Black Lives Matter

1960s riots seem increasingly relevant to today's political climate

By: Kaiim Daids

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

1960s riots seem increasingly relevant to today's political climate. To determine the political impact of violence in the 1960s seems increasingly relevant to today's circumstances. Imagine what the 1968 presidential election would have been like if there had not been well over 140 violent protesters immediately preceding Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination. The 1960s riots and protesting did lead to some positive changes. Outrage and pent-up frustrations boiled over in many disadvantaged African-American communities during the mid-to-late-1960s, igniting riots that rampaged out of control from one neighborhood to the next. Frustrated protesters burning, battering, and ransacking buildings, raging crowds created mayhem in which some community’s residents and law enforcement operatives endured shockingly random injuries or killings. Many people blamed the chaos and riots on outside agitators or young African-American men, who represented the largest and most noticeable group of protesters. In March 1968, the Kerner Commission debunks those assumptions, declaring white racism-not African-American anger-turned the key that unleashed urban African-American turmoil. Excessive law enforcement practices, an untenable justice system, unethical consumer credit practices, insufficient and segregated housing, joblessness, and voter suppression. In addition to culturally embedded forms of racial discrimination, all converged to drive and push violent upheaval on the neighborhoods of African-American communities throughout American cities from the West Coast to the East Coast. As black unrest arose throughout African-American communities, inadequately trained law enforcement operatives and National Guard troops entered affected African-American neighborhoods, often increasing the violence. White supremacy society, the presidentially appointed panel reported, is deeply involved in the African-American communities. White supremacy institutions establish them, white supremacy institutions sustain them, and white society unconsciously condones it. The nation, the African-Americans warned, was so fractured that the United States was poised to Splinter off into two radically unequal societies-one black American, one white American. For many African-American civil rights leaders riots represented a different kind of political activism. Commonly provoked by repressive and violent law enforcement operatives' actions, the African-American community's uprisings were political acts of Verbal self-defense and racial liberation on a mass and a public scale.