The NEWARK RIOTS: 40 Years Later

On this night in 1967, riots began in NJ's largest city. The city JUST across the river from where I grew up. The city whose tall buildings I could see from my childhood bedroom window. The city I've ALWAYS felt very affectionate toward and protective of. Yet again, I feel like i've written some of this before in other blogs, but I never shied from saying I grew up right next to Newark. I wore it as a kind of badge of honor. I also won't deny my lifelong desire to provoke...I LIKED seeing how peers would react when I'd say NEWARK. I LIKE to argue its case. It's NOT a cesspool. People work there, people live there, people go to school there. Good, decent people of all races. I remember going to Bamberger's on Christmas Eve once. My aunt used to work there. I remember Hayne's downtown, too. I remember going Downneck in the winter to a furniture store. Downneck is the Portuguese part now, the part of the city that never "went bad." It used to be Polish and Italian, though some still remain. My mother used to work downtown before I was born. It's from her that I heard about the National Guard standing at the bridges with machine guns during the riots. MY town...SO close to all that historic national unrest?! Newark was ALWAYS a factor in my life, always a backdrop to some story or anecdote, always the home of some older relative, always where some relative was born or died. I'd eventually become FAR too familiar as a visitor at St. Michael's Hospital. So, yeah, I have a history with Newark. It DOES have a lot of problems, but it's not all bad. And things ARE on the upswing...very slowly, but very steadily. Maybe 200 years from now, the riots of 1967 won't matter so much. But right now, they're still very much fresh wounds that continue to shape Newark. Forty years ago tonight, they began. On the 14th, people started dying. By the 18th, 26 people had died and there were more than 700 reported injuries. Unbelievable.