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UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
Tuesday, February 27, 1968
Editorial fiction
Summer, 1978
It was evening, a bad time for seven-year-old Jimmy.
His parents wouldn't let him go out into the ghetto streets because it was getting dark, and there was too much chance of being spotted by a National Guardsman.
But he didn't like being inside in the small, below-street apartment at that time of day, because his father and brother were awake and drinking by then, with their friends who stopped by, and the group got meaner as the hours passed.
Jimmy didn't understand most of it all, but he knew they were Negroes. Maybe that was enough.
The men were recounting the fighting and rioting of the previous night in bitter amusement as they passed around the whiskey bottle.
"Man, the way you took that nash was a work 'a art," said one of the men to Jimmy's brother. His brother had killed a National Guardsman with a homemade Molotov cocktail the night before. Jimmy's brother, Mattie, was only 17, but was accepted by the adults because of his skill in making homemade bombs.
"You did all right yourself," Mattie said, "I watched how you lifted his club and was off runnin' before them others knew he got blowed up."
The men laughed. It was a good way to relieve the tension.
They were either sitting or standing around the kitchen table, where Mattie was stuffing a gasoline-soaked rag into the top of a pop bottle filled with nails and bolts. Jimmy had forgotten what it would be used for when he drank the pop the day before.
A single bare light bulb hung above the sweaty men. It was very hot in the room, since there was black tarp tacked over the windows.
Jimmy couldn't remember when the routine of the rioting had not been part of their lives. He was glad it it for one reason. It had been over a year and a half since he had gone to school.
During the day, he played in the streets near their doorway or he would play with the insides of one of the seven televisions that his father had picked up at night from broken store windows.
The evening was a bad time for him, with the fighting beginning outside and the hate beginning inside, but the nights were a little better. He had gotten used to having to stay near his frightened mother, and to the noise of the shooting and yelling and the continual sirens outside at night. Sometimes the noise seemed far away and other times close.
Tonight's meeting was even more tense than usual. As always, the men listened to the television to see where the activity was the greatest. Riot coverage was reported from seven to ten, and then again at eleven each night. It was usually the same.
"Gonna need a sniper at that intersection," one of the men said quietly. The men all drew straws, and were then very quiet.
Suddenly, the men all knew it was time to
go out into the night. They always left one at a time, and Jimmy's father and Mattie always arrived home by different routes in the early morning hours.
As the men left, Jimmy's mother hugged his father and brother for a moment, as though they were going off to war.
Each man wore dark clothing, and in place of any identification carried his favorite weapon, a baseball bat, a Molotov cocktail, pistol, or something.
After the men silently filed out the door, it was quiet.
It was during these times when Jimmy's mother would tell him what it used to be like, before the Riots. He didn't believe some of the stories. Imagine walking around on the streets, and going into white stores, just like that. Oh, well, Jimmy thought, they tried to tell him about Santa Claus too.
The morning passed, and then the afternoon. Even Jimmy's little sister could sense his mother's growing fear.
Jimmy's father and brother didn't come home that next morning, but his mother was more irritated than worried. They had stayed away that long before, when the cops had a block surrounded or something, but she was counting on the groceries that she had told her husband to grab if he had a chance, during the night.
It was during the evening while Jimmy was playing with the tubes in the back of a television set and his mother was sewing that Mattie burst through the door and fell to the floor, clutching his stomach, the blood oozing out between his fingers.
Jimmy's mother screamed and ran over to her son, holding his head.
"Dad ain't comin' back," he gasped, out of breath. "I was shooting from a window when Dad tried to take on four of them and they—wait—close the door. I think the nash that got me might have followed me."
Jimmy's mother was halfway across the room when suddenly the National Guardsman stood framed in the doorway, his sub-machine gun ready.
Jimmy was also startled by the whiteness of his face. He had not seen one for months. The National Guardsman didn't look much older than Mattie, who went for a pistol in his jacket the second he saw the figure in the doorway.
A rapid burst of fire ripped into Mattie, and two of the bullets accidently caught the little sister, spinning her lifelessly into the wall.
The screams of Jimmy's mother were joined by the increasing noise from the street as a shouting mob advanced upon the National Guardsman, who ran from the doorway into the terrorized city streets.
Jimmy shrank into the corner, silently, watching his hysterical mother hug the two bodies, as the noise reached a savage peak outside on the warm summer streets of the big city.
It was evening, a bad time for seven-year-old Jimmy.
—John Hill
Assistant Editorial Editor
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Myron S. Kaufmann's REMEMBER ME TO GOD (Dell, 95 cents) is one of the big family novels, in this case a Jewish family in Boston. Without being distinguished it is extremely readable and believable, too. Richard Amsterdam is a young Jew at Harvard, with a family that he, of the new breed, is ashamed of. Kaufmann, like some other contemporary chroniclers of the Jewish faith in America, grasps well the conflict between the generations, and he makes his people much more than stereotypes.
Editorial essay
'Cool it' is impractical
The United States now fights one war in Vietnam; the chance of another with North Korea seems possible. And cities across the nation are preparing for riots—a sort of limited war.
The editorial essay in the Daily Kansan Feb. 20 asked, "what can be done now to ease the transition towards a monochromatic society." The answer was that there is no easy answer. This is, of course, obvious.
But the advice to the Negro to "cool it" and wait for the testing of civil rights laws and then court cases if the guaranteed rights are not there appears a bit naive in the face of the problems of the urban Negro and the accepted causes for last summer's riots.
The commission found no "persuasive evidence of a conspiracy." The commission did criticize police and National Guard for being trigger happy and for "using excessive and unjustified force."
Last week a commission on the Newark riots gave its report after five months of study using 107 witnesses and 700 staff interviews. The commission's findings was that the Newark riot was largely a spontaneous revolt against the conditions of life in Black Newark.
Housing (one-third of Newark's housing is substandard), unemployment (10.5 per cent of its non-white population is unemployed), a deteriorated school system (it is estimated it would take $250 million to rehabilitate it), Negro alienation, deepened by the city's reputation for corruption and bad police, and community relations were cited as these underlying conditions.
The most frightening finding of the Newark commission was that nothing had been done since last July to ease the conditions.
The reasons for all of the riots will not be the same but considering the problems of the city ghetto-dweller, it's easy to surmise that most of them are similar.
The mood all winter has been to prepare for the riots by riot control. Only limited and isolated civic and business ventures such as the Urban Coalition, now headed by former Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, John Gardner, have done anything about improving the ghetto conditions in susceptible cities like Newark, Detroit. Los Angeles and St. Louis.
Improving ghetto conditions is, as Newark's Mayor Addonizio, complains, going to take money—lots of money. But the United States now spends $75 billion a year for defense but allots only $7 billion for welfare.
An article in the Feb. 24 issue of the Saturday Review by James Gavin and Arthur Hadley presents the same growing concern about the urban crisis in America. But the article, titled "Crisis of the Cities, The Battle We Can Win," suggests using money now used to fight the war in Vietnam to rebuild the cities and to help their citizens lead a decent life.
Sen. Charles Percy of Illinois has said, "If we continue to spend $66 million a day trying to 'save' the 16 million people of Vietnam while leaving the plight of the 20 million urban poor in our own country unresolved, then I think we have our priorities terribly confused."
The United States now fights in Vietnam with a growing sense of discouragement as the war that was to have been over in a year goes on. We shiver at the thought of fighting on a new front in North Korea. Can we afford in the meantime, to lose the struggle against a civil war at home? By Alison Steimel
"Boy, Fetch Me A Rights Bill Compromise. Hear?"