But the destruction of the Third Precinct — this was striking, and truly new. The situation in Minneapolis burst beyond its early outline. On the evening of May 28, the third night of the rebellion, the police were forced to evacuate their own building, trounced on the very territory they had disciplined and patrolled, as they broadcast to the nation their own fear and vulnerability. (Malcolm X, who dreamed of a black revolution that would lift lessons from the French one, would perhaps have smiled at this latter-day Storming of the Bastille.) The retreat was caught on camera and streamed on social media. The infiltrated precinct feasted on by flames, vans pelted with projectiles as they sped out of the parking lot, the sound of shattering windshields mixed with the rebels’ howls and cheers.
The event felt like a fulcrum. The whole country seemed to tilt: sacked shopping malls in Los Angeles and pillaged luxury outlets in Atlanta, a siege on New York’s SoHo and flaming vehicles from coast to coast. Pictures of Philadelphia and Washington DC showed whole neighborhoods bristling with insurgency, crowds smashed the lordly windows in Chicago’s Loop, and rioters set fire to the Market House, where slaves were bought and sold, in Fayetteville, North Carolina, the town where Floyd was born. Not all of this, surely, could be the work of agents provocateurs. Something deeper and more disruptive had breached the surface of social life, conjuring exactly the dreaded image the conspiracy theorists refused to face. This was open black revolt: simultaneous but uncoordinated, a vivid fixture of American history sprung to life with startling speed. One thousand seven hundred US towns and cities — the number was absurd. Within a week, sixty-two thousand National Guardsmen were dispatched to support city forces as they lurched to regain control. But what emerged under the banner of blackness was soon blended with other elements, flinging multiracial crowds against soldiers and police. In living memory, this breadth and volume was virtually unprecedented, apart from the national uprisings sparked by the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. — a name wheeled out, on cue, to bemoan the unruliness of the rebellion.
But “rebellion” and even “uprising” soon fell from widespread use. As spring slid into summer, the preferred term devolved to “protests,” a change that marked the last phase in this jagged political sequence. There was constant, fractious overlap between differing attitudes and tactics. At first, battles in big cities outweighed more ordered, placid actions, but the latter soon became the standard (although Seattle and Portland were gripped by an insurrectionist element for months). A controlled but keen exuberance ruled the last months of demonstrations, which were less likely to result in ravaged property or mass arrests. By fall, the marches of the Obama years had in many ways returned but flushed with a new fury — a gift given them by the riots.
We need not fear that word. In fact, it’s vital to insist, over the drone of an amnesiac discourse, that last year’s spate of protest was propelled, made fiercely possible, by massive clashes in the street — not tainted or delegitimized by them, nor assembled from thin air. Those threatened by that fact will work to wipe it from our minds. The first phase of BLM thus made the case — unleashed the anguish — that was acted on last spring, in the flash of confrontation with the shock troops of the law.