By Terri Kay
On July 12, 2022 the People’s Organization for Progress, along with other activists and allies, commemorated the 55th anniversary of the Newark Rebellion on Springfield Ave at a triangle plot of land, where a plaque sits memorializing the names of those killed.In one of the deadliest rebellions which had broken out across the country at that time, 26 people were killed and over 700 injured during the five days of Newark’s insurrection.
Lawrence Hamm @LawrenceHamm7, People’s Organization for Progress, explains why the #NewarkRebellion wasn’t a riot.
Lawrence Hamm of People’s Organization For Progress talks about the continued resistance to street & school name changes, including Malcolm X High School.
Chairman Lawrence Hamm, POP, explains how the #NewarkRebellion began over the brutal police beating of cab driver John Smith & the police repression of a demonstration at the police precinct in outrage of this #PoliceBrutality.
#Newark wasn’t the first city in #NewJersey to have a #Rebellion Lawrence Hamm explains. In #Plainfield the Black community robbed the armory, which prevented the police from killing people during that rebellion.
Lawrence Hamm talks about how Black-owned businesses wrote “soul brother” on their windows, which kept the rebels from breaking them, but then the Newark PD went and broke all of those windows marked “soul brother!”
Baba Zayid Muhammad @ZayidBaba talks about the lessons of the #Newark Rebellion and #BuffaloMassacre in terms of the need for community self-defense.
Baba Zayid talks about the Craft Riots in NYC in 1862 where pro-Confederate whites were attacking Blacks, forcing Lincoln’s hand to sign the Emancipation Proclamation.
Libations and saying the names of all those killed during the 1967 #NewarkRebellion – Baba Zayid Muhammad talks about how #AmiriBaraka’s skull was cracked by Newark PD during the Rebellion.
Baba Zayid completes the libations with stories about some of those who were killed.
March jumps off, headed to Newark’s 1st police precinct.
Click here for more pics on Twitter.
Supplementary comments by author on the 1967 Rebellion in Detroit (July 23 – 28)
“The riots of 1833,1863, and 1943 were conflicts between the races. The 1967 Rebellion was a conflict between black and state power. In 1943, whites were on the offensive and rode around town in cars looking for easy black targets. In 1967, blacks were on the offensive and their major target was property.” Detroit: I Do Mind Dying pg 155. “At the week’s end there were 41 known dead, 347 injured, 3,800 arrested. Some 5,000 people were homeless…while 1,300 buildings had been reduced to mounds of ashes and bricks, and 2,700 businesses were sacked.” Time Magazine, 8/4/1967.
The explosive events around Detroit’s Great Rebellion of 1967 are what led the development of this writer’s ideology from liberalism to revolutionary socialism. Having just graduated from high school, I met John Watson after attending his talk about the Rebellion at the University of Michigan that September. I was not only seeking analysis, but direction on how to get involved. He led me to join People Against Racism, PAR, a radical white support group for the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, including DRUM, the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement. Watson was one of the founders of that organization and editor of the Inner City Voice. He also became editor of the South End, in a takeover of Wayne State University’s student newspaper.
Immediately after the Rebellion “Even as the New Detroit Committee [self-appointed committee of the city’s ruling elite] began to put its plans into action, black workers unleashed a social movement of their own which soon formed a series of organizational, ideological, cultural, political, and economic confrontations with established wealth and power.” Detroit: I Do Mind Dying pg 2.
When Black students, faculty and workers organized as the Black Action Movement, BAM, and went on strike at the University of Michigan in 1970, I became co-leader of the white allies group supporting BAM, its demands and the strike.
This article was updated on Aug. 4, 2022. The Detroit commentary was added after being inadvertently omitted.
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