The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
NEW HAVEN BURNED
1967 riots: 4 tense days that began ‘evolution’ of blacks
“It was very frightening. I thought it was very tragic. Most people didn’t know what generated this [the riot.”] — Johnny Dye
NEW HAVEN » In the late 1960s, race riots had exploded in Watts, Chicago, Bedford-Stuyvesant and Detroit, but New Haven felt it was different. It was not supposed to happen here.
That changed on Aug. 19, 1967, when a white restaurant owner shot a Puerto Rican man who had come at him with a knife.
It set off four days of rioting in the Model City of Mayor Richard C. Lee, where millions in federal funds had been used to raze large swaths of the city, particularly in the Hill, with the lofty goal of eliminating the slums.
What was left behind, however, as the Italian-America, Irish-American and Jewish residents were forced out, was substandard housing, fewer jobs, older schools and a concentration of poor blacks who had yet to establish a strong political base as the national civil rights movement was unfolding.
Fires, vandalism and looting devastated commercial property in that neighborhood, particularly on Congress Avenue, but it also spread to parts of Dixwell, Newhallville and Fair Haven.
More than 200 state troopers joined the city’s 430-person Police Department with many working round-the-clock. The Fire Department answered more than 100 alarms and sought police protection as they were pelted with objects.
The arrests totaled more than 500, the majority of them for violating a multi-day curfew established by Lee. There were no deaths.
On the 50th anniversary of that turmoil, people who viewed it firsthand reflected on what they saw and felt during that week.
Frightened residents
When Johnny Dye talks about the 1967 riots, what comes to mind immediately is his then very young family.
“We had a 1-year-old baby. We had a 2-year-old baby. We had a 5-year-old,” Dye said.
At the time, Dye, his wife and children lived in a three-family house on Gilbert Street near Congress Avenue, where they could hear the engines rushing to fires.
“It was very frightening. I thought it was very tragic. Most people didn’t know what generated this [the riot],” Dye recalled.
On the short block there were a few houses and a textile factory.
“I was panicked,” Dye said, concerned that someone would set that business on fire, which would likely spread down the block. “Everything was so close together. Old wooden houses. They burn like paper. It was too close for comfort.”
Dye worked the 3:30 p.m.-to-midnight shift at Pratt & Whitney in North Haven and his wife was afraid to be left alone with the children.
“I took my wife and three kids and left them with fam--
FROM PAGE 1 ily in Westchester County,” Dye said. “They could burn the house and everything in it. That was all right as long as my family was safe.
“To this day, I don’t know what was accomplished by this,” Dye said of the destruction. “It was an experience that I will never forget.”
Four days after it started, Dye picked up his family and brought them back home. His house was safe.
“I give a lot of credit to people in the Fire Department and law enforcement. I felt bad for those guys who were there practically round the clock,” Dye said.
Maxine Sumrell, a neighbor of Dye’s, who now lives on the same Arthur Street block as Dye, said she was about to go on a date with her future husband on Aug. 19, 1967, “when we saw all these state police. They came in uniform with rifles. I said, ‘I guess we are not going to the movies.’”
“We just stayed with family. We did a lot of praying. I remember that. Sometimes prayers are the only thing you can hold onto,” Sumrell remembered. connected to their community.”
Also, “You go back to the period and there was a lot going on in terms of groups self-identifying, interested in themselves and their community. There was a lot of community organizing going on and people began expressing urgencies in terms of power.”
While the frustrations of blacks turned violent in 1967, DeStefano said that underlying the riots was an evolution among African Americans toward self-empowerment, which can be seen now in the support of undocumented Latino immigrants by “a community that’s pretty well organized, resilient, [with] the ability to act on their own behalf without a governmental actor to bring them together.” which was followed by more unrest in 1968 when the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, Rice said there was a feeling of unease.
There were multiple breakins at the market, so many that his father could no longer get insurance and had to absorb the losses himself.
Rice said they would have stayed if the city had fixed up the properties around them. When that didn’t happen, they finally moved in 1979 after their father got ill.