Against the Rocks of a Lifetime

"But each generation must be as forgetful as the last—50 years later, we've barely begun to reckon with the implications of these uprisings, let alone address their root causes. So often, the reactions to these conflicts follow a woefully familiar script: paramilitary policing that only exacerbates the turmoil, sensationalistic media coverage that distorts public understanding, followed at last by a feckless government reports that says much of what the black community already knows and does little of what it needs.

"'The headline hasn’t much changed since 1967 in terms of how we remember those riots,' Dr. Khalil Gibran Muhammad, a professor of history, race, and public policy at Harvard, said in an interview. 'The critique from the black community is seen as illegitimate in most arenas of American life, so the longer-term response has been the explicit or veiled message that society was not to blame.'"

Noah Remnick at The Atlantic looks back on the Newark Riot of 1967.