Lawrence Hamm was just a child when the city he called home erupted in the Newark Rebellion of 1967.
He recalled him and his mother taking shelter in his grandparents’ house, witnessing the National Guard rolling into their community with rifles and tanks. They were unable to leave the house for several days. Broken glass covered the streets, and the smell of burning buildings filled the air.
“We literally watched it every night from our second floor porch,” said Hamm in an interview with New Jersey Urban News. I’ll never forget seeing the soldiers marching up 16th Avenue.”
Hamm would go on to found the People’s Organization for Progress (POP), a grassroots organization dedicated to advancing racial and economic justice in Newark and beyond. This year, POP will honor the lasting significance of the Newark Rebellion, an event that continues to resonate as a pivotal moment in the fight for equality, by holding a commemorative march on July 12.
The march, which starts at noon at the Rebellion Monument on 250 Springfield Avenue, serves as both a tribute to the past and a call to address the ongoing challenges facing the community today.
History of the Rebellion
The Newark Rebellion began on July 12, 1967 after two white police officers, John DeSimone and Vito Pontrelli, pulled over John William Smith, a Black cab driver and aspiring trumpet player.
The officers beat and arrested Smith for a minor traffic offense, with rumors of Smith’s death quickly spreading. This incident of police brutality, which was a long-lasting problem for Newark’s Black community, ignited six days of violent rebellion in the city.
Crowds first gathered outside the Newark Police Station, where Smith was held. Violence and looting soon followed, with New Jersey Governor Richard Hughes declaring a state of emergency and calling in the National Guard and state troopers.
By the end of the six-day rebellion, 26 people were reportedly killed, with 700 others injured and 1,400 arrested. It is also said to have caused $10-$15 million worth of property damage ($96.2-$144.3 million when adjusted for inflation).
The Rebellion was one of over 150 racial uprisings that occurred throughout the country during the “long, hot summer of 1967.” In response, U.S. President Lyndon Johnson established the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, also known as the Kerner Commission, to investigate the causes of these numerous uprisings.
The Commission’s report cited the causes of these rebellions as “pervasive discrimination and segregation in employment, education, and housing,” a massive concentration of impoverished Black citizens in major cities, oppressive and racist police practices, and Black people’s frustrations over unfulfilled expectations from civil rights legislation.
Hamm himself experienced these issues that sparked the Rebellion firsthand while growing up in Newark, having lived in a substandard “cold water flat,” where many other Black residents had to heat their own water. Thus, he said in a statement that the Newark Rebellion was “Black people’s collective response to years of ongoing white racist oppression, and not simply a spontaneous mob riot in response to a single random incident.”
While Hamm described the Rebellion as a “catastrophic upheaval,” he argued that it had a ripple effect that drove both Black and Puerto Rican communities in Newark to unite and combat systemic racial discrimination and gain socio-political power.
This paved the way for Kenneth Gibson to become Newark’s first Black mayor in 1970, which led to Newark having a predominantly Black city council during Gibson’s second term. The mayor even appointed Edward Kerr, Newark’s first Black police director, in 1973.
Inequities Persist
Despite these changes in leadership, police brutality persisted in Newark for decades later. Though Hamm acknowledged the “significant expansion” of the Black middle class and the abolition of apartheid in the U.S. since the Newark Rebellion, he argued that many of the issues that sparked the uprising still haven’t been resolved.
For instance, Hamm said that while the unemployment rate in Newark was 7.3% in 1967, it is still around 7% in the present day. He also argued that this data disguises the Black unemployment rate, which he stated is always twice the general unemployment rate.
“We still have poor-quality education, poor-quality healthcare, high cost of housing, high unemployment, discrimination…job discrimination, housing discrimination, all of those conditions that existed in 1967 still exist today,” said Hamm.
Hamm also argued that the second Trump administration has accelerated and intensified the process of combating Black progress and civil rights in the U.S. by limiting opportunities for Black Americans, particularly with the “Big Beautiful Bill” cutting billions of dollars from Medicaid, the SNAP program, and other essential safety net programs.
Honoring the Legacy
Since all these issues persist 58 years after the Newark Rebellion, POP’s planned march this July 12 is not just as a commemoration of the uprising, but also as a call to action. While the Rebellion helped illuminate the many problems Black communities face in America, he argues legislation must be passed at the federal and state levels to deal with these ongoing issues that led to the uprising in 1967.
“So in those very fundamental areas, health, housing, education, employment, we need significant legislation to make economic progress possible for the majority of people in society and particularly in our urban areas,” Hamm said in an interview, “because, remember, it’s not just Newark we’re talking about, we’re talking about urban America.”
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