Simmering Symptoms

Summer is the season of rioting, when the fetid heat of the slums and the sloughs of despair combine to send minorities into the streets. So far this summer, nothing has happened on the order of the huge and destructive Harlem and Watts riots, but that is little cause for congratulations or complacency. Each week for most of the summer, the nation has been plagued by a dizzying number of simmering racial disturbances, any one of which might explode into massive proportions. Last week was one of particularly widespread unrest:

> In Omaha, where National Guardsmen quelled Negro rioting over the July 4 weekend, Negroes in the city's North-Side ghetto took to the streets again, looting or fire-bombing 35 buildings over a 72-hour period. This time, violence spilled beyond the ghetto into other parts of the city.

>In Chicago, scene of heavy Negro rioting last month, racial violence came this time from whites. As 450 civil rights marchers demonstrated for open housing in a lily-white Southwest-Side neighborhood, they were taunted ("White power! White power!") by a mob of 750 whites, who burned twelve of the demonstrators' cars, overturned 22 and dumped two more into a lagoon. At week's end, as 500 marchers returned to the neighborhood for another try, a mob of 7,000 whites taunted them with curses, threw volleys of rocks, bottles and eggs. Injured: March Leader Martin Luther King, who was struck on the head by a rock and was narrowly missed by a switchblade knife that was thrown at him but gashed the shoulder of another demonstrator instead. Said King: "I have to do this--to expose myself--to bring this hate into the open."

>In Minneapolis, which has only 16,000 Negroes among its 480,000 residents, Negro youths smashed windows and looted white-owned stores on the city's racially mixed north side. Amid threats of more violence, city officials next day managed to find jobs in private firms for 60 Negro youths. Nonetheless, a building was set afire and more windows smashed in the troubled neighborhood.

> In Philadelphia, tense confrontations between police and Negroes occurred three nights running at an all-Negro public-housing complex, resulting in promises that Negro charges of police brutality would be investigated.

> In Providence, violence erupted following a civil rights rally at a shopping center in a predominantly Negro neighborhood. When hundreds of Negro youths began pegging rocks, beer cans and bottles at nine policemen who were keeping an eye on them, a phalanx of 48 other policemen stationed near by because of rumors of trouble quickly broke up the crowd from behind gladiatorlike shields, arresting 22 youths.

> In Perth Amboy, N.J. (pop. 39,000), a police arrest was followed by four nights of disquiet among the city's 7,000 Puerto Ricans, during which police claimed to have been attacked with rocks, bottles and Molotov cocktails. A Puerto Rican spokesman charged, however, that "it was the police who rioted" by seizing innocent people in the streets. Either way, city officials promised to consider rescinding an antiloitering ordinance that many Puerto Ricans resented.

> In Atlanta, after a white motorcycle policeman stopped a Negro for making an illegal turn, 200 other Negroes gathered and were led in chanting "Black power!" by Stokely Carmichael, 25, the national chairman of the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee, whose headquarters are only three blocks from the incident. A Negro police sergeant finally succeeded in dispersing them.

"Both at Once." The day after the Atlanta street incident, Stokely Carmichael told reporters that S.N.C.C. is considering forming a coalition with the extremist Black Muslims. As for black power, the New York Times laid hands on a confidential S.N.C.C. manifesto that showed that the use of the term was planned many months ago. Said the manifesto: "If we are to proceed toward liberation, we must cut ourselves off from white people. We must form our own institutions, credit unions, coops, political parties, write our own histories."

Making the case for a joint history, Ford Foundation Boss McGeorge Bundy last week told the Urban League convention in Philadelphia that "the more you look at the Negro problem the less you can separate it from the problem of life in America." The former presidential adviser took issue with those who contend that the Viet Nam war and improving the Negro's lot at home "have opposite priorities," declared that the U.S. has the men and resources "for both these jobs at once." Whatever the challenge, said Bundy, Negroes and whites "shall succeed or fail together, in our great cities as in our whole society."

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