Police used the myth of black snipers to justify brutality in the Long Hot Summer of 1967
In Newark and Detroit, no organized groups of shooters were ever found
The morning of July 15, 1967, New Jersey residents picked up their copies of the Star-Ledger as the sirens died down in Newark from the third straight night of unrest. Days earlier, the brutal arrest of a black cab driver by two white policemen brought decades-old struggles against racial oppression to a head in the city’s Central Ward. Above a photograph of State Troopers armed with rifles and shotguns, the local newspaper’s headline that morning was alarming: “POLICE BATTLE SNIPERS.” It was the first mention of any gunfire directed at law enforcement during the past three nights.
The previous morning, the State Police and National Guard had been called into Newark by Governor Richard Hughes to suppress what he called a “criminal insurrection against society.” Later that day, two black men and one white police detective were fatally shot outside a housing project amidst a barrage of gunfire from law enforcement aimed at alleged “looters.” Though likely a result of crossfire from police or Guardsmen, the death of detective Fred Toto was blamed on “sniper fire” from the high-rise project. As news of the alleged “sniper” attack spread over police radios in the following moments, law enforcement sprayed the building with bullets, and a wave of retributive state violence had begun.
When the Star-Ledger carried news of the shooting, it sent shockwaves of fear and outrage through white communities in Newark and across the nation. Although no snipers were found, the paper reported that the black community in the Central Ward had become more heavily armed, firing from atop high-rise buildings and roaming the streets in armed groups. Though several unarmed black civilians — including 10-year-old Eddie Moss — had been killed by indiscriminate shooting from law enforcement that day, the media spotlight focused on the death of a white police officer and the imagined threat of blackness.
While debate remains about the existence of any snipers in Newark, it is clear that the narrative of sniper activity championed by police and media had real consequences. Police and grand jury reports claimed that snipers were responsible for the deaths of unarmed black civilians who were actually shot and killed by law enforcement. Additionally, media-induced fear resonated within white communities on the fringes of the predominantly black Central Ward. As scholar Mark Krasovic has recently noted, Mayor Hugh Addonizio and Police Director Dominick Spina both received intelligence reports during the rebellion that white neighborhoods were becoming “armed camps.” Newark activist Louise Epperson later recalled bands of white vigilantes riding through the Central Ward, brandishing automatic weapons.
Though news reports about black snipers were vague during the rebellion, a July 28th report in Life magazine offered white America a more intimate glimpse into these mysterious black operatives. In a two-page article, senior editor Russell Sackett described a “clandestine meeting” with members of a “sniper organization” hiding out in a dingy Newark tenement. Sackett, a white Air Force veteran from rural Oregon who had been covering the Civil Rights Movement since the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954, reported that this group was part of a national organization with ties to militant civil rights groups. Accompanied by a photo of a black man, clad in a denim shirt, sunglasses, and head wrap, perched in a window with a rifle, the story offered a chilling view into the black guerilla underworld that many whites believed was behind the urban rebellions sweeping the nation.
The story was gripping, but it was fabricated. First, Sackett himself later admitted to Newark journalist Ron Porambo that the photograph of the supposed sniper had no connection with the story he had written (worse yet, the photo was alleged to have been staged). Second, Sackett also admitted that he had not identified the group as “a sniper organization,” and that he had seen no weapons during the meeting. Most importantly, however, neither Sackett nor any law enforcement agencies ever brought forth actual evidence supporting the claim that an organized group of snipers had been operating in Newark in 1967. Even Police Director Dominick Spina — who was no friend to Newark’s black community — attributed the overblown reports of sniper fire during the rebellion to “trigger-happy guardsmen.”
While there may have been sporadic gunfire in the direction of law enforcement during the rebellion, national and global events inflated the myth of black snipers out of proportion during the summer of 1967. For many white Americans, news footage of officers ducked behind cars, firing at unseen snipers bore an uncomfortable resemblance to the footage coming out of Vietnam during that same period and placed the threat of insurgency squarely in their own backyards. This type of imagery stoked growing fears in white America that a guerilla war against society was being waged in the nation’s cities. “It was frightening,” Newark resident Steve Adubato confessed, echoing the fears that many white communities had of “waking up to find out that all the things that you love and cherish…they’re not gonna be there.”
The 1967 sniper article wasn’t the first time Life stoked fears of an organized black uprising. In 1966 the magazine published an article titled “Plotting a War on ‘Whitey.’” Between pages filled with lily-white advertisements, Sackett demonstrated his flair for startling white suburban audiences. “In secret recesses of any ghetto in the U.S.,” he warned, “there are…hundreds of black men working resolutely toward an Armageddon in which Whitey is to be either destroyed or forced to his knees.” Sackett described an underground network of revolutionaries, armed with sniper rifles, Molotov cocktails, and bazookas, preparing to wage guerilla warfare.
While fantastic, these types of narratives held serious sway in shaping popular understandings of racial unrest and resultant public policy. As urban uprisings erupted in city after city from 1963 to 1967, reports from media outlets and government agencies blamed unrest on “radicals” and “outside agitators,” making the threat of a tactical national armed black uprising seem imminently possible to white America.
In May of 1967, the enemy appeared to be at the doorstep in California when a group of armed black men and women, dressed in black leather jackets and berets, arrived at the state capitol building. These members of the Black Panther Party, a militant organization formed the previous year in Oakland in response to rampant police violence, had made the trip to Sacramento to protest the fatal police shooting of a black man named Denzil Dowell. This latest killing re-affirmed the Party’s practice of conducting armed street patrols to monitor police behavior in their communities, and the Sacramento action was meant to be a demonstration of the same 2nd Amendment rights peacefully enjoyed by white Americans. By May, however, these armed patrols had become the target of a bill in the state legislature that sought to criminalize their previously protected right to openly carry firearms.
When the Panthers appeared at the state capitol, the state legislature was in session and Governor Ronald Reagan was on the lawn speaking to a group of 200 white children. News media naturally seized on the dramatic imagery. Television crews captured footage of tables full of confiscated firearms and ammunition. The headline in the Sacramento Bee screamed, “CAPITOL IS INVADED” above photos of stern black men gripping rifles.
Reagan blasted the demonstration as “a ridiculous way to try and solve the problems that have to be solved among people of good will.” For black Americans, however, “good will” had done little to address the persistent violence, racism, and lack of economic opportunity they faced. Nonetheless, Reagan argued that nothing could be done to address racial inequality when Americans have “even the implied idea that…guns might be directed at other Americans.”
Two months later, American guns were, in fact, directed at American citizens in Newark and Detroit. Like Harlem (1964) and Watts (1965) before them, the eruptions of violence in these cities was blamed on radical and criminal elements within black communities, rather than the years of oppressive violence that sparked the unrest. The widespread reporting on black snipers supported this analysis, and fueled vicious responses.
When Detroit erupted, President Lyndon Johnson delivered a nationally televised address on the recent uprisings. “We will not tolerate lawlessness,” Johnson told Americans, “this nation will do whatever it is necessary to do, to suppress and punish those who engage in it.” Although Johnson understood the connections between racial inequality and violence, he refused to accept the reality that these urban rebellions were expressions of frustration over the continued denial of civil rights, human rights, and self-determination to black Americans. The President viewed the “rioting” as the work of “a bunch of local gangsters” that were incited by black radicals or extremists. The media frenzy around black snipers during the rebellions merely affirmed what Johnson had already believed to be true.
The next day, Johnson met with FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and tasked him with finding evidence of a national conspiracy behind the rebellions. Though Hoover admitted that no such organized conspiracy existed, the President’s insistence provided the eager FBI Director with an opportunity to expand the bureau’s Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO). In the years to follow, this secretive organization would wage an unprecedented war upon black America, leaving a bloody trail in its wake.
It was a new, yet familiar governmental response to the age-old narrative that considered black demands for self-determination a violent threat to white society. When black Americans fought to eradicate the daily violence of institutional racism in their communities, this false narrative of black criminality served as justification for repressive and sadistic actions and policies.
“They have always known,” Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee Chairman H. Rap Brown (later known as Jamil Al-Amin) wrote of white America in 1969, “that if they could justify and make their actions legal, either through their courts or their history…then it would be unnecessary to actually rectify them.”
