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• 1 2023-09-04T23:59:36+00:00 A new framework (1969, 1971) 30 plain 2024-03-11T20:26:15+00:00 Efforts to understand the outbreak of collective racial violence in the 1960s led to a wave of scholarship by sociologists and historians focused on how those racial disorders related to the race riots of earlier periods. Although early arguments cast the violence of the 1960s as unlike anything in the past, scholars soon recognized that those outbreaks shared key features with racial disorder in Harlem in 1935 and 1943. The new interest in collective racial violence led to the publication of an edition of the MCCH’s final report that made more information about the disorder readily available.
  
  Robert Fogelson, an urban historian, was involved in both of those endeavors. After initially overlooking the 1935 disorder in his analysis of the outbreaks of the mid-1960s, he oversaw the publication of the MCCH report in a series he edited for Arno Press and then incorporated the disorder into the book-length version of his interpretation of the disorders of the 1960s. His research began when he was recruited to contribute to the work of the Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice, established by President Johnson on July 23, 1965, in the aftermath of the uprising in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles. After the directors of the commission rejected his report, Fogelson opted to make the topic part of his own research agenda in place of a project on the Harlem "ghetto." Somewhat ironically given those plans, an early version of his argument published in Proceedings of the Academy of Political Science in 1968 made no mention of the racial disorders in Harlem in 1935 and 1943. He argued that “on a closer examination of the race riots-and even of the 1917, 1919, and 1943 riots, which, as the most recent, should be the most homologous-it is clear that the riots of the 1960s were not extensions of this tradition [of interracial rioting in the United States].”
  
  In January 1969, Fogelson included the MCCH report in the series Mass Violence in America that he edited for Arno Press. The press, founded by Arnold Zohn in 1962 and taken over by the New York Times in 1968, specialized in reprinting previously published, out-of-print reference materials. Fogelson’s series included at least forty-four volumes, ranging from Henry Dawson's The Sons of Liberty in New York and Zechariah Chafee's The Third Degree to U. S. Congressional reports on the 1866 New Orleans Riot and hearings on the Ku Klux Klan. The text of the MCCH report was typed from the New York Amsterdam News by Sharon Thompson, a secretary at the Bureau of Applied Social Research. A xeroxed copy of the newspaper was in the Columbia University library. Fogelson also consulted a copy in the New York City Municipal Archives, apparently without noting the differences from the text he had published. For some reason, he would cite the archived text not the one he had help publish when he came to write about the disorder in Harlem. The Arno Press series of reprints were widely purchased by libraries, giving the MCCH report a significant influence on subsequent scholarship.
  
  At the end of that year, historians working for the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence published analyses that linked the disorders in Harlem to the racial violence of the 1960s. Richard Maxwell Brown saw the disorders as "foreshadowing" the new patterns of racial violence of the 1960s. He noted that, of the disorders prior to the 1960s, only in the Harlem disorders were whites not the main aggressors and the violence "concentrated on property destruction," but he nonetheless positioned the events in Harlem outside the "new pattern" inaugurated in 1964. Not so, said Elliot Rudwick and August Meier in the same Staff Report to the Commission. The "'new style' riot first appeared in Harlem in 1935 and 1943," they asserted. Since 1964, "the riot pattern" involved "Negro aggression mainly against white-owned property, not against white people." Before then, between the Harlem disorder in 1935 and 1964, some racial violence had followed the earlier form, most notably the disorder in Detroit in 1943. Where Brown had relied on the research of sociologist Allen Grimshaw, Rudwick and Meier cited Roi Ottley's New World A-Coming and the Black newspaper the New York Age.
  
  Fogelson’s book length study, Violence as Protest, published in 1971, added an aside to his argument published three years earlier about the racial disorders in Harlem that elaborated and expanded those arguments about their place in the longer history of racial violence. The disorders in Harlem in 1935 and 1943 shared "common and distinctive features" that made them "direct precursors" of the disorders of the 1960s. 

  These riots were spontaneous and unorganized, triggered by police actions, and distinguished by looting and burning of neighborhood stores and assaults on patrolmen and white passers-by. In all of them, the governmental authorities responded vigorously to increase the risks in participating, and, save in 1935, the moderate black leaders labored valiantly, if vainly, to restrain the rioters. Hence the essence of the Harlem riots and the 196os riots is an intense resentment of the police, an intolerable accumulation of grievances, the ineffectiveness of the customary restraints on rioting, and the weakness of moderate black leadership. It is against police malpractice and other grievances, especially economic deprivation, consumer exploitation, and racial discrimination, that the blacks were protesting

  Fogelson, borrowing Frazier's displacement of violence against whites in the MCCH report, argued that the "Harlem rioters directed most of their aggression against property rather than people." However, he went on to specifically mention that when crowds spread from the Kress store in 1935, "they roamed the streets, attacking white passers-by." In departing from the MCCH, report Fogelson relied on stories in the New York Times, Claude McKay's article in the Nation and Hamilton Basso's article in the New Republic.