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Looking back at America’s era of mayhem

Retired Black Panther leaders are trying to trademark the 1965 riot phrase “Burn, baby, burn” to use on a barbecue sauce. That, to me, is the most bizarre filing since Fox News Channel tried to claim exclusive rights to the phrase “fair and balanced.”

But it also seems ironically appropriate, especially at a time when Bob Dylan is doing commercials for Victoria’s Secret. Why shouldn’t the Huey P. Newton Foundation, which also wants to trademark the phrase “Revolutionary hot sauce,” cash in too?

A further irony: “Burn, baby, burn,” a street slogan during the 1965 riots in and near the Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts, came from an on-air catchphrase used by the popular black Los Angeles disc jockey, the Magnificent Montague. The Newton Foundation, named for Huey P. Newton, the late co-founder of the militant 1960s-era Black Panthers, is bringing the phrase back to the commercial pop-culture realm.

That’s about as appropriate a way as any to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Watts riots, which marked what I call the end of innocence for the black civil rights protests. The riots brought long overdue attention to the nation’s urban racial divide. They also opened up new divides along lines of race and class from which American cities today are just beginning to recover.

It is important to remember that, contrary to some of the Watts retrospectives I have seen published and broadcast, the riot that erupted in Los Angeles 40 years ago from Aug. 11 to 16 was not an isolated eruption. It was only one of the earliest and most spectacular of dozens of riots that erupted on urban America’s streets during the middle to late ’60s.

In 1964, summer racial violence blew up in the Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant sections of New York City and in Rochester, N.Y.

In July 1966, racial tension erupted in Omaha, Chicago, Brooklyn, N.Y., Cleveland and Jacksonville.

In 1967, President Lyndon B. Johnson sent federal paratroopers to quell a riot in Detroit, where 47 civilians died and thousands of homes were destroyed.

In 1968, after Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, racial violence flared up in more than 100 cities, including Chicago, Baltimore and Washington.

Johnson, according to various accounts, was baffled that riots followed the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the biggest breakthrough in civil rights since the end of slavery. He suspected numerous causes, including a communist plot engineered by Moscow. But a 1964 FBI report said there had been “no systematic planning or organization” behind the riots. A presidential riot commission, headed by former Illinois Gov. Otto Kerner, blamed the riots on the existence of “two nations,” one black, one white, separate and unequal.

Explanations for the riots during the ’60s, as now, tend to reflect the prejudices of the person doing the explaining. The uprisings did offer a narrow benefit in drawing attention to the unfortunate legacy of slavery and other racism, especially the concentrations of poverty that fashionably became known as “ghettos,” named after the European communities into which European Jews once were segregated.

In that era of Johnson’s War on Poverty, the riots uncovered the frustrations of urban black life: job discrimination, housing discrimination, abusive police, overpriced consumer goods and sellout politicians.

But the riots also fueled massive white flight to the suburbs, followed by merchants, employers and, eventually, those black families who could afford to leave their neighborhoods.

As the late urban activist Saul Alinsky once put it, neighborhood integration became that brief period between the time the first black family moved in and the last white family moved out.

It took about three decades of simmering racial fears, suspicions and resentments before a new era of cooperation between city halls, downtown corporations and urban neighborhoods began to replace race-based confrontations.

Today we are seeing the old divides replaced by new ones, city neighborhoods no longer look as frightening.

Housing prices have soared, and blacks, whites and a rainbow of other races have grown more comfortable with each other. Gentrification now threatens to displace the poor from neighborhoods that used to be written off.

Blacks who once were prevented from obtaining reasonable mortgages or home insurance by redlining practices now have to defend themselves against the relentless and dubious easy-money offers from predatory lenders.

For African-Americans of my generation (I was starting college when the Watts riots broke out), it has been dazzling to see how much has changed in urban neighborhoods.

We used to complain about white flight, now we worry when white gentrifiers move in. We used to complain about being redlined out of home loans. Now we need to worry when lenders want to throw money at us too easily.

History offers important lessons. It’s better to invest in our neighborhoods than to set them on fire. It’s time to learn, baby, learn.

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Clarence Page is a member of the Tribune’s editorial board. E-mail: cptime@aol.com