Donald Trump’s Reckless Rhetoric He says he’s not responsible for the bad behavior of his supporters. That’s what liberal activists said about the looters and arsonists in Baltimore and Ferguson, Mo. Jason Riley

Posted By on March 16th, 2016

http://www.wsj.com/articles/donald-trumps-reckless-rhetoric-1458081883

In 1967 the liberal New Republic magazine ran an editorial titled “Blow Up the Cities.” It meant literally. The article hailed “the promise of the riots” that had been traumatizing the country’s largest population hubs.

“Terrifying as the looting, the shooting, the arson are,” wrote the editors, “they could mean a gain for the nation if, as a result, white America were shocked into looking at itself, its cities, its neglect.” The editorial concluded, “The national commitment needed to bring racial justice to the cities is unlikely until New York, Chicago or Los Angeles is brought to an indefinite standstill by a well-organized guerilla action against the white establishment.”

The 1965 race riots that started in the Watts section of Los Angeles resulted in 4,000 arrests and 34 deaths. The 1967 riots in Newark, N.J., claimed 23 lives and left 600 injured. Rioting in Detroit the same year caused 43 deaths and destroyed 2,500 businesses.

“Groping for perspective,” wrote Taylor Branch in “At Canaan’s Edge,” his civil-rights history, “a shell-shocked New York Times editorial observed that the cumulative toll from Newark and Detroit fell far beneath the Pentagon’s latest casualty report in Vietnam.” Relax, folks. Detroit was still safer than wartime Saigon.

Of course, the media’s decision to condone and encourage this violent upheaval reflected orthodox liberal thinking among civil-rights organizations, politicians and leading black activists of the period. The rioting that erupted in Washington, D.C., after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. was described by the head of the local Urban League as a “low form of communication by people who seek to get a response from society that seems to be deaf to their needs.” Harlem Congressman Adam Clayton Powell said that riots were “a necessary phase of the black revolution.” H. Rap Brown, the former Black Panther, called for “guerilla war on the honkie white man” and said that “Violence is necessary. It is as American as cherry pie.” CONTINUE AT SITE

 

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