TIME MAGAZINE

(July 21, 1967)

The Los Angeles ghetto of Watts went berserk in 1965 after an unemployed high school dropout named Marquette Frye was arrested for drunken driving. In six days of rioting, 35 died, 900 were injured. In 1966, the Cleveland ghetto of Hough erupted when a white bartender denied a glass of ice water to a Negro patron. And in Newark, N.J., a trumpet-playing Negro cab driver by the name of John Smith (and the rumor that white policemen had killed him) last week became the random spark that ignited the latest--and one of the most violent--of U.S. race riots.

Four nights running, and even during the heat of the day, snipers' bullets spanged off sidewalks, night sticks crunched on skulls, and looters made off with the entire inventory of scores of stores (one small Negro boy was seen carrying table lamps his own size). New Jersey's Governor Richard Hughes proclaimed Newark a "city in open rebellion," declared a state of emergency, and called out the National Guard. More than 4,000 city police, state troopers and Guardsmen patrolled the city's debris-littered streets.

The toll in human suffering mounted hourly. Before the week was out, at least 21 people were dead, more than 1,000 injured, another 1,600 arrested. Property damage soared into the millions.

The very triviality of the riot's immediate cause made the Newark outburst particularly terrifying. It seemed to say that a dozen or so people could be killed in almost any city, any night, by the purest chance.