50 years on, Ferguson is the new face of racial unrest
THE DETAILS are still disputed, but the essential facts are not: one day in a long, hot summer, a white American police officer pulled a gun on a black teenager, shot him dead with many bullets and set off a ferocious riot.
For a week, thousands of black people took to the streets, attacking police, starting fires and looting shops. One person died, more than 100 were injured.
The violence had erupted after 15- year- old James Powell was killed by Lieutenant Jack Gilligan outside an apartment building in Harlem. The date was July 16, 1964.
The Harlem race riots 50 years ago have been historically overshadowed by more riots later that summer in Philadelphia, Rochester and Chicago, and then by the devastating Watts riots in California the next year. Yet the violence sparked by the killing of Powell was the catalytic event for what followed, the template for the modern American race riot repeated with grim familiarity down the decades from Harlem in 1964, to the Rodney King riots of 1992, to the violence, protests and continuing unrest today in Ferguson, Missouri.
These repeated explosions not only start in the same way — a bloody confrontation between a young black man and a white officer igniting the dry tinder of racial inequality — but end in depressingly similar fashion: an investigative commission, a determination to improve black lives, then inaction.
Polls show that the riots in Ferguson are viewed very differently from each side of the racial divide: from the white perspective, this is a problem of law and order; from the black vantage point, it is a racial issue.
A new Pew survey indicates that while 80 per cent of blacks believe the killing of Michael Brown raises important issues about race, less than half as many whites agree; blacks are more than twice as likely to distrust whatever emerges from the promised investigation.
In other words, America’s deep and often unacknowledged racial divide is reflected not only in the causes of the riots, but in the wider public reactions to them.
On one side anger and anxiety; on the other widespread indifference.
In the wake of the 1960s race riots President Johnson set up a commission under the Illinois governor Otto Kerner to investigate the unrest. His report was solidly researched, almost wholly sensible and now largely forgotten. It pointed out that in every case rioting was sparked by a confrontation with a police force seen by the black community as racist, invasive and unconcerned with protecting black citizens. It also concluded that the problem went far deeper than policing, noting that the underlying causes lay in chronic unemployment, unequal healthcare and education.
‘‘The system of failure and frustration that now dominates the ghetto,’’ Kerner reported, could only be tackled with unpre- cedented levels of funding.
Ferguson is a textbook example of how the lessons from Kerner went unlearnt. Nearly half of all black males in the St Louis area between 16 and 24 are unemployed, with black people twice as likely to be jobless as whites. A baby is twice as likely to die before the age of one if he or she is black. Nearly a quarter of Ferguson lives in poverty.
More than two-thirds of the suburb’s 21,000 inhabitants are black, yet its police force of 53 includes only three blacks. A recent racial profiling report showed that black citizens are far more likely to be stopped by police than white ones, even though whites are statistically more likely to be carrying contraband such as drugs.
The African- American community has made huge political and economic strides since 1964, symbolised, most obviously, in a black president. But at the same time places like Ferguson remain locked in hopelessness.