![]() It was on."Īs he was driving friends home on the second night of the riots, Williams faced down a police officer wielding a shotgun during a traffic stop. "There was no representation in government and people were taking advantage of black folks and it was only so much people were going to take. "This was the rebellion that people had predicted because it had been happening all over the country, and Newark was no different," said Williams, 73, now a professor at Rutgers University in Newark. Fifty years ago Junius Williams was a law student at Yale University fighting gentrification in Newark when the riots broke out. He was driving back from a "black power" conference in Philadelphia when news of the riots came across his car radio. Junius Williams was a law student at Yale University fighting gentrification in Newark when the riots broke out. Many of the scenes that unfolded in Newark have resembled the conflict of the last few years: Residents clashing with police wearing riot gear and driving armored vehicles down city streets, mass arrests, and government officials calling for curfews in an attempt to restore order and frustrated citizens burning neighborhood storefronts. There was that fear, there was that possibility, that the police would shoot you and nothing would happen - much the same as what happens today." ![]() "That really symbolized the whole tenor and system of corruption that was going on," said Means, now 84 and living in Monroe, New Jersey. ![]() The rioters spoke loudly, but were they heard? The echoes of 1967 in today's America would suggest they were not, and the lessons not learned linger for a new generation where racial tensions, indifference and inaction persist. It wasn't known why the group was stopped and searched. "The amazing thing about the ghetto is that so few Negroes have rioted." A National Guardsman moves a civilian towards the wall as police search others in riot-torn Newark, New Jersey, July 15, 1967. Martin Luther King wrote in his last book, "Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?" in 1967. "A riot is at the bottom of the language of the unheard," the Rev. The disorders exposed - for the first time to much of white America - racial and economic disparities that went far beyond the familiar scenes of segregation in the South. Days after Newark burned, Detroit followed. Newark was a deadly entry in the long list of major urban areas that exploded over a five-year period, among them Watts in Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Boston and New York's Harlem. In addition to the $10 million in property damage, the riots left economic and emotional scars on Brick City that, in many ways, have not yet healed. The rioting left 26 dead, more than 700 injured and nearly 1,500 arrested, mostly black. For four days in July, Newark was the epicenter of black rage.
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