Riot: from Rebellion to Redemption

male: This program was made possible in part by generous grants from the New Jersey Council for the Humanities, a state partner of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

And from Jack Daneri and Jane Earll.

Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations in this film do not necessarily represent those of our supporters or this media outlet.

[solemn piano music] Andre Braugher: It's a quiet intersection today, much as it was one hot day in July 1967 when cab driver John Smith was pulled over here for a minor traffic violation.

Words were exchanged, an arrest was made, and soon Smith was on his way to the Newark, New Jersey Police Department's 4th Precinct.

Though the trip was less than a mile, witnesses say by the time he arrived, he had been badly beaten.

Opinions differ on what happened during that short trip, but whatever it was, it led to a series of events so cataclysmic they would forever change the world for everyone who lived there.

[solemn piano music] [solemn piano music] Andre: More than 50 years after the Newark riots, when protests against law enforcement are boiling over in cities across the US, there appears to be no better time to take a hard look at how one of these conflicts begins, how it unfolds, and how it can impact a city for decades afterwards.

Following John Smith's arrest, five days of gunfire, looting, and fires rocked New Jersey's largest city just 12 miles from New York.

It was the worst violence to hit the state since the Revolutionary War.

The toll of death and destruction was nearly unthinkable.

More than a half century later, questions remain.

Most of those directly involved are gone now, but a few survivors can offer what they remember of those days and the years before and after.

Jim McLaughlin: I was born in Newark.

I lived there for over 50 years.

I had no perception of difficulty between the races in all my growing up years, and 'til I became a fireman, and even not at the beginning of that career.

Arthur Wardle: Everybody got along fine.

It was mixed racially as I recall, but I never paid much attention to race for my whole life.

Andre: Max Herman is a sociologist and college professor who spent 15 years interviewing people connected to the events of 1967.

Max Herman: Whereas White people may have felt, "Well, everything was fine, you know, by me, everything was okay," the pressure was building within a Black community that felt disenfranchised, and they wanted things to change.

Mary Brown: Well, I remember one time we went downtown when I was very young, and it was a restaurant there, and I said, "Oh, I wanna go in here," and my mom said, "No, we're not going in there, baby, we're going over here."

She didn't bother to explain to me why she said, "No, you don't want to even go in that restaurant anyway."

You know, it was that type of thing.

Like, it's like we do now.

We protect our children.

You don't want your child to realize at five years old that there are people out there that just hate you because of your color.

Sharpe James: When we were playing like football, basketball, we would travel to the North Ward.

Some of the parents would stone the bus or wanna run us out of the North Ward, "You don't belong over here."

Joe Cancelliere: I was absolutely a racist, you know, and had grown up that way.

But again, fear was the reason.

It was all about fear.

Steve Carroll: There was so much hatred going on, it was unbelievable.

Just growing up there, all you had to do was a White person, Black person look at each other, and next thing you know, you're fighting.

Samuel Nash: I think Blacks were just tired.

We were tired, man.

We were tired.

We knew something was wrong.

You know, we're tired of being poor.

I was tired of being poor.

I knew I was in poverty.

Lawrence Hamm: You know, for years we talked about the civil rights movement and what happened, you know, down south, but Newark was very much a segregated city.

Up until the 1960s, there was segregated seating in movie theaters in Newark.

Andre: Segregation in Newark was not just racial, but ethnic as well.

Throughout the 20th century, the city had numerous ethnic neighborhoods, each known for being home to a certain group.

The North Ward was primarily Italian, much of the West Ward was Irish, and the Weequahic area was predominantly Jewish, while German, Polish, and later on Portuguese families made up much of the eastern part of the city known as the Ironbound section, or "Down Neck."

As the last immigrants to arrive, African-Americans were relegated mostly to the poorest and oldest part of the city, the Central Ward.

Dr.

Clement Price: That ethnic Balkanization was very obvious, and then it took on a racial characteristic as the Italians and the Jews and the Irish and the Poles and the Greeks stopped coming into Newark.

The fastest growing ethnic population would be Blacks coming up from the American South, obviously, coming into Newark roughly between 1915 and 1965.

Their numbers become so great that Newark becomes by 1965 probably a predominantly Black city with these constellations of White ethnic communities, so it was a Balkanized city that had a deepening racial problem.

Max: Factories were closing down and moving out and people were losing jobs, and in the middle of this, the city government comes up with a plan to knock down over 100 acres of privately owned homes to build a medical school.

Andre: In addition to the medical school project, the government had plans to build a highway that would obliterate another large section of housing in the Central Ward, and there was another conflict over Mayor Addonizio's choice for a Board of Education position.

Perhaps the biggest piece of kindling in Newark's tinderbox that summer was the fact that several young Black men had recently died in the custody of Newark police, so when a rumor of another police killing circulated, the majority of residents were inclined to believe it, and to react.

Bob Payne: The cab driver had committed some traffic violation, and he was arrested.

The officers, from my understanding, denied that they actually assaulted him.

Dominick Spina: And on the way here to the 4th Precinct, he again became violent.

He kicked one of the police officers in the back of the head.

They finally brought him inside to the precinct.

They had to carry him out bodily because he refused to get out of the radio car.

John Smith: I was in no condition to get out because he had jammed me in the groin with his stick.

I was in intense pain.

So they started dragging me through the streets, and this evidently incensed the people of the community.

Ed Wall: The taxicab driver was locked up by the cops.

Someone started an erroneous rumor that the police in the 4th Precinct had beaten him to death, and then it spread from there.

Sharpe: We don't have no power, you don't recognize us, and then you're gonna brutalize our people.

What do we have to lose?

I think when you back anyone up against the wall and they feel helpless, they will strike back, they will fight back, they will riot.

Andre: In short order, what began as a protest of police brutality quickly expanded to a night of widespread civil unrest and rampant looting.

Lawrence: Somebody came upstairs and said there was a big commotion on Springfield Avenue.

"Let's all go down there and see what's going on," and we all ran down the stairs, and my mother was standing on the porch across the street to make sure I didn't go down, and that probably was a good thing because who knows, maybe I'd have been one of the people that had been shot or hurt or maybe even killed.

Ed: And I remember as if it were yesterday.

It was a Thursday, it was the 13th of July, and about 4 o'clock, some guy drove a car right into Flax's furniture store, and the looting began.

Dan Sheridan: On the corner, there was an auto parts store, and across from that was a drugstore, and people were just coming out of that.

I mean, these places were looted.

Just forget about anything left in there.

Betty Darby: People stealing, having a good time.

It was like if your mother wasn't home and you had your friends over and you could go party, because back then you still had people who had to eat beans every day, so they got 'em a piece of meat.

Craig Mierop: You know, that's really all the law is.

It's an agreement that exists no place but in the minds of those people who will accept its terms.

When someone suddenly decides they're not going to do it, and they do it in a group, you know, of about 200-300 people, it's like this monster with a lot of hands and no brain.

You know, it's just, it's-- how do you stop them?

Lawrence: It had a kind of almost carnival-like atmosphere 'cause you just saw people doing stuff that they didn't do before.

Kimberly Williams: I can remember my grandmother coming across the street.

Her arms were filled with stuff, but when she got the things in the house, I think my grandmother's conscience got the best of her because she took the stuff back.

Lawrence: Anybody that sat and looked at people looting, Black or White, would probably say, "Wow, that's not right," but those are the avenues that are left to people when they don't have another way to address their grievances.

Shiera Stern: They just were looting for the sake of looting.

A lot of them didn't have a cause, you know, "I'm looting because of this or because of that."

I mean, you could buy anything you wanted, you know, refrigerators, TVs, because the people had them, and they were running down the streets with them.

Pat D'Amico: Combat.

That's as close as I can describe it, combat.

And in combat such as war, innocent people get hurt.

Bat Masterson: The first place we hit was Springfield Avenue, which was just going crazy.

It was, you know, sirens, fires, arrests, people running all over the place, chasing kids, chasing people.

Dan: And the captain says, "Oh, stop."

In the middle of the street, there was a mattress burning.

I didn't even notice it.

I think most of the street lights were out, and so he says, "Hold on," and he jumped out, and he went to move the mattress out of the way, and all of a sudden somebody threw a firebomb.

It just missed him by a couple of feet, and that came from the east side.

And the west side of the street, there was a number of cops behind the cars going bam, bam, bam, "Stick your head out now, turkey."

So holy cow, we're in the middle of a gunfight.

Brendan Byrne: In the middle of the night, I get a call I think from Governor Hughes.

I was prosecutor of Essex County, and I get a call telling me that the riots have gotten out of control.

I went out on the streets with the people from the prosecutor's office.

I had a loaded gun with my hand almost on the trigger.

Was I scared?

Yeah.

Lawrence: Then it got very serious.

The police coming in, stopping people.

People were being arrested.

I mean, you could see all this from the front porch.

Samuel: We had a bird's eye view of the 5th Precinct.

We seen the police bringing people in and out, and they were very aggressive.

They were hitting them upside the heads.

Andre: When city authorities were unable to get the situation under control after two days, Governor Richard Hughes called in the state police and National Guard in an effort to stop the rioting.

Arthur: And as we were coming into the city, there was just six or seven huge columns of smoke rising into the sky, and I got a little nervous because we could see that it was obviously something big going on.

Paul Zigo: What I saw as I looked over in the area of Newark was a whole city on fire.

It looked like the city was like London in 1940 during the course of the London Blitz.

Ron Chance: The thing that I noticed right away was the acrid smell.

It just smelled.

It smelled like there was a dump on fire.

Arthur: There was nothing high-minded going on.

It was stealing, burning, burning other people's properties, destruction of property.

It was broken glass over every inch of the sidewalks and streets, abandoned cars, people running around.

Ron: Everybody was out of control.

They were just doing whatever they wanted to do.

We saw people breaking into windows and stealing stuff, carrying televisions down the street.

[Willie Nile singing "Hard Times in America"] Hard times in America.

Hard times in America.

Lawrence: We stood on our second floor porch and looked out over the neighborhood, and fire engines going everywhere, police cars going everywhere, people going everywhere.

Andre: While authorities hoped to quell the disturbance with the addition of state police and the National Guard, they may have unwittingly made the situation worse.

They were all outsiders, unfamiliar with the ways of the city, and the guardsmen were grossly ill-prepared for the task at hand.

Craig: This is the amazing thing about them, because in the Army, every time you look like you're not paying attention, someone will say to you, "Pay attention, this information could save your life."

So you were always taught to be ready, and of course, they weren't ready.

They had no ammunition.

We were supposed to go into this room and take two bullets each and one tear gas canister.

We're going to file in, and we were on our honor to just take two bullets.

Well, only about half of us got done, and all the bullets were gone.

So, well, some guys obviously had more, and some didn't have any.

I was one of the guys who didn't have any.

Sharpe: They were inexperienced young people, probably never fired their weapon, and they were scared.

They were more scared than we were.

Craig: You used World War II weapons, World War II tactics, and if World War II ever broke out again, we were your guys.

But the truth is, beyond that there was no hope.

The trucks didn't work, guns didn't work.

There were no walkie talkies or other forms of communication.

It was a figment of the government's imagination that this was a military unit.

This was literally like the Knights of Columbus.

Ron: Well, I don't think the National Guard had anywhere near the type of training or discipline or control that we had, and they were shooting a lot.

Craig: They were all White, and they all didn't want to be in the Army, so it's strange to have an army of guys who don't want to be in the Army.

Andre: When the Guard and state police rolled into the area, they changed the character of the conflict in many ways, and people in various neighborhoods reacted differently.

Max: I've talked to folks in the Guard and who said that they were up at the Roseville Armory, and they started rolling into the city through the North Ward, and the residents came out on the streets and were cheering them.

And basically, to paraphrase what one guardsperson told me, he said they were cheering, "Kill the niggers."

Craig: When we left the stadium, it was an all-White neighborhood, and they were lined up like a parade, and people had signs, you know, these "Go get 'em," "Put them down."

So you know, we were gonna, they were looking for retribution, and then as we drove, the crowd became not quite mixed but sparse, you know, and then it became four deep, all Black.

Nobody I know in the National Guard would have gone into that neighborhood for any other reason except for the result of a wrong turn on their way someplace else.

There's no reason why you would ever go there, and now you had to get off a truck, just two of you, maybe if you were lucky with four bullets, and maybe 60 or 70 people who were just standing there waiting to see what was gonna happen.

Max: And the perception of that from the Black community is that the guardsmen and the police were part of what they saw as an occupying force.

Andre: Residents feeling that their neighborhoods were being invaded and occupied, combined with the already tense environment, led to a dramatic escalation of the conflict.

And while some guardsmen had no ammunition, others had plenty, and seemed intent on using it.

To this day, there's a great deal of controversy over who did all the shooting, but by all accounts, once the Guard and the state police settled in, there was a massive amount of gunfire.

Max: No one was killed in the first and second days of this event in Newark.

People only started getting killed when the state police and the National Guard came into the city.

Pat: Someone said that there was sniper fire because you could hear sounds all over the place, you know, so you were a nervous wreck.

Andre: Before long, both law enforcement and the public were afraid of what would happen next.

Everyone seemed to be convinced that everyone else was shooting at them.

The high-rise housing projects were at the center of the activity, and whenever shots seemed to come from those buildings, the response was all out.

Craig: They would return fire on this high-rise, and I mean HUNDREDS of rounds of ammunition.

If you looked at the result of their firing, you'd see pockmarks three floors high and 100 yards wide, so they weren't firing at anything specific, they were just firing back at the building.

These are steel ball armor-piercing rounds.

They will go through a brick wall, and this is the most densely populated city in the most densely populated state in America.

Jack Burns: There was 75-100 cops walking around talking to each other, and I was, you know, maybe 50 yards away from Freddie.

And I didn't hear any, I didn't hear the shot, but I saw commotion started, and they said that Detective Toto had got shot.

Pat: He got hit in the chest, and he, there was a complete panic.

Bob: The emergency responded, the ambulance responded, and then they was treating him, and he was, you could tell that he was in pretty bad shape.

Pat: We had a feeling he was dead instantly, but he was taken away.

And I want to tell you, and I gotta be honest, there was a lot of firepower going right back, you know, because it came from one of the tall high-rises, and you know, in that kind of situation, you just wanna lay down some firepower to stop whoever's shooting.

Jack: Yeah, where was the person at?

I have no idea.

People were pointing, and people were shooting at the building.

Now, I don't know what they were shooting at because I was, you know, maybe 50 yards away, but they said the shot came from that building.

I guess, what floor?

You know, it's a 12 story building or more.

Andre: Some say that the shooting of Fred Toto was retribution for an earlier incident at the Scudder Homes housing project where police fatally shot two civilians.

By Friday night, in addition to Detective Toto, 12 citizens had been killed by gunfire, and four more had died from related incidents such as a collision with a fire engine.

All these deaths raised the stakes, and now everyone felt ever more at risk, and ever more compelled to shoot.

Samuel: The National Guard, they were very serious, man.

A lot of people got killed, but it was only because they were like, "Don't move," and people was moving, and they were shooting 'em.

Kimberly: They had told people to stay away from the windows, not to go near windows, and they never gave us a reason to why, but we assumed that if we went by the windows that we would be shot.

Kyle Tarver: My mother was so afraid because she got eight kids.

She had us under the bed hiding.

I remember bullets and stuff coming through, and it was a sad time.

Ron: People are shooting at ambulance drivers.

They're shooting at firemen, they're shooting at policemen.

Ed: The first few days, there was no gunshots.

There was no shooting at anyone the first, I'd say, two days.

The third day, we started getting a lot of gunfire.

Jim: When I became a fireman, I knew that it was difficult, physical, dangerous work at times, but I never suspected that I would ever be shot at or in danger of being shot at, which happened during the riots.

Michael Moran: There was something over the radio that, you know, a fireman had been shot, and that from there our next door neighbors came running in, and I had been in the cellar area where we had a TV set up, and I remember the next door neighbor rushing downstairs, and with kind of a look of terror in her face.

It was just surreal that something was happening that I probably was in a state of shock.

Andre: By the time fire captain Mike Moran was killed on Saturday night, 20 people had lost their lives, and the city was engulfed in flames.

Ed: Worst fires I've ever seen in my life occurred during the riots.

We documented in those five days something like 122 working fires.

I don't mean meat on the stove.

I don't mean car fires.

I mean where houses or stores were involved, and that's a lot of fires in five days.

Arthur: The firemen had put makeshift plywood over the roof of their trucks because people were throwing all kinds of missiles, garbage cans, bottles, rocks, bricks, all kinds of lethal stuff at the fire trucks.

Andre: While the firemen battled the fires, Newark police, state troopers, and National Guardsmen struggled to control the mayhem as shots flew throughout the Central Ward.

After a shot from a home hit a firehouse, Ron Chance was one of three state troopers ordered into the building.

Ron: So the three of us start off running across the street.

Well, nobody told the people behind me to stop shooting, and just as I got to the front door of this house, I just got this terrible pain on the elbow on my left arm, and I looked down and I had a hole in my shirt and I had blood running down my sleeve, and at that point I'd never even thought that I could have been shot because the only way I could have been shot was by somebody who was behind me, not somebody in front of me.

Andre: To understand what happened on the streets of Newark that summer, one must remember that chaos and mayhem were the watchwords of the week.

Ron Chance was almost certainly shot by law enforcement officers, and many civilians and civil servants were hit by bullets whose origins were unknown.

Evidence suggests that while most of the first responders acted responsibly, some took the law into their own hands.

National Guardsman Craig Mierop was a witness to one such occasion.

After guardsmen found two young men in a car with a handgun that had been fired repeatedly, Mierop found himself assisting two state troopers as they interrogated the suspects inside the Engine 6 firehouse on Springfield Avenue.

Craig: The large trooper really became crazy all of a sudden, and he started yelling, "Is this the gun you killed the cop with?"

He had a glove on with something in the center of his palm, and he hit him as hard as he could, and the suspect being handcuffed stumbled back here a couple steps, and then came forward again, and just as he got upright, all of a sudden he came at this kid and hit him across the head with a nightstick.

This kid's head exploded.

I mean, it just swelled up and split right in front of my eyes, and he must have broken his eye socket because it swelled up within seconds.

The big kid became hysterical crying and begged the policeman to stop hitting him, and the cop just whacked him.

Backhanded him with a nightstick, and he just fell straight down and then fell over unconscious, and then he gave his attention back to the small kid, and the policeman hit him again.

Imagine hitting somebody with a rosewood nightstick with all your might like a baseball bat more than once.

I thought if he kept hitting him he'd kill him, and the truth is I didn't realize at the time that he might have been trying to kill him.

And I at that point suddenly realized I didn't feel so good, and I went to sit down.

Don't ask me why I thought there'd be a chair there, but there wasn't, so I just fell on my ass on the floor.

And the trooper just became more and more angry, and he grabbed this kid by the collar and said, "So you're a tough little son of a bitch, huh?"

And they picked him up, held him parallel to the floor, and then started dropping him on his face.

They held him on an angle, and they just dropped him on his face, and he was of course handcuffed.

And then they did it a second time, and the second time the kid didn't get up.

And while he was lying there, he started to convulse, and he was vomiting, and then he just was done.

There was no movement in him at all, but the cop was furious that the little guy wouldn't pass out and beat him to the point that I think it's probable that he beat him to death.

For me, I never caught up.

I don't know why I couldn't act.

I couldn't say anything, I didn't do anything.

I suppose there was some fear in it that they were gonna do something to me.

They threw the kids in the truck and told the guy who drove it, who was a guardsman, to dump 'em.

He drove away, and they got in a Jeep and left, and that was their idea of maintaining the law and order.

Andre: The troopers involved in that incident had no badges or name tags and were never identified.

Just up the road, Trooper Ron Chance was exercising a lot more restraint in a frightening situation he encountered.

Ron: I'm standing on the side of the street, and right behind the Washington sign I see a blast.

A gun fires, and a bullet goes over my head and hits the building behind me, and we kneel down, and then another shot comes from the same place and over our heads and hits the building behind us.

We were there for about 45 minutes, maybe an hour.

We were stuck there on the street.

While we're there, a man comes from between two buildings on the other side of the street, and he says, "Help me, help me, please, I've been shot," and he walks right up to the cars where I am.

So we get back in, and we're now, we're still waiting for this guy to shoot at us again, so we're down behind our cars, and we open the door, crawl in, call command post and say, "We have a man here, a civilian who's just been shot."

The ambulance pulls up.

The man now moves up and is sitting in the window, and they just said, "We're not taking him," and they got back in the ambulance and drove away, and the man died.

Now, whether he was dead or not at that time, I don't know.

Andre: The man in the window was 50 year old bartender Oscar Hill, who had been walking home from work when he was shot.

To add further insult to his unfortunate end, when this picture in Life magazine showed him splayed out in a store window, most readers assumed he had been shot while looting there.

Decades after the riot, a number of controversies still surround the events of that week.

Trooper Chance's encounter falls under the heading of perhaps the most contentious dispute, the subject of snipers.

Max: There are folks that I talked to that are police officers and National Guardsmen, state police officers, who are thoroughly convinced that there were snipers, that there were people on the roofs of buildings that were taking shots at them.

On the other hand, there are folks in the activist community who say that the whole concept of a sniper was a myth, that there was no such thing as a sniper.

Bob: I disagree.

We had some instance where you could actually see.

I witnessed the shots coming from certain areas.

Ed: I documented 33 cases of shots.

Not someone thought they heard a shot fired, not that they heard noise in the area, but where there's a bullet in a firehouse door or damage to an apparatus.

Ron: It really aggravated me when I read some of the reports later that said that this was a police riot, that the police fired upon but no one ever fired at the police, there were no snipers.

Three times I was standing there and somebody tried to shoot me.

I saw the gun.

I saw the report.

I heard the report.

I heard the bullet go over my head.

I heard it hit something behind me, so there's absolutely no question in my mind that there were people out there shooting at us.

Max: Were there people on the roofs of buildings that were taking shots at police and firefighters?

Yeah, probably.

Were they part of an organized insurgency?

Very doubtful.

Craig: A sniper patrol.

Now this is something, where would I have learned this?

And I said, I actually said to the officer in charge, "How does this work?"

And he said, "Well, you drive around looking for snipers."

I said, "What do you mean?"

He said, "Well, you know, you drive around, somebody shoots at you," and then what?

I mean, I do what?

I, you know, it's a crazy concept.

I mean, how about if I don't drive, then there's no sniper?

You know, he's only shooting at us.

Let's all go home.

Ed: We were getting a lot of gunfire from the Hayes Homes across the street, and although I shouldn't admit it on TV, I feel very happy that I was responsible for getting one of them killed because he was shooting at us, and we had state troopers around the front of 6 Engine.

I got annoyed.

I went out and I said to the state trooper sergeant, I said, "Watch the sixth or eight floor.

It's a green drape up there.

Every so often a weapon comes out," and he did, and he had a Thompson submachine gun.

And no more green drape, no more rifle, no more shooting, so I think he got him.

Dr.

Price: In an illogical racial way, it makes some sense.

When you dig into the weeds, it's probably something that makes more sense in the theater of fear and loathing than in the theater of facts and data.

Ken Gibson: Nobody got shot by a sniper in Newark.

People who got killed were killed by National Guardsmen.

They fired up into the air, and bullets go up, they come down.

There was one fireman that was killed and one policeman, but nobody ever did an autopsy to prove where those bullets came from.

No autopsies of 26 people, right?

That should amaze everybody.

There's a reason for that.

The mayor, the governor, prosecutors, nobody wanted to know that those people were killed by ballistics from National Guardsmen.

Ed: Anyone who says that there were no snipers in Newark is covering up.

We were shot at.

Detective Toto was killed, and Mike Moran was shot off a ladder and was killed.

Those weren't accidents.

Those were deliberate gunfire.

Andre: Another enduring controversy surrounds the number of shots fired by troopers and guardsmen during the conflict.

Reports stated that the number was over 13,000.

Ron: We were issued bullets and I never used them, and I believe that the rounds that they're reporting are the rounds that were issued, not those that were fired.

We had to qualify once a year, and we had to practice with our own weapons on our own time at our own expense.

We had to buy our own bullets.

So now I'm in Newark, Sergeant's giving me free bullets that I can practice with, and my squad, eight guys, we were issued 400 rounds.

Maybe eight of them were fired, and I believe that that's the same exact thing that happened with all the other squads and platoons of the state police.

I was there for four or five days, and I never fired my weapon, and I was shot at, and I was shot.

Andre: Whatever the numbers, as the weekend wound down and Monday morning dawned, a variety of factors caused the shooting, the violence, and the looting to subside.

Pat: It ended because they just got tired and there was nothing to steal.

Craig: I remember there was a terrific thunderstorm.

It was short but it was powerful, and after that it was never the same, the looting.

For all the shooting people, and they did shoot people, the thing that really broke the momentum in my opinion was this rainstorm, that people for some reason will face bullets faster than getting wet.

Ron: The tide turned.

The people in the neighborhoods got fed up with what was going on and wanted to go back to work and get their lives back together.

Dr.

Price: City has its worst nightmare.

It has a perfect storm.

Some people said, "Okay, let's pick up where we left off."

Andre: The Newark riot was over.

Twenty-six people were dead.

The damage estimates in today's dollars: nearly $100 million.

Over 700 people were injured, and nearly 1,500 were arrested.

No one was ever charged in any of the 26 deaths associated with the riot, and while the violence and fires came to an end, these were not events that anyone would soon forget.

The after-effects of that week are still evident all over Newark, and the controversies stirred up by that conflict live on today.

More than a half-century later, people have a hard time even agreeing on what to call it.

Ed: Riots.

Dr.

Price: Rebellion.

Monroe Bierman: Riot.

Max: Civil disorder.

Lawrence: Rebellion.

Ron: Riots.

Dr.

Price: Revolution.

Pat: Riot.

Max: Civil disturbance.

Michael: Riots.

Lawrence: Uprising.

Dr.

Price: So in some quarters, it's a riot.

In other quarters, it's a rebellion.

In other quarters, it might be a pogrom because so many Jewish businesses were burned and looted.

In some quarters, it was a police riot.

Max: If you use the word "riot" in a certain context with an activist from the African-American community, then they might take exception to that, and indeed, many did.

On the other hand, if you use the word "rebellion" when speaking with a family of Jewish merchants whose store was destroyed, they will look at you and ask, you know, "Why would you use the word rebellion?"

Dr.

Price: And it depends on what side of history you want to be on.

As I've told my students over the years, we Americans see the Boston Tea Party as this kind of rise of discontent against the crown.

Well, the people in England saw it as a riot.

Lawrence: It's very difficult for me to understand how people can understand that when we talk about the American Revolution, and not understand that when we're talking about Black people fighting against their oppression.

Andre: Whatever one chooses to call the events of 1967, they had a profound effect on area residents for generations afterward, but in those first few months following the disturbance, the mood was particularly grim.

Monroe: All the clothing on the main floor was taken.

All the mannequins were broken, the glass, it was horrible.

It was a horrible experience, and I had a house and three children and a wife to support, and I wondered, you know, what was gonna happen?

Jim: After the riots, the city was a different place.

First of all, there was a lot of burned out buildings, empty streets all over the place from fire-ravaged buildings, and that caused other problems in the city.

A lot of homeless.

A lot of crime I think came after that too because people's lives were disrupted.

Frederick Burroughs: But the biggest problem was there was nowhere to go shop.

Supermarkets, you know, there's nowhere to buy food.

Mary: Oh, after the riots, it was doom.

Stores closed.

You know, people were scared too, so I can understand that.

People were still scared.

Kimberly: Everything was destroyed.

Everything in that area was destroyed.

There was nothing that was pretty much still standing.

It was a war zone.

The look on people's faces was so sad, you know, that they really couldn't understand how what they had was no longer beautiful.

It was devastation.

It looked like a big garbage can.

Bob: Stores were closed, boarded up.

It was a really sad situation there for a while.

Andre: As sad as it was for all residents, those days were especially tough for the 26 families who lost loved ones to the riots, and the thousands of other people whose lives intertwined with theirs.

Every year on the anniversary of that tumultuous week, a group of community activists, the People's Organization for Progress, gathers at the site of a memorial to those lost to the violence.

One gathering found Pamela Spellman addressing the crowd as she remembered her mother, Eloise, who was shot to death in the window of her own home, leaving behind 11 children.

Pamela Spellman: You know, they say that time heals all wounds.

Time doesn't heal this wound.

There's not a day in my life that goes by that I don't miss my Mom.

At the time that she was murdered, I was nine years old, but I remember everything.

It hurts me to my heart when her birthday come around.

I cry.

When Mother's Day come around, I cry.

When I'm in tough situations, I cry.

She was getting my sister out of the window because she didn't want her to get hurt.

Did you have the right to take my mom's life like an animal?

Andre: In the immediate aftermath of the riots, a number of things changed dramatically in the region.

Most of them were in one way or another related to the rapid migration out of Newark by almost everyone who could afford to move.

While the flight of the White population was already underway by the early '60s, the events of '67 accelerated it dramatically.

Many moved to surrounding towns in Essex and Union Counties: Irvington, Union, Maplewood, South Orange, West Orange, and Livingston.

Others moved to the Jersey Shore, where over time towns that had once been primarily summer resorts became year-round communities.

Between 1950 and 2000, Newark's population dropped by nearly 40%.

Cory Booker: All these undercurrents of bigotry and poverty and suppression, all these undercurrents of pain and dislocation burst to the fore and scattered much of the resources of this city outward, and it wasn't just White people that left.

People with resources left, people who could have invested in the city left.

Max: There were a few White communities, the Irish community in the West Ward and the Jewish community in the Weequahic section, and after the riots, those people, they moved out very, very rapidly.

Pat: Nobody wanted to stay there anymore because now you knew what could happen, and it could happen again.

Ken: A lot of White people left primarily because they felt that property values were going to continue to go down.

A lot of them felt strongly that they were going to be replaced by Black folks, where they lived, where they worked, some of which was true.

Debi Hall-Dean: When I moved to Vailsburg, I felt like I was in a strange land.

I mean, I had never seen so many White people in all my life.

The Vailsburg section sticks out like a tail on Newark's West End.

Its separation from the rest of the city was accentuated by the construction of the Garden State Parkway in the 1950s.

Debi Hall-Dean's family was the first to integrate her new neighborhood in Vailsburg.

She remembers how the riots changed her world.

Debi: It made my parents move me from a very comfortable place.

It took me into that whole world of "other" in the Vailsburg community, and that was directly related to the riots.

I got called all sorts of names, racial epithets.

Andre: One day in particular stands out in Debi's memory.

Debi: So I'm about 13 years old, coming home from school, new to the neighborhood, and I had already gotten used to the "for sale" signs in every window.

It was just the way it was, but then I walked past this house, 102 Sunset, and I hear someone come to the door and say with intentions of me hearing it, "There's that nigger that moved into the block," and it was hard.

It was frightening.

I just had never heard it and never experienced it, but it stung.

Andre: By Election Day in 1970, there were three major candidates: city engineer Ken Gibson, fire director John Caufield and sitting mayor Addonizio.

So once again, the power struggle involved the three largest ethnic groups in the city: Black, Irish, and Italian.

Ken: Getting people to believe that I could win, that was the hardest part.

I had to convince mostly Black people that I could win, and by the time election day rolled around, Addonizio had been indicted and was on trial.

Andre: Despite corruption accusations against the mayor, it came down to a runoff election between Addonizio and Gibson, with Caufield and other voices in the city forced to choose which side they would support.

Sharpe: Then in the runoff, of course, you had John Caufield, the Irish community tipped the scale and backed Kenneth Gibson.

Andre: Ken Gibson won the runoff, and barely a month later, Mayor Addonizio would be convicted on 64 counts of extortion and conspiracy related to a kickback scheme involving city contractors.

He was sentenced to ten years in prison.

While the remaining White population had its reservations, in 1970, Ken Gibson became the first African-American mayor of any major city in the Northeast.

Caufield and other Whites who had supported him received death threats, but the inauguration was peaceful enough, and the city entered a new era, or so one might have thought.

Ken: A lot of people felt that once they had a Black mayor, then we don't need to have any civil rights organizations anymore.

I was gonna take care of everything.

I was gonna provide all the jobs that Black people needed.

I was gonna take care of all the educational problems, and I was gonna get all the money that we needed from Washington.

They were expecting that I could walk on water, but I can't swim.

Sharpe: Ken Gibson could get nothing through that even approached the question of racial line, and they were determined that although you elected a Black mayor, he's still not in charge.

Andre: The racial animosity that lingered after the riots was like a festering wound, and with a newly installed Black mayor, tension between Black and White rose to new heights in the 1970s, and of course, there were those who sought to take advantage of that.

At the head of the line were two of the most controversial figures in Newark's history, poet and playwright LeRoi Jones, who later changed his name to Amiri Baraka, and North Ward activist Anthony Imperiale.

Both were loved by thousands, and hated and feared by just as many.

Sharpe: There was always a fear.

Anthony Imperiale in the White community, and Amiri Baraka in the Black community, opposing individuals who brought about fear and controversy.

Ras Baraka: A lot of people say different things about my father and his interaction and what was going on, and he basically was, along with many other people in this country, was trying to fight for more democracy that was inclusive of all Americans, not just a few people who people thought should be in government and in power.

Imperiale was trying to prevent democracy.

They stood in front of voting booths armed with weapons.

They tried to prevent people from moving into specific neighborhoods.

Ken: The only violence that took place on election night, Imperiale's people beat up the TV guys.

They broke up the cameras because they didn't want it shown that I had won.

Joe: I was afraid of everything, you know, kind of growing up, so when I heard that there were race riots going on right in the next town over, I used to have to ask my mother, "Ma, are they gonna come?

Are we in trouble?"

And my mother, she says, "No, don't worry about that."

And then I developed those fears towards different people in my life, specifically, you know, people of color, and I grew up that way, and in the town, I never really had to deal with people of color.

I just kind of saw them as the enemy from that day, from the riots back in '67.

And so when I heard about Anthony Imperiale, and you know, I heard an Italian name, I was Italian, and so okay, and that gave me a little peace, and then I heard like he had like weapons, and I heard he had a tank.

Bob: It's true that he did have a tank.

I did see the tank.

Yes, he had a tank.

Andre: In the late 1990s, Baraka and Imperiale set aside their differences one night and sat down together for several hours at a Newark restaurant.

No one knows what they talked about.

Ken Gibson was re-elected three times.

While he succeeded in bringing a great deal of federal funding to Newark and beginning the rebirth of the downtown, many fault him for failing to clean up the remnants of the riots.

Ken: Well, the city was suffering from the after-effects of '67 riots, it became very difficult to do business.

Fire insurance premiums went up.

All other property insurance premiums went up.

Debi: It was disheartening to see abandoned and sometimes burned buildings, and the fact that they stayed for so long, it did kind of take away the pride that I had in my city.

It was hard to say, you know, "I'm from Newark and I'm proud of it" when this is what Newark looks like.

Sharpe: People used to always come back, five years later, ten years later, fifteen years: "It looks the same.

Well, what happened?"

Cory: When I moved here onto a tough street in the mid-1990s and saw this, literally could still see the scars of the riots, places that had burned down and were not rebuilt.

Andre: After 16 years at City Hall, Ken Gibson was defeated by Sharpe James in 1986.

James immediately vowed to clean up the devastation left behind by the riots nearly 20 years earlier.

Sharpe: We went down Elizabeth Avenue and fixed up every abandoned structure on Elizabeth Avenue, every abandoned building on Lyons Avenue.

Andre: Another major advance during the James years was the development of the New Jersey Performing Arts Center.

Many mark its opening as the real beginning of Newark's recovery from the blight of the '60s.

In 2002, Cory Booker, the young Central Ward councilman, challenged James for the mayor's seat.

The election was documented in the Oscar-nominated film "Street Fight" by Marshall Curry.

Many viewers were shocked by the tactics that James employed, allegedly using the police department to harass Booker and his supporters.

Marshall Curry: I knew that New Jersey had a reputation of having kind of tough politics, but it was much more bare knuckles than I expected.

Andre: Sharpe James narrowly won re-election to a fifth term in 2002.

Booker came back in 2006 and made another run at James.

This time James dropped out of the race only hours before ballots were to be sent for printing.

Booker won with 72% of the vote.

Shortly after, Sharpe James was indicted on 25 counts of fraud and depriving the government of honest services.

He was later convicted on five counts and sentenced to 27 months in federal prison.

In 2002, former mayor Ken Gibson pled guilty to charges of tax evasion in a deal that spared him jail time.

Cory: Yeah, somebody joked with me once that I'm the first mayor since the 1960s that hasn't been indicted, and then they reminded me that I still had a year or two left on my term.

Andre: Cory Booker was mayor from 2006 to 2013.

Towards the end of his term, he reflected on the city's outlook.

Cory: We're very determined to return a sense of integrity, but more important than that, integrity's such a floor.

We really should be going for the ceiling, and the beauty of Newark right now is we're doing so many things that are breaking decades long trends.

So during the time that were the uprisings, the riots, you have a precipitous drop in population.

Well, now it's the first time in 60 years that the population is now growing again in the city of Newark.

What a beautiful turn.

Companies for decades were leaving, and now we have our first new hotels being built in downtown Newark in 40 years, our first new office towers being built in decades.

Andre: Whatever bright days may lie ahead, present day Newark is still a city with a great deal of troubles.

Debi: You can go 2-3 blocks in any direction from the Newark downtown and see poverty that I call cruel, and I think that's the reason that we're still being plagued with the violence that we are.

Hurt people hurt people.

Desperate people do desperate things.

Andre: Over the years, a network of charities and community organizations has developed to help those who might otherwise fall through the cracks.

The sight of people working together to help others lends some credence to the claim that Newark has finally begun to put its painful, divisive past behind it.

Perhaps the most compelling evidence that attitudes have evolved here is the 2014 election of Mayor Ras Baraka.

Yes, the son of Amiri Baraka, the radical leader who was once a thorn in the side of the city's administration, is now charged with uniting the city as it moves forward.

Ras: My father in 1967 was chained to a hospital bed after getting hit over the head by police out in the street fighting for inclusion in the city of Newark, and his son is the mayor of the city now, so I say that speaks volumes to how far we've come since 1967.

Ras: Watch out, America, here comes Newark!

Here comes Newark!

Here comes Newark!

Andre: In 2020, after the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police, and in the midst of a global pandemic, protests around the country turned ugly.

While some cities had relatively calm demonstrations, in multiple places, police actions were unnecessarily violent, and many protesters also got out of control, burning buildings and looting stores.

It's heartening to see that Newark's protests in 2020 were mostly peaceful.

Ras: We're still trying to atone in Newark for 1967.

We're still trying to atone.

Andre: Perhaps Newarkers have learned the lesson of 1967.

Lawrence: I don't think any right-thinking person would ever want that kind of thing to happen again.

Ed: It was one of those things that happened, and thank God it didn't happen again.

Mary: Should we never have to do that again.

Should the boiling pot never boil over again.

If it does, shame on us.

Andre: Despite all its past troubles, Newark will survive.

Anyone who knows Newarkers will tell you they're not easily defeated, and when they're knocked down, they will always get up again.

Cory: There was a pride here in Newark that never was abandoned by its people, and those folks in the city are now starting to see their day as our city begins to turn around.

I just think that this city will go ablaze again, that we will be on fire, and it's not gonna be an inferno of riot and rage, of bigotry and hate, but I think that it's going to be a different type of fire.

It'll be the blaze of hope, the blaze of opportunity, the very torch of the American dream.

Andre: This film is dedicated to Newark Fire Department Captain Jim McLaughlin and all the other people who stayed behind to put the pieces back together and make Newark a better place to live and work, and to Dr.

Clement A. Price, official historian of the city of Newark.

[Willie Nile singing "Song of a Soldier"] I have lived my life but as a soldier.

I have seen the flash of bomb and gun.

Though as yet I stand my only fortune Is to love, yes, just to love.

Just to love, yes, just to love.

Just to love, yes, just to love.

male: The preceding program was made possible in part by generous grants from the New Jersey Council for the Humanities, a state partner of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

And from Jack Daneri and Jane Earll.

Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations in this film do not necessarily represent those of our supporters or this media outlet.

male: If you enjoyed this program, you may be interested in seeing the full director's cut of "Riot: From Rebellion to Redemption."

The uncut version contains an additional 23 minutes of material and gives an even more in-depth look at this fascinating chapter in American history.

The 80 minute version is available on DVD or as a digital download.

The program is also available in various lengths for educational use.

To learn more, visit riotthefilm.com or scan the QR code on your screen.