When New Haven burned

08/19/2007

William Kaempffer , Register Staff

NEW HAVEN — Forty years ago today, the streets of New Haven became a war zone. On the surface, New Haven was tranquil, a model city and touchstone of urban renewal pushed forward by the determination of its nationally recognized mayor, Richard C. Lee.

Then, touched off on a hot evening when a white merchant in the Hill shot a Puerto Rican man who came at him with a knife, the city erupted into four days of race riots, with mobs of blacks and Puerto Ricans breaking windows, setting fires, looting stores and clashing with police.

"I remember driving over the Q bridge, looking over toward Congress Avenue, and all I could see was thick, black smoke," said retired police Chief William Farrell, then a lieutenant running the narcotics squad, "and I thought the city was burning down."

He wouldn’t get home for four days.

It was Aug. 19, 1967, during an era of social upheaval and turmoil on many fronts: generational, artistic, cultural, political and racial.

For three consecutive summers, the streets of Hartford’s North End became battlefields. There were disturbances in New Britain, Waterbury and dozens of other cities across the country. In violent outbreaks, 26 died in Newark, N.J., and 43 were killed in Detroit.

It wasn’t supposed to happen in New Haven, which had been heaped with national praise, was flush with massive infusions of federal urban renewal money and had a lofty goal of one day becoming a city without slums.

Earlier that day, Lee had arranged a huge picnic for 500 black youths who participated in a summer-long playground and neighborhood cleanup project.

The reality in predominantly black, poor neighborhoods was substandard housing and no jobs. There was growing frustration, hopelessness and anger.

"In retrospect, you could have felt it coming, because there were a lot of unhappy people, a lot of unrest. It was labeled a model city, but it was far from being a model city," said Cornell Scott, who founded the Hill Health Center the following year.

There were warnings. Five months earlier, black clergy told Lee a racial blow-up was inevitable. Black community leaders such as Ronnie Johnson and Fred Harris formed the militant Hill Parents Association and these disenfranchised leaders were willing to do whatever it took to achieve their goals.

"There was a sense of powerlessness then. That was amplified by the fact that there were relatively few blacks and Latinos in the power structure," said Jimmy E. Jones, an associate professor of world religions and African studies at Manhattanville College and educational coordinator at Masjid Al-Islam in New Haven. He came to New Haven in 1967. "There was a great deal of cynicism when I came to New Haven about this model city business."

Even so, no one was prepared for what erupted that Aug. 19, a Saturday night, after 5:55 p.m., when a white restaurateur shot a Puerto Rican man who came at him with a knife on Congress Avenue.

In less than 90 minutes, gangs began moving along Congress, smashing windows as they went. At about 9 p.m, the first Molotov cocktail was thrown, resulting in a two-alarm fire and destruction of a four-story brick building at 613 Congress. Police sealed off areas as firefighters battled stone throwers.

"I got a call from the detective bureau at my house, and they said we have serious problems, there are fires starting," said Farrell. The situation already was out of control when he arrived.

The rioting soon spread to Fair Haven, Dixwell and Newhallville.

The Police Department was short on riot gear. With too few helmets, the department borrowed hard hats from United Illuminating Co. UI welded down manhole covers in troubled neighborhoods after rumors surfaced of possible bomb attacks on the infrastructure. Short on weapons and armed only with .38-caliber revolvers, the police chief borrowed a few hundred shotguns and riot rifles from Winchester Repeating Arms.

By Sunday, the mayor declared a state of emergency and set a curfew. Some 200 state troopers marched down Congress Avenue in a show of force, which some black leaders blamed for inciting more rioting.

Bob Norman was a 32-year-old reporter with Channel 8 television and the riots were the first time he’d ever been tear-gassed. When he first drove down Washington Avenue, he saw men unloading rifles and bringing them into a store.

"We were trying to figure out, ‘How the hell are we going to cover this?’ Just keep the camera rolling and if things start to get bad, we’ll get out of here as quick as we can," said Norman, who later became mayor of East Haven. "When you’re covering a story, you don’t think you’re a part of it — until it was all over, and you think, ‘Oh my God, we could have been murdered out there.’"

No one was killed in New Haven’s riots. More than 500 people were arrested.

One night, as the riots still raged and police officers slept in cots in the ballroom of the Park Plaza, Lee made a late-night visit to a friend’s apartment at Yale University.

"When the ’67 riots occurred, he didn’t understand — and I don’t think any of us fully understood — what was happening: that here, the model city was blowing up. It was a tremendously tough thing on him emotionally and psychologically," said Henry "Sam" Chauncey, who at the time was a top aide to Yale’s president, Kingman Brewster. Lee showed up and paced the floor for hours, trying to figure out what was happening and why.

High on the list of numerous and complex reasons for the nationwide riots that summer were unemployment, inadequate housing and high concentration of poor blacks in particular areas, according to the report of the commission President Johnson appointed to determine the cause.

It was only part of the challenge of authority that included the civil rights and antiwar movements that, in New Haven, culminated in the massive May Day demonstration in 1970 during the Black Panthers trial.

A few months after the riots, Ronnie Johnson and five other men were arrested with a truck full of explosives and charged with plotting to blow up several banks and the police headquarters downtown. Johnson and one other man ultimately were convicted, but Johnson, who has died, prevailed on appeal, according to Anthony DeMayo, a retired Superior Court judge who at the time was the public defender in New Haven. He continues to work as a trial referee.

He always found the prosecution’s theory incredible: That the co-conspirators planned to plant dynamite outside downtown institutions, run a wire across Church Street to the Green, where they would push the detonator — all undetected.

Later, the theory evolved to argue the men planned to trade the dynamite for assault rifles.

To this day, DeMayo said, he believes the case was a set-up.

Fred Harris, another leader of Hill Parents Association, moved to Detroit. A message left with his son was not returned.

Mayor John DeStefano Jr., the son of a cop, was 12 years old when the riots broke out.

"My clearest recollection is I think my father was gone for a week, put up in the old Park Plaza," said DeStefano. It was hard to understand as a kid, he said.

"My sense is it was a scary time and that there was this sense that something was really wrong with the city."

In about 1980, when he started working for the city in the Hall of Records, he noticed the barred windows and some that were bricked up.

"It was the ’60s," was the answer when he inquired.

William Kaempffer can be reached at wkaempffer@nhregister.comor 789-5727.