The Harvest Of Casteism

Race, caste and what it will take to make Dalit lives matter

- Suraj Yengde

On a wednesday evening in July 1967, two white police officers dragged a black man, John William Smith, into their precinct building in the city of Newark. Smith, a taxi driver, had just been arrested, for the alleged crime of improperly passing the officers’ car, and had been beaten so brutally that he could not walk. Residents of a housing project saw him dragged in, and a rumour set off: the cops had killed another black man. A crowd formed, and resorted to attacking the precinct building. For five days, violence tore through the city, with a toll of over two dozen lives. Some called it rioting—others a rebellion.

That was just one flashpoint of what came to be known as “the long, hot summer of 1967.” The United States saw over a hundred and fifty “race riots” that season, with police brutality against black people a common spark, extending a long lineage of rage—Chicago in 1919 and 1935, Harlem in 1943 and 1964, Watts in 1965, Hough in 1966, and on and on. The US president, Lyndon B Johnson, already battling public anger over the invasion of Vietnam and faced with a fresh crisis, formed a committee to answer three questions: “What happened? Why did it happen? What can be done to prevent it from happening again?”