Sources

Sources for Map

All of the places located on the map were drawn from at least one of the following sources.  In addition, the creators did their best to verify each one of the individual revolts in a second source, often drawing on contemporary newspaper accounts, especially in local newspapers available via newspapers.com.  Special thanks must be given to Greg Lee Carter for sharing his data set with me—see citations below for Carter’s works.

Gregg Lee Carter, “In the Narrows of the 1960s U.S. Black Rioting,” The Journal of Conflict Resolution,  30 (March, 1986): 115-127; Gregg Lee Carter, “Explaining the Severity of the 1960s Black Rioting,” Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, 1983; Lemberg Center for the Study of Violence, Riot Data Review, no. 2 (August 1968);  Jane Baskin, Ralph G. Lewis, Joyce Hartweg Mannis, and Lester W. McCullough, Jr., The Long Hot Summer? An Analysis of Summer Disorders, 1967-71 (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University, Lemberg Center for the Study of Violence, 1972);  House Select Committee on Crime, Report: Reform of Our Correctional Systems, June 26, 1973 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1973); Walter Rucker and James Nathaniel Upton, eds., Encyclopedia of American Race Riots, 2 Vols. (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2006); and National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders,  New York Times edition (New York: Alfred P. Knopf, 1968. 

Bibliographic Essay

Many of the best scholarly works on the uprisings of the 1960s focus on single cities and/or compare revolts in a couple or few cities.  See especially, Peter B. Levy, The Great Uprising: Race Riots in Urban America during the 1960s (New York and London: Cambridge University Press, 2018).  It focusses on revolts in Cambridge and Baltimore, Maryland and York, Pennsylvania; Thomas Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005); Komozi Woodard, A Nation within a Nation: Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) and Black Power Politics (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1999); Kevin Mumford, Newark: A History of  Race, Rights, and Riots in America (New York: NYU Press, 2007); Sidney Fine, Violence in the Model City: The Cavanaugh Administration, Race Relations, and the Detroit Riot of 1967 (Ann ; Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1989); Gerald Horne, Fire This Time: The Watts Uprising and the 1960s (DeCapo Press, 1995); Max Herman, Fighting in the Streets: Ethnic Succession and Urban Unrest in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Peter Lang, 2005); Janet L. Abu-Lughod, Race, Space, and Riots in Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles (NY: Oxford, 2007); Michael W. Flamn, In the Heat of the Summer: The New York Riots of 1964 and the War on Crime (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016);and  J. Samuel Walker, Most of 14th Street Is Gone (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018); Jessica Elfenbein, et. al., Baltimore ’68: Riots and Rebirth (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001) and Laura Warren Hill, Strike the Hammer While the Iron Is Hot: The Black Freedom Struggle in Rochester, NY, 1940-1970 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2020). Broader works on riots in U.S. history, particularly the 1960s, include: Thomas Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggles for Civil Rights in the North (New York: Random House, 2008); Paul A. Gilge, Rioting in America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996); Malcolm McLaughlin, The Long, Hot Summer of 1967: Urban Rebellion in America (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) and Clay Risen, A Nation on Fire: America in the Wake of the King Assassination (Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley & Sons, 2009).    There are also a number of works that study cities or areas that experienced significant revolts, see especially: Robert O. Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005; Heather Ann Thompson, Whose Detroit? Politics, Labor, and Race in a Modern American City (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004); Peter B. Levy, Civil War on Race Street: The Civil Rights Movement in Cambridge, Maryland (Gainesville, FL: University of Florida Press, 2003); Matthew J. Countryman, Up South: Civil Rights and Black Power in Philadelphia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007); Patrick D. Jones, The Selma of the North: Civil Rights Insurgency in Milwaukee (Cambridge: MA: Harvard University Press, 2009); Kerry Pimblott, Faith in Black Power: Religion, Race, and Resistance in Cairo, Illinois (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2016) and J. Michael Butler, Beyond Integration: The Black Freedom Struggle in Escambia County, Florida, 1960-1980 (Chapel Hill, The University of North Carolina Press, 2016). 

These book-length studies can be supplemented by a number of well-written and perceptive articles, chapters in books,  and dissertations written by historians, particularly: Ashley Howard, Prairie Fires: Urban Rebellions as Black Working Class Politics in Three Midwestern Cities, unpublished dissertation, University of Illinois, 2012; Amanda I. Seligman, “’But Burn—No’: The Rest of the Crowd in Three Civil Disorders in 1960s Chicago,” Journal of Urban History 37 (March 2001): 230-255; and Alyssa Ribeiro, “’A Period of Turmoil’: Pittsburgh’s April 1968 Riots and Their Aftermath,” Journal of Urban History, 39 (April 2012): 147-7;  Andrew Goodman and Thomas Sugrue, “Plainfield Burnings: Black Rebellion in the Suburban North,” Journal of Urban History 33 (May 2007): 568-601;  Jeanne Theoharis, “’Alabama on Avalon’: Rethinking the Watts Uprising and the Character of Black Protest in Lost Angeles,” in The Black Power Movement: Rethinking the Civil Rights-Black Power Era, ed. by Peniel E. Joseph (New York: Routledge, 2006), pp. 27-54; Aliyah Dunn-Salahuddin, “A Forgotten Community, a Forgotten History: San Francisco’s 1966 Urban Uprising,” in The Strange Career of Jim Crow North: Segregation and Struggle outside of the South, ed. by. Brian Purnell and Jeanne Theoharis, with Komozi Woodard (New York: NYU Press, 2019), 211-234; Bruce Fehn and Robert Jefferson, “North Side Revolutionaries in the Civil Rights Struggle: The African American Community in Des Moines and the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, 1948-1970,” The Annals of Iowa, 69:1 (Winter 2010), 51-81. 

Contemporary analysis of the “civil disorders” was exhaustive, beginning with the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, New York Times edition (New York: Alfred P. Knopf, 1968) and National Commission on Civil Disorders, Supplemental Studies, July 1968 (Washington, DC: GPO, 1968).  Several other government-sponsored studies and/or government hearings include:  Governor’s Commission on the Los Angeles Riots, Violence in the City… An End or a Beginning? December 2, 1965.  This work is often referred to as the “McCone Report,” named after is chairman, John McCone, and State of New Jersey  Governor’s Select Commission on Civil Disorders, Report for Action: An Investigation into the Causes and Events of the 1967 Newark Race Riots (New York: Lemma Pub. Corp., 1972).  This report is often known as the “Lilly Report,” after Robert Lilley.  See also: U.S. Senate, Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the Committee on Government Operations, Hearings: Riots, Civil and Criminal Disorders, (Washington, DC: GPO, 1968).  In addition to these government sources, there were tens of books written in the 1960s and 1970s that sought to understand the “riots.”  See: David Sears, The Politics of Violence (Boston: MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1973); Benjamin Singer, Black Rioters (Lexington, MA: Heath, Lexington Books, 1970); R,.C. Porter and J. H. Nagel, Declining Inequality and Rising Expectations: Relative Deprivation and the Black Urban Riots,  (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1976); :  David Boesel and Peter Rossi, Cities Under Siege: An Anatomy of the Ghetto Riots, 1964-1968 (New York: Basic Books, 1971); James W. Button, Black Violence: Political Impact of the 1960s Riots (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978); Ted R. Gurr, Why Men Rebel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970); C. Porter and J. H. Nagel, Declining Inequality and Rising Expectations: Relative Deprivation and the Black Urban Riots,  (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1976);Joe R. Feagin, Ghetto Revolts: The Politics of Violence in American Cities (New York: Macmillan Publishing, 1973); Eugene Methvin, The Riot Makers: The Technology of Social Demolition (New York: Arlington House, 1970); Nathan Wright, Ready to Riot (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1968); Edward Banfield, The Unheavenly City: The Nature and Future of Our Urban Crisis (New York: Little Brown, 1970)  and Morris Janowitz, Social Control of Escalated Riots (Chicago: University of Chicago Center for Policy Studies, 1968). 

Scholarly articles written in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, especially by social scientists is too enormous to cite in its entirety.  Kenneth Kumer, ed., The Ghetto Crisis of the 1960s: Causes and Consequences, Vol. 7 (New York, Garland Press, 1991) contains some of the best of these studies.  A nice summary of the sociological literature can be found in: Rob Gillezeau, “Johnson’s War on Poverty and the 1960s Riots: An Investigation into the Relationship between Community Action Agencies and the Riots,” March 3, 2009, eh.net/eha/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Gillezeau.pdf [accessed July 11, 2014].  Seminal studies of the “disorders” include: Seymour Spilerman, “The Causes and Consequences of Racial Disturbances: A Comparison of Alternative Explanations,” American Sociological Review 35:4 (August 1970), pp. 627-49; Seymour Spilerman, “Structural Characteristics of Cities and the Severity of Racial Disorders,” American Sociological Review 41:5 (October 1976), pp. 771-93; Ted R.Gurr, “A Comparative Study of Civil Strife,” in H. D. Davis and T. R. Gurr, eds., Violence in America: Historical and Comparative Perspectives, Vol. II (Washington, DC: GPO, 1969); Leonard Berkowitz, The Study of Urban Violence: Some Implications of  Laboratory Studies of Frustration and Aggression, American Behavioral Scientist, 2 (1968): 14-17; Jerome L. McElroy and Larry D. Singell, “Riot and Nonriot Cities: An Examination of Structural Contours,” Urban Affairs Quarterly,  8 (March 1973); Joseph Boskin, “The Revolt of the Urban Ghettos, 1964-67,” Annals of the American Academy of Political Science, 382 (1969): 1-14R,. Donald J. Myers, “Racial Rioting in the 1960s: An Event Analysis of Local Conditions,” American Sociological Review 62 (February 1997), pp. 94-112.