Democracy and the black riots: Rethinking the meaning of political violence in democracy

Abstract

The findings of two presidential commissions have dominated the understanding of the Black urban riots of the 1960s and correspondingly the general understanding of the causes of political violence. The Kerner and Eisenhower commissions each explained the causes of the riots in terms of the social science orthodoxy of the time. The riots were seen as violent responses by a community that had experienced persistent and continual frustration as a result of economic deprivation wrought by White racism. The deprivation‐frustration‐aggression model of violence was superimposed as a causal explanation of the riots. Social science and the popular media extolled this as the definitive understanding of the riots. Yet over the past 30 years this model has not explained empirical findings and has fallen from grace, especially among political scientists. Our research shows that even within the context of the commission reports there was evidence of other, but less politically palatable, explanations. In addition, there was the overarching issue of the occurrence of violence in democracies. Riots, like terrorism, more commonly occur within democracies than in non‐democratic governmental systems. We suggest that viewed in this context, the Black urban riots are not a deviant occurrence but part of a common syndrome of violence in democracies. These riots, like others that preceded them, need to be viewed within the historical framework of the role of political violence in democracies and most specifically how democracies respond to political violence.