Gender Shift in Black America

The aftereffects of the mass movements of the late 1960s, of sustained racial unrest and the riots of 1967 and 1968 on black urban society are as yet not fully understood. Yet I believe they lie at the root of certain patterns in the experience of the black urban lower class. Urban unrest in the 1960s involved an assault not only on white racial-caste authority but also on normal civil authority; New Jersey’s governor at the time referred to Newark as a “city in open rebellion....