A TALE OF THREE RIOTS

On November 9, 1965, at 5:27 PM, at the height of the rush hour, the lights went out along the eastern seaboard. Parts of Canada, all of New York state and parts of seven other states went dark.  Eight hundred thousand people were stranded in total blackness in the New York City subways.  Traffic lights blinked out, stranding millions of commuters heading home after a hard day’s work, Thousands more were stuck in elevators and office buildings. One bakery threw out 10,000 pounds of dough because the ovens were dead.  Airline pilots looking for runways, saw only darkness below. In some hospitals, surgeons continued their operations with flashlights when backup generators failed. Ten thousand National Guardsmen and 5,000 off-duty policemen were called in to keep order.  From Ontario to New Jersey, power lines failed; thirty million people were stranded.

How did New Yorkers react?

“Amazingly enough,” reported the Associated Press, “despite the city’s reputation for crime and disorder, and despite the fact that the blackout came at the height of the commuter rush hour, there was no general panic.”

New York City police later reported that the crime rate in the city had actually fallen during the outage. There were only 5 reports of looting, the lowest ever amount of nighttime crime during the recorded history of the city.

No looting, no arson, no destruction of property, no rise in crime, no violence, no disorder, and contrary to an urban legend, no baby boom nine months later.  Camaraderie and good cheer were the norms.  Hard to believe, but true.

Like the rest of New Yorkers, my parents hunkered down, lit candles, rummaged around for those old flashlights, and turned on the transistor radios. 

I was lucky.  Instead of being in class in faraway Brooklyn, I skipped it to stay home and study for a history exam.

Twelve years later on July 13, 1977, in the midst of a brutal heat wave, the city again went dark.  This time the reaction was starkly different.

Widespread looting, unrest and arson broke out in the poorest neighborhoods. Over the next 24 hours, 1,600 stores were damaged, 1,000-plus fires were reported and more than 3,700 people were arrested. Economic damages reached well into the hundreds of millions of dollars.      per the New York Times.

The suddenness of the destruction was jarring; it seemed as if thousands of people were sitting in their homes, waiting to plunge into an orgy of theft and destruction if the world suddenly went dark.  When the lights went out, the looters ran wild through the streets.  They ransacked supermarkets, overturned cars, and generally went on a spree of plunder, reminiscent of raging armies of the past.   

Rioters looted everything and anything: luxury cars, clothespins, and sink stoppers.  The New York Post reported, “even the looters were being mugged.” The city was unable to stop the madness, “They set hundreds of fires and looted thousands of stores,” Time reported,  

I was home visiting my parents when the 1977 blackout hit.  A week after the destruction, the merchants in our Bronx neighborhood, published a flier with the following message.

      We want to thank you…

 For what were the neighborhood merchants thanking us?  For not looting their stores.  When the lights went out, when the phones stopped working, when the food in the fridge started melting, my parents didn’t run insanely out of the apartment to loot Louie’s grocery store on the Avenue.

During the recent blackout,” said the flyer, “White Plains Road did not suffer the horrors seen in other areas of the city.  We recognize that this is a result of the fact that you are fine, responsible people who want a safe, secure and attractive community in which to live and raise children.”  

I kept the flyer as a piece of social history, emblematic of a changing world

What happened in those twelve years to devolve from friendly camaraderie to frenzied destruction?

1.     The city was broiling from the longest heat wave in the city’s history.

2.     The unemployment rate was at 12 percent.

3.     Subway fares had jumped from 35 to 50 cents.

4.     The city’s profligate spending has forced cuts social services—including closing libraries and hospitals, along with huge layoffs of firefighters, police, teachers and sanitation workers.

By the long hot summer of 1967, violent upheavals exploded in more than 150 cities.  Almost all were caused by confrontations between white police officers and urban African-Americans, resulting in 83 deaths and 17,000 arrests. According to a 2007 study in The Journal of Economic History, Detroit’s uprising caused 43 deaths, 7,200 arrests and more than 2,500 buildings looted, damaged or destroyed in five days of rioting. The property damage adjusted for 2020 dollars—made the ’67 upheavals in Detroit ($322 million) and Newark ($115 million) two of the 10 costliest civil disorders in American history.

The violence in the 1967 blackout, was part of the darkening trend already taking place across the country.

During the previous decade, 1957 – 1967, the rates of murders, assaults and car thefts had more than doubled, the rate of burglary had more than tripled and robberies were up by a factor of ten. The social deterioration was already underway.  As Time suggested, “the character of the city, and perhaps of the country,” had changed.

Every negative social trend took off in the sixties: drugs, crime, racial tension, sub-cultural diversity groups creating divisive tensions, divorce, weakening of family, marriage and religion, victimization, substandard education, and the empowering divisiveness of victimization.  The noble and long-overdue civil rights movement led by Martin Luther King, Jr., was in full swing.  He explained it thusly:

 The policy makers of the white society have caused the darkness; they created discrimination; they created slums; they perpetuate unemployment, ignorance and poverty. It is incontestable and deplorable that Negroes have committed crimes; but they are derivative crimes. They are born of the greater crimes of the white society.

Writer, James Baldwin, a persuasive critic of racism during the civil rights movement, told a radio host: “To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage, almost all the time.” In a 1966 essay published in The Nation, he blamed disadvantaged schools, limited employment opportunities and, “The police (who) treat the Negro like a dog.”

At the time of the unprovoked riot of 1967, civil disobedience was common and has continued to 2024.  We therefore should not be surprised at the deplorable behavior of the Los Angeles fans after they defeated the lordly New York Yankees in the fifth game to win World Series.   A bus was set on fire, stores were burglarized or vandalized.  The Los Angeles police department ordered crowds to disperse chanting 'F*** the Yankees' began hurling fireworks and other objects at officers as the celebrations got out of hand.  A police tape showed people rushing out of Nike stores stealing boxes.  Some looters appeared to be playing basketball near a trashed Nike store.

The New York Post described the city as descending into chaos after the Dodgers’ win.

These maladjusted sports fans cannot blame their churlish behavior on injustice, or poverty or police brutality, or bad umpires, or because they won the World Series, or because Donald Trump is a Nazi/fascist.

Now we are faced with another possible uprising.  If Trump wins, the usual suspects will take to the streets to announce, “Trick or Treat, we’re torching your home. We must save this country by keeping the borders open, allowing men identifying as women to compete with the girls, proselytizing for gender affirming surgery, loss of energy independence, abortions up to the day of birth, drag queen story hours for five-year-olds, cities overrun by migrants, depleting the military, packing the Supreme Court, adding Puerto Rico as the fifty-first state, weaponizing the Justice Department, fentanyl deaths, rampant homelessness, and a monstrous debt.”

If Kamala wins, Republicans will do what they always do, shake their heads, and wonder sadly what has happened to their country.  They will not be torching cities.  If they do, I will be eating humblest of pies.