1967 Plainfield riots

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The Plainfield Riot was the second most violent disturbance to occur in New Jersey during the summer of 1967, only the major rioting (1967 Newark riots) in Newark, New Jersey, surpassed it.

Plainfield, New Jersey is located about 18 miles south west of Newark and in 1967 it had a population of 48,000, of which about a third were black.

Two days before the Plainfield riots began, the Newark rioting had broken out (a riot that was still going on as of July 14, 1967), and many communities in northern New Jersey were on edge, Plainfield included.

On the night of Friday, July 14th a fight broke out at a local diner, the White Star. Afterwards about 40 young black men left the diner and marched back to their housing project in the West End section of Plainfield. They vented their anger along the way by smashing store windows and throwing rocks at police cars. When the local police showed up in force, the group dispersed.

On Saturday night trouble started again. Rioting and looting increased and Molotov cocktails were thrown at fire trucks responding to calls. Police from surrounding jurisdictions were called in and the crowds finally dispersed when a heavy rain started to fall early Sunday morning.

On Sunday afternoon several hundred people gathered at a local park to hear the local Director of Human Relations talk about the situation in the city. The Union County, New Jersey Park Police, who had jurisdiction over the park, declared the meeting unlawful and ordered the crowd to disperse. The crowd broke up and reformed in the West End section of Plainfield where widespread rioting started again. The city police were caught off guard and did not respond quickly enough to quell the disorder.

Later that evening a white police officer, John Gleason, was manning a checkpoint when he started to chase a black youth into the ghetto; when he caught up with the young man, he shot and wounded him. When the officer tried to leave the area to get help, he was surrounded by a mob and was beaten, stomped and eventually brutally shot and killed with his own service revolver.

That same night in nearby Middlesex an arms factory was broken into and 46 carbines were stolen. The Plainfield Machine Company was a small manufacturing company that among other things, produced military style M1 carbines for the civilian market. The stolen guns were passed out to the men on the streets of Plainfield that very night. The police were anxious because of the large number of guns now on the streets and in one incident, a local fire station was under gun fire for five hours before New Jersey National Guardsmen, in armored personnel carriers, finally relieved it.

The police tried to arrange a truce and have residents turn in the stolen carbines. Black residents felt that having the guns in the community kept the police at bay and that they now had power over the police. When none of the stolen firearms were retuned, the area was cordoned off and 300 heavily armed New Jersey State Police and National Guardsmen started a house-to-house search for the stolen weapons. After about an hour and a half, with 66 homes searched, the operation was called off. The police felt that since Governor Hughes had declared a State of Emergency, no search warrants were needed.

By July 21st, things had calmed down to the point where National Guard troops and state police could be pulled out of the city.

Dozens of black residents would later file suit against the government claiming that their constitutional rights had been violated during the search for the stolen carbines.

Even several weeks after the riot, the local police and FBI were still looking for the stolen weapons. No arrests had been made in the theft and only a few of the guns had been recovered.

More than 100 people had been arrested for looting and rioting during the disturbance. Officer Gleason was the only person killed during the riot and in December 1968, a jury convicted two people, a man and a woman, of murder in his death. They were both sentenced to life imprisonment. Seven others were acquitted and one case was declared a mistrial because of a deadlocked jury.

[edit] References

The National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders,The Report of The National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, March 1 1968. Superintendent of Documents, U.S. Government Printing Office,Washington, DC.