Race and Rights

...One century's disorder," Waskow writes, "became the next century's liberty...

...James Weldon Johnson, the imaginative Negro leader of a thousand talents, called the summer of 1919 "Red Summer"—red with the blood of those injured and killed in racial clashes throughout the country...

...the most common post-riot public reaction was the demand for tougher, more repressive, police action...

...Never before or since—not excluding the past few years—has the country experienced such a widespread and intense time of racial violence...

...As the political system bends to incorporate these new techniques, those who devised them become "accepted into the political order...

...The fury that reigned "Over There" had somehow returned to the home front...

...The anxieties, fears, and hatreds mobilized by World War I spilled over into the postwar era to create what was probably the most reactionary period in American history...

...It also demands that civil rights leaders continually devise new tactics of "creative disorder" to channel the energies of the discontented youth in Northern ghettos...

...Their very use, like strikes for labor unions, is often finally recognized as a legitimate method of insisting upon social change...

...Creative disorder," the phrase Waskow uses to replace the negative connotations of "non-violence," is seen as the tactic through which racial and social groups make demands for change in a democratic society without reaching a point of overt conflict...

...the weather was often stiflingly hot when trouble began, and tempers cooled under the drenching of summer rainstorms...

...He describes the use of sit-ins, stall-ins, ride-ins, job blockades, economic boycotts, school boycotts, public marches, rent strikes, and others, and insists that they expand the meaning of democracy in a two-fold manner...

...To have related his thesis to the major substance of the book, Waskow needed the most artful mixture of theory and fact...

...The political system is malleable enough, open enough, to tolerate and incorporate different forms of disorder—and democracy itself acquires an expanded meaning in the process...

...local police rarely acted effectively—"neutrally"—and had to be replaced by or subordinated to Federal troops...

...charges that the Bolsheviki had initiated the troubles were commonly made (J...

...The last two points are especially important because Waskow makes them repeatedly, and they introduce the major thesis—and major contribution—of his book...

...His unimaginative organization militated against this and blurred the significance of his contribution...

...About two-thirds of Arthur Was-kow's From Race Riot to Sit-in deals with the seven most brutal riots of 1919—those at Charleston, Knoxville, Omaha, Chicago, Washington, D. C, Longview, Texas, and Elaine, Arkansas...

...Had Waskow concentrated on his major thesis he should have ruthlessly cut out the dissertation-like, too often turgid, and unimportant descriptions of many aspects of the 1919 race riots...

...From Race Riot to Sit-In is subtitled A Study in the Connections between Conflict and Violence...

...To make "creative disorder" work in this way, Waskow argues, the police power of the state must play the role of a powerful neutral force—permitting social groups to protest in meaningful ways without interference, at the same time as it acts to prevent violence: "A movement in this direction would require from the government the imagination necessary to build the kind of Federal police force that could check and prevent particular acts of violence against Negroes, even violence by local police...

...Concentrating his major concern on violence that involved confrontations of masses of whites and blacks—with Negroes "fighting back"—Waskow finds a number of similarities in most of the riots: gangs of white and Negro adolescents were involved...

...Edgar Hoover prepared one such report on Negro radicalism) ; rape, rumors of rape, or white fear that Negroes were plotting racial bloodbaths floated an-archically around...

...Historians have never been quite sure of the number of racial confrontations then—it depends on one's definition of riot—but Waskow presents^ short descriptions of sixteen others in an appendix...

...The problem is that this is two books in one...

...These are important insights, but they do not make the book, as its publisher describes it, "a classic study...