Pages from the Archives
Tensions also rose because many Cambridge blacks didn’ t buy the philosophy of nonviolence that was the mantra of leading civil rights activists of the 1960s. Saunders remembers Richardson-Dandridge having to restrain her from fighting during one demonstration. Other demonstrators armed themselves.
On June 14, 1963, racial tensions in Cambridge came to a head.
THE CHAOS COMES
On that day, according to Levy in“ Civil War on Race Street,”“ fires erupted at several white-owned businesses in the Second Ward. Guns were fired, apparently by both blacks and whites.( A white businessman) was hit by one of the shots. Local police who entered the Second Ward were met with a barrage of bricks and bottles. State police accompanied by canine units and armed with riot sticks rushed into the area to restore order.
Gov. Tawes sent in National Guard troops twice that summer, and they didn’ t leave until the next spring. But their presence in Cambridge didn’ t keep racial tensions from festering.
By 1967 CNAC had given way to the Black Action Federation. Comprised of former CNAC
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Brown’ s words sparked arson – and lifted him into nation’ s spotlight
By DeWAYNE WICKHAM
The racial conflagration that erupted in Cambridge, Md., on the night of July 24, 1967, might have been fanned when H. Rap Brown climbed atop a car and urged a crowd of blacks to“ burn this town down, if this town don’ t turn around.”
But the embers of that disturbance had been smoldering long before that – during years of civil rights protests and demonstrations in that hamlet, the county seat of Dorchester County, which is the birthplace of Harriet Tubman.
Yet while the 23-year-old leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee( SNCC) didn’ t create the turmoil that led to Cambridge’ s 1967 racial disturbance, by the time its embers had cooled it had propelled him into the national spotlight.
Brown and Stokely Carmichael, who preceded him as head of SNCC, were architects of the black power movement that emerged in the 1960s.
But it was what happened in Cambridge, a town of 15,000 people on the Choptank River, a Chesapeake Bay tributary, which put Brown’ s name on the front page of newspapers and his picture on an FBI wanted poster.
“ This ain’ t no riot, brother. This is a rebellion and we got 400 years of reason to tear this town apart,” Brown told a gathering in a section of Cambridge where most of the town’ s 4,000 blacks lived, according to a story the following day in The New York Times.
For more than three years, civil rights activists had staged demonstrations and boycotts in Cambridge in an effort to integrate local schools, desegregate public accommodations and to get black cops the same police powers as white officers.
Cambridge was placed under martial law in the summer of 1963. A curfew was imposed. Demonstrations were banned. And helmeted National Guardsmen with bayonets fixed to their rifles patrolled the town’ s streets for more than a year.
Alabama Gov. George Wallace took his segregationist campaign for the Democratic Party’ s presidential nomination to Cambridge in May of 1964. His speech at the Volunteer Fire Department hall to a crowd The New York Times called“ a wildly enthusiastic audience” of about 1,200 whites triggered a street confrontation between black protesters and nearly 400 Guardsmen.
But it wasn’ t until Brown came to town that gunfire erupted and buildings burned in a spasm of racial violence. He urged blacks to burn down a dilapidated, all-black elementary school and told them to arm themselves because Cambridge, he said, was about to explode.
The SNCC leader was struck in the face by a pellet from a shotgun blast about an hour after his speech.
A police officer was caught in the crossfire between a gun-wielding carload of whites and residents of the Second Ward, the town’ s black section of Cambridge. He was wounded in the face and hand.
Nearly two blocks of the Second Ward were destroyed by fires that burned out of control for two hours as the all-white volunteer firefighters refused to enter the area – even though it had been secured by 120 state troopers and Guardsmen.
A day later, Brown – who fled the town shortly after being released from a hospital – was charged with inciting a riot and arson. After six years of legal wrangling, Brown pleaded guilty to a lesser charge of failing to show up in 1970 for his trial on the original charges.
Brown was placed on the FBI’ s Most Wanted List when he went into hiding after two of his friends were killed when a bomb exploded
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