members, the BAF, like SNCC, had switched from advocating integration to advocating black power.
They invited H. Rap Brown to town. After his speech, Cambridge’ s Pine Street erupted in flames. Pine Street Elementary School was set afire, and the blaze destroyed it as well as 11 businesses. During the night, Brown was hit with shotgun pellets, and a police officer was injured.
H. Rap Brown / Associated Press
CAMBRIDGE TODAY
More than 40 years after that incident, Mayor Cleveland Rippons, a white man with blondish hair and a Fu Manchu mustache, sat in a Denny’ s restaurant in Cambridge and talked about what’ s happened that night. And he talked about what hasn’ t happened for blacks in Cambridge since that time.
“ There’ s a tremendous amount of substandard housing out there,” Rippons says, with a hint of a Southern drawl.
Finding jobs is still a problem for those seeking work.“ This area has always been in the top three, never out of the top five, in the unemployment rate in the state,” says Rippons.
According to the 2000 census, the overall unemployment rate in Cambridge is 4.4 percent. But the black unemployment rate of 6.8 percent is almost triple the white rate of 2.4 percent.
Attracting workers to Cambridge is as much a problem as keeping businesses.
Talibah Chikwendu, now the editor of“ The Daily Banner,” remembers when that paper hired its first black reporter. The year was 1996 – nearly three decades after the Kerner Commission recommended that newspapers diversify their staffs.
Chikwendu even remembers who the first black reporter was.“ Me,” she answered when asked. Chikwendu knows how many blacks work at the paper today.
“ Me,” she answers again.
Finding and retaining black reporters is not, Chikwendu emphasized, the fault of the paper’ s management.
“ I have not had African Americans apply,’ Chikwendu said.“ I have beat the bushes. I have contacted journalism schools. Nobody wants to come here.” in their car near the Bel Air, Md., courthouse in which Brown’ s trial was to have been held.
While serving five years in a New York prison for a robbery conviction during the 1970s, Brown converted to Islam and changed his name to Jamil Abdullah al-Amin. In 2002, he was convicted in Georgia of killing one sheriff’ s deputy and serious wounding another.
Abdullah al-Amin was sent to prison for life. •
Some 26 percent of Cambridge’ s black families live below the poverty line, versus 7 percent for white families. The $ 24,000 median income for black households in the city lags behind the $ 30,000 for white families.
Businesses tend to come – and go – in Cambridge. The Phillips Packing Company, for years the main employer in the town, no longer exists. Early in 2007 Icelandic, a frozen seafood company left Cambridge and took more than 400 jobs with it.
Federal courts ordered a redistricting of Cambridge’ s five council districts in 1984. As a result, three of the city’ s five council representatives – called commissioners – are black. But there are no blacks among the five workers at Cambridge’ s tiny city hall.
“ There have been African Americans who’ ve worked there in the past. We just don’ t have any working there today,” the mayor says. •
29