The Riots of 1964: Lessons from the looting of Columbia Avenue

The weekend of Aug. 28, 1964, marked Philadelphia’s only experience with the massive violent street protests that swept many African-American neighborhoods in the nation’s industrialized cities during that decade.

The legacy of the Columbia Avenue riots 50 years ago will no doubt be endlessly debated, but there is no argument about the incident that sparked the upheaval: As in Harlem, Watts, and Detroit and most other of the other blow-ups, the unrest was sparked by police action.

About 9:30 p.m. that Friday, two cops, a black officer named Robert Wells, and a white officer,  John Hoff, caught a call about a car obstructing the intersection of 22nd and Columbia (now Cecil B. Moore Avenue). They found Odessa and Rush Bradford in the midst of a drunken marital spat. As Wells argued with the uncooperative Odessa, eventually pulling her from the vehicle, onlookers gathered along the bustling commercial thoroughfare. Then James Mettles emerged from the crowd and struck Hoff. Police reinforcements were called. As Mettles and Odessa Bradford were driven away, the jeering crowd threw bottles and rocks at police.

A rumor circulated that a white police officer had murdered a pregnant black woman. The police had a very bad reputation in the area, so the rumors were readily believed. (After the unrest, NAACP leader Cecil B. Moore attributed it to “a long history of police mistreatment.”)  By 11 p.m., angry crowds began smashing windows on Columbia and 23rd. Looting quickly spread. Thousands of residents poured into the streets, ignoring pleas for peace from black civic leaders.

“There were so many rioters. Most of them women, teen-agers, or even younger,” according to Officer James McCade, as quoted in a 1965 report on the violence commissioned by the local branch of the American Jewish Committee. “We’d chase one away and another group would come on us from another direction throwing bricks, trash cans, anything. The situation was completely out of hand.”

The afflicted area was in North Central Philly, where the bulk of the city’s African-American population lived. Many families had arrived during the second phase of the Great Migration, during and after World War II, culminating just as industrial capital began to retreat from Philadelphia and other older manufacturing centers. Rigidly segregated from Philadelphia’s white neighborhoods and labor markets, blacks suffered high unemployment and poverty levels: They were excluded from the shrinking pool of jobs by racist hiring practices. The furious crowds that weekend mainly concentrated on manifestations of white power in the neighborhood: Property and police.

That Saturday, Mayor James Tate enacted a curfew and all liquor stores, bars and movie theaters were shut down. Crowds surged into the street again that night. The next day’s New York Times reported blocks of storefronts that “looked as though they had been ripped by a hurricane." But the fury had already begun to slacken. Sunday saw sporadic clashes, a few more looted stores and what would be, by most accounts, the only death: Officer James Miller shot and killed Green, claiming the young man came at him with a 7-inch knife.

By Monday morning, the disturbance was definitively over. Contemporary accounts put property damage at $3 million (or more than $23 million in today’s dollars). In one five-block area, only 54 of 170 properties escaped damage. All of them were easily identified as black-owned. Spared, too, were a Chinese restaurant with a sign reading, “We Are Colored Too,” and the office of an osteopath who performed clandestine abortion services. Although the shops were predominantly Jewish-owned, the American Jewish Committee reported that the rhetoric of the crowds was fiercely anti-white, but not anti-Semitic.  

Among those storefronts that survived unscathed was John Churchville’s Freedom Library at the intersection of Ridge Avenue and Jefferson Street. Churchill, who had just returned from SNCC’s Freedom Sumer campaign in Mississippi, established the storefront as an activist space — earlier in the summer he had organized a rent strike — and a lending library of books for and by black people. The Freedom Library sustained no damage, despite its location in the heart of the riot zone and the storefront’s huge plate-glass window.

Churchville remembers that weekend as a communal moment of reckoning for a grossly underserved population with few means of expressing their grievances. “I saw a spirit of camaraderie that I haven’t seen before or since in North Philly,” he says. “I saw neighbors helping each other. Old ladies trying to carry stuff from the stores and young guys saying, ‘Mrs., let me help you. I got two [T.V.s] here, you can have one.’ It was a human event, where people saw their own self-worth.”

Shop owners did not see it that way and loudly denounced what they saw as a dangerously moderate police response. Indeed, Philadelphia’s experience of civil violence was substantially less bloody than similar conflicts in, to name a few, Watts (1965, 34 dead), Newark (1967, 24 dead), and Detroit (1967, 43 dead). In Philadelphia 339 people were wounded, 308 were arrested, and Robert Green killed.

The tactics ordered by the Police Commissioner at the time, Howard Leary, are largely credited with the low toll. A proponent of police reform, he commanded his forces from the middle of the conflict, but ordered them to keep guns holstered unless attacked. This was hugely significant: Most of the dead in the urban upheavals of the 1960s were black people shot down by police or national guardsmen. Leary also forbade the use of horses, dogs or tear gas. Moore, the NAACP leader, called Levy "the most enlightened police man in America."

Leary’s tactics were not popular among many of the storeowners in the area or among rank-and-file cops. A reporter from The Philadelphia Bulletin saw Deputy Commissioner Frank Rizzo, on a street corner in the riot zone, arguing with Leary against the no-guns order. Years later, Rizzo described his former boss as “a gutless bastard.”

Rizzo traded on white fears of that August weekend to build political support for himself. He became police commissioner in 1966. Everywhere unrest threatened to flare, he showed up personally with masses of his men. In 1967, when he ordered a police phalanx to brutally disperse a large crowd of black student protesters, he declared "Frank Rizzo and the police department are not going to back away from lawlessness or insurrection.” Philadelphia did not experience another massive outbreak of civic violence for the rest of the 1960s, not even after the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated.

This was probably also because African-Americans became better organized politically. Churchill, who helped found the Black People’s Unity Movement, says, a lot of people got involved in politics as a result of the 1964 upheaval.

“We thought hard about how to channel the anger about this repressive situation,” he says. “How do we channel in into organizing people for their own betterment?” The strong growth of black organizing outside of the political system later resulted in greatly increased representation within it. 

But political-economic developments in the 1970s and 1980s undercut the potential for material gains, as the city’s tax base continued to shrink and President Reagan cut urban aid. Today, the neighborhoods of North Central Philly remain afflicted by even more acute versions of the same problems that incited the conflict of August 1964, compounded by the pressures of one form of federal aid that hasn’t shrunk: Outlays for the hugely expanded criminal-justice apparatus. As recent events in Ferguson, Mo., illustrate, it is the example of Rizzo, not Leary, that American law-enforcement remembers.