Word: urbanize
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Even before the rioting began, an economy-minded Congress, contending with Viet Nam war costs, huge tax loads and Great Society programs, was rejecting or drastically trimming practically every new proposal aimed at upgrading urban life. Now, determined not to reward violence, it may well give top priority to law-and-order measures aimed at curbing riots and turn sharply unsympathetic toward new social legislation. But both kinds are essential, of course...
Arriving in Havana last week to be lionized by Fidel Castro, Stokely Carmichael, coiner of the black-power slogan, left no doubt that this was true. Declared Carmichael: "In Newark, we applied the war tactics of the guerrillas. We are preparing groups of urban guerrillas for our defense in the cities. The price of these rebellions is a high price that one must pay. This fight is not going to be a simple street meeting. It is going to be a fight to the death...
...Guardsmen, of course, were not wholly to blame. Most are young, inexperienced "weekend warriors," incapable of handling what some officials are now calling "urban guerrilla warfare." Riot-control training barely exists; even military policemen in the Guard receive only one day of it. In New Jersey, where the Guardsmen's rough behavior brought a barrage of protests from Negroes, National Guard Major General James F. Cantwell conceded that the time had come for special training. "It is apparent," he wrote in a letter to the Secretary of the Army, "that there is a need for an immediate re-examination...
...local flics, who are pretty rough customers themselves, with their 6-ft. batons and leaded capes, prove unable to manage. Wilson suggests that the U.S. may soon find that it needs similar professional forces-possibly organized by the states, but more probably a federal force deployed in various urban areas-able to move swiftly and break up riots with minimal violence. "Americans have never liked to garrison troops in the central city," warned Wilson, "but we may have to reassess this position...
There is much that could be done in the cities, however, within this sad situation. Urban administrators, for example, could have used their influence to assure that Negroes received the same quality of municipal services as whites. Until very recently, this grating inequity was ignored...