America's "Dirty Laundry"

Some time last year I came across an interesting news article from 2000 about an information archive covering the race riots that flared up in America from the mid 1960s to the early 1970s.

Sociologist Dan Myers of the University of Notre Dame, who unearthed the extensive archive of newspaper articles, says it was previously believed that there were about a "couple of hundred" race riots during this period. However, the archives indicate that at least 3,500 riots of one size or another took place.

According to Myers, interest in the riots was high at the time, and the Lemberg Centre for the study of violence, which assembled the archive, also paid for a Roper Poll about the riots which included responses from some 6,000 people. By 1973 however, interest in the riots had begun to wane and the centre was closed down.

Taking his inspiration from the discovery of this collection, conservative writer Adrian Cerny has written a provocative history of the riots in a book entitled America's Dirty Laundry.

Making liberal use of newspaper article summaries and photographs from some of the major riots between 1965 and 1973, as well as statements from prominent politicians at the time, Mr Cerny has produced an eye-opening account of this tumultuous period in recent American history.

Cerny takes issue with the conventional view that the riots didn't really accomplish anything, and that they undermined some of the gains made through the peaceful civil rights protests of the late 50s and early 60s.

In Cerny's view, the riots played a major role in encouraging white flight from U.S inner cities and the subsequent political takeover of many civic governments by Black politicians.

Certainly the massive scale of the riots put a considerable strain on America's army and police services at a time when a high percentage of troops were serving in Vietnam.

Furthermore, there were few soldiers or policeman at the time who were trained in modern riot control methods, which often lead to escalating the level of violence between the authorities and the rioters.

For example, during the unrest in the city of Detroit during June 1967, over 2,000 firearms were stolen by rioters and the Mayor was forced to call in 900 inexperienced National Guardsmen to try and restore order. However, this only served to escalate tensions as the outnumbered and heavy-handed guardsmen came under heavy sniper fire from the rioters.
Eventually President Johnson was forced to intervene by calling in over 4,000 paratroopers to restore order. By the end of the rioting, 43 people were killed and over 1300 buildings were burnt or looted.

Without the manpower to guarantee law and order Cerny says, the Johnson administration decided to pursue a policy of appeasing the rioters by passing "second wave"affirmative action legislation such as the Fair Housing Act of 1968 which was deeply unpopular with many white voters.

As well as covering the riots of the civil rights era, Mr Cerny's book also documents the infamous LA riots of 1992 and the lesser known (at least outside the U.S) Cincinnati race riots of 2001. He has also written another book on the same theme - Terrorism and the Civil Rights Movement - a History.

While the book is written in a polemic rather than scholarly style, and could have done with more referencing it's an entertaining read which also contains a lot of eye-opening information about an important but under-explored chapter in U.S History.