222
JACK NEWFIELD
But none of that is really very important. The arguments are all
vague and abstract. What is important, though, are the riots of the last
four summers (twenty in 1964, eighty-two last year), and those to come
this summer. For those riots have become the black underclass' only
way, as Tom Hayden has pointed out, of entering and making history.
The studies now show that the rioters have not been the pawns
of "outside agitators," the "criminal element," or "mad dogs," as
Ronald Reagan baptized them. A two-year study of the Watts riot
showed that 20 per cent of the ghetto - including the middle class–
participated in the riot, and that 35 per cent approved, while an even
larger group felt some community with the rioters. In Newark, govern–
ment offers of rewards for turning in snipers were totally ignored.
What is most significant - and poignant - about the riots to me,
is
not
that they are "a rehearsal for revolution," as R ap Brown says,
but the exact opposite. They are a desperate cry for the most meager
and conventional reforms - jobs, an end to police brutality, housing
without rats, participation in community and municipal decision-making.
That there were eighty-two recorded riots last summer is primarily a
comment on the failure of two-party, representational democracy. The
riots mean that jobs and dignity have become convulsive issues because
the system has so atrophied it can't even provide elemental reforms.
But, finally, one cannot speak of Black Power, or the riots or even
Vietnam, in a departmentalized vacuum. They are all part of something
larger. We have permitted political power in America to pass from the
people to a technological elite that manipulates the mass media and
hoarels nuclear weaponry.
Representational democracy has broken down. Neither party seems
likely to nominate a critic of the war. Millions of southern Negroes are
still disenfranchised by intimidation and illiteracy. Dozens of states are
gerrymandered to favor rural, conservative constituencies. Vietnam
strategy
is
made by Rusk, Rostow, Helms and Westmoreland - all
bureaucratic appointees - while elected senators like Mansfield, Ful–
bright, Kennedy and McCarthy attack the war in vain. Adam Powell
is purged from Congress, while Newark - 60 per cent black - has no
black congressman. Congress itself is undemocratic because of the minority
veto of the filibuster, and the seniority system which favors old, rural
Southerners. Ordinary people can no longer affect national decisions
through democratic levers. The riots are an ugly, but legitimate attempt,
by the poor and powerless, to stretch democracy. We have given them
no other way.
