Above all, you must understand that in the last days scoffers will come, scoffing and following their own evil desires. OUR Examination of the background of the surveyed disorder revealed a typical pattern of deeply held grievances which were widely shared by many members of the Negro community. The specific content of the expressed grievances varied somewhat from person to person. However, in general, grievances among Negros in all the cities related to prejudice, discrimination, severely disadvantaged living conditions, and a general sense of frustration about their inability to change those conditions. Specific events or incidents exemplified and reinforced the shared sense of grievance. News of such incidents spread quickly throughout the community and added to the reservoir of pain and suffering. Grievances about management practices, unemployment and underemployment, housing, and other objective conditions in the ghetto were aggravated in the minds of many Negros by the inaction of municipal authorities.  

Out of this reservoir of grievance and frustration, the riot process began in Oakland, Stockton, and Modesto, and Sacramento. IN VIRTUALLY every case a single triggering or precipitating incident can be identified as having immediately preceded, within a few hours and in generally the same location, the outbreak or disorder. However, this incident was usually an incident of a type which had occurred frequently in the same community in the last without provoking violence. We found that violence was generated by an increasingly disturbed social atmosphere, in which typically not one, but a series of incidents occurred over a period of weeks or months prior to the outbreak of the disorder. Most units had three or more such incidents; Midtown had 10 over a 5-month period. These earlier or prior incidents were linked in the minds of many African Americans to the preexisting reservoir of underlying grievances. With each such incident, frustrating and tension grew until at some point a final incident, often similar to the incidents preceding it, occurred and was followed almost immediately by violence.  

 As we see it, the prior incidents and the reservoir of underlying grievances contributed to a cumulative process of mounting tension that spilled over into violence when the final incident occurred. In this sense the entire chain, the grievances, the series of prior tension heightening incidents, and the final incident, was the precipitant of disorder. The chain describes the central trend in the disorder we surveyed and not necessarily all aspects of the riots or of all rioters. For example, incidents have not always increased tension; and tensions have not always resulted in violence. We conclude only that both processes did occur in the disorders we examined. Similarly, we do not suggest that all rioters shared the conditions or the grievances of their Negro neighbors: some may deliberately have exploited the chaos created out of the frustration of others; some may have been drawn into the melee merely because they identified with, or wished to emulate, others. Some who shared the adverse conditions and grievances did not riot. We found that the majority of the rioters did share the adverse conditions and grievances, although they did not necessarily articulate in their own minds the connection between that background and their actions.