What actually happened in 1967
New York City did not have a major riot in 1967. The large outbreaks of that summer took place elsewhere, most notably in Newark, New Jersey, in mid-July and in Detroit in the last week of that month. New York had its own serious riot three years earlier, in July 1964, and it had smaller, shorter disturbances in 1967, but nothing on the scale of the cities that made national headlines. The title of this page therefore describes a crisis the city largely avoided, and the more useful question is why the summer of 1967 looked so different from one city to the next.
The “long hot summer”
The phrase long hot summer was used by journalists and officials for the run of warm-weather disorders in American cities from 1964 onward. The pattern was already familiar by 1967. Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant, along with Rochester and several New Jersey and Philadelphia neighbourhoods, saw violence in the summer of 1964. Watts, in Los Angeles, erupted in August 1965. In 1966 there were disturbances in Chicago, Cleveland and other cities.
By 1967 many city officials were expecting trouble, and it came in many places. Disturbances were reported in the early summer in cities such as Tampa, Cincinnati and Atlanta, and later in Buffalo, Milwaukee and Minneapolis, among others. The two that dominated attention were these:
- Newark, 12-17 July. The unrest began after the arrest and reported beating of a Black taxi driver by police and spread through the city’s Central Ward. The Newark riot left roughly two dozen people dead, most of them Black residents, and the National Guard and state police were deployed.
- Detroit, 23-28 July. Starting with a police raid on an after-hours bar on the city’s west side, the violence became the deadliest of the decade. Forty-three people were killed, and the Detroit uprising brought in the Michigan National Guard and then federal paratroopers at the request of the governor and the president.
Both are covered in more detail elsewhere on this site; the point here is that they were the extremes of a wider pattern, not isolated events.
Why New York was spared
Historians do not agree on a single explanation, and it is hard to prove why something did not happen. Several factors are often cited.
A mayor on the street. John Lindsay, who took office in January 1966, made a point of appearing in Harlem, Bedford-Stuyvesant and other neighbourhoods during hot weather, often with few aides. His critics thought this was theatre; many residents and later writers credited it with keeping lines of communication open.
Summer programmes and local structures. The city expanded recreation, jobs and neighbourhood service efforts, and set up offices in some districts intended to bring complaints to City Hall quickly. Federal anti-poverty money from the War on Poverty paid for part of this, although the amounts and effects were debated at the time and since.
Memory of 1964. After the 1964 disorder, the city’s police and political leaders had experience of what escalation looked like, and the department had changed some of its crowd tactics.
Luck and geography. New York’s Black and Puerto Rican neighbourhoods were large and spread across several boroughs rather than concentrated in one district, and a spark that ignited elsewhere simply did not catch. Sceptics note that conditions in New York’s poorest areas, including housing, schools and policing complaints, were not obviously better than in Newark or Detroit.
None of this meant calm everywhere. There were localised disturbances, including one in East Harlem in July 1967, but they ended quickly without the deaths and arson that marked the larger riots.
The Kerner Commission’s count
On 27 July 1967, while Detroit was still burning, President Lyndon Johnson created the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders. It became known as the Kerner Commission after its chairman, Illinois Governor Otto Kerner; Lindsay was its vice chairman. The commission examined the 1967 events and published its report in late February 1968.
It counted 164 disorders in the first nine months of 1967, which it sorted by seriousness; only a small number were classed as major, and most were minor. It rejected the idea that the riots were the product of an outside conspiracy. Instead it pointed to segregation, poverty, unemployment, poor housing and the conduct of police in Black neighbourhoods, and it warned that the country was “moving toward two societies, one black, one white - separate and unequal.”
The report was a landmark, but its recommendations for large new spending were not adopted in the form proposed. Johnson, committed to the Great Society programmes and increasingly consumed by the Vietnam War, distanced himself from it.
What the summer meant
The events of 1967 reshaped the politics of race and order. Some white voters turned toward calls for law and order, a reaction usually described as white backlash. Many Black leaders argued that the civil rights movement’s legal victories of 1964 and 1965 had not changed daily life in Northern cities. Within months, the King assassination in April 1968 set off a further wave of unrest in dozens of cities, with Washington, Baltimore and Chicago hit hardest.
New York in 1967 is best understood as a city that came close to the edge and, for reasons both deliberate and accidental, stayed back from it.