program of additional garbage collection and alley cleaning in the disturbance area. In Atlanta, on the day after the disturbance ended, the city began replacing street lights, repaving streets, and collecting garbage frequently in the disturbance area. However, the improved services were reportedly discontinued after a month and a half.

Other Programs

In one city, a consumer education program was begun.243 In none of the 20 cities surveyed were steps taken to improve welfare programs. In two of the surveyed cities, plans were developed to establish new business in disturbance areas.244

CAPACITY TO CONTROL FUTURE
DISORDERS

Five of the surveyed cities planned to improve police control capability in the event of disorder.245 Four cities developed plans for using counterrioters, 246 but

in one case the plans were later abandoned.247 In Detroit, plans were made to improve the administration of justice in the event of future disorders by identifying usable detention facilities and assigning experienced clerks to process arrestees.

REPAIR OF PHYSICAL DAMAGE

Significant numbers of businesses in the riot areas have reopened in several cities where damage was substantial. In Detroit, none of the businesses totally destroyed in the riot has been rebuilt, but many which suffered only minor damage have reopened. In Newark, 83 percent of the damaged businesses have reopened, according to official estimates.248 In Detroit, the only city surveyed which suffered substantial damage to residences, there has been no significant residential rebuilding.

In two cities, Negro organizations insisted on an active role in decisions about rehabilitation of the disturbance area.249

Chapter 3

Organized
Activity

The President directed the Commission to investigate "to what extent, if any, there has been planning or organization in any of the riots."

The President further directed the Federal Bureau of Investigation to provide investigative information and assistance to the Commission and authorized the Commission to request from any other executive department or agency any information and assistance which the Commission deemed necessary to carry out its functions.

The Commission obtained documents, numbering in the thousands, from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Department of State, the Department of Defense, the Department of the Treasury, the Internal Revenue Service, the Post Office Department, the Legislative Reference Service of the Library of Congress, and the Central Intelligence Agency. The Commission established a special investigating staff supplementing the Commission's field teams and related staff that made the general examination of the riots in 23 cities. The special investigating staff examined the data supplied by the field teams, by the several Federal agencies, and by congressional investigating units, and maintained continuous liaison with these organizations throughout its investigation.

In addition to examining and evaluating intelligence and information from Federal sources, the special investigating staff gathered information from local and state law enforcement agencies and officials. It also conducted its own field investigations in 15 cities with special emphasis on five that had experienced major disorders in 1967-Cincinnati, Newark, Detroit, Milwaukee, and New Haven. Special staff investigators employed by the Commission interviewed over 400 persons, including police officials, black militants, and ghetto residents.

The Commission studied the role of foreign and domestic organizations, and individuals dedicated to the incitement or encouragement of violence. It considered the organizational affiliations of those who called for violence, their contacts, sources of financial support, travel schedules and, so far as possible, their effect on audiences.

The Commission considered the incidents that had triggered the disorders and the patterns of damage

during disorders, particularly in Newark and Detroit. The Commission analyzed the extent of sniper activity and the use of fire bombs.

The Commission collected and investigated hundreds of rumors relating to possible organized activity. These included reports of arms caches, sniper gangs, guerrilla training camps, selection of targets for destruction, movement of armed individuals from one riot area to another, and preriot planning.

On the basis of all the information collected, the Commission concludes that the urban disorders of the summer of 1967 were not caused by, nor were they the consequence of, any organized plan or "conspiracy." Specifically, the Commission has found no evidence that all or any of the disorders or the incidents that led to them were planned or directed by any organization or group-international, national, or local.

Militant organizations, local and national, and individual agitators, who repeatedly forecast and called for violence, were active in the spring and summer of 1967. We believe that they deliberately sought to encourage violence, and that they did have an effect in creating an atmosphere that contributed to the outbreak of disorder.

We recognize that the continuation of disorders and the polarization of the races would provide fertile ground for organized exploitation in the future.

Since the disorders, intensive investigations have been conducted not only by this Commission but also by local police departments, grand juries, city and state committees, Federal departments and agencies, and congressional committees. None thus far has identified any organized groups as having initiated riots during the summer of 1967. The Commission appointed by Gov. Richard J. Hughes to examine the disorders in New Jersey was unable to find evidence supporting a conclusion that there was a conspiracy or plan to organize the Newark or Plainfield riots.

Investigations are continuing at all levels of government, including committees of Congress. These investigations relate not only to the disorders of 1967 but also to the actions of groups and individuals, particularly in schools and colleges, during this last fall and winter. The Commission has cooperated in these investigations. They should continue.

Part II: Why did It Happen?

Chapter 4

The
Basic Causes

We have seen what happened. Why did it happen? In addressing this question, we shift our focus from the local to the national scene, from the particular events of the summer of 1967 to the factors within the society at large that created a mood for violence among so many urban Negroes.

The record before this Commission reveals that the causes of recent racial disorders are imbedded in a massive tangle of issues and circumstances-social, economic, political, and psychological-which arise out of the historical pattern of Negro-white relations in America.

These factors are both complex and interacting; they vary significantly in their effect from city to city and from year to year; and the consequences of one disorder, generating new grievances and new demands, become the causes of the next. It is this which creates the "thicket of tension, conflicting evidence, and extreme opinions" cited by the President.

Despite these complexities, certain fundamental matters are clear. Of these, the most fundamental is the racial attitude and behavior of white Americans toward black Americans. Race prejudice has shaped our history decisively in the past; it now threatens to do so again. White racism is essentially responsible for the explosive mixture which has been accumulating in our cities since the end of World War II. At the base of this mixture are three of the most bitter fruits of white racial attitudes:

Pervasive discrimination and segregation. The first is surely the continuing exclusion of great numbers of Negroes from the benefits of economic progress through discrimination in employment and education and their enforced confinement in segregated housing and schools. The corrosive and degrading effects of this condition and the attitudes that underlie it are the source of the deepest bitterness and lie at the center of the problem of racial disorder.

Black migration and white exodus. The second is the massive and growing concentration of impoverished Negroes in our major cities resulting from Negro migration from the rural South, rapid population growth, and the continuing movement of the white middle class to the suburbs. The consequence is a greatly increased burden on the already depleted resources of cities, creating a growing crisis of deteriorating facilities and services and unmet human needs.

Black ghettos. Third, in the teeming racial ghettos, segregation and poverty have intersected to destroy opportunity and hope and to enforcé failure. The ghettos too often mean men and women without jobs, families without men, and schools where children are processed instead of educated, until they return to the street to crime, to narcotics, to dependency on welfare, and to bitterness and resentment against society in general and white society in particular.

These three forces have converged on the inner city in recent years and on the people who inhabit it. At