Fighting Again It s Like That Was Kind of Big Thing in the Sixties
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How today's protests compare to 1968, explained by a historian
Heather Ann Thompson explains what's changed and what has stayed the same.
The by week has seen protests confronting police violence in dozens of major cities across the United States, including some of the biggest and almost prolonged demonstrations in years. To many, the uprisings, particularly when they veered into property destruction, bring to mind the urban unrest of the 1960s, from the 1965 Watts riots in Los Angeles to the Newark and Detroit riots in the summer of 1967 to unrest in most every major American urban center in the wake of Martin Luther Male monarch Jr.'s assassination in April 1968.
Heather Ann Thompson is a professor of history and Afro-American and African Studies at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and a scholar of 1960s and 1970s protest movements, particularly against white supremacy and mass incarceration. Her most recent book, Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison house Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy, won the Pulitzer Prize in History.
"Non protesting at all would non keep white racial violence at bay," Thompson argues. "Protests keep happening precisely because white supremacy is never sufficiently reined in."
We spoke on the phone Monday afternoon about the parallels and differences between the urban protests and riots of the tardily 1960s and those occurring today. A transcript, lightly edited for length and clarity, follows.
Dylan Matthews
Big impaired question first: How are the protests happening now like to and dissimilar from unrest in the 1960s, like Newark or Detroit in 1967, or the protests after Martin Luther King Jr'south assassination in Apr 1968?
Heather Ann Thompson
At that place seem to be so many similarities. Because racial injustice just seems to exist baked into the DNA of this country, periodically and throughout history there come these moments when people just tin't take information technology anymore. They experience that the injustice is so particularly glaring or in that location'due south such a compendium of unjust events one correct after the other that they explode.
Those kinds of explosions of individual frustration and injure happen all the fourth dimension, every twenty-four hour period, and and so in that location are moments when something touches a nervus and there's a collective explosion.
A like moment was when Emmett Till was lynched and murdered in 1955. Like this moment today, that killing touched a collective nerve. Too many young African American boys and men had been lynched and murdered. We're in a similar moment; in that location is an ever-present drumbeat of racial violence.
So, not only is the wanton murder of black men by racist whites similar to what has happened before in history, but is today's collective uprising. It'southward a mix of protestation in terms of carrying signs and slogans, but besides rage and tears and lashing out. And, like in the 1960s, there has been some looting, because the glaring injustice of racial inequality is time and again accompanied by the injustice of economic inequality. That is why in these moments people also lash out at the rich and property. So in that sense we've been here before.
In that location's much that'due south different besides though, and information technology's all pretty scary. Nosotros have a president who has no regard for the First Amendment, the press, for calming dissent, for doing concrete things that could brand this a meliorate state of affairs rather than worse. Nosotros don't know our way forward from this moment. In the past in that location were at least calmer heads at the tiptop trying to figure out what to practice to bring peace. Some people wanted more cops, but others were saying we really need to make substantive changes and prepare what got united states of america into this mess
Dylan Matthews
How does the composition of the protests today compare to the late '60s?
Heather Ann Thompson
Once again, in that location are similarities and differences. There's a remarkable multiracial presence in the streets today marching for racial justice. Certainly in inner-city streets of the North, that does look quite different than it did in the 1960s. But of course the civil rights uprisings in the South were quite multiracial, but less so in the urban Northward and then.
I think that young people of all groups are now coming out because of their collective sense that the leadership has taken this country in such a terrible management. Like in the '60s, there is an element of today'south protests that is clearly generational. A whole generation of young people, blackness and white and brownish, who understand that their futurity, the racial future of this land, is in existent jeopardy right now, and I call back that motivates people to have to the streets.
Dylan Matthews
A lot of how people experience about these protests is mediated by media coverage. How does the media portrayal of events compare to 1967-68?
Heather Ann Thompson
The media rhetoric merely sounds so familiar. The distinctions that people are continually trying to depict betwixt the "real" protesters and violent provocateurs. The repeated rhetoric about outside agitators versus legitimate protesters. A lot of that media rhetoric is the same. Simply Trump'south America is different in that the media is also being attacked, much like in totalitarian nations where reporters can be arrested and locked up and jailed. When the CNN reporters were arrested, it sent an eerie message. The mainstream media is less obviously and not necessarily part of the establishment at present in the same manner it used to be. Of course, it really depends on which media you're talking about.
I guess fifty-fifty that is not completely new. During Vietnam, there were reporters willing to get on the nightly news and be extremely critical of police violence against demonstrators. And then we're seeing like divides in the media today.
Dylan Matthews
In the belatedly 1960s, you had physical organizations like the Black Panthers and Students for a Autonomous Society, and before the Student Irenic Coordinating Committee, that could requite some structure to what was happening on the streets. Obviously the protests weren't all some masterminded radical plot the style leaders like Richard Nixon or Nelson Rockefeller tried to portray them, but you had real organizational basic backside the discontent. Are we seeing a similar organizational coalescence now?
Heather Ann Thompson
This is a very fluid situation on the footing. I think that the mode the White House is trying to portray it is very like to how Nixon was trying to portray all uprisings: Information technology was either a communist plot or a blackness plot. Rockefeller was much more than concerned with communists, Nixon was much more concerned with "the blacks." The White House is saying this is all antifa and in that location's zip prove for that. From a superficial standpoint it's eerily similar.
But in terms of what's actually happening on the ground, I don't think we fully know. A lot of this key organizational piece of work on the ground seems to be really coalitional. A lot of the grassroots organizations that were already working on criminal justice reform or h2o justice or food justice are at present coalescing effectually this issue. They're coordinating and talking to one another most how to launch a peaceful protestation. They stand together to resist people who want to fight people to plough it more than violent.
What'south notable is that it's not beingness led by the NAACP or the Urban League. And the country legislators are absolutely AWOL. Information technology's deeply grassroots.
Dylan Matthews
Yous alluded to this earlier, but in 1968 there was a real effort by American elites to try to understand the root causes of rioting and endeavour to craft solutions that went across merely crushing the riots by force. What were some of the ideas that came out of that effort, and what can we learn from that effort at present?
Heather Ann Thompson
When Lyndon Johnson brought together the Kerner Committee to locate the causes of urban unrest, there were plenty of people who told him the truth well-nigh what the problem was. At that place was an entire minority study chosen The Harvest of American Racism, which was fifty-fifty more strident near how much modify actually needed to happen in this country than the Kerner Report was, but the public never actually saw it.
So, the protests did translate into some attempts to address the problem. Simply much of that was either window dressing or barely scratched the surface of what the real trouble was. Very picayune was done to tackle the economical underpinnings of that kind of injustice. And certainly in that location was an unwillingness to tackle white supremacy.
So how exercise we get out of this now? If there's zip else I'd honey for your readership to think of, it's this: If you lot have 75+ cities called-for, what does it say that from the leadership at every level, the only response has been more police? They're deploying the National Baby-sit and more than police rather than imagining a dissimilar model, similar peacekeeping forces, working with community organizations to bring calm. Recall well-nigh the UN peacekeeping forces as a model as opposed to sending in the armed forces, which only results in more violence and deaths.
Imagine if the response was, "We hear y'all and nosotros're going to do XYZ to change this. We're going to have customs organizations sit and monitor the police force," or, "We're going to open up the question of how police officers are charged in these situations." The response has not been to attempt to keep the peace in any mode that we know might work.
Dylan Matthews
One concern I've heard raised oftentimes is that protests, specially tearing protests that involve looting, gamble triggering a backlash amongst white voters; the political scientist Omar Wasow has a recent paper suggesting this was an important cistron in Richard Nixon's ballot in 1968. How practise you weigh that risk against the odds that protest will persuade people to accept constabulary violence and other underlying concerns seriously?
Heather Ann Thompson
This is an incredibly important strategic question people are thinking near. But to me, it'due south not helpful, I think, to think nigh the ascent of backlash as the fault or responsibility of people who spoke out on behalf of justice. Nosotros've somehow gotten this thought that nosotros wouldn't have had Nixon or law and order if it hadn't been for the activism of the 1960s. And I just think that's a cardinal misreading of the historical tape. The truth of the matter is that it'south precisely because of that level of racial backfire — considering of lynching, considering of slavery, because of the high prevalence of white backfire — that the 1960s were born in the first place.
To the extent that that stuff was rolled back at all, it was perhaps because the protests of the 1960s had not succeeded in pushing racial injustice back fully, and is non because there had been protests. That level of backfire has e'er been at that place.
If Trump were to win reelection, or if this were to embolden MAGA, people volition say, "That's because people were protesting." That's a complete misreading. The white supremacists were on the march and on the movement well before anyone showed upwards in downtown Philadelphia. They always are.
Dylan Matthews
How do antiracist protests like this connect to the history of race riots where whites targeted blackness communities, as in Tulsa or Cherry Summer or Colfax?
Heather Ann Thompson
Again, I call up the fashion we've set this upwards is dangerous, this idea that blacks need to exist conscientious nigh how they struggle to be man considering there might exist another Rosewood or Tulsa or Chicago 1919.
What we have to empathize is that the difference between what happens every twenty-four hours and what happened in Greenwood, Oklahoma, is a matter of magnitude merely not kind. Nosotros tend to ignore the deadening-rolling level of daily assailment and violence against people of color in this state, just we focus on these very dramatic episodes of white racial violence. So we look at those incidents of white racial violence and say it'due south a response to blacks being more demanding. All of those particularly ugly moments were by punctuated, escalated versions of what was going on every single day to the black and brown residents of this country. And they didn't cause them just by speaking out on behalf of justice.
It's actually of import for us to assimilate this truth. Non protesting at all would non proceed white racial violence at bay. It'southward a complete twisting of what'southward in fact going on. Protests go on happening precisely considering white supremacy is never sufficiently reined in. It's never seriously taken on by those with power. And and so the people will continue to erupt.
Source: https://www.vox.com/identities/2020/6/2/21277253/george-floyd-protest-1960s-civil-rights
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