Canarsie riots
The Canarsie riots refer to a series of racially charged confrontations that occurred in the late 1960s and early 1970s in Canarsie, a neighborhood in southeast Brooklyn, New York. During this period, the demographic landscape shifted as impoverished African American families moved into a predominantly white community that had previously been home to Jewish and Italian American residents. The arrival of these new residents triggered significant social tensions, with existing residents attributing various urban challenges, such as crime and drug addiction, to this demographic change.
As tensions escalated, the conflict manifested in violent protests, threats against African Americans looking to buy homes, and organized attacks on black youths by white groups. Notably, the aftermath of the tragic killing of an African American child propelled further unrest, leading to retaliatory actions by African American youths. The situation drew heightened police presence and national media attention, particularly during a controversial desegregation plan that aimed to bus African American children into local schools.
These events highlighted the entrenched racial animosities and divisions within the community, ultimately casting Canarsie as a symbol of systemic prejudice and the challenges of ethnic integration in urban America.
Canarsie riots
In the 1960s, Canarsie—a neighborhood in southeast Brooklyn, one of the five boroughs of New York City—was home to some sixty thousand working-class and middle-class Jewish and Italian American people. Many of them had left other Brooklyn neighborhoods— Brownsville, East New York, and East Flatbush—because those neighborhoods had become racially integrated. For various reasons, these whites did not wish to live among African Americans. It was an unusual alliance: Many of the Italian Americans were politically and socially conservative, and many of the Jews were liberal and active in the Civil Rights movement. The two groups lived peaceably together until the late 1960s, when poor African Americans started to move into Canarsie.
With the influx of the new impoverished group came many inner-city problems: street crime, drug addiction, and erosion of families. The Jews and Italians blamed the welfare state and the African Americans for these problems and found confirmation for the racial stereotypes they had carried for years. They decided, individually and collectively, to drive out the African Americans. What followed was a series of violent protests and confrontations. The summers of 1966 and 1967 saw repeated racial clashes in Canarsie and throughout Brooklyn. White homeowners who considered selling their homes to African Americans were threatened. Firebombs were thrown into the homes of new black residents. After an eleven-year-old African American child was killed by a sniper, large groups of African American youths took to the streets, throwing rocks and bricks at white-owned businesses and at police. Young Italian men formed a group called the Society for the Prevention of Niggers Getting Everything (SPONGE), made random, violent attacks on black youths, and once crashed through police barricades to attack a group of twenty-five young African Americans. Thousands of extra police moved through Brooklyn to contain scattered outbreaks of violence and were attacked by white and African American groups. Eventually the police developed a plan that allowed groups to stage nonviolent protests, and the violence eased for a time.
Resentment continued to build among the white Canarsie residents. Then, in the fall of 1972, a desegregation plan was enacted to bus African American children from Brownsville to the Canarsie public schools. In protest of this “forced busing,” white families boycotted the schools, keeping their ten thousand children home and staging public demonstrations of outrage under banners reading “Canarsie schools for Canarsie children.” Black families responded by keeping their children out of school on November 6, then observed as Black Solidarity Day. The boycotts attracted national attention, and comparisons were drawn to the whites of Little Rock, Arkansas, blocking the schoolhouse door in 1957. Canarsie became a symbol of bigotry and prejudice and of the wide gaps that still existed between ethnic groups even in the seemingly integrated cities of the North.
Bibliography
Barkan, Elliott Robert. Immigrants in American History: Arrival, Adaptation, and Integration. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2013. Print.
Levin, Jack, and Jack McDevitt. Hate Crimes Revisited: America's War on Those Who Are Different. Boulder: Westview, 2002. Print.
Reitano, Joanne. The Restless City: A Short History of New York from Colonial Times to the Present. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 2010. Print.
Rieder, Jonathan. Canarsie: The Jews and Italians of Brooklyn Against Liberalism. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1985. Print.