With the recent images of Ferguson in the news, the section dealing with the events of 1967 were particularly striking. I’d like to quote at length from the beginning of that chapter. You could easily replace Newark with Ferguson and not a thing would change even though nearly fifty years have passed.
Rebellion or Riot?
Civil disturbances of the kind that occurred in Newark in 1967 are usually labeled “riots” or “civil disorders” in social science literature. As we know, the people who participate in civil disturbances vary in motivation and purpose. Some might aim to exploit the absence of control and join in the looting to get whatever they can. Others might be swept up in the moment, drawn into the frenzy of mob behavior. Still others might bear a message, a political message if you will, that calls for authorities to address long-standing grievances of inequality and mistreatment. So if we grant that there are multiple things going on, why have the residents of inner-city Newark chosen to call events of July, 1967 a rebellion?
Let us briefly note what this kind of violence is about. Extensive scholarship argues that urban violence has its roots in poverty. Nathan Wright, former director of community affairs at the Episcopal Diocese of Newark, reminds us that in the Utopia, Thomas More wrote of the social, political, and economic basis for rioting during the reign of Henry VIII. Aristotle wrote in the same vein of social rebellions of his own day. More recent scholarship has suggested that the relationship between poverty or oppression and violence can best be explained by what is called relative deprivation theory. More hypotheses than theory, relative deprivation holds that violence results from a perception of the discrepancy between what people believe they are rightfully entitled to and what they think they are capable of getting. The emphasis is on the perception of deprivation: how people perceive their relative position in terms of where they are in comparison to others, and where they expect to be. People may feel deprived, for example, even though an objective observer might not consider them to be in need. Conversely, the existence of what an observer judges to be abject poverty or “absolute deprivation” is not necessarily thought to be unjust or harmful by those who experience it.
However, is there not enough constant deprivation to have violence all the time? When there has been violence in the inner city, the majority of residents do not participate, as was certainly the case in Newark. Why are some violent and not others? The answer to the last question is that most residents are not sufficiently alienated to risk breaking the law, so the overwhelming majority stays out of harm’s way. Regarding the larger question of why there is violence at a particular time, scholarship suggests that the onset of urban violence has two sequential parts. First there is the creation of the climate, simmering feelings of discontent widely shared by a substantial number of people. For example, Stanley Lieberson and Arnold M. Silverman wrote before the Newark disorders, “Riots are more likely to occur when social institutions function inadequately, or when grievances are not resolved, or cannot be resolved under the existing institutional arrangements.” Populations are then predisposed or prone to rebel; they are not simply neutral aggregates transformed into a violent mob by the agitation or charisma of individuals. The second factor is the role of social control agents, particularly police and law enforcement. Indeed, the immediate precipitant (like a police beating or shooting, or an accidental death perceived to be racial, as was the case in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, in 1981 or in Watts, Los Angeles, in 1992 when the brutal beating of Rodney King was shown around the world) “simply ignites prior community tensions revolving around basic institutional difficulties, and law enforcement loses the capacity to exercise control.” This interpretation seems to fit how things happened in Newark. Social institutions did not perform effectively, and social issues were suppressed or ignored for a long period of time. The beating of the cab driver was a match to the tinderbox created by neglect and inaction.
The foregoing helps to explain why most minority residents chose to label the 1967 episode a rebellion. Aside from the common use of the word “riot” in literature and social science research, the the aggrieved community in Newark, a riot and a rebellion mean different things. As Henry Bienen wrote in Violence and Social Change, “To choose a theory is to choose policy. If one chooses to emphasize the participants in violence and to see criminality pure and simple (and label the vent a riot), calls for law enforcement are in order. If one chooses to focus on conditions (and use the term rebellion), it follows that massive attacks on the economic and social order are called for.” “Rebellion” then is first an expression of the street-level theory of the event, a plea for improvement of the conditions that led to the upheaval.
Whatever the label, “civic rebellions,” as Nathan Wright wrote, “are a form of social insanity…they are basically the crazed behavior of men who sense that they are driven to distraction.” However, when one speaks of “crazed behavior,” and being “driven to distraction,” it is not just the inner-city residents to whom we refer. In the case of Newark and Detroit, the initial violence and looting – almost entirely against property – was followed by several days of indiscriminate violence by the police, state police officers, and the National Guard against citizens, homes, and businesses. In his analysis of the killings during the Newark and Detroit episodes, Albert Bergesen writes, “There seems to have been an increasing lack of organizational or normative control over the actions of officials, which suggests the presence of a ‘police riot’ in both cities.”
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