slingshotannie:Long. Hot. Summer.In the days following the tragic killing of Philando Castile by a S

slingshotannie:Long. Hot. Summer.In the days following the tragic killing of Philando Castile by a St. Anthony police officer, protests and demonstrations have taken place all across Minneapolis and St. Paul, most notably closing down I-94 for several hours on Saturday night and leading to the aggressive arrest of over 100 citizens.As a researcher who has spent the past two years learning about the history of discrimination, segregation, disparities, and racial strife in Minnesota (all of which are major undercurrents in a book I’m writing about Twin Cities funk and soul music), it’s been incredibly eye-opening to note how many parallels exist between the Twin Cities of the 1960s and the Twin Cities of today.I am embarrassed at how little I knew about the unrest that swept through North Minneapolis and the Selby-Dale area of St. Paul in the late ‘60s, and perplexed at how difficult it’s been to find objectively written narratives of this portion of our state’s history. The fact that it’s not a readily available narrative makes it even easier to sweep these events into the dustbin of the past and keep ourselves at an arm’s length from our own history. But racism isn’t a thing that only happened in the 1960s, and the arduous fight for racial justice didn’t end with what we refer to as the civil rights movement. In reality, the civil rights movement isn’t over; it’s still unfolding all around us, and marching steadfastly onward whether we acknowledge its validity or not.All of which brings me to a phrase that I’ve seen invoked many times this week.“If we fail to act, this will be a long hot summer,” Congressional Black Caucus Chairman G.K. Butterfield said on Friday, urging lawmakers to pass sweeping policing and criminal justice reforms.It was a sentiment echoed here in St. Paul by former NAACP president Nathaniel Khaliq, who was one of several community leaders who spoke passionately about justice for Philando Castile outside the Governor’s Mansion this week. “This time it’s going to be a long, long, hot summer,” he said.And it’s been repeated time and again by the media this week. Even a relatively specific Google search for news articles containing both “Philando Castile” and “long hot summer” turns up 1,440 results.So what does it mean? To start with, it’s a phrase with a 50-plus-year history.Perhaps because there was a movie by the same name released in 1958 and so it was embedded in the media’s subconscious, the phrase “Long, hot summer” became a buzzword following the Watts riot in Los Angeles in 1965 and was invoked again in the summers of 1966 and 1967 to describe the unrest that was sweeping the nation. According to Malcolm McLaughlin in Urban Rebellion in America: The Long, Hot Summer of 1967, newspapers had already starting predicting “a long, hot summer” in 1964, “even before the first Molotov cocktail was hurled, the first head was cracked, or the first store window was shattered.”From McLaughlin:“The phrase had long been used in a more literal sense, to describe the sticky summer months, but it gained renewed and widespread cultural relevance in 1958 when it was chosen as the title of a film, based on stories by William Faulker. While that movie was not about the Civil Rights movement, its sultry southern setting, its underlying tensions, and a threatened lyching (albeit of a white man, Ben Quick, played by Paul Newman) captured the world in which those conflicts were playing out. But, it was in the 1960s when ‘long, hot summer’ emerged as an evocative way to refer explicitly to the southern Civil Rights movement, where the heat of the sun combined with the heat of social conflict. When Martin Luther King, Jr., began his campaign in St. Augustine, Florida, in 1964, he called a press conference to announce the start of ‘a long, hot, nonviolent summer’ of protest.”As black Americans became increasingly frustrated by the lack of employment opportunities, housing, and services — and as white citizens fled into the suburbs and accelerated the ghettoization of low-income neighborhoods in the urban core — the phrase morphed into a catch-all buzzword, alongside the word “riot,” to describe the African-American uprising of the mid- to late-’60s. The nonviolent actions of protesters and marchers were lumped together with the more destructive actions of frustrated youth — not all of whom were even members of the African-American community — to create a terror-inducing pastiche of urban chaos.“Long, hot, and summer” are just three little words, but when used collectively, their imprint on white America’s perception of black protest and black anger is profound.It could help to explain why, in August of 1966, when a couple dozen black teenagers in Near North Minneapolis vented their boredom and frustration by throwing bricks through Jewish shopkeepers’ windows, the mayor urged the police to stand down and back off, and the city responded by immediately holding public meetings, working with business leaders to create jobs, and supporting the creation of community centers like the Way; but why, when similar events began to unfold the very next summer, the Mayor was pressured to call in the National Guard and police were given the order to shoot to kill.August 2, 2016 will mark the 50th anniversary of the Twin Cities’ first major racial disturbance on Plymouth Avenue. Unrest swept the city again on July 20 and 21, 1967, and in the summer of 1968 in St. Paul. There are so many threads to pull on and angles to explore with this history, and now seems like an excellent time to educate one another about the events that have shaped our city.Up next, I’ll share some of the research I’ve done into the Rondo neighborhood of St. Paul, and why it was so incredibly poignant that protesters reclaimed that paved space in the heart of the historic African-American neighborhood that was demolished to make way for I-94.(The first photo in this post was taken by Earl Seubert for the Star Tribune, and was published on July 22, 1967 with the caption “People From the Way Community Center Formed A Human Barricade To Keep Sightseers Away.” The second photo was taken by Pete Hohn of National Guardsmen on Plymouth Avenue and is part of the archives at the Minnesota Historical Society. And the third was taken by Mike Zerby for the Star Tribune and shows armed policemen on Plymouth Avenue in July 1967.) -- source link

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