have been made to black students while more fundamental disputes over school control and decentralization are still being contested.

The pervasiveness and strength of youthful militancy must be appreciated in the context of the black liberation and student movements. Traditional discussions of high shcool youth have invariably focused on "troublesome" and "abnormal" forms of "acting-out" behavior-disturbances at dances, athletic events, and parties, vandalism, gang fights and disputes over gang territory, etc. Much of this activity was seen as a function of youthful exuberance, or of adolescent restlessness, or of lower-class culture. Theorists and experts have shown a special interest in explaining the negative and pathological attributes of gangs, but they have rarely been concerned with examining collective youth action from a political perspective. There is a strong tendency to regard the political activities of youth in terms of "conspiracy" and "anarchy"161-an attitude which underestimates the popular appeal and purposeful character of the student movement.

Similarly, much attention has been directed to the problem of why young people cause so much trouble for the schools, whereas the equally legitimate question of why schools cause so much trouble for youth has been seriously neglected. 162 The problematic aspects of the educational process are widely attributed to students' cultural and family backgrounds, or to their inability to adjust to the demands of school life, or to their failure to cooperate with teachers and school administrators. Fighting, vandalism, truancy, disobedience, and other "disrespectful" behavior are handled as a form of psychological immaturity and cultural primitivism, commonly associated with adolescent "acting-out."

The militant activities of black youth have served to revise popular conceptions about the immaturity and independence of youth, as well as to focus considerable attention on the deficiencies and irrelevance of most ghetto high schools. Government and school officials have in some instances recognized the power of youth by agreeing to negotiate student demands, by creating special programs of job training, and by "consulting" with youth and gang leaders in the development of community projects. Often this recognition is motivated by an awareness that youth organizations, like the Blackstone Rangers in Chicago, are becoming more and more capable of mobilizing vast numbers of young people with a view to political or even guerilla action. After the death of Dr. King, the Blackstone Rangers helped to "cool" Chicago's Southside. According to one commentator, "This was their way of saying, 'You have to reckon with us because, if we cannot stop one [a riot], well, you know the alternative.' This was a naked display of power."163

The politicization of black youth reflects the growing political interest of youth in general. During 1968, for example, students in New York high schools formed a union to protest racism and the war in Vietnam as well as to enable participation in local school issues. 164 On April 26, thousands of high school students attended a rally to protest the war.165

More specifically, however, student militancy has its roots in the black liberation movement for political and cultural autonomy. Several years ago, school protests focused almost uniquely on the problem of de facto segregation. Black adults and their children boycotted local schools to protest their failure to comply with Federal standards on integration. White crowds,

particularly in the South, gathered outside newly integrated schools to jeer, harass, and even attack Negro students. 166 Civil rights organizations engaged student support to protest segregated facilities, but always insisted on the use of nonviolent tactics. In late 1960, for example, a representative of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference predicted a widespread resumption of demonstrations against segregation: "I certainly judge from the students' activity," he said, "that they are mobilizing for a big push in the fall. They are going to find unique ways to apply the technique of nonviolence." 167 Traditional civil rights organizations, especially the NAACP, were quick to condemn violence, even from black youths seeking revenge against white attacks, 168

The new directions of the black movement have influenced and in turn been influenced by urban, lower-class youth. Separatism has replaced integration as a primary objective and nonviolence has become for many another tactic of resistance rather than a moral creed. It is the spirit and determination of black youth which moved James Forman to describe the 1960's as the "accelerating generation, a generation of black people determined that they will survive, a generation aware that resistance is the agenda for today and that action by people is necessary to quicken the steps of history."169 The militancy of youth has received considerable support from adults and community organizations. 170 "If we had done this twenty years ago, our children wouldn't have to be doing this today. These children will make us free."171

Perhaps the most significant reason for the militancy of youth is the fact that education is central to the liberation perspective. The Nation of Islam has long recognized the importance of recruiting and socializing a whole new generation of proud and masculine youths:

The education and training of our children must . . . include the

history of the black nation, the knowledge of civilizations of man and the Universe, and all sciences.... Learning is a great virtue and I would like to see all the children of my followers become the possessors of it. It will make us an even greater people tomorrow. 172

New militant leaders and students themselves have come to appreciate the value of this perspective, realizing that only through control of the educational system can they build a political movement and instill pride, dignity, self-appreciation, and confidence in black Americans.

The struggle for educational autonomy is both a cultural and political struggle. It is a cultural struggle in the sense that the school can provide youth with an education which gives proper attention to black history and black values, thus providing a positive sense of self-appreciation and identity. But it is also a political struggle, for it is widely felt that the educational system is a predominant means used by those in power to teach people to "unconsciously accept their condition of servitude."173 According to Edgar Friedenberg, a white sociologist who has written extensively on education, "the school is the instrument through which society acculturates people into consensus before they become old enough to resist it as effectively as they could later."174 Thus, local control of the educational system will provide an opportunity to build a resistance movement as well as to achieve some cultural independence from the values of white America. "We don't want to

be trained in ROTC to fight in a Vietnam war," says one black youth. "We want ROTC to train us how to protect our own communities."175

The available evidence suggests that we are presently witnessing the rise of a generation of black activists, enjoying wide support from their communities and relatives, committed to the principles of local community control and cultural autonomy, and disenchanted with techniques of peaceful protest associated with the civil rights movement of the 1950's. Given this militant participation by black youth, it is difficult to accept the Kerner Report's conclusion that "the central thrust of Negro protest in the current period has aimed at the inclusion of Negroes in American society on a basis of full equality rather than at a fundamental transformation of American institutions." The available evidence suggests that "inclusion" and "integration" have become largely irrelevant to black youth. "Considering the opportunities for being a Negro man in 1967 that society has held out to them," writes an adviser to the Blackstone Rangers, "they feel very fortunate to have rejected them.... They want a mainstream all their own."176 Demands of the groups like the Black Panthers for cultural autonomy and decentralized power are gaining ascendancy. As Herman Blake testified before this Commission:

You can't go through any community without seeing black youth with Huey P. Newton buttons and "Free Huey." Many of them who have no connection with the Panthers officially, wear the Panther uniform. We all groove on Huey. No two ways about it. We dig him. And I use that rhetoric because that's the way it is. Not for any exotic reasons. 177 And, as the Reverend John Fry has suggested, in Chicago's South Side ghetto, "What it means to be a man is to be a Blackstone Ranger."178 Whatever differences may exist between militant black groups, their programs generally speak to self-defense, political independence, community control, and cultural autonomy. These themes challenge American social arrangements at a deeper level than did the movement for "civil rights" and, in doing so, they reveal problematic aspects of our national life which have been taken for granted, at least by whites. Thus, since the publication of the Kerner Report, the thrust of black protest, especially among the young, has shifted from equality to liberation, from integration to separatism, from dependency to power.

CONCLUSION

As we have pointed out throughout this report, group political violence is not a peripheral or necessarily pathological feature of American political history. For many black Americans today, violent action increasingly seems to offer the only practical and feasible opportunity to overcome the effects of a long history of systematic discrimination. The events of this year suggest that violent racial incidents have, at least temporarily, become part of the routine course of events rather than sporadic calamities.

Martin Luther King was killed on April 4, 1968. In the aftermath, civil disorders occurred throughout the country, following an already rising incidence of disorder in the first three months of the year. 179 The following facts are significant: 1) The month of April alone saw nearly as many dis

orders as the entire year of 1967, and more cities and states were involved than in all the previous year. 2) There were more arrests and more injuries in April 1968 alone than in all of 1967, and nearly as much property damage; and there were more National Guard and Federal troops called more times in April 1968 than in all of 1967, 180

Major riots-none of which, individually, matched in dead or injured the largest riots of the past three years-took place in several cities during the month of April. In Chicago, nine were killed and 500 injured; in Washington, D.C., eleven died, with 1,113 injuries. There were six deaths and 900 injuries in Baltimore, and six more deaths in Kansas City, Missouri. Racial violence of some degree of seriousness occurred in thirty-six states and at least 138 cities. 181

Considered in isolation, the summer itself was less "hot" than that of the previous year, but it was hardly quiet. Racial violence occurred in July, for example, in Seattle, in Paterson, N.J., in Jackson and Benton Harbor, Michigan; in San Francisco and Richmond, California. In Cleveland, a shoot-out between black militants and police ultimately left eleven dead, including three policemen. 182 And any aura of relative quiet over the summer should be dispelled by the fact that racial violence in 1968 did not end with the end of the summer. The opening of schools in the fall was accompanied by an increase in school disorders; sporadic assaults on police, and by police, continue as of this writing in many cities, and on college and high school campuses.

Two general points emerge in considering the extent of racial disorder in 1968. First, generally speaking, the violence began earlier and continued longer. 1967 also witnessed spring violence, but not to the same degree; and not all of the increase this spring can be attributed to the assassination of Dr. King. 183 It has become more and more difficult to keep track of violent racial incidents.

Secondly, 1968 represented a new level in the massiveness of the official response to racial disorder. In April alone, as noted above, more National Guard troops were called than in all of 1967 (34,900 to 27,700) and more Federal troops as well (23,700 to 4,800).184 Never before in this country has such a massive military response been mounted against racial disorder. Troops in the streets of the cities are well on the way to becoming a familiar sight. In one city-Wilmington, Delaware-armed National Guard troops, enforcing a series of harsh anti-riot and curfew provisions, occupied the city from April, 1968 until January, 1969.185

Although it is far too early for certainty, limited evidence suggests that the massive ghetto riot-typified by the uprisings in Watts, Newark, and Detroitmay be a thing of the past. None of the disorders of 1968 matches these in scope. The specific explanation for this is far from clear. It lies somewhere in the interaction between more massive and immediate "riot control" efforts by authorities and the apparent perception by many blacks that the "spontaneous riot," as a form of political protest, is too costly in terms of black lives. It is clear that some militant ghetto organizations, such as the Blackstone Rangers in Chicago and the Black Panther Party in Oakland, have made direct and markedly successful efforts to "cool" their communities, especially in the wake of the King assassination. These efforts have been

spurred in part by the belief that a riot would provide the opportunity for police attacks on ghetto militants:

We don't want anything to break out that will give them [the police] the chance to shoot us down. They are hoping that we do something like that but we are passing the word to our people to be cool.186

Blacks did not participate, except peripherally, in the Chicago events during the Democratic National Convention. There were no riots in the black neighborhoods of Chicago, 187 If this is a genuine trend, the decline of the large-scale riot has important analytical implications. It provides a kind of test for competing perspectives on the sources and meaning of riots. If the decline of riots means the decline of disorders in general, then the view of riots as controllable explosions rooted in black "tension" makes a good deal of sense. If, on the other hand, the decline of the riot means only a change in the character of violent black protest, then the roots of black violence may go deeper and reach more profoundly into the structure of American institutions.

There is some evidence-highly tentative-to suggest that the decline in the scale of riots coincides with an increase in more strategic acts of violence and a shift from mass riots to sporadic warfare. 188 In July, as noted above, Cleveland police battled with armed black militants, and the resulting disorder saw three police killed. There were several attacks on police in Brooklyn in the late summer; in August, two policemen were wounded by shotgun fire; in early September, two policemen were hit by sniper fire as they waited for a traffic light. 189 In mid-September, a police communications truck was firebombed, slightly injuring two policemen. 190 In Harlem, two policemen were shot and wounded, reportedly by two black men, as they sat in a parked patrol car. 191 Two September attacks on police took place in Illinois; in Kankakee, a policeman was wounded in what police termed an “ambush” in the black community;192 in Summitt, black youths reportedly fired shotguns at two police cars, injuring two policemen.193 In the same month, eighteen black militants were arrested in St. Louis following a series of attacks on police, including shots fired at a police station and at the home of a police lieutenant. 194 During October, the San Francisco Bay Area was the scene of the bombing of a sheriff's substation and sniper fire against firemen in the black community. Finally, in recent months, black students have made increasing use of strategic acts of violence including the occasional firebombing of homes as well as campus buildings. 195

Correspondingly, as we indicate in Chapter VII and more generally in the last chapter, the police and social control agencies increasingly view themselves as the political and military adversaries of blacks. This official militancy has even taken the form of direct attacks on black militant organizations. Black youth has become a special target for governmental and police action. Despite frequent successes in high schools, youthful militancy has often met with tough-minded programs of social control on the part of police and school officials. Most "helping" programs-job training, summer outings, athletic events, tutoring and civic pride projects, etc.-are seasonal and employ shortterm recreational strategies to "keep a cool summer" and distract youths from more militant kinds of activities. Some authorities feel, for example, that