STILL HAU The riots that forever changed Rochester began on July 24, 1964, at a Friday night street dance on Joseph Avenue. A chaperone asked two police officers for help with an intoxicated young man. The officers arrested the man, but a crowd surrounded them to prevent the police from taking him into custody. The officers called for backup and more police arrived, including the K-9 unit — a source of tension for years, with blacks insisting that the dogs were unnecessary and that using them to facilitate an arrest was inhumane. The dogs may have been the match tossed into the dry tinder of years of frustration and anger. Rocks and bottles were thrown and before long, store windows were being shattered. A mob swept through the Seventh Ward, looting stores and rushing past peacemakers such as Mildred Johnson, who ran a neighborhood unemployment service and tried to calm the crowd. Police Chief William Lombard, who was popular in the black community, walked alone into the angry crowd and pleaded for reason. The rioters ignored him, too, and then overturned his car and set it on fire. The rioting, or revolt as it is sometimes called, continued until morning despite the presence of hundreds of police officers. On Saturday night, the disturbance reignited and spread to the Third Ward, with rioters looting stores along Clarissa Street, Jefferson Avenue, and South Plymouth Avenue. On Sunday afternoon, 1,500 National Guard troops arrived to help restore order. When the smoke lifted, property damage topped $1 million, 350 people were injured, and 800 had been arrested. But the lifechanging consequence of the riots was not property damage or physical injury, or even the four tragic deaths, but the fear the city sucked deep into its lungs — a fear that has shaped the community that Rochester has become. In the decade after the riots, “whole neighborhoods seemed to just pack up and move across the canal into Gates or into northeast Greece,” says Paul Haney, a Monroe County legislator and a former member of Rochester City Council.
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6 CITY
JULY 16-22, 2014
ANOTHER ARTICLE BY MARK HARE WILL APPEAR IN OUR JULY 23 ISSUE
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Not that all was well before the riots, of course. White Rochesterians had actually begun their exodus years earlier. Some no doubt feared an increasingly black city, but others merely took advantage of accessible FHA mortgages designed to aid the construction of suburban neighborhoods. The riots accelerated the exodus, in other words, but were not the only cause. And though Rochester’s black population tripled to more than 25,000 during the 1950’s, the newcomers did not have the high-level skills needed for employment in the manufacturing sector, and the city’s iconic industries did far too little to recruit and train them for jobs. Black unemployment was over 10 percent. Meanwhile, thousands of jobs went unfilled and unemployment for whites hovered below 2 percent. The city’s leaders seemed oblivious to the changing demographics and the pressure cooker that unemployment and overcrowded housing was creating in the city center — despite highprofile police clashes with black citizens. In August 1962, for example, police arrested Rufus Fairwell while he was closing the service station where he was employed. He was accused of refusing to identify himself; he suffered two fractured vertebrae in police custody and was eventually cleared of any wrongdoing. Most blacks were clustered within a few city blocks; houses built for one or two families had four or five mailboxes on the front porch. Overcrowding was endemic; the 1960 Census found that 35 percent of the housing units in the Third and Seventh wards were deteriorated and dilapidated. Lagging behind other upstate cities, Rochester built just two affordable housing projects during the 1950’s. It’s an oversimplification to say that the anger that exploded that July night was the product of Third World housing, high unemployment, and stifling temperatures. But thousands of black people came to Rochester expecting to build better lives and found only better public assistance benefits. Their despair was bound to find its voice sooner or later. So where are we 50 years later? The poor are effectively “detained” in their neighborhoods, says Carvin Eison, a Rochester filmmaker and director of “July ’64,” a 2006 documentary about the lasting impact of the riots. (Eison is filming a sequel — “July 2014.”) In the original film, Minister Franklin Florence, the first president of the local civil rights organization FIGHT, says that the big problems in 1964