Feeling Riots

This chapter reflects upon the multiple interpretations of major urban rebellions in the United States between 1964-1969 to understand how descriptions of the major race riots, especially the metaphor of the powderkeg, created and reflected racialized political feelings where hopelessness replaced hope as the emotional framework for racial liberalism and as the possibility of integration ebbed. The assassinations of John Kennedy and, later, Malcolm X, along with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 evacuated black hope from political liberalism and replaced it with different political emotions, including rage, frustration, and fear. Blacks feared white terrorism and whites feared blacks. This impasse augmented the hopelessness and anger that undergirded riots. It prompted the passage of the 1967 DC Crime Bill and helped undermine the 1968 Civil Rights Bill as protest was elided with crime in news accounts and in public policy, effectively mystifying the context and content of urban rebellion. As the War on Poverty transformed into the War on Crime, feelings became a major rhetorical vector of policy discussions about urban rebellion. Law and order rhetoric reasserted white statism as the only permissible loyalty and effectively harnessed white anxiety and anger towards ending any possibility of black equality through the law.

A marginal man and his central contributions: The creative spaces of William (‘Wild Bill’) Bunge and American geography

The aim of the paper is to develop a geographical account of creativity by drawing on Arthur Koestler’s work. For Koestler creativity is sparked by the clash of two incompatible frames of meaning, and resolved by a new act of creation. Missing from Koestler’s account is geography, however. To show how geography might be brought into Koestler’s scheme the paper works through a detailed case study within the recent history of geography: the writing and publication of two very different but equally creative books by the well-known American geographer, William Bunge (1928–2013). In the late 1950s at the University of Washington, Seattle, Bunge wrote Theoretical Geography (1962), a meticulously executed hymn to the mathematics of abstract space, and which helped transform the discipline of geography into spatial science. Then during the late 1960s in inner-city Detroit Bunge wrote Fitzgerald: Geography of a Revolution (1971), and quite a different hymn. It was a paean to urban rebellion, to grassroots neighbourhood insurrection. It focussed not on abstract space, but a very concrete place: the one mile square that formed the Detroit inner city neighbourhood of Fitzgerald. In this case, Bunge’s book was a forerunner to radical geography. Catalytic to both of Bunge’s acts of creation, the paper argues, were the marginal spaces in which he wrote, marginal in the sense that they were distant from mainstream American academic geography. Incorporating them provides not only an explanation creativity within geography, but also geography’s own geography.

Redemptive Love, Vigilante Terror, and Rebellion

Chapter Two chronicles the key battles in Cairo’s Civil Rights Movement with a particular focus on how activists working with the local branch of the NAACP and SNCC mobilized Black congregations behind a powerful local movement aimed at upending the edifice of Jim Crow. By adopting a religious conception of civil rights liberalism rooted in Black Christian discourses of racial reconciliation and nonviolence, local activists were able to recruit intergenerational and cross-class support. However, this religiously based alliance ultimately fractured under the weight of white resistance and the growing disillusionment of Cairo’s Black working-class youth whose frustrations culminated in the urban rebellion of 1967.

Producing the Black Badman

This chapter begins with an examination of the political context and rhetorical politics of urban rebellion as Rap Brown augmented the Black Power vernacular after the Cambridge riots and the subsequent passage of the 1968 Civil Rights Act. To understand Brown’s interventions into the Black Power vernacular, this chapter examines the mobile, embodied performativity of black masculinity in Brown’s autobiographical manifesto Die Nigger Die! (1969), authored while Brown was under house arrest. Die Nigger Die! was phenomenally successful (due, in part, to its unsettling title), going through seven printings before being re-released after Brown’s murder conviction in 2002 by publishers at Lawrence Hill in Chicago. But because Brown’s vernacular style actually spurred the mass incarceration of black liberation activists, his memoir isn’t as concerned with prison conditions or resistance like Mumia Abu-Jamal’s essays or Assata Shakur’s memoir. His experiences with incarceration and repression focus more macroscopically on the ways in which white power creates the conditions for black repression and imprisonment. This chapter highlights Brown’s style, his performance as a black badman in games like the dozens, his understanding of the fragility of black boyhood and the politics of black masculinity, and his interest in both self-defense and violence in the text to understand the production of Black Power vernacular. Finally, this chapter considers Brown’s descriptions as the problems with both white culture and “Negro culture,” which causes the self-hate that makes black communities willingly submit to the nation.