1967: The Long, Hot Summer

In 1967, growing tensions erupted into what came to be known as “the Long, Hot Summer of 1967.”

Race uprisings—167 of them in large and small cities across America—began in Newark, New Jersey in response to housing and employment shortages and in response to the decreasing economic opportunities for African Americans (Thompson Fullilove, 2016, p. 153). In Newark alone, 26 people died; nationwide, the revolts caused more than 100 deaths (Thompson Fullilove, 2016, p. 150).

In East St. Louis, Black working-class people began protesting the lack of affordable housing, and “evening disturbances erupted in the city’s downtown, with at least two hundred people involved in the destruction of white-owned property, looting, and firebombing” (Lang, 2009, p. 192). Protests continued the next day in response to police shooting a nineteen-year-old man “as he fled police in a stockyard parking lot just outside the city limits” (Lang, 2009, p. 192).

This racially charged situation contributed to the nationwide response to Dr. Martin Luther King’s assassination on April 4, 1968, which was devastating.

The demonstration, known as the Holy Week Uprising, that occurred in U.S. cities was more destructive than the 1967 uprisings. Cities were torn apart, and black communities that were already stressed by decades of systemic racism suffered further isolation. Yet in St. Louis, white leaders and Black leaders were able to work together to avoid the violence and destruction that had crippled many cities across the U.S.

Lang wrote that “St. Louis’s long history of biracial civility, liberal-integrationist negotiation, and electoral paternalism proved durable enough to avert major disturbances” (2009, p. 193).

This video archive footage shows news coverage in St. Louis from the night Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated, as well as footage from events that took place over the following days.

In response to the Civil Rights movement and to the 1967 and 1968 race uprisings, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1968, which made discrimination based on “race, color, religion, or national origin” a federal crime.

However, despite the new law of the land, African Americans still suffered race-based discrimination in most areas of their lives. Feagin (2014) found that, “After the 1968 Civil Rights Act went into effect, residential segregation across the color line became unofficial and informal, as it remains today” (p. 172). 

When the 1968 Civil Rights Act was passed, the country was still embroiled in the “war on crime,” which continued to disproportionately single out African American men. This “war on crime” evolved into its extension, the “war on drugs” which continued to target Black communities. The war on drugs came out of the racially charged and anti-war environment of the 1968 presidential election and introduced a new set of racially influenced laws that disadvantaged Black people in the criminal justice system.