The great Thomas Sowell kindly recognized me in a recent syndicated column for showing there is a low-level race war raging in what used to be our country—racially-motivated black violence that deliberately targets the white historic American nation. [Race-Hustling Results: Part III, October 24, 2013]
I appreciate the recognition but I have to disagree with Dr. Sowell on one point. This war is nothing new: it has been raging for decades.
Dr. Sowell bravely praises the work of Colin Flaherty and his book White Girl Bleed a Lot for reporting the news the controlled media would rather conceal. He also says my writings on Political Correctness and the collapse of American cities can't be rejected as mere racism:
It would be easy to simply dismiss Kersey as a racist. But denouncing him or ignoring him is not refuting him. Refuting requires thought, which has largely been replaced by fashionable buzzwords and catchphrases when it comes to discussions of race.
Thought is long overdue. So is honesty.
In that spirit, I suggest Dr. Sowell should take a look at the July 28, 1967 issue of Life Magazine and its coverage of the Newark riots, which it termed “The Predictable Insurrection.” [PDF.] The story carried a picture of a wounded black child (12-year-old Joe Bass), with a caption screaming “Shooting War in the Streets.” It says:
Late in May, Newark’s mayor surveyed his realm and said with apparent satisfaction: “I do not believe there will be any mass violence in Newark this summer.” Yet the statistics submitted by Newark itself in applying for federal assistance argued against such complacency. More than half its 400,000 citizens are negroes, the largest percentage of any major city in the North. They are packed tightly in an area over which they exert no political control. Newark’s crime, venereal disease and maternal mortality rates are the highest of all comparable-sized cities in the country, its infant mortality rate the second highest. It has the highest incidence of sub-standard housing, the lowest per capita income, the highest per capita tax rate. Where the nation’s average unemployment rate is 3.2%, Newark’s is 8.2%.
A good share of the city’s white establishment, as well as many of its policemen, live outside Newark, retaining only voting addresses in the city. “We have a colonial government,” says a young Negro leader. There has been continual friction between the negro community and the Newark police.
[In a grim city, a secret meeting with the snipers, by Russell Sackett, Life, July 28, 1967] [Links added by VDARE.com, throughout.]
As an ironic juxtaposition to this warzone, the rest of the magazine was filled with advertisements featuring happy-go-lucky white families.
In the terrifying images of white soldiers confronting black rioters, you can see the transition from the self-confident traditional America portrayed in the advertisements to the wasteland now being created by diversity.
According to Brad Tuttle’s book How Newark Became Newark , Newark’s black population was only three percent in the early 1920s. However, following the Great Migration of African-Americans from the South, the character of the community fundamentally changed along with the population.
The result: a full scale insurrection in summer 1967. In that same issue of Life magazine, we are told:
For five days and nights, riot ripped through the Negro ghettos of Newark. Looters pranced gaily through pillaged shops. The crack of sniper fire resounded through the streets and was answered by volley after volley from heavily armed police and National Guardsmen. Streets were paved with broken glass, blocked by armed checkpoints which stopped every car and stained by the blood of bystanders caught in the cross fire. It was an insurrection, and 4,700 National Guardsmen and police met sniper shots and Molotov cocktails with rifles, shotguns, automatic weapons, clubs—the cruel impedimenta required to put down a violent rampage. Only force —sometimes brute force—could end the insurrection.
[Cry in Newark: 'You ain't seen nothing yet, baby!, Life, July 28, 1967]
The more things change, the more they stay the same. As Colin Flaherty has documented, large scale black populations use a kind of unconscious “probing” behavior to test whites when they move into a new community. This plays itself out in the horrifying acts of urban violence given names such as “Polar Bear Hunting,” the “Knockout Game,” and “Flash Mobs/Robs.” This motivation was shown in the comments of the blacks who attacked a white family in Akron, Ohio over Independence Day 2008, yelling “It’s a black world!” [Akron police investigate teen mob attack on family, by Phil Trexler, Akron Beacon Journal, July 7, 2009]
Eventually, as demographics change, this kind of tentative violence turns into full scale insurrection and the political seizure of power.
Let's look at Cincinnati in 2001, some 34 years after the Newark rebellion:
A grieving mother and 200 other African-Americans took over City Hall Monday afternoon, demanding to know why a Cincinnati police officer shot an unarmed man.
“You took a part of my life from me. ... I demand to know why,” said Angela Leisure of Golf Manor, mother of the slain man, Timothy Thomas.
It took three hours of angry accusations, threats and claims of a police cover-up Monday afternoon before Councilman James Tarbell offered at least one partial explanation: The officer thought Mr. Thomas might have had a gun in that dark Over-the-Rhine alley early Saturday morning.
After the stormy meeting at City Hall, the protest moved several blocks north to police headquarters on Ezzard Charles Drive, lasting until midnight, when police used tear gas and bean-bag ammunition to disperse the remnants of a crowd that earlier had swelled to 1,000.
They were still angry about the fatal shooting early Saturday morning of Mr. Thomas, 19, and the deaths of 14 other African-American men at the hands of police since 1995. At least two of them had fired first at police officers.
Earlier in the afternoon, protesters refrained from violence as they pushed in on City Council members from all sides. They were not mollified by members' promises to change the police hiring system and to find a new way to hire the police chief.
The jeering crowd demanded to speak with Police Chief Tom Streicher, City Manager John Shirey and police Lt. Col. Ron Twitty. All of them quickly appeared, but were unable to give direct answers to what happened that night.
The Rev. Damon Lynch III, president of the grass-roots civil-rights group Cincinnati Black United Front, threatened to have members of the group bar the doors. When committee Chairman John Cranley tried to leave during a recess that he hoped would calm the situation, some protesters pushed and shoved him. Visibly shaken, he had an escort when he returned to the chamber.
[Angry crowd demands answers: Tear gas ends demonstration at police station; Protesters charge cover-up in latest fatal shooting, by Jane Prendergast and Robert Anglen, Cincinnati Enquirer, April 10, 2001]
Eventually, this skirmishing culminated in the largest American riots since the “rebellion” in Los Angeles in 1992. Robert's Rules of Order was no match for a crowd motivated by racial solidarity.
Before the riots, Cincinnati was a 53 percent white city with a white political establishment. Twelve years after the riots, the city has tipped: it is now 48 percent white, with a majority black city council, black mayor and black police chief. An all-too-familiar scenario is under way.
Back in the 1970s. Kenneth Gibson, the first black mayor of Newark (who later pled guilty to tax fraud and was indicted for corruption) said: “Wherever American cities are going, Newark will get there first.” [City Of Newark | The Symbol Of Urban Sickness, by H. D. Quigg, UPI, March 8, 1973]
We are there today. Demography has become urban America's destiny.
Sowell wrote that he was glad he was old enough “that I may be spared living to see a race war in America.”
But he isn't. The war against the historic American nation has been raging for decades, and the results can be seen from Newark to Cincinnati to Detroit.
It's a war where only one side is fighting, and the casualties lie unmourned and forgotten.
Thanks to Dr. Sowell's courage, Conservativism Inc. can no longer pretend that this race war isn't happening. His column was even carried on National Review Online—presumably the editors are about to apologize to John Derbyshire.
Or perhaps not. Unfortunately, Conservatism Inc. can still choose to surrender.
Paul Kersey[Email him] is the author of the blog SBPDL, and has published the books SBPDL Year One, Hollywood in Blackface and Escape From Detroit, Opiate of America: College Football in Black and White and Second City Confidential: The Black Experience in Chicagoland. His latest book is The Tragic City: Birmingham 1963-2013.
