It has been three years since the 1964 uprising. Whatever lessons Rochester was going to learn should have been learned.
And yet, when Eastman Kodak Co. asked a consultant for a confidential assessment of race relations in the city in the summer of 1967, the conclusion could not have been grimmer.
“Whites’ hatred of blacks is matched by whites’ hatred and fear of blacks,” the report says. “Neither race makes any attempt to control or hide its antipathy. Black resentment centers on the Eastman Kodak Co. as the chief symbol of the ultimate in white power and oppression.”
The 34-page draft report, written under the direction of future U.S. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, it was intended to be a secret document for Kodak executives. It has rarely been cited and has never before been published in full, remaining largely intact in Moynihan’s papers at the Library of Congress.
It offers a surprisingly frank look at racial dynamics at a pivotal moment in Rochester’s history, depicting a city even more divided than in 1964, awash in anger, fear and guns.
“A common black attitude was that whites deserve violence as payment for broken promises about jobs, school desegregation, and housing improvements,” the report said. “The common white attitude was that if the ungrateful black man stepped out of line, he would be shot.”
Click here to read the full preliminary report.
In ‘weekend of agony’, lessons to learn
A revolt or a riot? Cause or result? Inevitable or inexcusable?
No day in Rochester’s 220-year history has generated as much soul-searching and debate as the weekend of July 24-26, 1964, 60 years ago this week. The simmering tension in the city’s black neighborhoods turned into three days of chaos and violence.
Five people died, four of them in a helicopter crash, and almost 900 were arrested. Property damage, mostly to white-owned businesses in black neighborhoods, totaled about $2 million.
White flight, fueled by exclusionary federal subsidies in the suburbs and racist intimidation tactics in the city, was already underway and hardly needed any more fuel. But for generations of white Rochesterians, that hot July weekend became convenient shorthand for a community that was passing through and going to hell.
“The Rochester riots pointed out sharply and fiercely the need to be specific about the race problem in this country,” wrote former Xerox executive Sol Linowitz. “Maybe in our agonizing weekend here, we learned a few things that will help others prevent for themselves what should never have happened to us.”
Eastman Kodak and the city’s largest institutions—the “oligarchic power structure,” as the report puts it—struggled to institute job training programs, some more effective than others. Black residents have recently been organized and represented, both by Franklin Florence’s FIGHT and by more moderate groups such as Action for a Better Community and the Urban League of Rochester.
Community leaders around the world vowed that things were changing for the better.
‘Riot Prediction Machine’
The report was written by an academic named Sol Chaneles, but it came about thanks to personal relationships between Moynihan and Kodak executives.
A Kodak leader, longtime secretary Leonard Zartman, invited Moynihan and his wife to come to Rochester during lilac season for pleasure but also for business. The assignment was a confidential report on the “assimilation of the large number of Negroes who have come to Rochester in recent years” and, in particular, what role Kodak should play in the process.
The job fit perfectly with Moynihan’s aspirations. A respected Washington intellectual and author of an influential 1965 report called “The Negro Family,” he secured the Kodak contract for a pioneering but obscure company called Simulmatics Corp., which sought to use Rochester as a proof of concept for its ambitions. quixotic.
“Scientists at Simulmatics Corporation acted on the proposition that if they could collect enough data about enough people and feed it into a machine, everything might one day be predictable,” wrote Jill Lepore in “If Then ,” your 2020 company history. “(They) helped build the machine in which humanity, in the 21st century, would find itself trapped and tormented.”
The applications in politics, finance and consumer marketing were obvious, but Simulmatics looked even further. In 1967, with racial violence raging across the country, he claimed that advanced computer simulations in his Urban Studies division could predict the exact location and timing of race riots.
The idea was a “Riot Prediction Machine,” in Lepore’s words, and Moynihan intended to take it for a spin in Rochester.
Long hot summer of 1967
A six-person research team was in Rochester from July 15 to 25, 1967, interviewing about 80 people. One secretary, Gaye Anne Himmelsbach, recalled that she spent the entire time locked in a hotel room under constant armed guard by the New York State Police.
The team’s work was qualitative, not quantitative, and yet, after four days, they confidently issued “an unqualified prediction of violence that would occur at around 11 pm on the night of Sunday, July 23.”
The prediction was not particularly bold: that weekend there were riots in dozens of cities across the country, most notably in Detroit, where 43 people were killed in five days. A week earlier, 26 people had died in fighting in Newark.
Moynihan’s team called state police, and troopers helped maintain order over the next few days. There was no riot on July 23, but rather “a night of tension marked by clashes between police and crowds of blacks,” the Democrat and Chronicle reported.
The following night, police killed a black man, Tommie Wright, as he drove toward a barricade on Jefferson Avenue. A subsequent internal investigation exonerated the police.
‘The situation cannot get worse’
Most notable from a historical perspective is the report’s stark picture of Rochester at a critical moment in its history.
Site research leader Peter Shulman recalled being in a room with young black men as they mixed Molotov cocktails.
“What I remember most about walking down the streets (in black neighborhoods) is that none of them were smiling,” Shulman, now 87, said in an interview. “We didn’t meet one happy person the entire time we were there. … I went there without any prejudice, but I left in solidarity with their position.”
The report presents a scathing review of Rochester’s social structure from the perspective of its poor black residents — “the little people,” as Chaneles said they referred to themselves.
“The ‘little people’ view these ghettos, whose physical boundaries are becoming increasingly rigid, as centers of sin whose existence depends largely on Kodak’s implicit or explicit approval,” he wrote. “(They) see the Eastman Kodak Company as the main agent for frustrating the possibilities of human and social development in the ghetto.”
In interviews with white leaders, Simulmatics researchers found attitudes ranging from ignorance to simmering anger. This was particularly true of the Rochester Police Department.
“One white officer interviewed said it is department policy to disregard prostitution and gambling in black areas,” Chaneles wrote. “He stated that senior department officials consider black officers to be suspect; and that high-ranking white men, both Italian and Eastman employees, dictate police policy.”
Tensions were so high, researchers concluded, that more violence was not only inevitable but would actually be beneficial.
“Further riots can, at this point, only have a cathartic effect and will produce periods of breathing space between tragic outbursts,” they wrote. “The situation can’t get any worse.”
Neutralized voltages
Despite the dire tone of the Simulmatics report, Rochester did not see a reprisal for the 1964 uprising for the next 60 years. Does that mean it was wrong?
Not necessarily. Much progress was being made in 1967, particularly at Kodak. That was the year Franklin Florence led a protest at the company’s annual shareholder meeting in New Jersey, commanding national headlines and eventually leading to an agreement on the job creation program. This happened in June 1967, a month before the Simulmatics team arrived in the city.
In a meeting with Kodak executives in May, Moynihan told them his “sympathies lay with FIGHT,” according to an internal memo. “Several times in the conversation I mentioned that (Saul) Alinsky is an honorable man and that he is not doing more than he said he would.”
When Moynihan became convinced in late July that a riot was imminent, he called Governor Nelson Rockefeller, who sent state police.
Shulman said investigators demanded from him the names of men he saw making pipe bombs earlier in the week.
“I told them we never asked the names of these people,” he said. “It would have been stupid to do that. But they didn’t believe me.”
A major riot broke out in Detroit the next day, taking the focus away from Rochester—and reinforcing, perhaps, the view of some of Rochester’s civic and business leaders that racism and civil rights were primarily issues for other cities.
—Justin Murphy is a veteran Democrat and Chronicle reporter and author of “Your children are in great danger: school segregation in Rochester, New York.” Follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/CitizenMurphy or contact him at jmurphy7@gannett.com.
This article originally appeared in the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle: Secret Kodak document reveals new perspectives after 1964 uprising
