A Poet Looks Back on a Bloody Week in 1967
Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times
At a poetry festival in Newark on Saturday, the poet Amiri Baraka will discuss the impact that the riots in the city had on his work.
By JAMES BARRON
October 10, 2012
NEWARK — The man in the tan shirt led the way to a squarish room in his house and sat down at a round table. Quietly, matter-of-factly, he talked about what happened in the summer of 1967.
"Rebellion, I call it," said the man, the poet Amiri Baraka, as he recalled the riots in Newark, which lasted nearly a week and left 26 people dead and more than 1,000 injured, among them Mr. Baraka himself.
Four and a half decades have passed, enough time for historians and urban policy experts to write millions of words about Newark's industrial decline after World War II and the riots that became a symbol of urban unrest and that continue to cast a shadow over the city.
Mr. Baraka, who became a celebrity in the decades after the riots, is one of the featured names at a four-day poetry festival in Newark starting on Thursday that organizers claim is the largest such festival in North America. The discussion in his house the other day offered a preview, and an almost moment-by-moment look back at the bloody upheaval. In the end, 889 stores had been damaged or looted, officials said.
By the time the violence broke out in Newark, there had been race riots in Jersey City, Harlem and the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles. And Mr. Baraka, a writer once known as LeRoi Jones who had been a playwright in Greenwich Village and a black nationalist in Harlem, had returned to his native Newark. "The idea that the city would blow up was obvious," he said.
It began after the police stopped a black cabdriver for a traffic violation and took him to a police station, where the arresting officers beat him. Mr. Baraka said he had joined a crowd outside the police station during the day but had walked home as night fell. Rumors were rampant that the taxi driver had died in police custody; in fact, he had been taken to a hospital.
Before long, Mr. Baraka said, word spread that bricks and bottles were being thrown at the police station and that crowds were breaking windows in the neighborhood. "I had this brand-new Volkswagen bus," he said, and he and several friends piled in. "We drove up Springfield Avenue. By the time we got to Belmont, it was raging."
"Pretty soon, pop, pop, pop, pop," he said. "Shots."
He said that the police stopped the van. One of the officers was "a cop I had gone to high school with — Italian."
"He hit me on the top of my head with his gun," he said, "and then they started beating." He said people watching from an apartment building took aim at the officers and threw things — including, he said, a refrigerator.
"The police took me to Dominick Spina's office," he said, referring to the Newark police director at the time. "I fell on the floor. Spina says, 'We got you,' like some grade-B movie. I say, 'Yes, but I'm not dead yet.' That's the level things were at."
He was arrested on charges of carrying an illegal weapon and resisting arrest, and even before the trial began, he castigated the judge who was presiding and the all-white panel of potential jurors as "my oppressors." He was convicted and sentenced to three years in prison, but in 1969 a judge reversed the conviction for lack of evidence.
Mr. Baraka has been a regular at the poetry festival, which has been held every other year since 1986 and is formally called the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival. Mr. Baraka is scheduled to read poems at the festival; he is also scheduled to appear on Saturday with Clement A. Price, a history professor at Rutgers University, in a discussion of the effect of the riots and other 1960s turbulence on Mr. Baraka's work.
It was an appearance at the Dodge festival in 2002 that cost Mr. Baraka his position as New Jersey's poet laureate. He read from his post-Sept. 11 poem "Someone Blew Up America," in which he suggested that Israel had known about the Sept. 11 attacks in advance and that it had warned 4,000 Israeli citizens not to go to work at the World Trade Center that day. Within days, Gov. James E. McGreevey demanded that he resign as poet laureate. He refused, but the State Legislature eventually abolished the position.
"Poetry is underrated," he said, "so when they got rid of the poet laureate thing, I wrote a letter saying, 'This is progress. In the old days, they could lock me up. Now they just take away my title.' "
But the conversation soon returned to Newark, then and now.
"Newark, pre-1967, is a different place," he said. "That 1967 thing was like a reckoning. I used to get held by the police for going to a poetry reading. The police would take the script out of my hand. That's like living under some kind of fascism."
"This is another era," he said. "My son is a councilman in the South Ward. In a sense that's what we always wanted, that he'd go away to school and not disappear into the suburbs with some degree. His brother is his chief of staff. His other brother is his chief of security."
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