Summary

This chapter corrects the mainstream narrative that uprisings in places like Detroit and Los Angeles in the 1960s were not in fact preceded by longer histories of activism. Martin Luther King Jr. himself found the shocked response to the Watts riots in Los Angeles in the mid-1960s to be disingenuous given the history of Black struggle in preceding years. By refusing to acknowledge this long history, white people could ignore their responsibilities and the ways in which they dismissed the struggle for equality. Ignoring the long and unsuccessful struggle of Black activists allows white leaders and citizens to demonize activists when a breaking point is reached and ignores how they contributed to the groundwork for the rebellions of the mid-1960s by ignoring earlier activist...