Interracial fights broke out at Bladensburg High School,
in Washington, D.C., following complaints of discrimination
against black students. "We're going to participate in every-
thing and nobody is going to stop us," said one spokesman
for the dissident students. After a boycott and sporadic vio-
lence, officials of the school met with student representatives
and agreed to an amnesty.155 Interracial violence recurred at
Trenton High School for the fourth time in nine months, re-
sulting in a boycott by two thirds of the school's 3,000 stu-
dents. Blacks were challenged by white students chanting
"Wallace for President." Further confrontations were pre-
vented by riot police who intervened between the two
groups.156 Other disturbances occurred in New Jersey: black
demonstrators and white counterdemonstrators protested at
Linden High School after a black student was suspended for
allegedly striking two white teachers; and about five hundred
black students boycotted classes at Montclair High School in
BLACK MILITANCY 167
order to protest a change in faculty leadership of the Black
Student Union.157 The teaching of black history was another
central issue in many protests, such as the boycott of three
high schools in Waterbury, Connecticut.158
Massive student boycotts occurred this year in Chicago and
New York. On October 21, about twenty thousand black stu-
dents boycotted classes and presented the Chicago Board of
Education with an extensive list of demands, including locally
controlled schools, student participation in decision-making,
more black teachers and history courses, more technical and
vocational training, greater use of black business services to
schools, and holidays to commemorate the birthdays of Dr.
King, Malcolm X, Marcus Garvey, and W. E. B. DuBois.159
In summary, high school protests by black students have
significantly increased in the last few years. Both middle- and
lower-class youth participate in such protests, often with the
active support of their parents and local community organiza-
tions. The success of boycotts and other instrumental protests
suggests the increasing political consciousness of youth. Al-
though interracial violence continues in varying intensity,
black and white students occasionally demonstrate more soli-
darity than they have in the past. "It's the youngsters versus
the system," commented the Mayor of Trenton, New Jersey,
after a school disorder, "rather than the students versus the
students." 160 High school activists have generally impressed
school officials with the sophistication and legitimacy of their
demands. Despite the general hostility of the white commu-
nity and press, some ameliorative concessions have been
made to black students while more fundamental disputes over
school control and decentralization are still being contested.
The pervasiveness and strength of youthful militancy must
be appreciated in the context of the black liberation and stu-
dent movements. Traditional discussions of high school youth
have invariably focused on "troublesome" and "abnormal"
forms of "acting-out" behavior — disturbances at dances, ath-
letic events, and parties, vandalism, gang fights and disputes
over gang territory, etc. Much of this activity was seen as a
function of youthful exuberance, or of adolescent restlessness,
or of lower-class culture. Theorists and experts have shown a
special interest in explaining the negative and pathological at-
168
tributes of gangs, but they have rarely been concerned with
examining collective youth action from a political perspec-
tive. There is a strong tendency to regard the political activi-
ties of youth in terms of "conspiracy" and "anarchy" 161 — an
attitude which underestimates the popular appeal and pur-
poseful character of the student movement.
Similarly, much attention has been directed to the problem
of why young people cause so much trouble for the schools,
whereas the equally legitimate question of why schools cause
so much trouble for youth has been seriously neglected.162
The problematic aspects of the educational process are widely
attributed to students' cultural and family backgrounds, or to
their inability to adjust to the demands of school life, or to
their failure to cooperate with teachers and school adminis-
trators. Fighting, vandalism, truancy, disobedience, and other
"disrespectful" behavior are handled as a form of psychologi-
cal immaturity and cultural primitivism, commonly asso-
ciated with adolescent "acting-out."
The militant activities of black youth have served to revise
popular conceptions about the immaturity and independence
of youth, as well as to focus considerable attention on the de-
ficiencies and irrelevance of most ghetto high schools. Gov-
ernment and school officials have in some instances recog-
nized the power of youth by agreeing to negotiate student de-
mands, by creating special programs of job training, and by
"consulting" with youth and gang leaders in the development
of community projects. Often this recognition is motivated by
an awareness that youth organizations, like the Blackstone
Rangers in Chicago, are becoming more and more capable of
mobilizing vast numbers of young people with a view to po-
litical or even guerrilla action. After the death of Dr. King,
the Blackstone Rangers helped to "cool" Chicago's South
Side. According to one commentator, "This was their way of
saying, 'You have to reckon with us because, if we cannot
stop one [a riot], well, you know the alternative.' This was a
naked display of power." 163
The politicization of black youth reflects the growing polit-
ical interest of youth in general. During 1968, for example,
students in New York high schools formed a union to protest
racism and the war in Vietnam as well as to enable participa-
BLACK MILITANCY 169
tion in local school issues.164 On April 26, thousands of high
school students attended a rally to protest the war.165
More specifically, however, student militancy has its roots
in the black liberation movement for political and cultural
autonomy. Several years ago, school protests focused almost
uniquely on the problem of de facto segregation. Black adults
and their children boycotted local schools to protest their fail-
ure to comply with federal standards on integration. White
crowds, particularly in the South, gathered outside newly in-
tegrated schools to jeer, harass, and even attack Negro
students.166 Civil rights organizations engaged student support
to protest segregated facilities, but always insisted on the use
of nonviolent tactics. In late 1960, for example, a representa-
tive of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference pre-
dicted a widespread resumption of demonstrations against
segregation: "I certainly judge from the students' activity," he
said, "that they are mobilizing for a big push in the fall. They
are going to find unique ways to apply the technique of
nonviolence." 167 Traditional civil rights organizations, espe-
cially the NAACP, were quick to condemn violence, even
from black youths seeking revenge against white attacks.168
The new directions of the black movement have influenced
and in turn been influenced by urban, lower-class youth. Sep-
aratism has replaced integration as a primary objective, and
nonviolence has become for many another tactic of resistance
rather than a moral creed. It is the spirit and determination
of black youth that moved James Forman to describe the
1960's as the "accelerating generation, a generation of black
people determined that they will survive, a generation aware
that resistance is the agenda for today and that action by peo-
ple is necessary to quicken the steps of history." 169 The mili-
tancy of youth has received considerable support from adults
and community organizations.170 "If we had done this twenty
years ago, our children wouldn't have to be doing this today.
These children will make us free." 171
Perhaps the most significant reason for the militancy of
youth is the fact that education is central to the liberation
perspective. The Nation of Islam has long recognized the im-
portance of recruiting and socializing a whole new generation
of proud and masculine youths:
170
The education and training of our children must ... in-
clude the history of the black nation, the knowledge of civili-
zations of man and the Universe, and all sciences. . . . Learn-
ing is a great virtue and I would like to see all the children
of my followers become the possessors of it. It will make us
an even preater people tomorrow.172
New militant leaders and students themselves have come to
appreciate the value of this perspective, realizing that only
through control of the educational system can they build a
political movement and instill pride, dignity, self-apprecia-
tion, and confidence in black Americans.
The struggle for educational autonomy is both a cultural
and political struggle. It is a cultural struggle in the sense that
the school can provide youth with an education which gives
proper attention to black history and black values, thus pro-
viding a positive sense of self-appreciation and identity. But it
is also a political struggle, for it is widely felt that the educa-
tional system is a predominant means used by those in power
to teach people to "unconsciously accept their condition of
servitude." 173 According to Edgar Friedenberg, a white so-
ciologist who has written extensively on education, "the
school is the instrument through which society acculturates
people into consensus before they become old enough to resist
it as effectively as they could later." 174 Thus, local control of
the educational system will provide an opportunity to build a
resistance movement as well as to achieve some cultural inde-
pendence from the values of white America. "We don't want
to be trained in ROTC to fight in a Vietnam war," says one
black youth. "We want ROTC to train us how to protect our
own communities." 17r>
The available evidence suggests that we are presently wit-
nessing the rise of a generation of black activists, enjoying
wide support from their communities and relatives, commit-
ted to the principles of local community control and cultural
autonomy, and disenchanted with techniques of peaceful pro-
test associated with the civil rights movement of the 1950's.
Given this militant participation by black youth, it is difficult
to accept the Kerner Report's conclusion that "the central
thrust of Negro protest in the current period has aimed at the
inclusion of Negroes in American society on a basis of full
BLACK MILITANCY 171
equality rather than at a fundamental transformation of
American institutions." The available evidence suggests that
"inclusion" and "integration" have become largely irrelevant
to black youth. "Considering the opportunities for being a
Negro man in 1967 that society has held out to them," writes
an adviser to the Blackstone Rangers, "they feel very fortu-
nate to have rejected them. . . . They want a mainstream all
their own." 17G Demands of the groups like the Black Pan-
thers for cultural autonomy and decentralized power are
gaining ascendancy. As Herman Blake testified before this
Commission :
You can't go through any community without seeing black
youth with Huey P. Newton buttons and "Free Huey." Many
of them who have no connection with the Panthers officially,
wear the Panther uniform. We all groove on Huey. No two
ways about it. We dig him. And I use that rhetoric because
that's the way it is. Not for any exotic reasons.177
And, as the Reverend John Fry has suggested, in Chicago's
South Side ghetto, "What it means to be a man is to be a
Blackstone Ranger." 17S Whatever differences may exist be-
tween militant black groups, their programs generally speak
to self-defense, political independence, community control,
and cultural autonomy. These themes challenge American so-
cial arrangements at a deeper level than did the movement
for "civil rights," and, in doing so, they reveal problematic
aspects of our national life which have been taken for
granted, at least by whites. Thus, since the publication of the
Kerner Report, the thrust of black protest, especially among
the young, has shifted from equality to liberation, from inte-
gration to separatism, from dependency to power.
Conclusion
As we have pointed out throughout this report, group po-
litical violence is not a peripheral or necessarily pathological
feature of American political history. For many black Ameri-
cans today, violent action increasingly seems to offer the only
practical and feasible opportunity to overcome the effects of
172
a long history of systematic discrimination. The events of
1968 suggest that violent racial incidents have, at least tempo-
rarily, become part of the routine course of events rather
than sporadic calamities.
Martin Luther King, Jr., was killed on April 4, 1968. In
the aftermath, civil disorders occurred throughout the coun-
try, following an already rising incidence of disorder in the
first three months of the year.179 The following facts are sig-
nificant: (1) The month of April alone saw nearly as many
disorders as the entire year of 1967, and more cities and
states were involved than in all the previous year. (2) There
were more arrests and more injuries in April, 1968, alone
than in all of 1967, and nearly as much property damage;
and there were more National Guard and federal troops
called more times in April, 1968, than in all of 1967.180
Major riots — none of which, individually, matched in dead
or injured the largest riots of the past three years — took place
in several cities during the month of April. In Chicago, 9
were killed and 500 injured; in Washington, D.C., 11 died,
with 1,113 injuries. There were 6 deaths and 900 injuries in
Baltimore, and 6 more deaths in Kansas City, Missouri. Ra-
cial violence of some degree of seriousness occurred in 36
states and at least 138 cities.1*1
Considered in isolation, the summer itself was less "hot"
than that of the previous year, but it was hardly quiet. Racial
violence occurred in July, for example, in Seattle; in Pater-
son, New Jersey; in Jackson and Benton Harbor, Michigan;
in San Francisco and Richmond, California. In Cleveland, a
shoot-out between black militants and police ultimately left
eleven dead, including three policemen. 1S2 And any aura of
relative quiet over the summer should be dispelled by the fact
that racial violence in 1968 did not end with the end of the
summer. The opening of schools in the fall was accompanied
by an increase in school disorders; sporadic assaults on po-
lice, and by police, continue as of this writing in many cities
and on college and high school campuses.
Two general points emerge in considering the extent of ra-
cial disorder in 1968. First, generally speaking, the violence
began earlier and continued longer. The year 1967 also wit-
nessed spring violence, but not to the same degree; and not
BLACK MILITANCY 173
all of the increase in the spring of 1968 can be attributed to
the assassination of Dr. King.183 It has become more and
more difficult to keep track of violent racial incidents.
Second, 1968 represented a new level in the massiveness of
the official response to racial disorder. In April alone, as
noted, more National Guard troops were called than in all of
1967 (34,900 to 27,700) and more federal troops as well
(23,700 to 4,800). lst Never before in this country has such a
massive military response been mounted against racial disor-
der. Troops in the streets of the cities are well on the way to
becoming a familiar sight. In one city — Wilmington, Dela-
ware— armed National Guard troops, enforcing a series of
harsh anti-riot and curfew provisions, occupied the city from
April, 1968, until January, 1969.185
Although it is far too early for certainty, limited evidence
suggests that the massive ghetto riot — typified by the upris-
ings in Watts, Newark, and Detroit — may be a thing of the
past. None of the disorders of 1968 matches these in scope.
The specific explanation for this is far from clear. It lies
somewhere in the interaction between more massive and
immediate "riot control" efforts by authorities and the appar-
ent perception by many blacks that the "spontaneous riot," as
a form of political protest, is too costly in terms of black
lives. It is clear that some militant ghetto organizations, such
as the Blackstone Rangers in Chicago and the Black Panther
Party in Oakland, have made direct and markedly successful
efforts to "cool" their communities, especially in the wake of
the King assassination. These efforts have been spurred in
part by the belief that a riot would provide the opportunity
for police attacks on ghetto militants: "We don't want any-
thing to break out that will give them [the police] the chance
to shoot us down. They are hoping that we do something like
that but we are passing the word to our people to be
cool." 1SG Blacks did not participate, except peripherally, in
the Chicago events during the Democratic National Conven-
tion. There were no riots in the black neighborhoods of
Chicago. 1ST If this is a genuine trend, the decline of the
large-scale riot has important analytical implications. It pro-
vides a kind of test for competing perspectives on the sources
and meaning of riots. If the decline of riots means the decline
174
of disorders in general, then the view of riots as controllable
explosions rooted in black "tension" makes a good deal of
sense. If, on the other hand, the decline of the riot means
only a change in the character of violent black protest, then
the roots of black violence may go deeper and reach more
profoundly into the structure of American institutions.
There is some evidence — highly tentative — to suggest that
the decline in the scale of riots coincides with an increase in
more strategic acts of violence and a shift from mass riots to
sporadic warfare.188 In July, as previously noted, Cleveland
police battled with armed black militants, and the resulting
disorder saw three police killed. There were several attacks
on police in Brooklyn in the late summer; in August, two po-
licemen were wounded by shotgun fire; in early September,
two policemen were hit by sniper fire as they waited for a
traffic light.189 In mid-September, a police communications
truck was fire-bombed, slightly injuring two policemen.190 In
Harlem, two policemen were shot and wounded, reportedly
by two black men, as they sat in a parked patrol car.191 Two
September attacks on police took place in Illinois; in Kanka-
kee, a policeman was wounded in what police termed an
"ambush" in the black community; 192 in Summit, black
youths reportedly fired shotguns at two police cars, injuring
two policemen.193 In the same month, eighteen black mili-
tants were arrested in St. Louis following a series of attacks
on police, including shots fired at a police station and at the
home of a police lieutenant.194 During October, the San
Francisco Bay Area was the scene of the bombing of a sher-
iff's substation and sniper fire against firemen in the black
community. Finally, in recent months, black students have
made increasing use of strategic acts of violence including the
occasional fire-bombing of homes as well as campus
buildings.195
Correspondingly, as we indicate in Chapter VII and more
generally in the last chapter, the police and social control
agencies increasingly view themselves as the political and mil-
itary adversaries of blacks. This official militancy has even
taken the form of direct attacks on black militant organiza-
tions. Black youth has become a special target for govern-
mental and police action. Despite frequent successes in high
BLACK MILITANCY 175
schools, youthful militancy has often met with tough-minded
programs of social control on the part of police and school
officials. Most "helping" programs — job training, summer
outings, athletic events, tutoring and civic pride projects, etc.
— are seasonal and employ short-term recreational strategies
to "keep a cool summer" and distract youths from more
militant kinds of activities. Some authorities feel, for exam-
ple, that "riots are unleashed against the community" from
high schools and that the granting of concessions to students
will only encourage further rioting.196
Consistent with this policy, intelligence units are supple-
menting youth offices within police departments and are de-
veloping sophisticated counterinsurgency techniques of gang
control.197 The size of the gang intelligence unit in Chicago
has been increased from 38 to 200.198 Governmental pro-
grams on behalf of urban youth rarely involve young people
in the decision-making process. A modest program of job
training in Chicago which appointed local youth leaders to
positions of administrative responsibility was harassed by po-
lice and discredited by a Senate investigation.199 Rather than
increasing opportunities for the exercise of legitimate power
by adolescents, public agencies have opted for closer supervi-
sion as a means of decreasing opportunities for the exercise
of illegitimate power.200
At the same time, it is clear that the massive national
effort, recommended by the Kerner Commission, to combat
racism through political and peaceful programs has not ma-
terialized and shows few signs of doing so in the near future.
Despite widespread agreement with the Commission's insis-
tence that "there can be no higher priority for national action
and no higher claim on the nation's conscience," 201 other
priorities and other claims still seem to dominate the nation's
budget.
Part Three
White Politics and Official Reactions
Chapter V
The Racial Attitudes of White Americans
The most significant conclusion of the National Advisory
Commission on Civil Disorders (The Kerner Commission)
was that "White racism is essentially responsible for the ex-
plosive mixture which has been accumulating in our cities
since the end of World War II." x Yet most Americans reply
"not guilty" to the charge of racism. Inran opinion survey
conducted in April of 1968, white Americans disagreed by a
53 to 35 percent margin with the contention that the 1967
riots were brought on by white racism.2
Perhaps part of the disagreement between public opinion
and the Kerner Commission stems from different definitions
of "white racism." The average person is likely to reserve the
emotionally loaded term "racism" for only the most extreme
assertions of white supremacy and. innate Negro inferiority.
Finding that few of his associates express such views, he re-
jects the central conclusion of the riot commission. Perhaps
he would be somewhat more likely to agree that historically
white racism is responsible for the position of the black man
in American society. The Kerner Commission Report, how-
ever, not only asserts that "race prejudice has shaped our his-
179
180
tory decisively" but claims further that "it now threatens to
affect our future." The Commission validated its charge of
racism by pointing to the existing pattern of racial discrimi-
nation, segregation, and inequality in occupation, education,
and housing. But a distinction must be made between institu-
tional racism and individual prejudice. Because of the in-
fluence of historical circumstances, it is theoretically possible
to have a racist society in which most of the individual mem-
bers of that society do not express racist attitudes. A society
in which most of the good jobs are held by one race, and the
dirty jobs by people of another color, is a society in which
racism is institutionalized, no matter what the beliefs of its
members are. For example, the universities of America are
probably the least bigoted of American institutions. One
would rarely, if ever, hear an openly bigoted expression
at schools like Harvard, Yale, the University of Chicago, the
University of California. At the same time, university facul-
ties and students have usually been white, the custodians
black. The universities have concerned themselves primarily
with the needs and interests of the white upper middle and
upper classes, and have viewed the lower classes, and espe-
cially blacks, as objects of study rather than of service. In
this sense, they have, willy-nilly, been institutionally "white
racist."
In the following pages we will examine the available data
on white attitudes toward black Americans. There we will see
that although there have been some favorable changes in the
past twenty years, a considerable amount of racial hostility
and opposition to integration remains. To understand the
sources of this opposition, we will examine the social charac-
teristics of those whites most opposed to racial change, and
we will consider psychological studies which examine preju-
dice in the individual personality. In the final section, on the
widening racial gap, we will examine the disparity between
white and black perception of racial issues, including the per-
ception of causes and consequences of riots. This disparity is
typified by the responses of black Americans to the same
April, 1968, opinion survey in which white Americans re-
jected the view that white racism was responsible for the
riots: by a 58 to 17 percent majority, blacks agreed with the
THE RACIAL ATTITUDES OF WHITE AMERICANS 181
contention that the 1967 riots were brought on by white rac-
ism. Also in the concluding section we will examine an opin-
ion gap that may be even more important and ominous than
black-white differences. That is the discrepancy between
public willingness and congressional unwillingness to enact
programs guaranteeing significant improvement in jobs, hous-
ing, and education in the black ghetto.
Decline in Prejudice
Since the early 1940's, survey research organizations such
as the National Opinion Research Center in Chicago have, at
repeated intervals, asked a series of standardized racial atti-
tude questions of representative samples of the U.S. popula-
tion. The immediately apparent trend of responses to these
questions is a decline in the verbal expression of anti-Negro
prejudice and a striking reduction in support for discrimina-
tion and segregation.3 Thus the percentage of white Ameri-
cans who express approval of integration when asked, "Do
you think white students and Negro students should go to the
same schools or to separate schools?" was 30 percent in 1942,
48 percent in 1956, and 60 percent in 1968. Support for resi-
dential integration as measured by responses to the question,
"If a Negro with the same income and education as you
moved into your block, would it make any difference to
you?" exhibit a similar pattern. In 1942, only 35 percent of
American whites would not have objected to a Negro neigh-
bor of their own social class. By 1956, 51 percent and, by
1968, 65 percent would accept such a neighbor. Similar
trends can be observed in decreasing support for segregation
in transportation facilities and increasing support for equality
of employment opportunity.
182
Chart V-l: Percent of White Americans Who Say White Students and Negro
Students Should Go to the Same Schools
60%
48%
30%
1942 1956 1968
Data furnished courtesy of the National Opinion Research Center.
Chart V-2: Percent of White American Who Do Not Object to Residential
Integration
65%
51%
35%
1942 1956 1968
Data furnished courtesy of the National Opinion Research Center.
THE RACIAL ATTITUDES OF WHITE AMERICANS 183
The Validity of Racial Attitudes Surveys
Several critics have questioned whether these changes in
poll responses represent "real" reductions in prejudice as op-
posed to a mere decline in the respectability of prejudice.
Even if we accept this skeptical explanation of the positive
trends, however, there are grounds for optimism. At the very
least, the reported shifts signify a change in perceived racial
norms, which in itself creates a climate of opinion more fa-
vorable to interracial understanding. It is true that any at-
tempt to assess white attitudes toward black Americans is
subject to numerous pitfalls. A person's "true" racial beliefs
and feelings cannot be measured directly but can only be in-
ferred from what he says and does. For a variety of reasons
an individual may not wish to reveal his true attitudes, and
indeed he may be only dimly aware of them. Several students
of race relations have argued, in fact, that overt discrimina-
tory actions, rather than verbal reports of feelings, are the
appropriate indices of prejudice. However, this suggestion
overlooks the fact that people can lie with behavior as well as
with words.4 Under the pressure of economic gain or social
expectations, a racially intolerant person may accept desegre-
gation, while the opposite pressures may lead to discrimina-
tory behavior on the part of tolerant individuals.
With regard to social policy implications, the chief justifi-
cation for studying attitudes of intolerance and exclusiveness
is the fact that racist attitudes are among the important
causes of racist behavior. There are several grounds for be-
lieving that racial opinion survey responses do reflect genuine
beliefs and feelings. Several experiments have demonstrated a
clear relationship between the standard measures of racial at-
titudes used in public opinion polls and more direct measures
of autonomic or "gut-level" emotional responses.5 Others
have shown a positive relationship between verbal measures
of attitudes toward minority groups and actual behavior in
interaction with members of the minority group.6 The posi-
tive relationship between attitudes and behavior has not been
demonstrated only in experimental studies of interracial be-
184
havioY. Preelection surveys have also shown that attitudes,
when properly measured, are predictive of complex social be-
havior.
Several grounds for believing that the polls are tapping
genuine feelings and evaluations have been suggested by
Thomas Pettigrew.7 For example, the remarkable consistency
of the results of surveys of white attitudes toward blacks re-
ported by different polling agencies using a wide variety of
questions would be difficult to explain if the respondents in
such surveys were merely attempting to appear respectable or
to gain the approval of the interviewers. As Pettigrew points
out, rapport in the polling situation is unusually good, and
most survey critics underestimate what a good confidant an
attentive stranger makes, who is interested in your personal
views. Perhaps most compelling of all, the data reported in
this chapter on regional differences in verbal expressions of
negative attitudes toward black Americans, and the general
trend over time of a sharp national reduction, but not elimi-
nation, of anti-Negro prejudice, are completely consistent
both with the persisting regional differences in segregation
and discrimination and with the national reduction in social
and legal sanctions in support of segregation.
The Elusive White Blacklash: Increased Acceptance of
Goals, Continued Rejection of Means
Another question raised by the preceding data on changing
racial opinions concerns the widely discussed "white back-
lash." Have recent hardenings and reversals of white attitudes
nullified the gains of the past? The answer to this question is
surprisingly complex. As we shall see, there has been no
overall white backlash in the sense of a reversal of attitudes on
the part of previously tolerant whites. Nor has there been a
decline in white support for the broadly defined goals of
equality of opportunity. But to suggest that the term "back-
lash" may be a misnomer is not to deny that white racism
continues to be a powerful force in American life. The events
of the 1960's have made race more salient for all white
Americans, especially for the lower-middle and working class
white Northerner, whose latent anti-Negro feelings could now
THE RACIAL ATTITUDES OF WHITE AMERICANS 185
emerge with political force, and for the white liberal, whose
sympathy for the broad goals of equality were put to the test
by specific policies such as the bussing of schoolchildren and
increased demands for black autonomy.
The several post-riot studies of immediate white reactions
to riots do not lend much support to the view that formerly
sympathetic whites have suddenly shifted to an anti-Negro
stance because of the riots. Those whites who reacted most
negatively to the Watts riot, for example, were those who ini-
tially disliked Negroes, favored segregation, and opposed the
civil rights movement.8 However, one can find scattered evi-
dence in the poll data to support the assertion that there has
been an overall negative reaction to the riots. An August,
1967, Gallup poll found that almost a third of all white per-
sons nationally say they have a lower regard for Negroes be-
cause of the riots. But the same poll demonstrates that basic
white attitudes toward integration in housing have undergone
no significant negative change. Gallup reports the following
shifts in white attitudes toward housing integration during the
period of ghetto riots and the presumed "white backlash":
Chart V-3: Responses of White Americans to the Question: "If colored peo-
ple came to live' next door, would you move?"
1963 1965 1966 1967
Yes, definitely 20% 13% 13% 12%
Yes, might 25 22 21 23
No 55 65 66 65
From Gallup Report press releases. Furnished courtesy of the American
Institute of Public Opinion.
Chart V-4: Responses of White Americans to the Question: "Would you
move if colored people came to live in great numbers in your neighbor-
hood?"
1963 1965 1966 1967
Yes, definitely 49% 40% 39% 40%
Yes, might 29 29 31 31
No 22 31 30 29
From Gallup Report press releases. Furnished courtesy of the American
Institute of Public Opinion.
186
Thus, there is little in the available opinion data to support
the notion of white backlash, if backlash is denned as in-
creased opposition to the goals and aspirations of Negro
Americans. The trend toward greater acceptance of interra-
cial goals by white Americans was merely slowed, not re-
versed. When one looks at white attitudes toward the means
employed by groups protesting inequality of opportunity for
black Americans, a somewhat less sympathetic picture emerges.
In a survey conducted by the National Opinion Research
Center in April of 1968, it was found that even though 40
percent of the white Americans interviewed said that they
have become more favorable toward racial integration in re-
cent years (as opposed to 33 percent who report becoming
less favorable and 25 percent who say their attitudes have not
changed), almost two out of three said they think the actions
Negroes have taken have hurt their cause more than they
have helped it.
The tentative acceptance of the goals of black Americans,
particularly for equal treatment by the law and for equal ed-
ucational opportunities, coupled with a rejection of the means
employed by action groups striving for equality of opportu-
nity, has long characterized white attitudes. Throughout the
1960's, whites have consistently opposed civil rights demon-
strations. Whites opposed, by close to a two to one majority,
the lunch counter sit-ins in 1960, the Freedom Rides of 1961,
the civil rights rally in Washington, D.C., in 1963, the stu-
dent-run Negro voter registration project in Mississippi in the
summer of 1964, and more generally "actions Negroes have
taken to obtain civil rights." 9
Much of the argument for the existence of white backlash
has been based upon an increase in opposition to the pace of
social change. The evidence for the desire for a slowdown is
supplied primarily by the changes in response to the follow-
ing question:
Chart V-5: Responses of Representative Samples of Americans to the
Question: "Do you think the Johnson administration is pushing integra-
tion too fast, or not fast enough?"
THE RACIAL ATTITUDES OF WHITE AMERICANS 187
Percent Saying "Too Fast"
February, 1964 30
April, 1965 34
July, 1966 46
September, 1966 52
August, 1967 44
April, 1968 39
October, 1968 54
From Gallup Report press releases. Furnished courtesy of the American
Institute of Public Opinion.
Although there has been a great deal of fluctuation, the gen-
eral trend appears to have been toward an increased resis-
tance to the pace of racial change.
In a recent study, however, Professor Michael Ross of the
University of California at Santa Barbara has cast doubt
upon this interpretation.10 Ross's data suggest that during the
Kennedy and Johnson administrations there was a cyclic
quality to public reactions to the pace of racial change, and
that shifts in public opinion about the rate at which integra-
tion is proceeding constitute not an overall hardening of
white attitudes, but simply highly volatile but temporary reac-
tions to recent events. The Ross analysis suggests that re-
sponses to the question about the pace at which the adminis-
tration is pushing integration are influenced by the general
popularity of the administration, independent of racial issues.
The results of a survey conducted by Louis Harris for
Newsweek magazine in the summer of 1967 fit the pattern of
increased acceptance of goals, coupled with continued rejec-
tion of means. Though the Harris survey showed that whites
were somewhat more inclined to admit to stereotyped views
regarding anti-Negro prejudice than they had been in the
immediate past, a clear majority were "ready to approve even
the most drastic federal programs to attack the root causes
of violence in the ghettos." 1X (Notably, by 1968 the accep-
tance of negative stereotypes had generally declined to below
the 1963 level.) In sum, then, during the 1960's assertive at-
tempts to achieve political, social, and economic equality of
opportunity for Negroes have met with the disfavor of a ma-
jority of white Americans. Only moderate legislation re-
ceives the approval of more than half of the whites in this
188
country. At the same time, over the past twenty years, and
despite some minor short-term fluctuation, there has been a
steady increase in white support for the goals of integration
and equality of opportunity for black Americans. Neverthe-
less it is abundantly clear that a great deal of resistance to
racial change remains.
To understand the sources of this resistance, we must know
more about the characteristics of those who oppose integra-
tion and who accept negative stereotypes of black Americans.
Who are the prejudiced and the opponents of racial change,
and how do they differ from their more tolerant countrymen?
Both social structure and individual personality are involved
in the causes of prejudice, and thus the answer to this ques-
tion will be given in two parts. We will examine first the
differences in white racial attitudes among population sub-
groups, and then the psychological characteristics associated
with racial prejudice.
Subgroup Difference in White Attitudes Toward Blacks
Numerous studies of the relationships between prejudice
and such variables as age, education, and socioeconomic sta-
tus are in agreement on at least one point: no single social
characteristic can completely account for patterns of ethnic
hostility.12 Nevertheless, in a number of studies, small but
consistent differences in prejudice have been shown to be as-
sociated with certain social groups. In the United States, the
greatest differences in attitudes toward racial integration are
regional. Surveys conducted by the National Opinion Re-
search Center in 1963 show white Northerners overwhelm-
ingly more favorable toward integration in schools, housing,
and public transportation than white Southerners, by a
difference ranging from 1 9 percent in the case of housing in-
tegration to 38 percent on the issue of integration in public
transportation.13 Clearly, historical effects continue to exert
their influence on white Southern racial opinion. Nevertheless
these regional differences are declining, and Southern atti-
tudes have undergone drastic changes from their earlier base-
line of a total rejection of integration.
Another population variable which is related to prejudice,
THE RACIAL ATTITUDES OF WHITE AMERICANS 189
though less strongly than region, is urbanization. Sheatsley 14
found that residents of the ten largest metropolitan areas ob-
tained the highest and most favorable scores on a "pro-inte-
gration scale" consisting of responses to questions dealing
with equality of employment opportunity for Negroes, racial
integration in schools, housing, and public transportation, and
approval or disapproval of white-Negro social interaction.
Those who reside in rural areas had the lowest and least fa-
vorable scores on the pro-integration scale. These rural-urban
differences in racial exclusiveness are perhaps in keeping with
the widely held view of the city-dweller as more cosmopoli-
tan, and tolerant of diversity in traits and behavior.
In keeping with another commonly held view, several stud-
ies have shown marked age differences in anti-Negro preju-
dice, with the oldest age groups expressing the most intoler-
ance. This difference may be related to the long-term trend in
white attitudes; it is possible that part of this long-term trend
reflects the replacement of an older, more intolerant genera-
tion by a newer and less prejudiced one. However, until ade-
quate long-term studies of the same individuals become avail-
able (as opposed to age-grading of a sample interviewed at
one point in time), this must remain a tentative hypothesis. It
is logically possible, as Bettelheim and Janowitz have pointed
out,15 that as a person grows older his attitudes become less
tolerant. A disturbing exception to the age and prejudice rela-
tionship is the finding in several recent surveys that the very
youngest Southern respondents interviewed, i.e., those in their
early twenties, are somewhat less tolerant than those in their
thirties. It has been suggested that this difference may reflect
the impact of the post- 1954 controversy over school desegre-
gation upon the formation of racial attitudes during the ado-
lescence of these young Southerners.16
In sociological research, socioeconomic status is often de-
fined in terms of three closely related variables: education,
income, and occupational status. Both separately and in com-
bination, these three components of socioeconomic status are
clearly related to anti-Negro prejudice. The higher an individ-
ual's socioeconomic status, the less likely it is that he will ex-
press intolerant pro-segregationist attitudes toward black
190
Americans. Of the three, education bears the strongest and
most consistent inverse relationship to anti-Negro prejudice.
In fact, the previously discussed relationship of age to preju-
dice is complicated by the important role of education.
Young people are not only likely to have more education
than older Americans (in terms of years of schooling), but
the quality of education that young people receive is more
likely to stress values and perspectives incompatible with rac-
ism. Thus the relationship between age and prejudice is at
least partly attributable to the more basic relationship be-
tween education and prejudice.
These findings should prove encouraging to those who view
the transmission of democratic values as one of the important
functions of education in a free society. However, certain
qualifications must be made regarding the presumed increase
in tolerance as a function of education. First of all, as Bettel-
heim and Janowitz pointed out, "the very fact that a signifi-
cant portion of college graduates still hold stereotypes and
support discrimination reflects the limits of the educational
system in modifying attitudes." 17 In addition, Stember has
shown that education brings both positive and negative
changes.18 The better educated are less likely to accept tradi-
tional stereotypes or to reject casual contacts with minority
group members, and they are opposed to formal discrimina-
tory policies. However, better educated people develop their
own "idiosyncratic" and derogatory stereotypes, and they
may be more likely to favor informal discrimination and to
reject intimate contact with minority groups. Thus, while the
overall effect of education is undoubtedly to reduce at least
the most blatant and obvious varieties of prejudice and dis-
crimination, education as it is presently offered in our society
is not completely incompatible with bigotry and intolerance.
A variable that bears a more complex relationship to preju-
dice than any mentioned so far is religion. Several studies
show that Jewish respondents are considerably less intolerant
of Negroes than are Protestant and Catholic respondents,
though this may be due in part to differences in level of edu-
cation and urbanization. The data on church attendance are
especially interesting and perhaps somewhat surprising. Nu-
merous studies have shown that church attenders are, on the
THE RACIAL ATTITUDES OF WHITE AMERICANS 191
average, more prejudiced than nonattenders. This finding is
particularly disturbing in view of the fact that the teachings
of all the world's major religions have stressed brotherly love
and humanitarian values. That Americans who attend church
are more intolerant than those who do not seems to suggest
that Christian religious denominations have failed to commu-
nicate the values of brotherly love and humanitarianism.
Social psychologists Gordon Allport and Michael Ross 1!'
have suggested a possible resolution of this paradox. Since in-
tolerance and discrimination conflict with religious principles,
a person for whom religion is intrinsically valuable, and who
has internalized the teachings of his religion, should be par-
ticularly unlikely to direct hostile sentiments and actions to-
ward others. On the other hand, prejudiced attitudes would
not necessarily be dissonant for the casually religious person
for whom religion, instead of being valued for its own sake,
serves instrumental needs such as getting along in the com-
munity. If we can assume that frequency of church attend-
ance is positively associated with devoutness and intrinsic re-
ligiosity, then the Allport-Ross interpretation receives some
support from recent studies which have asked more detailed
questions about frequency of church attendance. Several such
studies have demonstrated a curvilinear relationship between
prejudice and church attendance, with the casual infrequent
attender being more prejudiced than either the nonattender or
the person who attends church very frequently. Studies of the
relationship between attitudinal religious orientation and prej-
udice provide even more direct support for Allport 's distinc-
tion between instrumental and intrinsic religiosity.20
In sum, a composite profile of the racially intolerant indi-
vidual emerges: He (or she) is most likely to be a poorly ed-
ucated, older, rural Southerner, with a poor-paying, low-sta-
tus job. Though he is nominally a Christian, he attends
church irregularly. His more tolerant countryman is most
likely to be a well-educated, highly paid resident of a large
Northern city, with a high-status occupation. If he professes
allegiance to any religious denomination, he is most likely to
be Jewish or, if he is a Christian, a devoutly religious person
who attends religious services frequently.
192
Personality and Prejudice
Although such social factors as urbanization, region, and
education account for much racial prejudice, these forces do
not exert their effects directly upon intolerance and discrimi-
nation. They are mediated through the personality, beliefs,
and feelings of individuals.
White racism may serve three general needs or functions
for those who subscribe to it. 21 One psychological function of
prejudice which has received a great deal of attention in
many studies is the externalization of inner conflict. A person
who is insecure about his own personal or social status may
attempt to maintain his own sense of worth by disparaging
others. Influenced by the writings of Sigmund Freud, a num-
ber of authors have argued convincingly that, for many indi-
viduals, their own unacceptable and unconscious impulses
and desires may be an important cause of prejudice. Sexual
and aggressive feelings, which the individual would rather not
acknowledge to himself, may be projected outward and at-
tributed to minority groups. This refusal to acknowledge neg-
ative characteristics of oneself or one's own group, coupled
with a tendency to project the unacceptable characteristics
onto "out-groups," has been labeled the "authoritarian per-
sonality" and may result from child-rearing practices in
which the expression of sexuality and aggression is met with
severe parental sanctions.22 Such a person is most comforta-
ble with rigid and clear-cut systems of authority and status.
He tends to be unusually submissive to those above him in
such hierarchies and unusually aggressive toward those he
perceives as below him. The authoritarianism or "F" (for fas-
cism) scale developed by the personality researchers has been
used in hundreds of studies, most of which have found a
clear relationship between authoritarianism and prejudice.
Authoritarian personalities are not necessarily "sick" or "neu-
rotic." Indeed where authoritarian and racist social and po-
litical institutions exist, such personalities may be happier and
"better-adjusted" than the more ambivalent and more con-
sciously conflicted egalitarian personalities.
Externalization of inner conflict is not the only psychologi-
cal need that prejudice may serve. Obviously, intolerant atti-
THE RACIAL ATTITUDES OF WHITE AMERICANS 193
tudes may receive continual support from the social environ-
ment. Most individuals, needing the approval of their fami-
lies, friends, and work or business associates, do not readily
dissent from their views.23 In a study contrasting the psycho-
logical sources of anti-Negro prejudice in the North and the
South, Thomas Pettigrew found that the externalization of
inner conflict, as measured by the authoritarianism scale,
played an equally important role as a cause of prejudice in
both regions: in both the North and South, the authoritarians
were more anti-Negro than the nonauthoritarians. That au-
thoritarianism was not the sole cause of prejudice, however,
was demonstrated by the fact that, though the level of au-
thoritarianism was the same in the Northern and Southern
samples, the level of anti-Negro prejudice was much higher
among the Southern respondents. Pettigrew found that in the
South, but not in the North, those who were most attuned to
and concerned about adhering to local social customs were
most prejudiced.
In addition to the functions of social adjustment and exter-
nalization of inner conflict, prejudiced attitudes may serve a
reality testing function for some people, helping them to "size
up" objects and events in the environment.24 The cognitive
advantages of "prejudgment" in terms of culturally acquired
beliefs and evaluations are numerous and immediately appar-
ent. For example, reports of political turmoil in the emerging
African nations are quickly categorized by the bigot as yet
another illustration of "innate Negro inferiority" and the
need for white leadership and dominance of black people.
This saves him the mental effort of considering the complex
historical, political, and economic factors involved in these
and similar problems. By helping him make sense of the
world, these borrowed stereotypes become more firmly fixed,
and he becomes convinced of the accuracy of his socially ac-
quired definition of "reality." ,
A great deal of contemporary social psychological research
has supported the general proposition that there is a strain to-
ward consistency and "balance" in people's beliefs and evalu-
ations. We feel more comfortable when the groups and peo-
ple that we like are associated with "good" characteristics and
actions, and similarly we expect those we dislike to have neg-
194
ative qualities and to engage in "bad" activities. If we become
aware of inconsistencies and contradictions in our beliefs, we
feel uncomfortable and tend to change them so as to elimi-
nate or at least reduce the inconsistency.25
The contradiction between American values of fair play
and equality of opportunity on the one hand, and racial dis-
crimination on the other, are potential sources of "cognitive
dissonance." Does this mean that communications which di-
rectly attack this potential conflict will result in less preju-
dice? In a public opinion survey, sociologist Frank Westie 26
first asked people to indicate their agreement or disagreement
with general American creed statements, such as "Everyone
in America should have equal opportunities to get ahead,"
and "Under our democratic system people should be allowed
to live where they please if they can afford to." Most respon-
dents agreed with the general items. They were then asked
for their opinions on specific social policy questions related to
the general values, such as "I would be willing to have a
Negro as my supervisor in my place of work," or "I would be
willing to have a Negro family live next door to me." A
smaller percentage of people were willing to support values
such as equality of opportunity in employment and housing
when these values were expressed in the form of specific and
personal reactions to a Negro supervisor or a Negro neighbor
than when they were expressed in general terms. At this
point, Westie's interviewers asked the respondents to compare
their responses to the two related sets of questions. When
they had been inconsistent, most of the respondents recog-
nized the dilemma, and of those who responded to the incon-
sistency, 82 percent changed their anti-democratic answers to
the specific questions in the direction of their democratic
answers to the general questions. For example, upon seeing
the conflict between his endorsement of equal employment
opportunity and his rejection of the idea of a Negro as his
supervisor, a respondent might say, "Well, I guess it might be
all right for a Negro to be supervisor if he were unusually
qualified." Perhaps this finding lends support to Myrdal's pre-
diction that in the long run the general tenets of the Ameri-
can creed will win out over the contradictory valuations de-
THE RACIAL ATTITUDES OF WHITE AMERICANS 195
fining American race relations. However, it is clear that his-
torical and situational factors will also play a decisive role.
Selecting the Target for Prejudice: Racial
Differences or Belief Differences?
A source of prejudice that is related to the reality testing
and cognitive balance functions of attitudes is illustrated by
Milton Rokeach's recent research on "perceived belief
dissimilarity." 27 In a series of studies, Rokeach and his as-
sociates have contended that when a person is racially preju-
diced he is not really bothered by racial difference so much
as by a feeling that beliefs and values differ from his own.
When given a choice, whites prefer to associate with persons
of other races who hold similar beliefs, e.g., a white Christian
with a black Christian rather than with a white atheist. These
results were obtained not only in experimental studies in
which students completed questionnaires but also in very
realistic work situations in which newly hired janitors and
hospital attendants chose work partners on the basis of simi-
larity in beliefs rather than on the basis of race. This general
principle must be qualified in the case of intimate social con-
tact. In interpersonal forms of behavior such as one's own
dating or marriage or that of a member of one's family, race
is a more important consideration than beliefs. Although this
seems to contradict Rokeach's general formulation, the con-
tradiction may be more apparent than real. Though discrimi-
nation tends to occur along visible lines of language, color,
religious affiliation, and ethnicity, according to Rokeach,
these visible characteristics indicate to most people the exis-
tence of important differences in beliefs, interests, and
values.28 Even when we learn that fOr at least some important
religious or political values he is similar to us, we apparently
assume that in other realms he will probably differ from us
more than a person who has similar views and is of our own
race. Thus, even the slight preference for persons of the same
race and same belief, over persons of a different race but
same belief, may really represent attributed differences and
similarities in beliefs and values in realms other than those in
which the beliefs have been made public. At the very least,
196
we can probably conclude that for most people it is not color
per se that produces intolerance, but rather the differences in
beliefs, values, and behavior that are assumed to be asso-
ciated with differences in color.
The ethnocentric preference for in-group members and dis-
like for those who are "not our kind" varies from one indi-
vidual to another and from one population subgroup to an-
other. One important consequence of the experiences and
widening psychological horizons that accompany urbanization
and industrialization appears to be an increased tolerance for
other people and for other ways of doing things. Not only
does intergroup contact provide an opportunity for learning
about existing similarities of the out-group to the in-group,
but such contact may also work indirectly to reduce prejudice
by increasing behavioral and attitudinal similarities between
groups.29 Nevertheless, enclaves of provincialism remain in
even the largest cities, particularly in homogeneous ethnic
neighborhoods, where social interactions may be almost en-
tirely limited to members of one's ethnic group.
To summarize, prejudice may serve to externalize psychic
conflict, or it may enhance adaptation to an already preju-
diced group, or it may offer the mental stability that comes
with stereotypical thinking. Related to the reality testing or
stereotyped thinking function, recent research demonstrates
that perceived dissimilarities in beliefs and values are impor-
tant determinants of the selection of a target for prejudice.
That there are varying bases for prejudice has implications
for action programs designed to reduce intergroup tension.
For maximum effectiveness, a campaign to reduce prejudice
should be applied to the motivational bases of prejudice. An
"information" campaign which tries to destroy old stereo-
types and stresses qualities held in common by the in-group
and the out-group will have little effect if antipathy toward
the out-group is deeply rooted in local customs and norms. In
such a situation, prejudice helps the individual adjust to his
own group, and information about the disliked minority is ir-
relevant to the needs his antipathy serves. Statements by
highly respected leaders, together with legislation prohibiting
discrimination, may be more helpful than information cam-
paigns in undermining the social adjustment basis of racial
THE RACIAL ATTITUDES OF WHITE AMERICANS 197
hostility. But neither information nor statements from re-
spected and admired leaders is likely to affect the prejudices
of those for whom racial hostility serves as an expression of
deep social and personal frustration.
Social Change and Prejudice
In order to predict future changes in white attitudes to-
ward black Americans, we must consider the impact of cer-
tain social changes upon individual beliefs and values. The
effects of modernization upon prejudice are neither entirely
positive nor entirely negative. We shall begin by discussing
some positive effects.
As a nation we are becoming increasingly more urban,
more affluent, and better educated. At the same time white
attitudes toward black Americans become increasingly fa-
vorable. Does this mean that the social changes taking place
in the United States are inimical to dogmatic ethnocentrism?
Such is the conclusion arrived at by William Brink and Louis
Harris after their analysis of white racial attitudes: "The
thrust of education, mobility, and rising incomes will produce
fewer backlash whites and far more affluent whites. . . . The
impact of education and rationalism is having a telling effect
on white society in America." 30
The manner in which the social changes accompanying
modernization and industrialization increase tolerance has
been suggested by the sociologist Samuel Stouffer. Stouffer
found that youth, more education, higher status occupation,
and urban residence were associated with tolerance for politi-
cal nonconformity, a result that corresponds with the findings
of studies of racial tolerance. Stouffer suggests:
Great social, economic, and technological forces are work-
ing on the side of exposing ever larger proportions of our
population to the idea that "people are different from me,
with different systems of values, and they can be good
people." 31
In the light of Rokeach's studies of perceived differences in
beliefs as a source of prejudice, it appears that, in addition to
this "tolerance through familiarity" effect, a related process
198
may be occurring in which urbanization, education, and the
mass media bring real and vicarious contact with other
groups. Through this contact people learn that other groups
are not so different from themselves as they had imagined.
In general, then, the total effect of urbanization, education,
and widening social contacts should eventually undermine the
belief that "our way is the one true way." Perhaps this is best
exemplified by the process of education. Ideally, college stu-
dents should not only acquire information in their courses
that conflicts with a belief in innate racial inferiority or supe-
riority, they should also acquire a questioning, skeptical out-
look that is incompatible with the ethnocentric assumption
that all good resides in the in-group, while the out-group has
nothing but bad qualities.
Age differences in anti-Negro prejudice among whites pro-
vide still another reason for optimism. Even though it is logi-
cally possible that aging will bring a hardening of racial atti-
tudes, the fact that young people, particularly well-educated
young people, express more support for integration than their
elders may be a harbinger of the direction of change in
American race relations.
Unfortunately several important qualifications must be
added to this optimistic picture. For one thing, the available
evidence suggests that higher education does not automati-
cally reduce prejudice. Years spent attending college do not,
in themselves, serve to eliminate racist beliefs and attitudes,
unless the quality of the educational experience is incompati-
ble with such beliefs and attitudes. In a study done for the
Kerner Commission, Campbell and Schuman found that col-
lege education has a positive effect upon racial attitudes only
for those who received their college education after World
War II.32
A convincing proof that education and industrialization are
not in themselves foolproof immunization against prejudice
and ethnocentrism is given by Nazi Germany. In that in-
stance, advanced scientific achievements simply increased the
efficiency with which the ultimate genocidal conclusion of
racism was carried out. These all too recent horrors, along
with continuing racial intolerance in America, have led sev-
eral social scientists to examine the sources of strain in our
THE RACIAL ATTITUDES OF WHITE AMERICANS 199
society that may generate intergroup hostility. Paradoxically,
certain aspects of those very democratic institutions and
values in which we take most pride may under certain cir-
cumstances cause an increase in anti-democratic attitudes.
Bettelheim and Janowitz point out: "In an advanced indus-
trial society where individualistic values predominate, those
sociological variables that tend to weaken ethnic hostility
have some limits and may even generate counter-trends." 33
One such counter-trend is an inordinate concern with status
and with social and personal identity. Historian Richard Hof-
stadter has remarked: "Because, as a people extremely demo-
cratic in our social institutions we have had no clear, consis-
tent and recognizable system of status, our personal status
problems have an unusual intensity." 34 Thus the rootlessness
and heterogeneity of American life produce in some of us an
anxious desire to secure an identity and to escape from the
freedom of a democratic, loosely structured, rapidly changing
social system.35 The results of several studies indicate that
those who are most concerned about status tend also to be
most prejudiced,30 and that status concern is associated with
child-rearing practices that result in authoritarianism and prej-
udice in children.37 Concern for status seems to produce a
preference for hierarchical orderings, in which the prestige
that accrues to one's own group is derived at least in part
from the fact that there are groups below it on the totem
pole of prestige. Social changes that appear to have adverse
effects upon the relative standing of his own group are partic-
ularly distasteful to the individual whose personal identity is
derived to a large extent from his social standing. That politi-
cians are aware of this reaction is indicated by their explicit
appeal in the 1968 campaign to the "forgotten men" of the
lower-middle and working class — the whites who feel that
their relative standing is threatened by the social and eco-
nomic gains of black Americans.
A consequence of our fluid and changing social structure
that is closely related to anxiety over the status of one's own
group relative to other groups is the social mobility of indi-
viduals. Inevitably there are losers as well as winners in a
striving, competitive, achievement-oriented society. The losers
are the "downwardly mobile" — those who experience declines
200
in socioeconomic status within the spans of their own work
careers or whose socioeconomic status is lower than that of
their parents. After reviewing a series of studies on the attitu-
dinal consequences of social mobility, Bettelheim and Jano-
witz conclude that downward mobility typically increases prej-
udice, and while slightly upward mobility may have little
effect or may reduce prejudice slightly, extremely upward
mobility may also increase prejudice.38 The effect of down-
ward mobility seems readily understandable: a visible and
vulnerable minority group makes a likely scapegoat for the
bitterness and frustration caused by a loss in status. But addi-
tional mechanisms may be operating to produce a relation-
ship between mobility and prejudice.
One of the negative consequences of mobility is a disrup-
tion of interpersonal relationships with family, friends, and
work associates. Because of his social origins, the mobile in-
dividual is ill-at-ease with those of his present social rank and
also with those whose origins are similar to his. This break-
down in social integration may result in a loosening of the
normative constraints which are naturally exerted upon the
individual by «the everyday, face-to-face groups to which he
belongs. The absence of a restraint upon the mobile person's
prejudices may lead to a more blatant manifestation of his ra-
cial hostility. In some cases, the slightly upwardly mobile in-
dividual may successfully compensate for the disruption of
his relationships with primary, face-to-face groups by in-
creased participation in formal voluntary organizations in his
community. This is apparently less likely to occur in the case
of the downwardly mobile or the extremely upwardly mobile.
"Vertical" mobility, or change in socioeconomic status, is
not the only prejudice-inducing disruption that is endemic
to life in Western industrial democracies. "Horizontal," i.e.,
geographical, mobility may also increase alienation and
rootlessness. One in every five Americans moves annually.
In an as yet unpublished study of white voters in Gary, Indi-
ana, Thomas Pettigrew and Robert Riley found that George
Wallace's strongest supporters in 1968 were Protestants of
small town origin who did not grow up in Gary.39 Whatever
the nature of the underlying mechanisms, research has dem-
onstrated that both a subjective feeling of social isolation 40
THE RACIAL ATTITUDES OF WHITE AMERICANS 201
and an objective absence of social participation 41 are asso-
ciated with increased prejudice.
Isolation, anxiety over status, and downward social mobil-
ity, with their unfortunate personal and social consequences,
appear to be inevitable by-products of American democracy.
They are part of the price we pay for a free and open society
in which rewards are based upon individual achievement.
Whether or not we believe that the price is too high, these
consequences are likely to remain with us. We must there-
fore understand and somehow cope with the consequences of
alienation and status anxiety if we are to avert their potential
resolution in the authoritarian and racist social movements
which attract and appeal to the "dispossessed." 42
The Widening Racial Gap: Social Perception in the
"Two Societies"
White Resistance and Black Insistence
The National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders
concluded that "our Nation is moving toward two societies,
one black, one white — separate and unequal." There are sev-
eral senses in which this largely unheeded warning accurately
depicts continuing trends in American society. Most ob-
viously there are the demographic changes described by the
Kerner Commission: ". . . central cities are becoming more
heavily Negro while the suburban fringes around them re-
main almost entirely white." But perhaps even more ominous
than the white suburban "noose" around the black ghetto is
the growing psychological gulf separating black Americans
from white Americans. Although there has been a gradual in-
crease in white acceptance of racial integration and equality
of opportunity, a sizable portion of the white population still
resists these goals. Some surveys show increasing white oppo-
sition to the pace of racial change as well as continuing oppo-
sition to most of the means that have been used in attempts
to achieve integration and equality of opportunity, including
peaceful demonstrations and voter registration drives. In
sharp contrast to the mixture of gradualism and resistance
that characterizes white racial opinions in the United States,
202
black Americans are increasingly insistent in their demands
for an end to discrimination and inequality. This polarization
and conflict between white gradualism and the black revolu-
tion of rising expectations and demand for immediate change
manifests itself in many ways.
Happiness and Satisfaction with Life
The results of several studies indicate that Negroes are
generally less content than whites with the existing conditions
in their lives. Black Americans experience a large gap be-
tween aspirations and achievements. One quantitative mea-
sure used by pollsters which provides an index of the degree
of personal happiness or dissatisfaction is the "Self-Anchor-
ing Striving Scale" developed by social psychologist Hadley
Cantril.43 In this procedure, the interviewer first asks the re-
spondent to describe the best and worst possible future lives
for himself. After obtaining these descriptions of personal
hopes and fears, the interviewer shows the respondent a pic-
ture of an eleven-step ladder numbered from zero to ten, and
asks:
Suppose we say that the top of the ladder represents the
best possible life for you and the bottom represents the worst
possible life for you. Where on the ladder do you feel you
personally stand at the present time? Step number ?
The ladder rating obtained in response to this question pro-
vides a measure of the individual's feeling of gratification or
deprivation relative to his own conception of the ideal life for
himself. In several surveys in which this ladder rating ques-
tion was asked of representative samples of black and white
Americans, the former assigned themselves a significantly
lower position than did the latter, indicating a greater feeling
of deprivation relative to their goals and aspirations.
The results of a survey of more than 5,000 Negroes and
whites conducted in early 1968 in fifteen major American cit-
ies provides more specific information concerning the sources
of discontent among urban Negroes. Campbell and Schuman
found that, as compared to urban whites, Negro city dwellers
express more dissatisfaction with public services in their
THE RACIAL ATTITUDES OF WHITE AMERICANS 203
neighborhoods, complain more about the prices and the qual-
ity of goods in neighborhood stores, and are both less sat-
isfied with the protection they receive from the police and
more likely to report unfavorable experiences in their per-
sonal contacts with the police.44
A recent study shows that blacks are far more critical of
the police than are whites. On the one hand, blacks see the
police as less effective in giving protection to citizens: 17 per-
cent of nonwhite males in the $6,000 to $10,000 income
range felt the police did a "very good" job in protecting peo-
ple in their neighborhoods, as opposed to 51 percent of the
white males of similar income.45 On the other hand, blacks
are considerably less confident than whites about police hon-
esty, and considerably less satisfied with the treatment they
received from the police. Only 36 percent of nonwhite males
in the $6,000 to $10,000 income bracket thought police in
their neighborhoods were "almost all honest," while 21 per-
cent felt they were "almost all corrupt"; the corresponding
percentages for white males of the same income bracket were
65 percent and 2 percent.46 Only 31 percent of the non-
whites, as opposed to 67 percent of the whites felt the police
did a "very good" job of being respectful to people like
themselves.47
To many white Americans, the discontent that black peo-
ple more and more vociferously express is surprising and un-
justified. Distinguished commentators rarely fail to point out
that a great deal of "progress" has been made in the past sev-
eral decades, and particularly in the past few years, in the so-
cial and economic conditions of nonwhite Americans. How-
ever, as Thomas Pettigrew has suggested, what appear at first
glance to be "real gains" for Negro Americans fade into
"psychological losses" when they are compared with the stan-
dards of the more affluent white majority.48 Pettigrew's "real
gains-psychological losses" analysis is as applicable in 1969
as it was in 1963, despite some progress during the past six
years in reducing the disparity between white and nonwhite
life-styles. Thus a 1968 publication of the Bureau of Labor
Statistics entitled Recent Trends in Social and Economic
Conditions of Negroes in the United States provide figures
demonstrating that black Americans have made gains in in-
204
come, education, occupational status, and other areas in re-
cent years. To many white Americans, such figures appar-
ently suggest that Negroes should be happy with the progress
that is being made. After all, the statistics show, for example,
that for the first time the number of Negroes moving into
well-paying jobs has been substantial: since 1960 there has
been a net increase of 300,000 nonwhite professional and
managerial workers. To a black American, however, the
more important statistics may be those demonstrating that a
nonwhite is still almost three times as likely as a white man
to be in a low-paying job as a laborer or service worker. A
white defender of the status quo may point out that 27 per-
cent of nonwhite families in 1967 had a total income above
$8,000 — double the 1960 proportion, even when the figures
are placed in constant 1967 dollars. For black people, it may
be more relevant that in 1967 the annual family income of
Negroes was only 59 percent of the median annual white
family income.
Furthermore, it is misleading to focus only on gains for
blacks in general. While various indices do show increasing
gains for blacks as a group, the situation of the black ghetto
dweller is less promising. Department of Labor figures clearly
indicate that "social and economic conditions are getting
worse, not better, in slum areas." 49 In many ghetto areas,
housing conditions are deteriorating rather than improving; in
South Los Angeles, for example, the percentage of substan-
dard housing units increased from 18 percent to 34 percent
between 1960 and 1965, while median rents also increased,
from $69 to $77. 50 In 1966, the unemployment rate of non-
white boys aged 14 to 19 in urban poverty areas stood at 31
percent; of nonwhite girls, 46 percent. Comparable rates for
whites in poverty areas were 20 percent lower for boys and
10 percent lower for girls.51 Overall figures for nonwhite
youth unemployment are similarly discouraging. The jobless
rate for nonwhite males aged 16 to 17 was 9.4 percent in
1948 and 24.7 percent in 1968; for white youths of the same
age, the rate was 2.2 percent in 1948 and 10.9 percent in
1968.
Further, even where blacks have entered higher levels of
the economic ladder, they have not yet attained significant
THE RACIAL ATTITUDES OF WHITE AMERICANS 205
decision-making influence. A study of Negroes in policy-mak-
ing positions in Chicago — where some 28 percent of the pop-
ulation in 1965 was black — makes this clear:
The whitest form of policy-making in Chicago is in the
control of economic enterprises. Out of 6838 positions identi-
fied in business corporations, Negroes held only 42 (six-
tenths of 1 percent). Thirty-five of these were in insurance,
where Negroes occupy 6 percent of the 533 posts. But all 35
were in two all-Negro insurance firms. The other seven posi-
tions were in four smaller banks. In banks in general,
Negroes occupied three-tenths of 1 percent of the policy
posts. There were no Negro policy-makers at all in manufac-
turing, communications, transportation, utilities, and trade
corporations.
Out of 372 companies we studied, the Negro-owned insur-
ance companies were the only ones dominated by blacks.
And if we had used the same stringent criteria for banks and
insurance companies that we used for nonfinancial institu-
tions, there would have been no black policy-makers in the
business sector at all.
Now, amazingly enough, Chicago has proportionately
more Negro-controlled businesses, larger than neighborhood
operations, than any other major city in the North. There-
fore, similar surveys in other Northern Metropolitan areas
would turn up an even smaller percentage of Negro policy-
makers in the business world.52
Protests and the Pace of Change
Public opinion surveys conducted by Louis Harris and oth-
ers have shown that the gradualist racial sentiments of most
whites conflict with the increasingly urgent demands of black
Americans for their share of the affluence of America. This
gap has manifested itself on issues such as the causes of riots,
the pace of racial change, and the propriety of various means
for achieving integration and equality. For example, a 1966
Gallup poll found that while 58 percent of white Americans
thought that the Johnson administration was pushing integra-
tion too fast, only 5 percent of the black Americans inter-
viewed shared this opinion.
The pattern of approval or disapproval of protests and
demonstrations is similar to the observed differences regard-
206
ing the appropriate speed of integration. In a 1965 Harris
poll, a representative sample of Americans was asked
whether they felt that demonstrations by Negroes had helped
or hurt the advancement of Negro rights. While two out of
three white respondents said that the demonstrations had hurt
more than they helped, two out of three Negro respondents
expressed the opposite view. For the most part, responses to
more specific questions about protests and demonstrations re-
veal the same racial gap. Thus the Harris survey found that,
in May of 1968, 80 percent of the Negro interviewees but
only 29 percent of the whites approved of the Poor People's
March in Washington, D.C. Only with regard to riots and the
use of violence do the majority of both races agree in ex-
pressing disapproval, and even here the level of white disap-
proval is considerably higher than that of Negro disapproval.
Riots: Their Causes and Cures
An especially profound discrepancy exists between black
and white perception of the causes of riots. In their 1968 sur-
vey of opinions in fifteen large U.S. cities, Campbell and
Schuman found :
Negroes and whites do not perceive the riots in the same
terms. Most Negroes see the riots partly or wholly as sponta-
neous protests against unfair conditions, economic depriva-
tion, or a combination of the two. . . . The white population
in the 15 cities is more divided on the nature of riots. A
large segment, roughly a third on several questions, takes a
viewpoint similar to that of most Negroes, viewing the dis-
turbances as protests against real grievances, which should be
handled by removing the causes for grievance. Approxi-
mately another third see the riots in very different terms,
however, emphasizing their criminal or conspiratorial charac-
ter, their origin in a few men of radical or criminal leaning,
and the need to meet them with police power. The balance of
the white population in the 15 cities mix both views in var-
ious combinations.53
Comparable results were obtained in a Harris opinion survey,
conducted in the summer of 1967, on the perceived causes of
riots. The racial differences in opinion shown in Chart V-6
THE RACIAL ATTITUDES OF WHITE AMERICANS 207
clearly support the Harris assertion that white and black
views on the causes of riots are "eerily out of register."
Chart V-6: Most Frequent Spontaneously Mentioned Causes of Negro
Rioting by White and Negro Adults 54
Outside agitation
Prejudice — promises not kept,
bad treatment
Lack of jobs-unfair
employment
Poverty — slums, ghetto
conditions
Negroes are too lazy to work
for their rights
Uneducated people — don't know
what they are doing
Teen-agers looking for trouble
Law has been too lax
In view of their assessment of their situation, it is small
wonder that Negroes feel alienated from American society
and government. In April of 1968, 56 percent of the Negro
respondents told Harris interviewers that they agreed with the
statement, "I don't have nearly as good a chance to get ahead
as most people." Only 17 percent of the white interviewees
expressed such a belief in limited opportunity. In the same
poll, 52 percent of the Negroes and 39 of the whites agreed
with the statement, "People running this country don't really
care what happens to people like me." Similarly, blacks are
more critical than whites of government at the federal, state,
and local levels.55 The most disturbing aspect of the political
alienation of black people is the rapid growth of such feelings
in the past few years. From 1966 to 1968 there was a 20 per-
cent increase in the number of black Americans who express
a feeling of powerlessness to influence the government.
VhM
Negro
45%
10%
16
36
10
29
14
28
13
5
11
9
7
7
7
0.5
208
Congressional Backlash
Although black and white Americans disagree about the
causes of riots and have different beliefs about their abilities
to influence the government, according to both Gallup and
Harris polls, they are in substantial agreement on the cru-
cially important question of steps the government should take
to prevent future racial outbreaks. Clear majorities of both
whites and Negroes support federal programs to tear down
the ghettos and to give jobs to all the unemployed.56 The
Campbell and Schuman fifteen-cities survey substantiates this
conclusion :
There is majority support in the white sample for govern-
ment action to provide full employment, better education,
and improved housing in parts of cities where they are now
lacking. . . . Support for such programs declines somewhat
but remains at a majority level even when the proviso is
added for a ten percent rise in personal taxes to pay the
costs.57
Apparently the level of public support for proposals such as
those recommended by the Kerner Commission has been un-
derestimated by congressmen and others in political office.
Perhaps the press has oversold the notion of a white backlash
and has placed too little emphasis upon public approval for
massive federal spending to overcome racial inequities. Per-
haps although the minority of white Americans who have re-
ceived a disproportionate amount of attention from the press
oppose such programs, the preponderance of American public
opinion would support a war on poverty that goes far beyond
any of the measures seriously considered by recent Con-
gresses. Thus, on the issue of public spending, the more im-
portant gap appears to be between public willingness and
congressional unwillingness to initiate and support federal
programs in jobs, housing, and education. The American
public, black and white, appears apprehensive and fearful
about the future well-being of the neighborhood, the city, the
country in general. Most blacks tend to give different weight
to the nature and causes of the problems of America than
most whites. But each group would apparently support a
strong effort at the federal level to reduce intergroup hostil-
THE RACIAL ATTITUDES OF WHITE AMERICANS 209
ity, and neither views the remedy primarily in terms of es-
tablishing "law and order." The popularly reported, but mis-
named "white backlash" phenomenon has served to rational-
ize our timidity in making bold and imaginative inputs to-
ward the solution of our urban problems.
The minority of whites who radically oppose the aspira-
tions of the black community is a matter of considerable con-
cern, and their organization into militant groups poses at least
as much a threat to public order and safety as the activities
of groups already discussed. In analyzing anti-war, student,
and black protest, we have perhaps misleadingly brought to-
gether groups with varying potential for action. In the present
section of this report, we have attempted to distinguish be-
tween white attitudes and white actions. The next chapter
therefore considers the nature and roots of militant white ac-
tion in contemporary America, and the role of the militant
white in American history.
Chapter VI
White Militancy
The idea of "militancy" suggests the activities of blacks, stu-
dents, anti-war demonstrators, and others who feel themselves
aggrieved by the perpetuation of old, outworn, or malignant
social institutions. The historical record, however, indicates
that considerably more disorder and violence have come
from groups whose aim has been the preservation of an exist-
ing or remembered order of social arrangements, and in
whose ideology the concept of "law and order" has played a
primary role. There is no adequate term to cover all of the
diverse groups who have fought to preserve their neighbor-
hoods, communities, or their country from forces considered
alien or threatening. The lack of a common term for Ku
Klux Klansmen, Vigilantes, Minutemen, Know-Nothing ac-
tivists, and anti-Negro or anti-Catholic mobs reflects the fact
that these and other similar groups have different origins, dif-
ferent goals, and different compositions, and arise in re-
sponse to specific historical situations which repeat them-
selves, if at all, only in gross outline.
Still, certain patterns stand out in the history of white mili-
210
WHITE MILITANCY 211
tancy. In the past, the white militant was usually — though not
always — an Anglo-Saxon Protestant, and the targets of his
protest included other white ethnic groups. Today, while the
WASP remains a major figure in the overall picture of white
militancy, much of the white protest, especially in the urban
North, comes from ethnic groups — especially Southern and
Eastern European — which were themselves former targets of
nativist agitation. Another change is more subtle. Until re-
cently, the violent white militant acted, very frequently, with
the assistance, encouragement, or at least acquiescence of more
"stable" elements of the population, and quite often in con-
cert with the militant and nativist aims of the American politi-
cal and legal order. Today this is considerably less true. With
the exception of some areas of the country — notably parts of
the South — the violent white militant has become a minority,
and operates beyond the pale of the law and the polity, both
of which he tends to distrust in proportion to his lack of po-
litical efficacy or influence.
This chapter attempts to put white militancy in social and
historical perspective. The first section considers the charac-
teristic form of violent white militancy in history — vigilan-
tism — in its interplay with the general thrust of a militantly
nativist society. The following sections deal with contempo-
rary white militancy in the South, the urban North, and
among white paramilitary "anti-Communist" groups.
Vigilantism and the Militant Society1
American society has a lengthy tradition of private direct
action to maintain order, coupled with a certain disdain for
legal procedure and the restraints of the orderly political pro-
cess. At the same time, American institutions have had a long
history of nativism and racism. The interplay of these two
traditions has resulted in vigilante violence most often ex-
pressed in racist and nativist channels.
Every social order is maintained, at some level, by actual
or implicit sanctions of violence. An important aspect of the
American experience has been the degree to which private
groups have taken it upon themselves to administer or
212
threaten such sanctions. Some of these groups, perceiving the
formal enforcement of law and administration of justice as
weak or inefficient, have acted to "take the law into their own
hands." In practice, however, private enforcement of the
"law" has tended to mean a rejection of mere law in the
name of a presumably overarching conception of "order"
rooted inevitably in group interest.
The nature of the American frontier produced the ratio-
nale for the extralegal enforcement of law which came to be
known as vigilantism. This pragmatic approach to the gen-
uine crises of order, occurring in areas where settlement had
preceded the establishment of effective social control, was
deeply rooted in American traditions of self-help. The roots
of that tradition, in turn, are a number of national experi-
ences and predilections, including the Puritan heritage of col-
lective responsibility for the preservation of the moral order
and a traditional distrust of government regulation and inter-
vention. Perhaps more important than collective tradition was
the immediate problem of danger and insecurity in areas
where the formal agencies of law had barely penetrated or
had atrophied in periods of intense disorder. Not infre-
quently, vigilante justice brought a crude kind of order to
these sparsely settled areas. This was the context of the pre-
Revolutionary War South Carolina Regulators, the Law and
Order, Regulator, and Anti-Horsethief Societies of the East-
ern and Middle Western states, the vigilantes of the Western
frontier, and the popular tribunals of the mining camps.
In most of these private law enforcement ventures, the
aims were simple and unambitious. There was no attempt to
create new legal forms or to promote a new vision of the so-
cial order. Rather, the aim was the establishment of mecha-
nisms for order patterned, so far as possible, on familiar
models. In the absence of formal institutions of social con-
trol, voluntary associations sprang up to get done those things
which needed doing.
Beneath the pragmatic zeal for order, understandable
enough in the light of frontier conditions, lay a series of dan-
gerous precedents. The self-help tradition largely sidestepped
the restraints which a developed legal system imposes on the
quest for order. Consequently, voluntary enforcement of the
WHITE MILITANCY 213
"law" tended to lean inevitably toward the enforcement of
order, with or without law. Private violence, sometimes in
conjunction with constituted authority and sometimes not,
came to be used as an instrument for enforcing a threatened,
or presumably threatened, system of social, political, eco-
nomic, and cultural arrangements against the claims of those
groups standing outside the system whose actions — or, some-
times, whose very existence — were seen as threatening.
Doubtless the first "alien" group to feel the combined as-
sault of private and official violence was the American In-
dian. Regarded as wholly alien and wholly exterminable, In-
dians were subject to massive private violence which — like
the massacre of over two hundred, largely women and chil-
dren, which took place on Indian Island in California in
1860 — more often than not took place under the tacit aus-
pices of the American government. With regard to the In-
dian, "Many Americans cherished a conviction that they were
waging what came to be called a 'war of extermination,' and
they waged it with determination and hardly disguised
enjoyment." 2
The San Francisco Vigilance Committee of 1851 and the
Great Committee of 1856 are the best known of the Western
vigilante organizations. These committees were, on the whole,
composed of leading citizens whose aim was the seizure of
the administration of justice and the development of such
means of subsidiary control, including standing armies, as
were necessary in order to function without interference.
They sought neither legislative change nor the reform of ex-
isting institutions, but rather the punishment of criminals and
undesirables whom the courts had "allowed" to escape. They
sought, in short, to act as a substitute for a judicial process
which they saw as weak and inefficient. These committees
had counterparts in all states west of the Mississippi. In prac-
tice, the rough justice of the vigilance committees was
slanted toward nativist aims, and worked hardest against for-
eigners and minority groups, especially Mexicans and
Chinese. The pursuit of "law and order" meant — as it appar-
ently does today — a special effort against minority groups
considered dangerous to constituted order, moral values, and
racial hegemony.
214
In this Effort the vigilante groups were not alone. Rather,
private violence against minority groups in the West was only
the leading edge of an endemic regional nativism supported
by large segments of the population and in time elevated into
the laws of the land. Ten Broek and his associates suggest
this mixture of the formal and the informal, the legal and the
criminal, in the treatment of the Orientals in California:
The long agitation against the Oriental in California, to be
seen in proper perspective, must be set against a background
of violence and conflict involving the dominant white major-
ity and the dark-skinned minorities; a heritage of hatred
which had its inception in the fiercely competitive environ-
ment of gold-rush mining camps, was institutionalized in
local ordinance and state law, and came to constitute a pri-
mary cause of some of the worst outbreaks of criminal law-
lessness in California history.3
Private violence in California was encouraged by state law,
which prohibited Chinese from testifying in cases involving
whites. With this protection, militant Californians were
officially allowed to slaughter Chinese with relative impunity.
As in other instances of nativist agitation, there tended to de-
velop a division of labor between "respectable" elements who
utilized legislation — such as that resulting in the act of 1882
banning further Chinese immigration into the country — and
mobs who looted, burned, and murdered men, women, and
children in the Chinese quarters of the West Coast. This is
not to suggest that a majority condoned mob violence. But
the movement for social and political exclusion of the
Chinese effectively withdrew legal protection against this kind
of action. In the context of official denial of Chinese rights,
the preservation of "order" meant in practice that virtually
any pretext was sufficient for massive violence against them.
In Los Angeles, after a white was killed during a tong war,
mobs invaded the Chinese quarter, looting and "killing twen-
ty-one persons — of whom fifteen, including women and chil-
dren, were hanged on the spot from lamp-posts and
awnings." 4
A similar combination of public and private action has
characterized the expression of white militancy in the South,
where the Ku Klux Klan has intermittently arisen in the con-
WHITE MILITANCY 215
text of a social order which has given official and widespread
approval to the exploitation and subordination of the black
population. The Klan arose in the aftermath of the Civil
War, when emancipation, the Fourteenth Amendment, and
the ravages of the war itself had disrupted the traditional
caste order and weakened, to some extent, the effectiveness of
black subordination. To many white Southerners, the limited
gains of the Southern blacks represented a state of fearful
disorder. Woodward has described this atmosphere and the
early legislation aimed at reestablishing social control along
caste lines:
The temporary anarchy that followed the collapse of the
old discipline produced a state of mind bordering on hysteria
among southern white people. The first year a great fear of
black insurrection and revenge seized many minds, and for a
longer time the conviction prevailed that Negroes could not
be induced to work without compulsion. Large numbers of
temporarily uprooted freedmen roamed the highways, con-
gested in towns and cities, or joined the federal militia. In the
presence of these conditions the provisional legislature estab-
lished by President Johnson in 1865 adopted the notorious
Black Codes. Some of them were intended to establish sys-
tems of peonage or apprenticeship resembling slavery.5
After the Black Codes were struck down, the Klan
emerged to drive the freedmen out of politics and restore
power and control to the dominant white leadership. The
night-riding assaults on blacks, Northerners, and their South-
ern sympathizers were justified as "the necessary effort to pre-
vent crime and uphold law and order." 6 The first Imperial
Wizard of the Klan, General Nathan B. Forrest, explained the
need for the Klan in these terms:
Many Northern men were coming down there, forming
Leagues all over the country. The Negroes were holding
night meetings; were going about; were becoming very inso-
lent; and the Southern people . . . were very much alarmed
. . . parties organized themselves so as to be ready in case they
were attacked. Ladies were ravished by some of these
Negroes. . . . There was a great deal of insecurity.7
While Klan leadership was often held by men of substance,
216
the rank-and-file Klansman was most often a poor white fear-
ful of black economic competition. Klan violence, like West-
ern vigilantism, more often than not received support from
significant segments of the dominant population: "Acts of
violence were usually applauded by the conservative press
and justified then, and afterwards, by the always allegedly
bad reputation of the victims." 8
The typical weapon of the Reconstruction Klan and subse-
quent white terrorists was lynching. The Tuskegee Institute
has kept a record of lynchings in the United States since
1882 which gives an indication of the extent of white vio-
lence and serves as a reminder that the white militant has
been the single most violent force — outside of war — in Amer-
ican history. For the period 1882-1959, Tuskegee has re-
corded a total of 4,735 lynchings, of which 73 percent were
of Negroes and 85 percent of which took place in the South-
ern and border states.9
Again, it should be stressed that terrorist violence was only
the leading edge of Southern anti-Negro militancy, which, in
an important sense, was itself only the most blatant element
of an endemic national racism and nativism. The revived Ku
Klux Klan of the 1920's, which mixed anti-Negro, anti-Semi-
tic, and anti-Catholic agitation, spread throughout the coun-
try and rose to a membership of several million. It was
deeply entwined with several local and state governments.
Klan violence in California was as brutal as anywhere in
the South, and in the town of Taft, in Kern County, the po-
lice and best citizens turned out to watch an evening of tor-
ture in the local ball park. When an anti-Klan candidate won
the Republican primary in Oregon, the Klan jumped to the
Democratic Party and helped capture the governorship and
enough of the legislature to outlaw all parochial schools. In
Colorado, the Klan, with business support, elected two U.S.
Senators and swept the state. When the Grand Dragon, a
Denver doctor, was accused of having forced a high-school
boy into marriage by threatening him with castration, the
governor appointed the Klan leader aide-de-camp, as a show
of confidence.10
In part, the rise of the later Klan was influenced by D. W.
Griffith's racist epic, Birth of a Nation, which portrayed the
WHITE MILITANCY 217
early Klan as a romantic defender of Southern white woman-
hood against the ravages of the freed blacks. Such nostalgia
was not confined to the poor, the uneducated, and the paro-
chial. Woodrow Wilson, on seeing the picture, was reported
to have been much impressed: " 'It is like writing history
with lightning,' he said, 'and my only regret is that it is all so
terribly true.' " ai
In addition to the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan, the era
during and after the First World War saw an eruption of vig-
ilante activity against numerous groups, often backed by
constituted authority or the highly placed. During a wave of
agitation against German-Americans during the war, Theo-
dore Roosevelt advocated shooting or hanging any German-
American who proved to be disloyal.12 A private organization
called the American Protective League, operating as a kind
of quasi-official adjunct to the Department of Justice, en-
gaged in various acts of physical force against German-Ameri-
cans, unionists, and draft evaders.13 Vigilante violence against
IWW organizers in the Pacific Northwest took place in the
context of a judicial system explicitly hostile to unions and
largely controlled by business interests.14 In some of the post-
war race riots, like that in Washington in 1919, police and
the military joined with other militant whites in assaults on
the Negro community.15 Where nativist violence was not
officially sanctioned, whole communities sometimes rose up
against "alien" elements:
During the night of August 5, 1920, and all through the
following day hundreds of people laden with clothing and
household goods filled the roads leading out of West Frank-
fort, a mining town in Southern Illinois. Back in town their
homes were burning. Mobs bent on driving every foreigner
from the area surged through the streets. Foreigners of all
descriptions were beaten on sight, although the Italian popu-
lation was the chief objective. Time and again the crowds
burst into the Italian district, dragged cowering residents
from their homes, clubbed and stoned them, and set fire to
their dwellings. The havoc went on for three days, although
five hundred state troops were rushed to the scene.16
The militant violence of white vigilantes, then, has not op-
erated as a peripheral phenomenon in isolation from the
218
major currents of American history. Rather, vigilantism rep-
resented the armed and violent wing of national tendencies
toward racism, nativism, and strident Americanism which
have been present since the nation's beginnings. With spo-
radic acceptance by a dominant, largely Anglo-Saxon and
Protestant population in substantial control of much of the
American political, military, and legal apparatus, private vio-
lence was a significant factor in thwarting the democratic as-
pirations of minorities.
Today, the violent or potentially violent white militant
tends to speak from a position of relative political impotence,
and his militancy must be seen as in large part a protest
against that impotence and the insecurity which accompanies
it. Nevertheless, in some instances, the militant white receives
at least qualified support from — and sometimes achieves in-
fluence in — local or regional political structures. In other in-
stances, white militants have adopted American political rhet-
oric and used it to structure the expression of their own dis-
contents. On the other hand, national politics has seemingly
adopted some of the rhetoric of white militancy. In all in-
stances, the fabric of American social and political institu-
tions has created the context in which contemporary white
militancy flourishes. All of these phenomena are evident in the
contemporary South.
The South
The advancement of the nigra can be solely attributed to the
sincerity of the Southerner.
— Robert Shelton
In 1928, a leading historian characterized the South as "a
people with a common resolve indomitably maintained — that
it shall be and remain a white man's country." 17 Despite a
number of social and economic changes, on balance the
South remains distinct in the degree to which it remains com-
mitted to the preservation of the "white man's country," and
in many areas of the South official politics and private vio-
lence interact to make the South the great regional fortress of
white racism.
WHITE MILITANCY 219
The flourishing white violence in the South must be seen
against the background of major social and economic
changes which have produced in many areas of the region a
dispossessed and insecure class of marginal whites. Increasing
industrialization has shifted the center of influence to a rising
middle class, frequently Republican and increasingly affluent.
At the same time, industrialization has effectively begun to
undermine the caste order in the economic realm, a process
noted by students of the South some years ago.18 Jobs for-
merly "white" have been entered by Negroes, especially in
the burgeoning area of the Southern economy composed of
industries working in part on government contracts.19 At the
same time that caste controls over black economic competi-
tion are crumbling under the impact of economic rationaliza-
tion, a pervasive economic insecurity exists throughout much
of the still essentially underdeveloped region. Coupled with a
decreasing effectiveness of white sanctions over black social
and political behavior — resulting partly from urbanization
and industrialization and partly from civil rights activity —
these events have accentuated a traditional sense of power-
lessness and insecurity on the part of those marginal whites
who historically have owned little else than their white skin
and controlled little more than the local behavior of blacks.
The plight of the marginal white reflects a more general
marginality and primitivism characteristic of large areas of
the entire region. Culturally, parts of the South remain shot
through with a strident fundamentalism and distrust of every-
thing foreign; politically, parts of it remain dominated by
self-serving cliques whose power rests primarily on the tradi-
tional political exclusion of blacks; its economic stagnation
in many areas combines with its politics to produce in several
places a depressingly high rate of malnutrition, infant mortal-
ity, and disease. These conditions affect both poor black and
poor white. It is in this context that white terrorists, abetted
in some areas by an affluently racist middle class and a politi-
cal and legal order committed to the maintenance of caste
domination, have perpetrated repeated violence against
blacks, civil rights workers, and others.
It should be stressed that in the South it is particularly dif-
ficult to separate the phenomena of official and private vio-
220
lence. Southern police have traditionally condoned private
violence in many areas. In other areas, white vigilante groups
have drawn considerable membership from police forces.
Much of the militant white violence in the South has come
from organizations such as the several Ku Klux Klans and
the National States Rights Party, although considerable vio-
lence has been done by apparently unaffiliated whites, such as
the Florida group who recently kidnapped a young black who
was "beaten to an unrecognizable pulp" with a machete on
the mistaken belief that he had had sexual relations with a
white girl.20 There is some evidence that the militant white or-
ganizations differ in the degree to which they have espoused
or participated in violent action.
The National States Rights Party, with headquarters in Bir-
mingham and a membership in several non-Southern states,
is, like the Klan, anti-Semitic as well as anti-Negro. It is an
outgrowth of an earlier guerrilla group in Georgia called the
Columbians, which in the late 1940's organized an armed
plot to overthrow the Georgia state government. Though
small, the NSRP has been extremely active in Southern racial
violence.21
The largest of the Klan organizations, the United Klans of
America, headed by Robert Shelton of Tuscaloosa, Alabama,
has striven for a respectable image, and Shelton has report-
edly discouraged the use of violence by members. Neverthe-
less, Klan ideology and organizational structure are neither
oriented toward nor capable of control over the activities of
local groups and individuals. The murders of Lemuel Penn in
Georgia and of Mrs. Viola Liuzzo in Alabama were the by-
product of relatively disorganized patrolling efforts by such
local units. Further, even the "official" advocacy of nonvio-
lence is qualified in view of the Klan's conception of the im-
minent danger which black gains pose to Southern order.
"We don't want no violence," Shelton has said, "but we ain't
gonna let the niggers spit in our face, either." 22
The unaffiliated Mississippi White Knights of the Ku Klux
Klan have been the source of much of the violence against
civil rights workers in the state. The group arose during, and
in response to, the intensive civil rights activity in Mississippi,
after a long period in which Klan activity in the state had
WHITE MILITANCY 221
been dormant. Thirty-six White Knights have recently been
arrested on charges of terrorism, including suspicion of at
least seven murders. Much of this terrorist activity took place
during the "long hot summer" of 1964. The group has been
held responsible for the killing of three civil rights workers in
Neshoba County, Mississippi, during that summer; and its
leader, Sam Bowers, along with Neshoba Deputy Sheriff
Cecil Price, is now appealing federal conviction. The involve-
ment of the Neshoba Sheriff's Department in the murders in-
dicates the degree to which the Mississippi Klan has drawn
membership and support from law enforcement. No state
charges were ever brought against the Neshoba group.
The Mississippi White Knights have remained in the fore-
front of white violence. In 1966, the head of the Hattiesburg
chapter of the NAACP was killed in a shooting and fire-
bombing attack on his home by carloads of White Knights. In
1967, the head of the NAACP's Natchez chapter was blown
to bits when a bomb was planted in his car. The White
Knights are suspected of burning some seventy-five churches,
a fact that contrasts peculiarly with the group's justification
of violence in terms of Christian duty :
As Christians we are disposed to kindness, generosity,
affection and humility in our dealings with others. As mili-
tants, we are disposed to the use of physical force against our
enemies. How can we reconcile these two apparently contra-
dictory philosophies, and at the same time, make sure that we
do not violate the divine law by our actions, which may be
held against us when we face that last court on the Day of
Judgement? The answer, of course, is to purge malice, bitter-
ness and vengeance from our hearts. To pray each day for
Divine Guidance, that our feet shall remain on the Correct
Path, and that all of our acts be God's will working through
our humble selves here on earth.23
The White Knights have stressed that the major source of
their effectiveness is favorable public opinion. "As long as
they are on our side," Bowers has written, "we can just about
do anything to our enemies with impunity." 24 As a general
rule, Klan success throughout the South has come primarily
in those areas where state and local leaders and police have
been most militant in resisting civil rights activity. In the
222
Klan's center of strength in Alabama, a square in the center
of the state including Tuscaloosa, Birmingham, Anniston, and
Montgomery, the tacit encouragement of police and political
leaders has signficantly abetted Klan violence.
When it came down to bombings and beatings, the
Negroes of Birmingham claimed, it was sometimes difficult to
distinguish between the Klansmen and the deputies. Also
within the Klan's charmed geographical quadrilateral was the
governor's mansion in Montgomery where Alabama gover-
nors John Patterson and George Wallace refrained from giv-
ing the impression that pro-segregation violence was com-
pletely distasteful.25
Local and state juries and courts have acquired an impres-
sive record of failing to indict or convict in crimes against
civil rights workers. For that matter, the federal government
was not overly quick to step in against white violence until
the summer of 1964.26 There are signs, however, that the at-
titude of many elements of the South is in transition. New
civil rights laws, Supreme Court decisions, and increased FBI
surveillance have combined with local resistance to Klan vio-
lence. The, convictions brought by an all-white federal jury in
the Neshoba case are one such indication; another is the in-
creasing pressure by Mississippi police against the terrorist
activity of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.27
The Klan and other militant white groups, both organized
and ad hoc, have operated as the "dirty workers" of a system
of caste domination. In an important sense, Southern racism
has successfully channeled the political protest of the mar-
ginal white into expressions which support the existing politi-
cal and social arrangements of the South. In the process, the
actual sources of the grievances of the marginal white have
gone uncorrected. Klan violence represents the thwarted and
displaced political protest of whites acting from a context of
economic insecurity, threatened manhood, and inability to in-
fluence local and national political structures.
A study of Klan membership in the late 1950's described it
as largely composed of marginal white-collar, small business,
and skilled workers occupying an intermediate position
between clear-cut blue-collar and clear-cut white-collar
WHITE MILITANCY 223
positions.28 An assessment of present Klan membership
would not show much change. Among the recent leadership
of various state and national Klan organizations are num-
bered a truck driver, a crane operator, a barber, a former
rubber plant worker and later salesman, a former bricklayer
and lightning-rod salesman, a machinist, a paint sprayer, and
several evangelical ministers. The seven Klansmen convicted
in the Neshoba County slayings included three (ruck drivers,
one trailer salesman, a chemical plant worker, a deputy
sheriff, and a vending-machine distributor. In contrast to the
middle- and upper-middle-class membership of the vigorously
racist Citizens' Councils of the Black Belt South,2'1 the typical
rank-and-file Klansman is subject to the vicissitudes of
Southern economic insecurity and to a large degree excluded
from the benefits of industrialization accruing to the new
middle class.
In addition to economic insecurity and marginality, the
grievances of the rank-and-file Klansman include a strong
sense of diminished manhood. The rhetoric of Southern white
militancy, like that of black militants, is suffused with a sense
of the decline of male effectiveness and the restorative func-
tions of militant action: "Step out from behind the petticoat
and be a man." 30
Klan rhetoric reflects the strong sense of distributive injus-
tice common to the marginal Southern white. Klansmen have
criticized the extent of federal anti-poverty funds given to
blacks in the face of white poverty, and complain that riots
have brought blacks federal largesse while the law-abiding
poor white must work and receives no federal attention.
"Health, education, and welfare is nigger health, nigger edu-
cation, and nigger welfare; they have done nothing about
yours." 31 The Grand Dragon of the North Carolina Klan has
complained that "the only contact with the federal govern-
ment is the FBI bug," and that the government has never ap-
proached him to discuss constructive measures for poor
whites.32 Another Klan complaint has been that those whites
who advocate integration are those who are able to afford to
send their children to private schools, thus shifting the bur-
den of accommodation to the poor white.33
The racist thrust of Southern white protest has largely ob-
224
scured the genuine grievances which have indeed been largely
ignored, on both local and federal levels. For some areas of the
South, it may be the case that, as one critic has suggested,
"The establishment fears war between the races less than an
alliance between them." 34 In any case, under present political
conditions in many areas, the channeling of the marginal
white protest into anti-Negro directions serves to buttress a
system of political and economic stagnation in which the poor
of both races lose. Whether this condition can be altered is
largely dependent on the sensitivity of efforts to deal with the
grievances of the poor white. For the moment, the white pro-
test remains at the level of a crude racism, well expressed in
one of the Klan's recordings:
You have to be black to get a welfare check
and I'm broke
No joke
I ain't got a nickel for a coke
I ain't black you see
so Uncle Sam won't help poor nigger-hating me.3r>
The Urban North
They have learned from the black people that the squeaky
wheel gets the grease, so they're going to squeak, too.
— Tony Imperiale
It should be abundantly clear that violent white militancy
has not been confined to the South. At present, although
there has been relatively little private violence by whites in
the North, the potential exists for a substantial amount of
urban violence directed against blacks. There are a number
of indications that militancy is increasing among some seg-
ments of the population of the Northern and Western cities.
The immediate precipitants seem to have been black civil
rights activity, the ghetto riots, and a perception of the in-
creasing danger of black criminality; but the increasing mili-
tancy of these groups reflects a larger problem that has re-
ceived less attention than its importance warrants — the situa-
tion of the working-class and lower-middle-class white living
in what may be called the white ghettos of the cities.
WHITE MILITANCY 225
The leading edge of the growing Northern militancy lies in
the largely working-class, generally ethnic neighborhoods of
the cities. Given a national context in which the representa-
tives of all three major political parties felt compelled to issue
remarkably similar demands for "law and order," it is not
surprising that a similar, but more strident, demand is made
by those who are most directly threatened by the disorder at-
tendant on contemporary social change. In short, the new
militancy of the urban working class must be seen in proper
perspective. The militancy of those in the white ghettos
differs principally in being more urgent.
This urgency is anchored in a set of real and pressing
problems. As Robert Wood of HUD has put it:
Let us consider the working American — the average white
ethnic male:
He is the ordinary employee in factory and in office.
Twenty million strong, he forms the bulk of the nation's
working force. He makes five to ten thousand dollars a year;
has a wife and two children; owns a house in town — between
the ghetto and the suburbs, or perhaps in a low-cost subdivi-
sion on the urban fringe; and he owes plenty in installment
debts on his car and appliances.
The average white working man has no capital, no stocks,
no real estate holdings except for his home to leave his chil-
dren. Despite the gains hammered out by his union, his job
security is far from complete. Layoffs, reductions, automa-
tion, and plant relocation remain the invisible witches at
every christening. He finds his tax burden is heavy; his neigh-
borhood services, poor; his national image, tarnished; and his
political clout, diminishing . . . one comes to understand his
tension in the face of the aspiring black minority. He notes
his place on the lower rungs of the economic ladder. He sees
the movement of black families as a threat to his home
values. He reads about rising crime rates in city streets and
feels this is a direct challenge to his family. He thinks the
busing of his children to unfamiliar and perhaps inferior
schools will blight their chance for a sound education. He
sees only one destination for the minority movement — his
job.36
As has been the case historically, American social and po-
litical institutions have not found ways of accommodating
both the legitimate grievances of aspiring minorities and the
grievances of those who feel the threat of displacement. Nor
226
have those institutions succeeded in substantially lessening the
dangers of physical violence or criminal victimization which
accompany life on the fringes of the slums. The result has
been a pervasive insecurity for the white urban dweller,
which, while frequently exaggerated, nevertheless has a basis
in the rather grim realities of contemporary urban life. Under
present conditions, property values may indeed be threatened
when blacks move in numbers into white areas; whites living
near black ghettos do have to cope directly with the problem
of "crime in the streets"; and the failure of American institu-
tions to commit themselves decisively to the eradication of
racial injustice means that the root causes of white insecurity
as well as black discontent are likely to remain with us. It is
in the context of these conditions that urban white militancy
is nourished. Politically ineffective, educationally limited, and
uncommitted to the finer distinctions regarding civil liberties
and minority rights, the urban white of ethnic working-class
background is increasingly disposed to resistance.
One indication of the depth of the new militancy is the
body of evidence showing that a sizable segment of the urban
population is willing to use violence to defend itself against
black disorder. Not only do many Northern whites organize
in support of harsh police measures against rioters, many
urban whites express a willingness to use private violence. A
Harris poll taken in September, 1967, indicated that 55 per-
cent of a sample of white gun owners said they would use
their gun to shoot other people in case of a riot; 37 a later
Harris survey in March, 1968, found the same question an-
swered affirmatively by 51 percent of white gun owners.38 In
the 1967 survey, 41 percent of whites with incomes under
$5,000 expressed the fear that their own home or neighbor-
hood would be affected in a riot, as compared with 34 per-
cent of all whites. A study of white reaction to the Los An-
geles riot of 1965 indicates that the willingness to use guns
and personal fear of the riot are related. Twenty-three per-
cent of a sample of whites said that they had felt a great deal
of fear for themselves and their families during the riot, and
29 percent said that they had considered using firearms to
protect themselves or their families. However, nearly half of
those who had considered the use of firearms were also
WHITE MILITANCY 227
among those who had felt a great deal of fear.39 Willingness
to use guns was highest in lower-income communities and in
integrated communities at all income levels; among whites
living in close proximity to Negroes; among men, the young,
the less-educated, and those in three occupational categories
— managers and proprietors, craftsmen and foremen, and
operatives.40
In general, these findings support the conception of the
white working and lower-middle class on the ghetto fringe as
the most violence-prone wing of the growing white militancy,
but the fact that higher-income whites living close to blacks
express a high degree of willingness to use violence empha-
sizes the point that it is the situation — rather than the charac-
ter or culture of the working class — which is critical. The
perception of threat appears to be a great equalizer of class
distinctions.
Expressing willingness to use guns in the face of a riot, of
course, is not the same as actually doing so. Since the recent
riots have been contained within the black ghettos them-
selves, no information exists which directly matches white be-
havior with white opinion of the use of guns. However, the
Los Angeles study found that 5 percent of their sampled
whites did in fact buy firearms or ammunition during the riot
to protect themselves and their families.41 In Detroit, more
than twice as many guns were registered in the first five
months of 1968 — following the riot in August of 1967 — than
in the corresponding five months in 1967, prior to the riot,
and a similar trend is evident in Newark.42 It must be re-
membered that white neighborhoods were not significantly
threatened during these riots. Speculation on what might re-
sult if white areas were directly threatened is not reassuring.
Further light on the potential for white violence is shed by
a study prepared for the Kerner Commission which at-
tempted to pinpoint the "potential white rioter." A sample of
whites was asked whether, in case of a Negro riot in their
city, they should "do some rioting against them" or leave the
matter for the authorities to handle. Eight percent of male
whites advocated counterrioting. Suburban whites were
slightly less inclined to advocate a counterriot than were city
whites. Less-educated whites tended to support counterriot-
228
ing, and there was a striking degree of advocacy of counter-
rioting by teen-age males, 21 percent of whom agreed that
they should riot against Negroes. This percentage was slightly
higher than the percentage of Negro teen-agers who said they
would join a riot if one occurred in their city.43
Again, the degree to which these attitudes are, or might be,
expressed in behavior is not clear. Nevertheless, studies of re-
cent riots indicate that a significant number of "riot-related"
arrests of whites have taken place. Occasionally, as in the De-
troit riot of 1967, whites have been arrested on charges of
looting, apparently in cooperation with blacks. More fre-
quently, however, white males have been arrested beyond or
near the perimeters of riot areas for "looting outside the riot
areas, riding through the area armed, refusing to recognize a
police perimeter, shooting at Negroes." 44 Such incidents were
particularly apparent in the New Haven, Plainfield, Dayton,
and Cincinnati riots of 1967. The white counterriot, of
course, has historical precedent; most of the Northern race
riots before 1935 involved pitched battles between whites and
blacks, with working-class white youth particularly in evi-
dence.45
The historically prominent role of youth in militant white
violence has received less attention than it deserves. A similar
pattern has been evident in more recent years, as the fore-
going figures would suggest. Participation of white working-
class youth in violence against civil rights activity and against
blacks moving into white neighborhoods has been noted in
many Northern cities. In Chicago, for example, white youth
were especially prominent in the Trumbull Park housing dis-
turbances of the late 1950's, the assault on civil rights activ-
ists attempting to integrate South Side beaches in the early
1960's, and the violence accompanying Martin Luther King's
West Side campaign in 1966. Militant white youth have been
active in several racially troubled areas of Chicago in 1968.
In Blue Island, for example, sixty-seven white youths were ar-
rested after harassing and beating Negroes following an
incident in which two young whites were shot.46 Schools in
many areas have been disrupted by conflict between black
and white youth. The new militancy of black high school stu-
dents is being countered in some areas by a corresponding
WHITE MILITANCY 229
white student militancy. In Trenton, New Jersey, for exam-
ple, militant white high school students, many carrying signs
reading "White Power," boycotted classes protesting incidents
of "roughing-up" by black students.47
Although youth have been prominent in relatively disor-
ganized instances of militant white violence, the major efforts
at organized militancy have been made by the adults who
comprise the leadership of the various neighborhood defense
organizations which have appeared in the North and West.
Some of these, like the "Breakthrough" organization in De-
troit, urge members to "study, arm, store provisions and
organize"; a similar group called "Fight Back" in Warren,
Michigan, argues that "The only way to stop them is at the
city limits." 4S Others focus less on arms training and storage,
concentrating on community patrols to discourage black in-
trusion. The most significant of these urban vigilante groups
is the North Ward Citizens Committee of Newark, whose
leader, Anthony Imperiale, has recently been elected to the
Newark City Council.
Newark's North Ward is a primarily Italian-American
neighborhood with a large and growing black population, ad-
jacent to the predominantly black Central Ward, which was
the scene of the Newark riot of 1967. The strident nativism
of the North Ward Citizens Committee reflects the ironies of
the process of ethnic succession in America. Not too long
ago,
The Italians were often thought to be the most degraded of
the European newcomers. They were swarthy, more than
half of them were illiterate, and almost all were victims of a
standard of living lower than that of any of the other promi-
nent nationalities. They were the ragpickers and the poorest
of common laborers; in one large city their earnings averaged
forty percent less than those of the general slum-dweller.
Wherever they went, a distinctive sobriquet followed them.
"You don't call an Italian a white man?" a West Coast con-
struction boss was asked. "No sir," he answered, "an Italian
is a Dago." Also, they soon acquired a reputation as blood-
thirsty criminals. Since Southern Italians had never learned to
fight with their fists, knives flashed when they brawled among
themselves or jostled with other immigrants. Soon a penolo-
gist was wondering how the country could build prisons
which Italians would not prefer to their own slum quarters.
230
On the typical Italian the prison expert commented: "The
knife with which he cuts his bread he also uses to lop off
another 'Dago's' finger or ear ... he is quite as familiar with
the sight of human blood as with the sight of the food he
eats." ™
Today, of course, the situation has shifted considerably,
and the North Ward Italians feel themselves beleaguered by a
horde of criminal blacks, instigated by radicals. The North
Ward Citizens Committee operates patrols of the neighbor-
hood, and members train in karate. Their militant quest for
law and order is rooted in a set of severe insecurities atten-
dant on life in Newark, where all the problems of the urban
white North exist in extreme form. Newark is over half black;
it leads all cities of its size in crime rates. It was the scene of
one of the most disastrous episodes of black disorder and vi-
olent official response in the sixties. The sense of fear pervad-
ing the white ghetto is reflected in Imperiale's words: "When
is it gonna stop? Everybody says, 'don't bother 'em now.
Leave 'em alone, and they'll calm down.' Well, it took riots
that burned down half of a town before we learned." 50
Accompanying the fear of black violence is a strong sense
of relative injustice. The citizens of the North Ward, con-
scious that their own neighborhood is deteriorating, strongly
resent the concentration of state and federal monies being
poured into the black community.
Are there no poor whites? But the Negroes get all the anti-
poverty money. When pools are being built in the Central
Ward, don't they think the white kids have got frustration?
The whites are the majority. You know how many of them
come to me, night after night, because they can't get a job?
They've been told, we have to hire Negroes first.51
The sense of special and unjust treatment for whites with
grievances is compounded by what Imperiale regards as un-
fair discrimination against his organization:
The Mayor says he is going to try to get funds to start
civilian patrols in the Central Ward. He claims this should be
done for the so-called ghetto area. I went to Washington to
get federal funds to set up a civilian patrol program in the
North Ward and the other areas of the city, black as well as
WHITE MILITANCY 231
the white, and I was pushed from pillar to post. It is all right
for the Central Ward but not for the North Ward where I
am called a para-military organization.52
In August, Imperial's headquarters were bombed, and Im-
perial has been highly critical of the lack of response by the
law and city officials. "What makes me mad is that if the
bombing had happened in the Central Ward, there would
have been all kinds of FBI agents and authorities. When we
get bombed, neither the mayor, the governor nor anyone else
said it was a bad thing to have happened. No statement what-
soever was made in the papers." 53
This sense of injustice and of exclusion from political con-
cern could lead to a heightened political alienation. The citi-
zens of Newark's North Ward are largely correct in feeling
that the polity has ignored them. At present, the Imperiale
organization remains involved in traditional political action
through the electoral process. Imperiale has insisted on this:
"The Anti-Vigilante bill will do nothing because I am not a
Vigilante. I am one-hundred percent for a para-military law
because that would outlaw people dressed in uniforms getting
together and practicing sabotage and overthrow of the gov-
ernment. I love the government and am trying to save it." 54
Should legitimate politics bear few significant results in terms
of the grievances of the white ghetto, the North Ward Citi-
zens Committee and similar groups may feel driven beyond
politics. If this were to happen, the protest of the working-
class urban white could take a new and ominous form, whose
outlines are best indicated by the white paramilitarism exam-
ined below.
White Paramilitarism
Groups willing to use violence to defend presumably
threatened "American" values are not new in this country's
history. Nevertheless, the state of thinking and information
on these groups are undeveloped. This is doubtless partly due
to their frequently illegal and usually conspiratorial nature. It
is due also to a certain amorphous character of the groups
themselves. Paramilitary groups are constantly fragmenting,
232
dissolving, undergoing rapid membership turnover, and form-
ing and breaking alliances with other groups, both illicit and
aboveboard. Their disorganized character is an important
index of the nature of these groups and of their relation to
the larger social and political structure. As one observer has
suggested, "The Minutemen are more a frame of mind than
an organization or movement." 55 Put differently, these
groups could be said to represent a frame of mind in search
of an organization, and having little success in finding one.
"Patriotic" paramilitary groups are composed of men whose
grievances are not well articulated and who are unable to
organize themselves into a coherent political force, partly be-
cause of their own ideology and background and partly as a
result of the response of the polity to them. Consequently the
source of their grievances remains unaltered, while they are
driven farther and farther away from normal political life.
"Paramilitarism" here refers to the activities of a group
that prepares for coordinated, violent action in order to re-
store, defend, or create general values, having a technological
capacity for collective violence, and existing outside formal
legal or military institutions. 56 A number of the groups pre-
viously discussed have paramilitary aspects, including some
black organizations. This section focuses on groups that are
almost pure types of the paramilitary organization, in the sense
of dissociation from legitimate political structures and a con-
siderable degree of armament. One such group, the Minute-
men, is the largest and best organized of the type, and will
serve here as a model.
The contemporary Minutemen organization was founded
in 1961 out of several local guerrilla-style groups which had
arisen during the years 1957 to 1960, at a time when the
sense of threat from a growing and ostensibly monolithic in-
ternational Communism pervaded the country's psyche, con-
ditioned its foreign policy, and dominated its rhetoric. This
Cold War atmosphere must be kept in mind in order to rec-
ognize that the Minutemen, like other white militant groups
of a violent nature, are not so distant from the more re-
spectable elements of the larger society as it appears on the
surface. Rather, the original aim of the Minutemen — to pro-
vide guerrilla training in case of an armed invasion of the
WHITE MILITANCY 233
United States by Soviet forces — may be interpreted as a logi-
cal extension of the national security policies of the American
government and of a populace that took seriously the issue of
whether it was better to be dead or Red.
It was not entirely unnatural, therefore, that when the im-
age of a sharply dichotomized world altered considerably —
especially as a result of new perceptions of differences among
various Communist nations — some of those with a deeper
stake in the earlier image began to ask whether there was not
some kind of internal subversion of American commitment,
whether in fact "Communists" or their allies had substantially
taken control of the American polity. This became the theme
of the Minutemen soon after their origin, and remains so
today.
Minutemen believe that Communists are in substantial con-
trol of American politics, education, and communication;
that liberals and fellow travelers are working hand in hand,
knowingly or otherwise, with the hard-core in preparation for
a total Communist take-over of the country. This will occur in
the near future at an unspecified date referred to as "The
Day," at which time patriotic Americans will have to take to
countryside, armed, in defense of the country.
Minutemen refer to themselves as "America's last line of
defense against Communism" and see violence as justified in
view of the depth of the threat to American principles:
"When our constitutional form of government is threatened
we are morally justified in resorting to violence to discourage
Communists and their fellow travelers." 57 They view the use
of armed force as an explicitly counterrevolutionary measure
in the face of a thirty-year, largely nonviolent, bureaucratic
left-wing revolution which has been taking place in this coun-
try.
An informed estimate of active Minutemen membership as
of 1968 puts it at eight to ten thousand nationally, with heav-
iest concentrations on the West Coast, especially around Los
Angeles and Seattle; the Southwest; and the Midwest, espe-
cially the St. Louis-Kansas City area, with a sizable pocket in
New York.58 That the Minutemen are capable of much vio-
lence is undisputed. Recent Minutemen-linked events have in-
cluded an attempted bank robbery, complete with dynamiting
234
of police and power stations, near Seattle; 59 an assault on a
peace group in Connecticut; and an attempted assault on
three left-wing camps in the New York area. In the last inci-
dent, some twenty Minutemen were arrested and a sizable
amount of weaponry confiscated. The weapons included the
following:
125 rifles, single or automatic; ten pipe bombs; five mortars;
twelve .30 calibre machine guns; twenty-five hand guns;
twenty sets of brass knuckles with knives attached; 220
knives of various sorts; one bazooka; three grenade launch-
ers; six hand grenades; fifty 80 mm. mortar shells; one mil-
lion rounds of ammunition of all kinds; chemicals for prepar-
ing bomb detonators, including picric acid; thirty walkie-talk-
ies and various other communication devices including short-
wave equipment capable of intercepting police bands; fifty
camouflage suits with boots and steel helmets; and a cross-
bow.60
Minutemen train for guerrilla operations and conduct sem-
inars on weapons use, making of explosives, and so on.61 A
considerable amount of effort is spent on gathering intelli-
gence on potential targets — communications centers, power
stations, arms supplies — and this effort includes an attempt to
infiltrate police and National Guard units. This has appar-
ently been partly successful. Minutemen infiltration of the
New York State Police netted considerable information on
police radio communications.62
Effort is also devoted to a campaign of psychological war-
fare oriented to the harassment of liberals. The following
Minutemen message, printed on stickers and postcards, has
become well-known:
Traitors Beware
See the old man at the corner where you buy your papers?
He may have a silencer equipped pistol under his coat. That
extra fountain pen in the pocket of the insurance salesman
who calls on you might be a cyanide gas gun. What about
your milk man? Arsenic works slow but sure. Your auto me-
chanic may stay up nights studying booby traps. These pa-
triots are not going to let you take their freedom away from
them. They have learned the silent knife, the strangler's cord,
WHITE MILITANCY 235
the target rifle that hits sparrows at 200 yards. Traitors be-
ware. Even now the crosshairs are on the back of your necks.
Minutemen
In addition to their own potential for violence, the Minute-
men represent what may be the clearest example of a kind of
political alienation which could conceivably come to charac-
terize a wider and wider range of groups in American soci-
ety. Lacking sufficient data, an analysis of their source and
future is at best tentative and exploratory. Still, several facts
are illuminating.
The Minutemen membership is largely composed of mar-
ginal whites. The founder and leader, Robert DePugh, is a
Midwestern small entrepreneur with a history of business fail-
ure, who now operates a small, largely family-owned veteri-
nary drug concern. The former Midwest Coordinator of the
group, now head of a smaller but similar group called the
Counter-Insurgency Council, owns and operates a small ma-
chine shop and gunsmithy in a small Illinois town.63 The
group arrested in Redmon, Washington, in connection with
the attempted bank robbery included a longshoreman, a gro-
cery clerk, a church maintenance man, a ship's oiler, a civil-
ian driver for an army base, and a draftsman.64 Those ar-
rested in the New York camp episode included a landscape
artist, two truck drivers, a cab driver, a heavy equipment op-
erator, a milkman, a draftsman, a mold-maker, an airport
steward, a gardener, a horse groom, a bus driver, a New
York City fireman, a plasterer, two mechanics, and a clerk.65
Most of these were young, between the ages of eighteen and
thirty-one. A close student of the Minutemen describes their
membership as predominantly male, of Western European
ancestry and at least nominal Christianity; at least one-half
blue-collar workers, few professionals or salaried white-collar
workers, and an overrepresentation of small proprietors.66 It
is noteworthy that this distribution parallels to a considerable
extent estimates of contemporary Klan membership. This fact
may indicate a similar set of conditions underlying the rise of
the two groups, as well as offering an explanation for the fail-
ure of the Minutemen to recruit Southern membership.67
236
This distribution also approximates the traditional social base
of fascist movements.
The standard explanations of "right-wing" militancy in the
United States have relied heavily on the notion that such mil-
itancy represents a form of "status politics" accompanying
the strains of prosperity.68 This kind of explanation clearly
applies fairly well to groups such as the John Birch Society,
whose membership tends to be suburban and relatively
affluent.69 But in the case of "patriotic" organizations as well
as organized Southern racism, a certain division of labor is
apparent, based on class or at least occupational lines. Just as
the Citizens' Councils represent a higher-income membership
than the Klans, the Birch Society represents the prosperous
and at least quasi-respectable arm of the radical "anti-Com-
munist" movement. At the level of the Minutemen, a differ-
ent kind of analysis may be required.
While the problem of "status" is doubtless great for the
marginal white, his grievances run much deeper. In an impor-
tant sense, the small-time, small-town businessman, the urban
clerk, or worker has been overwhelmed by social develop-
ments beyond his capacity to understand or to control. It can
be argued that the source of his complaint is not "Commu-
nism" at all; rather, it is a form of capitalism which has been
imposed upon him from outside — not the classical entrepre-
neurial capitalism of early America, which he cherishes, but
the newer, bigger, corporate capitalism of contemporary
America. The new capitalism, while creating new opportuni-
ties and new security for large business and for much of or-
ganized labor, and extending an at least rudimentary welfare
state apparatus to the poor, has largely passed by those in the
various occupational backwaters which the Minutemen mem-
bership represents. The advantages — tax loopholes, govern-
ment contracts, controlled markets, and the like — accruing to
large-scale corporate capitalism are not available to them; nor
for many are the benefits of organized labor. Increasingly left
behind in the thrust of these developments, the marginal
white feels all of the strains of modern life without most of
its benefits.
This situation is strongly reflected in Minutemen ideology,
which, while "anti-Communist" on the surface, is actually
WHITE MILITANCY 237
much more complex. To begin with, the nature of "Commu-
nism" for the Minutemen is considerably blurred, as it is for
many extreme right-wing groups: "No matter what the name
by which this collective ideology is known; commun-ism, so-
cial-ism, liberal-ism, progressiv-ism or welfare-ism, it still
adds up to the same thing; it is the antithesis of individual-
ism, it is the enemy of freedom." 70 In a real sense, the
"enemy" is a complexity and centralization which goes well
beyond the meaning of "Communism." For that matter, Min-
utemen ideology explicitly renounces contemporary capital-
ism in its espousal of the classical variant; DePugh argues
that there is a "great difference between theoretical capitalism
(the free enterprise system) and capitalism as a power
structure." 71 And again, ". . . the 'power elite' is indeed a
strange combination of monopoly capitalism and world
communism." 72 These facts are congruent with evidence of
the populist character of certain other right-wing phenomena;
for example, a study of support for Senator Joseph McCarthy
found his support highest among small businessmen who op-
posed both labor unions and big corporations.73
The content of Minutemen ideology leads to the strong
suspicion that the agitation against "Communism" represents
primarily a muddled political awareness of the nature of a
"New Industrial State" 74 in which certain groups have been
effectively cut off from appreciable influence. The sense of
persecution by an organized conspiracy is heightened by their
political exclusion and finds its mode of expression in the
ideological preoccupations of the larger society.
Political impotence leads the Minutemen to a sense that or-
derly political activity is not feasible, and the Minutemen —
like many militants on the left — renounce existing political
parties and call for political purism: "Throughout history all
major political changes, violent and nonviolent, have been
made by minorities. Logically, then, the patriots must cooper-
ate only with their own kind, not in coalitions with members
of the vested bureaucracy, either Democratic or Re-
publican."75 In 1966, the Minutemen organized their own
political party, the Patriotic Party. This reflects the growing
politicization of the group and an attempt, if not to influence
the political order substantially, at least to promote a recogni-
238
tion of the political, rather than criminal, character of the
group. The Minutemen have insisted on their political iden-
tity in the face of numerous criminal prosecutions. "We are
not criminals," wrote DePugh while fleeing indictment in
connection with the Seattle bank robbery, "we are political
refugees in our own land." 76
The Minutemen have been unable to organize themselves
for political action in an effective sense. They remain a loose
collection of armed guerrilla bands. Their attempts at alliance
with other groups have met with little success. They were al-
lied with the Birch Society until DePugh was expelled from
that organization in 1964. Informal affiliation remains; some
of the Minutemen arrested in the New York incident were
also Birch members. Individual Minutemen have had connec-
tions with the American Nazi Party and the Klan; the Na-
tional States Rights Party cut off its support of the Minute-
men in 1964 on the ground that the Minutemen had "gone
too far." 77 The lack of enduring alliances among such groups
is traditional, but in the case of the Minutemen more specific
factors may be involved, including the lack of anti-Semitic or
anti-Negro elements in Minuteman ideology. The Minute-
men's highly individualistic ideology and their loose control
over membership severely hinder more effective collective or-
ganization. At the same time, the lack of strong organiza-
tional control may increase the potential for localized vio-
lence by individual members and units.
Lack of effective organization furthers the Minutemen's
political impotence. Their effective exclusion from politics in
turn influences their perception of the nature of the "power
structure" and forces them further into a political limbo
where violence becomes increasingly seen as the only effec-
tive activity. As Hofstadter has suggested, this kind of politi-
cal exclusion serves to confirm preexisting conceptions of the
polity as being in the hands of a malignant force:
The situation becomes worse when the representatives of a
particular political interest — perhaps because of the very un-
realistic and unrealisible nature of their demands — cannot make
themselves felt in the political process. Feeling that they have
no access to political bargaining or the making of decisions,
they find their original conception of the world of power as
WHITE MILITANCY 239
omnipotent, sinister, and malicious fully confirmed. They see
only the consequences of power — and this through distorting
lenses — and have little chance to observe its actual machinery.78
Conclusion
For decades, violent white militancy represented the rough
edge of a wider national nativism aimed at excluding immi-
grants and blacks, Indians and foreigners, from full participa-
tion in American life. Official policy today, except in some
areas of the South and the more hard-bitten sections of the
North, repudiates these aims. Still, a significant minority of
white Americans feel driven to the use or contemplation of
violence in support of similar aims. Their protest reflects the
failure of American society to eradicate the underlying causes
of the disaffection of both blacks and whites. On the one
hand, the failure to deal with the roots of racism has meant
the rise of violent black protest in the cities, which the work-
ing-class white fears will spill over into his own neighborhood
along with rising crime and sinking property values. On the
other hand, the failure to deal with the institutional roots of
white marginality has left many whites in a critical state of
bitterness and political alienation as they perceive the govern-
ment passing them by.
For the Minutemen, the Klan, and similar groups, adrift
and overwhelmed by the processes of the modern corporate
state, the language of racism or anti-Communism structures
all discontents and points to drastic solutions. Politically im-
mature groups define the source of their problems in terms
provided for them. This should not obscure the fact that their
problems are genuine.
Continued political exclusion and organizational fragmen-
tation render such groups increasingly prone to violence as a
last political language. An effective response to these groups
must transcend mere surveillance and condemnation, which
can only aggravate their frame of mind without providing re-
dress of their situation.
For the most part, the political response to white militancy
has been either repressive or self-servingly encouraging. The
current emphasis on "law and order" partakes of both ele-
240
ments. A continued repressive response to the militancy of
both blacks and whites could conceivably lead to a state of
guerrilla warfare between the races. There are precedents for
such warfare in some of the race riots of the first half of the
century, and in recent clashes between armed black and white
militants in the South.
Of more immediate importance is the growing militancy
among white policemen, as evidenced by the recent activity
of the Law Enforcement Group in New York, the beating of
black youths by policemen in Detroit, and the revelation of
Ku Klux Klan activity in the Chicago police force. The new
militancy of the police has obvious and ominous implications
for the American racial situation, indeed for the future char-
acter of all forms of group protest in America. The policing
of protest takes on a new aspect when the policeman carries
with him the militant white's racist and anti-radical world-
view. The following chapter analyzes the sources and direc-
tion of the increasing protest of the police.
Chapter VII
The Police in Protest
The Police and Mass Protest:
The Escalation of Conflict, Hostility, and Violence
One central fact emerges from any study of police encoun-
ters with student protesters, anti-war demonstrators, or black
militants: there has been a steady escalation of conflict, hos-
tility, and violence.
The Black Community
Writing in 1962, three years before the Watts riots and al-
most the distant past in this respect, James Baldwin vividly
portrayed the social isolation of the policeman in the black
ghetto:
. . . The only way to police a ghetto is to be oppressive.
None of the Police Commissioner's men, even with the best
will in the world, have any way of understanding the lives
led by the people; they swagger about in twos and threes pa-
trolling. Their very presence is an insult, and it would be,
even if they spent their entire day feeding gumdrops to chil-
dren. They represent the force of the white world, and that
world's real intentions are, simply, for that world's criminal
241
242
profit and ease, to keep the black man corralled up here, in
his place. The badge, the gun in the holster, and the swinging
club, make vivid what will happen should his rebellion be-
come overt. . . .
It is hard, on the other hand, to blame the policeman,
blank, good-natured, thoughtless, and insuperably innocent,
for being such a perfect representative of the people he
serves. He, too, believes in good intentions and is astounded
and offended when they are not taken for the deed. He has
never, himself, done anything for which to be hated — which
of us has? And yet he is facing, daily and nightly, the people
who would gladly see him dead, and he knows it. There is no
way for him not to know it: There are few things under
heaven more unnerving than the silent, accumulating con-
tempt and hatred of a people. He moves through Harlem,
therefore, like an occupying soldier in a bitterly hostile coun-
try; which is precisely what, and where he is, and is the rea-
son he walks in twos and threes.1
Today the situation is even more polarized. There have
been riots, and both black Americans and police have been
killed. Black anger has become more and more focused on
the police: the Watts battle cry of "Get Whitey" has been re-
placed by the Black Panther slogan: "Off the pigs." The
black community is virtually unanimous in demanding major
reforms, including police review boards and local control of
the police. According to the Kerner Commission 2 and other
studies,3 conflict with the police was one of the most impor-
tant factors in producing black riots. In short, anger, hatred,
and fear of the police are a major common denominator
among black Americans at the present time.
The police return these sentiments in kind — they both fear
the black community and openly express violent hostility and
prejudice toward it. Our review of studies of the police re-
vealed unanimity in findings on this point: the majority of
rank and file policemen are hostile toward black people.4
Usually such hostility does not reflect official policy, although
in isolated instances, as in the Miami Police Department
under Chief Headley, official policy may encourage anti-
black actions.5 Judging from these studies, there is no reason
to suppose that anti-black hostility is a new development
brought on by recent conflicts between the police and the
black community. What appears to have changed is not po-
THE POLICE IN PROTEST 243
lice attitudes, but the fact that black people are fighting back.
The Harlem Riot Commission Report of 1935 reserved its
most severe criticism for the police :
The police of Harlem show too little regard for human
rights and constantly violate their fundamental rights as citi-
zens. . . . The insecurity of the individual in Harlem against
police aggression is one of the most potent causes for the ex-
isting hostility to authority. ... It is clearly the responsibility
of the police to act in such a way as to win the confidence of
the citizens of Harlem and to prove themselves the guardians
of the rights and safety of the community rather than its ene-
mies and oppressors.6
And William A. Westley reported from his studies of police
in the late forties:
No white policeman with whom the author has had con-
tact failed to mock the Negro, to use some type of stereo-
typed categorization, and to refer to interaction with the
Negro in an exaggerated dialect, when the subject arose.7
Students of police seem unanimous in agreeing that police
attitudes have not changed much since those studies. In a
study done under a grant from the Office of Law Enforce-
ment Assistance of the United States Department of Justice,
and submitted to the President's Commission on Law En-
forcement and the Administration of Criminal Justice in
1966, Donald J. Black and Albert J. Reiss, Jr., found over-
whelming evidence of widespread, virulent prejudice by po-
lice against Negroes.8 The study was based on field observa-
tions by thirty-six observers who accompanied police officers
for a period of seven weeks in the summer of 1966 in Bos-
ton, Chicago, and Washington, D.C. It was found that 38
percent of the officers had expressed "extreme prejudice,"
while an additional 34 percent had expressed "considerable
prejudice" in front of the observers. Thus, 72 percent of
these policemen qualified as prejudiced against black Ameri-
cans. It must be remembered that these views were not solic-
ited, but were merely recorded when voluntarily expressed.
And it seems fair to assume that some proportion of remain-
ing 28 percent were sophisticated enough to exercise a certain
244
measure of restraint when in the presence of the observers.
Also, examples presented by Black and Reiss make it clear
that their observers found intense and bitter hatred toward
blacks. Moreover, these are not rural Southern policemen,
and our investigation has shown that their views are typical
of those in most urban police forces.
Concrete examples of this prejudice are not hard to find.
For example, the Commission's Cleveland Study Team found
that prejudice had been festering in the Cleveland police
force for a long time but suddenly bloomed into virulent big-
otry following the July, 1968, shoot-out between police and
black militants. When white police were withdrawn from the
ghetto for one night to allow black community leaders to
quell the rioting, racist abuse of Mayor Carl B. Stokes, a
Negro, could be heard on the police radio. And posters with
a picture of the Mayor under the words "Wanted for Mur-
der" hung in district stations for several weeks after the
shoot-out. Elsewhere our interviews disclosed the fact that
nightsticks and riot batons are at times referred to as "nigger
knockers."9 Robert Conot writes that "LSMFT" — the old
Lucky Strike slogan — has slipped into police argot as: "Let's
Shoot a Mother-Fucker Tonight." 10
Police actions often reflect these attitudes. In recent years
there have been numerous allegations by Negro and civil lib-
erties groups of police insulting, abusing, mistreating, and
even beating or murdering blacks. Studies of the police by in-
dependent bodies tend to support these allegations. For in-
stance, the 1961 Report on Justice, by the United States Civil
Rights Commission, concluded that "Police brutality ... is a
serious problem in the United States." ai Without presently
recounting specific additional instances and varieties of mis-
conduct, suffice it to say that this conclusion finds support
throughout the literature on police.12
The problem has become even more acute with the emer-
gence of increased black militancy. Reports in numerous cit-
ies, including Detroit,13 San Francisco,14 New York,15 and
Oakland,16 indicate that police officers have attacked or shot
members of the black community, often Black Panthers, at
offices, social events, and even courthouse halls. Indeed, it ap-
THE POLICE IN PROTEST 245
pears that such incidents are spreading and are not isolated in
a few police departments.
Moreover, difficult to document, it seems clear that police
prejudice impairs the capacity of the police to engage in im-
partial crowd control. If anything, the behavior that typifies
day-to-day policing is magnified in riot situations. The report
of the Kerner Commission indicates that, for example, police
violence was out of control during the 1967 riots,17 and simi-
lar findings are seen elsewhere,18 including the study of the
commission's Cleveland Study Team.
Protesters: Student and Anti-War
Conflict has been escalating not only between the police
and the black community; bad feeling and violence between
the police and students and peace groups has also increased.
The earliest peace marches were treated much like ordi-
nary parades by the police, and the protesters, many of
whom accepted nonviolence as their guiding principle, sel-
dom baited the police or expressed hostility toward them. But
slowly incidents began accumulating, until by the spring and
summer of 1968 protest marches frequently became clashes
between protesters and the police.
As discussed in our chapter on anti-war protest, the escala-
tion of the war led to growing frustrations and greater mili-
tancy on the part of protesters. Yet the police handling of
protesters was often unrestrained and only increased the po-
tential for violence — in the immediate situation and for the
future. Predictably, the escalation continued. Protesters grew
bitterly angry; and as anger against the police became a
major element in protest meetings and marches, the police
grew to hate and fear the protesters even more. Numerous
respected commissions, among them the Cox Commission,19
which studied the student uprising at Columbia University,
and the Sparling Commission,20 which studied the April,
1968, peace march in Chicago, found that the police used un-
called-for force, often vindictively, against protesters, often
regardless of whether the latter were "peaceful" or "provoca-
tive."
The extent of violence in police-protester confrontations
246
was most clearly shown to the nation by the media coverage
of the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
What was shown and reported confirmed what some people
already thought, confused others, but probably changed few
minds. However, the investigation of this commission's Chi-
cago Study Team documents "unrestrained and indiscrimi-
nate police violence on many occasions."
During the week of the Democratic National Convention,
the Chicago police were the targets of mounting provocation
by both word and act. It took the form of obscene epithets,
and of rocks, sticks, bathroom tiles and even human feces
hurled at police by demonstrators. Some of these acts had
been planned; others were spontaneous or were themselves
provoked by police action. Furthermore, the police had been
put on edge by widely published threats of attempts to dis-
rupt both the city and the Convention.
That was the nature of the provocation. The nature of the
response was unrestrained and indiscriminate police violence
on many occasions, particularly at night.
That violence was made all the more shocking by the fact
that it was often inflicted upon persons who had broken no
law, disobeyed no order, made no threat. These included
peaceful demonstrators, onlookers, and large numbers of resi-
dents who were simply passing through, or happened to live
in, the areas where confrontations were occurring.
Newsmen and photographers were singled out for assault
and their equipment deliberately damaged. Fundamental po-
lice training was ignored; and officers, when on the scene,
were often unable to control their men. As one police officer
put it: "What happened didn't have anything to do with po-
lice work." 21
Significantly, the violent police actions seen on television
were less fierce than the brutality they displayed at times or
places where there were no television cameras present.22
What is truly unique about Chicago, however, is not the
occurrence of police violence; rather, it is the extent and
quality of media coverage given to the actual events, the fact
that a respected commission with sufficient resources chose to
find out what happened, and the extent and quality of media
coverage of the report of those findings. Similar violence has
occurred in many places, including New York, San Fran-
cisco, and Los Angeles.
THE POLICE IN PROTEST 247
For example, in March, 1968, in New York's Grand Cen-
tral Station, while demonstrators engaged in typical Yippie
tactics, police suddenly appeared and, without giving the
crowd any real chance to disperse, indiscriminately attacked
and clubbed demonstrators.23 A similar outburst occurred a
month later in Washington Square; 24 and, of course, the po-
lice violence that spring at Columbia, described in Chapter
III, is by now a matter of common knowledge. The dispersal
of a march of thousands to Century City in Los Angeles dur-
ing the summer of 1967 is also a case in point. There, as re-
ported in Day of Protest, Night of Violence, a report pre-
pared by the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern
California, dispersal was accompanied by similar police club-
bing and beating of demonstrators, children, and invalids.25 It
should be emphasized that the decision to disperse that march
was at best questionable, since the protesters were not a vi-
olent, threatening crowd. Moreover, the report finds that the
paraders did not violate the terms of their parade permit, and
thus "the order to disperse was arbitrary, and served no law-
ful purpose." 26
The point that the Chicago convention violence is not
unique is highlighted by considering that in April, 1968, four
months earlier, similar violence occurred between police and
protesters during another peace march in Chicago. An inves-
tigation was conducted by an independent committee which
was chaired by Dr. Edward J. Sparling, president emeritus of
Roosevelt University, and whose membership included such
persons as Professor Harry Kalven, Jr., of the Chicago Law
School, and Mr. Warren Bacon, Vice President of the Inland
Steel Corporation. To quote from the report of this commit-
tee:
On April 27, at the peace parade of the Chicago Peace
Council, the police badly mishandled their task. Brutalizing
demonstrators without provocation, they failed to live up to
that difficult professionalism which we demand.
Yet to place primary blame on the police would, in our
view, be inappropriate. The April 27 stage had been prepared
by the Mayor's designated officials weeks before. Administra-
tive actions concerning the April 27 Parade were designed by
City officials to communicate that "these people have no
right to demonstrate or express their views." Many acts of
248
brutal police treatment on April 27 were directly observed (if
not commanded) by the Superintendent of Police or his
deputies.27
What happened during the Chicago convention, therefore,
is not something totally different from police work in prac-
tice. Our analysis indicates that the convention violence was
unusual more in the fact of its having been documented than
in the fact of its having occurred. The problem most defi-
nitely is not one unfortunate outburst of misbehavior on the
part of a few officers, as the report of the Chicago adminis-
tration alleged.28
In closing this section, it is instructive to note two facts:
First, the behavior of most police, most of the time, is not
necessarily represented by their actions in situations involving
protest. In protest situations their own political views often
seem to control their actions. Second, a violent response by
police to protesters is not inevitable. For example, recently a
major London demonstration protesting the Vietnam War
and the politics of the "Establishment" resulted in no serious
violence, and one serious attempt to provoke trouble was
avoided by a superbly disciplined and restrained team of po-
licemen. According to the New York Times:
. . . the police never drew their truncheons and never
showed anger. They held their line in front of the embassy
until, as the attackers tired, they could begin to push the
crowd down South Audley Street and away from the square.
Americans who saw the Grosvenor Square events could
not help drawing the contrast with the violence that erupted
between the Chicago police and demonstrators at the Demo-
cratic Convention in August.29
More recently, in the United States, during the inaugural cere-
monies for President Nixon, the Washington, D.C. authorities
and city police received a complimentary reaction from all
sides. David Dellinger called the police performance "beauti-
ful" and added that, "at key points the Mayor and other people
stepped in to prevent (violence) from escalating." The Wash-
ington Daily News, in an editorial of January 22nd, 1969,
described the conduct of the police as "a superb demonstra-
tion of discipline — a new, professional police force awesome
THE POLICE IN PROTEST 249
in its strength and self-control." In the materials that follow,
we shall attempt to analyze those features of the police role
in society that contribute to a breakdown of discipline and
self-control, when it occurs.
The Predicament of the Police
The significance of police hostility, anger, and violence
need hardly be stressed. Yet any analysis along this line runs
the risk of being labeled anti-police, and it is often argued
that such analyses demand more of the police than of other
groups in society. However, this criticism may both be true
and miss the point.
In some senses we do demand more of the police than we
do of other groups — or more accurately, perhaps, we become
especially concerned when the police fail to meet our de-
mands. But this must be the case because it is to the police
that we look to deal with so many of our problems, and it is
to the police that we entrust the legitimate use of force.
Moreover, unnecessary police violence can only exacerbate
the problems police action is used to solve. Protesters are in-
flamed, and a cycle of greater and greater violence is set into
motion — both in the particular incident and in future inci-
dents. More fundamentally, the misuse of police force vio-
lates basic notions of our society concerning the role of po-
lice. Police are not supposed to adjudicate and punish; they
are supposed to apprehend and take into custody. To the ex-
tent to which a nation's police step outside such bounds, that
nation has given up the rule of law in a self-defeating quest
for order.
So it becomes especially important to explore why the po-
lice have become increasingly angry and hostile toward
blacks and protesters and why they are inclined to overreact
violently when confronting such persons. The necessary start-
ing point is a careful examination of what it is like to be a
policeman today.
The predicament of the police in America today can
scarcely be overstated, caught as they are between two con-
tradictory developments: their job is rapidly becoming much
250
more difficult (some say impossible), while at the same time
their resources — morale, material, and training — are deterio-
rating. No recent observer doubts that the police are under
increasing strain largely because they are increasingly being
given tasks well beyond their resources.
The Policeman's Job
The outlines of the growing demands upon the police are
well known and require but brief review here. Increasingly,
the police are required to cope with the problems that de-
velop as conditions in the black community remain intolera-
ble and as black anger and frustration grow. Yet all intelli-
gent police observers recognize that the root causes of black
violence and rebellion are beyond the means or authority of
the police. As a former Superintendent of the Chicago Police
Department, O. W. Wilson, commented on riots in a recent
interview :
I think there is a long-range answer — the correction of the
inequities we're all aware of: higher educational standards,
improved economic opportunities, a catching up on the cul-
tural lag, a strengthening of spiritual values. All of these
things in the long run must be brought to bear on the prob-
lem if it is to be solved permanently, and obviously it must be
solved. It will be solved, but not overnight.30
Since the publication of the Kerner Commission Report
there is no longer much reason for anyone not to understand
the nature of the social ills underlying the symptomatic vio-
lence of the black ghettos. But while we all know what needs
to be done, it has not been done. The American policeman as
well as the black American must therefore suffer daily from
the consequence of inaction and indifference.
James Baldwin's characterization of the police as an army
of occupation, quoted earlier, requires more and more urgent
consideration. The police are set against the hatred and vio-
lence of the ghetto and are delegated to suppress it and keep
it from seeping into white areas. Significantly, no one knows this
better than the police who must try to perform this danger-
ous and increasingly unmanageable and thankless task.
Throughout our interviews with members of major urban po-
THE POLICE IN PROTEST 251
lice forces, their despair and anger in the face of worsening
violence and impending disaster were evident. No recent ac-
count about the police by scholars and journalists reports evi-
dence to the contrary. As the Saturday Evening Post recently
wrote of the police in St. Louis: "To many policemen, the
very existence of [an emergency riot mobilization] plan im-
plies that it will be used, and it is this sense of inevitability,
this feeling that events have somehow slipped out of their
control, that unnerves and frustrates them. . . ." 31
And, of course, the police are correct. Events are slipping
out of their control and they must live, more than most peo-
ple, with the threat of danger and disaster. As one patrolman
told a Post reporter, "the first guys there [responding to the
riot plan] — they've had it. I've thought of getting myself a lit-
tle sign saying 'expendable' and hanging it around my
neck."32 When the temperatures rise above 100 degrees in
the ghetto and tenements overrun with people, rats, hopeless-
ness, and anger, it is the police who are on the line; and any
mistake can bring death. A New York policeman interviewed
by our task force put the widespread apprehensions of the
police simply: "Yeah, I'm scared. All the cops are. You
never know what's going to happen out there. This place is a
powder keg. You don't know if just putting your hand on a
colored kid will cause a riot."
Similarly, the police can do little to ameliorate the reasons
for student and political protest. Many demands of the
protesters — moral political leadership, peace, and reform of
the universities — lie outside the jurisdiction of the police. But
when protesters are met with police, protest becomes a prob-
lem for the police.
Protest, moreover, poses an unusual problem for the po-
liceman. Although policemen are characteristically referred
to as law enforcement officers, more than one student of po-
lice has distinguished between the patrolman's role as a
"peace officer" concerned with public order 33 and the police-
man's role as detective, concerned with enforcing the law. As
a peace officer, the patrolman usually copes with his responsi-
bilities by looking away from minor thefts, drunkenness, dis-
turbances, assaults, and malicious mischief. "[The] normal
252
tendency of the police," writes James Q. Wilson, "is to under-
enforce the law." 34
In protest situations, however, the police are in the public
eye, and frequently find themselves in the impossible position
of acting as substitutes for necessary political and social re-
form. If they cope with their situation by venting their rage
on the most apparent and available source of their predica-
ment— blacks, students, and demonstrators — it should occa-
sion no surprise. The professional restraint, compassion, and
detachment oftentimes displayed by police are admirable.
Under pressure and provocation, however, the police them-
selves can pose serious social problems.
The Resources of the Police
As the job of the policeman has become more important
and sensitive, society has neglected the police in quite direct
ways. From our study of the police in many cities it is appar-
ent that law enforcement as an occupation has declined
badly.
The Problem of Manpower: Quantity and Quality
It is hard to say why men join the police force, but the
evidence we have indicates that police recruits are not espe-
cially sadistic or even authoritarian, as some have alleged. On
the contrary, the best evidence that we have been able to ac-
cumulate from the works of such police experts as
Niederhoffer 35 and McNamara 36 suggests that the policeman
is usually an able and gregarious young man with social
ideals, better than average physical prowess, and a rather
conventional outlook on life, including normal aspirations
and self-interest.
One outstanding problem of the police is a decline in pay
relative to comparable occupations.37 Correspondingly, the
prestige of the occupation in the estimate of the general
public has fallen sharply, and there has been a sharp decline in
the quality and quantity of new recruits.38 Most departments
have many vacancies. In New York City, for example, ac-
cording to a study conducted by Arthur Niederhoffer,39 more
THE POLICE IN PROTEST 253
than half of the recruits to the New York City police in June,
1940, were college graduates. During the last decade, on the
other hand, the proportion of recruits with a college degree
has rarely reached 5 percent. Neiderhoffer attributes this
change to a decline in the relative financial rewards for being
a policeman.40 He notes: "In the 1930's . . . top-grade pa-
trolmen in New York City earned three thousand dollars a
year. They owned houses and automobiles; they could afford
the luxuries that were the envy of the middle class; and they
were never laid off. In the panic of the Depression, the mid-
dle class began to regard a police career pragmatically." 41
However, as the affluence of the country has risen in general,
the relative rewards of police work have lagged badly. "Pa-
trolmen's pay in major cities now averages about $7,500 per
year — 33% less than is needed to sustain a family of four in
moderate circumstances in a large city, according to the U.S.
Bureau of Labor Statistics." 42 Even though a top-grade pa-
trolman in New York now earns about $9,000, this is less
than a skilled craft-worker, such as an electrician or plumber,
earns in New York.43 Meanwhile, we have encouraged police
to aspire to a middle-class life style. To achieve this, many
police "moonlight" on a second job and have wives who
work. Others — we do not know what percentage — engage in
graft and corruption, which, in some cities, has been de-
scribed as "a way of life." 44
Thus a decline in the relative salary of the police profes-
sion is at least partly to blame for the fact that, while we
have increasingly become committed to professionalism
among the police, in many of our great cities the quality of
recruits has actually been declining. In fact, matters are
worse than they might appear, for while the average level of
education among police recruits has been declining, the aver-
age level of educational achievement in the population has
been increasing rapidly. Thus, new police recruits are being
taken from an ever-shrinking pool of undereducated persons;
increasingly it is such people who find being a policeman a
"good job." 45
In many urban departments today the older policemen are
better educated and qualified than are the young policemen
— a reversal of the trend operating in almost every other oc-
254
cupation in America. As an Oakland police captain with
twenty-seven years on the force described changes in his de-
partment to our interviewer:
We are not getting the type of college people in the depart-
ment that we were before. The guys that we're getting now
have had a high school education, have gone into the army
for a couple of years and have come out and are looking to
get in the police department because of the good pay. Oak-
land is a relatively high-paying department, but still does not
get educated recruits. We're not getting one twentieth of the
people out of the junior colleges that we should get. What
we're going to have to do is subsidize the education of these
people.
Even more bleak is the picture painted by Dr. Maurice
Mensh, a physician who cares for the Washington, D.C., po-
lice: "This is an uneducated group. You should read some of
the essays they write. They can hardly write. . . . And you
put them on the street and ask them to make decisions that
are way beyond their capacity." 46 Moreover, such situations
exist even in what are considered to be the most elite, com-
petent, and 'educated police forces in the country. For exam-
ple, in Berkeley, California, there has recently been a sharp
decline in the educational level of recruits.47
Alongside problems of recruitment are problems of reten-
tion. For example, the San Francisco Chronicle reported on
November 12, 1968, that 195 officers of the San Francisco
Police Department had suddenly put in for early retirement.
This was approximately 1 1 percent of the force, which, like
most urban departments, chronically operates at about 5 per-
cent below authorized strength for lack of suitable applicants.
The mass of retirement applications followed the June pas-
sage of a ballot proposition to improve policemen retirement
benefits and permit retirement at an earlier age. The purpose
of the new program was to aid the department in recruiting
new officers. Ironically, its results thus far have been to in-
crease retirement applications.
What reasons did these policemen give for quitting the
force at the earliest possible moment? One veteran inspector
said, "It's a dog's job. It's a job the average man wouldn't
take. It doesn't have to be, but it is." Another inspector ex-
THE POLICE IN PROTEST 255
plained his decision this way: "We're running scared. ... If
there are social injustices, that's society's bag. We can't cure
them. All we can do is make arrests. . . ." In the judgment
of Captain Charles Barca, the men leave because "It's just an
ugly, difficult, uncomfortable way to make a living and will
continue to be that way until the general public develops
more appreciation for officers and more respect for them." 48
Although the San Francisco episode was striking because a
change in the law produced a sudden mass retirement, reports
from urban departments across the nation show that the ma-
jority of officers retire as soon as they are eligible.
Even more troubling is the fact that many urban depart-
ments report massive resignation rates — often nearly 20 per-
cent per year — among officers short of retirement. According
to our interview with Berkeley Police Chief William Beall,
Berkeley officers quit the force at all stages of their career.
"We lose many veteran officers with ten to fifteen years on
the force, men who are at the peak of their efficiency." Al-
most none of these men take law enforcement jobs elsewhere
— Berkeley is one of the highest paying and most admired de-
partments in the nation — but take up other occupations. "The
men who find these opportunities are our best, as you would
expect," Chief Beall told our interviewer. Thus for many po-
licemen the way to cope with the predicament of modern
policing is simply to get out.
One obvious consequence of all this has been a shortage of
manpower on police forces. An examination of the Uniform
Crime Reports of the Federal Bureau of Investigation shows
that the number of full-time police employees per 1,000 pop-
ulation in America's cities has gone virtually unchanged since
1960, while the number of complaints handled by the police
has increased enormously.49 A corollary is, of course, the ten-
dency to overwork and overextend our police.
Training: Deterioration in the Face of New Needs
Perhaps an even more significant effect of pressing man-
power needs is the tendency to allow existing training pro-
grams to deteriorate because of the pressure for immediate
manpower. There is considerable evidence that the new re-
cruits are receiving less adequate training from within depart-
256
ments than in the recent past.50 However, this deterioration
has largely gone unnoticed outside the police. While police
academies have undoubtedly been upgraded in many cities,
and while their curricula have been immeasurably improved,
frequently new recruits are not given the benefit of these im-
provements. Because of the overwhelming need for man-
power, recruits often are hustled out of their training period
and onto the streets before they have been adequately in-
structed. To appreciate the severity of this problem, one need
only consider the following excerpts from our interviews with
New York policemen about officer training. We select New
York because it is the largest police department in the nation
and is generally regarded as a police department with out-
standing training practices.
A patrolman on a Brooklyn beat:
There is no professionalization in this department. We're
getting a bunch of dummies on this job now. We've got guys
out on the street who haven't had any training outside of
three or four days in the academy. We had one class that
graduated in December and it had three weeks of training
and we had another class that was in June for only I think it
was two days, and they were put out on the street. The
Mayor says we've got to have more policemen; so we put these
guys out, and they shouldn't be there. And they keep saying,
we'll send them back to the academy for their training later,
and they've said this half a dozen times now and the guys are
still out on the street. You know, they aren't even training
these guys to shoot. . . . The way it stands now, we're put-
ting uniforms on guys and calling them cops, but they're not
cops; they don't know anything.
A sergeant:
I was an instructor at the police academy last year and I
know I had one of my classes turned out on the street after
about three weeks. They're supposed to come back to work
one day a week at the academy for what they missed, but it
never happened. They're out there working now with just
three weeks training. Last night I had a couple of young
officers who had just a very short time on the job and only a
few weeks in the academy and something happened and one
of the detectives fired his revolver and one of these young
guys couldn't resist, he fired too. I'm really afraid of what's
THE POLICE IN PROTEST 257
going to happen with these young guys. They're all eager to
get in and do what they think is real police work, but they
just don't have the training.
A patrolman:
We had a young officer killed about two days ago, and I
went and checked on his record myself, so I know this to be
a fact. He had been out of the academy for a few months
now and he had never had any training on how to handle a
gun.
Indeed, according to a story in the New York Times more
than 2,000 new policemen had been assigned to duty during
the first eight months of 1968 without being cleared by the
background investigation which "normally precedes appoint-
ment to the force." 51 The reason given by city officials was
the urgent need to obtain new policemen.
Deterioration of existing training programs is particularly
unfortunate at a time when new and vastly improved meth-
ods of training are needed if the police are adequately to deal
with demonstration, protest, and confrontation. In dealing
with crowds, police are required to exhibit teamwork, imper-
sonality, and discipline seldom demanded in their routine
work. In fact, certain characteristic features of police training
may hinder men from operating properly in crowd control
situations. As the National Advisory Commission on Civil
Disorders observed:
Traditional police training seeks to develop officers who
can work independently and with little direct supervision. But
the control of civil disturbances requires quite different per-
formance— large numbers of disciplined personnel, compara-
ble to soldiers in a military unit, organized and trained to
work as members of a team under a highly unified command
control system. No matter how well-trained and skilled a po-
lice officer may be, he will be relatively ineffectual to deal
with civil disturbances so long as he functions as an
individual.52
Thus one National Guard commander complained after view-
ing the police utilization of Guard units during the Detroit
riot of 1967:
258
They sliced us up like baloney. The police wanted bodies.
They grabbed Guardsmen as soon as they reached the armo-
ries, before their units were made up, and sent them out, two
on a fire truck, this one on a police car, that one to guard
some installation. . . . The Guards simply became lost boys
in the big town carrying guns.53
Perhaps no more dramatic illustration of the shortcomings
of police crowd control techniques can be offered than the
Detroit riot of 1967. Responsibility for riot control was di-
vided between U.S. Army paratroopers on one side of town
and a combination of Detroit police and the National Guard
on the other. The Guard proved as untrained and unreliable
as the police; and between the two, thousands of rounds of
ammunition were expended and perhaps thirty persons were
killed while disorder continued. Yet in paratrooper territory,
only 201 rounds of ammunition were fired", mostly in the first
several hours before stricter fire discipline was imposed, only
one person was killed, and within a few hours quiet and
order were restored in that section of the city.54
The Police View of Protest and Protesters
Faced with the mounting pressures inherent in their job,
the police have naturally sought to understand why things are
as threy are. Explanations which the police, with a few excep-
tions, have adopted constitute a relatively coherent view of
current protests and their causes. The various propositions
making up this view have nowhere been set out and made ex-
plicit, but they do permeate the police literature. We have
tried to set them out as explicitly as possible.
As will be seen, this view functions to justify — indeed, it
suggests — a strategy for dealing with protest and protesters.
Like any coherent view of events, it helps the police plan
what they should do and understand what they have done.
But it must also be said that the police view makes it more
difficult to keep the peace and increases the potential for vio-
lence. Furthermore, police attitudes toward protest and
protesters often lead to conduct at odds with democratic
ideals of freedom of speech and political expression. Thus the
THE POLICE IN PROTEST 259
police often view protest as an intrusion rather than as a con-
tribution to our political processes. In its extreme case, this
may result in treating the fundamental political right of dis-
sent as merely an unnecessary inconvenience to traffic, as
subversive activity, or both.
The "Rotten Apple" View of Man
What is the foundation of the police view? On the basis of
our interviews with police and a systematic study of police
publications,55 we have found that a significant underpinning
is what can best be described as a "rotten apple" theory of
human nature. Such a theory of human nature is hardly con-
fined to the police, of course. It is widely shared in our soci-
ety. Many of those to whom the police are responsible hold
the "rotten apple" theory, and this complicates the problem
in many ways.
Under this doctrine, crime and disorder are attributable
mainly to the intentions of evil individuals; human behavior
transcends past experience, culture, society, and other exter-
nal forces and should be understood in terms of wrong
choices, deliberately made. Significantly — and contrary to
the teachings of all the behavioral sciences — social factors
such as poverty, discrimination, inadequate housing, and the
like are excluded from the analysis. As one policeman put it
simply, "Poverty doesn't cause crime; people do." (And as
we discuss later, the policeman's view of "crime" is extremely
broad.)
The "rotten apple" view of human nature puts the police-
man at odds with the goals and aspirations of many of the
groups he is called upon to police. For example, police often
relegate social reforms to the category of "coddling crimi-
nals" or, in the case of recent ghetto programs, to "selling
out" to troublemakers. Moreover, while denying that social
factors may contribute to the causes of criminal behavior, po-
lice and police publications, somewhat inconsistently, de-
nounce welfare programs not as irrelevant but as harmful be-
cause they destroy human initiative. This negative view of the
goals of policed communities can only make the situation of
both police and policed more difficult and explosive. Thus,
260
the black community sees the police not only as representing
an alien white society but also as advocating positions funda-
mentally at odds with its own aspirations. A recent report by
the Group for Research on Social Policy at Johns Hopkins
University (commissioned by the National Advisory Commis-
sion on Civil Disorders) summarizes the police view of the
black community:
The police have wound up face to face with the social
consequences of the problems in the ghetto created by the
failure of other white institutions — though, as has been ob-
served, they themselves have contributed to those problems in
no small degree. The distant and gentlemanly white racism of
employers, the discrimination of white parents who object to
having their children go to school with Negroes, the disgrun-
tlement of white taxpayers who deride the present welfare
system as a sinkhole of public funds but are unwilling to see
it replaced by anything more effective — the consequences of
these and other forms of white racism have confronted the
police with a massive control problem of the kind most evi-
dent in the riots.
In our survey, we found that the police were inclined to
see the riots as the long range result of faults in the Negro
community — disrespect for law, crime, broken families, etc.
— rather than as responses to the stance of the white commu-
nity. Indeed, nearly one-third of the white police saw the
riots as the result of what they considered the basic violence
and disrespect of Negroes in general, while only one-fourth
attributed the riots to the failure of white institutions. More
than three-fourths also regarded the riots as the immediate
result of agitators and criminals — a suggestion contradicted
by all the evidence accumulated by the riot commission. The
police, then, share with the other groups — excepting the black
politicians — a tendency to emphasize perceived defects in the
black community as an explanation for the difficulties that
they encounter in the ghetto.50
A similar tension sometimes exists between the police and
both higher civic officials and representatives of the media.
To the extent that such persons recognize the role of social
factors in crime and approve of social reforms, they are
viewed by the police as "selling out" and not "supporting the
police."
Several less central theories often accompany the "rotten
apple" view. These theories, too, are widely shared in our so-
THE POLICE IN PROTEST 261
ciety. First, the police widely blame the current rise in crime
on a turn away from traditional religiousness, and they fear
an impending moral breakdown.57 Yet the best recent evi-
dence shows that people's religious beliefs and attendance
neither reduce nor increase their propensity toward crime.58
But perhaps the main target of current police thinking is
permissive child-rearing, which many policemen interviewed
by our task force view as having led to a generation irthat
thinks it can get what it yells for." Indeed, one officer inter-
viewed justified the use of physical force on offenders as a
corrective for lack of childhood discipline. "If their folks had
beat 'em when they were kids, they'd be straight now. As it
is, we have to shape 'em up." While much recent evidence,
discussed elsewhere in this report, has shown that students
most concerned with social issues and most active in protest
movements have been reared in homes more "permissive,"
according to police standards, than those who are uninvolved
in these matters, it does not follow that such "permissiveness"
leads to criminality. In fact the evidence strongly suggests
that persons who receive heavy corporal punishment as chil-
dren are more likely to act aggressively in ensuing years.59
The police also tend to view perfectly legal social deviance,
such as long hair worn by men, not only with extreme dis-
taste but as a ladder to potential criminality. At a luncheon
meeting of the International Conference of Police Associa-
tions, for example, Los Angeles patrolman George Suber
said:
You know, the way it is today, women will be women —
and so will men! I got in trouble with one of them. I stopped
him on a freeway after a chase — 95, 100 miles an hour. . . .
He had that hair down to the shoulders.
I said to him, "I have a son about your age, and if you
were my son, I'd do two things." "Oh," he said, "what?" "I'd
knock him on his ass, and I'd tell him to get a haircut."
"Oh, you don't like my hair?" "No," I said, "you look like
a fruit." At that he got very angry. I had to fight him to get
him under control.60
Nonconformity comes to be viewed with nearly as much
suspicion as actual law violation; correspondingly, the police
value the familiar, the ordinary, the status quo, rather than
262
social change. These views both put the police at odds with
the dissident communities with whom they have frequent
contact and detract from their capacity to appreciate the rea-
sons for dissent, change, or any form of innovative social be-
havior.
Explaining Mass Protest
It is difficult to find police literature which recognizes that
the imperfection of social institutions provides some basis for
the discontent of large segments of American society. In ad-
dition, organized protest tends to be viewed as the conspirato-
rial product of authoritarian agitators — usually "Commu-
nists"— who mislead otherwise contented people. From a sys-
tematic sampling of police literature and statements by law
enforcement authorities — ranging from the Director of the
Federal Bureau of Investigation to the patrolman on the beat
— a common theme emerges in police analyses of mass pro-
test: the search for such "leaders." Again, this is a view, and
a search, that is widespread in our society.
Such an approach has serious consequences. The police are
led to view protest as illegitimate misbehavior, rather than as
legitimate dissent against policies and practices that might be
wrong. The police are bound to be hostile to illegitimate mis-
behavior, and the reduction of protest tends to be seen as
their principal goal. Such an attitude leads to more rather
than less violence; and a cycle of greater and greater hostility
continues.
The "agitational" theory of protest leads to certain charac-
teristic consequences. The police are prone to underestimate
both the protesters' numbers and depth of feeling. Again, this
increases the likelihood of violence. Yet it is not only the po-
lice who believe in the "agitational" theory. Many authorities
do when challenged. For example, the Cox Commission found
that one reason for the amount of violence when police
cleared the buildings at Columbia was the inaccurate estimate
of the number of demonstrators in the buildings :
It seems to us, however, that the Administration's low esti-
mate largely resulted from its inability to see that the seizure
of the building was not simply the work of a few radicals
but, by the end of the week, involved a significant portion of
THE POLICE IN PROTEST 263
the student body who had become disenchanted with the op-
eration of the university/'1
In line with the "agitational" theory of protest, particular
significance is attached by police intelligence estimates to the
detection of leftists or outsiders of various sorts, as well as to
indications of organization and prior planning and prepara-
tion. Moreover, similarities in tactics and expressed griev-
ances in a number of scattered places and situations are seen
as indicative of common leadership.
Thus Mr. J. Edgar Hoover, in testimony before this com-
mission on September 18, 1968, stated:
Communists are in the forefront of civil rights, anti-war,
and student demonstrations, many of which ultimately be-
come disorderly and erupt into violence. As an example, Bet-
tina Aptheker Kurzweil, twenty-four year old member of the
Communist National Committee, was a leading organizer of
the "Free Speech" demonstrations on the campus of the Uni-
versity of California at Berkeley in the fall of 1964.
These protests, culminating in the arrest of more than 800
demonstrators during a massive sit-in, on December 3, 1964,
were the forerunner of the current campus upheaval.
In a press conference on July 4, 1968, the opening day of
the Communist Party's Special National Convention, Gus
Hall, the Party's General Secretary, stated that there were
communists on most of the major college campuses in the
country and that they had been involved in the student
protests.62
Mr. Hoover's statement is significant not only because he is
our nation's highest and most renowned law enforcement of-
ficial, but also because his views are reflected and dissemi-
nated throughout the nation — by publicity in the news media
and by FBI seminars, briefings, and training for local police-
men.
Not surprisingly, then, views similar to Mr. Hoover's domi-
nate the most influential police literature. For instance, a
lengthy article in the April, 1965, issue of The Police Chief,
the official publication of the International Association of
Chiefs of Police, concludes, referring to the Berkeley "Free
Speech Movement":
264
One of the more alarming aspects of these student demon-
strations is the ever-present evidence that the guiding hand of
communists and extreme leftists was involved.03
By contrast, a "blue-ribbon" investigating committee ap-
pointed by the Regents of the University of California con-
cluded :
We found no evidence that the FSM was organized by the
Communist Party, the Progressive Labor Movement, or any
other outside group. Despite a number of suggestive coinci-
dences, the evidence which we accumulated left us with no
doubt that the Free Speech Movement was a response to the
September 14th change in rules regarding political activity at
Bancroft and Telegraph, not a pre-planned effort to embar-
rass or destroy the University on whatever pretext arose.64
And more recently, the prestigious Cox Commission, which
was headed by the former Solicitor General of the United
States and investigated last spring's Columbia disturbances,
reported:
We reject the view that describes the April and May dis-
turbances primarily to a conspiracy of student revolution-
aries. That demonology is no less false than the naive radical
doctrine that attributes all wars, racial injustices, and poverty
to the machinations of -a capitalist and militarist "Establish-
ment." 6r>
One reason why police analysis so often finds "leftists" is
that its criteria for characterizing persons as "leftists" is so
broad as to be misleading. In practice, the police may not dis-
tinguish "dissent" from "subversion." For example, listed in
The Police Chief article as a "Communist-linked" person is a
"former U.S. government employee who, while so employed,
participated in picketing the House Committee on Un-Ameri-
can Activities in 1960." 66 Guilt by association is a central
analytical tool, and information is culled from such ultra-
right publications as Tocsin and Washington Report. Hostility
and suspicion toward the civil rights movement also serve as
a major impetus for seeing Communist involvement and lead-
ership. The Police Chief found it significant that black civil
rights leaders such as James Farmer, Bayard Rustin, John
THE POLICE IN PROTEST 265
Lewis, James Baldwin, and William McAdoo were among
"the swarm of sympathizers" who sent messages of support to
the FSM.67
Some indication of how wide the "communist" net
stretches is given by a December, 1968, story in the Chicago
Tribune. The reporter asked police to comment on the Re-
port of this commission's" Chicago Study Team:
While most district commanders spoke freely, many police-
men declined to comment unless their names were withheld.
The majority of these said the Walker report appeared to
have been written by members of the United States Supreme
Court or Communists.68
Supplementing the problem of police definition and identi-
fication of leftists is a special vision of the role that such per-
sons play. Just as the presence of police and newsmen at the
scene of a protest does not mean they are leaders, so the
presence of a handful of radicals should not necessarily lead
one to conclude that they are leading the protest movement.
Moreover, our chapter on student protest as well as other
studies of student protest — including the Byrne Report on the
Free Speech Movement and the Cox Report on the Columbia
disturbances — indicate that "the leadership," leaving aside for
the moment whether it is radical leadership, is able to lead
only when events such as administration responses unite sig-
nificant numbers of students or faculty. For example, the
FSM extended over a number of months, and the leaders
conducted a long conflict with the university administration
and proposed many mass meetings and protests, but their ap-
peals to "sit-in" were heeded by students only intermittently.
Sometimes the students rallied by the thousands; at other
times the leadership found its base shrunken to no more than
several hundred. At these nadir points the leaders were un-
able to accomplish anything significant; on their own they
were powerless. Renewal of mass support for the FSM after
each of these pauses was not the work of the leadership, but
only occurred when the school administration took actions
that aroused mass student feelings of betrayal or inequity.
The "leadership" remained relatively constant in its calls for
support — and even then had serious internal disputes — but
266
the students gave, withdrew, and renewed their support inde-
pendently, based on events. Clearly, the leaders did not fo-
ment student protest on their own; and whatever the inten-
tions or political designs of many FSM leaders, they never
had the power to manufacture the protest movement.
One special reason for this kind of police analysis of stu-
dent protest may derive from police unfamiliarity with the
student culture in which such protests occur. When this cul-
ture is taken into account, one need not fall back upon theo-
ries of sinister outside organizers to explain the ability of stu-
dents to organize, plan, and produce sophisticated leaders and
techniques. Even at the time of the Free Speech Movement
in 1964, many of the students, including campus leaders, had
spent at least one summer in the South taking part in the civil
rights struggles. Moreover, everyone had read about or seen
on television the "sit-ins" and other nonviolent tactics of the
civil rights movement. Also, while the police in Berkeley saw
the use of loudspeakers and walkie-talkies as evidence of out-
side leadership, the former had long been standard equipment
at student rallies and meetings, and the latter were available
in nearby children's toy stores (and were largely a "put-on"
anyway). Finally, with the intellectual and human resources
of thousands of undergraduates, graduate students, and fac-
ulty at one of the most honored universities in the world, one
would hardly expect less competent organization and plan-
ning.
A similar analysis may be made of conspiracy arguments
relying on similarities in issues and tactics in student protests
throughout the nation; explanations more simple than an ex-
ternal organizing force can be found. There is no question
that there has been considerable contact among student
protesters from many campuses. For example, students who
are undergraduates at one university often do graduate work
at another. And television news coverage of protest, student
newspapers, and books popular in the student culture have
long articulated the grievances and tactics around which
much unrest revolves. Thus, when it is also considered that
students throughout the country do face similar circum-
stances, it is hardly surprising for similar events to occur
widely and to follow a recognizable pattern. Interestingly,
THE POLICE IN PROTEST 267
collective actions, such as panty raids, have spread through
the student subculture in the past without producing sinister
conspiracy theories.
A related problem for police is sorting among certain types
of claims from and statements about radical movements. Chi-
cago prior to and during the Democratic National Conven-
tion is a case in point. To quote from the report of the com-
mission's Chicago Study Team :
The threats to the City were varied. Provocative and in-
flammatory statements, made in connection with activities
planned for convention week, were published and widely dis-
seminated. There were also intelligence reports from infor-
mants.
Some of this information was absurd, like the reported
plan to contaminate the city's water supply with LSD. But
some were serious; and both were strengthened by the au-
thorities' lack of any mechanism for distinguishing one from
the other.
The second factor — the city's response — matched in num-
bers and logistics, at least, the demonstrators' threats.69
Surely it is unsatisfactory not to distinguish the absurd
from the serious.70 And just as surely, the incapacity to dis-
tinguish can only result in inadequate protection against real
dangers, as well as an increased likelihood of unnecessary
suppression and violence. Again, this illustrates some of the
problems of the police view when confronted with modern
mass protest. The police are more likely to believe that "anar-
chist" leaders are going to contaminate a city's water supply
with LSD than they are to believe that a student anti-war or
black protest is an expression of genuine, widespread dissatis-
faction. Moreover, some radicals have increasingly learned to
utilize and exploit the power of the media in order to stage
events and create scenes, to provoke police into attacking
peaceful protesters, and the police have played an important
role in assuring their success.
An interesting footnote to this discussion of police ideas
about protest may be added by noting that, if the standards
used by leading police spokesmen to identify a conspiracy
were applied to the police themselves, one would conclude
that police in the United States constitute an ultra-right wing
268
conspiracy. For example, one would note the growing police
militancy with its similar rhetoric and tactics throughout the
.nation, and the presence of such outside "agitators" as John
Harrington, president of the Fraternal Order of Police, at the
scene of particular outbursts of militancy. We hasten to add
that we do not feel that this is an adequate analysis of the
situation. Police, like students, share a common culture and
are subject to similar pressures, problems, and inequities; the
police across the country respond similarly to similar situa-
tions because they share common interests, not because they
are a "fascist"-led conspiracy.
Militancy as a Response to the Police Predicament:
The Politicization of the Police
Traditional Political Involvement of Police
Political involvement of the police is not per se a new phe-
nomenon. Indeed, it is well known that in the days of the big
city political machines the police were in politics in a small
way. They often owed their jobs and promotions to the local
alderman and were expected to cooperate with political ward
bosses and other sachems of the machines. In Albany, writes
James Q. Wilson, "The . . . Democratic machine dominates
the police department as it dominates everything else in the
city." 71 In some cities under such domination, police were
expected or allowed to cooperate with gamblers or other
sources of graft. Wilson comments, however, that "there is
little evidence that this is the case in Albany." 72 Still, they
played relatively minor roles in active politics. As Wilson
writes, "The police are in all cases keenly sensitive to their
political environment without in all cases being governed by
it." 73 Their political concerns are ordinarily reserved for
those decisions affecting their careers as individual members
of a bureaucracy.
Yet there was traditionally another, perhaps more signifi-
cant, way in which the police were political — as the active
arm of the status quo. For decades the police were the main
bulwark against the labor movement: picket lines were
roughly dispersed, meetings were broken up, organizers and
THE POLICE IN PROTEST 269
activists were shot, beaten, jailed, or run out of town. Such
anti-union tactics are unusual today when national labor lead-
ers are firm figures of the establishment, but most of these
same men experienced encounters with the police in their
youth. While these days have passed for the unions — except
perhaps for those having a large Negro membership — partici-
pants in the new protest movements of the sixties also have
come to see the police as enforcers of the status quo. Civil
rights workers, first in the South and then in the North, and
subsequently student and anti-war protesters, have met with
active police opposition, hostility, and force. In addition, as
we have discussed elsewhere, minority communities, espe-
cially black and Spanish-speaking, have come to regard the
police as a hostile army of occupation enforcing the status
quo.
While these types of political involvement pose serious
questions, recent events point to a new and far more signifi-
cant politicization of the police. This politicization exacer-
bates the problems inherent in, for example, using the police
to enforce the status quo against minority groups; but, more
significantly, it raises questions that are at the very basis of
our conception of the role of the police in our society.
The Role of the Police
The importance of police to our legal processes can hardly
be overestimated. The police are the interpreters of the legal
order to the population; indeed, for many people, they are
the sole source of contact with the legal system. Moreover,
police are allowed to administer force — even deadly force.
Finally, the police make "low visibility" decisions; the nature
of the job often allows for the exercise of discretion which is
not subject to review by higher authorities. Styles of enforce-
ment vary from place to place, and informality often
prevails.74 So what the policeman does is often perceived as
what the law is, and this is not an inaccurate perception.75
At the same time, and because he is a law enforcement of-
ficer, the policeman is expected to exhibit neutrality in the
enforcement of the criminal law, to abide by standards of
due process, and to be responsible to higher officials. The
270
concept of police professionalization connotes the further dis-
cipline that a profession imposes; and while the police have
not yet achieved all of these standards, it is useful to list
some of them. For example, one expects a professional group
to have a body of specialized knowledge and high levels of
education, training, skills, and performance. The peer group
should enforce these standards, and elements of state control
may even be interjected (as is true, for instance, of doctors
and attorneys).
Complicating matters, however, is the policeman's percep-
tion of his job, for this may conflict with these demands and
expectations. For example, the policeman views himself as an
expert in apprehending persons guilty of crimes. Since guilty
persons should be punished, he often resents (and may not
comply with) rules of procedural due process, seeing them as
an administrative obstacle. So also when a policeman arrests
a suspect, he most likely has made a determination that the
suspect is guilty. Thus it may appear irrational to him to be
required to place this suspect in an adjudicatory system
which presumes innocence.76 Moreover, there is a tendency
to move from this position to equating "the law" with "the
police." One commentator has noted the following:
In practice, then, the police regard excessive force as a spe-
cial, but not uncommon, weapon in the battle against crime.
They employ it to punish suspects who are seemingly guilty
yet unlikely to be convicted, and to secure respect in commu-
nities where patrolmen are resented, if not openly detested.
And they justify it on the grounds that any civilian, espe-
cially any Negro, who arouses their suspicion or withholds
due respect loses his claim to the privileges of law abiding
citizens.77
Thus the policeman is likely to focus more on order than on
legality and to develop a special conception of illegality.78
These tendencies are accentuated by and contribute to the
growing police frustration, militancy, and politicization.
Police Militancy and Politicization: An Overview
The insufficient resources available to the police and a view
that attributes unrest to "malcontents" who illegitimately "ag-
THE POLICE IN PROTEST 271
itate" persons, in combination with the growing stresses in-
herent in the policeman's job, led to greater and greater po-
lice frustration. And this frustration has increased as the po-
lice perceive that some high police and governmental officials
and the courts do not accept their prescriptions for social ac-
tion (such as "unleashing" the police), let alone their de-
mands for more adequate compensation and equipment. In
response, the police have become more militant in their views
and demands and have recently begun to act out this mili-
tancy, sometimes by violence but also by threatening illegal
strikes, lobbying, and organizing politically.
This militancy and politicization have built upon an orga-
nizational framework already available: guild, fraternal, and
social organizations. These organizations — especially the
guilds — originally devoted to increasing police pay and bene-
fits, have grown stronger. The Fraternal Order of Police, for
example, now has 130,000 members in thirty-seven states.79
Moreover, these organizations have begun to challenge and
disobey the authority of police commanders, the civic govern-
ment, and the courts and to enter the political arena as an
organized, militant constituency.
Such developments threaten our long tradition of impartial
law enforcement and make the study of "police protest" es-
sential to an understanding of police response to mass protest.
Moreover, many of the manifestations of this police activism
bring the police themselves into conflict with the legal order
— they may act in a manner inconsistent with their role in
the legal order, or even illegally. Yet much of this activity is
justified in the name of law and order.
The issues raised by the growing police militancy and polit-
icization may at times be made especially difficult and com-
plex because tension exists between our idea of free expres-
sion and some of the demands we must place on the police.
In what follows, however, we shall argue that the role of po-
lice in a democratic society places special limits on police ac-
tivism and that, although exact limits are hard to define, in
several respects police activism has exceeded reasonable
bounds.
It is important to note at this point that not all of our ex-
pectations with regard to police behavior are, or should be,
272
reflected in statutes, regulations, or court decisions. We may
well expect police to act in ways which would be inappropri-
ate— even impossible — to define in terms of legality and ille-
gality. The issues raised are not necessarily "legal issues," ex-
cept in the sense that they affect the legal system.*0 More-
over, even where legal issues are involved, it cannot be
stressed too much that the solution to problems is not going
to be found merely in "strict enforcement" of the law: solu-
tions to the problems necessarily will lie in more fundamental
sorts of action. Similarly, it is important to understand that
the courts in fact can be little more than a generator of
ideals. The real problem comes in devising means to infuse
these ideals within the administrative structure of police orga-
nization. To assert that the courts are an effective check upon
police misconduct is often to overlook that misconduct in our
desire to affirm the adequacy of our judicial procedures.
Activism in Behalf of Material Benefits
Growing activism is seen both in the issues to which the
police address themselves and in the means employed to ex-
press these views. A traditional area of police activism is the
quest for greater material benefits. Police have long organized
into guildlike organizations, such as the Fraternal Order of
Police, whose aims include increased wages, pensions, and
other benefits. However, difficulties arise when police increase
the militancy of their demands. The growing phenomenon of
"police protest" is itself a form of mass protest which in
many ways directly affects the police response to other pro-
testing groups.
An example of such increased militancy is the threat of a
police "strike" in New York by John Cassese, President of
the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association.81 This is not solely
a "police issue," but instead is related to the issue of the
rights of all government employees. One hardly needs to be
reminded of the strikes of transit workers, sanitation workers,
teachers, and so forth to realize that the right of government
employees to strike is still a disputed issue — in fact, if not in
law. Regardless of the merits of the arguments on this gen-
THE POLICE IN PROTEST 273
eral question, it is clear that a police strike is among the most
difficult to justify, for the police are clearly in that category
of government employment where continued service is neces-
sary not only in the public interest but for the public safety.
And even then the policeman is different; we have seen
that, as a law enforcement officer, his role is peculiarly im-
portant and sensitive. Thus when police demands for higher
material benefits are expressed in a manner defiant of the
law, such as illegal strikes, unique problems arise. First, the
law enforcement apparatus is placed in the incongruous posi-
tion of one part having to enforce a law against another part.
Even if vigorous enforcement does occur, this is hardly a way
to improve the morale and efficiency of the system. Second,
efforts to encourage the public to respect and obey laws are
seriously undermined. To more people than ever, the law is
made to seem arbitrary, subject to the policeman's whim, and
lacking in moral force.
Less explicit forms of "strikes" raise related problems. One
such tactic is known as the "blue flu." In Detroit last year,
for example, according to newspaper accounts, an
aggressive police association steamrollered city hall into ac-
ceptance of one of the most generous salary scales in the na-
tion by the classic trade-union device of "job action" and
"blue flu," police vernacular for phony illnesses that keep po-
lice off the job as a display of power.82
Ray Girardin, then the police commissioner, was quoted as
saying, "I was practically helpless. I couldn't force them to
work." 83 "Blue flu" has also been reported elsewhere.84
Even more significant, perhaps, is the tactic of varying the
enforcement of the criminal law as a means of exerting pres-
sure. In Detroit the police combined a slowdown in ticket
writing with their "blue flu" campaign.85 New York has expe-
rienced this tactic also (although over the issue of one-man
patrol cars).86 Overenforcement of the criminal law can also
be used as a tactic of police pressure. Long Island police, for
example, are reported to have given unprecedented numbers
of traffic tickets in unprecedented circumstances — for such
things as exceeding the speed limit by one mile per hour.87
Even when such conduct stays within the letter of the law, it
274
is correctly perceived by citizens as a nonneutral, political
abuse of police power. In this sense it is an even more direct
assault on norms of due process and illustrates even more
graphically that when the police abuse the law we are left
without the machinery to "police the police."
Activism in the Realm of Social Policy
A second substantive area of growing militancy involves
broader questions of social policy, including which type of
conduct should be criminal, societal attitudes toward protest,
the procedural rights of defendants, and the sufficiency of re-
sources allocated to the enforcement of the criminal law. On
each of these issues the police are likely to consider them-
selves expert; after all, they deal in this area day after day.
Police Violence
The most extreme instances of police militancy are seen in
confrontations between police and other militant groups,
whether they be students, anti-war protesters, or black mili-
tants. The police bring to these confrontations their own
views on the substantive issues involved, on the character of
the protesting groups, and on the desirability and legitimacy
of dissent — in other words, the view discussed previously. In
numerous instances, including the recent Democratic Na-
tional Convention in Chicago, the nature of the police re-
sponse, to quote the commission's Chicago Study Team, has
been "unrestrained and indiscriminate police violence." 88 The
extent of this violence has previously been described in some
detail.
To understand how it happens one must consider that the
police view these other militants as subversive groups who in-
convenience the public and espouse dangerous positions. Per-
haps some flavor of this feeling is given by the following ex-
cerpt from the tape of the Chicago Police Department radio
log at 1 :29 a.m. Tuesday during the convention:
Police Operator: "1814, get a wagon over at 1436. We've
got an injured hippie."
THE POLICE IN PROTEST 275
Voice: "1436 North Wells?"
Operator: "North Wells."
In quick sequence, there are the following remarks from
five other police cars:
"That's no emergency."
"Let him take a bus."
"Kick the fucker."
"Knock his teeth out."
"Throw him in a wastepaper basket." 89
Similarly, columnist Charles McCabe tells of returning to the
lower East Side of New York, his childhood home, and meet-
ing a childhood friend who was now a policeman:
We went to a corner saloon, together with a. couple of
buddies and we talked — mostly about cops.
It was really terrifying. These guys, all about my age, had
been to Manhattan and Fordham and St. John's. They had
brought up decent families. But they had become really quite
mad in their work. On the subject of hippies and black mili-
tants, they were not really human.
Their language was violent. "If I had my way," said one,
"I'd like to take a few days off, and go off somewhere in the
country where these bastards might be hanging out, and I'd
like to hunt a couple of them down with a rifle." The other
cops nodded concurrence. I could only listen.90
When these attitudes are coupled with a local government
that is also hostile to the protesting group and with provoca-
tions by that group, unrestrained police violence is not sur-
prising. Indeed, the police may develop the expectation that
such conduct, if not expected, will at least go unpunished.
Such may well have been true of the Chicago convention,
where the Mayor's negative attitude toward police restraint
during the April racial disorders was well known 91 and
where discipline against offending police officers was thought
unlikely.92
Another striking instance of police militancy carried into
action is found in the growing number of police attacks on
blacks — attacks entirely unrelated to any legitimate police
work. Police attacks on members of the militant Black Pan-
ther Party are a case in point. In Brooklyn it was reported
that off-duty police, plus an undetermined number of other
276
men, attacked several Panthers in a court building where a
hearing involving the Panthers was taking place.93 And in
Oakland after the Huey P. Newton trial, two policemen were
reported to have shot up a Black Panther office.94 Moreover,
in other cities, including Detroit 95 and San Francisco,90 off-
duty police officers have attacked or shot members of the
black community. Accounts of such incidents could continue,
but the point is clear; these are isolated episodes only in the
trivial sense of being especially clear-cut and well-publicized
atrocities.
The Revolt Against Higher Authority
Attempts by higher officials to avoid occasions for such
outbursts of militancy illustrate the severity of that problem
and place in perspective another manifestation of police mili-
tancy— the revolt against higher authority. A well-docu-
mented example of this phenomenon has been provided by
the commission's Cleveland Investigative Task Force.
The task force has found that, in the wake of the July 23
shoot-out, police opposition to Mayor Carl Stokes and his ad-
ministration moved toward open revolt. When police were
withdrawn from ghetto duty for one night in order to allow
black community leaders to quell the rioting and avoid fur-
ther deaths, police reportedly refused to answer calls, and
some sent racist abuse and obscenities against the Mayor over
their radios. Officers in the fifth district refused to travel
in two-man squads, one white and one black, into the East
Side. For several weeks after the riot, posters with the picture
of Mayor Stokes, a Negro, under the words "Wanted for
Murder" hung in district stations. Spokesmen for the police
officers' wives organization have berated the Mayor; the local
Fraternal Order of Police has demanded the resignation of
Safety Director Joseph F. McNanamon; and many have re-
portedly been privately purchasing high-powered rifles for use
in future riots, despite official opposition by police command-
ers.
Similar revolts against higher police and civic authority
over similar issues have occurred elsewhere. For example, in
New York on August 12, 1968, Patrolmen's Benevolent As-
THE POLICE IN PROTEST 277
sociation President John Cassese instructed his membership,
about 99 percent of the force, that if a superior told them to
ignore a violation of the law, they should take action not-
withstanding that order.97 Thus if a superior ordered that re-
straint be used in a particular area of disorder (because, for
example, shooting of fleeing looters would create a larger dis-
turbance with which his men could not deal), policemen
were to ignore the orders. According to Cassese, this action
stemmed from police resentment both of directives to "cool
it" during disturbances in the wake of Dr. Martin Luther
King's assassination and of restraints during demonstrations
the following summer. Cassese charged that the police had
been "handcuffed" and were ready for a "direct conflict" with
City Hall to end such interference.98 Police Commissioner
Howard R. Leary countered with a directive of his own reas-
serting the authority of the departmental chain of command
and promising disciplinary action against any officer who re-
fused to obey orders.99 Thus far the dispute has remained
largely rhetorical, and no test incident has yet arisen.100
Cassese's position may understate the extent of militancy in
the New York police force. According to anonymous sources
quoted by Sylvan Fox, New York Times reporter and former
Deputy Commissioner in Charge of Press Relations for the
New York Police Department, Cassese took the steps out-
lined above in an effort to head off a grass-roots, right-wing
revolt within his own organization.101 "He responded just like
the black militants to the guys coming up from below," Fox
quotes one informant. "This was an attempt by a union
leader to get out in front of his membership." This militant
challenge was from the Law Enforcement Group (LEG),
some of whose members are alleged to have beaten Black
Panthers outside a Brooklyn courtroom.102 In fact, it would
appear that Cassese was not able to appease these new young
militants by his actions. The group has become more and
more prominent — the first of the militant, young, right-wing
policemen's groups to attract nationwide attention.
Clearly such militancy is outside any set of norms for po-
lice behavior; indeed, it is the antithesis of proper police be-
havior. Moreover, the implications of such conduct for the
political and legal system are profound. The immediate prob-
278
lem, of course, is to find to whom one can turn when the po-
lice are outside the law. A corollary is that illegal police be-
havior will encourage a similar lack of restraint in the general
population. Moreover, within the police department itself, the
effects of the erosion of authority have untold consequences.
A graphic illustration of the loss of discipline and authority
that can occur within a police force was recounted by this
commission's Chicago Study Team: "A high-ranking Chicago
Police commander admits that on occasion (during the con-
vention disorders) the police 'got out of control.' This same
commander appears in one of the most vivid scenes of the
entire week, trying desperately to keep an individual police-
man from beating demonstrators as he screams, 'For Christ's
sake, stop it!' " 103
Activism and Politicization
A form of police militancy that may raise somewhat dif-
ferent problems is what we have called the politicization of
the police — the growing tendency of the police to see them-
selves as an independent, militant minority asserting itself in
the political arena. Conduct in this category may be less ex-
treme than the police lawlessness discussed previously in the
sense that it may not necessarily be in violation of the law or
departmental orders. On the other hand, the issues it raises
are, if anything, more complex and far-reaching. Moreover, it
exacerbates the problems previously discussed.
Before turning to the more controversial forms of police
politicization, we shall focus on the organized police opposi-
tion to civilian police review boards, for this experience
foreshadowed the later politicization of the police.
Police Solidarity and the Civilian Police Review Board
The police see themselves, by and large, as a distinct and
often deprived group in our society:
To begin with, the police feel profoundly isolated from a
public which, in their view, is at best apathetic and at worst
hostile, too solicitous of the criminal and too critical of the
patrolman. They also believe that they have been thwarted
by the community in the battle against crime, that they have
been given a job to do but deprived of the power to do it.104
THE POLICE IN PROTEST 279
One result of this isolation is a magnified sense of group
solidarity. Students of the police are unanimous in stressing
the high degree of police solidarity. This solidarity is more
than a preference for the company of fellow officiers, esprit
de corps, or the bonds of fellowship and mutual responsibility
formed among persons who share danger and stress. It often
includes the protective stance adopted regarding police
misconduct.105 A criticism of one policeman is seen as a criti-
cism of all policemen, and thus police tend to unite against
complaining citizens, the courts, and other government agen-
cies. Students of police feel that this explains both the speedy
exoneration of police when citizen complaints are lodged, and
the paucity of reports of misconduct by fellow officers. It
seems clear, for example, that the officers who took part in
the famous Algiers Motel incident did not expect to get into
trouble and that the presence of a state police captain did not
deter them.106
Because of this situation many government officials and
citizens have demanded that a means of reviewing police con-
duct be established and that it be external to the police de-
partment. The civilian police review board is one such recom-
mendation. It, however, is anathema to the police, and fights
against these boards marked one of the earliest exertions of
political power by the police.
Both because it served as an example for police elsewhere
and because of its role in the evolution toward militancy of
the police involved, the most significant single case is the ci-
vilian review board battle in New York City.107 There, in
1966, the largest police force in America, led by the Patrol-
men's Benevolent Association, successfully appealed to the
public to vote a civilian review board out of existence.
On July 7, 1966, Mayor Lindsay fulfilled campaign
promise by appointing a review board made up of three po-
licemen and four civilians. The PBA placed a referendum on
the November ballot to abolish the board. From then until
the election the PBA conducted one of the most hard-fought
and bitter political campaigns in New York City's history.
According to a number of accounts policemen campaigned
hard while on duty: patrol cars and wagons bore anti-review
board signs, police passed out literature, and even harassed
280
persons campaigning on the other side. Many have claimed
that at the height of the campaign cars with bumper stickers
supporting civilian review were flagrantly ticketed, while an
anti-review sticker seemed to make autos almost ticket-proof.
Billboards, posters, and ads were heavily exploited, and the
campaign was heavily financed by the PBA and private
sources. One poster depicted damaged stores and a rubble-
strewn street and read: "This is the aftermath of a riot in a
city that had a civilian review board." Included in the text
was a statement by J. Edgar Hoover that civilian review
boards "virtually paralyzed" the police. Another poster showed
a young girl fearfully leaving a subway exit onto a dark
street: "The Civilian Review Board must be stopped! . . .
Her life . . . your life . . . may depend on it." On Novem-
ber 8, 1966, election night, the civilian review board was bur-
ied by a landslide of almost two to one.
Similar battles have since been waged in cities throughout
the nation.108 Our review of printed material circulated by
police organizations, articles in police magazines, and
speeches by prominent police spokesmen indicates a frequent
theme which is fairly represented by the following:
No matter what names are used by the sponsors of the so-
called "Police Review Boards" they exude the obnoxious
odor of communism. This scheme is a page right out of the
Communist handbook which says in part, ". . . police are the
enemies of communism, if we are to succeed we must do
anything to weaken their work, to incapacitate them or make
them a subject of ridicule." 109
At the outset, it was the distrust by minority group mem-
bers of internal police review procedures which caused the
demands for civilian review boards; the militant opposition of
the police has only heightened this distrust. Thus, as might be
anticipated, a cycle of greater and greater polarization has
been set in motion.
An example of this polarization was seen in St. Louis in
September, 1968.110 The five-man civilian police board sus-
pended one policeman for thirty days and another for ten
and sent a letter of reprimand to four others for use of exces-
sive force in a highly controversial arrest and detention of
THE POLICE IN PROTEST 281
two black militant leaders. While the black community and
pro-civil rights whites called this merely a "slap on the wrist,"
it produced an angry rebellion among rank-and-file police.
More than 150 police officers attended an initial protest meet-
ing. A second meeting produced a petition signed by more
than 700, one third of the total force, demanding the resigna-
tion of the police board and saying police no longer had any
confidence in the board. Subsequently, the city has rapidly
been polarized. Civil rights and student groups, the ACLU,
and others have come to the support of the board. Mean-
while the police have built a powerful coalition with unions,
neighborhood clubs, political associations, the American Le-
gion, civic groups, and various ad hoc committees. In the
words of Los Angeles Times correspondent D. J. R. Bruck-
ner, the polarization of the community "is a frightening situa-
tion."
Beyond the Review Board
Perhaps the most significant impact of these struggles,
aside from further polarizing an already polarized situation,
has been to give the police a sense of their potential political
power. Their overwhelming victories in review board fights
have given them, as one distinguished law professor inter-
viewed by a task force member put it, "a taste of blood." In-
deed, many experts believe the American police will never be
the same again. Police organizations such as the Patrolmen's
Benevolent Association, conceived of originally as combining
the function of a trade union and lobbying organization for
police benefits, are becoming vehicles for the political senti-
ments and aspirations of the police rank and file, as well as a
rallying point for organized opposition to higher police and
civilian authority. We call this phenomenon the politiciza-
tion of the police.
On issues concerning the criminal law and its enforcement,
the police traditionally have asserted their views by communi-
cations within the existing police structure and by testimony
before legislative and executive policy-making bodies. Today,
as a result of their growing politicization, the police are more
likely to resort to activist forms of expression such as lob-
282
bying and campaign support for measures and candidates
conforming to their ideology. Indeed, at a time when they are
becoming more and more disenchanted with the decisions
reached by our political process, the police perceive no sharp
line dividing traditional activities from more partisan political
issues such as choices among candidates for local or national
office.
One example of partisan political involvement was found
in the last two Presidential campaigns. During the 1964 cam-
paign a number of departments had to issue special direc-
tives in order to curtail policemen from wearing Goldwater
buttons on their uniforms and putting Goldwater stickers on
their patrol cars. Moreover, this past fall there were reports
that police in Washington, D.C., and other cities were passing
out Wallace-for-President literature from police patrol
cars.111
But perhaps the most significant political action is seen on
the local level, and this political activity is far from the tradi-
tional seeking of higher benefits. According to Michael
Churns, one of the founders of the Law Enforcement Group
in New York, his group is more interested in "constitutional
and moral" issues than "the purely monetary considerations.
We're for better conditions in the country." 112 A survey of
police in five cities found that police "are coming to see
themselves as the political force by which radicalism, student
demonstrations, and Black Power can be blocked." 113
This activity takes many forms, one of which is campaign
support. The following excerpt from a story in the San Fran-
cisco Chronicle reveals a practice which is becoming more
common across the nation:
Plans were announced yesterday to have policemen from
all communities in Alameda County sell $10-a-person tickets
for a testimonial dinner for Robert Hannon, Republican can-
didate for State Senate.
Detective Sergeant Jack Baugh of the Alameda County
Sheriff's Department, co-chairman of the dinner, said the rec-
ord of Democratic State Senator Nicholas Petris is "repul-
sive to a police officer."
Baugh said tickets would be sold by police outside of their
working hours and in civilian clothing.114
THE POLICE IN PROTEST 283
Police are also discovering that as a lobby they can have
great political power. Mayor John Lindsay has seen this
power in New York. When he tried to have police cadets
take over traffic patrol duties in New York, the Patrolmen's
Benevolent Association lobbied against him in the state legis-
lature and won.115 On other issues, such as the use of one-
man squad cars and the consolidation of precincts, the Mayor
has had to back down.110 Indeed, the PBA may well be one
of the most powerful lobbies in the New York State Legisla-
ture. The scale of its activities is indicated by a reception held
in March of 1968 for members of the State Legislature.117
More than five hundred people were entertained in the Grand
Ballroom of the DeWitt Clinton Hotel in Albany by three
bars, a live orchestra, and other trappings. The success of
PBA lobbying is seen, again, in the fact that, after a bitter
fight, the New York State Legislature, at the urging of the
PBA, broadened the areas in which police may use deadly
force.
A powerful police lobby is not unique to New York. In
Boston, for example, the PBA lobbied vigorously against
Mayor Kevin White's decision to place civilians in most jobs
occupied by traffic patrolmen, a move that would have freed
men for crime work. The City Council, which had to approve
the change, sided with the police.118 The Mayor then went to
the State Legislature, but the police lobby again prevailed and
White lost. In November, 1968, the PBA again prevailed
over the Mayor when the City Council substantially altered
the police component of White's Model Cities Program.
Changes included the removal of a plan to allow citizens to
receive (not judge) complaints against the police and the
deletion of references to the need to recruit blacks to the po-
lice force.119
In a West Coast city in which we conducted interviews, a
graphic example of police lobbying was described. According
to a policeman on the board of the local Police Officers Asso-
ciation, the practice has been to put "pressure" on City Coun-
cil members directly through phone calls, luncheons, and the
like. So far the local POA leaders are uncertain how far this
has gotten them. As one POA board member told a task force
interviewer: "[We have gotten very little] although we have
284
tried to wine and dine them and even blackmail the members
of the City Council. But they are too stupid to understand
what the Association is trying to do."
Militant tactics similar to those used by students, anti-war
protesters, and blacks have also found their way into police
activism. For example, New York police have marched on
City Hall, and Detroit police have shown up in uniform at a
City Council hearing in what some councilmen are reported
to have felt was a blatant attempt at intimidation.120 More-
over, because they are law enforcement officers, police can
avail themselves of tactics beyond those available to most dis-
sident groups — and of even more questionable legitimacy.
The examples of slowdowns in ticket writing and overen-
forcement of the criminal law have already been discussed.
In addition, an extraordinary tactic has been reported in a
confrontation between Philadelphia Police Commissioner
Frank L. Rizzo and the city's school board over the station-
ing of police in unruly, predominantly black schools. Rizzo is
said to have told the school board that the police performed
many duties of which the public was unaware — for example,
keeping "dossiers" on a lot of people, including "some of you
school people." 121 The threat was implicit. Similarly, a pri-
vate Los Angeles group called "Fi-Po," the Fire and Police
Research Association, maintains dossiers on individuals and
groups, compiled from "open sources." During the 1968
campaign Fi-Po is reported to have passed the word that the
son of a candidate for a major California political office had
once been arrested on a narcotics charge.122
One of the more militant police groups in New York is
"LEG," the Law Enforcement Group. Its activism is not only
political but is often directed against the courts. The hostility
of police to the United States Supreme Court — and their
disregard of some of its rulings — is widely known.123 LEG,
however, directs much of its attention to lower courts. In-
deed, it came into existence with a petition calling for the re-
moval of Criminal Court Judge John F. Furey from the
bench because LEG alleged that he permitted unruly conduct
in his court during the arraignment of two members of the
Black Panther Party.124
As pointed out previously, the police tend to view them-
THE POLICE IN PROTEST 285
selves as society's experts in the determination of guilt and
the apprehension of guilty persons. Because they also see
themselves as an abused and misunderstood minority, they
are particularly sensitive to what they perceive as challenges
to "their" system of criminal justice — whether by unruly
Black Panthers or "misguided" judges.
LEG's current political activities are varied. They are de-
manding a grand jury investigation of "coddling" of criminals
in the courts.125 And moving more explicitly into the realm
of partisan politics, LEG announced a campaign to support
United States senators who will prevent "another Warren
Court" by blocking the appointment of Abe Fortas as Chief
Justice.126 But perhaps LEG's most extraordinary tactic is its
system of court watchers. Off-duty members attend court ses-
sions and note "misbehavior" by judges, prosecutors, proba-
tion officers, and others involved in the judicial process. Lieu-
tenant Leon Laino, one of the founders of LEG, described
this program to a task force interviewer:
The courts have a lot to do with the crime rate — the way
they handle people, let them out on bail or without bail so
that they can commit the same crime two or three times be-
fore coming to trial. Nowadays the courts let people get
away with anything. Even disrespectful conduct while in
court. But since we have instituted a policy of court watchers
... we have noticed a change in the behavior of these
judges.
LEG has already singled out several judges as "coddlers" of
criminals.127 Especially where judges must stand for reelec-
tion, the potential for further police intervention into the ju-
dicial and electoral process appears clear.
Although the politicization of the police is recent and thus
difficult to assess, one thing is clear — police political power in
our large cities is both considerable and growing. The police
are quite consciously building this power, and its impact is
being felt throughout the political system. An example is
given by an observer in New York:
In fact, there's a growing danger of disagreeing with the
cops. On precinct consolidation, for example, councilmen,
rabbis, state senators privately would say, "It doesn't sound
286
like a bad idea, but the police are getting everybody so hot, I
don't see how we could go with it."
See, these [issues like precinct consolidation] are not the
exciting issues and a lot of people don't feel like taking on a
political force like the cops.12*
Some police spokesmen rate this power even higher:
We could elect governors, or at least knock 'em off. I've
told them [the police] if you get out and organize, you could
become one of the strongest political units in the
commonwealth.129
And in cities, including New York 130 and Boston,131 there is
talk that police spokesmen may run for public office.
Thus the growing police politicization, combined with the
disruptive potential of other forms of police militancy, make
the police a political force to be reckoned with in today's
city. Indeed at times they appear to dominate. For example,
aides to New York Mayor John Lindsay are reported to feel
that the Mayor's office has lost the initiative to the police,
who now dominate the public dialogue.132 And some observ-
ers feel that ultimate political power in Philadelphia resides
in Police 'Commissioner Frank L. Rizzo, not the Mayor.133
The implications of this situation are pointed to by Boston
Mayor Kevin White: "Are the police governable? Yes. Do I
control the police, right now? No." 131
The Military Analogy
Political involvement of the police — even apart from its
contribution to more radical forms of police militancy —
raises serious problems. First, aside from the military, the po-
lice have a practical monopoly on the legal use of force in
our society. For just such a reason our country has a tradi-
tion of wariness toward politicization of its armed forces, and
thus both law and custom restrict the political activities of
members of the military. Similar considerations obviously
apply to the police.
In some senses the police are an even greater source of po-
tential concern than the armed forces because of their close-
ness to the day-to-day workings of the political process and
THE POLICE IN PROTEST 287
their frequent interaction with the population. These factors
make police abuse of the political process a more immediate
prospect. For example, bumper stickers on squad cars, politi-
cal buttons on uniforms, selective ticketing, and similar con-
tacts with citizens quickly impart a political message.
A second factor which has led to restrictions on members
of the armed forces is the fear that unfettered political
expression, if adopted as a principle, might in practice lead to
political coercion within the military. Control over promo-
tions and disciplinary action could make coercion possible,
and pressure might be exerted on lower-ranking members to
adopt, contribute to, or work for a particular political cause.
Thus, again, regulation (and sometimes prohibition) of cer-
tain political activities has been undertaken. For example, su-
periors are prohibited from soliciting funds from inferiors,
and many political activities are prohibited while in uniform
or on duty. Such considerations, again, apply to the police.
The Judicial Analogy
Even where coercion of the populace (or fellow force
members) does not exist in fact, politicization of the police
may create the appearance of such abuses. This can affect the
political process and create both hostility toward the police
and disrespect for the legal and political system.
Moreover, lobbying, campaigning, and the like, in and of
themselves, tend to make the policing function itself appear
politically motivated and nonneutral. Since the policing func-
tion is for so many people so central and important a part of
our legal mechanisms, the actual or apparent politicization of
policing would carry over to perceptions of the entire legal
system. Such perceptions of politicization would be contrary
to society's view that the system should be neutral and non-
political. And such a situation would, of course, have adverse
consequences for confidence in and thus reliance on its legal
system to resolve disputes peacefully. And this is most true of
those groups — students, anti-war protesters, and blacks — who
perceive the police political position as most hostile to their
own aspirations and who are also among the most heavily po-
288
liced. Moreover, the legal system would in turn be exposed to
even greater political pressures than is presently the case.
So. while the police may be analogous to other government
employees or to members of the armed forces, they are also,
and perhaps more importantly, analogous to the judiciary.
Each interprets the legal order to, and imposes the laws on,
the population, and thus the actions of each are expected to
be neutral and nonpolitical. In the case of the judiciary, there
is a strong tradition of removing them from the partisan po-
litical arena lest their involvement impede the functioning of
the system.
It may be useful in this connection to illustrate just how
strong are our societal norms concerning judicial behavior
and to note that these norms often demand standards of con-
duct higher than what is legally required. For example, even
when judges run for reelection, it is widely understood that
the election should not be political in the usual sense. More-
over, at various times in our history there has been public un-
easiness about justices of the Supreme Court advising Presi-
dents of the United States. Perhaps even more to the point,
however, is the fact that whereas justices have from time to
time informally advised Presidents, it is unthinkable that they
would take to the stump or engage in overt political activity
in their behalf.
Conclusion
Thus we find that the policeman in America is over-
worked, undertrained, underpaid, and undereducated. His dif-
ficulties are compounded by a view expounded at all law en-
forcement levels — from the Director of the Federal Bureau
of Investigation to the patrolman on the beat. This view gives
little consideration to the effects of such social factors as pov-
erty and discrimination and virtually ignores the possibility of
legitimate social discontent. Typically, it attributes mass pro-
test instead to a conspiracy promulgated by agitators, often
Communists, who misdirect otherwise contented people. This
view, disproven so many times by scholars and distinguished
THE POLICE IN PROTEST 289
commissions, tends to set the police against dissident groups,
however lawful.
Given their social role and their view, the police have be-
come increasingly frustrated, alienated, and angry. These
feelings are being expressed in a growing militancy and politi-
cal activism.
In short, the police are protesting. Police slowdowns and
other forms of strike activity, usually of questionable legality,
are employed to gain greater material benefits or changes in
governmental policy (such as the "unleashing of the police").
Moreover, direct police challenges to departmental and civic
authority have followed recent urban disorders, and criticisms
of the judiciary have escalated to "court watching" by police.
These developments are a part of a larger phenomenon —
the emergence of the police as a self-conscious, independent
political power. In many cities and states the police lobby ri-
vals even duly elected officials and influence. This poses serious
problems, for police, just as courts, are expected to be neutral
and nonpolitical; even the appearance of partiality impairs
public confidence in the legal system. Thus, difficult though it
may be to articulate standards for police conduct, the present
police militancy seems to have exceeded reasonable bounds.
Moreover, this police militancy is hostile to the aspirations
of other dissident groups in our society. Police view students,
the anti-war protesters, and blacks as a danger to our political
system, and racial prejudice pervades the police attitudes and
actions. No government institution appears so deficient in its
understanding of the constructive role of dissent in a consti-
tutional democracy as the police.
Thus, it should not be surprising that police response to
mass protest has resulted in a steady escalation of conflict,
hostility, and violence. The police violence during the Demo-
cratic National Convention in Chicago was not a unique phe-
nomenon— we have found numerous instances where vio-
lence has been initiated or exacerbated by police actions and
attitudes. Such police violence is the antithesis of both law
and order. It leads only to increased hostility, polarization,
and violence — both in the immediate situation and in the fu-
ture. Certainly it is clear today that effective policing ulti-
mately depends upon the cooperation and goodwill of the po-
290
liced, and these resources are quickly being exhausted by
present police attitudes and practices.
Implicit in this analysis is a recognition that the problems
discussed in this chapter derive from larger defects. Their im-
portance reflects the urgent need for the fundamental reforms
discussed elsewhere in this report — reforms leading, for ex-
ample, to more responsive political institutions and an affir-
mation of the right to dissent.
Police spokesmen, in assessing their occupation, conclude
that what they need is more money and manpower and less in-
terference by the civic government and the courts. As this
chapter has indicated, the latter recommendation is mistaken,
and the former does not say enough. What is needed is a
major transformation of the police culture by, for example,
bringing a greater variety of persons into police work and
providing better training. Because of time limitations, this
task force has not developed specific proposals for legislative
or executive action. We have, however, given thought to such
proposals, and in what follows we shall discuss the types of
action we feel should be taken.
A first step is a thorough appraisal by the Department of
Justice of the role played by the federal government in the
development of the current police view of protest and protest-
ers. This would require several efforts, including examining
and evaluating literature distributed by the federal govern-
ment to local police agencies and examining all programs
sponsored by the federal government for the education of po-
lice. Moreover, an attempt should be made to create an en-
lightened curriculum for police training concerning the role
of political activity, demonstration, and protest in a constitu-
tional democracy.
A second step toward a meaningful transformation of the
police culture would be the establishment of a Social Service
Academy under the sponsorship of the United States govern-
ment. This academy should be governed by an independent
board whose members would be selected for their eminence
in such fields as criminology, sociology, and psychology — in a
manner analogous to that used for the selection of members
of the National Science Board of the National Science
Foundation.135 Like the military academies, this institution
THE POLICE IN PROTEST 291
would provide a free higher education to prospective police,
social workers, and urban specialists who, after graduation,
would spend a minimum of three or four years in their cho-
sen specialty. Internships would be arranged during one or
more summers, and police graduates would undoubtedly be
considered qualified to enter police departments at an ad-
vanced level. The academy would provide the prospective po-
liceman an opportunity for the equivalent of a college educa-
tion. Moreover, it would attract a larger variety of people
into police work — and help bring a desirable flexibility in
dominant police culture. This suggestion might be supple-
mented within existing universities by a federally financed
program of scholarships and loans to persons who commit
themselves to a period of police, social welfare, or urban
work after graduation (or a foregiving of educational loans
to persons who in fact enter such occupations). Indeed, this
nation has in the past adopted analogous programs,136 when
the need in question was national defense.
Accompanying the creation of a Social Service Academy
should be the development of a system of lateral entry in po-
lice departments. This has been recommended numerous
times in the past,137 and we can only urge that consideration
be given to a program of federal incentives to achieve this
end. Generally speaking, across the country one police de-
partment cannot hire a man from another police department
unless that man starts at the bottom.138 The only exception is
in the hiring of police chiefs. This situation is analogous to a
corporation which filled its executive positions exclusively
with persons who had begun their careers with that corpora-
tion. One can imagine how dismal the corporate scene would
be if inbreeding were the fundamental and unshakable norm
in the acquisition of personnel. This is the situation in most
police departments.
The combination of these two programs would no doubt
lead to increased pay for police. Lateral entry itself would
tend, though the market mechanism, to drive wages up, and
the insertion of academy-trained recruits into the labor pool
would have the same result. The quality of people and train-
ing which we envision should go a long way toward making
policing a profession, in the full sense of that term. As this
292
result is approached, substantial increases in police pay would
be necessary and desirable, and these increases should be sig-
nificantly more than the 10 or 15 percent usually mentioned.
The impact of these changes will be felt only over a period
of perhaps ten years. Yet a short-run means to alleviate the
problems discussed is a necessity. Several possibilities exist.
First, the lack of police manpower is in part due to a problem
of definition. Certain functions the police now perform, such
as traffic control, could be performed by other civil servants.
Other writers and commissions have recommended such a
redefinition of the "police function," and we concur.
In need of similar reexamination is the definition of
"crime." This is not the best of all possible worlds, and re-
sources are limited. Thus even disregarding the philosophical
debate over legislation in the area of "private morality," a ra-
tional allocation of police resources might well remove cer-
tain conduct from the purview of the criminal law.139 Not
only would such action free police resources for more impor-
tant uses, but it would also remove one source of police cor-
ruption and public disrespect for law.
If communities are to be policed adequately — and this con-
cept includes the community's acceptance of the policing as
well as the quality of the policing — the principle of commu-
nity control of the police seems inescapable. Local control of
the police is a fairly well-established institution in the sub-
urbs, and it may well be a necessity in the central cities. We
recognize that the implementation of this policy is a complex
matter — that different plans would be appropriate in different
urban situations and that different types of control for dif-
ferent police functions may be desirable. We feel, however,
that the principle is sound and that alternative models should
be developed and utilized.
Finally, institutionalized grievance procedures are badly
needed, especially in our large cities. It is clear that effective
machinery should be external to any offending governmental
agency if it is to be effective and be perceived as effective.140
Ideally, the police should not be singled out for such treat-
ment, but it is imperative that they be included. We suggest
that models for a federal grievance procedure be explored.
Chapter VIII
Judicial Response in Crisis
The actions of the judicial system in times of large-scale
mass protest — and especially civil disorder — are an impor-
tant, if severe, test of a society's judicial system and its capac-
ity to protect the rights and liberties of its citizens.1 This
chapter is a study of the judicial system and its response to
mass protest. Because of the breadth of this topic — ranging
from anti-war protest to black militancy and from the nature
of political justice to the mechanics of processing thousands
of cases during civil disorders — we have chosen to focus our
inquiry more narrowly. So we begin this chapter with a sur-
vey of the actions of courts during the recent urban disor-
ders. We then indicate some of the causes and implications of
these actions, focusing primarily on themes that we feel have
been developed inadequately elsewhere. In so doing we also
indicate the broader implications of our analysis for the legal
system and its functioning during periods of social unrest and
mass protest, whether that be black militancy, student unrest,
or anti-war protest.
To undertake even the study of the judicial response to the
recent urban disorders, however, is far from easy, for there is
little in the way of data. Indeed, there are far fewer studies in
depth about even the routine operations of judges, prosecu-
tors, and other court officials in the lower criminal courts than,
for example, about police. Furthermore, judges are not as
uniform in their views as police, and they are not organized
293
294
into guild organizations that have a sharp ideological charac-
ter. So it lis more difficult to generalize about judicial attitudes
and actions.
Moreover, early governmental investigations . of riots in-
clude few explicit comments on the operation of the judicial
system. Reports of the 1919 Chicago riot, the 1935 Harlem
riot, the 1943 Detroit riot, and the 1965 Watts riot offer, at
most, cursory generalizations, without data on case process-
ing, bail, or counsel. These early commissions evidently did
not consider judicial actions as having any great importance;
they were more or less taken for granted. This view was
equally shared by government agencies and academics — even
such classical studies of urban race relations as DuBois' study
of The Philadelphia Negro 2 and Drake and Cayton's Black
Metropolis 3 evaluated criminality without addressing its judi-
cial context.
Official reports of riots during 1968, however, have given
more attention to the judicial system. Undoubtedly this is in
part because of an increased sensitivity in recent years to
standards of judicial due process, largely because of the lead
of the Supreme Court. Another reason for this recent con-
cern is, of course, that during the urban disorders of the
1960's persons have been arrested in the thousands, straining
the capacity of the courts to process and adjudicate cases in
an orderly fashion. Almost 4,000 persons were arrested in
Watts in August, 1965; 4 more than 7,200 persons were ar-
rested in Detroit in a nine-day period in 1967; 5 1,500 were
arrested during a five-day riot in Newark; 6 in April, 1968,
following the death of Martin Luther King,7 over 3,000 per-
sons were arrested in Chicago within a three-day period; dur-
ing the week following Dr. King's death, 7,444 were arrested
in Washington, D.C., and over 5,500 in Baltimore.8 Thou-
sands of other persons, including lawyers and media person-
nel, were, in the process, brought into contact with the lower
criminal courts, persons who would not otherwise have been
exposed to or even had secondhand knowledge about them.
Responses ranged from anger at the injustices and callousness
of the judicial system during periods of civil emergency to
praise for overworked officials who did their best under
trying conditions.
JUDICIAL RESPONSE IN CRISIS 295
In these circumstances, it is not surprising that official at-
tention has turned to assessing the administrative competence
of the courts to cope with the volume of cases generated by
civil disorders. The Kerner Commission Report devoted a
chapter to problems of criminal justice during crises,9 and the
Chicago Riot Study Committee included a chapter on the
courts in their report of August, 1968.10 Other investigations
have specifically focused on the courts; a District of Colum-
bia committee reported on the courts in May, 1968; 1X a Bal-
timore committee reported in the same month; 12 a New
York committee presented recommendations to Mayor Lind-
say for court procedures during emergencies in August,
1968; 13 and the American Bar Association reviewed the
problems of courts during civil disturbances in the spring
issue of the American Criminal Law Quarterly.14 We shall
draw on these reports, as well as our own interviews and
other materials, to describe judicial operations during civil
disorders.
The Lack of Preparation: An Overview
The first major urban riot of the 1960's — in the Watts sec-
tion of Los Angeles — was unanticipated by the judicial sys-
tem, which understandably experienced severe administrative
pressures. But even after the development of "emergency
contingency plans" in some cities judicial systems continued
to be unprepared for and overwhelmed by civil disorders.
The lack of preparation had an immediate practical im-
pact. In Detroit, within two days of the beginning of the riot,
4,000 were incarcerated in makeshift jails. William Bledsoe,
an Assistant State's Attorney General assigned to the Civil
Rights Commission, reported that prisoners were "standing
where there wasn't enough room to lie down. Or at least,
people would take turns lying down. If you did find a place,
you didn't dare get up. . . . Men and women were housed
under these conditions together, without sanitary facilities,
with perhaps one or two bologna sandwiches a day, if
that. . . ." 15 In Newark, a large proportion of those arrested
were held in an armory without proper food, water, and toi-
296
let or medical facilities until detention pressures finally forced
authorities to release defendants on lower bails.10
Despite the Kerner Report's publication of lucid recom-
mendations concerning the administration of justice in crisis,
only New York had formulated a comprehensive emergency
plan for the judicial system by April, 1968. Even in Washing-
ton, D.C., where the judicial system responded more fairly
and efficiently than any other urban jurisdiction, "advance
planning had been confined to discussion, making plans that
were not operational by the time of the riot, or the drawing
up of isolated plans that did not really resolve the central
problems of mass arrest and detention." 17
And in Chicago, for example, the Bar Association's Special
Committee on Civil Disorders, which had been established al-
most ten months before the riot in April, 1968, had made no
practical recommendations either to its constituency or the
courts.
Thus, it is not so surprising that in Washington, D.C., cells
built for eight were at times crowded with up to sixty
persons.18 And in Chicago, whose jail handles on an average
day some fifty arrestees, on the weekend of the riots follow-
ing Dr. King's death there were over five hundred cases per
day without any corresponding increase in clerical and ad-
ministrative personnel. 19
In all cities studied, there was a serious shortage of profes-
sional and administrative personnel. The lack of a centralized
and efficient record-keeping system meant that families and
lawyers could not quickly locate defendants, nor could they
always find an official who would accept bond.
These practical difficulties, which might have been pre-
dicted, often were aggravated by inflexible and hostile poli-
cies of court and correction officials. In Chicago and Balti-
more, defendants were initially prevented from making phone
calls to their families on the grounds that the security risk
would be too great. In Detroit, men who were absent from
their homes for as long as ten days could not be located by
families or employers. In Baltimore, defendants were ar-
raigned in courtrooms guarded by armed and helmeted sol-
diers. When lawyers were available there was little opportun-
ity for lawyers to advise their clients, and some judges even
JUDICIAL RESPONSE IN CRISIS 297
refused to allow lawyers in their courtroom during the ar-
raignment procedures. "The writ of habeas corpus," com-
mented one Detroit defense lawyer, "was suspended and for
several days there was a sign on the door of the Wayne
County Jail that stated that no attorneys, either assigned or
retained, could see their clients." 20
The indignities to prisoners caught up in mass arrests were
aggravated by the imposition of high bail, amounting to pre-
ventive detention, inadequate representation, and minimal ob-
servance of due process requirements.
The Role of Lawyers in Crisis
An important factor in shaping the judicial response was
the absence of adequate defense lawyers in criminal court.
During riots, the lack of experienced criminal lawyers be-
comes a major crisis, for the adversary system of justice de-
pends upon defense attorneys to maintain its impartiality and
integrity. When lawyers are either untrained, uninterested, or
unavailable, the adversary system becomes a fiction and de-
fendants are forced to rely on the good sense, professional-
ism, or benevolence of the courts — an outcome particularly
undesirable in the stressful situation accompanying mass dis-
orders.
One of the most severe deficiencies in the administration of
justice under normal conditions is its failure to provide
skilled defense counsel for defendants. Though lawyers are
qualified to help strengthen the dignity, self-assertiveness, and
power of the poor and disaffiliated, they have only recently
begun to show organized interest in this task.21 This becomes
especially clear in times of civil disorders. The Kerner Com-
mission found that the most serious legal problem during civil
disorders is the "shortage of experienced defense lawyers to
handle the influx of cases in any fashion approximating indi-
vidual representation." 22 With the possible exception of some
special interest groups, such as the American Civil Liberties
Union and neighborhood legal agencies, the response by the
organized bar to such emergencies has been, with very few
exceptions, slow, insufficient, and ineffective. To make mat-
298
ters worse, the judiciary has at times restricted participation
by volunteer groups, as in Detroit and Newark in 1967 and
Chicago in 1968, where lawyers were denied access to court-
rooms and jails.23
In Detroit, volunteer lawyers found it difficult to contact
clients, and the organized bar made little effort to represent
prisoners at arraignment, though they later responded after
the riot was brought under control. According to a local law
professor, "the legal profession in Detroit did not check the
court of justice throughout most of the week in which the
riot occurred. In fact, the profession was paralyzed." 24 By
the middle of the second week of preliminary examinations it
was difficult to secure the volunteer services of lawyers, since
only 10 to 15 percent of the members of the Detroit Bar As-
sociation had offered their services.25 While the bar associa-
tions in Chicago, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C., re-
sponded more quickly to the civil disorders in 1968, the re-
sults were by no means adequate. Little had been done to im-
plement the Kerner Commission's recommendation that "the
bar in each community undertake mobilization of all avail-
able lawyers for assignment so as to insure early individual
legal representation to riot defendants." 2G Washington was
the only city where the organized bar and judiciary cooper-
ated in quickly recruiting and directing volunteer lawyers. In
Chicago, the Bar Association offered assistance to the Chief
Judge and Public Defender, who declined on grounds that
extra resources were not needed. This response was taken at
face value. The Bar Association refrained from criticizing the
courts' actions during the riots, preferring instead to act as a
broker between the courts and various legal defense
organizations.27 This was seen by representatives of these or-
ganizations as quiescent support of the courts' policies. Vol-
unteer help was also initially refused by the Public Defender,
who resented the interference of "outsiders" and regarded
with suspicion their lack of experience in criminal courts.28
During the riots, courts in various cities often become
armed camps, and some lawyers were intimidated by police
and troops in and around the courtrooms. According to one
volunteer in Detroit, "going into the court building was a
devastating experience. It was surrounded by armed guards
JUDICIAL RESPONSE IN CRISIS 299
with machine guns. The building was practically a tomb and
prisoners were being processed by some method I couldn't
fathom." '^ In Chicago, lawyers were initially turned away
from the courts by police guards. Those that demanded and
received entry were ignored and, in some cases, met with hos-
tility from bailiffs and court officials. At first, they were not
allowed to enter the "bullpens" to interview prisoners. Even
members of the Public Defender's Office were turned away
from the jail by nervous sheriff's deputies. "I'm surprised that
no one got shot there," commented an assistant public de-
fender. "I remember walking up the steps [of the jail] with
my public defender card in front and saw the Sheriff's police
with a machine gun, with the safety off, pointed at
me. . . ."30
Moreover, even when volunteer lawyers were present, they
were all too often unfamiliar with criminal court practices.
According to a survey in Detroit, 67 percent of the lawyers
had spent less than 5 percent of their time in criminal
court.31
Without organization or leadership, most volunteer lawyers
found themselves facing chaotic situations in which they
spent many frustrating hours waiting, petitioning officials,
and wasting their considerable skills and resources. In Wash-
ington, D.C., according to Ronald Goldfarb:
Lawyers converged on the Courthouse. Being unfamiliar
with General Sessions, they groped for several hours trying
to figure out the system. After doing so, they sat around, in
many cases, waiting for appointments that were slow in com-
ing because of the breakdown in the papering process.32
In Detroit and Washington, D.C., however, experienced crim-
inal lawyers and law school interns established a briefing
course for the volunteers.33 There was no time for organiza-
tion of similar programs in Chicago or Baltimore. Many in-
experienced volunteers quickly left the courts out of feelings
of frustration and incompetence.
With the exception of Chicago, black lawyers and criminal
court "regulars" were generally absent from the ranks of vol-
unteers. In Washington, the president of the predominantly
black Washington Bar Association claimed that Negro de-
300
fense lawyers had been purposely bypassed by the courts in
favor of "uptown" lawyers.34 In Chicago, the city's black Bar
Association mobilized its members after the riot was over,
held emergency meetings, and made public statements criti-
cizing the court's expedient policies. This pressure helped to
prod the court into holding bail hearings. In addition, these
actions demonstrated sympathy by black lawyers with the
"brothers on the street" and also helped to "reinstitute faith"
in both black lawyers and the legal process.35
In general, riots have underlined the fact that the great
majority of lawyers have little interest or experience in the
legal problems of the poor. Bar associations have taken at
best only a charitable interest in the criminal courts. This
problem is compounded during riots by court officials who
rarely extend cooperation to volunteers and maintain a veil of
secrecy over proceedings. Legal agencies with special interest
in judicial reforms also find that their efforts during a civil
disorder tend to be frustrated in the interest of efficient rather
than just proceedings. In Detroit and Chicago, members of
the Lawyers' Guild and ACLU openly expressed their frus-
tration with the courts. "We lent dignity to it last time by
participating," said a spokesman for the Detroit Civil Liber-
ties Union. "It was a farce." 3G
High Bail as Preventive Detention
Another serious problem in the judicial response to riots is
found in bail. We have put together a city-by-city survey of
bail practices during civil disorder in Detroit, Newark, Wash-
ington, D.C., Baltimore, and Chicago. The evidence is clear:
the constitutional right to bail was almost invariably replaced
by what in effect was a policy of preventive detention. This
was particularly unfortunate. Not only did it work great
hardships on the individuals involved — such as loss of em-
ployment because of absence — it also gave these persons an
especially unfavorable experience with the practical workings
of "the rule of law," an experience that was unlikely to per-
suade anyone of the merits of "working within the system for
orderly change." In this way, the functioning of the judicial
JUDICIAL RESPONSE IN CRISIS 301
system during disorders may have contributed to the very
grievances that lie at the roots of such disorders. Moreover,
the implicit justification (if there was one) for these practices
— that without preventive detention persons arrested would
return to rioting — ignores two most important points. First,
no evidence exists that this is true as a general proposition;
indeed, it is surely untrue with respect to a great many of
riot-related arrests — because of either the circumstances of
the area or of the arrest, or the normal lapse of time involved
in processing an arrested person. Thus, the "feedback to riot"
justification for holding large numbers in custody is wholly
lacking in evidence; and furthermore, it seems implausible to
believe that following a court appearance, an arrestee
charged with looting would return to the riot area, especially
if his promise not to return was made a condition of his re-
lease. Second, the Kerner Commission correctly pointed out
that alternatives exist to incarceration and suggested:
That communities adopt station house summons and re-
lease procedures (such as are used by the New York City
Police Department) in order that they be operational before
emergency arises. All defendants who appear likely to return
for trial and not to engage in renewed riot activity should be
summoned and released.
In fact, all too often the constitutional right to bail seemed
irrelevant. According to Judge Crockett of the Recorder's
Court in Detroit:
. . . hundreds of presumably innocent people, with no pre-
vious record whatever, suddenly found themselves separated
from their unknowing families and jobs and incarcerated in
our maximum security detention facilities . . . ; and all of
this without benefit of counsel, without an examination, and
without even the semblance of a trial.™
Whether this was because the courts were too overcrowded or
because the courts intended to aid other public agencies in
quelling the disturbances or were expressing distaste and fear
of the participants in the disturbances, the effect was the
same: punishment was applied before trial.
302
Detroit: In Detroit the use of bail as preventive detention
was explicitly acknowledged by the judiciary. The twelve Re-
corder's Court judges met on the second day of the riot (Mon-
day, July 27) and agreed to set bonds averaging $10,000;
some were set as high as $200,000.™ The Detroit Free Press
noted that as a result of the decision, hundreds of persons
were "railroaded through Recorder Court Sunday . . . night
and Monday, slapped with high bonds and stashed away to
await trial." 10 The high bail policy was applied uniformly —
ignoring the nature of the charge, family and job status of
those arrested, the prior record, and all other factors usually
considered in the setting of bail. In response to criticism from
black leaders, this policy was defended by one Recorder's
Court judge: "We had no way of knowing whether there was
a revolution in progress or whether the city was going to be
burned down or what." 41 With the exception of one judge
who gave individualized hearings but later said that even he
had set bail too high, the judges of Recorder's Court carried
out the high bail policy from July 23 to 30.
The impact of this policy was immediate. The detention fa-
cilities became severely overcrowded. The Wayne County
Juvenile Home, with a capacity for 160 boys, housed more
than 650 boys who could not make bond. Judge Lincoln, a
Juvenile Court judge, dealt with this problem by declaring
that "in spite of all the pressures, there has not been one boy
released back to feed this riot." 42 Adult prisoners were incar-
cerated in maximum security prisons and police garages as
the County Jail became overcrowded. Prisoners able to post
bond were not always released. The overcrowded conditions
did not prevent the Sheriff of the County Jail from refusing
release of prisoners if he felt that the bond was "too low."
The Sheriff claimed that the Executive Judge of the Recorder
Court had ordered him to refuse release until the original
judge reviewed the bail to see if it had been set too low.43
According to Judge Crockett, the situation had gotten so
"far out of control that there was justifiable fear that if there
were no riot then the Recorder Court's actions would surely
have started one. We had hundreds of people in buses on
Sunday for eighteen hours using a manhole as a latrine. This
was prior to arraignment."44 A week after the start of the
JUDICIAL RESPONSE IN CRISIS 303
riot, judges released hundreds of prisoners. Over 1,000 were
released on their own recognizance. Yet, by Monday of the
second week, 2,000 people were still confined, and on August
4, the end of the second week, 1,200 remained. Judge Crock-
ett commented later that "even now there is [no real
appreciation] of the full extent of the injustices we committed
by our refusal to recognize the right to immediate bail and
our objection to fixing reasonable bail." 45
The arbitrariness of Detroit's high bail policy is further
supported by a study made of 1,014 arrestees who were being
detained awaiting trial in the Michigan State Prison.46 Forty-
four percent of those awaiting trial were married, and 86 per-
cent had resided at the same address for one to five years.
Eighty percent were employed, and 41 percent were em-
ployed at a major auto company. Moreover, 49 percent of
those employed had worked at the same place for one to five
years, and 14 percent had had the same employer for five to
ten years. There was no consistent prior record. Sixty-seven
percent had no prior convictions, 19 percent had one prior
conviction, and 14 percent had previously been convicted two
or more times. Thus from these statistics, one would have ex-
pected less stringent bail policies than usual; in fact the con-
trary was true.
Furthermore, the amount of bond showed little relation to
the severity of the crime charged. The study concluded that
"arrestees who were married, employed and without prior
criminal records were treated virtually the same as were de-
fendants who were single, unemployed, and had previous
convictions and/ or arrests."47 Moreover, there are grounds
to believe that future bail policies will have a similar effect. A
former judge of Michigan's Supreme Court, for example,
feels that the only lesson the Recorder's Court is likely to
draw from the events is that "$15,000 to $20,000 bonds were
unnecessary — next time bond will be $2,000 or so — to ac-
complish the same objective but to avoid the exposure.
$2,000 bonds will keep them off the streets." 4S
Newark: In the summer of 1967, Newark courts employed
a similar high bail-preventive detention policy until detention
pressures forced a complete reversal. A "Release on Recog-
nizance" program was initiated in the last days of the riot.
304
with half of those arrested being interviewed and 65 to 80
percent of those being released. As in Detroit, public state-
ments by high judicial officials showed a distinct lack of con-
cern for those affected by a high bail policy. At the height of
the riot, according to the Newark Evening News (July 14,
1967), the Chief Magistrate commented, "If they can't afford
it, let them stay in jail." 1!)
Chicago: In the April, 1968, disorders following the assas-
sination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Chicago evidently took
no notice of the Kerner Report's recommendations that
. . . communities and courts plan for a range of alternative
conditions to release, such as supervision by civic organiza-
tions or third party custodians outside the riot area, rather
than to rely on high money bail to keep defendants off the
streets. The courts should set bail on an individual basis and
provide for defense counsel at bail hearings. Emergency
procedures for fast bail review are needed.50
No emergency plans were made for release in a mass arrest
situation. Rather, the courts continued the use of high bail to
keep people off the streets. This policy had results similar to
those in Detroit and Newark: detention facilities were over-
whelmed and individualized justice was abandoned.
Yet the response of the .Chicago courts to the April, 1968,
disorders was consistent with plans made after Newark and
Detroit. Soon after the disorders in those cities, the Chief
Judge for the Circuit Court met at the Chicago Bar Associa-
tion with the State's Attorney, Public Defender, Corporation
Counsel, and representatives of the Chicago Bar and Legal
Aid Society. They met to discuss "what lessons to draw from
Newark and Detroit." At that meeting, the Chief Judge an-
nounced a high bail policy that would be followed in Chicago
with the explicit intention of keeping those arrested off the
streets during a riot.51
The April, 1968, riots were not the first time such a policy
had been employed. In late January, 1967, Chicago experi-
enced a snowstorm which immobilized the whole city, includ-
ing the police. During this period, acts of looting and vandal-
ism broke out on the predominantly black West Side. The
courts responded to this crisis by imposing high bail on "loot-
JUDICIAL RESPONSE IN CRISIS 305
ers." When the Chief Judge of the Circuit Court, John Boyle,
was asked about the constitutionality of using high bond to
keep a defendant in jail rather than to guarantee appearance
at trial, he replied, "What do you want me to do — cry croco-
dile tears for people who take advantage of their city? Didn't
I read ... all about President Johnson's 'war on crime'?" r'2
The Public Defender, in response to criticism from the
ACLU that he was not challenging the courts' bail policies,
commented that he was "not going to start fighting with
judges because they set some bond that some people think is
too high." 53
According to an ACLU study in Chicago, the average bail
for the charge of burglary under "normal" conditions is
$4,300. Bail for the winter "looting" cases ranged from
$5,000 to $30,000, with an average of $14,000. Bond hear-
ings, as reported in official transcripts, typically took the fol-
lowing form: 54
The Clerk:
The Court :
The Clerk:
The Court:
State's
Attorney :
The Court:
Sam B.
Branch 46. 1-31.
Bond, Mr. State's Attorney?
Bond for B ... ?
On Sam B . . ., your Honor, the State will rec-
ommend a bond of $20,000.
$20,000.
And in another case:
The Court:
Defendant:
The Court:
Defendant:
The Court:
Defendant:
The Court:
Defendant:
What do you do for a living, son?
Sir, I work for the post office and for . . . two
jobs.
Can you afford to hire a lawyer?
Yes, I could, your Honor.
All right. You hire yourself a good lawyer, sir.
We will continue this case.
Your Honor, I have a wife and three kids and
I only left them with twelve dollars in the house.
Could I possibly get . . .
Twelve dollars.
But I get paid from the post office this coming
Thursday and I get my check at the other job,
your Honor.
306
The Court:
Defendant:
The Court:
Defendant:
The Court:
State's
Attorney:
The Court:
You should have been on the job instead of out
on the corner that night.
I had to get milk for my baby. I avoided this
crowd as far as I could and then I was afraid
they would rob me, your Honor; and my baby
was crying. He is only 9 months old and I was
going to — I was two blocks from my house
avoiding these crowds because I am afraid they
would rob me, but, your Honor, I got there
and the police I saw — I could only see the top
of the police car. Then I wasn't afraid any more
because I thought the police wouldn't bother me.
Then when the police got close the people went
out of the store and dropped goods all over the
ground.
Someday you'll learn how order is in Chicago.
Sir, may I please have a personal bond?
No, sir.
Motion State, February 20, 1967.
I will not interfere with the bond. February 20,
Bailiff.
Counsel was not permitted to represent defendants at the
time bail was set, and the preliminary hearings were contin-
ued by the court for at least three weeks. This meant that de-
fendants held under unusually high bail were incarcerated for
three weeks before the court would even consider if there
was probable cause to hold them. Almost all of the arrestees
remained in custody unable to make bond. The city's judicial
policies with respect to "looting" were well expressed by
Magistrate Maurice Lee: "This type of crime during a city-
wide emergency is comparable to grave-robbing." 55
It is perhaps not surprising, then, that the April, 1968, dis-
orders found Chicago courts ready to impose bails which,
though actually not "exorbitant," were nevertheless suffi-
ciently high to prevent the immediate release of most prison-
ers. Moreover, there was no official mechanism for notifying
families of the detention or amount of bond required for the
release of those arrested. And volunteers were required to put
tremendous pressure on the courts even to participate in such
matters as notification during the bond hearings.
Problems of actually posting bail were endless. In most
cases, the family of an arrested person knew only that he did
JUDICIAL RESPONSE IN CRISIS 307
not return home. The records department of the jail was
closed in the evenings and, when open, rarely had informa-
tion on the location of prisoners. Many prisoners who had
money when arrested were initially unable to post bond since
no bond clerks were available. At the jail and House of Cor-
rection, hundreds of concerned relatives were milling around
with little idea of how to proceed. Several Sheriff's deputies
guarded the jail, pointing their guns at the waiting crowd.
Law students and legal aid lawyers performed the tasks that
clerks should have performed if they had been assigned to
the bond office.50
The bail policy was later justified by the Chief Judge of the
Municipal Division. "When a man is sitting on the bench and
he's looking out the window and he sees the city afire, big
blazes here and there and everywhere, and he sees the people
who are supposedly involved, it's very difficult for him to
make a real considered judgment." r'7 This inability to make a
"considered judgment" inevitably favored the police over de-
fendants. About 800 defendants were given bonds of $1,000
or over. Release-on-own-recognizance bonds were restricted
for the most part to curfew violators, indicating that the
gravity of the allegation tended to dictate the amount of
bond. In determining bond, the courts paid little attention to
such criteria as the background of those accused, despite the
fact that over 70 percent of the defendants had never been
previously arrested, 83 percent had never been previously
convicted, and about 50 percent were arrested within six
blocks of their homes. At least 37 percent of the arrestees
spent over four days in jail pending the disposition of their
cases. Ten days after the riot began, there were still over 200
people in jail who could not make bond.5S
Baltimore: In Baltimore, according to a local blue-ribbon
committee, bail for curfew violations was invariably set at
$500, and few, if any, bondsmen were available at the
courts. "Very few defendants were released on their own re-
cognizance, and rarely was there time or inclination on the
part of the judge to hear a defense plea for a bail geared to
the circumstances of the individual defendant." r,!) Of 345
curfew defendants who were not tried immediately, only 99
managed to make bail.00 A significant number of curfew vio-
308
lators stood trial immediately under a stipulated prosecution;
many reportedly pleaded guilty because of the "threat of in-
carceration implicit in the bail systems." 61 Of the 3,500 per-
sons charged with curfew violations, all but 345 had been
tried and sentenced during the riot:
The mass trials of many defendants took place in an atmo-
sphere akin to martial law. The disorders and the administra-
tion of the curfew generally made detention of defendants an
incommunicado detention. Contact with those who might
help in posting bail was problematic at best. Thus there was
considerable pressure on defendants to agree to be tried
summarily.62
Washington, D.C.: Bail policy in Washington, D.C., varied
considerably. Compared with policies in other cities, it was
certainly less oppressive and less arbitrary. Nevertheless,
some judges set bond during the first two days of the riot
with the express purpose of keeping defendants off the
streets.03 Other judges strictly adhered to the provisions of
the Bail Reform Act, releasing many prisoners on their own
recognizance and cooperating with volunteer lawyers to facil-
itate immediate release of their clients. Even so, fewer defen-
dants were released on personal recognizance than is usually
the case under normal conditions. According to Ronald Gold-
farb:
A check of Bail Agency records, and interviews with Bail
Agency personnel, defense lawyers and prosecutors leads to
one inescapable conclusion: defendants arraigned during the
riot had more stable family ties, better employment records
and far less serious criminal records than does the regular
criminal defendant in the Court of General Sessions. ... It
is clear that many judges effectively discarded the liberal pol-
icies of the Bail Reform Act during the riot.fi '
Some Causes and Implications of Judicial Response
Routine Justice and Riot Justice
It is clear from the foregoing that the courts are ill pre-
pared to cope with the volume of cases encountered in civil
JUDICIAL RESPONSE IN CRISIS 309
emergencies. When we ask why, the reason that is often given
is strain — the added caseload simply is too much for the
courts to handle. Any operating system, from a washing ma-
chine to a government bureau, breaks down from overload.
Yet the "strain" explanation suggests an implicit assumption
we believe to be unfounded: that the courts ordinarily offer
services that are consonant with ideals of due process of law
under an adversary system. By contrast, the evidence points
to a direct relation between the way courts function during
emergency situations and the way they function normally,
and it is important that persons concerned with the shortcom-
ings of the courts during emergencies not lose sight of the
similar day-to-day shortcomings. Reform of the former neces-
sarily should embrace the latter.
The courts are ordinarily understaffed and ill equipped;
and the actions of courts during civil disorders may be seen
as ordinary practices writ large, given public attention, and
made vivid. In this section, we will examine routine justice as
it proceeds in the same areas discussed previously. The simi-
larities, we believe, will become evident.
It is in the lower courts that the quality of criminal justice
must be measured, for as many as 90 percent of the criminal
cases in this country are settled at this level.65 Though the Su-
preme and Appeal Courts set precedents and receive wide
publicity, it is the municipal courts that are the judicial sys-
tem of most relevance for the vast majority of accused per-
sons. It is thus of great significance that the President's Com-
mission on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Jus-
tice found:
It is clear that the lower courts are generally manned by
less competent personnel than the courts of general jurisdic-
tion. There are judges, attorneys and other officers in the
lower courts who are as capable as their counterparts in
more prestigious courts, but the lower courts regularly do not
attract such persons. 6G
And the President's Commission on Crime in the District of
Columbia recently observed that "abbreviated trials, disregard
for witnesses, inadequate and shabby facilities — all contribute
to an appearance of justice which weakens respect for law
310
and order." °7 Again, according to the President's Commis-
sion on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice:
Every day in the courthouses of metropolitan areas the in-
adequacies of the lower courts may be observed. There is lit-
tle in the process which is likely to instill respect for the sys-
tem of criminal justice in defendants, witnesses or observ-
ers.08
Bail
If a defendant is charged with a noncapital offense, he gen-
erally has the right to be released on bail. Apart from the
Eighth Amendment guarantee that bail cannot be "excessive,"
there are no strict guidelines, though the Supreme Court has
ruled that the function of bail must be limited to guaran-
teeing the appearance of the defendant at subsequent
proceedings; 69 thus it cannot be based on a desire to protect
society from subsequent criminal conduct. In reality, how-
ever, the practices prevailing during riots also prevail in day-
to-day bail-setting. Usually there is no evaluation of the fac-
tors, such as the accused's family and community ties, which
may affect the likelihood of escape; more often bail is used
against a defendant to "teach him a lesson," or to "protect
the community," just as it is during a civil disorder.70 The
practical result of the system is that persons with money or
access to money are able to obtain release on bail, while poor
persons, who often cannot meet even the bondsman's fee, re-
main incarcerated.
A study of the administration of bail in Philadelphia
showed that over 50 percent of persons held in lieu of bail
were eventually released after trial, either through acquittal
or on suspended sentence or probation.71 Moreover, several
studies have demonstrated that accused persons released on
bail are able to put together a better defense and generally
make a better appearance before the court, since they are
able to get fresh clothes and do not enter the courtroom as
prisoners.72 The results of these opportunities are dramatic:
persons released on bail are less likely to be convicted, and if
convicted are more likely to receive shorter or suspended
sentences.73 Moreover, because the judge need not take ac-
JUDICIAL RESPONSE IN CRISIS 311
count of this "dead time" in sentencing, the period awaiting
trial often places pressure on the accused to plead guilty.
Ironically, then, the overcrowding of detention facilities
during periods of civil crisis may work to the advantage of
those so detained, as compared to the situation of the average
poor arrestee charged with a felony. Overcrowded detention
facilities put pressures on judges to release early — within a
few days or a week — as compared to the weeks or months of
jail time not uncommonly experienced in routine justice.
Counsel
Though the Supreme Court has held that the accused must
be informed of his constitutional guarantees and his right to
obtain or have counsel appointed, in day-to-day situations —
just as in civil disorder situations — judges generally bypass or
give little emphasis to these requirements.
In theory the judge's duty is to advise the defendant of the
charges against him and of his right to remain silent, to be
admitted to bail, to retain counsel or to have counsel ap-
pointed, and to have a preliminary hearing. But in some cit-
ies the defendant may not be advised of his right to remain
silent or to have counsel assigned. In others he may be one
of a large group herded before the bench as a judge or clerk
rushes through a ritualistic recitation of phrases, making little
or no effort to ascertain whether the defendants understand
their rights or the nature of the proceedings. In many juris-
dictions counsel are not assigned in misdemeanor cases; even
where lawyers are appointed, it may not be made clear to the
defendant that if he is without funds he may have free
representation.74
In Detroit, for example, counsel is rarely provided at the
arraignment stage in Recorder's Court and, according to one
expert, "ordinarily the accused is not informed that he has a
right to have counsel 'appointed,' or that he can exercise this
right 'immediately.' " 75 For the many who have been inade-
quately advised of their right to attorney, their first appear-
ance in court is also likely to be their last. Most plead guilty
without consultation, often under the implied threat of an ad-
ditional stay in jail if a further hearing for a plea is required.
Even if an accused citizen obtains counsel, the reality of
312
what "counsel" means differs markedly from the abstraction
envisioned in such Supreme Court decisions as Gideon v.
Wainwright (1963), Escobedo v. Illinois (1964), Miranda v.
Arizona (1966), and In re Gault (1967). In theory the right
to counsel is perhaps the most important of rights because
the presence of counsel should assure procedural regularity
and the implementation of related principles. In fact, how-
ever, we find few defense attorneys who give to the role the
attitude that Francis Allen has suggested as the mark of the
qualified defense attorney: "a constant, searching, and crea-
tive questioning of official decisions and assertions of author-
ity at all stages of the process." 76
Studies of criminal defense lawyers suggest that "legal ser-
vice" is characteristically too little and too late. The relatively
few private lawyers available to the poor tend to be the least
well trained and most inclined to violate the profession's code
of ethics.77 Criminal lawyers are predominantly general prac-
titioners, unaffiliated with law firms, who make their livings
from "small fee" cases and do a great deal of trial work.78
According to Ladinsky, solo lawyers (most of whom handle
the criminal matters of the poor) more often than firm law-
yers come from lower-class backgrounds and from families
having minority status. They "have quantitatively inferior
education when compared to firm lawyers." 79 It is not sur-
prising, then, that criminal lawyers on the average earn less
from their work and outside sources than civil lawyers.80
Since most persons who appear in the lower courts are
poor, where a defendant has counsel (and, again, a large pro-
portion of defendants, particularly in misdemeanor cases, are
not represented at all) that counsel is generally appointed
without charge by the court. The quality of defense work by
state-appointed attorneys is often even less distinguished than
that by small-fee criminal lawyers.
Moreover, even in large cities the criminal bar is small and
tends, along with the Public Defender's Office — which is
usually more competent than appointed attorneys — to consti-
tute a closed system. Given the pressures of the system to
process vast numbers of cases, cooperation and accommoda-
tion are highly valued, with the result that most cases are ne-
JUDICIAL RESPONSE IN CRISIS 313
gotiated on the basis of informal norms developed in re-
sponse to administrative needs rather than legal principles:
Most cases are disposed of outside the traditional trial pro-
cess, either by a decision not to charge a suspect with a crim-
inal offense or by a plea of guilty. In many communities one
third to one half of the cases begun by arrest are disposed of
by some form of dismissal by public prosecutor, or judge.
When a decision is made to prosecute, it is estimated that in
many courts as many as 90% of all convictions are obtained
by guilty pleas.81
Defense counsel is intimately involved in this process; his
work comes to depend on cooperation with other officials in
the system. The mass of clients may not be adversely
affected. Yet the individual case may not be considered solely
on its merits.82 Moreover, there is no judicial review as to
the fairness of the bargain, no guarantee that the defendant
will receive what he has bargained for, and no control over
the degree of pressure used to elicit acceptance of the
bargain.83 In this pretrial, publicly invisible method of dis-
pensing justice, the defendant's guilt is generally assumed, a
burden that ideally at least should be carried by the state.84
The process comes to look less rational — subject to chance
factors, to undue pressure, and sometimes to the hint of
corruption.85
Faced with enormous caseloads, lacking financial and tech-
nical resources, and lacking especially the interest of the or-
ganized bar, the lower criminal courts should not be expected
to generate a quality of distinction during emergencies that is
fundamentally absent in its routine operations. Moreover, rec-
ommendations for improving the performance of courts dur-
ing emergencies will be lacking unless they also address the
problems found in these routine operations.
The Lower Court as an Agency of Law Enforcement
Although one may liken the functioning of the judicial sys-
tem during mass disorders to its routine functioning, ob-
viously something more dramatic is occurring. Not only are
the problems faced during riots more severe than those con-
314
fronted in the routine administration of justice; in addition,
more varied and intense outside pressures are brought to bear
on the courts.
During riots there is fear in the wider community, the
courts come under scrutiny by the news media, and judicial
authorities are in constant communication with political lead-
ers. Under these circumstances, judicial actions and state-
ments indicate that the courts usually cooperate by employing
their judicial authority in the service of riot control, becom-
ing, in effect, an agency engaged in nonjudicial forms of law
enforcement.
In Detroit, for example, the Chief Judge of Recorder's
Court made it clear in press releases that high bonds would
be used to keep "rioters" off the street and that he would not
release "thugs who would help to further [a] 'takeover-by-vio-
lence' plan." 86 The courts in Detroit refused to release pris-
oners until they were assured by the Mayor, a federal repre-
sentative, and local military commanders that the city was
secure.87 The executive may tend to perceive judicial action
as his responsibility. Regarding the Newark riot, the Gover-
nor proclaimed that "New Jersey will show its abhorrence of
these criminal activities, and society will protect itself by fair,
speedy and retributive justice." 88 The judges and magistrates
in Newark were responsive to the Governor's direction that
"the strength of the law ... be demonstrated." 89 In Chi-
cago, where the judicial system is routinely under tight politi-
cal control, the courts cooperated with the Mayor's office and
city prosecutors in detaining "rioters" until the emergency
was declared over. The Chief Judge of Chicago's Municipal
Division accurately reflected the political perspective of city
hall: "I have seen tremendous progress for this particular mi-
nority group. They have come up so far and are progressing
except for these civil disorders. Civil disorder ... is the
worst thing for the black race. It's bad; it's creating a cleav-
age in our society against them." 90
In response to, and usually in agreement with, a desire for
a quick restoration of order, the courts adopt a law enforce-
ment perspective on riot control. Such a perspective may be
summarized as follows: (1) civil disorders represent a time
of extreme and dangerous emergency, requiring extraordinary
JUDICIAL RESPONSE IN CRISIS 315
measures of control and resistance; (2) the efforts of the po-
lice, military, fire department, and other public agencies must
be actively supported to restore order as quickly as possible;
(3) the presumption of guilt of defendants is made necessary
by the presence of troops in the city, the sight of "fires on the
horizon," and a common-sense appreciation of the danger
and inherent criminality of a "riot" or "uprising"; (4) high
bail is required to prevent rioters returning to the riot; (5)
the nature of the emergency and the overwhelming number
of defendants preclude the possibility of observing the nice-
ties of due process; (6) due process will be restored as soon
as the emergency has been terminated.91 Both the courts and
the police seek to prevent growth of the disorder, to distin-
guish the leaders, and to control the mob. The courts attempt
to control the mob by detaining rioters until order is restored,
by displaying power and resolve in the processing of defen-
dants, by observing strict security precautions (having troops
and police in court buildings and courtrooms, limiting access
to prisoners, and checking credentials of lawyers), and by
coordinating policies with other public agencies.
We have already suggested that the need for eliminating
due process has not been documented. The evidence suggests
that most "rioters" will not necessarily return to the riot area
following a court appearance.92 Moreover, when during crisis
courts do become an instrument of order, rather than of law,
communities find themselves without a tribunal for impartial
judgment. This conclusion has two important consequences.
First, as we have already noted, since the guilt of the accused
is assumed, the adversary system and its attendant guarantees
of due process are further eroded. Second, while there is or-
dinarily little control over the police and other agencies of
government by courts, during riots there is active coopera-
tion.
The criminal courts do more than arraign and try accused
persons and sentence the guilty. When they operate properly,
the courts insist on lawful standards of operation from other
agencies of government. We do not have in mind here suits
brought against governmental agencies, but rather what hap-
pens in the course of the routine criminal process. The courts
have the responsibility to bring legal standards to bear on
316
prosecutors, probation officers, police, lawyers, and other per-
sons and agencies involved in law enforcement. In doing so,
the courts are presumed to constrain these persons and agen-
cies to adhere to law.
In order to perform this supervisory task, however, courts
must in some degree be independent of other parts of the
criminal justice system. The necessity for such independence
— for a capacity to be both part of the law enforcement ap-
paratus and in some degree stand apart from it — has long
been recognized, for there are strong pressures on the crimi-
nal courts to be uncritical of other agencies of law enforce-
ment. Recent Supreme Court decisions concerning the proper
use of police power reflect an awareness of this tendency to
erode the insulation between the criminal courts and other
agencies of law enforcement. Under normal conditions, this
tendency is occasionally halted by appellate court decisions
and by professional standards of propriety. During periods of
civil emergency, however, even stronger pressures are gener-
ated for expedient action, and the courts surrender much of
what remains of their supervisory function; law enforcement
agencies are encouraged, at least implicitly, to exert control by
any means necessary. Moreover, the court's own actions —
such as preventive detention through high bail — may be in
violation of law. By condoning and following such policies,
the courts contribute to the "breakdown of law" and to the
establishment of an "order" based on force without justice.
The implications of this situation are far-reaching. Some have
been discussed earlier. To fully appreciate their gravity, how-
ever, one must examine the unique role that the courts play
in our governmental system and the stresses that our legal
system is undergoing in this time of widespread dissatisfac-
tion and protest.
Disenchantment with Law
The criminal courts, like all legal institutions, are "politi-
cal" in the sense that they engage in formulating and admin-
istering public policies.93 The ties and differences between the
political and judicial systems, however, are complex, and we
must not overlook their distinctive characters.
The judicial system is tied to the political system in several
JUDICIAL RESPONSE IN CRISIS 317
obvious ways. Judicial personnel are sometimes elected; even
more often they are appointed by political officeholders. Also,
the enforcement of judicial decisions is often left to political
officials. Finally, the laws the judiciary is empowered to inter-
pret and apply are created and can be changed through polit-
ical processes. In general, the closeness of the courts to the
political system does much to ensure the flexibility of our
legal system, its openness to change.
At the same time the judicial system is relatively insulated
from politics. The selection of judicial personnel is guided in
some measure by standards developed according to legal
rather than political competence, and tenure arrangements
have developed to protect judges from political interference.
Moreover, judges are expected, and in considerable degree
expect themselves, to be constrained by constitutional, statu-
tory, and case law and by general principles of legality, in
their assessment of evidence and their decisions. Such con-
straints are intended both to protect individuals against arbi-
trary state action and to prevent the courts from usurping
powers more properly exercised by legislative and executive
agencies.
In a constitutional democracy, then, the judiciary ideally
functions as an impartial arbiter of conflict, relatively free
from partisan interests — whether they be social, economic, or
political. Our society recognizes that departures from mat-
ideal are inevitable. However, it also views them with deep
suspicion; for when the judiciary assumes a partisan role, the
ideal of legality may seriously be undermined and the reso-
lution of conflict reduced to the distribution and availability
of force.
The evidence presented with respect to judicial behavior
during the recent urban riots indicates a readiness by courts
to lend their support to a system of preventive detention, to
become an instrument of political needs relatively unre-
strained by considerations of legality.94 In the process, they
undermine their own reputation as impartial arbiters of social
disputes. Such actions lead to disaffection among those who
have come into contact with a partisan judiciary, or who
think they have. The importance of this cannot be underesti-
mated, for the courts are our model for the "rule of law" to
318
which we urge rioters to adhere. And lawlessness is precisely
what we condemn in such dissidents.
Riot situations, however, are not the first instance of such
disaffection. Yet the fact remains that the conduct of courts
during riots reinforces the cynicism that many feel toward the
legal system and converts others to similar views.
Because such disaffection decreases the likelihood of wide-
spread acceptance of appeals to the "rule of law," it is impor-
tant to examine briefly how this disaffection developed, prior
to and after the recent urban disturbances. While it may be
argued that much of this disaffection is due to naive and un-
real demands made of the courts by the disaffected, it must
be emphasized that the courts — and other branches of gov-
ernment— have themselves contributed to the decline of legal
authority and, in some instances, to strengthening the resolve
of dissenting groups. To the extent that this is true, the
courts, like the police, may aggravate collective outbursts.
Political activity in the civil rights and anti-war movements
was the first experience for many persons, both black and
white, with the legal apparatus. In the early stages of the civil
rights movement, especially in the South during the 1950's,
the legitimacy of the legal system was assumed. People inten-
tionally violated local laws, but they did so in the name of
higher federal laws, which they believed would prevail in the
courts. They had implicit faith in the justice of the legal sys-
tem, if only it could be made to operate according to its own
stated ideals.
The trouble was that even in theory, but especially in prac-
tice, the ideals of a federal system are ambiguous. Civil rights
activists saw "the law" as federal law, the Constitution, the
Supreme Law of the Land. White Southerners, at least those
in political power, defied the federal law and interposed state
law. Thus a paradox appeared: though federal law was de-
clared by federal courts to be supreme, the hegemony of
local laws and government — based on white supremacy — pre-
vailed in practice. State judicial systems often actively parti-
pated in this erosion of legality. Moreover, federal courts,
especially the lower federal courts, often facilitated or ac-
quiesced in this process, or at best were powerless — whether
for legal or political reasons — to do anything about it. As a
JUDICIAL RESPONSE IN CRISIS 319
result, the stature of all law — state and federal, legislative and
executive and judicial — suffered. As Tom Hayden testified be-
fore this commission on October 23, 1968:
The major issue that shaped our political outlook . . . was
domestic policy and particularly the problem of civil rights in
the South which came to the attention of northern students in
1960 through the direct action of voter registration
campaigns. . . . Working in the South brought us face to
face for the first time with the reality that we had never
known, the direct reality of the police state. . . . The crucial
discovery of that experience for many students, however, was
that the South was not an isolated and backward region but
was an integral part of the whole country. . . .
An elementary lesson began to dawn on us, a lesson that
never was taught us in our civics classes, and that lesson was
simply that law serves power. . . ,95
Although the importance of experiences in the South can-
not be overestimated, disaffection was not merely a product
of the civil rights struggle in the South.
Two points are of particular importance in this respect.
First, lower-class blacks, whether in the North or South, have
always been skeptical of the courts' capacity to administer
fair and equal criminal justice.96 As long ago as 1903,
W. E. B. DuBois noted that "the Negro is coming more and
more to look upon law and justice, not as protecting safe-
guards, but as sources of humiliation and oppression." 97 In
recent years, most militant blacks have come to believe, along
with one SNCC leader, that "the legal system is bankrupt.
There is no such thing as justice for black folks in this
country." 98 Thus, the Kerner Commission was correct in
concluding that "civil disorders are fundamental governmen-
tal problems, not simply police matters." 99 We will enlarge
on that perspective in our concluding chapter.
Second, among protesters outside the South there was also
a deterioration of respect for the legal system. To understand
why this occurred, one must examine ( 1 ) the expectations of
these protesters, and (2) the suitability of the courts for the
role they are forced to play in protest situations.
In the early 1960's, students, blacks, and civil rights work-
ers had much faith in the courts, and early experiences in the
civil rights movement at least held out the hope that the judi-
320
ciary might be a progressive governmental ally. Indeed, the
courts were often far ahead of the other branches of govern-
ment in upholding the notion of legality. Moreover, legality
— with its corollaries of consistency and impartiality — was
often found to coincide with justice, and this nurtured the ex-
pectation that some element of "social justice" could and
would emerge through the judicial process. Even when civil
rights activists became disillusioned with the legal system and
the courts in the South and began to focus their attention on
the North, they still had faith in the legal processes in the
North — after all, it was not the South. Profound disillusion-
ment, however, soon occurred in the North also.
An extensive literature exists on the role that courts play in
our democracy. Some of this has already been sketched, but
the functioning of courts is obviously much more complex
than this. The importance of precedent, the doctrine of "po-
litical questions," the scope of appellate review, the distinc-
tion between "pure speech" and "conduct," the roles of the
jury and the judge, and similar nuances — which often prevent .
courts from reaching the "just" result or even from deciding
a case on its substantive, as opposed to procedural, merits-
are all important to a sophisticated evaluation of the courts.
However, for better or worse, it is a fact that the vast major-
ity of our citizens — and protesters — do not have such refined
notions concerning the courts.
Thus at least some of the disillusionment with the legal sys-
tem might have been avoided if a more "sophisticated"
appreciation of our judicial and governmental system had ex-
isted. Such an appreciation would have recognized the limita-
tions "inherent" in the judicial process and would not have
been disappointed by actions of courts which were consistent
with a strict standard of "neutrality" and "legality" but did
not meet broader notions of social justice. Indeed, it would
have been recognized that, in other contexts (such as the
South), judicial neutrality had been thought desirable.
However, such understanding of the limitations of the judi-
ciary was not widespread in the civil rights movement (as
Tom Hayden's testimony suggests), and increasingly courts
were perceived as and resented for acting in a manner con-
trary to the movement's conceptions of social justice. For ex-
JUDICIAL RESPONSE IN CRISIS 321
ample, the Chief Judge of the Court of General Sessions in
Washington, D.C., has defended "neutrality" and "objectiv-
ity" by saying:
When faced with a mass civil disorder, there will be great
pressure to disregard the particular violation — especially if
the activity is nonviolent; especially when it is in support of a
cause which is obviously just; and especially when you hap-
pen personally to agree with some of the basic aims of the
demonstrators. We, the judges, cannot afford to succumb to
that kind of temptation.1 nn
So, activists soon perceived "neutrality" — at least a strict judi-
cial interpretation of it — as an obstacle to social justice. Iron-
ically, even those with "more sophisticated" views are likely
to agree with such a short-run analysis. They, however, point
to the long-run necessity of a neutral judiciary. It is this point
that the disenchanted activists either did not see or rejected
on grounds that social needs were too urgent.
But that was only part of the problem. An authority can
manage a claim of "neutrality" provided it is also consistent.
Yet an increased exposure to the courts, especially the lower
courts, seemed to those involved to reveal inconsistency. An
observer of civil rights activity in San Francisco in the sum-
mer of 1964 commented:
Scores of defendants all accused of the same crime are
being tried by different departments of one system. There are
variations in rulings on the admissibility of evidence, varia-
tions in the attitudes of judges toward the cases and, most
importantly, great variations in outcome. Some jurors have
complained that attempts have been made to "gag" them in
the deliberation process. I know of one instance of three boys
who alleged that they were sitting together that night at the
Sheraton Palace. One of the boys was acquitted, one of the
boys was convicted, and one of the boys will be tried again
because of a hung jury. The boys expressed in amazement to
me: "And we were sitting side by side!" 101
Clearly, the reality was out of line with expectations. Defen-
dants are less likely than officials to view the system in over-
all terms.102
As important, perhaps, was the fact that students more and
more tended to view the courts as enforcers of rules that
were themselves arbitrary. For example, students during the
322
1964 Free Speech Movement at the University of California
challenged the administration's attempt to end a long tradi-
tion of political activity near Sather Gate. Judge Robert Kro-
ninger, when faced with sentencing students arrested during
the Free Speech Movement, made the following evaluation:
"Resistance to the rule of law whether active or passive is in-
tolerable, and to describe criminal conduct as civil disobedi-
ence is to make words meaningless." 103 Yet from the per-
spective of the student protesters, merely to describe their
civil disobedience as criminal conduct is equally meaningless.
As they saw it the alternative was to acquiesce to an adminis-
tration which, according to the report of its own prestigious
investigative committee, had "displayed a consistent tendency
to disorder in its own principles." 104
Similarly, the courts have come to be seen as enforcing
laws that are technicalities either designed or used to suppress
dissent. Such a view in many instances was not without fac-
tual basis. For example, after the April, 1968, peace march
in Chicago, a distinguished commission reached the following
conclusion:
By attempting to discourage protest by withholding [pa-
rade] permits, the City invites disaster at some time when it
may have constitutional reasons for prohibiting a particular
assembly. . . . The First Amendment is meaningless unless
dissenting individuals attempt to take advantage of the rights
it affords. If such individuals do not make the attempt, it is
true that there is no violence, no conflict, no overt repression
of speech; there is also no freedom. ... In a democracy, it
should not require courage to defy authorities in order to ex-
press dissenting views.105
Moreover, congressional enactment and judicial enforcement
of a law specifically aimed at draft card burning — after this
was already used as a means to voice dissent — was widely
seen as a blatant attempt to stifle dissent, as were many of the
policies promulgated by General Hershey, Director of the Se-
lective Service System. Finally, anti-war protestors and blacks
have seen themselves charged with criminal offenses — often
of an omnibus nature such as "mob action" — to which police
actions have contributed.
It is obviously true that the courts, as such, should not be
the object of blame in many of the foregoing instances; under
JUDICIAL RESPONSE IN CRISIS 323
any realistic theory of judicial responsibility they had no op-
tion open to them. At the same time, however, it is true that
judicial enforcement of these laws heightened the bitterness
of protesting groups and lessened their respect for the legal
system. Perhaps, then, any lessons to be drawn from this ex-
perience should be addressed to the other branches of govern-
ment. And central to any such lesson is the recognition that
during periods of protest the legal and social system, fragile
in the first place, is by definition undergoing unusual stress,
precisely because of the importance of the issues involved
and depth of feelings involved. To the extent that the courts
are required to enforce laws that are not particularly neces-
sary or which place unnecessary stress on the legal system,
the legal system itself suffers.
Related to this is another manner in which the recent esca-
lation of protest has resulted in an enormous burden on tradi-
tional disciplinary and criminal procedures and thus contrib-
uted to the growing disenchantment with the legal system.
This derives not so much from the larger number of cases, but
rather from the courts being asked to perform tasks for
which they are inherently unsuited. And this becomes in-
creasingly true as protest increases, and it becomes more dif-
ficult to draw lines between dissent and criminality.106
The criminal process is based on the implicit assumption
that crime, by and large, is an individual enterprise, or at
most an enterprise encompassing only a small proportion of
any community. The lower criminal courts are designed to
handle a large volume of misdemeanor cases in which most
defendants plead guilty and do not contest the authority and
legitimacy of the courts. Moreover, the process assumes that
those activities defined as "crimes" are disapproved of by a
large proportion of the community. This, however, is not true
of contemporary mass protest, if the community in which the
protest occurs is taken to be the most relevant.
Often a significant segment of the protesting community is
involved in protest "crimes" — as, for instance, in Watts, De-
troit, Berkeley, and Columbia — and a large proportion do not
define the activity as "crime." Moreover, protesters do not ac-
cept the court's authority to decide the disputes. This situa-
tion is one in which even further disenchantment and erosion
of the concept of legality are likely; as such it presents a cri-
324
sis for the courts and the legal system. By being required to
pass judgment over communities that do not support the
judgment, courts are placed in an extremely difficult political
and thus legal situation.
The federal courts have faced this type of situation in
the South; municipal courts in the North face what is per-
haps an even more difficult situation with respect to the
black communities. The black communities are black, and
they are segregated as a result of a history of white dom-
ination going back to slavery. So perhaps more accurate
than this analogy to the South is one to the colonial court,
for the black communities of America — segregated com-
munities providing the maids and janitors and carwashers
for more affluent whites — come close to being internal col-
onies. And to the extent that a lack of political and social
change forces the courts to deal with these problems, the
legal system itself is placed in a difficult and dangerous
position.
Recommendations
To those who seek recommendations for improving the
performance of the courts during civil crises, we can offer no
simple — or even difficult — solutions. When the courts become
a central political forum, it seems reasonable to infer that the
traditional political machinery is malfunctioning. For the
courts, the fundamental problem is that they are organized to
do one sort of task — adjudicating — and that in civil disorders
they are asked to deal with the outcome of political conflict
as if it were only a criminal matter. Under such conditions,
they often become and are perceived as an instrument of
power rather than of law.
Given the fact that the courts will probably continue to be
burdened with the responsibility of handling mass protests,
every effort should be made to improve the ability of the
courts to administer justice efficiently and fairly, with full re-
gard to the civil liberties of defendants. Several reforms are
needed in this respect:
1 . The criminal courts are in serious need of thorough re-
JUDICIAL RESPONSE IN CRISIS 325
organization so that they may be capable of meeting even
minimal standards of justice, decency, and humanity under
normal conditions. Such reorganization would help to elimi-
nate some of the more flagrant abuses of legal rights during a
civil disorder. More significantly, it would help to eradicate
one of the causes of such emergencies, for there is good rea-
son to believe that injustice and the ensuing loss of faith in the
authority of the law may move rational persons toward ex-
tralegal action. It is especially tragic that those who have most
reason to be disenchanted with our society — particularly the
poor and ethnic minorities — are treated most unjustly by the
courts. Our criticism is not primarily aimed at court officials,
for in an important sense the personal competence of such
officials is the least of our problems. Much more important is
the fact that we have not furnished the courts with financial,
administrative, and jurisprudential resources commensurate
with their importance in a society aspiring to constitutional
democracy.
2. The actions of the courts during a civil disorder should
be lawful, sympathetic, and respectful. It seems clear from
the evidence that during periods of civil crisis pressures on
the courts for expedient action are inevitable. Despite these
pressures, the courts must make every effort to encourage the
lawful operation of the entire law enforcement system, in-
cluding the police and prosecutors, as well as themselves. The
Kerner Report made several important suggestions with re-
spect to this problem. Among its recommendations are:
That communities adopt station house summons and re-
lease procedures (such as are used by the New York City
Police Department) in order that they be operational before
emergency arises. All defendants who appear likely to return
for trial and not to engage in renewed riot activity should be
summoned and released.
That recognized community leaders be admitted to all pro-
cessing and detention centers to avoid allegations of abuse or
fraud and to reassure the community about the treatment of
arrested persons.
That the bar in each community undertake mobilization of
all available lawyers for assignment so as to insure early in-
dividual legal representation to riot defendants through dispo-
sition and to provide assistance to prosecutors where needed.
326
Legad defense strategies should be planned and volunteers
trained in advance. Investigative help and experienced advice
should be provided.
That communities and courts plan for a range of alterna-
tive conditions to release, such as supervision by civic organi-
zations or third-party custodians outside the riot area, rather
than to rely on high money bail to keep defendants off the
streets. The courts should set bail on an individual basis and
provide for defense counsel at bail hearings. Emergency
procedures for fast bail review are needed.
That no mass indictments or arraignments be held and rea-
sonable bail and sentences be imposed, both during or after
the riot. Sentences should be individually considered and
pre-sentence reports required. The emergency plan should
provide for transfer of probation officers from other courts
and jurisdictions to assist in the processing of arrestees.107
We support these recommendations of the Kerner Com-
mission, which were adopted in detail by the District of Co-
lumbia and other Committee reports, with the following
reservation. Clearly some emergency measures are needed to
permit the courts to operate in an orderly fashion during a
civil crisis. The danger is that such "temporary" measures
may become permanent and "emergencies" become routine.
We are especially concerned with the trend toward devising
"emergency "measures" which are not addressed to needed
fundamental reforms in the routine criminal justice system.
For example, recent official investigations of the operation
of the courts in crisis have sought new laws and new judicial
techniques for controlling "rioters." Thus, many cities are
presently exploring the possibility of preventive detention
legislation,108 and a blue-ribbon commission in Baltimore
has recommended the passage of a "scavenging" law in
anticipation of future riots.109 Moreover, these trends lead
us to believe that preparations are being made to deal ef-
ficiently with future civil disorders while little is being done
to remedy the social and political grievances that motivate
such disorders. This is a fundamental error.
Finally, we believe that a number of assumptions, both in
social psychology and in official conceptions, have served to
obscure and undermine the political character of contempo-
rary protests. In our concluding chapter, we intend to assess
those assumptions.
Part Four
Conclusion
Chapter IX
Social Response to Collective Behavior
Throughout this report we have concentrated on showing
the difficulty of determining what causes and what prevents
violence, such as it is, in several protest movements. A com-
mon theme has emerged from the analysis of these move-
ments. We have argued that they represent forms of political
protest oriented toward significant change in American social
and political institutions. In this concluding chapter we con-
sider some of the implications of this perspective for public
policy. In doing so, we narrow our focus to the question of
the meaning of riots and civil disorder. We believe that con-
ventional approaches to the analysis and control of riots have
inadequately understood their social and political significance,
and need to be revised.
In the first section of this chapter we examine the perspec-
tive on riots developed in social-scientific theories of collec-
tive behavior. This is not merely an academic exercise. At
least since the 1919 Chicago Commission on Race Relations,1
these perspectives have influenced the assumptions underlying
official responses to civil disorders. Even where direct in-
fluence is unclear, it remains true that there has been a re-
markable similarity between academic and official views on
the nature, causes, and control of civil disorder. In the second
section, we consider some of the themes in the official concep-
tion of riots in the light of historical and contemporary evi-
dence. In the final section, we consider the implications of our
329
330
findings for conventional approaches to the social control of
disorder.
Theories of Collective Behavior
"Common sense" sees riots as threatening, irrational, and
senseless. They are formless, malign, incoherent, and destruc-
tive; they seem to raise to the surface those darker elements
of the human character that are ordinarily submerged. Most
of all, they are something others do: the lower classes, disad-
vantaged groups, youth, criminals. By and large, this conven-
tional view of riots has been adopted in the development of
the study of collective disorder, although some of the most
recent work in social science has come to perceive the rela-
tive and definitional aspects of such terms as "order," "vio-
lence," and "crime." As William Kornhauser has recently
written, "The readiness to assimilate all politics to either
order or violence implies a very narrow notion of order and a
very broad notion of violence . . . what is violent action in
one period of history becomes acceptable conflict at a later
time." 2 It is this more recent perspective that we attempt to
apply to the analysis of collective behavior, especially in our
consideration of social response.
The "Crowd"
The modern study of collective behavior has its origins in
the nineteenth-century European writers on the "crowd." In
the work of Gabriel Tarde, Gustave Le Bon, and others, the
emergence of the "crowd" was identified with the rise of de-
mocracy. It was seen as both the catalyst and symbol of the
decline of everything worthy in European civilization during
and after the French Revolution. In becoming part of a
crowd, wrote Le Bon, "a man descends several rungs in the
ladder of civilization." 3 Unlike civilized behavior, crowd be-
havior was impulsive, spontaneous, and uninhibited, rather
than the product of reason, established tradition, and the re-
straints of civilized life. Ideas spread in the crowd through
processes of contagion and suggestion. In this view, the
crowd developed like a highly infectious disease; the crowd
SOCIAL RESPONSE TO COLLECTIVE BEHAVIOR 331
represented a pathological state.4 Like others after him, Le
Bon had little to say about the origins of crowds; while ex-
haustively discussing their nature, he left the conditions of
their emergence obscure. In this way, the "pathological" and
"destructive" behavior of crowds was dissociated from its en-
vironmental and institutional framework. Finally, Le Bon and
other early writers tended to lump together indiscriminately
what we today regard as distinct phenomena; in their aristo-
cratic assault on the crowd, they included parliamentary bod-
ies and juries as manifestations of "crowd behavior." 5 This
approach, while perhaps useful in discrediting the aspirations
of rising social classes in a democratizing age, seriously un-
dermined the analysis of specific instances of collective be-
havior.
Transplanted to American sociology and social psychology,
the preconceptions of European theorists underwent con-
siderable modification.6 Lacking a feudal tradition, American
society was not receptive to the more explicitly anti-demo-
cratic biases represented in European theories of the crowd.
The irrational behavior of crowds was no longer, for the
most part, linked to the rise of democratic participation in
government and culture. The simplistic disease model of col-
lective behavior was for the most part replaced by a new per-
spective which, while discarding some of the older themes,
retained many of their underlying premises.7
The major change invoked in more recent analyses of col-
lective behavior is toward greater interest in the causes of dis-
order. At the same time, early conceptions of the nature of
riots have largely been retained.
The Nature of Riots
Social scientists usually place riots under the heading of
"collective behavior," a broad concept which, in most treat-
ments, embraces lynchings, panics, bank runs, riots, disaster
behavior, and organized social movements of various kinds.8
Underlying this union of apparently diverse phenomena is the
idea that each in some sense departs from the more routine,
predictable, and institutionalized aspects of social life. Collec-
tive behavior, in the words of a leading social psychology
332
text, is not only "extraordinary" and "dramatic," but also
"likely to be foolish, disgusting, or evil." 9
The crucial element of "collective behavior" is not that it is
collective — all group interaction is — but that it is qualitatively
different from the "normal" group processes of society. Smel-
ser, for example, acknowledges that although patriotic cele-
brations may erupt into riot, they are not to be considered as
illustrative of collective behavior:
True, they are based often on generalized values such as
the divine, the nation, the monarchy or the alma mater. True,
they are collective. True, they may release tensions generated
by conditions of structural strain. The basic difference be-
tween such ceremonials and collective behavior — and the rea-
son for excluding them — is that the former are institution-
alized in form and context.10
"Collective behavior" is thus conceived as nonconforming
and even "deviant" group behavior. Under this conception,
the routine processes of any given society are seen as stable,
orderly, and predictable, operating under the normative con-
straints and cumulative rationality of tradition. The instabil-
ity, disorder, and irrationality of "collective behavior," there-
fore, are characteristic of those groups that are experiencing
"social strain" — for example, "the unemployed, the recent
migrant, the adolescent." X1 As such, "collective behavior" is
characteristically the behavior of outsiders, the disadvantaged
and disaffected. Sometimes, however, "collective behavior"
becomes the property of the propertied, as when businessmen
and bankers "panic" during a stock-market crash or the fail-
ure of a monetary system. Yet since the propertied rarely ex-
perience such "social strain," they likewise rarely inherit the
derogation "panicky" and "crazy." When they do they are
also relegated to the status of social outcasts, even though a
bank run may in fact be an illustration of rational self-inter-
est, narrowly conceived. Usually, however, "panicky" and
"crazy" are terms reserved for social movements and insur-
rections, collective behavior theorists suggesting that a funda-
mentally similar departure from reasonable and instrumental
concerns underlies all of them.
According to a recent theorist, what such phenomena have
SOCIAL RESPONSE TO COLLECTIVE BEHAVIOR 333
in common is their organization around ideas which, like
magical beliefs, distort reality and "short-circuit" the normal
paths to the amelioration of grievances.12 This distorted out-
look is held responsible for the "crudeness, excess, and eccen-
tricity"" of collective behavior.1 3
Related to this conception of collective behavior as irra-
tional is an implicit notion that collective behavior is — partic-
ularly in its more "explosive" forms — inappropriate behavior.
Just as many bewildered observers tend to view a riot in the
same terms as a temper tantrum, so a social scientist catego-
rizes collective behavior as "the action of the impatient." 14
Implicit in this perspective is the application of different
premises to collective as opposed to "institutionalized" behav-
ior. To define collective behavior as immoderate, and its un-
derlying beliefs as exaggerated, strongly implies that "estab-
lished" behavior may be conceived as both moderate and rea-
sonable, barring direct evidence to the contrary. Needless to
say, such an approach has important political implications,
which ultimately renders much of collective behavior theory
an ideological rather than analytical exercise. This inherently
judgmental aspect of collective behavior theory is made all
the more damaging by being unexpressed; indeed, many of
the theoretical traditions represented in current work on col-
lective behavior stress the need for a "value-free" social sci-
ence.
It should be emphasized that theories of collective behavior
are not all of a piece, nor are they necessarily as internally
consistent as this overly brief analysis implies. Several theo-
rists, for example, recognize the potentially constructive char-
acter of collective behavior: all, however, remain deeply
rooted in the tradition of viewing collective behavior as dis-
tinct from "orderly" social life.15
Whereas much of modern social science remains close to
its early forerunners in its assessment of the nature and qual-
ity of collective behavior, it departs from the traditional view
in recognizing that the origins of collective disorder are nei-
ther mysterious nor rooted in the dark side of human
personality.16 Rather, modern social theory usually focuses on
two social sources of collective behavior: a condition of so-
cial "strain" or "tension," leading to frustration and hostility
334
on the part of marginal or disadvantaged groups; and a
breakdown of normal systems of social control, in the sense
of both widespread social disorganization and the inability of
local authorities to maintain order in the face of emergent
disorder. When contemporary theorists attempt to deal with
the causes of riot, one or both of these factors is generally
invoked. On balance the latter factor — i.e., the breakdown of
social control on a global or local level — predominates in
these discussions. A major text in the sociology of collective
behavior stresses as determinants of collective behavior both
"social disintegration" and the failure of those occupying po-
sitions of social control to effectively perform their
functions.17 Another, while stressing the importance of "frus-
tration" as one kind of strain leading to "hostile outbursts," 18
also argues that firmness in the "agencies of social control"
may play a role in preventing outbursts.19 This perspective is
affirmed in a recent work directed specifically at the causes
and control of ghetto disorders, where it is argued that while
"social tensions" clearly underlie riots, they amount to only a
partial explanation; "a key element in the outbreak of riots is
a weakness in the system of social control." 20
Specifically, the failure of social control is said to be in-
volved in a number of ways, and at a number of stages, in
the emergence of ghetto riots. On one level, the breakdown
of social control means the existence of "a moral and social
climate that encourages violence," especially through the
mass media.21 On another level, it means the failure of law
enforcement agencies to stop the process of "contagion" 22
through which riots spread. Left inadequately controlled, the
riot escalates into widespread destruction and extensive sniper
fire.23 Similarly, modern riot control manuals stress that riots
are triggered by "social contagion," and "the level of mob
frenzy ... is reinforced and augmented by seeing others
who are equally excited and also rioting." 24
The retention of the concept of contagion illustrates the
degree to which most theories of collective disorder remain
bound by earlier perspectives. The conception of the "esca-
lated riot" involving heavy sniper fire illustrates the reciprocal
relation between an inadequate theoretical framework and an
inadequate attention to questions of fact, for, as the Kerner
SOCIAL RESPONSE TO COLLECTIVE BEHAVIOR 335
Commission exhaustively demonstrated, the existence of
"heavy sniper fire" in the ghetto riots of the 1960's was
largely mythical.25 It is the kind of myth, however, that fits
very well the theoretical presuppositions dominating much
collective behavior theory. It is also the kind of myth that
may turn out to be self -confirming in the long run.
We find conventional theories of riots open to challenge on
the following counts :
1. They tend to focus on the destructive behavior of dis-
affected groups while accepting the behavior of authorities
as normal, instrumental, and rational. Yet established, thor-
oughly institutionalized behavior may be equally destruc-
tive as, or considerably more so than, riots. No riot, for ex-
ample, matches the destructiveness of military solutions to
disputed political issues.26 Further, available evidence sug-
gests both that (a) armed officials often demonstrate a
greater propensity to violence against persons than unarmed
civilians; and (b) these actions often escalate the intensity of
the disorder and comprise a good part of the "destruc-
tiveness" of riots, especially in terms of human deaths and in-
juries. Furthermore, as the reports of our Chicago, Cleveland,
Miami, and San Francisco study teams well illustrate, riots
are not unilaterally provoked by disaffiliated groups. Collec-
tive protest involves interaction between the behavior of
"rioters" and the behavior of officials and agents of social
control. Each "side" may on close inspection turn out to be
equally "riotous." The fact that the behavior of one group is
labeled "riot" and that of the other labeled "social control" is
a matter of social definition.27
2. They tend to describe collective behavior as irrational,
formless, and immoderate. As we will demonstrate in the
next section, less emotional scrutiny of riots indicates that
they show a considerable degree of structure, purposiveness,
and rationality.28 Nor is "established" behavior necessarily
guided by rational principle. While the beliefs underlying a
riot may frequently be inaccurate or exaggerated, they are
not necessarily more so than, for example, commonly held
beliefs about racial minorities by dominant groups, the per-
ception of foreign threats to national security, of the causes
of crime, of threats to internal security, and so forth. A
336
measure of irrationality, then, is not a defining characteristic
of collective behavior generally or of riots in particular;
rather, it is an element of many routine social processes and
institutions and forms of collective behavior. The more sig-
nificant difference may be that established institutions are
usually in a more advantageous position from which to define
"rationality."
The "inappropriateness" of riots is clearly variable, de-
pending on the availability of alternative modes of action.
Only by neglect of the relevant institutional setting can "inap-
propriateness" be considered a definitive characteristic of
riots. Historically, riots have been used as a form of political
bargaining in the absence of other channels of effective ac-
tion. Where such channels are atrophied, nonexistent, or
unresponsive, the riot may become a quasi-established, rela-
tively standard form of political protest.29
Hans W. Mattick, a consultant to the Kerner Commission,
has described the underlying political character of recent
urban riots:
The content of the riot is reciprocal, like a broken bargain.
It consists of claims and denials made in the substance and
conceptions of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The
parties to the bargain are the Negro community and the
white majority, living under the rule of law, at some level of
social accommodation. In process of time the predominant
social forces come to shape the law in accordance with the
differential distribution of power between the white majority
and the black minority. Such consolidations of power are
reinforced with irrational myths about black inferiority and
white supremacy, and supported by discriminatory behavior
patterns and prejudicial attitudes. As a result the Negro com-
munity experiences unfair treatment at the hands of the white
majority and grievances accumulate. When claims of griev-
ance are made, they are denied, minimized, and rationalized
away. When legal attacks are made on discriminatory pat-
terns, the formal law is changed in a grudging, rearguard ac-
tion and represented as progress. Meanwhile informal proce-
dures are devised to subvert the formal changes in the law.
Grievances continue to accumulate and soon the grievance
bank of the Negro community is full: almost every aspect of
social life that has a significant effect on the life chances of
Negroes seems blocked. The progress of the law has been too
little and too late. At this juncture of history, after a series of
SOCIAL RESPONSE TO COLLECTIVE BEHAVIOR 337
prior incidents of similar character, the final incident takes
place and violence erupts.
Any attempt to understand the nature of a riot based on
final incidents is, more frequently than not, to deal with
symptoms rather than causes. Indeed, final incidents are rou-
tine and even trivial. They are distinguished in retrospect be-
cause they happen to have been the occasion for the eruption
of violence; otherwise they resemble ordinary events.30
Beyond this, it is questionable whether there exists any
necessary correlation between appropriate or moderate be-
havior and the use of established means. A strong preference
for "normal channels" is discernible in many of the critiques
of disorderly protest, black or otherwise. However, in human
history, witches have been burned, slaves bought and sold,
and minorities exterminated through "normal" channels. The
"rioters" in Prague, for example, may not be "senseless" in
believing that the Soviet Union is attempting to crush
Czechoslovakian aspirations for democracy; nor are they nec-
essarily "irrational" in perceiving unresponsiveness in "nor-
mal channels." The propriety — and to a large degree the ra-
tionality— of disorderly behavior is ultimately determined by
historical outcomes, in the light of existing alternatives. Fur-
ther, an assessment of the existing alternatives to disorderly
protest must concern itself with the actual as well as the
ideal, with substance as well as form. To suggest, for exam-
ple, that disorderly protest has no justification in a society or-
ganized on democratic principles may obscure the fact that
the society historically has offered less equality of political
participation than its stated form would suggest. Which, of
course, is not to suggest disorderly protest is always justified.
Our point is that such labels as "normal channels" or "pro-
test" do not automatically attach themselves to "goodness" or
"badness" and that particular demands and grievances should
be considered on their merits.
3. Finally, it is insufficient to analyze riots in terms of "ten-
sion" and "frustration." It is not that this perspective is
wrong, but that it tells at once too little and too much. Too
little, because the idea of "tension" or "strain" does not en-
compass the subjective meaning or objective impact of subor-
dinate caste position or political domination. Too much, be-
cause it may mean almost anything; it is a catchall phrase
338
that can easily obscure the specificity of political grievances.
It is too broad to explain the specific injustices against which
civil disorders may be directed; nor does it help to illuminate
the historical patterns of domination and subordination to
which the riot is one of many possible responses.
The difficulty with most traditional collective behavior
theory is that it treats protest and riots as the "abnormal" be-
havior of social groups and derives many of its conceptual as-
sumptions from psychological rather than from political
premises. It may well be asked what remains of the idea of
collective behavior if a political perspective is adopted. Does
such a perspective imply that there is no such phenomenon,
or thai there is not a "carnival" element or "contagion" ele-
ment in riots that have political roots? Such an implication is
not intended. We recognize that there may well be an ele-
ment of "fun" in being caught up in a collective episode,
whether race riot or panty raid. (Some years ago, it was cus-
tomary for Yale students to overturn trolley cars after football
victories.) We also recognize that individual participants in
disorders may have their share of disturbance or ignorance.
What we object to is the substitution of a psychological anal-
ysis for a political one and, especially, the one-sided applica-
tion of psychological premises to collective protest. We see
no analytical justification for an arbitrary classification of
some forms of political action as based, wholly or in part, on
the cognitive or emotional inadequacies of the participants.
We do not object to collective behavior theories that attempt
to generalize about interaction and development in a non-
judgmental fashion. By contrast, we are most critical of those
theories that are inherently ideological and that inadvertently
use ostensibly "neutral" concepts and "scientific" language to
discredit political action. From the point of view of a politi-
cal analysis, the question has to be asked, "Why did Yale stu-
dents move from overturning trolley cars to engaging in
peace marches?" Collective behavior theory, as presently de-
veloped, does not offer adequate answers to that question, or
to similar ones.
We have discussed collective behavior theories of riot to
indicate how widespread and dominant certain assumptions
concerning riots are. These assumptions sometimes spill over
SOCIAL RESPONSE TO COLLECTIVE BEHAVIOR 339
into analyses of less violent forms of collective protest, al-
though this tendency to generalize has not been widespread.
But it has been true that the view of riots as pathological has
been adopted by officials who have analyzed riots. The next
section deals specifically with these official views, and con-
trasts them with historical and contemporary evidence sup-
porting the view that riots represent a form of instrumental
political action.
Official Conceptions of Riot
In Chapter IV, we discussed evidence indicating that the
ghetto riots of the 1960's were participated in by a cross sec-
tion of the ghetto communities, and given wide sympathy or
support by those communities. Given these facts, few serious
official treatments of riots now attempt to explain the result-
ing violence purely in terms of a criminal or "riffraff" ele-
ment. Nevertheless, some official commissions, while gener-
ally appreciating that riots attract some popular support and
participation, argue that riots are invariably aggravated or in-
stigated by the criminal activities of a small group of provoca-
teurs who take advantage of human weakness and transform
basically nonviolent individuals into an irrational mob.
Thus, riots are widely characterized as outlets for pent-up
frustrations and grievances sparked by a few. In Chicago, ac-
cording to the 1919 report, even "normal-minded Negroes"
exhibited a "pathological attitude to society which sometimes
expresses itself defensively in acts of violence and other
lawlessness." 31 The Harlem riot also drew upon the partici-
pation of "normal" citizens:
[Neither] the threats nor the reassurances of the police
could restrain these spontaneous outbursts until the crowds
had spent themselves in giving release to their pent up emo-
tions. . . . Negro crimes result from the fact that normal in-
dividual impulses and desires are often forced to express
themselves in a lawless manner in a disorganized social
environment.32
The Watts riot was characterized as an "insensate rage of de-
struction," a "spasm," and a "formless, quite senseless, all but
340
hopeless violent protest." 33 Similarly, the riots of 1968 were
viewed as the product of a "sense of rage" and "years of
frustration born and bred in poverty." 34
Implicit in this concept of frustration-aggression is the idea
that riots are without purpose or direction. Though it is
granted that "rioters" have some objective justification for
their unhappiness and anger, it is also argued that they tend
to exaggerate the importance of underlying grievances. Ac-
cording to the recent Chicago Commission, for example,
"There is a conviction on the part of a clear majority of our
black citizens that [political] representation is entirely unsatis-
factory and must be improved. This conviction, whether or
not or to what extent it is true [our emphasis], is of critical
importance to the continued health of our city." 35
The essential problem with this perspective is that it ne-
glects the intrinsically political and rational aspects of collec-
tive protest and fails to take seriously the grievances that mo-
tivate riots. Looting, for example, which distinguishes the
riots of the 1960's, is a form of group protest and not merely
individualistic or expressive action. Looting is widespread,
collective, public, and undertaken by a cross section of local
residents whose behavior is perceived by most of the commu-
nity as a legitimate form of protest. The instrumental nature
of looting is evident in its selective character: stores and su-
permarkets with a reputation for discrimination and exploita-
tion are usually singled out by looters.36 It is not accurate,
therefore, to conceive of looting as merely random or sense-
less violence.
Finally, the emphasis on the irrational and "hypnotic" 37
aspects of rioting tends to obscure the interactional nature of
riots. It is misleading to ignore the part played by social con-
trol agencies in aggravating and sometimes creating a riot. It
is not unusual, as the Kerner Commission observed, for a riot
to begin and end with police violence.
Abnormality
Almost every official riot commission has pointed out that
riots are abnormal and useless:
The problem will not be solved by methods of violence.3S
SOCIAL RESPONSE TO COLLECTIVE BEHAVIOR 341
The avenue of violence and lawlessness leads to a dead
end.39
[There] can be no justification in our democratic society
for a resort to violence as a means of seeking social justice.40
[Unless] order is fully preserved, ... no meaningful, or-
derly, and rational physical, economic or social progress can
occur.41
Violence cannot build a better society.42
This "violence doesn't pay" argument is misleading on two
counts. First, it refers only to the domestic violence of dis-
affected groups, while ignoring the fact that systematic
official violence for social ends is widely upheld in other
spheres. Thus, the commissions of 1919, 1943, and 1968 do
not even mention the possibility of a connection between war
and domestic violence. It is a matter of moral judgment to
attribute "normality" to one kind of violence — such as over-
seas war — but not to another. And it may be a glaring exam-
ple of motivated obtuseness to ignore the possible connection
between the public celebration of heroic military violence
"over there" and the sporadic appearance of rebellious vio-
lence "back home." The breakdown of peaceful restraint dur-
ing periods of war is among the most firmly established find-
ings of social science.
Second, whether or not violence is "useless" is a problem
for historical analysis, not a certainty. In any event, rioting
has not been a particularly novel or unusual technique for ex-
pressing grievances. Instances of such rioting by both the re-
spectable and disreputable poor in eighteenth- and nineteenth-
century Europe have been well documented by historians.43
As Hobsbawm has noted, the preindustrial city mob "did not
merely riot as a protest, but because it expected to achieve
something by its riot. It assumed that the authorities would
be sensitive to its movements, and probably also that they
would make some sort of immediate concession." Like the
modern riot, the classical mob was composed of a cross sec-
tion of "the ordinary urban poor, and not simply of the
scum." 44 Moreover, one need not be fond of revolutions to
observe that riots are sometimes the preface to an even more
organized overthrow of existing arrangements with the substi-
tution of new regimes. And one need not admire the conse-
quence of the Russian Revolution to appreciate those of
342
America or France. All three began with rioting. There is no
intention here of making dire predictions. Our only point is
that the viewpoint that holds that rioting is "useless" lacks a
certain foundation in reality. At the same time, rioting is a
"primitive" form of political action, which may lead to conse-
quences undesired by the rioters.
Collective violence by powerless groups acts as a "signaling
device" to those in power that concessions must be made or
violence will prevail.45 Hobsbawm gives the example of the
Luddites, whose "collective bargaining by rioting was at least
as effective as any other means of bringing trade union pres-
sure, and probably more effective than any other means avail-
able before the era of national trade unions." 46 Similarly,
Rimilinger notes that those involved in the development of
European trade unionism were "convinced of the righteous-
ness not only of their demands but also of the novel means
proposed to enforce them." 47
The available evidence, then, suggests that contemporary
urban riots are participated in by a predominantly youthful
cross section of the lower-class black community, that they
are supported (usually passively) by other segments of that
community, that they are often instrumental and purposive,
and that they are not a historically unique form of social pro-
test.
Social Control of Riots
Official and academic conceptions of riots have strongly in-
fluenced the assumptions underlying governmental response
to civil disorders in the past. We have argued that these con-
ceptions seriously misconstrue the meaning of riots on several
counts. It follows that riot-control efforts based on these con-
ceptions may be inadequate and often self-defeating.
No recent treatment advocates a purely repressive ap-
proach to riot control. On the contrary, official conceptions
of riots have usually been translated into recommendations
combining a program for the reduction of social tensions
with a call for the development of strategy and technology to
contain disruption. On its face, this dual approach seems both
reasonable and feasible. It suggests sympathetic response to
SOCIAL RESPONSE TO COLLECTIVE BEHAVIOR 343
legitimate grievances, and at the same time it offers the pros-
pect of sophisticated, measured, and controlled force to pro-
tect civic order. After considerable analysis, however, we
have come to question whether this two-pronged approach is
ultimately workable.
Prospects of Support
First, implicit in the two-pronged theory is the assumption
that, in practice, reform measures have about the same pros-
pect of gaining executive and legislative support as control
and firepower measures. Historical experience, however, sug-
gests no such parity. On the contrary, commissions from the
Chicago Commission of 1919 to the Kerner Commission
have adopted the dual approach and have lived to observe
control recommendations being implemented without con-
comitant implementation of social reform measures. Al-
though it has generally been recognized that riots are moti-
vated in part by legitimate grievances, the ensuing political
response clearly reveals that order has been given priority
over justice. After the Harlem riot in 1935, it was reported
that "extra police stand guard on the corners and mounted
patrolmen ride through the streets. ... To the citizens of
Harlem they symbolize the answer of the city authorities to
their protest. ... It offers no assurance that the legitimate
demands of the community for work and decent living condi-
tions will be heeded." Yet the Harlem Commission warned
that riots would recur so long as basic grievances were not
answered.48 Over thirty years later, the Kerner Commission
reported a similar finding that "in several cities, the principal
official response has been to train and equip the police with
more sophisticated weapons." 49 Following the Kerner Com-
mission, there has been considerable development of riot-con-
trol weapons and programs in urban areas,50 without similar
efforts, recommended by the Commission, to meet underlying
and legitimate grievances. From the evidence, it appears that
it has been found more expedient to implement recommenda-
tions for control than recommendations for altering the social
structure. There is little evidence that a call for social reform,
on the one hand, and for the development of sophisticated
riot-control techniques and weaponry, on the other, will not
suffer the same fate today.
344
We may suggest as a general rule that a society which
must contemplate massive expenditures for social control is
one which, virtually by definition, has not grappled with the
necessity of massive social reform. There are various possible
levels of social reform, ranging from merely token and sym-
bolic amelioration of fundamental problems to significant
changes in the allocation of resources — including political
power. We feel that contemporary efforts at reform in this
country remain largely at the first level. Precisely because so-
ciety leaves untouched the basic problems, the cycle of hostil-
ity spirals: there is protest, violence, and increased commit-
ment to social control: as we spiral in this direction, the
"need" for massive social control outstrips the capacity of
democratic institutions to maintain both social order and dem-
ocratic values. Little by little, we move toward an armed soci-
ety which, while not clearly totalitarian, could no longer be
called consensual.
We need to reverse the spiral. A genuine commitment to
fundamental reform will have positive effects, both reducing
the need for massive social control and altering the quality
and character of social control. We do not, of course, suggest
that every demand of every protester or protest group be
met. We do suggest, however, that a distinction be drawn be-
tween demands and underlying grievances and that grievances
be considered on their merits. Too often attention is paid to
disruption, but not to the reasons for it.
Law enforcement should be taken seriously. By this we
mean to suggest that policing should take place within the
framework of due process of law, using the minimum force
required to effect the establishment of order. When actual
crimes are committed, suspects should be arrested, charged,
and tried in a court of law, not beaten in the streets. As sug-
gested in Chapter VII, we should support reform of control
agencies, not simply the addition of weaponry. The reduction
and reformation of control should also occasion positive ben-
efits by reducing polarization and hostility; that, in turn,
should decrease disaffection, thus decreasing the need for
force, and so forth. Only if the roots of disorder are attacked
can the spiral be reversed and the problem of social order
rendered manageable within a democratic framework.
SOCIAL RESPONSE TO COLLECTIVE BEHAVIOR 345
The ramifications of reducing force and reforming the so-
cial structure, including the established policing services, are
evident if we examine the connection between anti-war, stu-
dent, and black protest. For example, a reduction of military
spending and involvement overseas would reduce the level of
anti-war and student protest, freeing resources that could
then be used to combat the problems of the black communi-
ties. A greater understanding of black problems by control
agents — a sympathetic understanding — would, in turn, also
reduce the need for massive force.
Strategies of Control
The escalation of violence is related to strategies of social
control. Our evidence suggests that a diversion of resources
into domestic force and away from redress of social griev-
ances is not only costly but self-defeating, since the heighten-
ing of force is likely to be a factor in creating still more vio-
lence. The ultimate result of force will probably not, in the
long run, be to "channel the energy of collective outbursts
into more modest kinds of behavior"; 51 the eventual effects
may be directly contrary.
Because the police are received with hostility in the black
communities of America (for reasons discussed in Chapters
IV and VII), the introduction of more and better-armed po-
lice will, we believe, only aggravate the situation. The con-
temporary ideology and behavior of police across America
make it difficult to think otherwise. Furthermore, the intro-
duction of sophisticated weaponry will likely be seen by pro-
testing groups as evidence of governmental duplicity. The de-
velopment of "nonlethal" weapons, for example, will not be
perceived by the young man in the ghetto as a humane re-
sponse to his condition; to him they will still be weapons —
aimed at him — and will be viewed with hostility. Finally, as
we have developed at length, the police, the military, and
other agents of social control may themselves be implicated
in triggering riots and in building up long-term grievances.
The Political Significance of Riots
The conventional approach underestimates the political sig-
nificance of riots. Even given the possibility of efficient
346
short-term control of riots, and ignoring its immediate de-
structive effects, the political nature of riots suggests that
forceful riot-control techniques may channel expressive protest
into more organized forms of political violence, thus requir-
ing greater military and paramilitary force with its inescap-
able monetary and social costs. Thus it is not surprising that
one expert finds that riots may be "giving way to more spe-
cific, more premeditated and more regularized uses of
force." 52 What is surprising, however, is his conclusion that
"only surveillance and covert penetration supplies an effective
technique of management." 53
We have learned from the Vietnam War that power and
covert surveillance may well have the unanticipated effect of
increasing resistance. Indeed, the literature of guerrilla war-
fare stresses that revolutionaries are made through violence.
So, too, the young man who encounters the hostile actions of
a policeman is likely to increase his hostility toward the soci-
ety and to be attracted to groups that express such hostility.54
Moreover, in measuring the consequences of escalating
domestic force, we must add the political and social dangers
of depending on espionage as an instrument of social control,
including its potential for eroding constitutional guarantees of
political freedom.
For these reasons, we question the conventional two-
pronged approach to contemporary American protest. An ap-
proach that gives equal emphasis to force and reform fails to
measure the anticipated consequences of employing force;
and it fails to appreciate the political significance of protest.
If American society concentrates on the development of more
sophisticated control techniques, it will move itself into a de-
structive and self-defeating position. A democratic society
cannot depend upon force as its recurrent answer to long-
standing and legitimate grievances. This nation cannot have it
both ways: either it will carry through a firm commitment to
massive and widespread political and social reform, or it will
develop into a society of garrison cities where order is en-
forced without due process of law and without the consent of
the governed.
Appendix
Witnesses Appearing at Hearings Conducted by
the Task Force on "Violent Aspects of Protest and
Confrontation" on October 23, 24, 25, 1968
First Day
I. Anti-war and Student Movements
A. Henry Mayer, Student Co-Chairman of Faculty-Student
Committee after 1966 strike at University of California,
Berkeley.
B. Tom Hayden, author of Rebellion in Newark and former
officer of Students for a Democratic Society.
C. Kingman Brewster, President, Yale University.
D. Sam Brown, organizer, Eugene McCarthy campaign.
E. Irving Louis Horowitz, Professor of Sociology, Wash-
ington University, St. Louis; Editor of Trans-action.
Second Day
II. Responses of the Social Order
A. Police
1. Gordon Misner, Visiting Associate Professor of Crim-
inology, University of California, Berkeley.
347
348
2. John Harrington, President, Fraternal Order of Po-
lice.
3. David Craig, Public Safety Commissioner of Pitts-
burgh.
B. Majority Group and Judicial Responses
1. David Ginsburg, Executive Director, National Ad-
visory Commission on Civil Disorders.
Third Day
Ml. Black Militancy
A. Louis Masotti, Director, Civil Violence Research Cen-
ter, Case Western Reserve University.
B. Herman Blake, Assistant Professor of Sociology, Uni-
versity of California, Santa Cruz.
C. Sterling Tucker, Director of Field Services, National
Urban League.
D. Price Cobbs, M.D., San Francisco psychiatrist, co-author of
Black Rage.
NOTES
Chapter I
1. Amitai Etzioni, Demonstration Democracy (Washington,
D.C.: Center for Policy Research, 1968), p. 10.
2. See, in general, reports of Chicago, Cleveland, and Miami
Study Teams. Also, Etzioni, pp. 36-41.
3. National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, Report
(Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office,
1968), p. 2. Hereafter cited as Kerner Report.
4. Etzioni, p. 10.
5. George F. Kennan, Democracy and the Student Left (New
York: Bantam Books, 1968), pp. 8-9.
6. Robert F. Kennedy, quoted in Irving L. Horowitz, "Kenne-
dy's Death — Myths and Realities," Trans-action, V, No. 8,
July/ August, 1968, p. 3.
7. Gallup Poll, September, 1968.
8. Unless otherwise noted, the material in this section is drawn
from an unpublished paper by Richard Rubenstein, "Mass
Political Violence in the United States," prepared for this
commission, 1968.
9. Clifford Geertz, "Is America by Nature a Violent Society?"
New York Times Magazine, April 28, 1968, p. 25.
10. Some of the better known works of this "consensus school"
are: Daniel Boorstin, The Genius of American Politics
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953); Louis Hartz,
The Liberal Tradition in America (New York: Harcourt,
Brace, 1955); Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology (New
York: Free Press, 1960); Seymour Martin Lipset, Political
Man: The Social Basis of Politics (Garden City, New York:
Doubleday, 1960). In a brief summary it is impossible to do
descriptive justice to the complexity and diversity of these
349
350
thinkers. It is worth noting, in particular, that not all con-
sensus scholars jumped from the perception of consensus to
its celebration; this is particularly true of the work of Louis
Hartz.
11. This seems to have been an underlying assumption of the
Kerner Report. Chapter 6 of the Report is limited to a dis-
cussion of Negro history. Chapter 9, comparing Negroes
with European immigrants, suggests one similarity between
the two group experiences — the length of time needed to
escape from urban poverty (three generations). It does not
recognize, however, that domestic groups other than
Negroes resorted to mass violence as a method of group
advancement.
12. Hartz, p. 58.
13. The focus on insurgent groups in the succeeding paragraphs
may seem to imply that political violence originated with
these groups, or that they were the aggressors. On the con-
trary, these revolts were generally conceived as defensive re-
sponses to outside aggression, a conception with some basis
in fact. See note 16.
14. Quoted in Martin Gruberg, Women in American Politics
(Oshkosh, Wisconsin: Academia Press, 1968), p. 4.
15. Gruberg, p. 6.
16. There is no definitive work on political violence in the
United States, and very little comparative work has been
done in this field. See Orville J. Victor, History of American
Conspiracies, 1863; Lamar Middleton, Revolt U.S.A. (New
York: Stackpole Sons, 1938); Bennett Milton Rich, The
Presidents and Civil Disorder (Washington, D.C.: The
Brookings Institution, 1941); Daniel Aaron, ed., America in
Crisis (New York: Knopf, 1952); Richard Hofstadter, The
Paranoid Style in American Politics (New York: Knopf,
1966). The following works of broader scope will also
repay study: on Indians, Oscar Handlin, Race and National-
ity in American Life (Boston: Little, Brown, 1957), and
Roy Pearce, The Savages of America (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins Press, 1965); on Southern nationalism, Jesse T.
Carpenter, The South as a Conscious Minority (reissued
New York: New University Press, 1963), and William R.
Taylor, Cavalier and Yankee (New York: G. B. Braziller,
1961); on Reconstruction violence, Stanley F. Horn, Invisi-
ble Empire. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1939), and Kenneth
Stampp, The Era of Reconstruction (New York: Knopf,
1965); on slave revolts, Herbert Aptheker, American Negro
Slave Revolts (New York: International Publishers, 1939),
and William Styron, The Confessions of Nat Turner (New
York: Random House, 1967); on nativism, John Higham,
Strangers in the Land (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers Uni-
versity Press, 1955); on vigilantism, David W. Chalmers,
NOTES 351
Hooded Americanism (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1968); on
labor-management warfare, Louis Adamic, Dynamite (re-
issued Gloucester, Mass.: P. Smith, 1963), Robert F. Hoxie,
Trade Unionism in the United States (reissued New York:
Russell and Russell, 1966), Graham Adams, Jr., Age of
Industrial Violence (New York: Columbia University Press,
1966); on black- white violence, Arthur I. Waskow, From
Race Riot to Sit-In (Garden City, New York: Doubleday,
1966).
17. Daniel Bell, "Crime as a Way of Life," in Bell, Chap. 10.
18. Quoted in Middleton, Revolt, p. 141.
19. From an unpublished paper by Irving L. Horowitz, "The
Struggle Is the Message: An Analysis of Tactics, Trends,
and Tensions in the Anti-War Movement," prepared for this
commission, 1968.
20. New York Times, September 12, 1967, p. 1; September 30,
1968, p. 1.
21. New York Times, January 5, 1967, p. 5.
22. New York Times, October 23, 1968, p. 46.
23. John V. Lindsay, "Law and Order," Life, September 2,
1968, pp. 32-33.
24. Colin Miller, "Press and the Student Revolt," in Revolution
at Berkeley, eds. Michael V. Miller and Susan Gilmore
(New York: Dial Press, 1967), p. 347.
25. Harris Poll, June 10, 1968.
26. Harris Poll, March 27, 1967.
Chapter II
1. See Willard A. Heaps, Riots U.S.A.— 1765-1965 (New
York: Seabury Press, 1966); and Lawrence Lader, "New
York's Bloodiest Week," American Heritage, June, 1959,
pp. 44-49, 95-98.
2. See Twain's polemical writings, "To the Person Sitting in
Darkness," and "On the Killing of 400 Moros." For a schol-
arly development of such policies and attitudes see Walter
La Feber, The New Empire: An Interpretation of American
Expansion 1860-1898 (Ithaca, New York: Cornell Uni-
versity Press, 1963).
3. Cited in Raymond Leslie Buell, Cuba and the Piatt Amend-
ment, Foreign Policy Association, New York, April, 1929,
p. 52.
4. On May 2, 1965, President Johnson first alluded to an inter-
national conspiracy in the Dominican crisis, by announcing,
"We will defend our nation against all those who seek to
destroy not only the United States but every free country in
the hemisphere" (New York Times, May 3, 1965, p. 10).
On May 5, the United States government released its fa-
352
mous list (later revised downwards) of 54 "Communist
and Castroist" leaders in the Bosch forces. Referring to
these elements, Under-Secretary of State Thomas Mann
claimed that "left-wing totalitarians that are members of the
Communist apparatus are not really indigenous forces.
These are, rather, instruments of Sino-Soviet military
power." (New York Times, May 9, 1965, IV, p. 3.)
5. New York Times, March 9, 1968, p. 2.
6. London Daily Mirror, July 4, 1965.
7. President Johnson, speaking in New York, August 12, 1964,
as quoted in Theodore Draper, Abuse of Power (New
York: Viking Press, 1967), p. 66. See also the President's
speeches of August 29 and September 28, 1964 (loc. cit.,
p. 67).
8. U.S. Department of State Bulletin, August 31, 1964, p. 299.
9. All pertinent articles and the final declaration of the confer-
ence are reprinted in Vietnam: History, Documents and Op-
inions on a Major World Crisis, ed. Marvin E. Gettleman
(Greenwich, Conn.: Fawcett, 1965). The entire text can be
found in George McTurnan Kahin and John W. Lewis, The
United States in Vietnam (New York: Dial Press, 1967).
10. Discussions to work out arrangements for elections through-
out Vietnam in 1956 were scheduled by the Geneva Agree-
ments to begin after July 20, 1955, between "the competent
representative authorities of the two Zones."
"As legal successor to the French, Diem was either bound by
the terms of this armistice, politically as well as militarily, or
obliged to turn authority in the South back to French until the
elections were held. . . . The Eisenhower Administration was ad-
vised of this logical conclusion at the SEATO meeting in Febru-
ary 1955. There the United States was cautioned by its allies that
SEATO would not function if a South Vietnamese refusal to hold
the required elections resulted in an attack from the North. . . .
Nevertheless, backed by Washington, Diem declared on Septem-
ber 21 that '. . . there can be no question of a conference, even
less of negotiations' with the Hanoi Government [Times (Lon-
don), September 22, 1965]. Diem adamantly held to his position.
The election date of July 1956 passed with Diem still refusing
even to discuss the possibility of sitting down with Vietminh
representatives to discuss the modalities of such elections. In this
stand he continued to receive warm American encouragement and
the fullest American diplomatic backing." (Kahin and Lewis, op.
cit., p. 82; cf. Philippe Devillers, "Ngo Dinh Diem and the Strug-
gle for Reunification in Vietnam," in Gettleman, op. cit., pp.
210-21.)
For a fuller study of this period, consult F. Weinstein, Viet-
nam's Unheld Elections (Cornell University South East Asia
Program Data Paper No. 60, 1966).
American responsibility for Diem's intransigence has some-
NOTES 353
times been denied, by pointing to Secretary of State Dulles'
statement on June 28, 1955, that "We are not afraid at all
of elections, provided they are held under conditions of gen-
eral freedom which the Geneva armistice agreement calls
for. If these conditions can be provided we would be in
favor of elections." American Foreign Policy: Current Docu-
ments 1950-1955, II, 2404.)
As, however, the Dulles notion of general freedom was un-
likely to prevail in North Vietnam, it was quite consistent
for him to agree with Diem, in their meeting of March 14,
1956, "that present conditions would not permit free elec-
tions as provided in the 1954 Geneva armistice agreement
for Vietnam" (New York Times, March 15, 1956, p. 12).
On June 1, 1956, Assistant Secretary of State for Far East-
ern Affairs Walter S. Robertson publicly ridiculed the notion
of "so-called 'free elections,' " using the argument of the
State Department's Blue Book in 1961. (See note 11.)
Meanwhile North Vietnam, the Soviet Union, and mainland
China repeatedly and vigorously protested Diem's failure to
hold consultations or a general election (cf. e.g. New York
Times, May 13, 1956, p. 38; July 18, 1956, p. 5). The efforts
in 1965 of William Bundy and other government spokes-
men to blame North Vietnam for the failure to hold elec-
tions contributed not a little to the growing alienation of
college students and their awareness of a "credibility gap."
11. "It was the Communists' calculation that nationwide elec-
tions scheduled in the Accords for 1956 would turn all of
Viet-Nam over to them. . . . The authorities in South
Viet-Nam refused to fall into this well-laid trap. . . . The
Government in the South had never signed the Geneva Ac-
cords and was not bound by their provisions. It refused to
take part in a procedure that threatened its country with ab-
sorption into the Communist bloc." ("A Threat to the
Peace: North Viet-Nam's Effort to Conquer South Viet-
Nam," U.S. Department of State Publication 7308, Far
Eastern Series 110, December, 1961, pp. 3-4.)
12. The government's claim that the guerrillas were directed
from Hanoi was based on the claim that, according to U.S.
News and World Report (October 7, 1963, p. 56), "Be-
tween 5 and 10 per cent of the so-called 'hard core' guerril-
las were trained in Communist North Vietnam. . . . Most
of these are southern-born Vietnamese who were taken to
the North by their pro-Communist families" (in accordance
with the military provisions of the 1954 Agreements). The
hard-core guerrillas were estimated to comprise between 20
and 25 percent of the total number. The claim of Hanoi's
leadership amounted therefore to the contention that be-
tween 1 and 2.5 percent of their numbers had received
training in North Vietnam, the majority of whom had been
354
regrouped there from their native South Vietnam in 1954 as
part of the Geneva Accords.
13. New York Times, October 23, 1966; cf. February 10, 1966.
14. Vietnam: Lotus in a Sea of Fire (New York: Hill and
Wang, 1967), p. 68.
15. President Johnson himself voiced this theory in his famous
"unconditional discussions" speech of April 7, 1965:
"Over this war — and all Asia — is another reality: the deepen-
ing shadow of Communist China. The rulers in Hanoi are urged
on by Peiping. This is a regime which has destroyed freedom in
Tibet, which has attacked India, and has been condemned by the
United Nations for aggression in Korea. It is a nation which is
helping the forces of violence in almost every continent. The con-
test in Vietnam is part of a wider pattern of aggressive purposes."
("Pattern for Peace in Southeast Asia," U.S. Dept. of State Publi-
cation 1872, April, 1965, p. 3.)
Yet when the President uttered these words it was already
clear that Chinese military support for the war was strictly
limited; and the State Department had already received
numerous reports that in contradistinction to the more in-
transigent Chinese position, the North Vietnamese were pre-
pared to envisage a reconvening of the 1954 Geneva Con-
ference. The theme of Chinese instigation recurs in many of
President Johnson's speeches, e.g. July 28, 1965.
16. Appendix D to the White Paper listed the captured enemy-
manufactured weapons in an 18-month period as 72 rifles,
64 submachine guns, 15 carbines, 8 machine guns, 5 pistols,
4 mortars, 3 recoilless 75-mm rifles, 3 recoilless 57-mm
guns, 2 bazookas, 2 rocket launchers, and 1 grenade
launcher. According to Pentagon figures obtained by I. F.
Stone from the Pentagon press office, in the three years
1962-64 the guerrillas had captured 27,400 weapons, while
giving up 15,100 weapons, or an average of 7,550 for each
18 months. This roughly constituted only 2.5 percent of the
weapons captured in the same period (during which 23,500
American troops were introduced into Vietnam). Much of
the remaining 97.5 percent, presumably, was of American
origin (/. F. Stone's Weekly, March 8, 1965). The estimate
that only 2.5 percent of captured Viet Cong weapons were
Communist-manufactured is confirmed by an earlier U.S. es-
timate of 2 percent (Baltimore Sun, October 14, 1963) and
by the statement of an unnamed senior U.S. military adviser
in Saigon that 90 percent of Viet Cong weapons came from
the United States (New York Times, June 18, 1964, p. 5).
17. The U.S. government's arguments for the legality of its in-
tervention are summarized in "The Legality of United States
Participation in the Defense of Viet-Nam," Memorandum
from the Department of State, Office of the Legal Adviser,
March 4, 1966 (reprinted in Congressional Record, March
10, 1966, pp. 5503-9). This memorandum is contained as
NOTES 355
Appendix I in the answering document prepared by the
Lawyers Committee on American Policy Towards Vietnam,
Vietnam and International Law: The Illegality of United
Stales Military Involvement (New York: O'Hare Books,
1967), pp. 113-30. The extensive legal debate is usefully
summarized, with relevant citations, by John H. Messing,
"American Actions in Vietnam: Justifiable in International
Law?" Stanford Law Review, XIX (1966-67), pp. 1307-36.
Among the more recent law review articles which bear on
the same subject are J. K. Andonian, "Law and Vietnam,"
American Bar Association Journal, LIV (May, 1968), pp.
457-59; "Political Settlement for Vietnam: the 1954 Geneva
Conference and its Current Implications," Virginia Journal
of International Law, VIII (December, 1968), p. 4; E. P.
Deutsch, "Legality of the War in Vietnam," Washburn Law
Journal, VII (Winter, 1968), pp. 153-86; L. R. Velvel,
"War in Vietnam: Unconstitutional, Justiciable, and Juris-
dictionally Attackable," Kansas Law Review, XVI (June,
1968), pp. 449-503e.
18. Why Vietnam, U.S. Government Publication, August 20,
1965, p. 5.
19. See President Eisenhower's letter to Diem of October 23,
1954, emphasizing the dependency of any economic aid on
forthcoming "assurances" and "performance" in the area of
"needed reforms." No mention is made of military assis-
tance in Department of State Bulletin, XXXI, November 15,
1954, p. 735f.
20. It is true, however, that the SEATO treaty, drawn up at
Secretary Dulles' urging in the wake of Dienbienphu and
the American sponsorship of Diem, does envision the de-
fense of South Vietnam against aggression. The American
government attached a special statement clarifying its under-
standing that "aggression" was to apply "only to Communist
aggression." See Background Information Relating to South-
east Asia and Vietnam (Report of the U.S. Senate Commit-
tee on Foreign Relations, 89th Congress, 1st Session, Re-
vised, June 16, 1965).
21. Nicholas Katzenbach, Senate Congressional Record, Septem-
ber 11, 1967, S12758.
22. Quoted in New York Times, August 6, 1964, p. 8.
23. Senator Gaylord Nelson, Congressional Record, September
18, 1967, S25834-35.
24. Washington Post, February 25, 1968, p. 1.
25. See, for example, /. F. Stone's Weekly, December 5, 1966;
1. F. Stone in New York Review of Books, March 28, 1968;
and the lead item and editorial in the Washington Post,
February 25, 1968.
26. See New York Times, June 3, 1964, pp. 1 and 3; November
2, 1967; and the editorial of May 20, 1966, p. 46. See also
356
Charles Roberts, LBJ's Inner Circle (New York: De La
Conte, 1965), pp. 20-22.
27. Two sets of government figures for 1962, for example, con-
vey the impression that 15,000 enemy guerrillas sustained
30,000 casualties. See Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., A Thou-
sand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House (New
York: Houghton Mifflin, 1965), p. 982.
28. James Reston, "Washington: Ships Passing in the Night,"
New York Times, February 9, 1966, p. 38.
29. President Johnson first attacked "nervous nellies" in his
speech of May 17, 1966 (New York Times, May 18, 1966,
p. 8).
30. Robert S. Elegant, "New War Policy — Truth," San Fran-
cisco Chronicle, February 14, 1969, p. 15.
31. New York Times, April 2, 1968, p. 1. The stock market re-
surgence of April 1, 1968 involved sales of 17.7 million
shares, surpassing the former volume record of 16.4 million
shares which had been set on "Black Tuesday," October 26,
1929.
32. New York Times, April 2, 1968, p. 63.
33. New York Times, February 9, 1968, p. 12.
34. The revised estimate of ARVN desertions in 1965 was, ac-
cording to official ARVN figures, 113,000. For the first six
months of 1966 it was 67,000. Viet Cong defections were
put at 11,000 in 1965, 20,242 in 1966 (New York Times,
February 24, 1966, p. 1; January 4, 1967, p. 3).
35. New York Times, February 9, 1968, p. 12.
36. 50 U.S.C. App. S. 456(j). The concept "Supreme Being"
has been broadly interpreted by the Supreme Court, thus
liberalizing the restrictions on "religious training and belief."
See U.S. v. Seeger, 380 U.S. 163.
37. The implementation of this recommendation was struck
down by the U.S. Court of Appeals, Second Circuit, in
Wolff v. Selective Service System Local Board No. 16, 372
F. 2d 817, wherein it was decided that the local boards ex-
ceeded their jurisdiction in so complying: "no regulation au-
thorizes a draft board to declare a registrant delinquent or
to reclassify him for such action," 372 F. 2d at 821.
In Oestereich v. Selective Service System Local Board
No. 11, the Supreme Court held that the Selective Service
System uses regulations governing delinquency, "to deprive
registrants of their statutory exemption, because of various
activities and conduct and without any regard to the exemp-
tions provided by law," and described the board's activity as
"basically lawless," 37 Law Week 4054.
38. New York Times, January 15, 1968, p. 5.
39. Martha Gellhorn, "Suffer the Little Children . . . ," in La-
dies Home Journal, January, 1967, p. 108.
NOTES 357
40. Richard E. Perry, "Where the Innocent Die," in Redbook,
CXXVIII, No. 3, January, 1967, p. 103.
41. Quotations from Allied Control Law No. 10, promulgated
in 1945 for the trial of war criminals.
42. International Military Tribunal, Charter, Art. VIII; in Trial
of the Major War Criminals (Nuremberg, 1947), I, 12;
quoted also in Whiteman, Digest of International Law, XI,
p. 883. For discussions of the legal validity of this principle,
see Y. Dinstein, The Defense of Obedience to Superior Or-
ders in International Law (Leyden, 1965); I. Brownlie, In-
ternational Law and the Use of Force by States (Oxford,
1963), p. 192; A. von Knieriem, The Nuremberg Trials
(1959), pp. 247 ff. The bearing of the Nuremberg principle
on the court-martial of Captain Howard Levy is discussed
in a note by Martin Redish, Harvard International Law
Journal, IX (1968), pp. 169-81.
43. New York Times, September 5, 1965, p. 4E.
44. New York Times, August 15, 1965, p. 3.
45. A.P. Report, January 15, 1967.
46. A.P. Report cited by Noam Chomsky, Ramparts, Septem-
ber, 1967, p. 18.
47. Air War — Vietnam (New York: Bantam Books, 1967). Mr.
Harvey, an aviation correspondent, visited Vietnam for
fifty-five days while compiling an article for the magazine
Flying. "Because of his credentials, he was allowed and en-
couraged to fly every kind of mission being flown. ... At
the outset Harvey intended to do no more than record, as
clearly as possible, every aspect of the air war. . . . He de-
cidedly was not looking for damaging material, but ... he
found it" (Robert Crichton, New York Review of Books,
January 4, 1968, p. 3).
48. Air War — Vietnam.
49. David Perlman, "U.S. Starving Wrong People in Vietnam,"
in San Francisco Chronicle, January 23, 1967, p. 8.
50. Science, February 9, 1968, p. 613.
51. Science, May 10, 1968, p. 600.
52. Editorial in New York Times, March 24, 1965, p. 42.
53. The United States is a party to the Hague Convention No.
IV of 18 October 1907, Respecting the Law and Customs of
War on Land (36 Stat. 2277; Treaty Series 539), and the
Annex thereto, embodying the Regulations Respecting the
Laws and Customs of War on Land (36 Stat. 2295; Treaty
Series 539). According to Article 23, par. (a) of the Annex,
"It is especially forbidden ... to employ poison or poisoned
weapons." However, as the old War Department Basic Field
Manual (FM 27-10, 1940, Sect. 8) noted succinctly (while
prohibiting "the wanton destruction of a district"): "The
practice of recent years has been to regard the prohibition
358
against the use of poison as not applicable to the use of
toxic gases."
The variance between international agreements and
United States practice with respect to poisons and toxic
gases is conveniently summarized by the U.S. Department
of the Army Field Manual FM 27-10, The Law of Land
Warfare, 1956, Sects. 37-38, pp. 18-19:
"37. Poison
"a. Treaty Provision.
"It is especially forbidden ... to employ poison or poisoned
weapons. [Hague Convention No. IV, Annex, Par. 23(a)]
"b. Discussion of Rule. The foregoing rule does not prohibit
measures being taken to dry up springs, to divert rivers and aque-
ducts from their courses, or to destroy, through chemical or bacte-
rial agents harmless to man, crops intended solely for consump-
tion by the armed forces (if that fact can be determined).
"38. Gases, Chemicals, and Bacteriological Warfare
"The United States is not a party to any treaty, now in force,
that prohibits or restricts the use in warfare of toxic or nontoxic
gases, of smoke or incendiary materials, or of bacteriological war-
fare. A treaty signed at Washington, 6 February 1922, on behalf
of the United States, the British Empire, France, Italy, and Japan
(3 Malloy, Treaties 3116) contains a provision (art. V) prohibit-
ing 'The use in war of asphyxiating, poisonous or other gases, and
all analogous liquids, materials, or devices,' but that treaty was
expressly conditioned to become effective only upon ratification
by all the signatory powers, and, not having been ratified
by all of the signatories, has never become effective. The Geneva
Protocol 'for the prohibition of the use in war of asphyxiating,
poisonous, or other gases, and of bacteriological methods of war-
fare,' signed on 17 June 1925, on behalf of the United States and
many other powers {94 League of Nations Treaty Series 65), has
been ratified or adhered to by and is now effective between a con-
siderable number of States. However, the United States Senate has
refrained from giving its advice and consent to the ratification of
the Protocol by the United States, and it is accordingly not bind-
ing on this country.
For a fuller discussion of the various international agree-
ments with respect to asphyxiating gases, see G. H. Hack-
worth, Digest of International Law (Washington, 1943),
VI, 269-71.
54. Editorial, New York Times, October 11, 1966, p. 46.
55. George McT. Kahin, "The NLF Terms for Peace," New Re-
public, October 14, 1967, p. 17.
56. Fred Emery, "Vietnam's Other War Moves Slowly," London
Times, March 10, 1967, p. 13.
57. San Francisco Chronicle, October 9, 1967, p. 12. Represen-
tative Ford was attacking the Americanization of the South
Vietnamese economy: "This is just the opposite of our de-
clared purpose. This trend should be immediately reversed."
NOTES 359
58. New York Times, September 1, 1965, p. 36.
59. Speech of April 28, 1966, cited in New York Times, April
29, 1966, p. 32.
60. "Beyond Vietnam," speech of April 4, 1967. Reprinted in J.
Grant, ed., Black Protest (Greenwich, Conn.: Fawcett Pre-
mier Books, 1968), p. 419.
61. Secretary Rusk, Congressional Record, August 25, 1966,
U.S. Congress, Senate Committee on Armed Services, p. 9.
62. San Francisco Chronicle, August 9, 1967, p. 1.
63. Gerald Moore, speaking of Gary, Indiana, reported that
'"Surprisingly many [Wallace supporters] say they would
have voted for Robert Kennedy (and did in the May pri-
mary)" ("Microcosm of the Politics of Fear," Life, Septem-
ber 20, 1968, p. 40).
64. New York Review of Books, February 23, 1967, p. 16.
65. See Chapter III of this report.
66. William Sloane Coffin, Yale University Chaplain, was in-
dicted along with Dr. Benjamin Spock for abetting draft re-
sisters. Dr. Robert McAfee Brown, Professor of Religion at
Stanford University, participated in a ceremonial mailing of
draft cards to General Hershey in January, 1968. In Octo-
ber, 1967, the Rev. Philip Berrigan and others poured duck
blood on Selective Service files in Baltimore, and in May,
1968, he and his brother, Rev. Daniel Berrigan, a Jesuit,
were arrested for the burning of 600 draft records in Ca-
tonsville, Maryland. Martin Luther King, during a Decem-
ber, 1967, visit to those imprisoned after the October Stop-
the-Draft Week demonstrations in Oakland, California, re-
plied to a question from a young black draft resister that he
encouraged him to stand by his decision of conscience.
67. New York Times, December 5, 1965, p. 1.
68. An early and significant example of black anti-war protest
was the leaflet circulated in McComb, Mississippi, and
printed in the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party news-
letter of McComb on July 28, 1965. The leaflet set forth
"five reasons why Negroes should not be in any war fighting
for America." It is reprinted in J. Grant, ed., Black Protest,
pp. 415-16.
69. Martin Luther King, Jr., "Beyond Vietnam," in Black Pro-
test, p. 419.
70. James Ridgeway, "Freak-out in Chicago: The National
Conference of New Politics," New Republic, September 16,
1967, p. 11.
71. For the Hershey incident, see New York Times, March 22,
1967, p. 13. For Eartha Kitt at the White House, New York
Times, January 19, 1968, p. 1. For the forty-three black sol-
diers at Fort Hood who on the night of August 24, 1968,
refused orders to go to Chicago for possible riot-control
duty, see New York Times, September 8, 1968, p. 47.
360
72. New York Times, March 6, 1964, p. 11.
73. See, for example, San Francisco Chronicle, November 13,
1968, p. 10.
74. For a detailed narrative of the permit negotiation for the
August events, see Daniel Walker, Rights in Conflict, a re-
port prepared for this commission, November 18, 1968, pp.
31-42.
75. See New York Times, April 22, 1968, p. 16; Dave Dellin-
ger, "Lessons from Chicago," Liberation, October, 1968;
and the investigation by civic leaders called Dissent and
Disorder: A Report to the Citizens of Chicago on the April
27 Peace Parade.
76. An early example was the failure of the Oakland police to
interfere with the Hell's Angels who violently attacked the
Vietnam Day Committee march of October 16, 1965. Their
strange passivity is indicated by the New York Times report
that "The attackers carried off a big banner and took it
back to the Oakland police line to shred it. Then they
charged in again" (New York Times, October 17, 1965, p.
43). It should be noted that the Berkeley police (the inci-
dent occurred at the Berkeley-Oakland city limits) moved in
to end the violence and arrested six Hell's Angels. In doing
so one Berkeley police officer suffered a fractured leg.
77. The New York Times account of the San Francisco incident
makes it clear that "A few of the demonstrators threw
bricks, bottles, and balloons filled with animal blood" (Jan-
uary 12, 1968, p. 9; emphasis added). Some fifty specially
trained police, "provoked by the missiles," then indiscrimi-
nately attacked the 400-odd demonstrators with clubs, in ac-
cordance with a prearranged strategy. "At least 60 persons
were arrested."
78. The flag-lowering incident is summarized as follows in
Walker, Rights in Conflict, p. 24: "Some of those present
claim that the actual flag lowering was the work of police
undercover agents. The Chicago Tribune reported that Rob-
ert L. Pierson, who as 'Big Bob' Lavin served in an under-
cover capacity as Jerry Rubin's bodyguard, was 'in the
group which lowered an American flag in Grant Park.' Pier-
son has said, however, that he had no part in lowering the
flag.
79. Walker, November 18, 1968, p. 4.
80. Walker, November 18, 1968, pp. 1-30.
81. For other examples of attempted self-immolation see New
York Times, November 12, 1965, p. 3; April 11, 1966, p. 4;
August 20, 1967, p. 31; October 16, 1967, p. 11; and De-
cember 4, 1967, p. 20.
82. For the Catonsville incident of May 17, 1968, see Facts on
File, 1968, p. 263. For the Milwaukee incident of Septem-
ber 24, 1968, see New York Times, September 25, 1968, p.
NOTES 361
5. In the first incident 600 draft files were burned; in the
second, considerably more.
83. See a Selective Service System Memorandum, Channeling
(Washington, D.C.: National Headquarters, Public Informa-
tion for Selective Service, July, 1965).
84. See, for example, Nicholas Von Hoffman, "The Class of '43
Is Puzzled," The Atlantic, October, 1968.
85. See Archibald Cox, Crisis at Columbia (New York: Vin-
tage, 1968).
86. Boston Globe, September 8, 1968.
87. See "Chaplain Coffin Explains His Position," Yale Alumni
Magazine, March, 1967.
88. See, for example, New York Times, April 24, 1966, p. 3;
November 12, 1966, p. 7; February 23, 1967, p. 24; and
May 31, 1967, p. 12.
89. "The University and the Multiversity," New Republic, April
1, 1967, p. 17.
90. Douglas F. Dowd, "American Fouls Its Dream," The Na-
tion, February 13, 1967, p. 200.
91. "Intellectuals and the War," Viet-Report, October, 1966,
p. 29.
92. "Lessons from Chicago," Liberation, October, 1968, p. 11.
Chapter III
1. Data supplied by Legal Rights Desk, U.S. National Student
Association; also, see Richard E. Peterson, The Scope of
Organized Student Protest in 1967-68 (Princeton: Educa-
tional Testing Service, 1968).
2. See the discussion in Newsweek, February 24, 1969, pp.
22-23.
3. Fortune, January, 1969, p. 68.
4. Crisis at Columbia: Report of the Fact-Finding Commission
Appointed to Investigate the Disturbances at Columbia Uni-
versity in April and May 1968 (New York: Vintage Books,
1968), p. 4.
5. Relevant studies of the personality and background of stu-
dent activists include the following: Richard Flacks, "The
Liberated Generation," J. Social Issues, XXIII (1967), pp.
52-75; J. Katz, The Student Activist (United States Office
of Education, 1967); P. Heist, "Intellect and Commitment;
The Faces of Discontent" (Berkeley, Center for the Study
of Higher Education, 1965); K. Mock, "The Potential Ac-
tivist and His Perception of the University" (Berkeley, Cen-
ter for the Study of Higher Education, 1968); D. Westly
and R. G. Braungart, "Class and Politics in the Family
Backgrounds of Student Political Activists," American So-
362
ciological Review, XXXI (1966), pp. 690-92; C. Weissberg,
"Students Against the Rank" (unpublished M.A. essay, De-
partment of Sociology, University of Chicago, 1968); W. A.
Watts and David Whittaker, "Free Speech Advocates at
Berkeley," Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, II (Janu-
ary-March, 1966); S. Lubell, "That Generation Gap," The
Public Interest (Fall, 1968), pp. 52-61; C. Derber and R.
Flacks, "Values of Student Activists and Their Parents"
(University of Chicago, 1967), mimeo; R. Flacks, "Student
Activists — Result, Not Revolt," Psychology Today (October,
1967); N. Haan et al., "The Moral Reasoning of Young
Adults" (Berkeley: Institute for Human Development,
1967); Lamar E. Thomas, unpublished dissertation research
(Committee on Human Development, University of Chi-
cago, 1968).
6. The following sources provide a theoretical and empirical
foundation for our discussion of the "classical" student
movement in "transitional societies": S. Eisenstadt, From
Generation to Generation (New York: Free Press, 1966);
P. Altbach, "Students and Politics," in Student Politics, ed.
S. M. Lipset (New York: Basic Books, 1967), pp. 74-93; J.
Ben-David and R. Collins, "A Comparative Study of Aca-
demic Freedom and Student Politics," ibid., pp. 148-95; S. M.
Lipset, "University Students and Politics in Underdeveloped
Countries," ibid., pp. 3-53; D. Matza, "Position and Behav-
ior Patterns of Youth," in Handbook of Modern Sociology,
ed. R. Faris (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1964), pp. 191-215;
E. Shils, "The Intellectuals in the Political Development of
New States," World Politics, April, 1960, pp. 329-68; A.
Yarmolinsky, Road to Revolution (New York: Collier,
1962); R. Lifton, "Youth and History: Individual Change
in Postwar Japan," Daedalus, November, 1962, pp. 172-91;
J. P. Worms, "The French Student Movement," in Lipset,
Student Politics, pp. 267-79; Walter Lacqueur, Young Ger-
many (New York: Basic Books, 1962); Frank Pinner, "Tra-
dition and Transgression: Western European Students in the
Postwar World," Daedalus (Winter, 1968), pp. 137-55. The
discussion of current student rebellion in Latin America,
France, West Germany, and Czechoslovakia has been
greatly aided by conversations with Mario Machado, Martin
Verlet, Wolfgang Neitsch, and Tomas Kohut — all active
participants in the student movements of their respective
countries.
7. Quoted in the New York Times, February 16, 1968.
8. S. M. Lipset, "Student Activism," Current Affairs Bulletin,
XLII, No. 4 (July 15, 1968), p. 58.
9. Ibid., pp. 52-53.
10. The standard history of American higher education is Fred-
NOTES 363
erick Rudolph, The American College and University (New
York: Vintage, 1965).
11. See, for example, Kenneth Keniston, The Uncommitted: Al-
ienated Youth in American Society (New York: Harcourt,
Brace, 1965).
12. Studies of political activity and student attitudes at Berkeley
prior to the Free Speech Movement include: D. Horowitz,
Student (New York: Ballantine Books, 1962); H. Selvin
and W. O. Hagstrom, "Determinants of Support for Civil
Liberties," in The Berkeley Student Revolt, eds. S. M. Lipset
and S. Wolin (New York: Anchor, 1965), pp. 494 ff.; M.
Heirich and Sam Kaplan, "Yesterday's Discord," in Lipset
and Wolin, pp. 10 ff.
13. J. O'Brien, "The New Left's Early Years," Radical America
(May-June, 1968); H. Zinn, SNCC: The New Abolitionists
(Boston: Beacon, 1964); J. Newfield, A Prophetic Minority
(New York: New American Library, 1966).
14. The most important of these journals were New University
Thought, Studies on the Left, The Activist, Root and
Branch, and the English journal, New Left Review.
15. Richard E. Peterson, The Scope of Organized Student Pro-
test in 1967-68 (Princeton: Educational Testing Serice,
1968).
16. Life, October 18, 1968.
17. SDS's initial policy strategy is best described in the Port
Huron Statement (Chicago: Students for a Democratic So-
ciety, 1966«). The early history of SDS is discussed in
O'Brien, in Newfield, and in Paul Jacobs and Saul Landau,
The New Radicals (New York: Vintage, 1966). The early
political orientation of SDS is reflected in articles published
in Mitchell Cohen and Dennis Hale, The New Student Left:
An Anthology (Boston: Beacon, 1966). SDS's changing or-
ientation toward the university is described and documented
in Richard Flacks, "Student Power and the New Left; the
Role of SDS" (Berkeley: Center for the Study of Higher
Education, 1968), mimeo.
18. R. Rothstein, "ERAP: Evolution of the Organizers," Radi-
cal America (March-April, 1968), pp. 1-18; also the essays
by Gitlin, Flacks, Moody, Davis, Wittman and Hayden in
Cohen and Hale, pp. 120-220.
19. Elizabeth Sutherland, ed., Letters from Mississippi (New
York: McGraw-Hill, 1965).
20. Tom Hayden, "SNCC, the Qualities of Protest," Studies on
the Left (Winter, 1965).
21. SDS Bulletin (August, 1965).
22. Letter from Dean of Students Katherine Towle to student
organizations, dated September 14, 1964.
23. Sutherland; Bruce Payne, "SNCC: An Overview, Two Years
364
Later," and Mario Savio, "An End to History," both in
Cohen and Hale.
24. Although it is difficult to assess the size of SDS accurately
because the majority of its adherents do not pay dues, the
following figures demonstrate its growth rate: In 1962, SDS
had 10 functioning chapters and about 200 paid members;
by September, 1964, there were 25 chapters and 1,000 mem-
bers; by April, 1966, there were at least 150 chapters and
5,000 dues-paying members (see Newfield). SDS leaders
now claim 7,000 dues-paying members and 300 chapters,
and they believe there are 35,000 other students who partic-
ipate regularly in SDS activities {Life, October 18, 1968).
Richard Peterson's recent survey based on reports of univer-
sity administrators indicates that these may be underesti-
mates.
25. Student radical debates over tactics concerning the Vietnam
War are reflected in the pages of New Left Notes, the SDS
weekly newsletter, during 1965-67.
26. The University of Chicago sit-in and its aftermath are de-
scribed in Vern Visick, "The Rank Protest of 1966-67"
(University of Chicago Divinity School, 1967), mimeo.
27. The new SDS strategy was enunciated in Carl Davidson, "A
Student Syndicalist Movement," New Left Notes, September
9, 1967, p. 2.
28. For a review of the implications of these protests for SDS's
strategic outlook, see Carl Davidson, "Toward Institutional
Resistance," New Left Notes, November 13, 1967, p. 1.
29. The following discussion is based on interviews with student
movement leaders and local activists, observation of student
meetings and protest activity, and review of the student rad-
ical press during the years in question by various members
of and consultants to the task force. Some published mate-
rial may be singled out as particularly indicative of chang-
ing attitudes within the movement.
On the impact of the civil rights movement on white
student radicals: Hayden, "SNCC," A. Kopkin, ed., Thoughts
of Young Radicals (New Republic, Harrison-Blaine, 1966).
On the poverty program and the organization of the poor:
Robert Kramer and Norm Fruchter, "An Approach to
Community Organizing," Studies on the Left (March-April,
1966).
On the university: Savio, "End to History"; "Davidson
Outlines Four-Pronged Strategy," National Guardian, No-
vember 11, 1967, p. 9; "SDS Meeting Probes Theory of
Social Change," National Guardian, March 4, 1967, p. 6;
Columbia Liberated (New York: Columbia Strike Coordi-
nating Committee, 1968); Clark Kerr, The Uses of the Uni-
versity (New York: Harper, 1963); North American Con-
gress on Latin America, Who Rules Columbia (New York:
NOTES 365
NACLA, 1968); Hal Draper, "The Mind of Clark Kerr,"
New Politics, III (1965), pp. 51-61; S. Weissman and D.
Tuthill, "Freedom and the University," Motive (October,
1965), pp. 4-14.
On the war and United States foreign policy: Carl
Oglesby, "Let Us Shape the Future," Liberation (January,
1966); Hans Morgenthau, "What Ails America," New Re-
public (October 28, 1967); L. Menashe and R. Radosh,
Teachins USA (New York: Praeger, 1967); Oglesby and R.
Shaull, Containment and Change (New York: Macmillan,
1967).
On military penetration of education: Sol Stern, "NSA:
CIA," Ramparts (March, 1967); "The Universities and the
War," Viet-Report, January, 1968; R. J. Samuelson, "War
on Campus: What Happened when Dow Recruited at Har-
vard," Science (December 8, 1967).
On the draft: Alice Lynd, We Won't Go (Boston: Bea-
con, 1968); "A Call to Resist Illegitimate Authority" (Bos-
ton: Resist, 1967); Richard Flacks et al., "On the Draft," in
The Triple Revolution, eds. R. Perucci and M. Pilisuk (Bos-
ton: Little, Brown, 1968).
On the psychology of radicalization see Kenneth Kenis-
ton, Young Radicals (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1968).
On the psychological bases of legitimacy see Richard
Flacks, "Social Psychological Perspectives on Legitimacy"
(University of Chicago, 1968), mimeo. Norman Mailer's
two recent books, The Armies of the Night (New York:
New American Library, 1968), and Miami and the Siege of
Chicago (New York: New American Library, Signet Book,
1968), contain excellent expressions of the attitudes of
youthful rebels toward national authority and the police at
the present time.
30. Quoted in The Saturday Evening Post (September 21,
1968).
31. "Columbia and the New Left," The Public Interest (Fall,
1968), p. 81.
32. On the rationale for resistance and confrontation tactics: in-
formal interviews and conversations were conducted with
the following new left leaders: Thomas Hayden, Rennard
Davis, Todd Gitlin, Carl Davidson, Paul Potter, Clark Kis-
singer, Michael Rossman, Steve Halliwell, Frank Bardacke;
public speeches by Mark Rudd, Michael Klonsky; conversa-
tions with Staughton Lynd and David Dellinger; a system-
atic monitoring of the following "new left" periodicals:
New Left Notes, The Movement, San Francisco Express
Times, The Guardian, The Rat, Village Voice, Liberation.
Particularly helpful writing on the issues raised in our dis-
cussion frequently appears in these publications, especially
in articles by the following persons: Julius Lester, Robert
366
Allen, Jack Smith, Carl Davidson, Greg Calvert (The
Guardian); Marvin Garson (Express Times); Michael
Klonsky, Les Coleman (New Left Notes); interviews with
Tom Hayden and Jerry Rubin (The Movement, October,
November, 1968).
We have participated in and observed numerous meet-
ings and informal group discussions among students.
On the growing "alienation," pessimism and radicalism of
students on the campus, a recent study of campus opinion at
Columbia: A. Barton, "The Columbia Crisis: Campus, Viet-
nam and the Ghetto" (Bureau of Applied Social Research,
Columbia University, July, 1968). A pilot study just com-
pleted by Richard Flacks, of student attitudes toward the
"movement" at the University of Chicago, shows a similar
pattern of disillusionment with the political system, but also
a strong pattern of hostility toward SDS because of its "rev-
olutionary" posture.
On the spontaneity of major campus confrontations:
Berkeley — Max Heirich, The Free Speech Movement at
Berkeley (New York: Columbia University Press, forthcom-
ing); Columbia — Cox; Brooklyn College — Interview with
Professor Norman Weissberg, Department of Psychology,
Brooklyn College.
On the police as a provocative force: Cox, "Tactics for
Handling Campus Disturbances," College and University
Business, August, 1968, pp. 54-58.
33. In Chapter IV we consider black high school protest in
some detail.
34. James Forman, Sammy Younge, Jr.: The First Black Col-
lege Student to Die in the Black Liberation Movement
(New York: Grove Press, 1968).
35. This commission has appointed a special task force to inves-
tigate the disturbances at San Francisco State: their report
will deal with those issues in greater detail.
36. The Culture of the University: Governance and Education,
Report of the Study Commission on University Governance
(University of California, Berkeley, January 15, 1968), p. 9.
37. The following material is adapted from Rodney T. Hartnett,
College and University Trustees: Their Backgrounds, Roles,
and Educational Attitudes (Princeton, New Jersey: Educa-
tional Testing Service, 1969).
38. Kerr, The Uses of the University.
39. For a description of this change see Christopher Jencks and
David Riesman, The Academic Revolution (Garden City,
New York: Doubleday, 1968), ch. 1.
40. Seymour Lipset and Phillip Altbach, "Student Politics and
Higher Education in the United States," Comparative Edu-
cation Review, X (June, 1966), pp. 326-29.
41. For an influential study of local faculty contrasted to
NOTES 367
cosmopolitan professors see Alvin W. Gouldner, "Cosmopo-
litans and Locals: Toward an Analysis of Latent Social
Roles," Administrative Science Q., II (1957-58), pp.
281-306, 444-80.
42. James Trent and Judith Craise, "Commitment and Confor-
mity in the American Culture," Journal of Social Issues,
XXIII (July, 1967), pp. 34-51.
43. Frederick Rudolph, "Changing Patterns of Authority and In-
fluence," in Order and Freedom on the Campus, eds. Owen
Knorr and W. John Minter (Boulder, Col.: Western Inter-
state Commission for Higher Education, 1965), pp. 1-10.
44. Morris B. Abram, "The Eleven Days at Brandeis — as Seen
from the President's Chair," New York Times Magazine,
February 16, 1969, p. 116.
45. For one thorough analysis, see Study Commission on Uni-
versity Governance, op. cit.
46. David Riesman and Christopher Jencks, "The Viability of
the American College," in Nevitt Sanford, ed., The Ameri-
can College (New York: Wiley, 1962), p. 109.
47. See the account of the role of students in policy-making and
discipline at the University of California, Berkeley, at the
turn of the century in C. Michael Otten, "From Paternalism
to Private Government: The Patterns of University Author-
ity over Students" (Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Depart-
ment of Sociology, University of California, Berkeley,
1968).
48. See Study Commission on University Governance, op. cit.,
pp. 57—64 for an extensive discussion of law in the campus
community. Our formulation here of the need for a transi-
tion from "discipline" to "due process" is a shorthand
phrase for a complex problem. Beyond the problem of im-
plementing due process, moreover, is the problem of the de-
velopment of legal mechanisms for dealing with political
conflict — a problem which, as we indicate in Chapter VIII
of this report, remains unresolved in the legal order as a
whole.
49. Bell, op. cit., p. 95.
50. Quoted in Newsweek, February 24, 1969, p. 23. This should
not be taken as a blanket endorsement of the University of
Chicago's handling of recent conflict.
51. The response of outside authorities to recent campus disor-
ders typically ranges widely, from the reasonable to the lu-
dicrous: we do not intend to suggest that it is all of a piece.
Few authorities, for example, would agree with the recent
suggestion of a California State Assemblyman concerning
disorder on California campuses: "Wouldn't we be money
ahead in the long run to put walls around our campuses and
have a Checkpoint Charley and make people show their ere-
368
dentials?" Quoted in the San Francisco Chronicle, February
21, 1969, p. 12.
52. "The Case of the Columbia Gym," The Public Interest, No.
13 (Fall, 1968).
Chapter IV
1. Chicago Commission on Race Relations, The Negro in
Chicago: A Study of Race Relations and a Riot (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1922); The Mayor's Commis-
sion on Conditions in Harlem, The Negro in Harlem (New
York, 1935); Governor's Committee to Investigate the Riot
Occurring in Detroit, June 21, 1943, Report (Michigan,
1943); Governor's Commission on the Los Angeles Riots
(1965), Violence in the City — An End or a Beginning (Los
Angeles: College Book Store, 1965); National Advisory
Commission on Civil Disorders, Report (New York: Ban-
tam, 1968); and Chicago Riot Study Committee, Report
(Chicago, 1968).
2. National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, p. 16.
3. Frederick Douglass, quoted in Charles E. Silberman, Crisis
in Black and White (New York: Vintage, 1964), p. 218.
4. Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (New York:
Grove Press, 1966), p. 394.
5. Lerone Bennett, Confrontation: Black and White (Chicago:
Johnson Publishing Co., 1965), p. 19; and Black Protest,
ed. Joanne Grant (Greenwich, Conn.: Fawcett Premier,
1968), p. 8.
6. For example, Glazer's contention that the situation of black
Americans has evolved into one of "economic well-being
and political despair" is considerably oversimplified. Nathan
Glazer, "America's Race Paradox," Encounter, XXXI (Oc-
tober, 1968), pp. 9-18.
7. See Harvey Wish, "American Slave Insurrections Before
1861," Journal of Negro History, XXII, July, 1937, pp.
299-320; see also Herbert Aptheker, American Negro Slave
Revolts (New York: Columbia University Press, 1943).
8. Bennett, p. 48; and David Walker, "An Appeal to the Col-
oured Citizens of the World," in Black Protest, ed. Joanne
Grant, pp. 84-89.
9. Quoted in Black Protest, p. 65.
10. Malcolm X Speaks, ed. George Breitman (New York:
Grove Press, 1966), p. 116.
1 1 . Garveyism refers to Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Im-
provement Association, a nationalist and separatist move-
ment which gained a wide following in the United States in
the 1920's. See Edmund D. Cronon, Black Moses (Madison,
NOTES 369
Milwaukee, and London: University of Wisconsin Press,
1955).
12. Shelly v. Kraemer, 68 Sup. Ct. 836 ( 1948).
13. Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954).
14. Bennett, pp. 169-170.
15. Bennett, pp. 38-65.
16. Bennett, pp. 150-151.
17. Black Protest, p. 10.
18. See generally Arthur I. Waskow, From Race Riot to Sit-In:
1919 and the 1960's (Garden City, New York: Doubleday
Anchor, 1966).
19. James Farmer, "The New Jacobins and Full Emancipation,"
in Black Protest, pp. 377-82.
20. Martin Luther King, Jr., "Nonviolence and the Montgomery
Boycott," in Black Protest," pp. 281-82.
21. See Sally Belfrage, "Freedom Summer," in Black Protest,
pp. 393-402.
22. James Forman, Sammy Younge, Jr. (New York: Grove
Press, 1968), pp. 252-253.
23. Southern Justice, ed. Leon Freedman (New York: Random
House, 1965).
24. Black Protest, p. 399.
25. John Lewis, "March on Washington," in Black Protest, pp.
375-77.
26. Howard Zinn, "The Limits of Nonviolence," in Freedom-
ways, IV, First Quarter, 1964, pp. 143-48, and reprinted in
Black Protest, pp. 312-17; see also Lewis, note 25.
27. Lewis, pp. 375-77.
28. Zinn, p. 315.
29. Black Protest, p. 369.
30. Zinn, p. 314.
31. Lewis, pp. 375-77.
32. Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton, Black Power:
The Politics of Liberation in America (New York: Vintage
Books, 1967).
33. Loren Miller, "Farewell to Liberals," in Black Protest, p. 434.
34. Lee Rainwater and William L. Yancey, The Moynihan Re-
port and the Politics of Controversy (Cambridge, Mass.:
M.I.T. Press, 1967).
35. Fred Ferretti and Martin G. Berck, "Harlem Riot, 1964," in
Black Protest, pp. 349-56.
36. Belfrage, p. 399.
37. Quoted in Black Protest, pp. 415-16.
38. Quoted in Black Protest, pp. 416-17.
39. The following discussion has been informed by the work of
Robert Blauner.
40. Jean Paul Sartre, Preface in Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of
the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1963), p. 7.
41. George L. Shepperson, "Notes on Negro American In-
370
fluences on the Emergence of African Nationalism," in
Black History, ed. Melvin Drimmerced (Garden City, New
York: Doubleday, 1968), p. 499.
42. LeRoi Jones, Home (New York: Morrow, 1966), p. 203.
43. Fanon, p. 174.
44. Ronald Segal, The Race War (New York: Bantam, 1966),
p. 38.
45. Immanuel Wallerstein, Africa: The Politics of Independence
(New York: Vintage, Random House, 1961), p. 12.
46. Rupert Emerson and Martin Kilson, "The American Di-
lemma in a Changing World: The Rise of Africa and the
Negro American," in Daedalus (Fall, 1965), pp. 1061-62.
47. Melville J. Herskovits, The Myth of the Negro Past (Bos-
ton: Beacon Press, 1958), p. 298.
48. Wallerstein, p. 68.
49. Emerson and Kilson, p. 1067.
50. Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized (Boston:
Beacon Press, 1967), p. 120.
51. Memmi, p. 123.
52. Wallerstein, p. 50.
53. Malcolm X, Autobiography, p. 321.
54. Malcolm X, Autobiography, p. 324.
55. Malcolm X, Autobiography, p. 369.
56. Malcolm X Speaks, pp. 46-47.
57. Emerson and Kilson, pp. 1066-67.
58. Segal, p. 253.
59. Harold Isaacs, The New World of Negro Americans (New
York, 1963), Chapter 1.
60. Emerson and Kilson, p. 1060.
61. Malcolm X, Autobiography, p. 350.
62. Malcolm X, Autobiography, pp. 346-47.
63. Malcolm X, Autobiography, p. 347.
64. Georges Balandier, "Political Myths of Colonization and
Decolonization in Africa," trans. Jean-Guy Vaillancourt
from Cahiers lnternationaux de Sociologie, XXXIII, July-
December, 1962, pp. 85-96 and cited in State and Society,
ed. Reinhard Bendix (Boston: Little, Brown, 1968), p. 476.
65. See E. U. Essien-Udom, Black Nationalism (New York:
Dell, 1962).
66. Wallerstein, p. 59.
67. Fanon, p. 191.
68. See, generally, the work of Herskovits and Harold Cruse.
69. Fanon, pp. 54 and 104.
70. Fanon, p. 48.
71. Fanon, p. 73.
72. Memmi, p. 127.
73. Fanon, especially pp. 121-38.
74. Fanon, p. 104.
NOTES 371
75. Harold Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (New
York: Morrow, 1967).
76. Tucker, testimony before this commission, October 25,
1968, p. 2131.
77. The "riffraff" theory is fully described and criticized by
T. M. Tomlinson and David O. Sears, Los Angeles Riot Study:
Negro Attitudes Toward the Riot (Los Angeles: Institute of
Government and Public Affairs, University of California,
1967); see also Robert M. Fogelson and Robert B. Hill,
"Who Riots? A Study of Participation in the 1967 Riots," in
Supplemental Studies for the National Advisory Commis-
sion on Civil Disorders (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Govern-
ment Printing Office, July, 1968), pp. 221-22.
78. Federal Bureau of Investigation, Prevention and Control of
Mobs and Riots (Federal Bureau of Investigation, U.S. De-
partment of Justice, 1967), p. 31.
79. Governor's Committee to Investigate the Riot Occurring in
Detroit, Part III, pp. 1-3; Governor's Commission on the
Los Angeles Riots, p. 1; Chicago Riot Study Committee, p.
3; and Interim Riot Report to Mayor of Pittsburgh, Sum-
mer, 1968, p. 3.
80. Chicago Riot Study Committee, p. 28.
81. Mayor's Commission on Conditions in Harlem, p. 11.
82. David O. Sears and John B. McConahan, Los Angeles Riot
Study: Riot Participation (Los Angeles: Institute of Govern-
ment and Public Affairs, University of California, 1967),
pp. 20-21.
83. Nathan E. Cohen, Los Angeles Riot Study: Summary and
Implications for Policy (Los Angeles: Institute of Govern-
ment and Public Affairs, University of California, 1967).
84. Fogelson and Hill, pp. 221-48.
85. T. M. Tomlinson and David O. Sears, Los Angeles Riot
Study: Negro Attitudes Toward the Riot, p. 33.
86. Cohen, p. 4.
87. Fogelson and Hill, p. 243.
88. Richard Komisaruk and Carol Pearson, "Children of the
Detroit Riots," Journal of Urban Law, XXXXIV, Spring
and Summer, 1968, pp. 599-626.
89. William H. Grier and Price M. Cobbs, Black Rage (New
York: Basic Books, 1968), p. 211.
90. Eldridge Cleaver, Revolution in the White Mother Country
and National Liberation in the Black Colony (Oakland,
California, Ministry of Information Black Paper, Black Pan-
ther Party for Self-Defense, 1968), p. 1.
91. Martin Luther King, Jr., "Beyond Vietnam," in Black Pro-
test, p. 419.
92. Ibid.
93. Black Protest, p. 21.
372
94. John Dollard, Caste and Class in a Southern Town (Garden
City, New York: Doubleday, Anchor, 1949).
95. See generally Waskow.
96. Robert F. Williams, "Negroes with Guns," in Black Protest,
pp. 340-44; see also Cruse.
97. Williams, p. 342.
98. Charles R. Sims, "-Armed Defense," in Black Protest, pp.
357-65.
99. Harold Nelson, "The Defenders: A Case Study of an Infor-
mal Police Organization," Social Problems, XV, No. 2
(Fall, 1967), pp. 127-47.
100. Malcolm X, Autobiography, p. 366.
101. From a staff interview with Huey P. Newton.
102. Newton interview.
103. New York Times, September 11, 1968, p. 37.
104. New York Times, September 5, 1968, pp. 1 and 94.
105. President's Commission on Law Enforcement and the Ad-
ministration of Justice, Task Force Report: The Police
(Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office,
1967), Chapter VI.
106. President's Commission, Police, Chapter VI.
107. Cleaver, p. 4.
108. Newton interview.
109. See generally an unpublished manuscript by Richard Ruben-
stein, "Mass Political Violence in the U.S.," prepared for
this task force, 1968; and Chapter VI of this report.
110. From a staff interview.
111. Quoted in Patrick Douglas, "In the Lair of the Panthers,"
Seattle Magazine, V, No. 55 (October, 1968), p. 38.
112. Forman, p. 263.
113. Stokely Carmichael, "Black Power," in Black Protest, p.
464.
114. The Fire Next Time (New York: Dial Press, 1963), p. 115.
115. Baldwin, p. 108.
116. Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), "A
Position Paper on Race," in Black Protest, p. 456.
117. SNCC, p. 454.
118. See, for example, Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma
(New York: McGraw-Hill, 1962), pp. 927-30.
119. Nathan Glazer and Patrick Moynihan, Beyond the Melting
Pot (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1963), p. 53.
120. Charles Keil, Urban Blues (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1966), p. 5.
121. Eric Hoffer, "The Negro Is Prejudiced Against Himself,"
New York Times Magazine, November 29, 1964, p. 27.
122. For a critique of the idea of cultural deprivation, see Ken-
neth B. Clark, Dark Ghetto (New York: Harper, Torch-
book, 1965), Chapter VI, pp. 111-53.
NOTES 373
123. See the discussion of the meaning of Negro family organiza-
tion in Frank Reissman, "In Defense of the Negro Family,"
cited in Rainwater and Yancey, pp. 474-78.
124. SNCC, p. 453.
125. According to one black intellectual, 'If Negroes were ac-
tually thinking and functioning on a mature political level,
then the exclusion of whites — organizationally and political-
ly— should be based not on hatred but on strategy." Cruse,
p. 365.
126. See generally James Q. Wilson, Negro Politics (New York:
Free Press, 1960).
127. Carmichael and Hamilton, p. 10.
128. Harold M. Baron, "Black Powerlessness in Chicago," Trans-
action, VI, No. 1, November, 1968, p. 28.
129. Baron, p. 28.
130. Baron, p. 31.
131. Baron, p. 33.
132. Baron, p. 31.
133. For a history of black separatism in the United States see
Essien-Udom.
134. For further discussion of this criticism see Cruse, Crisis;
Christopher Lasch, "The Trouble with Black Power," in
New York Review of Books, X, 4, February 29, 1968, pp.
4—14; and Jervis Anderson, "Race, Rage and Eldridge
Cleaver," Commentary, XLVI, No. 6 (December, 1968),
pp. 63-69. We do not feel that this report is the ap-
propriate place to discuss factionalism within the black mili-
tant movement. It is a complex and ever-changing problem
characteristic of all groups advocating drastic social change,
white and black, left and right. We have consequently lim-
ited our discussion to the general political thrust of contem-
porary militancy, especially to its relevance for white Amer-
ica.
135. National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, Report,
p. 112.
136. Forman, p. 281.
137. Carmichael and Hamilton, p. 44.
138. Carmichael and Hamilton, p. 43.
139. Malcolm X, Autobiography, pp. 376-77; see also Cleaver.
140. Forman, p. 263.
141. National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, Report,
p. 21.
142. The following analysis is based on incidents reported in the
New York Times during the month of September for the
years 1960-68. This month was chosen on the assumption
that protest is most likely to occur when students return to
school in the fall.
143. See Jonathan Kozol, Death at an Early Age (New York:
374
Bantam, 1967); Herbert Kohl, 36 Children (New York:
New American Library, 1967); and Clark, op. cit.
144. Lemberg Center for the Study of Violence, Riot Data Re-
view, No. 2 (Waltham, Mass.: Brandeis University, August,
1968), pp. 73-75.
145. Lemberg Center, p. 75.
146. New York Times, October 24, 1967, p. 33.
147. New York Times, October 12, 1967, p. 39; November 17,
1967, p. 38; and December 15, 1967, p. 53.
148. Chicago Sun Times, September 15, 1967.
149. Chicago Tribune, September 15, 1967.
150. Daily Defender, September 16, 1967, p. 1.
151. Nation's Schools, November, 1967, pp. 26-28.
152. Chicago Daily News, September 25, 1967, p. 5.
153. Chicago Daily News, September 25, 1967, p. 37.
154. U.S. News and World Report, May 20, 1968, p. 37.
155. Washington Post, September 24, 1968, p. A3; September 25,
1968, p. Bl; and September 26, 1968, p. Bl.
156. New York Times, September 27, 1968, p. 54.
157. New York Times, September 27, 1968.
158. New York Times, September 28, 1968, p. 22.
159. Newsweek, October 28, 1968, p. 4; and Chicago Sun
Times, October 25, 1968, p. 11.
160. New York Times, December 15, 1967, p. 53.
161. The following editorial excerpt is typical of popular con-
ceptions of youth protests: ". . . student dislocation is not
intended to win concessions of peace but is designed to keep
the schools in convulsion. . . . We doubt if any but a hand-
ful of the black student boycotters in Chicago have the
faintest conception that they are being used to generate a
revolutionary climate. The cradle is being robbed for radi-
calism." (Chicago Tribune, October 17, 1968.)
162. But see the works of Holt, Kozol, and Clark.
163. Rev. John Fry, "The Subculture of Youth," Chapter 27, in
The People vs. the System: A Dialogue in Urban Conflict
(Chicago: Acme Press, 1968), p. 345.
164. New York Times, September 28, 1968, p. 29.
165. U.S. News and World Report, May 20, 1968, p. 37.
166. See, for example, the various stories in the New York Times,
September 6, 1962, p. 22.
167. New York Times, September 18, 1960, p. 71.
168. See, for example, New York Times, September 3, 1960, p. 1.
169. Forman, p. 281.
170. As we point out on pages 146-48, research on community
support for riots supports this contention.
171. San Francisco Chronicle, September 12, 1968, p. 32.
172. Elijah Muhammed, quoted in Essien-Udom, p. 253.
173. Forman, p. 281.
NOTES 375
174. Edgar Z. Friedenberg, Coming of Age in America (New
York: Random House, 1965), p. 170.
175. Newsweek, October 28, 1968, p. 84.
176. Rev. John Fry, p. 345.
177. Herman Blake, testimony before this commission.
178. Rev. John Fry, p. 344.
179. Lemberg, p. 59.
180. Ibid.
181. Lemberg, p. 60.
182. For further discussion of this incident see this report, Chap-
ter VII.
183. Lemberg, p. 74.
184. Lemberg, p. 60.
185. Chicago Daily Defender, January 21, 1969, p. 8.
186. New York Times, September 10, 1968, p. 30, quoting an
unidentified Black Panther.
187. Walker Report, pp. 29-30.
188. It must be emphasized that the exact nature of most of the
following incidents is not clear, due to the lack of any in-
formation other than short news reports which are difficult
to evaluate. They should be understood as tentative indica-
tions.
189. New York Times, September 13, 1968, p. 1.
190. New York Times, September 20, 1968, p. 37.
191. New York Times, September 29, 1968, p. 37.
192. Chicago Tribune, September 30, 1968.
193. St. Louis Post Dispatch, September 12, 1968.
194. Washington Post, September 6, 1968, p. A3.
195. New York Times, January 8, 1969, p. 36.
196. Ray Momboisse, Riot and Civil Emergency Guide for City
and County Officials (Sacramento, Calif.: MSM Enter-
prises, 1968), p. 11.
197. Edwin Lemert, "Juvenile Justice — Quest and Reality,"
Trans-action, IV, 1967, p. 32.
198. Chicago Tribune, November 8, 1968, p. 4.
199. Robert A. Levin, "Gang-busting in Chicago," New Republic,
June 1, 1968, pp. 16-18; and Riots, Civil and Criminal Dis-
orders, Hearings before the Permanent Subcommittee on
Investigations of the Committee on Government Operations,
United States Senate (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government
Printing Office, June 28 and July 1 and 2, 1968).
200. Gerald Marwell, "Adolescent Powerlessness and Delinquent
Behavior," Social Problems, XIV, No. 1 (Summer, 1966),
pp. 35-47.
201. National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, Report,
p. 2.
376
Chapter V
1. National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, Otto
Kerner, Chairman, Report (New York: Bantam Books,
1968).
2. Louis Harris, "Whites, Negroes split on causes of rioting,"
The Philadelphia Inquirer, April 16, 1968.
3. Bruno Bettelheim and Morris Janowitz, Social Change and
Prejudice (New York: Free Press, 1964); Paul B. Sheats-
ley, "White Attitudes Toward the Negro," Daedalus,
XCIV, No. 1, Winter, 1966, pp. 217-38.
4. Robert Merton, "Fact and Factitiousness in Ethnic Opinion-
aires," American Sociological Review, V, No. 1, 1940, pp.
13-24.
5. J. B. Cooper, "Emotion in Prejudice," Science, August 7,
1959, pp. 314-18; Gary W. Porier and Albert J. Lott,
"Galvanic Skin Responses and Prejudice," Journal of Per-
sonality and Social Psychology, V, No. 3, 1967, pp. 253-59.
6. Melvin DeFleur and Frank R. Westie, "Verbal Attitudes
and Overt Acts : An Experiment on the Salience of Attitudes,"
American Sociological Review, XXIII, No. 6, 1958, pp.
667-73.
7. Thomas F. Pettigrew, "Parallel and Distinctive Changes in
Anti-Semitic and Anti-Negro Attitudes," Jews in the Mind
of America, ed. C. H. Stember (New York: Basic Books,
1966).
8. Richard T. Morris and Vincent Jeffries, "The White Reaction
Study" (Los Angeles: Report of the Institute of Govern-
ment and Public Affairs, University of California, June 1,
1967).
9. Hazel Erskine, "The Polls: Demonstrations and Race
Riots," Public Opinion Quarterly, XXXI, No. 4, Winter,
1967-68, pp. 655-77.
10. Unpublished dissertation (Harvard, 1969) by Michael Ross,
"Resistance to Racial Change in the Urban North: 1962-
1966."
11. Louis Harris, "After the Riots: A Survey," Newsweek, Au-
gust 21, 1967, pp. 18-19.
12. Melvin M. Tumin, An Inventory and Appraisal of Research
on American Anti-Semitism (Freedom Books, 1961); Paul
B. Sheatsley, "White Attitudes Toward the Negro," Dae-
dalus, 1966, Vol. 95, No. 1, pp. 217-38.
13. Sheatsley, pp. 217-38.
14. Ibid.
15. Bettelheim and Janowitz, 1964; and Sheatsley, pp. 217-38.
16. Sheatsley, pp. 217-38.
17. Bettelheim and Janowitz, 1964, p. 18.
NOTES 377
18. Charles Herbert Stember, Education and Attitude Change:
The Effect of Schooling on Prejudice Against Minority
Groups (New York: Institute of Human Relations Press,
1961).
19. Gordon W. Allport and Michael J. Ross, "Personal Reli-
gious Orientation and Prejudice," Journal of Personality and
Social Psychology, 1967, V, No. 4, 1967, pp. 432-43.
20. Allport and Ross, pp. 432-43; and Gordon W. Allport, The
Nature of Prejudice (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley Pub-
lishing Company, 1954), Chapter 28, "Religion and Prej-
udice."
21. M. Brewster Smith, Jerome Bruner, and R. W. White,
Opinions and Personality (New York: Wiley and Sons, 1956).
22. T. W. Adorno, et al., The Authoritarian Personality (New
York: Harper and Row, 1950). For critical analysis of this
approach see generally Studies in the Scope and Method of
the Authoritarian Personality, eds. R. Christie and M. Ja-
hoda (New York: Free Press, 1954).
23. Gordon W. Allport, The Nature of Prejudice (Reading,
Mass.: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1954).
24. Allport, 1954; Smith, Bruner, and White, 1956.
25. Leon Festinger, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance (Stan-
ford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1957).
26. Frank R. Westie, "The American Dilemma: An Empirical
Test," American Sociological Review, XXX, No. 4, 1965,
pp. 527-38.
27. Milton J. Rokeach, Beliefs, Attitudes and Values (San Fran-
cisco: Jossey-Bass, Inc., 1968).
28. D. D. Stein, Jane A. Hardyck, and M. B. Smith, "Race and
Belief: An Open and Shut Case," Journal of Personality
and Social Psychology, I, No. 4, 1965, pp. 281-89.
29. Thomas Pettigrew, "Racially Separate or Together?" Presi-
dential Address to the Society for the Psychological Study
of Social Issues, September, 1968. In Press as a publication
of the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith.
30. William Brink and Louis Harris, Black and White (New
York: Simon and Schuster, 1966).
31. Samuel A. Stouffer, Communism, Conformity, and Civil
Liberties (New York: Doubleday, 1955).
32. Angus Campbell and Howard Schuman, "Racial Attitudes
in Fifteen American Cities," in Supplementary Report for
the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders
(Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, June,
1968), Chapter 3.
33. Bettelheim and Janowitz, 1964, Chapter 1.
34. Richard Hofstadter, "The Pseudo-Conservative Revolt," in
The Radical Right, ed. Daniel Bell (Garden City, New
York: Doubleday, 1963).
378
35. Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom (New York: Holt,
Rinehart and Winston, 1941 ) .
36. Walter Kaufman, "Status, Authoritarianism, and Anti-Semi-
tism," American Journal of Sociology, LXII, No. 4, 1957,
pp. 379-82.
37. Adorno et al., 1950.
38. Bettelheim and Janowitz, 1964, Chapter 2.
39. Thomas F. Pettigrew, personal communication.
40. Leo J. Strole, "Anomie, Authoritarianism and Prejudice,"
American Journal of Sociology, 1956, LXII, No. 1, pp.
63-67.
41. Richard F. Curtis, et al., "Prejudice and Urban Social Partic-
ipation," American Journal of Sociology, LXXIII, No. 2,
1967, pp. 235-44.
42. Daniel Bell, "The Dispossessed," in The Radical Right, ed.
Daniel Bell, 1963.
43. Hadley Cantril, The Pattern of Human Concerns (New
Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1965).
44. Campbell and Schuman, 1968, Chapter 1.
45. Philip H. Ennis, Criminal Victimization in the United
States: A Report of a National Survey (Washington, 1967),
p. 54.
46. Ennis, p. 57.
47. Ennis, p. 56.
48. Thomas F. Pettigrew, "Actual Gains and Psychological
Losses: The Negro American Protest," Journal of Negro
Education, XXXII, No. 4, 1963 Yearbook, pp. 493-506.
Also appears as Chapter 8 in Thomas F. Pettigrew, A Profile
of the Negro American (Princeton, New Jersey: D. Van
Nostrand Co., 1964).
49. U.S. Department of Labor, Manpower Report of the Presi-
dent (Washington, 1967), p. 73 — hereafter cited as Man-
power Report.
50. Manpower Report, p. 90.
51. Manpower Report, pp. 77-78.
52. Harold M. Baron, "Black Powerlessness in Chicago,"
Trans-action, VI, No. 1, November 1968, pp. 27-33.
53. Campbell and Schuman, 1968.
54. Harris, Newsweek, August, 1967.
55. Campbell and Schuman, 1968.
56. Harris, Newsweek, August, 1967.
57. Campbell and Schuman, 1968.
Chapter VI
Unless otherwise indicated, data for this section are derived
from an unpublished paper submitted to this task force by
David M. Chalmers.
NOTES 379
2. Jacobus ten Broek, Edward N. Barnhart and Floyd W. Mat-
son, Prejudice, War, and the Constitution (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 1954), pp. 13-14.
3. ten Broek, et al., p. 11.
4. ten Broek, et al., p. 16.
5. C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow
(New York: Galaxy, Oxford University Press, 1966), p. 23.
6. David M. Chalmers, Hooded Americanism (Chicago: Quad-
rangle Paperbacks, 1968), p. 20.
7. Quoted in Chalmers, pp. 20-21.
8. Chalmers, p. 18.
9. United States Civil Rights Commission Report, Justice
(Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1961),
pp. 266-68.
10. Chalmers, p. 3.
1 1. Quoted in Chalmers, p. 27.
12. John Higham, Strangers in the Land (New York: Atheneum,
1963), p. 104.
13. Higham, p. 212.
14. Patrick Renshaw, The Wobblies (Garden City, New York:
Doubleday, Anchor, 1967), pp. 163-67.
15. Arthur I. Waskow, From Race Riot to Sit-in (Garden City,
New York: Doubleday, 1966), Chapter 3.
16. Higham, p. 264.
17. U. B. Phillips, quoted in Woodward, p. 8.
18. Allison Davis, "Caste, Economy, and Violence," American
Journal of Sociology, LI, No. 1 (1945), pp. 7-15.
19. James W. Vander Zanden, Race Relations in Transition
(New York: Random House, 1965), pp. 6-7.
20. Baltimore Sun, September 18, 1968.
21. California Department of Justice, Paramilitary Organiza-
tions in California (California: Report to State Legislature,
1965).
22. Quoted in Chalmers, p. 372.
23. Los Angeles Times, quoting Bowers, July 29, 1968.
24. Los Angeles Times, quoting Bowers, July 29, 1968.
25. Chalmers, p. 373.
26. See Chalmers, Chapter 4.
27. Los Angeles Times, July 29, 1968.
28. Vander Zanden, p. 43.
29. Vander Zanden, p. 26.
30. Quoted in Peter Young, "Appendix to Consultant's Report,"
Task Force I, this commission, p. 6.
31. Quoted in Young, p. 14.
32. Quoted in Young, p. 20.
33. Quoted in Young, p. 21.
34. Quoted in Young, p. 32.
35. Quoted in Young, p. 26.
36. Unpublished paper by Robert Wood delivered at the Na-
380
tional Consultation on Ethnic America, Fordham University,
June, 1968.
37. Reported in the Philadelphia Inquirer, September 20, 1967.
38. Reported in the Washington Post, April 22, 1968.
39. Richard T. Morris and Vincent Jeffries, The White Reaction
Study (Los Angeles: Institute of Government and Public
Affairs, University of California, 1967), p. 7.
40. Morris and Jeffries, pp. 16-26.
41. Morris and Jeffries, p. 7.
42. Arnold Katz, Firearms, Violence, and Civil Disorders (Palo
Alto: Stanford Research Institute, 1968), p. 45.
43. Angus Campbell and Howard Schuman, "Racial Attitudes
in Fifteen American Cities," in Supplemental Studies for the
National Advisory Commission On Civil Disorders (Wash-
ington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1968), pp.
58-59.
44. Unpublished paper by Robert Shellow, et al., "The Harvest
of American Racism: The Political Meaning of Violence in
the Summer of 1967," November, 1967, pp. 90-92.
45. Waskow, Chapters 3 and 4; see also unpublished disserta-
tion (University of Pennsylvania, 1959), by Allen Grim-
shaw, "A Study in Social Violence."
46. Chicago Sun Times, August 24, 1968.
47. New York Times, September 26, 1968.
48. Paul Goldberger, "Tony Imperiale Stands Vigilant for Law
and Order," New York Times Magazine, September 29,
1968.
49. Higham, p. 66.
50. Quoted in Goldberger.
51. Quoted in Goldberger.
52. Quoted in Young, p. 36.
53. Quoted in Young, p. 41.
54. Quoted in Young, p. 45.
55. J. Harry Jones, Jr., The Minutemen (Garden City, New
York: Doubleday, 1968), p. 410.
56. See, generally, an unpublished paper by Richard P. Albares
(University of Chicago: Center For Social Organization
Studies, 1968), "Nativist Paramilitarism in the United
States: The Minutemen Organization."
57. Quoted in Albares, p. 8.
58. Albares, pp. 25-26.
59. Jones, Chapter 22.
60. Jones, p. 298.
61. Albares, p. 50.
62. Albares, p. 47.
63. Albares, pp. 14-18.
64. Jones, pp. 399-400.
65. Jones, pp. 295-298.
66. Albares, p. 26.
NOTES 381
67. Cf. Albares, p. 26.
68. See generally The Radical Right, ed. Daniel Bell (Garden
City, New York: Doubleday, Anchor, 1964), Chapter 1.
69. Alan F. Westin, "The John Birch Society," in Bell, p. 239;
see also, generally, Benjamin R. Epstein and Arnold For-
ster, The Radical Right (New York: Vintage Books, 1967).
70. Robert B. DePugh, "Blueprint for Victory," 1966, p. 20.
71. Quoted in Albares, p. 11.
72. Quoted in Albares, p. 13.
73. Unpublished dissertation (Columbia, 1957) by Martin
Trow, "Rightwing Radicalism and Political Intolerance," pp.
30-31.
74. See John Kenneth Galbraith, The New Industrial State
(Boston: Signet, 1967).
75. DePugh, p. 32.
76. Quoted in Jones, p. 407.
77. Albares, pp. 62-67.
78. Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Poli-
tics (New York: Vintage, 1967), pp. 39-40.
Chapter VII
1. James Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name (New York: Dell,
1962), pp. 65-67.
2. Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Dis-
orders (New York: Bantam Books, 1968). See especially
"The Background of Disorder," pp. 135-50 and the charts
on pp. 149-50.
3. See, e.g., Robert M. Fogelson, "From Resentment to Con-
frontation: The Police, the Negroes, and the Outbreak of the
Nineteen-Sixties Riots," Political Science Quarterly,
LXXXIII, No. 2 (June, 1968), pp. 217-47.
4. Among these are: William A. Westley, The Police: A So-
ciological Study of Law, Custom and Morality (unpublished
Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Sociology, University of
Chicago, 1951); Jerome H. Skolnick, Justice Without Trial
(New York: Wiley, 1966); Arthur Niederhoffer, Behind the
Shield: The Police in Urban Society (Garden City, New
York: Doubleday, 1967); Burton Levy, "Cops in the
Ghetto: A Problem of the Police System," American Be-
havioral Scientist (March-April, 1968), pp. 31-34.
5. Miami Study Team on Civil Disturbances, Miami Report,
submitted to this commission, January 15, 1969.
6. Unpublished report prepared by the Mayor's Commission
on Conditions in Harlem (New York, 1935), The Negro in
Harlem.
7. Westley, p. 168.
382
8. "Patterns of Behavior in Police and Citizen Transactions."
9. This and subsequent interview information were derived
from interviews carried out by members of this task force,
unless otherwise indicated.
10. Robert Conot, Rivers of Blood, Years of Darkness (New
York: Bantam, 1967).
11. "Book 5" (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office,
1961), p. 28.
12. See, e.g., Ed Cray, The Big Blue Line: Police Power vs.
Human Rights (New York: Coward-McCann, 1967); Jerome
H. Skolnick, "The Police and the Urban Ghetto," Research
Contributions of the American Bar Foundation, 1968, No. 3
(Chicago: American Bar Foundation, 1968); Anthony Am-
sterdam, Testimony to the National Commission on Causes
and Prevention of Violence, Transcript of Proceedings, espe-
cially pp. 2476, 2485, 2491; Paul Chevigny, Police Power
(New York: Pantheon, 1969); Report of the National Ad-
visory Commission on Civil Disorders: "Task Force Report:
The Police," The President's Commission on Law Enforce-
ment and Administration of Justice (Washington: U.S.
Government Printing Office, 1967), pp. 148, 164, 181-83.
13. According to the San Francisco Chronicle of November 5,
1968, p. 4, and the Detroit Free Press, November 14, 1968,
nine police were suspended for beating black youths at a
dance.
14. An off-duty policeman was indicted for shooting a black
truck driver following a minor traffic accident, San Fran-
cisco Sunday Chronicle and Examiner, This World, October
13, 1968, pp. 5-6. He was later acquitted.
15. As reported in the New York Times, September 5, 1968, p.
1, 150 off-duty policemen attacked a group of Negroes —
some were members of the Black Panthers — in a hallway of
the Brooklyn Criminal Courts Building.
16. On-duty policemen were dismissed after firing twelve shots
into a Black Panther headquarters, San Francisco Chronicle,
September 11, 1968, p. 1.
17. In Newark, National Guardsmen and state troopers "were
directing mass fire at the Hayes Housing Project in response
to what they believed were snipers" {Report of the National
Advisory Commission, pp. 67-68), although the only
shots fired were by Guardsmen. The same pages describe
the shooting up of stores with the sign "Soul Brother" in
their windows. In Detroit, "Without any clear authorization
or direction someone opened fire upon the suspected build-
ing. A tank rolled up and sprayed the building with .50 cali-
ber tracer bullets." {Report of the National Advisory Com-
mission, p. 97.)
18. In Paterson, New Jersey, according to the New York Times
(October 30, 1968, p. 18), a grand jury placed blame on
NOTES 383
Paterson police for vandalism, brutality, and intimidation in
quelling a week of racial disorder. . Amsterdam refers to
such police tactics as "terrorization as a means of crowd
control" in his testimony, p. 2491.
19. Fact-Finding Commission Appointed to Investigate the Dis-
turbances at Columbia University in April and May, 1968,
The Cox Commission, Crisis at Columbia (New York: Vin-
tage, 1968). See also Chapter HI of this report and Daniel
Bell, "Columbia and the New Left," The Public Interest
(Fall, 1968).
20. April 27 Investigating Committee, Dr. Edward J. Sparling,
Chairman, Dissent and Disorder: A Report of the Citizens
of Chicago on the April 27 Peace Parade, August 1, 1968.
21. Rights in Conflict (Chicago: November 18, 1968), p. vii;
this report is now available in trade editions; for example,
New York: Bantam Books, 1968.
22. Ibid.
23. New York Times, March 23-25, 1968.
24. New York Times, April 28, 29, 1968.
25. Los Angeles: Sawyer Press, 1967.
26. Ibid., "Introduction."
27. Dissent and Disorder, pp. 30-31.
28. Mayor Richard J. Daley, "Strategy of Confrontation," pub-
lished as a Special Section in the Chicago Daily News, Sep-
tember 9, 1968.
29. New York Times, October 28, 1968, p. 3.
30. "A Policeman Looks at Crime," U.S. News and World Re-
port, August 1, 1966, p. 52.
31. Saturday Evening Post, November 16, 1968, p. 28.
32. Ibid.
33. See, e.g., Michael Banton, The Policeman in the Community
(London: Tavistock Publications, 1964), p. 7, and Arthur L.
Stinchcombe, "Institutions of Privacy in the Determination
of Police Administrative Practices," American Journal of
Sociology, LXIX (September, 1963), pp. 150-60, both cited
and discussed in Skolnick, Justice Without Trial, p. 33.
34. James Q. Wilson, Varieties of Police Behavior (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968), p. 49. The original
is in italics.
35. Behind the Shield, pp. 103-52.
36. John H. McNamara, "Uncertainties in Police Work: The
Relevance of Police Recruiters' Backgrounds and Training," in
The Police: Six Sociological Essays, ed. David J. Bordua
(New York: John Wiley, 1967), pp. 163-252.
37. According to Richard Wade, a University of Chicago pro-
fessor of urban history, "Fifty years ago, policemen had an
income relatively higher than other trades and there were
more applicants than there were jobs"; quoted in A. James
384
Reichley, "The Way to Cool the Police Rebellion," Fortune
(December, 1968), p. 113.
38. Interviews in San Francisco have shown that a new recruit
faces twelve years of night work before he is "promoted" to
daylight work. This undoubtedly is one explanation.
39. Behind the Shield . . .
40. Evidence indicates that concurrent with the relative decline
in financial rewards for police, the quantity and quality of
equipment in some departments has also declined.
41. Behind the Shield . . ., p. 16.
42. Reichley, p. 113.
43. Police salaries average only two-thirds that of union plumb-
ers, Time, October 4, 1968, p. 27.
44. Time, October 4, 1968, pp. 26-27; Sandy Smith, "The Mob:
You Can't Expect Police on the Take to Take Orders," Life,
December 6, 1968, pp. 40-43.
45. Today, according to Reichley, fewer than 10 percent of
policemen are college graduates when recruited to the force;
most have not more than a high school diploma. And Time
reported that Detroit recruits are from the bottom 25 percent
of high school graduating classes, October 4, 1968, p. 26.
46. Washington Post, December 15, 1968, p. B3.
47. Interview with Police Chief William Beall.
48. Quotes from San Francisco Examiner, November 13, 1968,
pp. 1, 16.
49. In 1960 there were 1.9 police employees per 1,000 popula-
tion; in 1966, this ratio had increased to 2.0 employees per
1,000. At the same time the number of serious criminal
offenses increased 48.4 percent in just the six-year period
1960-66. Thus, while the number of indexed crimes jumped
almost 50 percent, the number of employees was augmented
by no more than 5 percent. J. Edgar Hoover, Director, Fed-
eral Bureau of Investigation. Uniform Crime Reports for
the United States, 1960, 1966 (Washington: U.S. Depart-
ment of Justice, U.S. Government Printing Office).
50. Charles Saunders, Jr., of the Brookings Institution reports
that some departments won't allow new officers to issue
tickets — presumably because they have not undergone suffi-
cient training — but require them to carry guns, Reichley, p.
150.
51. New York Times, August 30, 1968, p. 10.
52. Report of the National Advisory Commission, p. 485.
53. G. Wills, The Second Civil War (New York: New Ameri-
can Library, 1968), p. 47.
54. See Report of the National Advisory Commission, p. 100.
55. Among numerous other publications Law and Order and
The Police Chief magazines for the past eighteeen months
were reviewed. We read them both for an understanding of
NOTES 385
the police perspective of their world and for their theories
of appropriate response to social problems. Interviews and
other reports augmented this study.
56. David Boesel, Richard Berk, W. Eugene Groves, Bettye Eid-
son, Peter H. Rossi, "White Institutions and Black Rage,"
Trans-action (March, 1969), p. 31.
57. See, e.g., J. Edgar Hoover, quoted in John Edward Coogan,
"Religion, a Preventive of Delinquency," Federal Probation,
XVIII (December, 1954), p. 29.
58. Travis Hirschi and Rodney Stark, "Hellfire and Delin-
quency," publication A-96, Survey Research Center, Univer-
sity of California at Berkeley.
59. See, e.g., R. R. Sears, et al., "Some Child-rearing Antece-
dents of Aggression and Dependency in Young Children,"
Genetic Psychology Monograph (1953), pp. 135-234; E.
Hollenberg and M. Sperry, "Some Antecedents of Aggres-
sion and Effects of Frustration in Doll Play," Personality
(1951), pp. 32-43; W. C. Becker, et al., "Relations of Fac-
tors Derived from Parent Interview Ratings to Behavior
Problems of Five Year Olds," Child Development, XXXIII
(1962), pp. 509-35; and M. L. Hoffman, "Power Assertion
by the Parent and Its Impact on the Child," Child De-
velopment, XXXI (1960), pp. 129-43.
60. Washington Post, December 15, 1969, p. B3.
61. Cox Commission, p. 164.
62. Proceedings, p. 56.
63. The Police Chief, April, 1965, p. 10.
64. The Byrne Commission Report submitted to the Special
Committee of the Regents of the University of California on
May 7, 1965; most easily available in Los Angeles Times, May
12, 1965, Part IV, pp. 1-6. Quoted section, p. 5.
65. Cox Commission, p. 189.
66. The Police Chief, April, 1965, p. 36.
67. Ibid., pp. 42-44.
68. Donald Yabush, Chicago Tribune, December 3, 1968, p. 1.
69. Chicago Study Team, pp. vii-viii, emphasis added.
70. The variety of intelligence received by law enforcement
officials is indicated by this listing of Yippie threats pub-
lished in the mass media: "There were reports of proposals
to dynamite natural gas lines; to dump hallucinating drugs
into the city's water system; to print forged credentials so
that demonstrators could slip into the convention hall; to
stage a mass stall-in of old jalopies on the expressways and
thereby disrupt traffic; to take over gas stations, flood sewers
with gasoline, then burn the city; to fornicate in the parks
and on Lake Michigan's beaches; to release greased pigs
throughout Chicago, at the Federal Building and at the Am-
phitheatre; to slash tires along the city's freeways and tie up
traffic in all directions; to scatter razor sharp three-inch
386
nails along the city's highways; to place underground agents
in hotels, restaurants, and kitchens where food was prepared
for delegates, and drug food and drink; to paint cars like
independent taxicabs and forcibly take delegates to Wiscon-
sin or some other place far from the convention; to engage
Yippie girls as 'hookers' to attract delegates and dose their
drinks with LSD; to bombard the Amphitheatre with mor-
tars from several miles away; to jam communication lines
from mobile units; to disrupt the operations of airport con-
trol towers, hotel elevators and railway switching yards; to
gather 230 'hyper-potent' hippie males into a special battal-
ion to seduce the wives, daughters and girlfriends of con-
vention delegates; to assemble 100,000 people to burn draft
cards with the fires spelling out: 'Beat Army'; to turn on fire
hydrants, set off false fire and police alarms, and string wire
between trees in Grant Park and Lincoln Park to trip up
three-wheeled vehicles of the Chicago police; to dress Yip-
pies like Viet Cong and walk the streets shaking hands or
passing out rice; to infiltrate the right wing with short haired
Yippies and at the right moment exclaim: 'You know, these
Yippies have something to say!'; to have ten thousand nude
bodies floating on Lake Michigan — the list could go on."
Chicago Study Team, p. 49.
71. Wilson, Varieties of Police Behavior, pp. 237^38.
72. Wilson p. 238.
73. Wilson, p. 230.
74. See Wilson generally.
75. See, e.g., Wayne R. LaFave, Arrest: The Decision to Take a
Suspect into Custody (Chicago: American Bar Foundation,
1965); Skolnick, Justice Without Trial; and Wilson, Varie-
ties of Police Behavior.
76. A cornerstone of our judicial system is that an accused is
presumed innocent until proven guilty. The policeman, how-
ever, may feel that this should not be the rule since he
would not have arrested the accused unless he was guilty.
For a more detailed discussion of these points, see Skolnick,
Justice Without Trial, Chapter 9, pp. 182-203.
77. Fogelson, p. 226.
78. We have discussed previously the tendency to equate devi-
ance with crime.
79. Interview with John Harrington, President of the Fraternal
Order of Police.
80. Certain political activities by police — discussed in detail be-
low— may raise such issues, especially where the activities
create sharp antagonism within the policed community and
threaten the ability of the civic government to control the
police.
81. A "job action" began in response to the city's refusal "to
negotiate a new contract" (New York Times, October 16,
NOTES 387
1968, p. 1). On October 26 the New York Times reported
that Cassese was in defiance of a court order in his direction
to continue the "slowdown" (p. 1). But on October 27, it
was reported that he had bowed to the court order (New
York Times, p. 1).
82. San Francisco Chronicle, December 16, 1968, p. 12.
83. Washington Post, December 15, 1968, p. Bl.
84. For example, in Newark, New Jersey, as reported in New
York Times, November 30, 1968, p. 1.
85. Washington Post, December 15, 1968, p. Bl.
86. Ibid.
87. New York Times, November 18, 1968, p. 1.
88. Chicago Study Team, p. vii.
89. Chicago Study Team, p. 1 17.
90. San Francisco Chronicle, December 11, 1968, p. 41.
9 1 . Chicago Study Team, p. 1 .
92. The Chicago Study Team writes that almost three months after
the convention no disciplinary action had been taken against
most of the police violators (p. xiii).
93. New York Times, September 5, 1968, p. 1.
94. San Francisco Chronicle, September 11, 1968, p. 1.
95. San Francisco Chronicle, November 5, 1968, p. 4, and De-
troit Free Press, November 14, 1968.
96. San Francisco Sunday Chronicle and Examiner, This World,
October 13, 1968, pp. 5-6.
97. Los Angeles Times, August 16, 1968, p. 4.
98. New York Times, August 18, 1968, p. E7.
99. Los Angeles Times, August 16, 1968, p. 4.
100. According to a Washington Post story, the PBA may have
backed down. December 15, 1968, p. Bl.
101. New York Times, August 1 6, 1968, p. 38.
102. New York Times, September 5, 1968, p. 1.
103. Chicago Study Team, p. xii.
104. Fogelson, pp. 224^25.
105. An example of this phenomenon seems to have been
pointed to by the commission's Chicago Study Team:
"There has been no public condemnation of these violators
of sound police procedures and common decency by either
their commanding officers or city officials. Nor (at the time
this Report is being completed — almost three months after
the convention) has any disciplinary action been taken
against most of them. That some policemen lost control of
themselves under exceedingly provocative circumstances can
perhaps be understood; but not condoned. If no action is
taken against them, the effect can only be to discourage the
majority of policemen who acted responsibly, and further
weaken the bond between police and community" (p. xiii).
Indeed, this might have been predicted from the lack of re-
388
sponse to the Sparling Report on the police violence during
the Chicago peace march of April 1968.
According to a Washington Post study (December 15,
1968, p. B5): "Criticism of the Chicago force has become
a symbol of the 'lack of support' that policemen constantly
bemoan. Policemen everywhere rallied to the defense of
their Chicago colleagues. ''How can people defend the rights
[sic] of that filth and attack good police officers?' asks
Walter Fahey, a Boston patrolman." And a police chief is
reported as observing that Chicago made police feel they
had to defend rough and stupid police behavior because
they felt criticism of Chicago police was criticism of police
everywhere.
106. See John Hersey, The Algiers Motel Incident (New York:
Bantam, 1968). Reportedly, ten black men and two white
girls were severely beaten by police during the Detroit riots;
three of the men were found dead, shot at close range, and
the police involved failed to report the incident.
107. The following discussion is based on information that is
readily available from sources such as the New York Times
during the period discussed.
108. See, e.g., reports of Boston and Philadelphia in San Fran-
cisco Chronicle, December 16, 1968, p. 12.
109. An editor's note in a compendium of articles opposing re-
view boards entitled "Police Review Boards," prepared by
the National Fraternal Order of Police Committee on
Human Rights and Law Enforcement, Cincinnati, Ohio, no
date.
110. This discussion draws from the D. J. R. Bruckner article,
Los Angeles Times, October 2, 1968, pp. 26 ff.
111. See New York Times, November 3, 1968, p. 78; our inter-
views in Oakland, San Francisco, and New York; and Reich-
ley for related information about the Wallace campaign
of 1968.
112. San Francisco Chronicle, December 16, 1968, p. 12.
113. Ibid.
114. San Francisco Chronicle, September 28, 1968, p. 9.
115. Washington Post, December 15, 1968, p. Bl.
116. Ibid.
117. One of our staff was present at that reception.
118. Washington Post, December 15, 1968, p. B2.
119. Ibid.
120. San Francisco Chronicle, December 16, 1968, p. 12.
121. Ibid.
122. San Francisco Chronicle, December 18, 1968, p. 11.
123. John Harrington, National President of the Fraternal Order
of Police, has launched a campaign urging Congress to re-
verse certain Supreme Court decisions on criminal justice,
San Francisco Chronicle, December 16, 1968, p. 12.
NOTES 389
124. New York Times, August 16, 1968, p. 38.
125. New York Times, September 3, 1968, p. 20; August 16,
1968, p. 38.
126. New York Times, August 16, 1968, p. 38.
127. Ibid.
128. Washington Post, December 15, 1968, p. Bl.
129. Henry Wise, the labor lawyer retained to help organize and
bargain for the Patrolmen's Association, as quoted in Wash-
ington Post, December 15, 1968, p. B2.
130. Washington Post, December 15, 1968, p. Bl.
131. Washington Post, December 15, 1968, p. B2.
132. Washington Post, December 15. 1968, p. Bl.
133. Washington Post, December 15, 1968, p. B2.
134. Ibid.
135. See 42 U.S.C. 1863.
136. For example, the National Defense Education Program,
Chapter 17 of Title 20 of the U.S. Code, and the National
Science Foundation, Chapter 16 of Title 42. Grants could
also be made to existing institutions to establish special
courses, much as the NDEP provides financial assistance to
schools for teaching science, mathematics and foreign lan-
guages; and on-the-job summer training might also be pro-
vided. Such a program should be approached cautiously,
however, in light of the currect pressures to deny academic
credit to Reserve Officer Training Corps and the compara-
tively low regard for policemen in the academic community.
137. See, e.g., "Task Force Report: The Police," The President's
Commission on Law Enforcement . . ., p. 142.
138. Ibid.
139. See Herbert L. Packer, The Limits of the Criminal Sanction
(Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1968); The President's
Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of
Justice, The Challenge of Crime in a Free Society (Washing-
ton, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, February, 1967),
p. 126; and Skolnick, "Coercion to Virtue," Research Con-
tribution of the American Bar Foundation, No. 7 (1968).
140. Report of the National Advisory Commission, pp. 311-12.
Chapter VIM
National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, Report
(New York: Bantam, 1968), p. 337 — hereafter cited as
Kerner.
W. E. B. Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro (New York:
Schocken Books, 1967).
St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton, Black Metropolis (New
York: Harper, Torchbook, 1962).
390
4. Governor's Commission on the Los Angeles Riots (1965),
Violence in the City — An End or a Beginning (Los An-
geles: College Book Store, 1965), p. 24.
5. Kerner, p. 339.
6. Ibid.
7. Chicago Riot Study Committee, Report (Chicago, 1968), p.
19.
8. District of Columbia Committee on the Administration of
Justice under Emergency Conditions, Interim Report (May
25, 1968), p. 5 — hereafter cited as D.C. Report; and Balti-
more Committee on the Administration of Justice under
Emergency Conditions, Report (May 31, 1968), p. 6 — here-
after cited as Baltimore Committee Report.
9. Kerner, Chapter 13.
10. Chicago Riot Study Committee, Report, Chapter XII.
11. D.C. Report.
12. Baltimore Committee Report.
13. Mayor's Committee, Administration of Justice under Emer-
gency Conditions (New York, 1968).
14. American Criminal Law Quarterly, VI, 3 (Spring, 1968).
15. "The Administration of Criminal Justice in the Wake of the
Detroit Civil Disorder of July, 1967," Michigan Law Re-
view, LXIV, 7 (1968), p. 1598 — hereafter cited as Michigan
Law Review Riot Study.
16. Kerner, p. 341.
17. Ronald L. Goldfarb, 'The Administration of Justice in
Washington, D.C, During the Disorder of April, 1968," an
unpublished manuscript, p. 6.
18. Goldfarb, pp. 10-11.
19. Anthony Piatt and Sharon Dunkle, The Administration of
Justice in Crisis: Chicago, April, 1968 (Center for Studies
in Criminal Justice: University of Chicago, 1968).
20. Information from staff interview.
21. Jerome E. Carlin and Jan Howard, "Legal Representation
and Class Justice," UCLA Law Review, XXII (January,
1-965), pp. 381 and 437.
22. Kerner, p. 342.
23. Kerner, p. 342; Piatt and Dunkle, pp. 9-24.
24. Michigan Law Review Riot Study, p. 1553.
25. Michigan Law Review Riot Study, p. 1600.
26. Kerner, p. 357.
27. Piatt and Dunkle, pp. 22-23.
28. Piatt and Dunkle, pp. 17-19.
29. Michigan Law Review Riot Study, p. 1553.
30. Piatt and Dunkle, p. 8.
31. Information from staff interview.
32. Goldfarb, p. 28.
33. Ben W. Gilbert, Ten Blocks from the White House: Anat-
omy of the Washington Riots 1968 (New York: Frederick
NOTES 391
A. Praeger, 1968), Chapter 8; Michigan Law Review Riot
Study, p. 1604.
34. Gilbert, p. 125; Goldfarb, p. 29.
35. Piatt and Dunkle, pp. 19-24.
36. Information from staff interviews.
37. Kemer, p. 357.
38. Judge George W. Crockett, Jr., "Recorder's Court and the
1967 Civic Disturbance," Journal of Urban Law, XLV
(Spring and Summer, 1968), p. 846.
39. Information from staff interview.
40. Detroit Free Press, July 28, 1967.
41. Detroit Free Press, October 15, 1967.
42. Detroit Free Press, July 26, 1967.
43. Crockett, p. 846.
44. Ibid.
45. Crockett, p. 841.
46. E. Philip Colista and Michael G. Domonkos, "Bail and
Civil Disorder," Journal of Urban Law, XLV (Spring and
Summer, 1968), pp. 815-39.
47. Colista and Domonkos, p. 818.
48. Information from staff interview.
49. Newark Evening News, July 14, 1967.
50. Kemer, p. 357.
51. Information provided by Chicago Civil Liberties Union.
52. Chicago Daily News, February 8, 1967.
53. Ibid.
54. Illinois Special Legal Project, The Roger Baldwin Founda-
tion of the ACLU, "Preliminary Report and Evaluation on
the Bail Procedures in Chicago's Looting Cases — Winter,
1967" (Chicago, August, 1967).
55. Chicago Tribune, February 1, 1967.
56. Piatt and Dunkle, passim.
57. Information from staff interview.
58. Information from University of Chicago Law Review Riot
Study Project.
59. Baltimore Committee Report, p. 48.
60. Ibid.
61. Baltimore Committee Report, pp. 48-49.
62. Baltimore Committee Report, p. 57.
63. D.C. Report, p. 83; Goldfarb, p. 34.
64. Goldfarb, p. 35.
65. The President's Commission on Law Enforcement and Ad-
ministration of Justice, Task Force Report: The Courts
(Washington, D.C: U.S. Government Printing Office,
1967), p. 29, hereafter cited as Task Force.
66. Task Force, p. 32.
67. President's Commission on Crime in the District of Co-
lumbia, Report (Washington, D.C: U.S. Government Print-
ing Office, 1966), p. 351.
392
68. Task Force, p. 30.
69. Stack v. Boyle, 342 U.S. 1 (1951); Williamson v. U.S., 184
F. 2d 280 (2nd Cir. 1950).
70. Caleb Foote, "Compelling Appearance in Court; Adminis-
tration of Bail in Philadelphia," University of Pennsylvania
Law Review, CII (1954), p. 1031; Caleb Foote, "New York
Bail System," University of Pennsylvania Law Review, CVI
(1958), p. 633.
71. Foote, "Compelling Appearance in Court: Administration
of Bail in Philadelphia," p. 1031.
72. See, for example, the testimony before this commission of
Professor Anthony Amsterdam on October 31, 1968.
73. See, for example, the various bail studies of Caleb Foote,
and works of the Vera Foundation in New York.
74. Task Force, p. 30.
75. Michigan Law Review Riot Study, p. 1556.
76. Francis A. Allen (Chairman), Poverty and the Administra-
tion of Federal Criminal Justice (Washington, D.C.: U.S.
Government Printing Office, 1963), pp. 10-11.
77. Jerome E. Carlin, Lawyers' Ethics (New York: Russell Sage
Foundation, 1966).
78. Arthur Lewis Wood, Criminal Lawyers (New Haven, Con-
necticut: College and University Press, 1967); Jack Ladin-
sky, "Careers of Lawyers, Law Practice and Legal Institu-
tions," in Rita James Simon, ed., The Sociology of Law
(San Francisco: Chandler Publishing Company, 1968), pp.
275-89.
79. Ladinsky, p. 279.
80. Wood, p. 149.
81. Task Force, p. 4.
82. Jerome H. Skolnick, "Social Control in the Adversary Sys-
tem," Journal of Conflict Resolution, XI (1967), pp. 52-70.
For studies of the impact of the Gault decision on juvenile
court which point to similar conclusions, see Anthony Piatt
and Ruth Friedman, "The Limits of Advocacy: Occupa-
tional Hazards in Juvenile Court," University of Pennsylva-
nia Law Review, CXVI (May, 1968), pp. 1156-84; Anthony
Piatt, Howard Schechter, and Phyllis Tiffany, "In Defense
of Youth: A Case Study of the Public Defender in Juvenile
Court," Indiana Law Journal, XLIII (Spring, 1968), pp.
619-40.
83. Task Force, pp. 11-12. See also the recent criticisms by
Chief Judge David L. Bazelon, of the United States Court
of Appeals (D.C. Circuit), reported in the Washington Post,
February 14, 1969.
84. David Sudnow, "Normal Crimes: Sociological Features of
the Penal Code in a Public Defender's Office," Social Prob-
lems, XII (1965), pp. 255-76.
85. Task Force, p. 10.
NOTES 393
86. Detroit Free Press, July 27, 1967.
87. Crockett, p. 846.
88. Newark Evening News, July 16, 1967.
89. Newark Evening News, August 2, 1967.
90. Information from staff interview.
91. Federal Bureau of Investigation, Prevention and Control of
Mobs and Riots (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government
Printing Office, 1968), Chapter 7.
92. See pages 300-301.
93. Martin Shapiro, "Political Jurisprudence," Kentucky Law
Journal, LII (1963), pp. 294-343; Richard Quinney, "Crime
in Political Perspective," The American Behavioral Scientist,
8 (1964), pp. 19-22.
94. Otto Kirchheimer, Political Justice (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1961).
95. Proceedings, pp. 1745-46.
96. This view, of course, is not without factual basis. The Chi-
cago Commission on Race Relations which studied the 1919
riot concluded that black citizens received harsher judicial
treatment than white citizens under both routine and emer-
gency conditions: "It . . . appears, from the records and
from the testimony of judges in the juvenile, municipal, cir-
cuit, superior, and criminal courts, of police officials, the
state's attorney, and various experts on crime, probations,
and parole, that Negroes are more commonly arrested, sub-
jected to police identification, and convicted than white
offenders; that on similar evidence they are generally held
and convicted of more serious charges, and that they are
given longer sentences." Chicago Commission on Race Rela-
tions, The Negro in Chicago: A Study of Race Relations
and a Riot (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1922),
pp. 622-23.
97. W. E. B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk, 1903, p. 176.
98. Information from staff interview.
99. Kerner, p. 333.
100. Harold H. Greene, "A Judge's View of the Riots," D.C. Bar
Journal, XXXV (August, 1968), p. 28.
101. Frederic S. LeClercq, "The San Francisco Civil Rights
Cases," unpublished paper, Center for the Study of Law and
Society, University of California, Berkeley, 1964, pp. 14-15.
102. Edmund Cahn distinguishes between the "official" and "con-
sumer" perspectives on law. "Law in the Consumer Perspec-
tive," University of Pennsylvania Law Review, CXII (No-
vember, 1963), pp. 1-21.
103. Quoted in Jerome H. Skolnick, "The Berkeley Rebels and
the Courts," unpublished paper, Center for the Study of
Law and Society, University of California, 1965.
104. Special Committee of the Regents of the University, Report,
May 7, 1965.
394
105. The April 27 Investigating Commission, "Dissent and Disor-
der," Chicago, August 1, 1968, p. 108.
106. Irving Louis Horowitz and Martin Liebowitz, "Social Devi-
ance and Political Marginality: Toward a Redefinition of
the Relation between Sociology and Politics," Social Prob-
lems, XV (1968) pp. 280-96.
107. Kerner, p. 357.
108. See, for example, Baltimore Committee Report, Chapter 3;
D.C. Report, p. 86; and American Criminal Law Quarterly
(Spring, 1968).
109. Baltimore Committee Report, pp. 38-39.
Chapter IX
1. Chicago Commission on Race Relations, The Negro in Chi-
cago: A Study of Race Relations and a Race Riot (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1922) — hereafter cited as The
Negro in Chicago.
2. From an unpublished paper by William Kornhauser quoted
in Henry Bienen, Violence and Social Change (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, The Adlai Stevenson Institute
of International Affairs, 1968), p. 106.
3. Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd (London: Ernest Benn, 1952),
p. 32. Also available in Viking Compass Book (New York,
1960), p. 32.
4. Le Bon, Chapter 2.
5. Le Bon, Chapter 5.
6. Leon Bramson, The Political Context of Sociology (Prince-
ton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1961).
7. See Kurt Lang and Gladys Engel Lang, "Collective Behav-
ior," in International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences,
1968, pp. 556-64.
8. See, e.g., Roger Brown, Social Psychology (New York: Free
Press, 1965); Herbert Blumer, "Collective Behavior," in Re-
view of Sociology: Analysis of a Decade, ed. J. B. Gittler
(New York: John Wiley, 1957), pp. 127-58; Neil J. Smel-
ser, Theory of Collective Behavior (New York: The Free
Press, 1962); and R. H. Turner and L. M. Killian, Collec-
tive Behavior (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1957).
9. Roger Brown, p. 709.
10. Smelser, p. 74.
11. Smelser, p. 1.
12. Smelser, esp. p. 72.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid.
15. The work of Blumer, especially, emphasizes the creative po-
tential of collective behavior: see Blumer, op. cit. Smelser's
work specifically notes the "reconstitutive" character of col-
NOTES 395
lective behavior, but in the same breath judges it as "unin-
stitutionalized" and based on extravagant beliefs; see Neil J.
Smelser, Essays in Sociological Explanation (Englewood
Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1968), pp. 96-97.
16. But see Smelser's more recent work in which an attempt is
made to get at the "deeper psychological meanings" of col-
lective episodes, especially his statement that "the striking
feature of the protest movement is what Freud observed: it
permits the expression of impulses that are normally re-
pressed." Smelser, Essays, p. 121.
17. Turner and Killian, pp. 20-21.
18. Smelser, Theory of Collective Behavior, p. 246.
19. Smelser, Theory of Collective Behavior, pp. 261, et passim.
20. Morris Janowitz, Social Control of Escalated Riots (Chi-
cago: University of Chicago Center for Policy Study,
1968), p. 7.
21. Ibid.
22. Janowitz, p. 14.
23. Janowitz, p. 13.
24. Federal Bureau of Investigation, Prevention and Control of
Mobs and Riots (Department of Justice, April 3, 1967), p.
25.
25. National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, Report
(New York: Bantam, 1968), Chapter 2.
26. Carl J. Couch, "Collective Behavior: An Examination of
Some Stereotypes," Social Problems, XV, No. 3 (1968),
pp. 310-22.
27. Throughout this chapter, we have applied the perspective of
labeling theory — usually associated with the field of deviant
behavior — to the theory of collective behavior. See, for ex-
ample, the work of Howard Becker and Edwin Lemert.
28. Jules J. Wanderer, "1967 Riots: A Test of the Congruity of
Events," Social Problems XVI, No. 2 (1968), pp. 193-98.
29. Eric Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels (New York: Norton,
1959); George Rude, The Crowd in History, 1730-1848
(New York: Wiley, 1964).
30. Hans W. Mattick, "Form and Content of Recent Riots,"
Midway, IX, No. 1 (Summer, 1968), pp. 18-19.
31. The Negro in Chicago, p. 342.
32. Unpublished report prepared by the Mayor's Commission
on Conditions in Harlem (New York, 1935), The Negro in
Harlem, pp. 7 and 99.
33. Governor's Commission on the Los Angeles Riots, Violence
in the City — An End or a Beginning? (Los Angeles: Col-
lege Book Store, 1965), pp. 1, 4-5 — hereafter cited as Vio-
lence in the City.
34. See e.g., Chicago Riot Study Committee, Report (Chicago,
1968), p. 3; Mayor's Special Task Force, Progress Report
(Pittsburgh, 1968), p. 4.
396
35. Chicago Riot Study Committee, Report, p. 112.
36. E. L. Quarantelli and Russell R. Dynes, "Patterns of Loot-
ing and Property Norms: Conflict and Consensus in Com-
munity Emergencies," 1968, paper submitted to this com-
mission.
37. FBI, Prevention and Control of Mobs and Riots, p. 86.
38. The Negro in Chicago, p. xiii.
39. Violence in the City, p. 9.'
40. Chicago Riot Study Committee, Report, p. 3.
41. Mayor's Special Task Force, Pittsburgh, p. 5.
42. National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, Report,
p. 2.
43. Supra, note 27.
44. Hobsbawm, p. 114.
45. Lewis A. Coser, Continuities in the Study of Social Conflict
(New York: Free Press, 1967), p. 83.
46. Eric Hobsbawm, Labouring Men: Studies in the History of
Labor (New York: Basic Books, 1964), p. 16.
47. Gaston Rimilinger, "The Legitimation of Protest: A Com-
parative Study in Labor History," Comparative Studies in
Society and History, H (April, 1960), p. 343.
48. The Negro in Harlem, p. 109.
49. National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, p. 18.
50. G. Wills, The Second Civil War (New York: New Ameri-
can Library, 1968), p. 47.
51. Smelser, Theory of Collective Behavior, p. 73.
52. Janowitz, p. 20.
53. Ibid.
54. Bienen, Violence and Social Change, Chapter 3.
Selected Bibliography
Chapter I. Protest and Politics
There is no comprehensive study of the history of political vio-
lence, and the social-scientific literature on the social meaning of
violence is undeveloped. The works which we criticize in the
chapter are cited in the notes at the appropriate place. See Rich-
ard Rubenstein's forthcoming book Rebels in Eden: Mass Political
Violence in the United States.
Chapter II. Anti-War Protest
Documents
Clergy and Laymen Concerned about the War. In the Name of
America. New York: Dutton, 1968.
Fulbright, J. William. The Vietnam Hearings. New York: Vin-
tage, 1966. Introduced by Senator Fulbright, the book in-
cludes the testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee by Dean Rusk, James M. Gavin, George F. Ken-
nan, and Maxwell D. Taylor.
Gettleman, Marvin E., ed., Vietnam: History, Documents, and
Opinions on a Major World Crisis. New York: Fawcett, 1965.
Raskin, Marcus G., and Bernard B. Fall. The Viet-Nam Reader:
Articles and Documents on American Foreign Policy and the
Viet-Nam Crisis. New York: Vintage, 1965.
The Draft
American Friends Service Committee, Peace Education Division.
The Draft? New York: Hill and Wang, 1968.
397
398
Carper, Jean. Bitter Greetings; The Scandal of the Military Draft.
New York: Grossman, 1967.
Tax, Sol, ed. The Draft, A Handbook of Facts and Alternatives.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967.
Historical Analysis
Ashmore, Harry S., and William C. Baggs. Mission to Hanoi: A
Chronicle of Double-Dealing in High Places, A Special Re-
port from the Center for the Study of Democratic Institu-
tions. New York: Berkley Publishing, 1968. Includes a valu-
able chronology.
Fall, Bernard B. Street Without Joy: From the Indochina War to
the War in Viet-Nam. Harrisburg, Pa.: The Stackpole Com-
pany, 1961. A military history of the war from 1946 to 1954.
. The Two Viet-Nams: A Political and Military Analysis.
New York: Praeger, 1964. Rev. ed. Developments from the
end of World War II through early 1964.
Viet-Nam Witness, 1953-66. New York: Praeger, 1966.
Collection of articles.
Gavin, James. Crisis Now. New York: Vintage, 1968. Exposition
of the relationship between foreign and domestic issues.
Goodwin, Richard N. Triumph or Tragedy: Reflections on Viet-
nam. New York: Vintage, 1966. By the former assistant to
Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, first appearing as an article
in The New Yorker.
Halberstam, David. The Making of a Quagmire. New York: Ran-
dom House, 1965. Pulitzer prizewinning account based on
observations between 1961 and 1964.
Hanh, Thich Nhat, Vietnam: Lotus in a Sea of Fire. New York:
Hill and Wang, 1967. Analysis by a prominent Vietnamese
Buddhist.
Harvey, Frank. Air War: Vietnam. New York: Bantam, 1967.
Kahin, George McTurnan, and John W. Lewis. The United States
in Vietnam. New York: Delta, 1967. Detailed historical, po-
litical, and military analysis.
Lacouture, Jean. Vietnam: Between Two Truces. New York: Ran-
dom House, 1966. By the correspondent of Le Monde.
Lynd, Staughton, and Thomas Hayden. The Other Side. New
York: New American Library, 1967. Sympathetic view of
North Vietnam by two American radicals.
McCarthy, Mary. Vietnam. New York: Harcourt, 1967. Vivid
narrative by an eminent novelist.
Mecklin, John. Mission in Torment. Garden City, New York:
Doubleday, 1965. By a former high officer of the U.S. Infor-
mation Agency in Saigon.
Menashe, Louis, and Ronald Radosh, eds. Teach-ins: U.S.A.: Re-
ports, Opinions, Documents. New York: Praeger, 1967.
BIBLIOGRAPHY 399
Pike, Douglas. Viet-Cong. Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1966.
The most scholarly study of enemy organization.
Ray; Michele. The Two Shores of Hell. New York: McKay, 1968.
Salisbury, Harrison. Behind the Lines: Hanoi, December
23-January 7. New York: Harper and Row, 1967.
Schell, Jonathan. The Village of Ben Sue. New York: Vintage,
1967. An account of American treatment of the South Viet-
namese countryside.
. The Military Half. New York: Vintage, 1968. First-hand
reportage of military operations in two South Vietnamese
provinces.
Schlesinger, Arthur M., Jr. A Thousand Days. Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 1965. President Kennedy's approach to Vietnam.
Schurmann, Franz, Peter Dale Scott, and Reginald Zelnik. The
Politics of Escalation in Vietnam. New York: Fawcett, 1966.
Analyzes the political basis of American military decisions.
Senate Republican Policy Committee. "The War in Vietnam." May
1, 1967.
Sontag, Susan, Trip to Hanoi. New York: Farrar, Straus & Gi-
roux (Noonday ed.), 1968.
International Law
Falk, Richard A. The Vietnam War and International Law.
Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1968. Contains
also pertinent documents.
Lawyers Committee on American Policy Toward Viet-Nam, Con-
sultative Council. Vietnam and International Law: An Anal-
ysis of the Legality of the United States Military Involve-
ment. Flanders, New Jersey: O'Hare, 1967.
Chapter III. Student Protest
General Bibliographies
Altbach, Philip. A Select Bibliography on Students, Politics and
Higher Education. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Center for International Affairs, 1967.
. Student Politics and Higher Education in the U.S., a Se-
lect Bibliography. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Center for International Affairs, 1968.
International Student Politics
Lipset, Seymour Martin, ed. Student Politics. New York: Basic
Books, 1967.
"Students and Politics," Daedalus (Winter, 1968).
400
Empirical Data
Kenniston, Kenneth. Young Radicals. New York: Harcourt,
Brace, 1968.
Peterson, Richard. The Scope of Organized Student Protest in the
U.S., 1967-68. Princeton, N.J.: Educational Testing Service,
1968.
Sampson, Edward, ed. "Stirring out of Apathy," Journal of Social
Issues (July, 1967).
"Special Issue: The Universities," The Public Interest (Fall,
1968).
Columbia and After
"American Youth: Its Outlook is Changing the World: A Special
Issue," Fortune (January, 1969).
Fact-Finding Commission Appointed to Investigate the Disturb-
ances at Columbia University in April and May, 1968, The
Cox Commission. Crisis at Columbia. New York: Vintage,
1968.
"Special Issue on the American University and Student Protest,"
American Behavioral Scientist, XI (May-June, 1968).
The New Left
Kennan, George. Democracy and the Student Left. New York:
Bantam, 1968.
Newfield, J. A Prophetic Minority. New York: New American Li-
brary, 1966.
Chapter IV. Black Militancy
There is an abundant and increasing literature on black protest
in America. The following works should be considered basic:
Carmichael, Stokely, and Charles V. Hamilton. Black Power; The
Politics of Liberation in America. New York: Vintage, 1967.
A concise discussion of the need for black political and cul-
tural autonomy.
Clark, Kenneth B. Dark Ghetto; Dilemmas of Social Power. New
York: Harper, Torchbooks, 1965. An analysis, by a black so-
cial scientist, of the social, political, and economic structure
of the urban ghetto.
Cleaver, Eldridge. Soul on Ice. New York: McGraw-Hill, Ramparts
Book, 1968. A collection of writings by the Minister of In-
formation of the Black Panther Party.
Dollard, John. Caste and Class in a Southern Town. Garden City,
BIBLIOGRAPHY 401
New York: Doubleday, Anchor, 1949. A classic study, still
useful, of race and racism in the South in the 1930's.
Essien-Udon, E. U. Black Nationalism. New York: Dell, 1962. A
study of Black Nationalist movements in American history,
with special reference to the Nation of Islam.
Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove
Press, 1963. An extremely influential treatment of the politics
and psychology of colonialism and anti-colonialism.
Grant, Joanne, ed. Black Protest. Greenwich, Conn.: Fawcett Pre-
mier Books, 1968. An anthology of documents and writings
on black protest from the seventeenth century to the 1960's.
Malcolm X. The Autobiography of Malcolm X. New York:
Grove Press, 1966. An indispensable account of the thought
and development of Malcolm X, whose influence on contem-
porary black militancy has been enormous.
National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders. Report. Wash-
ington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1968. The
Kerner Report. Indispensable for an understanding of the
1967 riots and official reaction.
Waskow, Arthur I. From Race Riot to Sit-in. Garden City, New
York: Doubleday, Anchor, 1966. Historical analysis of the
1919 race riots and the nonviolent civil rights movement.
Chapter V. The Racial Attitudes of White Americans
General Introduction
Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. New York: Macmillan and
Free Press, 1968. For brief, informative entries on such top-
ics as "Prejudice: The Concept" by Otto Klineberg, "Race
Relations: Social-Psychological Aspects" by Thomas F. Petti-
grew, and "Prejudice: Social Discrimination" by J. Milton
Yinger.
Simpson, George, and J. Milton Yinger. Racial and Cultural Mi-
norities, 3rd ed. New York: Harper and Row, 1965. Compre-
hensive and up-to-date general introduction to prejudice and
discrimination.
Personality and Prejudice
Adorno, T. W., et al. The Authoritarian Personality. New York:
Harper and Row, 1950. Most influential work examining prej-
udice from a psychoanalytic perspective.
Allport, Gordon W. The Nature of Prejudice. Reading, Mass.:
Addison-Wesley, 1954. Though published fifteen years ago, it
remains the definitive social-psychological account of this
topic.
402
Brown, Roger. Social Psychology. New York: Free Press, 1965.
Especially Chapter 10. Summary of Adorno as well as meth-
odological and conceptual criticisms inspired by The Authori-
tarian Personality.
Pettigrew, Thomas F. "Personality and Sociocultural Factors in
Intergroup Attitudes: A Cross-national Comparison," Conflict
Resolution, II, No. 1 (1958), pp. 29-42. Illustrates an appli-
cation of the Smith et al. (see below) functional approach to
racial prejudice.
Rokeach, Milton. Beliefs, Attitudes and Values. San Francisco:
Jossey-Bass, Inc., 1968. Research testing theory of perceived
belief dissimilarity as a determinant of the selection of a target
for prejudice.
. The Open and Closed Mind. New York: Basic Books,
1960. Analysis of the relationship between prejudice and
rigid, dogmatic thinking.
Smith, M. Brewster, Jerome Bruner, and R. W. White. Opinions
and Personality. New York: Wiley, 1956. Discussion of the
psychological functions of social attitudes broader than the
psychoanalytically oriented Adorno.
Prejudice and the Social Context
Bell, Daniel, ed. The Radical Right. New York: Doubleday, 1963.
Contains a number of essays which trace the sources of root-
lessness and status anxiety in American society which may
foster a predisposition to participate in racist social move-
ments.
Bettelheim, Bruno, and Morris Janowitz. Social Change and Prej-
udice. New York: Free Press, 1964. An account of the psy-
chological effects of social change upon racial and religious
intolerance. Chapter 2 reviews studies of the effects of social
mobility upon prejudice.
Blalock, Hubert M. Toward a Theory of Minority Group Rela-
tions. New York: Wiley, 1967. A methodologically sophisti-
cated discussion of personality and prejudice, but primarily
an attempt to systematize "macro" or social system level
theoretical propositions about racial discrimination and inter-
group conflict.
Williams, Robin. Strangers Next Door. Englewood Cliffs, New
Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1964. Description of a series of empiri-
cal studies which examine the effects of both personality and
sociocultural factors upon prejudice.
Public Opinion Surveys of Racial Attitudes
Brink, William, and Louis Harris. Black and White. New York:
Simon and Schuster, 1966. See especially Chapter 5, "White
BIBLIOGRAPHY 403
Attitudes: Political Cross Fire," and Chapter 6, "White Atti-
tudes: The Age-Old Dilemma."
The Negro Revolution in America. New York: Simon
and Schuster, 1964. Especially Chapter 9, "What Whites
Think of Negroes."
Pettigrew, Thomas F. "Parallel and Distinctive Changes in Anti-
Semitic and Anti-Negro Attitudes," in C. H. Stember, ed.,
Jews in the Mind of America. New York: Basic Books, 1966.
A discussion of changing white racial attitudes which con-
vincingly debunks many of the myths concerning the "white
backlash."
Sheatsley, Paul B. "White Attitudes Toward the Negro," Daeda-
lus, XCV, No. 1 (1966), pp. 217-38. Very useful summary
of trends in white racial attitudes over the past twenty-five
years.
Finally, newspaper columns by George Gallup and Lou Harris
and occasional articles in weekly magazines — Newsweek
especially — provide sensitive barometers of changing racial
beliefs and feelings. More detailed information is published
as the Gallup Monthly Political Index.
Chapter VI. White Militancy
There is a relatively small amount of literature on the militant
white. This is especially true in the case of the organization and
structure of contemporary white militant groups. The following
works are helpful:
Albares, Richard P. Nativist Paramilitarism in the United States:
The Minutemen Organization. University of Chicago: Center
for Social Organization Studies, 1968. The most thorough
analysis of the Minutemen.
Bell, Daniel, ed. The Radical Right. Garden City, New York:
Doubleday, Anchor, 1963, 1964. An influential collection of
essays on right-wing politics in the United States, guided by
the questionable assumption of the pathological character of
"extremist" politics.
Chalmers, David M. Hooded Americanism. Chicago: Quadrangle
Paperbacks, 1968. A thorough history of the various Ku
Klux Klans, from Reconstruction to the present.
Higham, John. Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Na-
tivism. New York: Atheneum, 1963. An indispensable study
of nativist thought and action in the United States.
Hofstadter, Richard. The Paranoid Style in American Politics.
New York: Vintage, 1965, 1967. Historical analysis of ex-
treme political ideologies in the United States. Similar in con-
ception to the Bell collection.
Vander Zanden, James W. Race Relations in Transition. New
404
York: Random House, 1965. Contains materials on the mod-
ern Klan and White Citizens' Councils.
Chapter VII. The Police in Protest
The following are part of a growing collection of information
on the police, their actions and interactions:
April 27 Investigating Commission, Dr. Edward J. Sparling,
Chairman. Dissent and Disorder: A Report to the Citizens of
Chicago on the April 27 Peace Parade. Chicago, August 1,
1968. The report of a blue-ribbon committee investigation of
police violence against a peace march in Chicago during
April, 1968.
Black, Donald Jonathan. Police Encounters and Social
Organization: An Observation Study. Unpublished Ph.D. dis-
sertation, Department of Sociology, University of Michigan,
1968. The results of systematic field observation of police-
public contacts.
Bordua, David J. The Police. New York: Wiley, 1967. A collec-
tion of important essays on the contemporary police, it in-
cludes a superb bibliography.
Chevigny, Paul. Police Power: Police Abuses in New York City.
New York: Pantheon, 1969. A lawyer's report on the almost
impossibility of fighting police malpractices through the
courts.
Cray, Ed. The Big Blue Line: Police Power vs. Human Rights.
New York: Coward-McCann, 1967. A compendium of recent
police malpractices.
Jacobs, Paul. Prelude to Riot; A View of Urban America from
the Bottom. New York: Vintage, 1968. A study of the condi-
tions of poverty and bureaucracy which lie behind the griev-
ances of rioters.
Levy, Burton. "Cops in the Ghetto: A Problem of the Police Sys-
tem," American Behavioral Scientist (March-April, 1968),
pp. 31-34. An unhopeful reappraisal of police community
relations efforts.
National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders. Report. New
York: Bantam, 1968. The Kerner Commission's report and
interpretation of 1967 riots.
National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence,
Chicago Study Team. Rights in Conflict. Chicago, November
18, 1968. Also available in trade editions; for example, New
York: Bantam, 1968. Daniel Walker's celebrated report on
the events surrounding the Democratic National Convention
in Chicago, August, 1968.
Niederhoffer, Arthur. Behind the Shield: The Police in Urban Soci-
BIBLIOGRAPHY 405
ety. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1967. A study of
police training and recruitment in New York City.
President's Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration
of Justice. Task Force Report: The Police. Washington, D.C.:
U.S. Government Printing Office, 1967. On the organization,
personnel, resources, and relations with the community.
Reiss, Albert J., Jr. "How Common Is Police Brutality?" Trans-
action (July-August, 1968), pp. 10-19. Based on the same
data as Black's study, this article shows how frequently police
use excessive force.
Skolnick, Jerome H. Justice without Trial. New York: Wiley,
1966. A study of police use of discretionary powers.
Westley, William A. The Police: A Sociological Study of Law,
Custom and Morality. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, De-
partment of Sociology, University of Chicago, 1951. A study
of a Midwestern police department focused on how the po-
lice subculture sustains illegal police practices.
Wilson, James Q. Varieties of Police Behavior. Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1968. A case study of police in
eight communities; their styles of policing.
Chapter VIII. Judicial Response in Crisis
Until the Kerner Report (1968), there was little scholarly inter-
est in the activities of the judicial system in times of civil disorder.
Furthermore, there are few empirical studies of the routine opera-
tions of the criminal courts. The following are examples of the
current work:
April 27 Investigating Commission. Dissent and Disorder. Chi-
cago, August 1, 1968. Independent, critical study of the
suppression of dissent in Chicago.
Baltimore Committee on the Administration of Justice under
Emergency Conditions. Report. Baltimore, May 31, 1968. Re-
port by an official committee on response of judicial system
to the riot in Baltimore, 1968.
Bledsoe, William. "The Administration of Criminal Justice in the
Wake of the Detroit Civil Disorder of July, 1967," Michigan
Law Review (1968). Cited from prepublication galley proofs.
Comprehensive study of response of judicial system to the
Detroit riot, 1967.
Carlin, Jerome E., and Jan Howard. "Legal Representation and
Class Justice," UCLA Law Review, XXII (January, 1965).
Study of accessibility to and use of legal system by the poor.
Chicago Riot Study Committee. Report. Chicago, 1968. Includes
superficial analysis of response of judicial system to the riot
in Chicago, 1968.
District of Columbia Committee on the Administration of Justice
under Emergency Conditions. Interim Report. District of Co-
406
lumbia, May 25, 1968. Official committee report on response
of judicial system to the riot in Washington, D.C., April,
1968.
Gilbert, Ben W. Ten Blocks from the White House: Anatomy of
the Washington Riots 1968. New York: Frederick A. Prae-
ger, 1968. Independent, critical study by a lawyer of judicial
system response to the Washington, D.C., riot.
Kirchheimer, Otto. Political Justice. Princeton: Princeton Univer-
sity Press, 1961. Influential study of the uses of the judicial
system for political ends.
National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders. Report. New
York: Bantam 1968. Especially Chapter 13. Pioneering cri-
tique of the response of the judicial system to the 1967 riots.
Includes statement of principles for future reference.
Piatt, Anthony, and Sharan Dunkle. The Administration of Justice
in Crisis: Chicago, April, 1968. Chicago: Center for Studies
in Criminal Justice, University of Chicago, 1968. Indepen-
dent, critical study by University of Chicago researchers on
response of judicial system to the April riot in Chicago,
1968.
President's Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration
of Justice. Task Force Report: The Courts. Washington: U.S.
Government Printing Office, 1967. Official survey of criminal
courts in the United States.
Skolnick, Jerome H. "Social Control in the Adversary System,"
Journal of Conflict Resolution, XI (1967), pp. 52-70. Empir-
ical study of routine operations of criminal lawyers and
public defenders.
Sudnow, David. "Normal Crimes: Sociological Features of the
Penal Code in a Public Defender's Office," Social Problems,
XII (1965), pp. 255-76. Empirical study of routine opera-
tions of the Public Defender's Office.
Wood, Arthur Lewis. Criminal Lawyer. New Haven, Conn.: Col-
lege and University Press, 1967. Formal survey of back-
ground, interests, and competence of criminal lawyers.
Chapter IX. Social Response to Collective Behavior
Blumer, Herbert. "Collective Behavior," in J. B. Gittler, ed., Re-
view of Sociology: Analysis of a Decade. New York: Wiley,
1957. Classic review of the social-scientific literature on col-
lecting behavior, and a presentation of Blumer's own ap-
proach, stressing the creative character of collective behavior.
Bramson, Leon. The Political Context of Sociology. Princeton,
New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1961. Historical
study of theories of mass society and collective behavior, em-
BIBLIOGRAPHY 407
phasizing differences between European and American con-
ceptions.
Chicago Commission on Race Relations. The Negro in Chicago.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1922. The first major
"riot commission" report, strongly influenced by early col-
lective behavior theories.
Governor's Commission on the Los Angeles Riots. Violence in the
City: an End or a Beginning? Los Angeles: College Book
Store, 1965. The McCone Report on the Watts riot of 1965,
best seen as a case study in official misunderstanding.
Janowitz, Morris. Social Control of Escalated Riots. Chicago:
University of Chicago Center for Policy Studies, 1968. An
example of the application of conventional collective behav-
ior theory to the problem of riot control, and a case study of
the pitfalls in this approach.
National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders. Report. New
York: Bantam Books, 1968. The. Kerner Report, an example
of the strengths and limitations of conventional approaches
to civil disorders.
Smelser, Neil J. Theory of Collective Behavior. New York: Free
Press, 1962. The most prominent recent attempt to provide a
sociological framework for the study of all forms of collec-
tive behavior. An example of the several problems inherent
in the conventional social-scientific approach to collective dis-
order.
Index
AAAS, 53
Abnormality, riots and, 340-42
Abolitionists, 12-13, 128
Abram, Morris B., 120
Academic institutions, See also
student protest; Universities,
war effort and, 102-3
Administration, university, 117-18
AFL-CIO, Vietnam and, 58
Africa
culture of, 139-41
power and politics in, 141, 142,
143
Afro- American Associations, 109
Age differences in prejudice, 189,
198
"Agitational" theory, 262 ff.
Alabama, Ku Klux Klan in, 222
Albany, Georgia, 134, 268
Aliens, 13
vigilantism and, 213
in wartime, 154
Allen, Ethan, 18
Allport, Gordon, 191
American Civil Liberties Union,
247, 297, 300
bad and, 305
American Criminal Law Quart-
erly, 295
American Friends Service Com-
mittee, 35
American Institute of Public
Opinion, xviii
Anti-colonialism, 137 ff.
Anti-ranking protests, 96
Anti-war protest, 27 ff.
administration arguments and,
38 ff.
black Americans in, 61 ff., 136-
37
clergy and, 61
course of war and, 45-47
dialogue and, 65-66
disorganization of, 30 ff.
domestic scene and, 57
"doves" and "hawks," 43-44, 48
draft and, 47-49
future of, 76-78
growth of, reasons for, 35 ff.
media and, 42 ff.
opinion leaders and, 42 ff.
police and, 245
Presidential campaign of 1964
and, 37-38
size of movement, 32
South Vietnam regime and, 54-
56
students in, 59-61, 72, 102
tactics of, 65 ff.
time factor and, 35-37
varieties of protesters, 68 ff.
violence in, 66-68
war crimes issue, 49 ff.
Appalachian farmers, 11
Apple, R. W., 47
Arguedas, Antonio, 56
Arnett, Peter, 52
Asian- American students, 111
Assimilationism in colonialism,
140
Atlantic City convention, 92
Authoritarianism, prejudice and,
192
Backlash
of confrontation, 108
white, 184 ff., 208-9
Bacon, Warren, 247
Bail, 300 ff., 310
408
INDEX 409
Baldwin, James, 155, 241, 250
Baltimore judicial system, 296,
307-8
Barca, Charles, 255
Baugh, Jack, 282
Beall, William, 255
Becker, Howard, xviii
Behavioral theories of riots, 329 ff.
Belief differences, racism and, 195—
97
Bell, Daniel, 105, 123
Berkeley, xvii, 101-2, 113
anti-war movement, 70-71
communists and, 263-64
draft protests, 96, 98
Free Speech Movement, 93,
263-64, 265, 266, 322
police, 255
Presidential campaign of 1964
and, 92-93
rebellion of 1964, 79
SLATE and, 88
Vietnam Day Committee, 94-95
Berrigan, Daniel and Philip, 61
Bettelheim, Bruno, 189, 190, 199
Birch Society, 236
Birth of a Nation, 216
Black, Donald J., 243
Black Codes, 215
Black Metropolis, 294
Black militancy, 125 ff.
African history and, 156
anti-colonialism and, 137-39
anti-war movement and, 61 ff.,
136-37
assimilation and, 140
Berkeley and, 88
civil rights and decline of faith,
129 ff.
community control and, 158 ff.
culture and, 139-41, 154 ff.
direction of, 149 ff.
factionalism, 377
federal intervention and, 133-34
historical violence of, 15
judicial system and, 393
liberals and, 134-35
middle class and, 110
Mississippi Freedom Demo-
cratic Party and, 92, 135, 136
peaceful progress myth and, 9
police and, 152-53, 203, 241 ff.,
275-76
policy-making positions and,
159, 160, 205
politics and, 143-45, 158 ff.
power and, 141-43
"riffraff" theory, 146-48
riots, impact of, 145 ff.
roots of, 128 ff.
satisfaction with life and, 202 ff.
self-defense and, 150 ff.
socioeconomic status and, 204
student movement and, 88, 104,
109-11, 124, 132, 163 ff.
violence and, 127, 144, 145 ff.
white attitudes and, 179 ff. See
also Racism.
youth in, 162 ff.
Black Panther Party, 149, 152-53,
162, 275, 276, 277
"Black Power," 160-61
Black Student Unions, 109
Blackstone Rangers, 168, 171
Blake, Herman, 171, 348
Bledsoe, William, 295
"Blue flu," 273
Blumer, Herbert, xviii
Boston Five, 74
Boston police, 243, 283
Bowers, Sam, 221
Boyle, John, 305
Brandeis University, 120
Breakthrough, 229
Brewster, Kingman, 347
Brink, William, 197
Broek, Ten, 214
Brooklyn
Criminal Court attack, 152, 275,
277
police training, 256
Brown, H. Rap, 9
Brown, Robert McAfee, 61
Brown, Sam, 347
Brown v. Board of Education, 130
Brown University, 98
Bruckner, D. J. R., 281
Burchett, Wilfred, 33
Bureau of Labor Statistics, 203,
253
Campbell, Angus, 198, 202, 206,
208
Cantril, Hadley, 202
Capitalism, paramilitarism and,
236
Carey, Charles, xviii
Carmichael, Stokely, 137
410
Cassese, John, 272, 276-77
Catonsville Nine, 72
Cedar Falls, Operation, 52
Center for the Study of Law and
Society, xvii
Central Intelligence Agency, 56
academic institutions and, 103
Centralization, political, 18
Chalmers, David, xvii
Chemical warfare, 53, 357
Chessman, Caryl, 88
Chicago, 294
anti-war protest, 66, 245, 247
bail policy, 304 ff.
Democratic convention in, 6,
31, 66, 246-48, 274-75
black participation, 173
radicals and, 267
high school protests, 164-65,
167, 168
job training, 175
judicial system, 296, 298, 299-
300, 314, 322
police, 243, 246-48, 265, 274-
75, 278
policy-making positions in, 159,
160, 205
riot of 1968, 146
white militancy in, 228
Yippie threats, 385
Chicago, University of, 93, 96, 123
Chicago Study Team, 6, 66, 67,
146, 246, 265, 267, 274, 278
Chicago Tribune, 265
Child-rearing, permissiveness in,
261
Children's Crusade, 65
Chinese, vigilantism and, 213-14
Chomsky, Noam, 60
Christian Science Monitor, 47
Churns, Michael, 282
Cincinnati, 166
CIO, 15
Cioffi, Lou, 46
Citizens' Councils, 223
Civil rights movement. See also
Black militancy,
decline of faith in, 129 ff.
federal intervention,. 133-34
middle class and, 110
nonviolence, 77, 101, 131-32,
150
in North, 130, 135, 151 ff.
in South, 101, 128 ff.
youth in, 162-63
Civil Rights Commission, 244
Civilian review boards, 278 ff.
Cleaver, Eldridge, 162
Clergy, anti-war protest and, 61
Cleveland, Grover, 14
Cleveland, Ohio, 172, 173
police, 244, 276
Clifford, Clark, 55
Coal industry, violence and, 14
Cobbs, Price, i, ii, xiv, 348
Coffin, William Sloane, 61, 73
Cognitive dissonance, 194
Cohen, Nathan, 148
Cold War
anti-colonialism and, 142
Korea and, 36
Vietnam and, 56
white paramilitarism and, 232-
33
Cole, Robert, xviii
Coleman, Kermit, xvii
Collective behavior, 329 ff.
abnormality and, 340-42
crowds and, 330-31
political ' aspects, 345-46
riots, 331 ff.
control, 342 ff.
official conceptions of, 339 ff.
theories of, 330 ff.
Colleges. See also Student protest;
Universities.
in crisis, 1 1 1 ff.
Colonialism
in America, 11-12
black militancy and, 137 ff.
welfare, 157
Columbia University, 118
"agitators," 262, 264
anti-war movement, 61
community and, 124
Cox Commission and, 80
police at, 105, 123
SDS at, 98, 100, 105, 123
Columbians, 220
Commission on Law Enforcement
and Administration of Justice,
309, 310
Committee for Draft Resistance,
34
Committee for Nonviolent Action,
35
Committee for a Sane Nuclear
Policy, 35
Communists, 35
agitation by, 263-65
Hoover, J. Edgar, on, 263
INDEX 411
paramilitarism and, 232-33
Vietnam and, 39-40, 353
Community Action Patrol, 152
Community control, black mili-
tancy and, 158 ff.
Congress, racism and, 208-9
Conot, Robert, 244
Conspiracy in student pretest, 266,
267
Contagion, social, 334
Control, social, 342 ff.
in student protest, 120 ff.
Con Thien, 46
CORE, 63, 131-32
Counter-Insurgency Council, 235
Counsel, legal, 297 ff., 310 ff.
Courts. See also Judicial systems.
police and, 285
Cox Commission, 80, 245, 262, 263
Craig, David, 348
Crawford, Thomas, xvii
Cray, Ed, xvii
Credibility gap, 102
Crews, Frederick, xvii
Crime
definition of, 292
judicial system and, 323
Crockett, George W., Jr., 301, 302
Crowd control, 7
theories of, 330-31
Cuban interventions, 28
Culture, black militancy and, 139—
41, 154 ff.
Currie, Elliott, xvii
Czechoslovakia, 82, 337
bail policy, 301-3
police, 257-58, 273
riot of 1967, 148, 257-58
white militancy, 228, 229
Detroit Free Press, 302
Diem, Ngo Dinh, 36, 38, 102, 352,
353
Dominican Republic, 28, 351
Douglass, Frederick, 128
Dounis, George, 49
"Doves," 43-44
Dow Chemical Company, 98-99
Draft protest, 47-49
black Americans and, 61 ff.
deferment and, 95, 103-4
judicial system and, 322, 356
in Oakland, 62-63
students in, 47-49, 96, 98, 103-4
Drake, St. Clare, 294
DuBois, W. E. B., 138, 294, 319
Dulles, John Foster, 355, 356-57
East St. Louis, 166
Economy
education and, 113
inertia of, 16
Education
economy and, 113
racism and, 190, 198
Educational Testing Service, 89,
115
Erlanger, Howard, xviii
Ethnocentric preferences, 195-97
Etzioni, Amitai, xvii
Dak To, 46
Deadly force, decision to use, 6-7
Defense, Department of
defoliation and, 53
universities and, 103
Deferments, draft, 103-4
Dellinger, David, 77
Democratic Party
Atlantic City convention, 92
black militants and, 135
Chicago convention, 6, 31, 66,
173, 246-^8, 267, 274-75, 385
Demonstration, peaceful, right of,
23
DePugh, Robert, 235, 237, 238
Detroit, 294
gun registry, 227
judicial system, 295, 296, 298,
299, 311, 314
Faculty, university, 117-18
Fanon, Frantz, 138, 144, 145
Farmers, Appalachian, 11
Federal Bureau of Investigation,
255
Ku Klux Klan and, 223
riots and, 146
Ferber, Michael, 73
Fifth Avenue Peace Parade Com-
mittee, 34
Fight Back, 229
Fi-Po, 284
Flacks, Richard, xvii
Flint, Michigan, 166
Ford, Gerald, 55
Fogelson, Robert M., 147, 148
Forman, James, 110, 155, 161, 169
Forrest, Nathan B., 215
412
Fort Hood Three, 75
Fortas, Abe, 285
Fortune, 80
Fox, Sylvan, 277
France, student movement in, 85
Fraternal Order of Police, 271,
272, 276
Free Speech Movement, 93, 263-
64, 265, 266, 322
Freedom Democratic Party, 92,
135, 136
Freedom Riders, 132
Frick, Henry Clay, 14
Friedenberg, Edgar, 170
Friends Service Committee, 35
Frustration, 334, 337
Fry, John, 171
Fulbright, J. W., 41, 57
Furey, John F., 284
Gallup polls
racism and, 185, 187
Vietnam War and, 44, 48
Garveyism, 129, 138, 140
Geertz, Clifford, 8
Gellhorn, Martha, 50
Geneva Accords of 1954, 38
Germany, student protest in, 85-
86
Ghettos
police and, 241 ff.
political autonomy of, 158 ff.
self-defense in, 151 ff.
GI teach-ins, 77
Ginsburg, David, 348
Girardin, Ray, 273
Goldfarb, Ronald, 299
Goldwater, Barry, 92
police support for, 282
Goodman, Mitchell, 73
Grand Central demonstration, 247
Great Committee of 1856, 213
Griffith, D. W., 216
Grimshaw, Allen, xviii
Group for Research on Social
Policy, 260
Guerrilla theater, 77
Gusfield, Joseph, xvii
Hague Convention, 357
Hanh, Thich Nhat, 39
Harmon, Robert, 282
Hanoi, 50
Happiness, prejudice and, 202 ff.
Harlem
police and, 174
riots
1935: 147, 243, 343
1964: 136
Harrington, John, 268, 348
Harrington, Michael, 91
Harris polls
labor strikes, 23
racism, 187, 197, 205-7
self-defense, 226
Hartz, Louis, 9
Harvey, Frank, 52
Hattiesburg, Mississippi, 221
"Hawks," 43-44, 48
Hayden, Tom, 31, 319, 347
Headley, Chief, 242
Herbicides, 53
Herblock, 47
Hershey, Lewis, 95, 322
Herskovits, Melville, 139
Heyman, Ira M., xvi
High school protests, 163 ff.
Hill, Robert B., 147, 148
Historical background of violence,
8 ff.
Hobsbawn, Eric, 341
Hofstadter, Richard, 199, 238
Hollingworth, Clare, 46
Hoover, J. Edgar, 263, 280
Horowitz, Irving, xvii, 347
House Un-American Activities
Committee, San Francisco
and, 88
Hutchins, Robert, 77
Immigrant groups, 13, 154, 213
Imperiale, Anthony, 224, 229, 231
Imperialism, 56, 137 ff.
Independence, violence and, 20
Indians, American, 10-11
vigilantism and, 213
Individuals, integration as, 21
Institutional violence, 5
Institutionalized behavior, 333
Integration of people as individu-
als, 21
Intellectuals
anti-war protest and, 59
student protest and, 84
International Voluntary Services,
43
International War Crimes Tri-
bunal, 33
Iron Triangle campaign, 52
Islam, Nation of, 169-70
Jail facilities, 302 ff.
Janowitz, Morris, 189, 190, 199
Jefferson, Thomas, 15
Jencks, Christopher, 121
Job training in Chicago, 175
John Birch Society, 236
Johnson, Lyndon B.
campaign of 1964, 37
deceitf ulness of spokesmen, 102
Dominican Republic and, 28
SDS support for, 92
Vietnam and, 354
bombing policy, 45
legality of intervention, 40
Jones, LeRoi, 138
Judicial system, 293 ff.
bail in, 300 ff., 310-11
counsel and, 297 ff., 310 ff.
disenchantment with, 316 ff.
draft resistance and, 322
lack of preparation, 295-97
law enforcement and, 313 ff.
neutrality and, 321
police and, 285, 287-88, 290
recommendations, 324—26
routine vs. riot procedures, 308-
10
Junction City, Operation, 52
Kadish, Sanford, xviii
Kahin, George McT., 54
Kalven, Harry, Jr., 247
Katzenbach, Nicholas, 41
Kennedy, Robert F., 5, 45, 46, 58
Kennedy, John F., 91
Kerner Report, 3
black militancy and, 126, 147,
162, 170, 175
collective behavior and, 334,
336, 343
judicial response and, 295, 298,
301, 304, 319, 325
police and, 242, 245, 257
racism and, 179, 198, 201
white militancy and, 227
Kerr, Clark, 102, 117
Khe Sanh, 46
King, Martin Luther, Jr., 56, 61,
131, 149, 150
aftermath of death, 153, 164,
168, 172, 294, 304
INDEX 413
draft and, 63
Knox, P. C, 28
Korean War, 29, 36
Kornhauser, William, xviii, 330
Kroninger, Robert, 322
Ku Klux Klan, 150, 214 ff.
First World War era, 217
membership, 222-23
organizations, 220 ff.
Ky, Nguyen Cao, 33, 55
Labor
historical violence of, 14-15
strikes, beginnings of, 23
Vietnam War and, 58
Ladies' Home Journal, 50
Laino, Leon, 285
Law, disenchantment with, 316 ff.
Law Enforcement Group, 277, 282,
284-85
Lawyers, 297 ff., 310 ff.
"Leaders" in mass protest, 262 ff.
Leary, Howard R., 277
Le Bon, Gustave, 331
leDivelec, Marie-Helene, xvii
Lee, Maurice, 306
Legal system. See also Judicial
system.
police role in, 269-70
Lemberg Center, 164
Leonard, Nancy, xviii
Levy, Howard, 43, 75
Lewis, John, 134
Liberals, black militancy and, 134-
35
Liebowitz, Martin, xvii
Life, 22
Lincoln, Abraham, 28
Lincoln Park, 68
Lindsay, John V., 279, 283, 286
Lipset, S. M., 82, 83
Liuzzo, Mrs. Viola, 220
Lockman, Ronald, 43, 64, 75
London police, 248
London Daily Telegraph, 46
Looter, concept of, 7
Los Angeles
guns in, 227
high school protests, 164
police, 247, 261
socioeconomic status in, 204
Riot Study, 148
Los Angeles Times, 14, 281
Lovestone, Jay, 58
Lowell, Robert, 60
414
Luce, Don, 43
Lynching in South, 216
Lynd, Staughton, 60
MACE, 69
Maddox, 41
Mailer, Norman, 60
Malcolm X, 63, 128, 136, 142, 149,
151
Marks, Sharon Dunkle, xvii
Masotti, Louis, 350
Mass protest
behavioral theories of, 329 ff.
institutions and, 4
police and, 262 ff.
Mattick, Hans W., 336
Matza, David, xviii
Mayer, Henry, 347
Mayer, Jean, 53
May wood, Illinois, 165-66
McCabe, Charles, 275
McCarthy, Eugene, 65
McComb, Mississippi, 136
McCormack, Sam, xviii
McDermott, John, 77
McNamara, John H., 252
McNamara, Robert S., 54, 64
McNanamon, Joseph F., 276
Meany, George, 58
Media, Vietnam War and, 42 ff.
Mensh, Maurice, 254
Messinger, Sheldon, xvii
Mexican-Americans
students, 111
vigilantism and, 213
Mexico, annexation of, 28
Miami police, 242
Michigan State University, 102
Midwest, Minutemen in, 233, 235
Middle class
civil rights and, 110
confrontation tactics and, 108
white militancy and, 227
Military agencies, academic co-
operation with, 102-3, 121
Mills, C. Wright, 89
Milwaukee Fourteen, 72
Mining industry, violence in, 14-15
Minorities
higher education and, 114
power and, 142
Minutemen, 232 ff.
Misner, Gordon, 347
Mississippi, 151
Freedom Democratic Party, 92,
135, 136
Ku Klux Klan in, 220 ff.
Mobility, social, prejudice and,
199-200
Mohr, Charles, 39, 51
Molly Maguires, 14
Monroe, North Carolina, 151
Morrison, Norman, 70
Moynihan Report, 135
Muhammed, Elijah, 131
Multiversity, 93, 117
Napalm, 50
Natchez, Mississippi, 221
National Advisory Commission on
Civil Disorders. See Kerner
Report.
National Association for the Ad-
vancement of Colored People,
130-31
high school protests and, 165
in Mississippi, 221
self-defense and, 151
National Guard troops, 172, 173
in Detroit, 257
in Newark, 382
National Liberation Front
communism and, 39-40
tactics of. 52
National Mobilization Committee
to End the War in Vietnam,
33, 34, 68
National Opinion Research Center,
xviii, 181, 186, 188
National States Rights Party, 220,
238
National Student Association, 79
Negroes. See also Black militancy.
peaceful progress myth and, 9
Nelson, Gaylord, 41
Neshoba County, 151, 221, 223
Neutrality of justice, 321
New left activist tactics, 107-8
New Politics convention, 64
New York. See also Columbia
University,
high school protests, 168
Minutemen in, 234, 235
police, 247, 251
attacks on, 174
authority and, 276-77
civilian review board and,
279-80
politics and, 272, 282, 283, 284
INDEX 415
salary of, 252-53
strikes, 273
training, 256-57
violence, 247, 275
New York City College, 93
New York Times, 3, 39, 47, 50, 51,
54, 248, 257, 277
Newark, 294
judicial system, 314
bail, 303-4
National Guard in, 382
white militancy in, 227, 229-31
Newark Evening News, 304
Newsweek, 187
Newton, Huey P., 152, 276
Nhu, Madame, 36
Niederhoffer, Arthur, 252
Nitze, Paul, 51
Nkrumah, Kwame, 138
Nonconformity
police and, 261-62
riots and, 332
Nonviolence, 77
civil rights movement and, 101,
131-32, 150
North
abolitionists, 12-13
civil rights movement, 130, 135,
151 ff.
prejudice in, 193
riots in, 145 ff.
white militancy in, 224 ff.
North Carolina, 151, 223
North Ward Citizens Committee,
229-31
Oakland, California, 62-63, 69
Black Panther Party and, 152,
153, 276
police, 253-54, 360
Official violence, 6-7, 18, 154
in South, 220
Order, definition of, 5
Orientals in California, 214
Pacification in Vietnam, 55
Pacifists, 68
Pan-Africanism, 140
Panic, 332
Paramilitarism, white, 231 ff.
Parks, Mrs. Rosa, 130-31
Paterson police, 382
Patriotic Party, 237
Patrolmen's Benevolent Asociation,
272, 276, 279-80, 283
Peace movement. See Anti-war
protest.
Peaceful demonstration, rights of,
23
Peaceful progress, myth of, 9
Penn, Lemuel, 220
Permissiveness, 261
Perry, Richard E., 50
Perry, Thomas O., 53
Personality, prejudice and, 192 ff.
Peterson, Richard, 89
Pettigrew, Thomas, 184, 193, 203
Philadelphia
bail policy, 310
police, 284
Philadelphia Negro, 294
Philippine nationalism, 28
Pittsburg, California, 166
Piatt, Anthony, xvii
Police, 108, 241 ff.
activism
for material benefits, 272-74
for social policy, 274 ff.
"agitators" and, 262
anti-war protesters and, 245 ff.
black views of, 152-53, 203,
241 ff., 275-76
federal government and, 290
judicial analogy, 287-88
manpower problems, 252 ff.
mass protest and, 262 ff.
military analogy, 286-87
nonconformity and, 261-62
permissive child-rearing and, 261
political involvement, 268 ff.,
281 ff.
predicament of, 249 ff.
resources of, 252 ff.
retirement of, 254-55
review boards and, 278 ff.
revolt against higher authority,
276-78
role of, 269-70
"rotten apple" theory and, 259 ff.
salaries, 252-53
solidarity of, 278 ff.
sporadic violence against, 174
strikes, 273
student protests and, 105, 123,
245 ff., 262 ff.
training, 255 ff.
views of protesters, 258-59
violence of, 246 ff., 274-76
white views of, 203
416
Police Chief, The, 263, 264
Police Officers Association, 283
Politics
black militancy and, 143-45,
158 ff.
centralization of, 18
inertia in, 16
police involvement, 268 ff.,
281 ff.
riots and, 345-46
violence in American history,
8ff.
white paramilitarism and, 237-
38
Polls
on labor strikes, 23
on racism, 183 ff., 197, 205-7
on self-defense, 226
on Vietnam, 44, 48
Poor People's March, 206
Port Chicago, California, 34
Port Huron SDS convention, 90
Poverty, student protest and, 101,
104
Power
black militancy and, 141-43
structure of university, 121-22
Prejudice. See also Racism.
decline in, 181
Presidential campaign of 1964,
92-93, 282
Press, Vietnam War and, 43
Price, Cecil, 221
Progress, peaceful, myth of, 9
Progressive Labor Party, 33
Protest
contemporary, 21 ff.
definition problems, 3 ff.
force to control, 6-7
historical background, 8 ff.
Proviso East High, 165-66
Racism, 133, 179 ff.
age differences and, 189, 198
backlash and, 184 ff., 208-9
belief differences and, 195-97
Congress and, 208-9
decline in, 182
education and, 190, 198
personality and, 192 ff.
politics and, 160
protests and, 104-5, 205-6
religion and, 190-91
riots and, 206-7
satisfaction with life and, 202 ff.
social change and, 197 ff.
socioeconomic status and, 189-
90, 199-200, 204
students and, 104-5
subgroup differences in, 188 ff.
surveys of, 183 ff.
urbanization and, 189, 198
widening gap in, 201 ff.
Radicals
police and, 265, 267
student movement and, 84, 89,
107-8
Railroad strikes, 14
Randolph, A. Philip, 131
Raskin, Marcus, 60, 73
Redbook, 50
Redmon, Washington, 235
Reisman, David, 121
Reiss, Albert J., Jr., 243
Religion, racism and, 190-91
Republican Blue Book, 33, 44
Research, economy and, 113
RESIST, 34
Resistance, The, 34
Resistance tactics, student, 105 ff.
Reston, James, 22
Review boards, civilian, for police,
278 ff.
Rhee, Syngman, 36
"Riffraff" theory, 145 ff.
"Right-wing" militancy, 236
Rights in Conflict, 67
Riots
behavioral theories of, 330 ff.
control of, 258, 334, 342 ff.
feedback to, 301
impact of, 145 ff.
inappropriateness of, 336
liberals and, 135-36
opinions on causes of, 207
participants in, 146 ff., 339
racism and, 206-7
vigilantism and, 217
white reactions to, 185
Rizzo, Frank L., 284, 286
Rokeach, Milton, 195, 197
Roper Research Associates, xviii
Ross, Michael, 187, 191
ROTC, black youth and, 170
"Rotten apple" theory, 259 ff.
Rubenstein, Richard, xvii
Rudd, Mark, 100
Rusk, Dean, 39, 56, 67
Russell, Bertrand, 33
INDEX 417
Rustin, Bayard, 136
Saigon, 39, 46, 54
St. Louis, 174, 251, 280
Salisbury, Harrison, 33, 50, 51
San Francisco, 67
HUAC demonstration, 88
judicial system, 321
police, 254-55, 282
vigilantism, 213
San Francisco Chronicle, 254, 282
San Francisco State College, 111
Sane Nuclear Policy, 35
Saturday Evening Post, 251
Schell, Jonathan, 52
Schuman, Howard, 198, 202, 206,
208
Schurmann, Franz, 60
SDS. See Students for a Demo-
cratic Society.
Selective Service, 49
deferments, 103-4
Qualification Test, 95
Self -Anchoring Striving Scale, 202
Self-defense, black militancy and,
150 ff.
Selznick, Philip, xvii
Senate Preparedness Committee,
56
Senate Republican Policy Com-
mittee, 44
Shelly v. Kraemer, 130
Shelton, Robert, 218, 220
Shoup, David M., 76
Skolnick, Alexander Nathan, xviii
Skolnick, Arlene, xviii
Skolnick, Jerome H., ii
Slavery, 128
Smelser, Neil, xviii, 332
Smith, Bruce L. R., xvi
SNCC. See Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee.
Social responses, 329 ff.
anti-war movement and, 58 ff.
control, 120 ff., 334
police activism and, 274 ff.
prejudice and, 197 ff.
Social Service Academy, 291
Socioeconomic status
paramilitarism and, 236
racism and, 189-90, 199-200,
204
Sons of Liberty, 12
South
Black Codes of, 215
civil rights movement in, 101,
128
historical violence in, 12-13, 19
KKK in, 214 ff., 220 ff.
lynching in, 216
prejudice in, 193
self-defense of blacks in, 150-51
slavery in, 128
SNCC and, 110
white violence in, 12-13, 133,
218 ff.
South Vietnam, 54 ff. See also
Anti-war protest; Vietnam
War.
Southern Christian Leadership
Conference, 63, 169
Sparling Commission, 245, 247
Speiglman, Richard, xviii
Spellman, Cardinal, 61
Spock, Benjamin, 73
Stark, Rodney, xvii
Starr, Roger, 124
State Department White Papers,
36, 38
Stevenson, Adlai, 90
Stokes, Carl B., 244, 276
Stop the Draft Week, 62-63, 69
Stouffer, Samuel, 197
Strain, social, 333-34, 337
Strikes, labor, beginnings of, 23
Student Mobilization Committee,
34
Student protest, 79 ff.
anti-war, 59-61, 72
black, 88, 104, 109-11, 124, 132,
163 ff.
confrontation tactics, 105 ff.
contemporary, 87 ff.
control measures, 120 ff.
crisis of colleges and, 1 1 1 ff.
decision - making participation
and, 122
draft, 103-4
faculty and administration and,
117-18
fragmentation of university in-
terests and, 115
in France, 85
high school, 163 ff.
idealism and, 82
international perspective, 81 ff.
"normal channels" and, 91
optimism in, 91-92
phases of movement, 99-100
418
police and, 105, 123, 245 ff.,
262 ff.
power and influence in, 97, 119
radicalism, 84, 89, 107-8
reasons underlying, 107-8
response to, 120 ff.
role of higher education and,
112ff.
syndicalism, 97
Third World, 109-11, 124, 149
trustees and, 115-17
in West Germany, 85-86
Student Nonviolent Coordinating
Committee, 131-32, 134
draft and, 63
formation of, 88
middle class and, 110
Mississippi Freedom Democratic
Party and, 92
Vietnam and, 136-37
white exclusion from, 157
Students for a Democratic Society,
33
aims of, 89-90
anti-Dow demonstrations, 98-99
class consciousness of, 97
at Columbia, 98, 100, 105, 123
draft and, 96, 98
Johnson (L. B.) and, 92
membership, 89, 364
1963 optimism of, 91
phases of movement, 99-100
Port Huron convention, 90
Students for Freedom, 164
Supreme Court decisions
civil rights, 130
defense counsel, 312
draft resistance, 356
Surveys of racism, 183 ff.
Syndicalism, student, 97
Tarbi, Frank, 73
Teach-ins (1965), 59, 94-95
Television, Vietnam War and, 42
Tension, social, 333-34, 337
Tet Offensive, 47
Third World Liberation Front,
109-11, 124, 149
Thoreau, Henry, 28
Tocsin, 264
Tonkin Gulf Resolution, 41
Trenton, New Jersey, 167
True, Arnold, 76
Trustees, university, 115-17
Truth Teams, 59
Tucker, Sterling, 145, 348
Turner Joy, 41
Tuscaloosa, Alabama, 220
Tuskegee Institute, 132, 216
Twain, Mark, 28
United Klans of America, 220
United Nations, anti-colonialism
and, 142^3
Universities. See also Student pro-
test,
changing roles of, 112 ff.
as community, 112
in crisis, 111 ff.
dialogue in, 91
military agencies and, 102-3,
121
faculty and administration, 117—
18
fragmentation of interests, 115
power structure, 121-22
response to protest, 120 ff.
trustees, 115-17
University of California, Berkeley.
See Berkeley.
University of Michigan Survey Re-
search Center, xviii
Urban League, 134, 145
Urbanization
racism and, 189, 198
white militancy and, 224 ff.
Ursin, Edmund C, xvii
U. S. News and World Report, 47
Vasquez de Ayllon, Lucas, 128
Vietnam Commencements, 72
Vietnam Day Committee, 94
Vietnam Summer, 69
Vietnam War. See also Anti-war
protest.
black militancy and, 136-37
chemical warfare, 53
Communism and, 39-40
course of, 45-47
defoliation, 53
desertions, 46
draft, 47-49. See also Draft pro-
test
elections and, 352-53
Korean War vs., 29, 36
legality of intervention, 40
regimes, 54 ff.
INDEX 419
student movement and, 102
Vigilantism, 211 ff.
Violence. See also Riots.
anti-war protest and, 65 ff.
black militancy and, 127, 144,
145 ff.
definition of, 4-6
institutional, 5
nonviolence vs., 77
official, 6-7, 18, 154, 220
police, 245 ff., 274-76
political, in history, 8 ff.
sporadic acts of, 174
usefulness of, 341
white, 210 ff. See also Whites,
militancy of.
Wagner Act, 15
Walker, David, 128
Wall Street Journal, 45
Wallace, George, 58
War crimes issue, 49 ff .
War on Poverty, 101, 104
Warren, Michigan, 229
Washington, D. C, 294
crime in, 309-10
high school protests, 166
judicial system, 296, 299
bail policy, 308
peace marches, 88, 134
police, 243, 254
Poor People's March on, 206
Washington Post, 3
Washington Report, 264
WASPs, 13-14, 211
Watts riot, 147, 152, 294, 339-40
Welfare colonialism, 157
West Frankfort, Illinois, 217
West German students, 85-86
Westley, William A., 243
White, Kevin, 283, 286
White Knights of the Ku Klux
Klan, 220 ff.
White Papers, State Department,
36, 38
Whites, 13-14, 211
backlash, 184 ff., 208-9
colonialism and, 137 ff.
culture and, 156-58
dominance in politics, 143
militancy of, 210 ff.
in North, 224 ff.
paramilitarism, 231 ff.
in South, 12-13, 133, 218 ff.
vigilantism, 211 ff.
racial, attitudes of, 179 ff. See
also Racism,
satisfaction with life, 202 ff.
student, 85
Wilmington, Delaware, 173
Wilson, James Q., 251, 268
Wilson, O. W., 250
Witnesses at Task Force hearings,
347-48
Women, militance of, 15
Wood, Robert, 225
Working class. See also Labor.
militancy of white, 224 ff.
Wui Nhon, 50
Yippie threats in Chicago, 385
Young, Whitney, 134
Younge, Sammy, Jr., 132
Zinn, Howard, 60, 134
About The Authors
Jerome H. Skolnick is presently in residence at the
Center for the Study of Law and Society, University of
California, Berkeley, and has just accepted an appoint-
ment as Professor of Sociology, University of California,
San Diego. He is on leave from the University of Chicago,
where he is Associate Professor of Sociology. He is also
Senior Social Scientist, American Bar Foundation, and
Research Associate, Center for Studies in Criminal Jus-
tice, University of Chicago Law School.
He has taught at the University of California, Berkeley,
the Yale Law School, and the New York University Law
School. During 1965-66 he was Carnegie Fellow in Social
Science at Harvard Law School.
Born in 1931, he attended public schools in New York
City, graduated in 1952 from the City College of New
York, and was granted a Ph.D. in Sociology by Yale
University in 1957.
He is the author of Justice Without Trial: Law En-
forcement in a Democratic Society (1968), and his many
articles include an analysis of trends in American soci-
ology of law, an analysis of police-community relations
written for the National Advisory Commission on Civil
Disorders, and a report on law and morals prepared for
the President's Commission on Law Enforcement and
Administration of Justice.
William H. Grier and Frice M. Cobbs are Assistant
Professors of Psychiatry at the University of California
Medical Center, San Francisco, and are psychiatrists in
private practice. Their book Black Rage was published
in 1968.
UNIV. OF FLORIDA
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