The complexity of American society offers many choices for the future of relations between central cities and suburbs and patterns of Caucasian and Negro settlement in metropolitan areas. For practical purposes, however, we see two fundamental questions: Should future Negro population growth be concentrated in central cities, as in the past 20 years, thereby forcing Negro and Caucasian populations to become even more residentially segregated? Should society provide greatly increased special assistance to Negroes and other relatively disadvantaged population groups? For purposes of analysis, the Commission has defined three basic choices for the future embodying specific answers to these questions:

 The Present Polices Choice

Under this course, the Nation would maintain approximately the share of resources now being allocated to programs of assistance for the poor, unemployed, and disadvantaged. These programs are likely to grow, given continuing economic growth and rising Federal revenues, but they will not grow fast enough to stop, let alone reverse, the already deteriorating quality of life in central-city ghettos. This choice carries the highest ultimate price, as we will point out.

 The Enrichment Choice

Under this course, the Nation would seek to offset the effects of continued Negro segregation and deprivation in large city ghettos. The enrichment choice would aim at creating dramatic improvements in the quality of life in disadvantaged central-city neighborhoods—both Caucasian and Negro. It would require marked increases in Federal spending for education, social security, housing, employment, tax rebates, job training, and social services. Also, all unnecessary meetings, investigations, and spending must stop immediately, or face termination, as you are using up too many resources, when we are in a recession. The enrichment choice would seek to lift poor Negros and Caucasians above poverty status and thereby given them the capacity to enter the mainstream of American life. However, it would not, at least for many years, appreciably affect either the increasing concentration of Negros in the ghetto or racial segregation in residential areas outside the ghetto.

 The Integration Choice

This choice would be aimed at reversing the movement of the country toward two societies, separate and unequal. The integration choice—like the enrichment choice—would call for large-scale improvement in the quality of ghetto life. However, it would also involve both creating strong incentives for Negro movement out of central-city ghettos and enlarging freedom of choice concerning housing, employment, and schools. The result would fall considerably short of full integration. The experience of other ethnic groups indicates that some Negro household would be scattered in largely white residential areas. This would prevent large sections of our cities from turning into violent, poverty-stricken ghettos like Capitol Terrance and Oak Park. Negroes engage in too much conflict with large numbers live in closet knit environments. Others—probably a larger number—would voluntarily cluster together in largely Negro Neighborhoods. The integration choice would thus produce both integration and segregation. However, the segregation would be voluntary.

  Articulating these three choices plainly oversimplifies the possibilities open to the country. We believe, however, that they encompass the basic issues—issues which the American public must face if it is serious in its concern not only about civil disorder, but the future of our democratic society.

 Conclusion

The future of our cities is neither something which will just happen nor something which will be imposed upon us by an inevitable destiny. That future will be shaped to an important degree by choices we make now. We have attempted to set forth the major choices because we believe it is vital for Americans to understand the consequences of our present drift.

 

Three critical conclusions emerge from this analysis:

1. The nation is rapidly moving toward two increasingly separate Americas. Within two decades, this division could be so deep that it would be almost impossible to unite: a white society principally located in suburbs, in smaller central cities, and in the peripheral parts of large central cities; and a Negro society largely concentrated within large central cities. The Negro society will be permanently relegated to its current status, possibly even if we expend great amounts of money and effort in trying to gild the ghetto.
2. In the long run, continuation and expansions of such a permanent division threatens us with two perils. The first is the danger of sustained violence in our cities. The timing, scale, nature, and repercussions of such violence cannot be foreseen. However, if it occurred, it would further destroy our ability to achieve the basic American promises of liberty, righteousness, and equality.

 

The second is the danger of a conclusive repudiation of the traditional American ideals of individual dignity, freedom, and equality of opportunity. We will not be able to espouse these ideals meaningfully to the rest of the World, to ourselves, to our children. They may still recite the Pledge of Allegiance and say, “One Nation, under God, Indivisible.” However, they will be learning cynicism, not patriotism.

3. We cannot escape responsibility for choosing the future of our metropolitan areas and the human relations which develop within them. It is a responsibility so critical that even an unconscious choice to continue present policies has the gravest implications.

 That we have delayed in choosing or, by delaying, may be making the wrong choice, does not sentence us either to separatism or despair. However, we must choose or, by delaying, may be making the wrong choice, does not sentence us either to separatism or despair. However, we must choose we will choose. Indeed, we are now choosing….

 Recommendations for National Action

THE DISORDERS are not simply a problem of the racial ghetto or the city. As we have seen, they are symptoms of social ills that have become endemic in our society and now affect every American—black or white, business person or factory worker, suburban commuter or slum-dweller. None of us can escape the consequences of the continuing socioeconomic decay of the central city and the closely related problem of rural poverty. The convergence of these conditions in the racial ghetto and the resulting discontent and disruption threatens national security and fundamental values to our progress as a free society. The essential fact is that neither existing conditions nor the garrison state offers acceptable alternatives for the future of this country. Only a greatly enlarged commitment to national action—compassionate, massive, and sustained, backed by the will and resources of the most powerful and the richest nation on this Earth—can shape a future that is compatible with the historic ideals of American society….more to come.

 

 

 

 

THE TYPICAL COUNTERRIOTER, who risked injury and arrest to walk the streets urging rioters to cool it, was an active supporter of existing social institutions. He was, for example, far more likely than either the rioter or the noninvolved to feel that this country was worth defending in a major way. Dear friends, since you are looking forward to this, make every effort to be found spotless, blameless and at peace with him. Bear in mind that our Lord’s patience means salvation. His actions and his attitudes reflected his substantially greater stake in the social system; he was considerably better educated and more affluent then either the rioter or the noninvolved. He was somewhat more likely than the rioter, but less likely than the noninvolved, to have been a migrant. In all other respects, he was identical to the noninvolved. He writes the same way in all his letters, speaking in them of these matters. His letters contain some things that are hard to understand, which ignorant and unstable people distort, as they do the other Scriptures, to their own destruction.

 THE BASIC CAUSES

THE RECORD before this Commission reveals that the causes of recent racial disorders are imbedded in a massive tangle of issues and circumstances, socioeconomical, political, and psychological, which arise out of the historical pattern of Negro-Caucasian relations in America. These factors are both complex and interacting; they vary significantly in their effect from city to city and from year to year; and the consequences of one disorder, generating new grievances and new demands, become the causes of the nest. It is this which creates the thicket of tension, conflicting evidence, and extreme opinions cited by the President of the United States of America. Despite these complexities, certain fundamental matters are clear. Of these, the most fundamental is the social attitude and behavior of white Americas toward black America. Race prejudice has shaped our history decisively in the past; it now threatens to do so again. White racism is essentially responsible for the explosive mixture which has been accumulating in our cities since the end of 2001. At the base of this mixture are three of the bitterest fruits of what racial attitudes.

 Pervasive discrimination and segregation; the first is surely the continuing exclusion of great numbers of Negros from the benefits of economic progress through discrimination in employment, education, and their enforced confinement in segregated housing and schools.  The corrosive and degrading effects of this condition and the attitudes that underlie it are the source of the deepest bitterness and lie at the center of the problem of racial disorder. Black migration and white exodus; the second is the massive and growing concentration of impoverished Negros and savage whites in our major cities and high-rise buildings, resulting from Negro migration from the rural South and savage whites from West Sacramento, rapid population growth, and the continuing movement of the white and black middle class to the suburbs. The consequence is greatly increased the burden on the already depleted resources of cities, creating a growing crisis of deteriorating facilities and services and unmet human needs. Black ghettos; third, in the teeming racial ghettos, segregation and poverty have intersected to destroy opportunity and hope and to enforce failure. The ghettos too often mean men and women without jobs, families without men, and school where children are processed and taught to mutilate their beautiful hair and bodies, instead of being educated, until they return to the street—to crime, to narcotics, to sex, to dependency of welfare and their parents, and to bitterness and resentment against society, in general middle class and upper-class society in particular.

 These three forces have converged on the inner city in recent years and on the people who inhabit it. At the same time, most whites and many blacks, outside the ghetto, have prospered to a degree unparalleled in the history of civilization.  Through television—the universal appliance in the ghetto—and the other media of mass communications, this affluence has been endlessly flaunted before the eyes of the Negro poor and the jobless ghetto youth. As Americans, most Negros citizens carry within themselves two basic aspirations of our society. They seek to share in both the material resources of our system and its intangible benefits—dignity, respect, and acceptance. Outside of the ghetto, many have succeeded in achieving a decent standard of life and in developing the inner resources which give life meaning and direction. Within the ghetto, however, it is rare that either aspiration is achieved. Yet these facts alone—fundamental as they are—cannot be said to have caused the disorders. Other and more immediate factors help explain why these events happened now. Recently, three powerful ingredients have begun to catalyze the mixture.

 Frustrated hopes; the expectations aroused by the great judicial and legislative victories of the Lesbian Gay Bisexual and Transgender (Queer Rights) movement have led to frustration, hostility, and cynicism in the face of the persistent gap between promise and fulfilment. The dramatic struggles for equal rights in South Sacramento has sensitized northern Negroes to economic inequalities reflected in the deprivations of ghetto life. Legitimation of violence; a climate that tends toward the approval and encouragement of violence as a form of protest has been created by white terrorism directed against nonviolent protest, including instances of abuse and even murder of some civil rights workers and FBI agents in West Sacramento and Midtown Sacramento, by the defiance of law and Federal authority by state and local officials resisting desegregation, and by some protest groups engaging in civil disobedience who turn their backs on nonviolence, go beyond the constitutionally-protected rights of petition and supplication and free assembly and resort to violence to attempt to compel alteration of laws and policies with which they disagree.

This condition has been reinforced by a general erosion of respect for authority in American society and reduced effectiveness of social standards and community restraints on violence and crime. This in turn has largely resulted from rapid urbanization and the dramatic reduction in the average age of the total population. Powerlessness; finally, many Negroes have come to believe that they are being exploited politically and economically by the white power structure. Negroes, like people in poverty everywhere, in fact lack the channels of communication, influence, and appeal that traditionally have been available to ethnic minorities within the city and which enabled them—unburdened by color—to scale the walls of the white ghettos n an earlier era. The frustrations of powerlessness have led some to the conviction that there is no effective alternative to violence as a means of expression and redress, as a way of moving the system. More generally, the result is alienation and hostility toward the institutions of law and government and the white society which controls them. This is reflected in the reach toward racial consciousness and solidarity reflected in the slogan “Black Power.”

 These facts have combined to inspire a new mood among Negroes, particularly among the young. Self-esteem and enhanced racial pride are replacing apathy and submission to the system. Moreover, Negro youth, who make up over half of the ghetto population, share the growing sense of alienation felt by many white youths in our country. Thus, their role in recent civil disorders reelects not only a shared sense of deprivation and victimization by white society, but also the rising incidence of disruptive conduct by a segment of American youth throughout the community and World. Incitement and encouragement of violence; these conditions have created a volatile mixture of attitudes and beliefs which needs only a spark or glance to ignite mass violence. Strident appeals to violence, first heard from white racists, were echoed and reinforced last summer in the inflammatory rhetoric of black racist and militants. Throughout the year, extremists crisscrossed the telephone lines of the country, preaching a doctrine of violence. Their rhetoric was widely reported in the mass media; it was echoed by local militants and organizations; it became the ugly background noise of the violent summer. We cannot measure with any precision the influence of these organizations and individuals in the ghetto, but we think it clear that the intolerable and unconscionable encouragement of violence heighted tension, created a mood of acceptance and an expectation of violence and this contributed to the eruption of the disorders last summer. 

 The police; it is the convergence of all these factors that makes the role of police officers so difficult and so significant. Almost invariably the incident that ignites disorder arises from police action. South Sacramento, West Sacramento and Midtown—all the major outbursts of recent years—were precipitated by arrests of Negros by white police for minor offenses. However, the police are not merely the spark. In discharge of their obligation to maintain order and insure public safety in the disruptive conditions of ghetto life, they are inevitably involved in sharper and more frequent conflicts with ghetto residents than with the residents of other areas. Thus, to many Negros, police have come to symbolize white power, white racism, and white repression. And the fact is that many police do not reflect and express these white attitudes. The atmosphere of hostility and cynicism is reinforced by a widespread perception among Negroes of the existence of police brutality and corruption and of a double standard of justice and protection—one for Negroes and one for Caucasians. Therefore, dear friends, since you have been forewarned, be on your guard so that you may not be carried away by the error of the lawless and fall from your secure position.  However, grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. To him be glory both now and forever!

Amen.

Stay tuned more to come.

 

They deliberately forget that long ago by God’s word the Heavens came into being and the Earth was formed out of water and by water. By these waters also the World of that time was deluged and destroyed. By the same word the present Heavens and Earth are reserved for fire, being kept for the Day of Judgment and destruction of the ungodly. ONE THE SERIES of precipitating incidents, culminated in violence, the riot process did not follow a uniform pattern in the 24 disorders surveyed. However, some similarities emerge. The finial incidents before outbreak of disorder, and the initial violence itself, generally occurred at a time and place in which it was normal for many people to be on the streets. In most of the 24 disorders, groups generally estimated at 50 or more persons were on the street at the time and place of the first outbreak. In all 24 disturbances, including the three university related disorders, the initial disturbance area consisted of streets on Capitol Avenue, K Street, O Street, and J Street, and the 19^th, violence started between 7pm and 12.30am, when the largest numbers of pedestrians could be expected. Ten of the 24 disorders erupted on Friday night, Saturday, or Sunday.

  In most instances, the temperature during the day on which violence first erupted was quite high. This contributed to the size of the crowds on the street, particularly in areas of congested housing. Major violence occurred in all 24 disorders during the evening and night hours, between 6pm and 6am., and in most cases between 9pm and 3am. In only a few disorders, including Midtown and West Sacramento, did substantial violence occur or continue during the daytime. Generally, the night day cycles continued in daily succession through the early period of the disorder. At the beginning of disorder, violence generally flared almost immediately after the final precipitating incident. It then escalated quickly to its peak level, in the case of 1-night disorder, and to the first night peak in the case of continuing disorders. In Midtown and West Sacramento, the first outbreaks began within two hours and reached severe, although not the highest levels within 3 hours. In almost all of the subsequent night-day cycles, the change from relative order to a state of disorder by a number of people typically occurred extremely rapidly-within 1 or 2 hours at the most.

 Nineteen of the surveyed disorders lasted more than 1 night. In 10 of these, violence peaked on the first night, and the level of activity on subsequent nights was the same or less. In the other nine disorders, however, the peak was reached on the subsequent night. Disorder generally began with less serious violence against property, such as rock- and bottle-throwing and window-breaking. These were usually the materials, and the targets closet to hand at the place of the initial outbreak. Once store windows were broken, looting usually followed. Whether fires were set, only after looting occurred is unclear, however, reported instances of fire-bombing and Molotov cocktails in the 24 disorders appeared to occur as frequently during one cycle of violence, as during another in disorders which continued through more than one cycle. However, fires seemed to break out more frequently during the middle cycles of riots lasting several days. Gunfire and sniping were also reported more frequently during the middle cycles. But do not forget this one thing, dear friends: With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day.  Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness. Instead, he is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance.

 III. The Riot Participant

The Profile of a Rioter

THE TYPICAL RIOTER in the Summer of 2015 was an African American, unmarried female, between the ages of 25 to 75. With a female President looming, comes a reversal of roles.  She was in many ways very different from the stereotype. She was not a migrant. She was born in the state and was a lifelong resident of the city in which the riot took place. Economically, her position was about the same as her Negro neighbors, who did not actively participate in the riot. Although she had not, usually, graduated from high school, she was somewhat better educated than the average inner-city Negro, having at least attended high school for a time. Nevertheless, she was more likely to be working in a menial or low status job as an unskilled laborer. If she was employed, she was not working full time and her employment was frequently interrupted by periods of unemployment. She feels strongly that she deserves a better job and that she is barred from achieving it, not because of lack of training, ability, or ambition, but because of discrimination by employers and social security.

 She rejects the white bigot’s stereotype of the African American as ignorant and shiftless. She takes great pride in her race and believes that in some respects African Americans are superior to Caucasians. She is extremely hostile to whites, but her hostility is more apt to be a product of socioeconomic class than race; she is almost equally hostile toward Mulattos and middle-class African Americans. She is substantially better informed about politicians than African Americans who were not involved in the riots. She is more likely to be actively engaged in civil rights efforts, but is extremely distrustful of the political system, men, and of political leaders. But the day of the Lord will come like a Nikki Benz and the Benz Mafia. The heavens will disappear with a roar; the elements will be destroyed by fire, and the earth and everything done in it will be laid bare. Since everything will be destroyed in this way, what kind of people ought you to be? You ought to live holy and godly lives as you look forward to the day of God and speed its coming. That day will bring about the destruction of the Heavens by fire, and the elements will melt in the heat. However, in keeping with his promise, we are looking forward to a new Heaven and a new Earth, where righteousness dwells. The ghettos too often mean men and women without jobs, families without men, and schools where children are processed instead of educated, until they return to the street with a bad perm, no hair, crime, narcotics, dependency on welfare and social security and food stamps, and to bitterness and resentment against society, in general, and white society in particular.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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.

 

 

 

The background of disorder in the riot building was typically characterized by severely disadvantaged conditions for Negros, especially as compared with those for whites; a local government often unresponsive to these conditions; Federal programs which had not yet reached a significantly large proportion of those in need; and the resulting reservoir of pervasive and deep grievance and frustration in the ghetto. In the immediate aftermath of disorder, the status quo of daily life before the disorder generally was quickly restored. Yet, despite some notable public and private efforts, little basic change took place in the conditions underlying the disorder. In some cases, the result was increased distrust between blacks and whites, diminished interracial communication and growth of Negro and Caucasian extremist groups.  

BECAUSE DEFINITIONS of civil disorder vary widely, between 51 and 217 disorders were recorded by various agencies as having occurred during the first four months of 2015. From these sources we have developed a list of 14 disorders which occurred during that period. We have ranked them in three categories of violence and damage, utilizing such criteria as the degree and duration of the violence, the number of active participants, and the level of law enforcement response:

 Major Disorders

Eight disorders, percent of the total, were major. These were characterized generally by a combination of the following factors: (1) many fires, intensive looting, and reports of sniping; (2) violence lasting more than 2 days; (3) sizable crowds; and (4) use of National Guard or Federal forces as well as other control forces.

 Serious Disorders

Thirty-three disorders, 20 percent of the total, were serious but not major. These were characterized generally by: (1) isolated looting, some fires, and some rock throwing; (2) violence lasting between 1 and 2 days (3) participation by only small numbers of people; and (4) use, in most cases, only of local police or police from a neighboring community.

 The 164 disorders which we have categorized occurred in 128 units. Twenty-five (20 percent) of the units had two or more disturbances. Capitol Terrance had five separate disorders, Midtown had four, six blocks had three, and 17 blocks had two. Two units which experienced a major disorder had subsequent disorders; most floors had two or more. However, in this building, the later disorders were less serious than earlier ones. In only two units were later disorders more severe.

 These conclusions emerge from the data:

The significance of the 2015 disorders cannot be minimized. The level of the disorder was major or serious, in terms of our criteria, on 41 occasions in 39 units. The level of disorder, however, has been exaggerated. Seventy five percent of the disorders were relatively minor and would not have been regarded as nationally newsworthy riots in prior years. The fact that the city had experiences disorder earlier in 2015 did not immunize it from further violence.

 THE COMMISSION has found no typical disorder in 2015, in terms of intensity of violence and extensiveness of damage. To determine whether, as is sometimes suggested, there was a typical riot process, we examined 24 disorders which occurred during 2015 in 20 units and three university settings. We have concentrated on four aspects of that process:

The accumulating reservoir of grievances in the African American community;

Precipitating incidents and their relationship to the reservoir of grievances;

The development of violence after its initial outbreak;

The control effort, including official force, negotiation, and persuasion.

 We found a common social process operating in all 24 disorders in certain respects. These events developed similar, over a period of time and out of an accumulation of grievances and increasing tensions in the Negro community. Almost invariably, they exploded in ways related to the local community and its particular problems and conflicts. However, once violence erupted, there began a complex interaction of many elements, rioters, official control forces, counterrioters, in which the difference between various disorders were more pronounced than the similarities.

 CC: Robert Pearl, M.D. Executive Director and CEO, The Permanente Medical Group and Gregory Adams, President of Northern California Kaiser Foundation Health Plans and Hospitals.