The brutal killing of Michael Brown in the formerly obscure Missouri city of Ferguson in August 2014 offers proof – as if any were needed – that the racial divide remains a chasm in the United States. Among its most horrifying features was the image of scores of protesters holding their hands in the air chanting “don't shoot,” while SWAT teams paraded caches of weaponry more appropriate to a warzone.Footnote ¹ The widespread protesting and violence that erupted in the wake of Brown's death also offered uncomfortable echoes of the so-called long, hot summer of 1967, when urban upheavals threatened to consume the United States. Those who are wishing to delve further into the history of that summer will find Malcolm McLaughlin's The Long Hot Summer of 1967 illuminating and sobering.

McLaughlin's study is not merely a chronicle of the urban unrest but an important attempt to place the protests and the federal response they produced in a social and intellectual context. Its prime focus is the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, also known as the Kerner Commission, which was established by the Johnson administration to evaluate the meaning of the recent disturbances. McLaughlin's intellectual history of the commission and its report is particularly illuminating, largely through the emphasis it places on a suppressed report entitled “The Harvest of American Racism” which circulated among the commission's members. This was a far more radical document than the eventual Kerner Report, and while McLaughlin accepts that its prescription was perhaps overwrought, its suppression was clearly also regrettable. The Long, Hot Summer then devotes successive chapters to the events of the summer itself before revealing how these events assisted Stokely Carmichael's and H. Rap Brown's attempts to define black power. He closes the book with an evaluation of the summer's legacy, as played out in the response to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference's proposed Poor People's Campaign.

McLaughlin's argument is clear and forceful: the Kerner Commission was hobbled by a failure to investigate the “problems of power and democracy” (xi) and the Great Society liberals were mistaken in turning to the police to quell the tension. The book is at its best when detailing the confusion of the political establishment when faced with the task of attempting to understand the rebellions. This bewilderment, McLaughlin suggests, derives from their simple inability to question the ideological foundations of modern capitalism. McLaughlin maintains that the advocates of the Great Society had too much faith in capitalism's ability to address the multifarious needs of the poor and that they failed to understand that the American economy needed its own reconstruction. While the liberals might have correctly identified many of the problems and might have been right to allocate considerable funds to alleviate these problems, their failure to understand or even listen to the people they aimed to help constituted a failure of democracy. Elitism, he argues, was the fundamental problem, abetted by the report's insistence that the uprisings were a consequence of urban poverty. Ultimately, the response of the federal government was a “dramatic expansion of the apparatus of state security” (xi), one which has led to the situation that faces Ferguson, and, indeed, much of urban America.

McLaughlin attributes part of this militarization to the concept of a “long, hot summer” itself, which imposes a false coherence on the events of that period. Most of the outbreaks of violence were unrelated and were so geographically diffuse that any attempt to link them is problematic. Put simply, rioting was not contagious, yet the very concept of a “long, hot summer” enabled police departments to load the events with meaning, which bolstered their own demands for greater powers of repression. That a significant number of such disorders were merely commonplace, minor confrontations or sporadic attempts at arson or antisocial behavior was, unfortunately, irrelevant. McLaughlin indicates that the frequent references to “guerrilla war” in the media helped foster an acceptance among the wider public that armed force was a necessary and proportionate response to urban unrest. He suggestively links this response to the mob violence which often followed so-called “race riots” earlier in the century, thus raising a troubling but important question: were the armed responses simply a late twentieth-century lynch mob? After all, the vast majority of gunplay was committed by those in uniform. Indeed, this was noted by the Kerner Report, which stated baldly, “Great harm is likely to result from the use of military weapons of mass destruction by police forces which lack the command and control and firearms discipline of military units … Controlling a civil disorder is not warfare” (148). If only successive generations of politicians and police chiefs had taken this warning to heart.