The dates
New York’s major riot of the 1960s was not in 1967. It took place in July 1964, first in Harlem and then in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant, and it was among the first of the large urban disturbances of the decade. In 1967 the city did not have a riot on that scale, even as Newark and Detroit burned. But the Harlem riot of 1964 is the best way to understand the racial tension that existed in New York in 1967, because the grievances that set it off were still largely in place three years later.
The shooting of James Powell
On the morning of 16 July 1964, an off-duty police lieutenant, Thomas Gilligan, shot and killed a 15-year-old Black student, James Powell, outside a building on the Upper East Side. Gilligan said that Powell had come at him with a knife; many witnesses disputed it, and the case became one of competing accounts. A grand jury later declined to indict the officer.
The shooting came only two weeks after President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. That law banned discrimination in public places and employment, but for many Northern Black residents the new law seemed far away from their daily experience of crowded housing, poor schools and policing.
Harlem, then Bedford-Stuyvesant
Protests began with a rally organised by the Congress of Racial Equality and others, and a demand that the officer be suspended. A crowd marched toward a police station on 123rd Street in Harlem. On the nights that followed, there were clashes between young people and police, bottle- and brick-throwing, looting of shops and fires. The unrest spread to Bedford-Stuyvesant, which was then the largest Black neighbourhood in Brooklyn, and lasted about six days in total.
Reported totals vary by source, but are usually given as one person killed, over a hundred injured, and several hundred arrested. Mayor Robert Wagner cut short a trip abroad, and he called in respected Black figures such as the activist Bayard Rustin to help calm tempers. Some established leaders urged a pause in demonstrations, while others argued that the anger was legitimate and the cause was deeper than one shooting.
Why the grievances persisted
By 1967 many of the same conditions remained.
- Policing. Residents of Harlem, Bedford-Stuyvesant and the South Bronx often described police as aggressive and unaccountable. The city’s debate over an independent civilian review board for complaints became a symbol of this. In November 1966 New Yorkers voted on the proposal in a referendum and rejected it by a wide margin, which many Black New Yorkers took as a sign of white resistance to oversight.
- Housing. Large parts of central Harlem and central Brooklyn had old, overcrowded buildings, and landlords and city agencies were frequently accused of neglect. Efforts to build integrated housing met opposition in some white neighbourhoods.
- Schools. Segregation by neighbourhood left the schools in Black districts overcrowded and often under-resourced. The pushes for integration and, later, for community control were driven by this.
- Work. Unemployment among young Black men was a persistent problem even in years of national economic growth, a point often made by critics of the War on Poverty, which delivered some training and youth-employment funds, but not on the scale many wanted.
Politics and rhetoric in 1967
The mood among young activists was changing. The phrase Black Power gained wide attention in 1966 and 1967, and groups such as the Black Panther Party were beginning to attract national notice from their base in California. In Harlem, the memory of Malcolm X, who had been killed in February 1965, remained strong. Many younger residents were more sceptical of the strategies of the civil rights movement’s older leaders.
In July 1967 the city saw disturbances in East Harlem, where officials moved fast to calm things down. Mayor John Lindsay’s presence in the streets, a theme in another article, is generally credited with limiting them. After the Newark riot and the Detroit uprising, New York officials were extremely sensitive to the risk of a repeat.
What 1964 and 1967 tell us together
The comparison is useful because it shows that a riot is not a straightforward measure of how bad conditions are. The causes in New York were present in 1964 and still present in 1967, but the trigger, the response of officials, and chance all differed. The Kerner Commission, which reported in February 1968, looked at cities across the country and concluded that segregation, poverty and police relations had contributed to the disorders. New York’s experience across 1964 and 1967 fits that broader finding, even though 1967 itself passed without a major riot.