The Daily Newarker

About a week ago, the Newark Museum presented a screening of New Jersey’s Summer of Discontent: Revolution ‘67, a documentary about the five days of violence remembered as ‘the riots of ’67’.

The film itself, a presentation of the Newark Black Film Festival, was informative enough, especially to someone like me who, over the years, was informed about the riots mainly through vignettes from a classmate who ‘had an uncle who knew a police officer’ who lived through it, but never thoroughly researched the causes and catalysts of the unrest.

‘Summer of Discontent’ says that the unrest started with a raucous protest at the former Fourth Precinct, after police had arrested and severely beaten a black cab driver named John Smith. It offers compelling facts, including that the National Guard and state troopers pumped out roughly 150 rounds of ammunition for every one supposedly fired by local ‘snipers’. There were no indictments for the 26 local residents killed (some while crouching on their apartment floors), overwhelmingly at the hands of firing by uniformed forces.

I was disappointed, however, that the film did not delve into exactly which retail and commercial arteries and took the hardest hit from the violence, especially because people often say that it was the riots that caused businesses to flee the city, triggering its decline. One sees tall buildings ablaze, but with no commentary about whether a company owned that building, how many local residents were employed there or whether the riots prompted those entrepreneurs to withdraw from Newark in disgust or out of a sense of frustration and futility.

After the screening, the sponsors presented a panel discussion featuring Richard Cammarieri of the New Community Corporation, Junius Williams, Esq., Director of the Abbott Leadership Institute at Rutgers, University/Newark and Amiri Baraka, writer and activist. Dr. Clement A. Price, director of the Institute on Ethnicity, Culture and Modern Experience at Rutgers/Newark, moderated. They say the film fails to discuss the roles of local activists and residents, who had been marshaling Newark residents against police brutality and slumlords for years before the Newark Community Union Project, a group organized by young, educated and white activists came to Newark to live among the poorest and residents and do the same thing. None of the panelists diminished the work of NCUP and its most visible leader, Tom Hayden, but ‘Summer of Discontent’ presented that information in such a way that if one is not familiar with the activism of Bob Curvin and others, they might form the impression that Newark’s black population was a huddled mass finally agitated into aimless, random violence by a pack of anti-bourgeois idealists.

Lately, some have taken to calling that terrifying period ‘the revolution of ‘67’ or ‘the rebellion of ‘67’. The latter is my favorite, because after hearing what the panelists had to say, I got the impression that there was a push and pull between the establishment and the local activists for a long time. After the riots, those activists successfully slashed the acreage of residential land being seized for the development of UMDNJ and blocked the development of proposed Route 75, which would have connected Route 78 and Route 280, but in my opinion, further eviscerated much of the heart of Newark.

Don’t worry if you didn’t get a chance to see the screening at the Museum. Channel 13, the local PBS station, will broadcast the documentary on July 10 at 10 p.m. Corresponding with the dates of the riots, the mayor’s office will sponsor a free screening of ‘Summer’ at the Newark Screens multiplex on Springfield Avenue from July 12 through July 17.