Killing of unarmed black teen sparked ’66 riots against police
The previous Portals described how, on a sweltering Tuesday afternoon 50 years ago in Hunters Point, a white police officer shot and killed Matthew Johnson, an unarmed 16-year-old African American suspected of car theft who was running away and more than 80 yards distant. The shooting prompted unrest that spread not only through the neighborhood, but into areas of the city that were miles from the scene.
As Walter Thompson writes in “The Fire Last Time,” an article about the Hunters Point uprising that appeared in the October issue of San Francisco Magazine, residents of the impoverished neighborhood said the shooting ignited longsmoldering grievances. “I think it just took that one more incident to say we’d had enough and would start acting
crazy,” Tyrone Primus, who was 16 at the time, told Thompson. “I can’t say how it exploded, but it just happened.”
After Johnson’s body was removed, enraged groups of young men began moving down Third Street, throwing rocks and breaking the windows of businesses that weren’t owned by African Americans. Attempts to calm people failed — Mayor Jack Shelley was shouted down when he went to a meeting hall that evening in the Bayview, and a police officer who had acccompanied him was hit in the face by a thrown brick.
Police were soon issued protective headgear and batons and ordered to prevent looting and violence. According to the official police report on the disturbances, Shelley and Police Chief Thomas Cahill told officers to avoid unnecessary force in dealing with the protesters. The officers set up staging areas on Quint Street, just west of Third, and began clearing the streets.
By 11 p.m., however, the unrest had spread to the Fillmore. At 11:39 p.m., Shelley called Gov. Edmund “Pat” Brown, who declared a state of emergency and called up 2,000 National Guardsmen.
A curfew was instituted in Bayview-Hunters Point and the Fillmore. The Guardsmen were mustered at Kezar Stadium and Candlestick Park.
The next morning, Sept. 28, a crowd gathered at Third and Mendell Street. Community leaders briefly managed to calm them, but things soon spiraled out of control.
By 11 a.m. it was already 86 degrees — it would hit 95 that day — and the crowd had swelled to 200 people. Their fury heightened by liquor looted from a nearby store, groups of men hurled rocks and Molotov cocktails at passing cars. With the crowd now 700 strong, the outnumbered police called for help.
Meanwhile, the disturbances spread to schools. At Mission High, large groups of students began to gather and fights broke out. By 12:20 p.m., riot conditions were reported “on all floors at Mission High.”
At 1:18 p.m., there was a riot call at Horace Mann Junior High. At the same time, youths in the Haight began smashing windows and throwing objects at cars. Violence also broke out at Washington and Balboa high schools.
The uprising reached its climax late Wednesday afternoon. In response to gunfire, hurled rocks and firebombs, a patrol force was dispatched into the Bayview, moving from building line to building line on Third Street to disperse the crowd. The officers were targeted by gunfire and firebombs from the Bayview Community Center at Third and Mendell, and from a nearby parked car. Hunters Point resident James Lockett, who took part in the uprising, told me that men on higher ground also fired at the patrols.
The officers were ordered to return fire to protect themselves. First they fired two warning volleys into the air, then blasted away at the windows where the shots were coming from. The entire facade of the community center was riddled with bullets and every window was broken. Miraculously, no one was killed or seriously injured.
At 6:26 p.m., National Guardsmen with fixed bayonets began marching north on Third and the blocks to the east and west. They, too, came under gunfire. Checkpoints were set up and a curfew enforced, and only minor incidents reported that night.
For four more days, violence and sporadic looting rocked the Bayview-Hunters Point, Haight, Fillmore, Oceanview and Mission neighborhoods, with isolated incidents in Bernal Heights and North Beach.
Firefighters were attacked, cars tipped over and Molotov cocktails thrown into liquor stores. The police incident log includes such entries as, “Juveniles with clubs — 23rd and Fair Oaks,” and “16-18 Negro male juveniles with hammers, 23rd and South Van Ness.” But the worst was over. At 11 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 2, the state of emergency was lifted.
The Hunters Point uprising did not result in the massive property damage and loss of life that characterized disturbances in places like Watts or Cleveland. Johnson was the only person who was killed. A total of 161 people were injured: 85 police and firefighters, five other city employees, two California Highway Patrol officers and 69 civilians. Property damage amounted to $135,887.
Authorities arrested 457 people, 325 adults and 132 juveniles. Of the total, 129 were white.
Tellingly, the arrest statistics reveal a wide disparity between the types of jobs held by whites and those held by blacks. Seventy-one of the blacks arrested were laborers, compared with 15 of arrested whites.
One notable non-arrest: Alvin Johnson, the officer who shot Matthew Johnson. He was cleared of wrongdoing.
The Hunters Point eruption shook San Francisco to its core, forcing it to reckon with an ugly racial reality it had tried to ignore. Blue-ribbon panels were appointed to look into the causes of the disturbance, jobs programs were created and federal money allocated.
But despite these efforts, the underlying problems remained — lack of jobs, racism, inferior schools, broken families, gangs, substandard housing. Those problems were exacerbated when crack cocaine ravaged urban black communities in the 1980s. In the last few decades, many of the neighborhood’s African Americans have left.
Fifty years after the disturbances, Hunters Point stands on the verge of a transformation almost as radical as the one it experienced during World War II, when large numbers of blacks first moved there. The massive San Francisco Shipyard project is slated to create 12,000 new units of housing; another developer is planning to build 1,000 units at India Basin. How many black people will be living in the neighborhood 50 years from now is an open question.