The Iron is Hot

The Rochester uprising began late on the night of July 24, 1964, just as order was being restored in Harlem from the outburst there days earlier. It seemed to the New York Times, with its big-city bias, that the events in Rochester were merely an extension of those that had begun in Harlem. But whatever inspiration they may have drawn from the flare-up in Harlem, Blacks in Rochester rose up in protest over grievances that were both long-standing and local. It had been an extremely hot week in Rochester, with temperatures rising above ninety degrees for several consecutive days. Crammed into housing without air-conditioning, residents sought relief from the day’s heat in the cooler night air. People congregated on the steps and stoops with their neighbors for conversation; others shot dice, hoping to make a quick dollar. Meanwhile, youngsters gathered for an approved and chaperoned street dance sponsored by the Northeast Mother’s Improvement Association, a local block group. The mothers hoped that refreshments sold at the dance would provide some wholesome fun for the community’s teenage population while raising funds to build a playground.

As the chatter on the police transmission announced, however, this would be “more than a typical Friday night in July.”¹⁴ Things came to a head when the police, who had been called by the dance organizers, arrested twenty-year-old Randy Manigault for public intoxication. The organizers found themselves in a difficult situation. Manigault’s behavior had escalated at the event, culminating in his groping of several young girls. He refused to leave when asked. Though organizers were undoubtedly aware of the ongoing conflict between the community and the police, they had obtained a city permit to hold the dance, which meant police officers were patrolling nearby. Unable to manage Manigault any longer, they enlisted the officers’ assistance. Community residents reported, however, that the officers, supported by their K-9 unit, were overly aggressive and unnecessarily harsh in making the arrest—standard police practice in Rochester’s Black neighborhoods by that point (see figure 3.1). What was unusual was the way community residents responded: they attempted to rescue Manigault from police custody. When that failed, residents picked up rocks, bricks, and bottles—retrieved from the garbage and debris left lying in the streets by a neglectful Department of Public Works—and turned them into missiles aimed at the officers and their dogs.

The police and the community quickly became mired in a state of war, as officers engaged in hand-to-hand combat in the streets with the rock-throwers they were attempting to arrest. As the ranks of their opponents grew, the officers called for reinforcements. Police Chief William Lombard, believing his presence would cool tempers, soon arrived. Despite the unsavory reputation of many of his officers, Lombard believed he personally retained the respect of many Black residents, including Black leaders. On this occasion, however, Lombard got no respect. As he called for order, even agreeing to release those who had been arrested, Lombard’s own car was overturned in the street and he too was bombarded with bricks and bottles.¹⁵ Outnumbered and under assault, the officers retreated and formed a perimeter around the Black community. The strategy now became one of containment, that is, preventing the insurgency from moving into the prosperous and upscale downtown area. As the New York Times reported, “The melee became so intense that [the police] withdrew from the center of it and established a perimeter defense to contain it. The police said the situation was ‘definitely out of control and critical.’ ”¹⁶

Government had disappeared from the Black community, if only briefly. Seizing the opportunity created by the power vacuum, the insurgents turned their attention to the hated retail establishments. One of the first targets was Kaplow’s liquor store. The media would portray this particular attack as purely opportunistic, aimed merely at obtaining free liquor. In reality, the decision to single out Kaplow’s was much more complex and strategic. Mr. Kaplow was well known and despised in the community. At his establishment, one could get liquor on credit. In exchange for engaging in this illegal practice, Kaplow charged hugely inflated rates of interest. John Mitchell, the husband of Third Ward supervisor Constance Mitchell and an activist in his own right, recalled Kaplow’s methods for the purchase of liquor on credit: “He’d write it down in the book, and then if he wanted to charge you for two bottles, he’d charge you for two. If you got one and he wanted to charge you for two, you had to pay,” on pain of being denied further credit.¹⁷ Consequently, Mitchell was not surprised at the swift sacking of Kaplow’s. “When they started the riot,” he continued, “the first thing they broke into was Kaplow’s. Man, they cleaned his liquor store out. That’s why they brought ten cases of liquor over to my house, put it on my porch, and said, ‘This is your share, Mr. Mitchell.’ ”¹⁸ The sharing of liquor from Kaplow’s, including with those who had not participated in the attack, even to highly respected members of the community such as John Mitchell, set the tone for the moral economy of the riot. Similar acts of redistribution followed the ransacking of food, clothing, and other establishments.

The pattern of attack throughout the uprising demonstrated that far from being opportunistic and capricious, as media depictions suggested, the participants deliberately and willfully chose their targets. In addition to Kaplow’s liquor store, Peck’s pharmacy was attacked and supplies seized on the first night of the uprising. This, too, was unsurprising. Lester Peck had long maintained a dual career as pharmacist and politician, using the one career to advance the other. As previously detailed, Peck’s predominantly Black constituents finally ousted him as ward supervisor in 1961. Constance Mitchell, a recipient of some of the loot taken from Kaplow’s liquor store, replaced him. Peck’s crimes against the Black community were twofold. He maintained a practice of strong-arming his constituents for votes, threatening to restrict their access to necessary medication. Second, his pharmacy extended credit, although whether at the same usurious rates as Kaplow is unclear. The uprising apparently removed Peck from the Black community altogether. When queried by a reporter whether he would rebuild his looted pharmacy, Peck responded, “I doubt it; I think this will be the coup de grace; I think this will drive us out.”¹⁹ Peck’s pharmacy and Kaplow’s liquor store were not alone: the targeting of stores with questionable practices and of owners with unfavorable reputations continued throughout the uprising. At the same time, schools, churches, and community organizations, along with businesses with good standing in the community, all escaped unscathed.

City leaders took strong measures to quell the disturbance. After consulting state officials, city manager Porter Homer declared a state of emergency and ordered liquor stores throughout the city of Rochester closed. He also imposed an 8:00 p.m. curfew. The curfew not only failed to stop the upheaval, but it also outraged many who resented the curtailment of their rights. Buddy Granston, a veteran recently returned to Rochester from military service in Germany, recalled a series of events that increasingly fueled his anger at the curfew and the police charged with enforcing it. First, the police refused to let Granston (and other residents) off his porch. On the second evening of the uprising, officers pointed guns at his head as he returned home from work. The following night, Granston and his landlord were arrested for breaking the curfew. He remembered,

We were goin’ over to [a friend’s] house to have a couple a’ cold ones, and I’ll never forget this: the police stopped us right around the Plymouth Circle.… They stopped us and they said we were breakin’ the curfew and so they called the wagon and they put us all in the wagon. And that’s when I, you know, I might have lost it some, here I’m a veteran just got home from servin’ my country in the war and here I am in the Black Mariah, one of the names we used to call the wagon; you call it “paddy wagon” or whatever, we call it the Black Mariah.… Here I am goin’ to jail with a wagon full of people that they had—were puttin’ in jail because we broke the curfew.²⁰

Granston and those with whom he went to jail had plenty of company, most of them also charged with curfew violations. An analysis by the city manager’s office reported that of 893 total arrests, more than 50 percent, 451 people, were curfew violators.²¹ In fact, the curfew increased the level of anger against the city and the police, thereby aiding the uprising, which became better organized after the first night.²² Both residents and the police reported that bricks, rocks, and Molotov cocktails were made and stored on rooftops in preparation for the second night of the rebellion.

Those with inside knowledge of the Black community knew that the uprising would continue after the first night. Accompanied by other members of the clergy and the community, Arthur Whitaker, pastor of Mt. Olivet Baptist Church in Rochester’s Third Ward, walked the streets of the Seventh Ward, where the uprising began, to survey conditions during the first night of the uprising. “Reverend,” the ringleaders greeted Whitaker, “we’re coming over to your side tomorrow night!”²³ Sure enough, after a daytime lull in events, the uprising did spread to the Third Ward on the second night, even as it continued unabated in the Seventh Ward. Typical of the era, television played a role in the diffusion of the uprising throughout Rochester’s predominantly Black neighborhoods, almost all of them in the Third and Seventh Wards. On the day after the uprising began, film footage showed firefighters spraying African Americans in the face with high-power fire hoses and policemen beating Black women with nightsticks (see figure 3.2). Viewers could also see and hear white crowds chanting, “Send them back to Africa!” behind police lines meant to prevent the rebellion from spreading downtown.²⁴

Roswald Graham was among those who experienced the heavy hand of the law as the police began the suppression on the second night of the uprising. Graham, an African American, left work with three white fellow employees in his car. He had already dropped off two members of the carpool at their places of residence when a police car pulled alongside his. Although the police had neither sirens nor lights going, Graham understood his predicament and immediately pulled over. One of the officers bounded from the car and fired a barrage of questions at the startled Graham, who offered a nervous smile. Even before the other three officers came around, Graham was already spread-eagled against the wall, as the first officer searched him. Suspecting he was carrying a weapon, the four officers bantered about where “they” typically hide knives and guns. Finding nothing, the first officer forcefully kicked Graham before allowing him to get up. He was later treated at the emergency room for injuries sustained when the officer kicked him. Graham’s white passenger was more fortunate, escaping with a gentle search and polite conversation.²⁵

The evidence indicates that such scenes riled up Black Rochesterians and added fuel to the uprising as it spread from the Seventh to the Third Ward. As the uprising migrated, its moral economy remained unchanged. Loma Allen, the white president of the Baden Street Settlement, which at the time of the uprising aided residents with housing, finding employment, and responding to discrimination, remembered an “interesting thing that happened.… Not one thing at Baden Street was hurt.” Likewise, she continued, “there was a strip of shops along Joseph Avenue of all kinds. The ones that had been good to the neighbors were not touched. [However] the other ones were trashed.” As goods looted from targeted establishments were redistributed, and in some cases destroyed, schools, churches, community organizations and favored businesses were exempt. “It was fascinating,” Allen continued. “They knew exactly who to pick off.”²⁶

With the police focused on containment, and apparently powerless to deal with the uprising inside the Black community, city officials appealed to the state. Governor Nelson Rockefeller was awakened at 3:00 a.m. the same night the disturbance began and told of the crisis. He immediately ordered state troopers to the scene, though it took them nearly four hours to arrive. Rockefeller also promised to send the National Guard, if necessary, an action he did not take during the Harlem uprising. On arriving, the state troopers took command of the situation, which the Rochester police resented. Despite public proclamations about the outstanding cooperation between the two police units, the evidence suggests that local police and local officials felt displaced by the state troopers. Certainly there were disagreements over the best course to pursue.²⁷

Even with the arrival of the state troopers, the strategy for dealing with the uprising did not initially change. The authorities were still focused on containment. As the day wore on, however, police presence in the Black community increased. Then the rebellion leapfrogged from the Seventh to the Third Ward that Saturday night, marking a second night of rebellion. It seemed to some that greater force would be needed to restore order, especially with talk circulating about a third night. Against the advice of the state troopers, Governor Rockefeller was requested to make good on his promise to send the National Guard if the situation warranted. Importantly, this request came not from city officials and the state police, who opposed it, but from an influential group of private citizens—Black and white—led by Georgiana Sibley, better known as Mrs. Harper Sibley, Rochester’s wealthy white matriarch and avowed racial liberal. Sibley, a board member of the Rochester Area Council of Churches and a proponent of the police advisory board, held constant meetings with various church and community leaders in her home throughout the uprising. At one such meeting, the public safety commissioner reportedly threatened to “line the niggers up like cordwood in the streets” if the rebellion did not end. Fearing a bloodbath if the local police were not restrained, Sibley and several ministers from the Rochester Area Council of Churches went over the heads of city officials and the state police, using backdoor channels to appeal to Rockefeller to send in the National Guard.²⁸ It was the first time in this era that the National Guard was called in to help suppress an urban rebellion. However, the Guard never actually entered the battle. On arriving in Rochester, they paraded through the streets and then retired to their barracks in the local civil defense shelters. Still, the show of force convinced many that the Guard had quelled the disturbance.

Actually, the uprising effectively ended after the second night, before the National Guard came on the scene. For one, the protestors had run out of targets to attack, having already looted or burned the most hated symbols of oppression in the Black community. Repression also took its toll. As authorities became more confident about the security of the downtown area, the city and state police abandoned the policy of containment and took the fight to the insurgents. The dragnet of the Black community resulted in some nine hundred arrests. For all practical purposes, the curfew placed the whole Black community under house arrest, and once they returned to the neighborhoods, the police aggressively enforced it. Most of those arrested were charged with curfew violation, as already noted, but many who took an active part in the uprising were also apprehended. The removal of such individuals from the streets and the increasingly heavy police presence served as a deterrent to others who may have considered joining the fray. In any case, would-be participants had fewer targets to attack. Sibley and her supporters may not have been convinced, but the uprising had indeed run its course by the time the National Guard arrived (see figure 3.3).

While officials lauded the police for their restraint and congratulated themselves on the small number of deaths during the rebellion (no one was actually murdered), those on the receiving end have different recollections.²⁹ Black victims of the police roundups report experiencing persistent and routine verbal and physical abuse. Ward supervisor Constance Mitchell caught a glimpse of the attitude of the police. After learning of the city’s intention to impose a curfew, Mitchell visited the public safety commissioner’s office in the company of eight ministers. Their purposes were simple. They requested passes to remain on the street, talking to their neighbors and cooling tempers, a role Mitchell had been playing for many years. As they waited in an outer room, a voice announced over the intercom, which had been left on accidentally: “Let those niggers do what they want to do, but the minute they step outside of [the prescribed] boundaries and head towards Main Street, shoot to kill.”³⁰ Apparently the death toll was so low because the ruckus was confined to the Black community.

Black members of the police force were not immune from the repression. Charles Price was one of the few Black officers on the Rochester police force at the time of the unrest, having by then advanced to the rank of sergeant. Though quite tight-lipped regarding his perceptions of the uprising, his recollections of the event and his own interactions with the state troopers are telling. Given his ability to meld into the Black crowd, Price had been assigned to work intelligence in plain clothes. On the second night of the uprising, he came face to face with a state trooper, who ordered him, “Get off the street!” Price asked the trooper why and was promptly thrown into a paddy wagon. His fellow officers were in disbelief when he arrived at the police station downtown in handcuffs and explained to the state trooper that he had just arrested Sergeant Price, who was on duty that evening. The state trooper, only mildly embarrassed, blamed Price for not telling him he was an officer. Price rejoined that at no point did the trooper inquire about his identity or his mission. On Price’s retelling of this story, his wife, Pauline, quietly murmured, “Typical.”³¹ Forty-five years after the fact, Price’s convictions on the nature of the uprising remained the same: “The riot was an economic and, I would say, political [event]; people were tired of being denied things that they actually should have, that were their given rights.”³²

Riots Reconsidered

Many misconceptions about the uprisings of the 1960s persist, despite (or perhaps because of) multiple contemporary reports by local and national investigative committees.³³ J. Edgar Hoover’s 1964 Federal Bureau of Investigation report sets the tone: “A common characteristic of the riots was a senseless attack on all constituted authority without purpose or object.” The report continued, “They were not a direct outgrowth of conventional civil rights protest.”³⁴ The mainstream media echoed such sentiments. An article in U.S. News and World Report mirrored this refrain. About the Rochester participants, the publication suggested,

They are the people who ran wild when a crowd of boozed-up Negroes attacked a couple of policemen. They weren’t “demonstrating” for anything. They used the riot as an excuse to see how much they could get away with—wrecking and sacking hundreds of stores—but making sure they cleared out the liquor stores first. They got away with enough liquor to keep them drunk for six months. Fired up on the stolen liquor, police said, the Negro mobs raged through areas covering more than 50 city blocks.… The mobs broke into store after store.³⁵

In fact, there is much evidence to suggest that urban residents used these disruptions to voice discontent with specific local conditions, particularly those conditions left unresolved by traditional civil rights struggles.

Historical scholarship, however, still has not fully come to terms with the Black insurgency of the 1960s. Although making great strides in reconceptualizing the Black Freedom Struggle, historians have yet to consider “race riots” as a legitimate part of “the Movement.” The first generation of scholars to engage this era’s urban race riots and rebellions tended to see them as disorganized responses to economic or social repression; race was generally a secondary factor in their analyses. Furthermore, these scholars focused primarily on the conditions that led to rioting, or the conditions that suggested riots may occur. They often looked at single factors (e.g., segregation or poverty) in an attempt to prove or disprove such notions as the underclass theory. Such works rarely historicized events or examined changes over time.³⁶ Moreover, many early scholars of the civil rights movement were former activists who were politically invested in separating themselves from the supposed senseless violence of the rebellions. They rarely looked closely at the organizations and movements the uprisings produced, much less placed rebellion in the context of the Black Freedom Struggle.

This historiographical lacuna is a direct result of the tendency to write about the civil rights movement as though it were solely a nonviolent phenomenon.³⁷ That scholars maintained this framework for so long has shaped the way that urban disturbances continue to be understood. The media take their cue from such entrenched perceptions, positioning “violent thugs” in opposition to “responsible Black leaders.” If a Black leader is to remain “responsible” in the public eye, he or she is expected to condemn any and all acts against private property or state authority. Yet in committing such violent reprisals, those engaged in rebellions often bring national attention to the disturbing conditions in their communities in ways that have eluded “responsible” leadership. It is only recently that scholars have begun to make positive connections between the uprisings of the 1960s and the civil rights movement.

Far from engaging in senseless acts of violence against all authority, as Hoover and others claimed, participants in the Rochester uprising attacked specific conditions and sought tangible outcomes from their efforts. Black Rochesterians and their white allies had exhausted their efforts to mediate conditions in the predominantly Black wards as business leaders and city officials repeatedly dismissed their concerns. Loma Allen recalled that the Baden Street board had little success with city officials and so instead turned to business leaders. Allen set up a meeting with Monroe Dill, Eastman Kodak’s industrial relations director. Allen recounted the conversation: “[Dill] said, ‘Oh, Loma, don’t worry.’ I said, ‘Monty, please get the people busy and do something about this housing, harassment, and so forth and so on.’ ‘Oh, Loma, now don’t get excited. I’ll take care of everything.’ So I left him and he said, ‘Nothing’s going to happen anyway.’ ”³⁸

Black concerns had been articulated before, during, and after the July 1964 uprising through the news media, in the bid for the civilian police review board, and through a series of demands submitted to the mayor’s office. These concerns got lost in the binary juxtaposition of “violent thugs” and “responsible leadership.”³⁹ For people not confined to respectability politics and tactics, violent reprisals to private property and state authority became a logical next step to ensure their concerns were acknowledged. In the midst of the uprising, one man declared, “Violence is one thing the white man understands.” When asked whether he had taken part in the looting, he responded that he had taken “some things my wife and family need. And the white man owes me more.”⁴⁰ Darryl Porter, who volunteered as a teenager in Constance Mitchell’s election campaign and has worn many hats in Rochester, also participated in the 1964 uprising. He offered the following analysis of his actions:

I was doing about what everybody else was doing, I was breaking the law, throwing bottles, breaking windows, robbin’ places and things like that, because people in Rochester are getting tired of all these slum houses and the brutality from the policeman, the way they beat on teenagers, and the way they yell at ya if you stand on the corner, and the treatment they do to ya when they get ya down to the police station. When all the riot was going on, this made the mayor and the city get up [off] their high horses and wanted to come see what was going on and why it was going on. Since it happened, everyone is getting down to talk about it and I think there should be a little bit more change in this world.⁴¹

Still another young Black man offered, “Something have to be done. It have to be done. I mean, we can’t get our rights, so I mean if you can’t get your rights, you got to take some kind of risk now, ain’t ya? Ain’t ya?”⁴²

Another misconception suggests that riotous mobs simplistically targeted white-owned stores while sparing Black-owned businesses. There is, indeed, plenty of evidence from Rochester and elsewhere that white establishments were looted or torched even as Black businesses were spared. The NAACP national field secretary reported on the Rochester uprising: “It is worthy of note that only white businesses were broken into and looted. It was obvious this was a form of retaliation and resentment.”⁴³ City Manager Homer confirmed this: “The pattern has been one of containment. And a pattern of white stores looted, Negro stores missed. There is a high probability whites may take counteraction tonight.”⁴⁴ African American storeowners got the point. As disturbances began in some cities, they posted signs indicating their establishments were Black-owned.⁴⁵ A confidential 1964 study by the Chicago Police Department concluded that such postings were effective: “It was felt … that such signs did protect the Negro store in most instances.”⁴⁶

Yet the participants in these uprisings were much more methodical than such reports indicate. In Rochester, Deputy Police Chief DePrez noted that there was order inherent in the chaos, though perhaps he misjudged its nature. “For the most part only stores operated by whites were smashed and looted,” DePrez asserted. “Negro-owned places weren’t touched. Someone had to point out which places to smash.”⁴⁷ In fact, no one had to point out which stores to target. As Loma Allen contends, anyone residing in the community knew which stores had offended the community. Their decisions were not based solely on the race of the storeowners. While the few Black-owned business and stores were exempted, white store owners with solid reputations were also spared. Take, for example, the white-owned Mangione store in Rochester. Mr. Mangione lived and worked in Rochester’s Seventh Ward, where the uprising began. His son, the famous jazz musician Chuck Mangione, remembered this:

Papa Mangione had a grocery store on the corner of … Martin Street. The store was actually attached to our house, and so … my father would eat dinner and keep the door open so he could see who was coming into the store. And I don’t ever remember him really having a complete meal without having to get up and go out to sell some kid some penny candy or somebody came in to get something.⁴⁸

The elder Mangione, it seems, was kind to the youth of the community, extended reasonable credit to those who could not pay immediately, and made his home with the people from whom he made his living. As Trent Jackson recalled,

The Mangione store was, you go in, and Mr. Mangione you know, looked like he had this feeling, you, it sounds funny, I’m dating myself but you know you could get a donut for a nickel. And you could go in, and we would go in sometimes after practice and we would look at the donuts and then you look at a piece of cake, and then you look [making a decision between the two], well I’ll take that. And well, then sometimes he would say, “you know, you’re a good boy, you can get both for the price of one.”⁴⁹

Not surprisingly, the Mangione store was untouched during the uprising, even as other white-owned establishments were looted and destroyed.

The mob was neither headless nor heartless, and there were constant negotiations between participants and residents about which establishments to target and which to exempt. Again, the moral economy of the uprising can be seen in a case in Rochester, where the crowd changed course and spared a white-owned storefront at the request of a single mother. The woman heard people below her in conversation, discussing setting fire to the looted building where she lived with her children. Afraid for her family, she descended to face the crowd and pleaded for them to move on, leaving the building intact.⁵⁰ The crowd did so expeditiously.

There is further evidence that the resentment of participants was directed at specific targets. In Rochester, many of the items taken from looted stores, particularly televisions and appliances, did not end up in private residences but instead were smashed in the streets.⁵¹ By contrast, food, always a prized commodity among the poor, was redistributed to members of the community. Even Constance Mitchell was offered some of the looted food, just as her husband John was offered looted liquor. She remembered, “People were bringing all the stuff—they come over and they brought a side of beef and set it on our porch and said, ‘Here, Mrs. Mitchell, this is your share.’ ”⁵² Evidently the looters were giving back a little to the Mitchells, who were revered for opening their home to the community for meetings, education, and counseling on a daily basis. Reportedly, if the door to the Mitchell home was open, there was a pot of food on the stove, and anyone was welcome to partake.

Yet another common theme in the literature is that the majority of participants in these rebellions were mainly young men. Various scholars portray the participants in the rebellions as both overwhelmingly male and overwhelmingly young. Thomas Sugrue is typical. In his highly regarded synthesis, Origins of the Urban Crisis, Sugrue is so convinced that youth dominated the urban uprisings that he frequently uses the term “teenager” as a stand in for “rioter.” Additionally, he argues that in the course of an uprising “allegations of police harassment of women challenged Black manhood: Men should—indeed must—protect their women.”⁵³ The emphasis on male participation continues throughout the chapter devoted to riots.

Sugrue is not alone. Matthew Countryman’s important work on Philadelphia and Komozi Woodard’s on Newark, New Jersey, also emphasize the role of teenagers. Countryman, like Sugrue, argues that confrontations with the police were a way for young males to assert their masculinity. Countryman argues that chants, which “promised violent revenge on the police,” performed on a picket line in the wake of the Philadelphia uprising, “enabled the teenage protestors to symbolically resolve their anxiety that racism would prevent them from claiming the prerogatives of masculinity.”⁵⁴ Writing of the 1967 riot in Newark, Komozi Woodard adds his considerable authority to this line of argument: “CORE members attempted to divert the crowd by leading a march on City Hall, but the attention of the Black youth in the streets was riveted on the precinct station house.” Woodard continues—“Before long, a hail of bricks, bottles, and Molotov cocktails hit the side of the police station”—using “Black youth” as a synonym for young Black men.⁵⁵ Other scholars of the urban uprisings also place the male teenager front and center.⁵⁶

These accounts do not comport with the evidence from Rochester, where women were active participants during every stage of the uprising. Police arrested at least seventy-five women during the course of the Rochester uprising; the charges against them mirrored those faced by men: curfew violation, felonious rioting, and various others associated with looting. Though women made up a relatively small proportion of total arrests, this is likely due to a police predilection to view Black men as more violent and dangerous than Black women. Other evidence suggests that women were entirely engaged in the rebellion and offered considerable support to the efforts. A Rochester police document entitled “Preliminary Report of the Riot Investigation” noted that during the uprising, “the police detail made several attempts to disperse the crowd … but were forced back by the barrage from behind buildings, roofs, and the crowd of women and older people.”⁵⁷ Reporters also noticed the presence of large numbers of women during the uprising.⁵⁸ Given the very public role of women in the civil rights movement and in local protests, it is unsurprising that they would join in this form of Black agitation as well.

In Rochester, at least, the uprising was far more than just a male youth rebellion, or even a youth rebellion. While young men and women certainly provided energy and voice, they did not have a monopoly on discontent. Rochester residents Gavin Huber Jr., age ninety, and Eva Dyer, sixty-three, were both charged with felonious rioting. Forty-two percent of those arrested in Rochester were over the age of thirty.⁵⁹ These statistics reflect widespread discontent rather than youthful rebellion. Even the Rochester police department took note: “The crowd swelled to about 500 people, and the older people were not assisting the police in their attempt to control the situation. They joined the youths in abusing the police and whenever the police tried to make an arrest they would interfere with the police and accuse the police of brutality.” The police department’s report added, “The older Negro citizens made little or no attempt to correct the riotous acts of the younger Negroes.”⁶⁰ Indeed, they did not; they had joined them! Constance Mitchell remembered, “It was the young people that stole the televisions and you know stuff like that, but it wasn’t just the young people that stole milk, pop, bread, meat.”⁶¹

Reducing the Contagion

In ways large and small, the events in Rochester were a taste of the coming decade. Just two days before the Rochester uprising, psychologist and activist Kenneth Clark, renowned for his research on the impact of racism on Black children, declared, “Riots like those in Harlem could occur in any other city with a large Negro population.”⁶² A shaken Constance Mitchell echoed the warning after the eruption in Rochester. She declared that America “was in the middle of a social revolution.… And the same thing that happened in Rochester on Friday night can happen in any community in America.”⁶³ The reverberations of the Rochester uprising would indeed be felt across the nation. In the midst of the uprising, an FBI agent visited Rochester with a blunt message for city officials: “The White House wants to know what’s going on.”⁶⁴ The president and his advisers were not alone. Rochester became, and remained for some time to come, a topic of conversation among government officials at the state and local levels, businesspeople, and activists.

For those charged with preserving law and order everywhere, Rochester would also become a place of note. Fearing a contagious effect, and seeking ways to combat it, police departments and public security officials across the nation turned their attention to Rochester. Rochester garnered such attention for three reasons. First, the timing of the uprising put Rochester at the forefront. Second, most cities had more in common demographically with Rochester than with Harlem. That Rochester exploded was unexpected and put a wider swath of urban areas on notice; they could experience such rebellions too. Third, Rochester had successfully quelled the uprising without any reported homicides. The police effectively contained the uprising to the Black neighborhood and prevented its spread to the prosperous downtown area. Thus, the prospect of such rebellions compelled cities and states to improve their response, communication, and recovery plans. After calling up the National Guard for the Rochester uprising, Governor Rockefeller took steps to increase the level of coordination among city, county, state, and federal officials in case of another emergency. In March 1965, the New York State Division of Military and Naval Affairs issued directives to all locales outlining “the authority and procedures for requesting the use of troops, equipment and armories of the New York State’s Military Forces in an emergency.”⁶⁵ This document would be revised several times over the next decade.

Other cities followed New York’s lead. In October 1964, John Madl, chief of patrol division for the Chicago Police Department, visited New York City, Rochester, and Philadelphia to study the most effective means of controlling and quelling racial disturbances. Madl’s confidential report stated that “the trip was most beneficial and that much of the material [collected] will be useful in strengthening our plans for riot control.”⁶⁶ Around the same time, Lieutenant Colonel Rex Applegate, working for the Office of Strategic Services and an expert in hand-to-hand combat, published an article in Ordnance entitled “New Riot Control Weapons” in which he complained, “The spontaneous and directed demonstrations and riots now being encountered on the domestic scene are no longer restrained by the mere ‘presence’ of the uniform. The military as well as the police have recently had to confront civilian crowds and mobs that held none of the ‘respect for the uniform’ that once automatically was assumed to be present.”⁶⁷ One of Applegate’s most treasured new weapons for riot control was the long baton, which he found superior to both the bayonet and the gun because it could be used to “achieve the desired result and, at the same time personally perform in the kind of aggressive manner that maintains [its user’s] morale and offensive spirit.”⁶⁸ Similar articles appeared in various news outlets and were clipped and circulated among lawmen.⁶⁹

Police officials nationally also paid close attention to the role of the media in rebellions. Here, too, they drew lessons from the Rochester uprising. While appreciating the media’s ability to convey public information quickly, as in publicizing the state of emergency, the Rochester police accused the broadcast and print media of inaccurate and biased reporting. Police officials were also concerned that reporters had been given too much information. In his “Command Report” of the Rochester uprising, Colonel William F. Sheehan noted an incident “whereby [a] reporter was able to secure far too much information from a young 2nd Lieutenant. Serious consideration must be given to the isolation of troops from reporters unless accompanied by an experienced [public information officer].”⁷⁰ Some news managers agreed and suggested self-censorship. In 1967, the Northern California chapter of the Radio and Television News Directors Association drafted guidelines to regulate the coverage of rebellions, which it then disseminated throughout the country. The guidelines included this introduction: “The following are suggestions for reporting of civil disorders and other events that may reflect public tension. These reminders to newsmen in southern California are based on experience in various cities of the United States, including Los Angeles.” The upshot of these recommendations was that news outlets should rely on the statements of public officials rather than “interviews with obvious ‘inciters.’ ”⁷¹ The California news directors also suggested that the media should restrict information about how to make the weapons used by rioters and the exact locations of the rebellions. These recommendations would have delighted Rochester’s Colonel Sheehan, whose own suggestions for controlling the news did not go nearly as far.

As the 1960s came to a close, scores of Black uprisings had shaken the nation, causing many to claim that indiscriminate mobs engaging in senseless violence had brought the civil rights movement to an end. Civil rights activists, in turn, did much to distance themselves from the uprisings, in many cases denouncing them outright. Yet in Rochester, the Black Freedom Struggle blossomed in the wake of the rebellions. An independent report of six cities, released in 1967, rightly determined that,

although numbers vary from city to city, sizable percentages of both whites and Negroes agree that “riots have brought about some long-delayed action by the city governments to help the Negro community.” The benefits perceived by both groups range from such psychological matters as focusing attention on Negroes’ needs and problems to the concrete steps of providing more jobs and better housing.… It would seem possible that though Negroes do not particularly like being the “squeaky wheel,” they are coming to the conclusion that only intense forms of social protest can bring relief from social injustice.⁷²

A full accounting of that squeaky wheel, and the intense forms of social protest it produced, is impossible without including the Rochester uprising and its consequences. Though historians and other scholars have long privileged the story of Black agitation in larger urban settings, there is much to learn by reconsidering the era in the light of events in the second-tier cities.