Austin Bogues

Asbury Park (N.J.) Press

In Newark, the violence that tore apart the city in the summer of 1967 goes by a different name among locals. Refer to the unrest as "rioting," and they'll quickly correct you — it's the "Rebellion."

Six days of violence in Newark that July that left 26 dead, hundreds wounded and the city ablaze. It was just one of nearly 160 violent uprisings in cities from coast to coast, which led President Lyndon Johnson to appoint a special commission to determine the root of inner-city unrest in the 1960s.

The Kerner Commission's verdict, delivered in early 1968, was ominous: The United States was "moving toward two societies, one black, one white — separate and unequal."

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Nearly 50 years after that bloody summer in Newark, scholars, historians and witnesses wonder whether America has learned the lessons of the Kerner report — especially in light of high-profile shootings by police, growing concern over wealth inequality and a divisive election that showcased persistent disparities between rural and urban communities.

In Newark, the unrest began July 12, 1967, just hours after a black cab driver, John Smith, was beaten by white police officers during an arrest. Reports quickly circulated that Smith had been killed, although he was alive and at a hospital. Events unfolded into violence, protests and death on the streets before martial law was declared and the National Guard brought in.

In recent years civil unrest has roiled such cities as Baltimore, Charlotte and Ferguson, Mo., after the deaths of black men in confrontations with police. Organized protests have been largely peaceful, but cities have also seen violence, looting and arson.

Johnson's commission on civil unrest, chaired by Illinois Gov. Otto Kerner Jr., suggested a number of remedies, including better access to housing and education, as well as training for police departments. It also faulted white racism for much of the turmoil and sense of repression in black communities.

Years later, memories of Newark's violence linger among those who lived through it.

And many wonder whether more might be in the future.

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In July 1967, Larry Hamm was 12 years old and at a friend's birthday party when someone yelled that something was happening on Springfield Avenue. Protests started to stretch into his section of the city. As he ran toward the street, he saw his mother standing on the front porch of their apartment complex, yelling for him to get inside.

"It was a cataclysmic event, it was something that I will never forget," says Hamm, who now leads People Organized for Progress, a Newark civil rights group.

His organization has led a march in remembrance of the Rebellion each year for the past 33 years.

"We call it a Rebellion because it took military force to put it down. If it was just a riot, it would have been over in just a short time," he says.

"We'll continue to have these uprisings as long as the oppressive condition that confronts black people in their daily lives continues, particularly the issue of police repression. Almost every rebellion was sparked by an incident of police brutality," Hamm says.

"I think that it's been very obvious over the past few years, particularly around the national scene, that there are two ways that people view this country," says Newark Mayor Ras Baraka, whose father, poet and political activist Amiri Baraka, was beaten badly during the riots. "Some of it is from the eyes and perspective of people of color and those who sympathize with that condition, and then everyone else. Those two Americas still exist."

Junius Williams, who is now director of the Abbott Leadership Institute at Rutgers University's Newark campus, was a young third-year law student in 1967. When he and his friends rode into town the first night of the demonstrations, they were stopped by police who pointed guns at their heads. It wasn't until an officer found law school books in his trunk that they were let go. He believes he would have died that night if he hadn't had the textbooks with him.

Williams says he worries that the country has done little since the 1960s to foster trust between law enforcement and young men of color. He says Donald Trump's election might yield more distrust because of Trump's pledges to restore "law and order" to cities — which sounds to some like code for a crackdown on African Americans.

"I'm old enough not to be fearful, because we've been through the fire and we've been through the flood, and we're still here," he says. "Am I concerned? Yes.

"I think America — not just black people, not just brown people, (but) America — is in for four hard years. I think this is going to test the system's ability to be flexible enough to accept the fact that something's got to be done for the people who have been discriminated against. If not, there will be more violence as once again people get pushed to the edge."