Laura Warren Hill - Strike the Hammer: The Black Freedom Struggle in Rochester, New York, 1940–1970

Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what a people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.

Frederick Douglass, West India Emancipation speech, 1857

This book is a story of transformations wrought by an event that happened on July 24, 1964, in Rochester, New York. On that day, the citys Black community erupted in rebellion, the suppression of which required calling up the National Guard. Barely a week earlier, another uprising had taken place in the fabled Black mecca of Harlem. The rebellions in both places, Rochester and Harlem, shared a common spark: police brutality and misconduct, which would also be true of subsequent urban uprisings in that era. The events on opposite sides of New York State happened at a crucial moment in the modern African American experience. To some, the timing seemed incongruous. At the beginning of the same month as the back-to-back uprisings in Harlem and Rochester, July 1964, the first major legislative achievement of the civil rights movement, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, had come into effect. The twin rebellions in New York State in 1964 were a foretaste of what was to come as the Southern-based civil rights movement, fresh from its legislative victories (the Civil Rights Act would be followed by the equally consequential Voting Rights Act of 1965) gave way to a different kind of Black political mobilization centered largely, although not exclusively, in the urban North. The civil rights movement had dismantled Jim Crow as a system of legalized racism, with consequences that were more immediately evident in the South than in the North. The new Black political mobilization, building on the energy arising from the rebellions and fashioning theories of a Black political economy, sought to address the structures of socioeconomic marginalization and impoverishment that survived the legal dismantling of Jim Crow, North as well as South. From this standpoint, the perceived incongruity of explosive rebellions in Black communities, hard on the heels of legislative victories advancing Black rights, was more apparent than real.

Rochester emerged as an important laboratory, and national model, in the transition from the old to the new. This too seemed incongruous. Yet belying stereotypes casting it as a nondescript municipality on the northern edge of the Lower 48, perched on one side of Lake Ontario and with Canada on the other side, Rochester became a key center of the new Black political mobilization. It was indeed an improbable achievement. To begin, Rochester was not a major urban center. In 1960, it ranked just thirty-eight among the nations cities by population, behind Long Beach, California, and Birmingham, Alabama. Nor did Rochester have a Black majority, or anything close to it. The citys Black population, while growing, stood at just 7.4 percent of the total in 1960. Again, Rochester did not conform to preconceptions of where and why Black uprisings occurred, any more than it seemed emblematic of the Black Freedom Struggle in the twentieth century. For these reasons and more, the events in Rochester have been variously mischaracterized, when they have not been ignored altogether. Even so, Rochester rose to the forefront. Where it led, other urban centers would follow.

As a result of the rising in Rochester, a newly energized African American community used the public outpouring of discontent to launch one of the most innovative, and largely uncharted, campaigns for Black freedom in the twentieth century. In so doing, Black Rochester became a national leader in the quest for the new Black political economy in the Black Power moment. Rochester ministers and community activists spearheaded two developing tendencies within Black Power. The first, Black theology, was closely related to the second, Black economic development. Furthermore, Rochester was home to a radical socialist tendency most often associated with Emma Goldman. If Black Rochester was hot in 1964, it was in part because it was heir to a long local history of striking back against the twin pillars of inequality and injustice, in the context of the larger national and global struggle for Black freedom.