My family was beaten (literally) into moving out.

"You aint welcome round here no more cracker" was what my mother remember as she was held against a car and whipped with a car antenna by a group of black girls.

They were one of the few families that tried to stay and maintain a business.

Little girls learn racism from somewhere.

Let's not pick sides.


Both sides were wrong.

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Why not? You can choose to either partake of the violence or avoid it. Which is the better choice?

His incident wasnt during the 60's

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Your first mistake was to answer back to the undefeated, master of beating suckers silly.

Cause then. the Terrorists win

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Your first mistake was to answer back to the undefeated, master of beating suckers silly.

There's no question that the racial climate of North Philly during the 1960s was extremely turbulent.....I don't think the riots helped the situation. What it did was allow many Afican Americans to vent their frustrations on a police force many assummed were racially segerated and administered brutalaity at the drop of a dime...this is not seceret...

leaders likececil B. Moore, Dr. Walt Palmer and others were used to calm the riots, which lasted for a few days I believe....

The business along the Columbia Ave cooridor never came back....if you ride through there today, you will see many of the storefronts still boarded up. Many of them have been demolished etc....

There is a revitilization effort taking place; temple is responsible for "building up" the neighborhood (broad to 18th street)....

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Obama for President
Biden for VP

Philadelphia must never forget the acts perpetrated by these terrorists. Council should formally condemn these terrorists and their acts, designate a day of memorial, call for flags to be at half staff, and a moment of silence.

One of your better counter-posts.

Tempers were high and innocent people hurt on both sides.

And indeed we're still paying for this outburst.

But I think the OP was also railing against the intellectual apologists for the rioting. What he was claiming, and I think he has a point, is that many of the people doing the rioting were not really protesting injustice but using injustice as an excuse to loot and pillage. (To provide an analogous example not involving dark-skinned peoples, think about the reputation of British soccer fans abroad today.)

The riots occurred at a time when radical ideas enjoyed unusually wide acceptance in the American intelligentsia. Things like this happen in cycles too, BTW. And by confusing lawlessness with civil disobedience (and even legitimate physical resistance to unjust laws), the intelligentsia ended up doing nobody any favors either.

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Sandy Smith, Exile on Market Street, Philadelphia
"Jazz and blogging are both intimate, improvisational, and individual -- but also inherently collective. And the audience talks over both." --Andrew Sullivan, "Why I Blog," The Atlantic, November 2008

I heard some stats recently which I hope aren't true but seem to be, and, if so, are incredibly sobering. In 1960 there were 2 million people living in Philly, and about 400,000, or 20%, were black. Ignoring the small Hispanic and Chinese populations at the time, that would have meant that 1.6 million white people lived in Philly. Today about 650,000 white people live in Philadelphia, meaning that in about 50 years somewhat less than 1 million white people left Philadelphia. That is staggering.

I read that the riots stopped on the north end at Lehigh since that was a white neighborhood (Swampoodle) and the whites assembled at the north side of the avenue, preventing the spread. Now a guy I mentioned this to said "it did and it didn't" and told me that the corner businesses on the northeast and northwest corners got hit.

A very very bad situation that exists today is the economic crippling of the area and other black areas. I mean, when a supermarket opens in West Philly or somewhere similar, it's a big deal and gets press and optimism. That's sad.

No excuse. Same thing has happened to all people. Almost every demographic and religion has been beat, enslaved etc..