Protest fills a vacuum left by the abdication of political leadership. Black protesters and rebels in the 1960s took to the pavement to express their fury at local governments for ignoring their needs. They lamented that civil rights laws seemed to accomplish little more than token change; they reviled urban renewal for bulldozing black neighborhoods; and they saw the federal government as moving too slowly and too late.
Likewise, in 2020, the Floyd protests have grown out of resentment at city governments whose policies favor upscale real estate development over community redevelopment and have yet to solve the problems of overpriced housing and underfunded schools. They point their fingers toward a White House that seems bent on fomenting racial divisions for President Trump’s political goals.
But if the 2020 protests share much in common with their 1960s predecessors, they also differ in important ways.
The crowds in our big cities today are far more racially diverse today than they were 52 years ago. In some suburbs and small towns, from Bellingham, Wash., to Bloomington, Ind., they are overwhelmingly white. Yes, some demonstrations for racial justice in the 1960s were interracial — but when it came to civil rights, African Americans often protested with only modest white support, if any at all. The advent of rioting — led by black rebels, overwhelmingly centered in segregated African American neighborhoods — reflected the harsh racial realities of the time. America was, in the words of the Kerner Commission (empaneled by the Johnson administration in 1967 to explore the causes of urban unrest) two nations, one black, one white, separate and unequal, especially when it came to housing and education.
Despite reports of white looters in some cities then, most civil disorder was led by African Americans. In the ‘60s, looting and burning happened in black neighborhoods. “Mom and pop” businesses, including black-owned stores in many cities, were targets, not department stores, luxury chains and shopping malls. With few exceptions, ‘60s urban rebels stayed away from businesses with a predominantly white clientele. Looting, vandalism and arson wiped out whole blocks of retail in places like North Philadelphia, Harlem, Watts in Los Angeles, Chicago’s West Side and Detroit’s Twelfth Street, leaving nearby white areas untouched.
In 2020, by contrast, angry crowds in New York shattered windows in wealthy Soho, pillaged chain stores in Union Square and even hit the iconic Macy’s flagship. In Philadelphia, the first wave of unrest swept through the upscale shops and chains near Rittenhouse Square, before spreading to more working-class blocks in West Philadelphia and other outlying neighborhoods. In Los Angeles, protesters mostly avoided places like Watts and turned their anger on places like Rodeo Drive and the Grove shopping mall.
Why are today’s uprisings more interracial and more decentralized? Why have the targets changed? We are seeing a new, hybrid form of protest emerging in places that are responding to two interconnected realities in urban American today: racial injustice that falls especially hard on African Americans, and deep economic insecurities that affect blacks along with a far wider swath of the population, including the young whites who have joined protests in huge numbers.