Michael W. Flamm. In the Heat of the Summer

As I read Michael W. Flamm’s In the Heat of the Summer: The New York Riots of 1964 and the War on Crime, Detroit was observing the fiftieth anniversary of the 1967 race riots there. The occasion was memorialized with public lectures and discussions, a digital news project, and the release of Kathryn Bigelow’s new film, Detroit (2017). In recent years, historians have produced books and public commemorations about the racial uprisings in Watts, Newark, and even Rochester, New York. But oddly enough, very little has been written about the New York City riots of 1964, the first of the summer uprisings that became almost commonplace in the late 1960s. As Flamm suggests, it may be that the New York riots do not quite fit our textbook periodization of the black freedom struggle, coming as they did in the heat of Freedom Summer and just days after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. As the southern civil rights movement moved toward a crescendo with the Selma protests and the passage of the Voting Rights Act a year later, the summer of 1965 and the Watts riots seem like a more appropriate turning point. But as the author points out, the New York riots are important not just because they marked the first long, hot summer, but because they revealed a new racial fracturing that would “drive a wedge between the civil rights movement and many white liberals” (2).

Ancient history · Civil rights · Periodization · Political science · Spanish Civil War · White (mutation) · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies