Fifty years ago this week, with frustration and anger running high in African American neighborhoods, racial violence erupted across the country.
It began in Newark, NJ, where tensions boiled over from racial profiling and police brutality, as well as the lack of jobs, job training and affordable educational opportunities. In a two-square-mile area of central Newark, plagued by rampant unemployment and poverty, rioting broke out. Clashes with police escalated the violence, leading to 26 deaths, 1,200 injuries and extensive damage to local businesses over five days of rioting.
After the National Guard helped restore order, more troops and tanks were required a week later in Detroit, where 43 were killed and 1,200 injured in six days of urban warfare. Angry African American residents looted businesses and set fires that destroyed 200 buildings.
Violence erupted across the country—in Cleveland and Cincinnati, Buffalo and Birmingham, Louisville, Nashville and Wichita. For black communities that increasingly believed they lacked political representation to address their concerns, their anger caught the nation’s attention.
Anger and violence erupted along Plymouth Avenue in Minneapolis on July 19, 1967. With the Newark conflict still front-page news, trouble started in downtown Minneapolis at the annual Aquatennial Parade and moved up Plymouth later that evening.
A large crowd began throwing rocks into stores and businesses on the street, then vandalizing and looting them. Ten shops between Penn and Humboldt Avenues were set on fire during the night, and two---Silver’s and Knox Food Market at Plymouth and Morgan Avenue—were burnt to the ground. Firebombs were tossed near the home of a Minneapolis alderman and several cars were overturned.
“The scene that night on the street was nightmarish,” Minneapolis civil rights activist Harry Davis told Iric Nathanson, author of Minneapolis in the Twentieth Century: The Growth of an American City. “The stench of the smoke was oppressive. The heat was intense enough to break display windows, exposing the stores to looting.”
Roughly 60 police officers with helmets and shotguns were positioned along Plymouth. Their orders were to disperse crowds without going on the attack or pursuing massive arrests, an approach that seemingly kept the violence from escalating much beyond the avenue.
A few businesses along Plymouth, including the Peoples Baking Corporation and Hi-Hat Café, were firebombed the next day, igniting another wave of fires. Crowds also set cars afire, hurled rocks at police cars, and street violence led to two shootings and two beatings. Governor Harold LeVander called on the National Guard, and 600 guardsmen were on Minneapolis streets by nightfall.
Despite daily 90-degree temperatures, tensions cooled considerably the following day, dampened by the National Guard’s continued presence and heavy hailstorms. No outbursts were reported once the guardsmen were on the scene.
Compared to the violence and destruction in Newark and Detroit, the Minneapolis disturbance never grew into a full-scale riot. The Minneapolis Tribune credited the police for minimizing the scale and damage of the two-day confrontation: “There was no shooting, no club-swinging to produce the usual pictures of bashed and bloody heads, no police rush upon the crowd.”
The Minneapolis disturbance, no matter how small, destroyed a large piece of the community’s infrastructure. Low-cost housing, social services and government offices, and the Fourth Precinct police station have filled a few gaps, but the Plymouth Avenue neighborhood continues to struggle to this day.
Despite the myth to the contrary, the truth is few Americans climb economic classes. It is a nearly impossible task for the poorest. President Lyndon Johnson launched his “war on poverty” in January 1964, a response to the dramatic rise in American poverty in the late 1950s.
In 1959, according to federal statistics, more than one in four American children lived in poverty. Men without a college education, people of color, families headed by women, and the elderly often struggled to make ends meet. Nearly 21 percent of American families lived below the poverty line. With African Americans lacking the same opportunities as white Americans, 54.9 percent of black families were poor.
The “war on poverty” had taken a backseat to the Vietnam War by 1967. Today, 50 years later, once again one in four American children live in poverty. Nearly 30 percent of disabled Americans are poor. In all, more than 40 million Americans live below the poverty line at a time Congress refuses to make the minimum wage a livable wage and hacks away at the safety net for poor Americans.
Today’s rural poor and inner-city poor have one thing in common: they lack political representation in Washington, where few voices speak for them. If poverty rates continue to rise as millions of American families lose health insurance or adequate coverage—moving closer to some of the dreadful makers at the end of the 1950s—how will they make themselves heard? At what point does anger boil over?
The middle class is taking its lumps, too. The Congressional Budget Office reported in 2016 that the wealthiest 10 percent of American families own 76 percent of all family wealth. The percentage has climbed from two-thirds of all wealth to more than three-quarters in the last 25 years. This transfer of wealth means both middle-class and poor families have seen their share of the pie decline in recent decades. The bottom half of the population now owns just one percent of the total pie.
Baseball has a few links to these events. Tigers slugger Willie Horton, who grew up in Detroit’s Jeffries Projects, stepped away from the pennant chase after his team split a mid-July doubleheader with the New York Yankees at Tiger Stadium. Still in uniform, he stood atop a car on Detroit’s 12th Street and begged people to stop the violence and the destruction of what little infrastructure their neighborhoods had. His words mostly went unheard.
Look for more coverage of the 1967 Twins and the wild, four-team AL pennant race that summer, culled from the upcoming and tentatively titled The Glory Years of the Minnesota Twins: Rock ‘n’ Roll, War and Peace, the Civil Rights Movement and Baseball in the 1960s. I also post on my author page on Facebook.
It began in Newark, NJ, where tensions boiled over from racial profiling and police brutality, as well as the lack of jobs, job training and affordable educational opportunities. In a two-square-mile area of central Newark, plagued by rampant unemployment and poverty, rioting broke out. Clashes with police escalated the violence, leading to 26 deaths, 1,200 injuries and extensive damage to local businesses over five days of rioting.
After the National Guard helped restore order, more troops and tanks were required a week later in Detroit, where 43 were killed and 1,200 injured in six days of urban warfare. Angry African American residents looted businesses and set fires that destroyed 200 buildings.
Violence erupted across the country—in Cleveland and Cincinnati, Buffalo and Birmingham, Louisville, Nashville and Wichita. For black communities that increasingly believed they lacked political representation to address their concerns, their anger caught the nation’s attention.
Anger and violence erupted along Plymouth Avenue in Minneapolis on July 19, 1967. With the Newark conflict still front-page news, trouble started in downtown Minneapolis at the annual Aquatennial Parade and moved up Plymouth later that evening.
A large crowd began throwing rocks into stores and businesses on the street, then vandalizing and looting them. Ten shops between Penn and Humboldt Avenues were set on fire during the night, and two---Silver’s and Knox Food Market at Plymouth and Morgan Avenue—were burnt to the ground. Firebombs were tossed near the home of a Minneapolis alderman and several cars were overturned.
“The scene that night on the street was nightmarish,” Minneapolis civil rights activist Harry Davis told Iric Nathanson, author of Minneapolis in the Twentieth Century: The Growth of an American City. “The stench of the smoke was oppressive. The heat was intense enough to break display windows, exposing the stores to looting.”
Roughly 60 police officers with helmets and shotguns were positioned along Plymouth. Their orders were to disperse crowds without going on the attack or pursuing massive arrests, an approach that seemingly kept the violence from escalating much beyond the avenue.
A few businesses along Plymouth, including the Peoples Baking Corporation and Hi-Hat Café, were firebombed the next day, igniting another wave of fires. Crowds also set cars afire, hurled rocks at police cars, and street violence led to two shootings and two beatings. Governor Harold LeVander called on the National Guard, and 600 guardsmen were on Minneapolis streets by nightfall.
Despite daily 90-degree temperatures, tensions cooled considerably the following day, dampened by the National Guard’s continued presence and heavy hailstorms. No outbursts were reported once the guardsmen were on the scene.
Compared to the violence and destruction in Newark and Detroit, the Minneapolis disturbance never grew into a full-scale riot. The Minneapolis Tribune credited the police for minimizing the scale and damage of the two-day confrontation: “There was no shooting, no club-swinging to produce the usual pictures of bashed and bloody heads, no police rush upon the crowd.”
The Minneapolis disturbance, no matter how small, destroyed a large piece of the community’s infrastructure. Low-cost housing, social services and government offices, and the Fourth Precinct police station have filled a few gaps, but the Plymouth Avenue neighborhood continues to struggle to this day.
Despite the myth to the contrary, the truth is few Americans climb economic classes. It is a nearly impossible task for the poorest. President Lyndon Johnson launched his “war on poverty” in January 1964, a response to the dramatic rise in American poverty in the late 1950s.
In 1959, according to federal statistics, more than one in four American children lived in poverty. Men without a college education, people of color, families headed by women, and the elderly often struggled to make ends meet. Nearly 21 percent of American families lived below the poverty line. With African Americans lacking the same opportunities as white Americans, 54.9 percent of black families were poor.
The “war on poverty” had taken a backseat to the Vietnam War by 1967. Today, 50 years later, once again one in four American children live in poverty. Nearly 30 percent of disabled Americans are poor. In all, more than 40 million Americans live below the poverty line at a time Congress refuses to make the minimum wage a livable wage and hacks away at the safety net for poor Americans.
Today’s rural poor and inner-city poor have one thing in common: they lack political representation in Washington, where few voices speak for them. If poverty rates continue to rise as millions of American families lose health insurance or adequate coverage—moving closer to some of the dreadful makers at the end of the 1950s—how will they make themselves heard? At what point does anger boil over?
The middle class is taking its lumps, too. The Congressional Budget Office reported in 2016 that the wealthiest 10 percent of American families own 76 percent of all family wealth. The percentage has climbed from two-thirds of all wealth to more than three-quarters in the last 25 years. This transfer of wealth means both middle-class and poor families have seen their share of the pie decline in recent decades. The bottom half of the population now owns just one percent of the total pie.
Baseball has a few links to these events. Tigers slugger Willie Horton, who grew up in Detroit’s Jeffries Projects, stepped away from the pennant chase after his team split a mid-July doubleheader with the New York Yankees at Tiger Stadium. Still in uniform, he stood atop a car on Detroit’s 12th Street and begged people to stop the violence and the destruction of what little infrastructure their neighborhoods had. His words mostly went unheard.
Look for more coverage of the 1967 Twins and the wild, four-team AL pennant race that summer, culled from the upcoming and tentatively titled The Glory Years of the Minnesota Twins: Rock ‘n’ Roll, War and Peace, the Civil Rights Movement and Baseball in the 1960s. I also post on my author page on Facebook.