Black Power

Abstract

In the summer of 1967 some eighty American cities were convulsed by racial disorders, interpreted as senseless violence by White America, interpreted as the nascent stage of revolution by Black Power militants. In that summer, the House of Representatives slashed the Model Cities programme, eliminated rent subsidies for the city poor, reduced federal aid to education, and voted down a $40 million rat extermination programme the same week as it approved $10 million for an aquarium in the District of Columbia, and with little opposition, passed an anti-riot bill, specifically directed against SNCC leaders. In that summer a special police helicopter, armed with a Thompson submachine- gun and financed by private business groups, buzzed over Cleveland's black ghetto-counter-insurgency warfare, Southeast Asia or urban America?