Nixonland - Newark Riots

The biggest city in New Jersey was a frighteningly corrupt town. Mayor Hugh Addonizio, a former member of the U.S. House of Representatives, once explained his career change this way: "There's no money in being a congressman, but you can make a million bucks as mayor of Newark." Its tenements, purchased at fire-sale prices during the Depression, were gold mines for their owners, so long as they didn't sink any money into them. So Newark had the highest percentage of substandard housing of any American city: 7,097 units had no flush toilets; 28,795, no heaters. Twenty-eight babies died in a diarrhea epidemic in 1965, eighteen of them at City Hospital, which was also infested by bats. The city's major industry was illegal gambling. Cops ran heroin rings. Food stores raised prices the day welfare checks arrived. All the same, downtown was filled with construction cranes. "Urban renewal" served Mayor Addonizio's political purpose: by continually scattering Negroes, who were 65 percent of the population, it radically reduced their power.
Wednesday, July 12, 1967, police manhandled a cabdriver during an arrest. He had bushy hair, and they might have thought that made him a Black Muslim, whose lairs they had recently been raiding. A false report got around that he had died in police custody. Angry citizens massed at the Fourth Precinct. Shortly before midnight, a Molotov cocktail burst against the wall. Police in riot helmets surrounded the protesters. The two sides yelled racial slurs. Kids started throwing rocks. The first liquor-store windows were broken. The looting began; that was always next. Cars with makeshift towlines ripped the iron grates from store windows so their contents could be stripped; junkies cleaned out drugstores; ordinary citizens by the thousands took what they liked from white businesses as fast as they could carry it. Some skipped black-owned stores with SOUL BROTHER signs marking their status like lamb’s blood. Others didn’t. A disgusted Urban Leaguer rued the “carnival air.” Social scientists spoke of “the revolution of rising expectations” as one cause of riots: more and more Great Society abundance all around, success without squalor, beauty without barrenness - just not so much for blacks. Looters, too, took America’s promises seriously.
The mayor and the director of police temporized. That made everything worse. Certain dysfunctional civic responses would become a pattern in urban riots. The only preparations Newark officials had made had been orders to street cops for restraint: maybe that would tide things over. But police who perceived they’d been “handcuffed” tended to act in a less, not more, restrained manner. (The hapless cabbie had been kicked so repeatedly in the groin that by the time he had arrived at the precinct house he couldn't walk; that was  before he was assaulted with gun butts, nightsticks, and dirty water from the jailhouse toilet.) Police were ordered to avoid arrests for looting, for arrests would be an acknowledgement there was a “riot.” Insurance companies didn’t cover riots. Maybe it would die out before anyone went on record using the word. “The situation is normal,” police director Dominick Spina announced, piles of broken glass lying at his feet.
A second wave flared, then burned itself out around midnight Thursday. Relieved officials decided the crisis was over. Mayor Addonizio soon had to admit it wasn’t. At 2:30 AM he called Governor Richard Hughes in a panic to call out the state police and the National Guard. Spina announced over every police radio, “If you have a gun, whether it is a shoulder weapon or whether it is a handgun, use it.” The same Governor Hughes who had determinedly refused to interfere with the tenure of the Communist history professor Eugene Genovese during his reelection fight in 1965 announced, “The line between the jungle an the law might as well be drawn here as any place in America.” By 4:30 AM the first state police had appeared. By 7 AM National Guard units had rolled up Springfield Avenue, the Essex County main drag that started in leafy Short Hills and ended in Newark’s heart of darkness. White residents set up shotgun patrols, standing ready for Negroes “to spill over onto white ground.” They shouted at the passing military trucks, “Go kill them niggers.”
And that is what they did. Thus began the second Newark riot: not looting, not arson, but scared officers of the law committing officially sanctioned murder.
Three were dead by daylight Friday. One was Rose Abraham, a forty-five-year-old mother of five, out looking for one of her children. Tedlock Bell Jr., twenty-eight, a father of four, a former basketball star, had just told his companions to submit quietly to the police when he was killed. A young man named James Sanders was shotgunned in the back while running from a liquor store. The commander of the antiriot forces, Colonel Kelly of the New Jersey State Police, pronounced that the looting was under control. Another looter was shot dead in the back at the end of the day. His name was Albert Taliaferro. By then nine Newark residents had died.
A group of citizens were milling around outside the Scudder Homes housing project when there police cars turned the corner. The crowd assumed they must be firing blanks - until a .38-caliber bullet ripped through Virgil Harrison’s right forearm. Men took off their undershirts to wave as white flags. The cops kept on shooting - at ground level, claiming they were hunting a sniper on the upper floors. That was how Rufus Council, thirty-five, Oscar Hill, fifty, and Virgil’s father, Isaac “Uncle Daddy” Harrison, seventy-two (and perhaps Robert Lee Martin, twenty-two, and Cornelius Murray, twenty-eight), lost their lives. Oscar Hill was wearing his American Legion jacket. Murray’s body was missing $126 and a ring. Robert Lee Martin’s family reported that cops stripped money from his body. There indeed had been snipers in the Scudder Homes. But they began shooting an hour later, in response to the cops. They killed a police detective, Fred Toto, thirty-three, a father of three.
Seventy-six residents of Beacon Street signed an eyewitness petition: “At approximately five-thirty PM on the fourteenth of July, most of the residents of Beacon Street were sitting on their porches watching their kids playing in the front. Without provocation, members of the state police approached the corner and sprayed the street from left to right. They shot James Sneade, 36, in the stomach, as he made repairs on his car out front. Karl Greene, 17, was shot in the head as he stood on his sister’s perch.”
At eight thirty a father driving with his family to White Castle slowed for a barricade. Guardsmen opened fire. His ten-year-old son, Eddie Moss, was mortally wounded in the head.
At around ten thirty, Leroy Boyd, thirty-seven, father of two, was shot to death. A funeral home director reported finding six .38-caliber bullets - police bullets - in his body.
A man named Albert Mersier died shortly before midnight after being shot while attempting to load a stolen vacuum cleaner into his car.
By Saturday morning, fourteen square miles were sealed off by National Guard roadblocks, pacifying the rioters - but not ending the violence. Saturday afternoon twenty-four-year-old Billy Furr got into a debate with a Black Muslim who had just told a Life magazine reporter that the riot would continue “until every white man’s building in Newark is burned.” Billy demurred, “We ain’t riotin’ agains’ all you whites. We’re riotin’ against police brutality, like that cabdriver they beat up the other night. That stuff goes on all the time. When the police treat us like people ‘stead of treatin’ us like animals, the riots will stop.” Furr and the reporter ran into each other later. Furr gave him a beer he’d looted and went back into Mack Liquors. A police car skidded to a halt as Billy Furr emerged with a six-pack. He ran and was cut down by a high-velocity dought-0 shot to the head. Particles from three shells went completely through his body and sprinkled the reporter. An errant shot cut down a twelve-year-old boy, Joey Bass, who survived.
At 6. PM bullets ripped through the windows of Eloise Spellman, a forty-one-year-old widow, on the tenth floor of the Hayes Homes project. Her son and daughter watched her die. The shooters were guardsmen and state troopers, who reported she died from sniper fire.
Rebecca Brown, thirty, like to sit at her second-floor window. She kept a color photo of the Star-Spangled Banner clipped from the New York Sunday News on the wall. An adjacent wall was pocked with twenty-six automatic-weapons bullets from street level, one of which killed Mrs. Brown.
Mrs. Hattie Gainer, also on the second floor, was cut down by the same flurry of bullets. A conscience-wracked state trooper barged in as she lay moaning in a pool of blood and cried, “We made a mistake. We shot the wrong person. We’re killing innocent people.” The ambulance didn’t collect her for another three hours.
By Saturday evening four thousand National Guardsmen were harassing residents at random from hundreds of checkpoints set up around the city. A man described driving to the hospital to visit his injured wife: “I saw a guy get pulled from a car at Bergen and Sixteenth Avenue and the cops were beating him.” Officers shot out one of the man’s tires, taunting him from their jeeps, “Kennedy’s not with you now”; “Let’s kill all these black bastards.”
A kid named Howard Edwards drove down from Staten Island to see a girlfriend, who had assured him the riot was over. Since he hadn’t taken out the registration for the ’57 Chevy he’d just bought, he didn’t respond when the National Guard told him to “Stop, motherfucker.” By some miracle he survived the hail of bullets that ended up rattling Fire House Eleven on Ninth Street and the fire-sprinkler pipes of a nearby factory. One of the fire captains who answered the resulting fire alarm, Mike Moran, a father of six with a pregnant wife, died from a ricocheting bullet. The unsuspecting Lothario whose ’57 Chevy was responsible for it all spent thirty days in solitary confinement (“I’m sure it was a tommy gun,” a fire captain testified) as the most dreaded suspect in the Essex County lockup, until they finally let him slink back to Staten Island a month later with a charge of violating curfew. The story of the fiendish Negro with the tommy gun who held off an entire company of National Guardsmen, then engineered the false alarm that made firemen his sitting ducks, made good PR cover for what was actually going on: state police going up and down Springfield Avenue, smashing up every not-yet-molested SOUL BROTHER store.
On Sunday afternoon James Rutledge Jr., rummaging through a shuttered bar with three other kids, was shot thirty-nine times. The cops put a knife next to him when they were done and said he tried to throw it at them.
Michael Pugh expired at 1 AM Monday morning. He’d been shot by a guardsman in front of his home on Fifteenth Avenue while taking out the garbage. A boy with him called the guardsmen names, and they opened fire. Michael Pugh was twelve years old.
Raymond Gilmer, the last official death, twenty years old, may or may not have been running from a stolen car. He got a bullet to the back of the head.
One more corpse wasn’t included in the Newark death toll: a cop with a conscience who testified against his comrades during the grand jury investigation of the riot died of “occlusive coronary arteriosclerosis” while “visiting friends at 25 Gold Street,” a newspaper said. That address was the police clubhouse.
This, too, was another riot pattern: a lack of investigative energy where police offenses were concerned. When the Newark grand jury presentment was made public the following April, it described all these killings in inculpating forensic detail: “Albert Mersier Jr. was fatally shot by a police officer as he was fleeing from the scene of a burglarized warehouse”; “Rose Abraham suffered a fatal bullet wound of the right hip … police were attempting to clear this area of looters.” But each count ended with the identical refrain: “Due to insufficient evidence of any criminal misconduct, the jury found no cause for indictment.” The bullets recovered often weren’t from service revolvers. Some cops had used personal weapons, making ballistic reports uncheckable.
The press was interested in making the carnage make sense. A turkey shoot of grandparents and ten-year-olds did not fit the bill. The New York Daily News ran an “investigation” of the death of the Newark fire captain and called it “The Murder of Mike Moran.” Twelve-year-old Joey Bass, in dirty jeans and scuffed sneakers, his blood trickling down the street, lay splayed across the cover of the July 28 Life. The feature inside constituted a sort of visual and verbal brief for why such accidents might have been excusable. The opening spread showed a man with a turban wrapped around his head loading a Mauser by a window, captioned, “The targets were Negro snipers, like the one above.” In actual fact the photo had been staged by a blustering black nationalist, and what the copy claimed was an upper-floor vantage onto the streets was actually a first-floor room overlooking a trash-strewn backyard. “The whole time we were in Newark we never saw what you would call a violent black man,” Life photographer Bud Lee later recalled.” The only people I saw who were violent were the police.”
CBS camera crews recorded wrenching footage of Uncle Daddy’s funeral. Producers decided not to run it. A sympathetic portrait of “rioters” would have been far too controversial. Concluded Governor Hughes, “I felt a thrill of pride in the way our state police and National Guard have conducted themselves.”