Calvin Hernton in 1966

Calvin Hernton, in the article pictured above, was writing about the insurrections in Watts, Los Angeles in 1966 (here published in British socialist newspaper Peace News during his time in London). He also wrote, brilliantly, about the wider wave of urban insurrections, from the Harlem Rebellion of 1964 through Newark, Watts, Detroit (and Atlanta, Baltimore, Birmingham, Boston, Buffalo, Chicago, Cincinnati, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, New Britain, Rochester, Plainfield, Tampa, Toledo, Washington D.C.) in his 1968 essay 'Dynamite Growing out of their Skulls', which is one of the most important essays of that period about the long hot summers, and which has much to teach about what's changed and not changed since then. And here we are again in June 2020 as anti-blackness is -- once again! -- revealed as the structuring order of a society simultaneously decimated by mass unemployment, by a virus whose effects -- of course! -- are disproportionate, and social, not 'natural', in their effect on those who are not 'the people who think themselves white' or thinks themselves comfortable, safe, middle or upper class, male, who wear that identity like a magic cloak. And a President who encourages neo-Fascist militia to declare open season on 'leftists' and people of colour, who describes resistance as terrorism, and who hides in a bunker when the smell of the smoke reaches his nostrils through the White House walls. (And as, here in the UK, the government here refuses to set a date for the enquiry into disproportionate BAME deaths from COVID due to concerns that this would be a 'bad combination' with the Floyd protests in the US.)

Hernton grew up in the South under American racial apartheid; he lived through the era of McCarthyism, was watched by the FBI, harassed by cops in New York, was in London when Stokely Carmichael was refused re-entry into Britain after the speeches he'd given at the Dialectics of Liberation conference, the same year that Carmichael had his passport confiscated in the States for visiting Cuba. His work in prose and poetry speaks with righteous anger and realistic despair about this situation--in his poems about the Harlem Rebellion or the Birmingham church bombing, in the late poem he wrote for the murdered graffiti artist Michael Stewart. He knew as well as anyone that it was never just about 1966, or 1964, 1965, 1967, 1968. History doesn't move in a straight line from past to present, but, in his words, the past "haunts", "traps" us. Has its own sparks, the fire next time. The 1960s, or LA in 1992, might seem the obvious historical parallel (if parallel is really the right word for the way history moves). But take it further back. Robert Greene II's concise and on-the-money article at Jacobin draws parallels between the Red Summer and what he dubs the current 'Red Spring'. Pandemic, global conflict, racial terror in which the victims and those who resist are labelled 'terrorists', liberals wring their hands over violence against property. How much have the co-ordinates changed since the selection of poems that Claude McKay published in The Liberator in 1919?

And so the sparks of June 2020. As Hernton puts it: "Not even a child should have been surprised".