Trump’s comment has a racist history
President’s tweet about shooting looters dates back to ’60s racial unrest
WASHINGTON—U.S. President Donald Trump’s use of the phrase “when the looting starts, the shooting starts,” in a tweet about the protests over George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis, hearkens back more than five decades to one of the most tumultuous periods in race relations in recent U.S. history, when Black neighbourhoods in cities from Newark, N.J., to Los Angeles erupted in violence sparked by a history of racism and sustained poverty.
The first known use of the phrase came from Walter Headley, the Miami police chief, in December 1967, after he dispatched police officers carrying shotguns to patrol the centre city during a wave of violent crime. Headley’s tough anticrime tactics, including a stopand-frisk policy and the use of dogs to patrol majority-Black neighbourhoods, had long been controversial in the city.
According to reports from the Miami Herald and other outlets at the time, Headley said the city had been spared major racial unrest and looting in a year of violence because he had let it be known that “when the looting starts, the shooting starts.”
“This is war,” he said. “We don’t mind being accused of police brutality,” he added. “They haven’t seen anything yet.”
The remarks were quickly condemned by Roy Wilkins, then the executive secretary of the NAACP, who said Headley was “on the wrong track.” The field secretary of the group’s Florida chapter, Marvin Davies, said, “This man has no place in a position of public trust.”
Headley repeated the phrase in August 1968 in response to riots in the predominantly Black Liberty City neighbourhood during the Republican National Convention, which was being held in Miami. Criticized for not returning from a vacation to address the situation, he said of his officers, “They know what to do. When the looting starts, the shooting starts.”
Headley made the statements at the peak of a years-long wave of racial violence in U.S. cities. The largest and most costly protest took place in August 1965 in Los Angeles’ Watts neighbourhood after a scuffle between white police officers and two Black men who were pulled over in a traffic stop. The ensuing riots led to 34 deaths, 1,032 injuries and $40 million (U.S.) in property damage.
But the disturbances peaked in 1967 and 1968, two years that saw more than 150 race riots. In the worst of them, in Cleveland and Detroit, many people died and thousands were injured. Protests flared again in the spring of 1968 after Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was gunned down in Memphis, Tenn. Many white authorities blamed the outbreaks on socalled outside agitators or radical Black political groups bent on fomenting violence. But a commission appointed by U.S. president Lyndon B. Johnson in July 1967 to study the causes of the riots flatly rejected that the following March, saying white racism was the root of the problem.
The thick report by the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders — the Kerner Commission, named after its chairman, Illinois governor Otto Kerner — warned “our nation is moving toward two societies, one Black, one white — separate and unequal.”
Miami’s Liberty City erupted in violence again in May 1980, after an all-white jury in Tampa, Fla., acquitted four white police officers in the fatal beating of a Black insurance executive. In a report on the riots, the Ford Foundation called them unprecedented and likened them to slave uprisings during the Civil War. “Compared to Miami,” the report stated, “the 1960s riots were merely a warning about the hostility that lay beneath the surface rather than the outpouring itself.”