Apartheid. USA 1988

[p. 98]

July 12, 1987:

The weeds grow waist-high in the vacant lots along Springfield Avenue in Newark, New Jersey. Children play amidst shards of broken glass and rubbish that has turned foul in the heat. Outside a nearby housing project, pocked with broken windows, adults congregate beneath a few scraggly trees, waiting for a breeze to stir the murky air and listening to distant thunder. This is Newark's Central Ward, where 20 years ago the arrest of a black taxi-cab driver touched off six days of racial violence that claimed 26 lives and caused more than 15 million dollars in damages.

In that angry summer, riots scarred city after city, leaving in their wake looted shops and burned-out buildings. But the damage in Newark - then, as now, one of the poorest cities in the nation - was particularly severe with 1 300 arrests, 700 injuries and as many ruined businesses. Now, in the squalid corner of the Central Ward where the riots began and where the fiery mayhem was most severe, citizens looked back two decades and remembered. They pointed to the station house that had been pelted with bottles and to the roof-tops where snipers had crouched and sprayed the street with bullets. They recalled helicopters clattering low in the sky and helmeted National Guardsmen patrolling the streets with M-1 rifles. ‘It was like World War II,’ said Teddy Hinson, a limousine driver.^130.

130. The New York Times, from a report by Jane Gross