It had been three years because the rebellion of 1964. No matter classes Rochester was going to be taught ought to have been realized.
And but when the Eastman Kodak Co. requested a guide for a confidential evaluation of race relations within the metropolis in the summertime of 1967, the conclusion couldn’t have been grimmer.
“The hatred of whites by Negroes is matched by the white’s hatred and worry of the Negro,” the report reads. “Neither race makes any try to regulate or conceal its antipathy. The Negro resentment focuses on the Eastman Kodak Co. because the prime image of the last word in white energy and oppression.”
The 34-page draft report, written underneath the course of future U.S. Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, was supposed as a secret doc for Kodak executives. It has seldom been cited and by no means earlier than revealed in its entirety, resting principally undisturbed in Moynihan’s papers on the Library of Congress.
It offers a startlingly frank view of race dynamics at a pivotal time in Rochester’s historical past, describing a metropolis much more divided than in 1964, awash in anger, worry and weapons.
“A standard Negro angle was that whites deserve violence in fee for damaged guarantees about jobs, faculty desegregation and improved housing,” the report learn. “The widespread white angle was that if the ungrateful Negro steps out of line — he’ll be shot.”
Click here to read the full draft report.
In ‘weekend of agony,’ classes to be taught
An rebellion or a riot? Trigger or end result? Inevitable or inexcusable?
No three days in Rochester’s 220-year historical past have generated as a lot soul-searching and debate because the weekend of July 24-26 in 1964, 60 years in the past this week. Lengthy-simmering rigidity within the metropolis’s Black neighborhoods ignited into three days of chaos and violence.
5 folks had been killed, 4 of them in a helicopter crash, and practically 900 had been arrested. The property harm, principally to white-owned companies within the Black neighborhoods, totaled about $2 million.
White flight, pushed by exclusionary federal subsidies within the suburbs and racist scare techniques within the metropolis, was already underway and hardly wanted additional gasoline. However for generations of white Rochesterians, that sizzling July weekend turned handy shorthand for a group going by means of, and to, hell.
“The Rochester riots pointed up sharply and fiercely the necessity to get particular concerning the race drawback on this nation,” former Xerox govt Sol Linowitz wrote. “Maybe in our weekend of agony right here, we realized a number of issues which is able to assist others keep away from for them what ought to by no means have come to us.”
Eastman Kodak and town’s largest establishments — the “oligarchical energy construction,” because the report put it — scrambled to institute job coaching packages, some more practical than others. Black residents had been newly organized and represented, each by Franklin Florence’s FIGHT and by extra reasonable teams like Motion for a Higher Group and the City League of Rochester.
Group leaders in all places swore issues had been altering for the higher.
‘Riot Prediction Machine’
The report was written by a tutorial named Sol Chaneles however took place thanks to private relationships between Moynihan and Kodak executives.
One Kodak chief, longtime secretary Leonard Zartman, invited Moynihan and his spouse to return to Rochester throughout lilac season for pleasure but additionally enterprise. The project was a confidential report on the “assimilation of the massive numbers of Negroes who’ve come to Rochester in recent times,” and specifically what function Kodak was alleged to play within the course of.
The job match neatly into Moynihan’s personal aspirations. A revered Washington mental and writer of an influential 1965 report referred to as “The Negro Household,” he secured the Kodak contract for a pioneering however shadowy firm referred to as Simulmatics Corp. that sought to make use of Rochester as a proof of idea for its quixotic ambitions.
“The scientists of the Simulmatics Company acted on the proposition that if they might acquire sufficient information about sufficient folks and feed it right into a machine, all the things, at some point, may be predictable,” Jill Lepore wrote in “If Then,” her 2020 historical past of the corporate. “(They) helped construct the machine by which humanity would, by the twenty-first century, discover itself trapped and tormented.”
The functions in politics, finance and client advertising had been apparent, however Simulmatics appeared nonetheless farther afield. In 1967, with racial violence throughout the nation, it claimed that superior pc simulations in its City Research division might predict the precise location and timing of racial uprisings.
The concept was a “Riot Prediction Machine,” in Lepore’s phrases, and Moynihan meant to take it for a spin in Rochester.
Lengthy, sizzling summer season of 1967
A six-person analysis workforce was in Rochester from July 15 to July 25, 1967, interviewing about 80 folks. A secretary, Gaye Anne Himmelsbach, recalled that she spent the whole time locked in a lodge room underneath fixed armed guard from New York State Police.
The workforce’s work was qualitative, not quantitative, and but after 4 days they confidently issued “an unqualified prediction of violence to happen about 11 p.m. on Sunday evening July 23.”
The prediction was not a very daring one: riots occurred in dozens of cities throughout the nation that weekend, most notably in Detroit, the place 43 folks had been killed over 5 days. Per week earlier, 26 folks had been killed in preventing in Newark.
Moynihan’s workforce referred to as the state police and the troopers helped keep order over the subsequent few days. There was no riot July 23 however moderately “an evening of rigidity that was marked by confrontations between police and crowds of Negroes,” the Democrat and Chronicle reported.
The next evening police killed one Black man, Tommie Wright, whereas he drove towards a barricade on Jefferson Avenue. A later inner investigation exonerated the police.
‘The scenario can’t turn out to be worse’
Extra notable from a historic perspective is the unvarnished image that the report offers of Rochester at a vital second in its historical past.
The on-site analysis chief, Peter Shulman, recalled being in a room with younger Black males as they made Molotov cocktails.
“What I bear in mind essentially the most from strolling across the streets (in Black neighborhoods) was that none of them had been smiling,” Shulman, now 87, stated in an interview. “We didn’t meet a contented particular person the whole time we had been there. … I went there with none preconceptions, however I got here away sympathetic to their place.”
The report passes alongside a scathing assessment of Rochester’s social construction from the eyes of its poor Black residents — “the little folks,” as Chaneles stated they referred to themselves.
“The ‘little folks’ view these ghettos, whose bodily boundaries have gotten more and more inflexible, as facilities of sin whose existence relies upon largely on Kodak’s implicit or express approval,” he wrote. “(They) see the Eastman Kodak Firm as being the first agent for thwarting the chances for human and social improvement within the ghetto.”
In interviews with white leaders, the Simulmatics researchers discovered attitudes starting from ignorance to simmering rage. This was notably true within the Rochester Police Division.
“One white police officer interviewed stated that it’s division coverage to ignore the prostitution and playing within the Negro areas,” Chaneles wrote. “He acknowledged that top departmental officers maintain the Negro policemen suspect; and that extremely positioned white males, each Italian locals and Eastman officers, dictate police coverage.”
The strain was so excessive, the researchers concluded, that additional violence not solely was inevitable however in actual fact could be useful.
“Additional riots can, at this level, solely have a cathartic impact and can produce respiratory spells between tragic outbursts,” they wrote. “The scenario can’t turn out to be worse.”
Tensions defused
Regardless of the dire tone of the Simulmatics report, Rochester has not seen a reprisal of the 1964 rebellion within the 60 years since. Does that imply it was flawed?
Not essentially. A lot progress was being made in 1967, most prominently at Kodak. That was the yr that Franklin Florence led a protest on the firm’s annual shareholder assembly in New Jersey, commanding nationwide headlines and finally resulting in a settlement on jobs creation program. That occurred in June 1967, a month earlier than the Simulmatics workforce got here to city.
In a gathering with Kodak executives in Might, Moynihan advised them that his “sympathies lay with FIGHT,” based on an inner memo. “A number of instances within the dialog I discussed that (Saul) Alinsky is an honorable man, and that he’s doing not more than he stated he would do.”
When Moynihan turned satisfied in late July {that a} riot was imminent, he referred to as Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, who despatched in state police.
Shulman stated investigators demanded from him the names of the boys he’d seen making home made bombs earlier within the week.
“I advised them we by no means requested these folks for his or her names,” he stated. “It could have been silly to take action. However they didn’t consider me.”
An enormous riot broke out in Detroit the next day, taking the main target from Rochester — and reinforcing, maybe, the view of a few of Rochester’s civic and enterprise leaders that racism and civil rights had been principally points for different cities.
— Justin Murphy is a veteran reporter on the Democrat and Chronicle and writer of “Your Children Are Very Greatly in Danger: School Segregation in Rochester, New York.” Comply with him on Twitter at twitter.com/CitizenMurphy or contact him at jmurphy7@gannett.com.
This text initially appeared on Rochester Democrat and Chronicle: Secret Kodak document reveals new perspectives after 1964 uprising
