Anne del Castillo (Moderator): This screening and discussion is part of a series of events commemorating the history of Newark, and I'm looking forward to a vibrant discussion this evening. We have an esteemed panel with us tonight, including filmmaker Marylou Tibaldo-Bongiorno; Komozi Woodard, a history professor at Sarah Lawrence College and author of A Nation Within A Nation; Carol Glassman, who you saw in the film, and who was an activist and worked as a community organizer at SDS; and Ronald Smothers, who was a young reporter during the summer of 1967 covering Newark for the Washington Post.
We'll start with some initial impressions from the panel about the film. Professor Woodward, let's start with you.
Komozi Woodard: The first thing I want to say is about the beating of John Smith. In July 1967, people saw the police beating John Smith in the street first. Apparently some youth threw rocks at the police to get them to stop. Then the police took Smith into the car and beat him. Then they took him to the precinct and dragged and beat him. So basically, people responded to a 20th century slave whipping that was happening right in front of them. That's what that incident recalls for African Americans of that history.
The distinctive thing about Newark is that I don't think there's any other account of an uprising where people attacked the police department. They're not running away from the police in this case, and it's an incident that is like the Easter Uprising in 1916 in Dublin, Ireland. The people are attacking the institution of the government. This is not an accident: They didn't stumble into the police department. They are attacking the symbol of police repression. That's very distinct in American history.
In terms of riot control after the uprising took place, Newark is very different from other situations. There was a white riot in Cicero, Illinois in 1961: A black bus driver and his family tried to move into an apartment, and 6,000 white people rioted for days. They took all of his furniture and the furniture of neighbors and burned it and broke it up in the street. The National Guard is called out they only stayed in Cicero for a week. They didn't shoot into people's homes. Let's contrast that to what happened in Newark. What happened in Newark is not normal procedure. A riot didn't justify what the National Guard did because there had been riots throughout American history and they don't shoot into residential homes. What you just saw in the film is very extraordinary, and it should not be understood as a normal occurrence just because there was a riot. There had been other riots, but white people are not shot at like that when there have been other riots, not like they were in Newark.
Carol Glassman: Hi, I'm Carol Glassman. It is a little hard to know what I want to say directly about the film. I came to Newark as a young, college graduate moved by the civil rights movement and trying to be involved in civil rights activity around the issues of poor people and of changing the political and social structures which oppress poor people. I wound up coming to Newark with a group of people from Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). I feel that my experience in Newark totally transformed me, and I feel like the opportunity, the relationships and the intimacy that I had with people here in Newark is something that I continue to have.
During 1967, I was in the Clinton Hill neighborhood, which was where we began. In the film, Tom [Hayden] makes it sound like we dropped into Newark out of the sky. We actually came in coordination with a group called the Clinton Hill Neighborhood Council, but we very quickly split with them because we were trying to organize and politicize people at the very bottom. There's a point in the film where somebody says that it is only middle class people who cry out for good services, that it is only middle class people who know when things are wrong. That is the complete opposite of what our experience was.
As organizers, we started as outside agitators. We very quickly became a very mixed group of local people and outside people trying to activate and give voice to the concerns of people at the bottom. I think the film — and it is the nature of filmmaking and I have deep respect for the work that Marylou has done — the film may overemphasize our role. We were very significant in certain areas. We worked in the lower Clinton Hill area, and were very deeply connected to people and action there. We were part of all the coalitions that existed in the city, including CORE, and with George Richardson's Freedom Democratic Party. In particular, when the poverty program came, we were set up to move into the community action part of the poverty program because we had been already doing community action.
The complexity of that time and the complexity of the political activity at that time is captured in the film, but I don't think it is possible to really capture it. It was a time of enormous energy, enormous activity and enormous excitement [about the] possibilities. For many of us, what has happened seems quite small compared to what we were dreaming of. But I do believe in community action. There's a point in the film where I say "It was time for us to go" and Tom [Hayden] talks about it also: It was time for us to leave black neighborhoods as a significant force. Several of us moved to a white working-class neighborhood to do the same thing: We moved into the neighborhood, we started to get to know people in the neighborhood, started to find out what the issues in the neighborhood were and how to connect them not only to local issues, but to the larger issues of Newark.
Ronald Smothers: I've watched this film evolve over a number of years, and what I've seen happen is a broadening of its view of things, a broadening of the number of voices that you hear in the film, and this had been wonderful. I've watched it deepen in texture and grow.
As a newspaper reporter, I've done any number of those anniversary-like stories: "Ten Years after the March from Washington," "Fifteen Years after Brown v. Board of Education." One of the things that many of those commemorative, journalistic endeavors suffer from is a lack of scope, a lack of a broad historical look at the events, a lack of a way to put the events in a context and a perspective that's national. I think that's what the film does very, very well: it puts the events in that perspective, in that it separates triggers from causes; it highlights the situation with John Smith — the cabdriver — and what happened, but it doesn't stop there. It goes on to talk about Newark's precipitous slide prior to 1967; what was happening to the city; how it was being carved up by highways heading out into the suburbs and what the great suburban movement had done to population and the structural economics of a city like Newark, and how the suburban movement had done the same things to Detroit, Washington and any other city that had a rebellion similar to the one in Newark.
So in separating those two things — triggers and causes — we don't just get a commemorative piece. What we get is a broader discussion of the context in which all of this happened. As you know, context is everything.
During the summer of 1967, I was a young reporter on his first big assignment. As a matter of fact, I was on the assignment because when the riots hit, the Washington Post, where I worked, looked around and they didn't have very many black faces there. But they had this young intern (that was me) who would run into a burning building if they asked him to. So they sent me to some burning buildings. At that time, I was terribly naïve about things. I wasn't from Newark and I didn't have very much perspective then. I was very focused on the concrete events. In the years of covering other riots and rebellions and urban issues since 1967, I've developed a little more perspective on things. This film has put the events of that summer in important perspective so that we can really learn from the events, not just commemorate, not just wonder about what happened, but learn by looking at some of the causes of the riots.
Woodard: I did hear one comment about the film that's probably worth repeating: Someone thought it added to the power of the film to have someone who was in the public housing project talk about experiencing the shooting. It is one thing to have a statistic about that, but to have a real person saying, "I was living on Rose Street, and the tank came in front of my house and the machine gun turret pointed to my window. My life has never really been the same " is very powerful. I hope you never have to experience that. It's one thing to watch on television, the National Guards shooting an enemy with a tank, but when that tank rolls up to your house, and you think you're an American, and you look out and they're pointing at you, that raises a big question in your mind, "Well, who am I in America?"
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