Correcting the premise
New York City did not have a major riot in 1967. What it had was a long run of local tension, some of it violent, in the mid-1960s, and a series of large protests in 1967 that were political rather than racial in origin. This page covers both: the Brooklyn disturbances and school conflicts that made up much of the city’s unrest, and the demonstrations that did take place in New York in 1967. The big outbreaks of that summer were in Newark and Detroit, and New York’s one great riot of the decade came in 1964, covered in a separate article.
Brownsville and East New York
Brooklyn’s Brownsville and East New York neighbourhoods were a good example of how fast change could be in the postwar city. Both had been home to large Jewish and Italian populations, many of whom moved to other parts of the city and the suburbs in the 1950s and 1960s. Black and Puerto Rican families moved in, often into aging housing and public housing projects, while jobs, services and investment lagged. Brownsville had some of the highest rates of poverty in the city.
In the mid-1960s there were periodic disturbances here, typically beginning with a dispute with police or a rumour, and involving rock- and bottle-throwing, fires and arrests over a few nights. The Brownsville disturbances are less well documented than the better-known riots in Harlem or Newark, and exact dates and totals are harder to pin down, so it is safest to describe them in general terms: local and short-lived, without the death tolls of Newark or Detroit, but a clear sign of strain. The nearby area of Bedford-Stuyvesant was the other main Brooklyn flashpoint, and it had been involved in the unrest of July 1964.
School fights
Schools were a second front. In February 1964 hundreds of thousands of pupils stayed away from New York schools in a one-day boycott to press for faster integration. The city’s schools were still heavily segregated by neighbourhood, and plans to change that met resistance from white parents as well as some doubts from Black parents who wanted better schools more than integration.
By 1966 and 1967 the argument had moved toward community control. In East Harlem, parents boycotted a new junior high school, I.S. 201, in 1966 over claims it was not delivering a better education. The idea that local communities should have a say over their own schools grew into a demonstration project in the Ocean Hill-Brownsville district of Brooklyn, which began in 1967. It led to an acrimonious dispute with the teachers’ union that came to a head in the strikes of autumn 1968, a later chapter than the year covered here but one with roots in 1967.
What did happen in the city in 1967
The year brought a number of large, mostly peaceful protests in New York.
- The Be-In in Central Park, March 1967. On Easter Sunday several thousand young people gathered in the park for a gentle, flower-strewn gathering, an East Coast echo of the San Francisco scene.
- Martin Luther King at Riverside Church, 4 April 1967. King delivered the Beyond Vietnam speech in Manhattan, criticising the war and linking it to poverty at home. It drew sharp criticism from some newspapers and some civil rights allies.
- The Spring Mobilization, 15 April 1967. A large march went from Central Park to the United Nations, where King and other speakers addressed the crowd. Organisers described it as one of the largest antiwar demonstrations the country had yet seen, and estimates of the crowd varied widely, from well over 100,000 to several times that.
- Stop the Draft Week, December 1967. In early December, protesters tried to block the induction centre at Whitehall Street in lower Manhattan. Police made arrests, among them the paediatrician Benjamin Spock and the poet Allen Ginsberg.
The year ended with a gathering of activists, including Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, who announced the Yippies on New Year’s Eve; the group took form in New York and went on to play a part in the protests at the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago.
Why the picture matters
The common thread in these events is that New York’s unrest in 1967 was more often political than violent. It was an arena for the national argument over the Vietnam War and the Selective Service draft, while its poorest neighbourhoods carried tensions that stayed beneath the surface. A year later, in April 1968, the city’s reaction to King’s death was notably less destructive than in Washington, Baltimore or Chicago, although the underlying issues remained unresolved. That mix of strain and relative restraint is the better description of New York in 1967 than any story of a city in flames.