Black Music Sunday: 1967’s long, hot summer of rebellion

It’s been a very hot summer so far, and not just because of climate change. We’re faced with openly racist hostility, revisionist spewings about slavery being good for Black people, and a host of other grave political concerns politically. As I pondered this week’s installment of Black Music Sunday, I recalled another long, hot summer—more than five decades ago in 1967—and I realized how many of the folks in my life today weren’t even born then. They don’t remember when urban centers across America burned—literally. 

Though often portrayed as race riots, many historians have also described these events as uprisings and rebellions. The uprisings took place in Atlanta, Boston, Cincinnati, Buffalo, Tampa, Birmingham, Chicago, Detroit, Minneapolis, Milwaukee, Newark, New York City, Plainfield, Rochester, Toledo … the list is long—there were more than 150 rebellions that summer.

One major result of the unrest was the incisive “Kerner Commission Report,” the important conclusions of which were essentially ignored. The aftermath of the summer of ‘67 also created a shift in music, which became more militant, more “Black and proud,” and also highlighted conditions in the Black “ghettos” of the United States.

RELATED STORY: Florida tries to defend its revisionist history on slavery

Black Music Sunday is a weekly series highlighting all things Black music. With nearly 170 stories (and counting) covering performers, genres, history, and more, each featuring its own vibrant soundtrack, I hope you’ll find some familiar tunes and perhaps an introduction to something new.

First, about those Black “ghettos.” Historian Daniel B. Schwartz wrote about the changing use of the word “ghetto” for TIME Magazine in 2019.

A 1948 report on Segregation in Washington—published the same year that the Supreme Court banned judicial enforcement of restrictive covenants in Shelley v. Kraemer—contained a chapter on housing segregation entitled “Ghettos in the Capital.” The authors made no bones about their intent to evoke the specter of the ghettos of the Holocaust in the way they referred to the residential segregation of blacks. “Ghetto is an ugly word,” one chapter opened. “To a Dane it is ugly. To any Nazi victim. To anyone who saw how Hitler placed a yellow mark on Jews so they could be made to live apart, suffer apart, die apart. To an American it is ugly.”

The new black referent for “ghetto” truly came to the fore in the 1960s, as urban race riots starting in the middle of the decade vaulted segregated areas onto the front pages of newspapers and onto television screens across the nation and the globe. Digital history resources reveal how usage of the word “ghetto” soared in the 1960s and 1970s and how phrases like “Negro ghetto” or, increasingly, “black ghetto” came to eclipse “Jewish ghetto.”

The African-American psychologist Kenneth Clark’s 1965 book Dark Ghetto probably did more than any other individual work to connect “ghetto” and “black” in the mainstream media. The title of the book was doubly appropriate. For Clark, the darkness of the “dark ghetto” was evident not only in the skin color of its inhabitants but in the fact that he saw such areas as bleak, desperate places, devoid of faith in a better future and awash in self-destructive behavior and social vices, even as they were defended by others as the home of vibrant culture and community.

The transference of the word “ghetto” from Jewish to black enclaves stirred controversy. Some pointed to the lack of statutory laws restricting African Americans to prescribed areas, but that argument overlooked a whole range of state actions—from the enforcement of restrictive covenants before 1948, to support for redlining and the denial of home insurance for blacks in the suburbs, to the building of public housing in already segregated districts—that made black residential concentration far more than purely a case of de facto segregation.

One of the pieces of music used in the soundtrack was Lou Rawls’ “Dead End Street” His monologue specifically refers to Chicago, but the songs could be applied to every Black urban area at the time.

Historian Alice George wrote about the Kerner Commission’s results for Smithsonian Magazine in 2018:

Many Americans blamed the riots on outside agitators or young black men, who represented the largest and most visible group of rioters. But, in March 1968, the Kerner Commission turned those assumptions upside-down, declaring white racism—not black anger—turned the key that unlocked urban American turmoil.

[…]

“White society,” the presidentially appointed panel reported, “is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it.” The nation, the Kerner Commission warned, was so divided that the United States was poised to fracture into two radically unequal societies—one black, one white.

[…]

… it is rare for a president to offer no public endorsement of a report produced by his own hand-picked commission. Still, that’s what LBJ did.

The president had chosen moderate commission members because he believed they would support his programs, seek evidence of outside agitation, and avoid assigning guilt to the very people who make or break national politicians—the white middle class. The report blindsided him.

[…]

Backlash was immediate. Polls showed that 53 percent of white Americans condemned the claim that racism had caused the riots, while 58 percent of black Americans agreed with the findings.

The last surviving member of the Kerner Commission, former U.S. Sen. Fred Harris, spoke with Bloomberg three years ago about the findings—and how they hold true today.

For a deeper dive, check out “AMERICA ON FIRE: The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellion Since the 1960s,” by Elizabeth Hinton.

From the 2021 New York Times review of the book, by Peniel E. Joseph:

 

Through 10 crisply written and lucidly analytical chapters, Hinton reframes the conventional understanding of the long hot summers of the 1960s and their aftermath. She begins by challenging the common use of the term “riot” to describe the civil disturbances that threatened to shatter America at the time. Hinton reminds us that the racial massacres that formed an archipelago of Black suffering and death from Springfield, Ill., in 1908 to Chicago in 1919 and Tulsa, Okla., in 1921, were riots instigated by whites, although they remain unlabeled as such.

Indeed, she argues, the violent clashes, often with the police, that have broken out in Black communities from the 1960s up to the present “can only be properly understood as rebellions” — part of “a sustained insurgency.” “America on Fire” persuasively expands the chronology of these actions from a discrete six- or seven-year period in the ’60s to encompass, in evolving stages, every decade since. By her calculation — she includes a 25-page timeline of dates and locations — between July 1964 and April 2001 nearly 2,000, often violent, urban rebellions erupted in the United States in response to the racially biased policing of housing projects, public schools, parks, neighborhoods and street corners.

America learned the exact wrong lessons from the burning embers of Watts, Newark and Detroit, setting the stage for a shift from the War on Poverty to a War on Crime funded by the 1968 Safe Streets Act, which put the federal government in the business of crime control and encouraged local police departments to identify potential criminals before they committed crimes — in short, to try to manage problems caused by systemic racism beyond residents’ control.

Hinton recounts, in finely grained detail, how new resources devoted to policing Black communities in cities such as York, Pa., and Stockton, Calif., exacerbated the racial segregation, disinvestment, violence and punishment that would permanently scar the entire nation.