Atlanta: Stokely’s Spark

Atlanta, which deservedly prides itself on a tradition of racial moderation, had weathered the restive summer of 1966 without a single Negro riot—until last week. When violence finally erupted in the sleazy streets of the Summerhill district, it came as a peculiar and perverse triumph for Stokely Carmichael, 25, the fiery Negro demagogue who leads the Atlanta-based Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee, at once the youngest and most belligerent organization in the civil rights movement. For weeks S.N.C.C. sound trucks had rolled through the Georgia city’s black ghettos, blasting out Carmichael’s battle cry, “Black Power!” About all that was needed for an explosion was a spark—and in the end it was Carmichael who found one and fanned it into flame.

Back at 4. The flash point was the routine arrest, in a Negro neighborhood, of a twice-convicted Negro car thief suspected of a third offense. When the suspect broke and ran, a policeman dropped him with two shots in the hip and side. The action naturally pulled a crowd, but it was neither large nor truculent. Among the curious onlookers, however, was Carmichael. “We’re tired of these racist police killing our people,” he shouted. “We’re going to be back at 4 o’clock and tear this place up.”

Promptly at 4 p.m., two uneventful hours after the arrest, some 500 Negroes confronted a force of 1,000 armed police at the site. Half an hour later, Atlanta’s silver-haired Mayor Ivan Allen Jr., 55, reached the area, and soon both sides were engaged in a savage crossfire of bricks, bottles and tear gas. Allen, a progressive, moderate official who is as protective of Negro rights as he is of Atlanta’s reputation, mounted a police car to plead for reason. But no one, it appeared, cared to listen much. Amid cries of “White devil!”, the rioters shook the mayor off his perch. Undaunted, Allen waded into the mob, spent the next few hours trying to calm the rioters. By the time they finally dispersed, 16 persons had been injured and 73 were under arrest.

Armpit .38. In the aftermath of Atlanta’s riot, it became clear that the principal victim was the Negro cause. Up north, Harlem’s Representative Adam Clayton Powell had only encomiums for Carmichael’s style of leadership. At a press conference publicizing a black power convention scheduled for Oct. 15, Powell ranted: “Even Jesus did not tell you what to do after you have been struck on both cheeks.” As for himself, Powell confided he invariably packs a Colt .38 under his armpit.

In Atlanta, Police Chief Herbert Jenkins dubbed S.N.C.C. the “Nonstudent Violent Committee,” and similar sentiments echoed throughout the Negro civil rights movement. “It is still my firm conviction that a riot is socially destructive and self-defeating,” lamented Martin Luther King Jr. Atlanta’s Negro leaders were more outspoken; they adopted a resolution condemning the riot as “irresponsible” and “shameful.” Julian Bond, the Atlanta Negro who was elected to the Georgia legislature last winter but later denied his seat for condoning draft card-burning as an antiwar gesture, resigned as S.N.C.C. publicity director. Other Atlanta Negroes set fire to a pile of S.N.C.C. literature and demanded that the local S.N.C.C. chapter move out of their neighborhood.

After the riot, Carmichael and company patrolled the city’s Negro districts handing out leaflets denouncing “the bestiality of a racist mayor and his corrupt police department.” Though Carmichael insisted that his agitators had not started the riot, police arrested him on charges of inciting a riot and disturbing the peace. The prophet of black power was jailed under $10,000 bond, awaiting a grand-jury investigation of the spark that became a bonfire which was not easily quenched. At week’s end a Negro teen-ager was shot and killed and another was wounded, apparently by two whites in a moving car. A policeman assigned to investigate the violence was then wounded by a sniper. The bottles and rocks were flying again.