14. Civil War in July, 1967 Part I

Tanks rumbling through the streets, buildings sprayed wholesale with machine gun fire, the rubble pervading the cities looking like Germany in 1945, compulsory curfews and blockades imposed — who would have thought during the Age of Apathy in the 1950s that, a decade later, America would be reduced to this? And who can now deny that the Negroes in America are a colonized and occupied people? The tanks, the National Guardsmen and state police, the federal troops, are merely the outward manifestation of this ever-present fact.

p>Ask yourself: If a white neighborhood were rioting and looting, would buildings be pulverized en masse by state and federal troops, wounding and killing thousands of innocent people? Would curfews be imposed and streets blockaded? Would apartment-to-apartment searches be made, as at Plainfield, New Jersey, breaking down doors and destroying furniture without bothering about search warrants? Of the thousands wounded during this virtual civil war of July, 1967, almost all were Negroes, and the vast majority were shot by trigger-happy white troops, concerned only to “shoot everything that is black and that moves,” in the words of one officer. Since the greatest degree of devastation and shooting was performed by the state troops, we are justified in calling the July civil war an exercise in mass counter-revolutionary violence perpetrated by the government, in response to a far more limited Negro rebellion against a white state. For when the very basis of the state is challenged, or seems to be, the state’s violence is many times that of the rebels.

And ask yourself also: By what right does the state move in and shoot looters? Surely looting cannot be condoned, but capital punishment for looting, which is what shooting amounts to, is just as criminal and unjustifiable. In my view, a criminal forfeits the rights which he takes away from another person; and therefore a murderer, who takes away from another person his right to life, deserves capital punishment. But surely, and by any known moral standards, capital punishment for mere robbery is so far excessive a punishment that it, in turn, amounts to criminal murder of the victim. We all revile the days of pre-Industrial Revolution Britain, when petty thieves were executed. Are we to return to that brutality now?

Perhaps the most incredible aspect of the July warfare was the decree of the mayor of Milwaukee — one that was universally applauded — forcing everyone off the streets! This, to be sure, ended the riot, but what did it do to the liberty of everyone in Milwaukee? Can we tolerate a country where no one is allowed on the streets because someone might commit a crime? The mayor only ended rioting in Milwaukee by turning that city into one vast jailhouse, and free men cannot tolerate this sort of action.

If the Negroes in America are, indeed, an occupied and colonized people, then we must give serious consideration to a solution which, baldly stated, seems absurd and ridiculous: the partitioning of the United States into white and Negro nations. This solution will be explored in future columns.