On Sun, Feb 22, 2009 at 9:52 AM, Shane Taylor <shane.taylor at verizon.net>wrote:
> ["The Fire Last Time", by Scott McLemee:]
>
> In the wake of Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination on April 4, 1968, a
> wave of riots erupted throughout the United States — leading to the
> occupation of Baltimore, Chicago, and the District of Columbia by federal
> troops and the mobilization of the National Guard in a dozen more. The
> violence lasted for a week. Clay Risen gives some numbers in the opening
> pages of A Nation on Fire: America in the Wake of the King Assassination,
> just published by John Wiley & Sons: "39 people were dead, more than 2,600
> were injured, and 21,000 had been arrested. The damages were estimated at
> $65 million—about $385 million today."
>
> But when Risen, the managing editor of the journal Democracy: A Journal of
> Ideas, told people he was working on a book about the '68 riots, he says
> they often assumed he meant the police melee at the Democratic national
> convention in Chicago a few months later. The post-assassination upheaval —
> which engulfed more than 100 cities — gets a brief nod in accounts of the
> Sixties, of course; yet the details remain vague, as if our historical
> memory had somehow erased most of them. Drawing on contemporary accounts,
> government reports, interviews, and archival sources, Risen presents a
> narrative history of some of the events of that catastrophic week.
>
> "A race war did in fact come to America that day," he writes, "but it
> turned out to be a cold war, not a hot one. When the smoke cleared and the
> sirens ran down, an invisible wall went up between urban and suburban
> America, every bit as real as the one in Berlin.... In the worlds of legal
> theorist Jonathan Simon, in the 40-year wake of the riots, 'Americans have
> built a new civil and political order structured around the problem of
> violent crime.'" But evidence suggests that the riots were hardly the work
> of street thugs. "There was no 'typical' rioter," notes Risen, "but the
> statistically average profile was better educated and more likely to be
> employed than most people in the riot area....Such results underscore an
> alternative theory of ghetto rioting: that it was at least as much an
> expression of protopolitical anger as it was of opportunism and common
> criminality."
>
> With its emphasis on the political logic of racial backlash, A Nation on
> Fire shares themes with Rick Perlstein's Nixonland — but it also seems
> strangely contemporary at a time when fresh surges of "protopolitical anger"
> are in the air, worldwide. (Street demonstrations have just toppled the
> government in Iceland, for example.) Risen agreed to answer a series of
> questions about his book by e-mail. A transcript of our exchange follows.
>
> <http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2009/01/28/mclemee>
>
>
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