Races: Trouble Across the Tracks
To the thousands who flock each summer weekend to its white sand beaches and boardwalk carnival rides, Asbury Park, N.J., seems a tidy, if somewhat faded haven of tranquillity. But it is also, like many American small towns, a community where “across the tracks” still has a vivid, invidious meaning. To the east of the Penn Central railroad line, where well-kept lawns sweep toward the Atlantic Ocean, live most of Asbury Park’s 12,500 whites. On the West Side, in a ghetto of frame houses splaying out from Springwood Avenue, live most of Asbury Park’s 8,500 blacks. Last week the tranquillity was shattered by four nights of black riots that began on the West Side but spilled briefly across the tracks to white Asbury Park as well. The toll was 190 injured, 174 arrested and some $4,000,000 in damages to stores and residences.
The trouble began with rock and bottle throwing following an Independence Day dance on the West Side. For two days the window-smashing, fire-bombing and looting were confined to the black neighborhood, leaving it without power and short on food, and turning much of Springwood Avenue into a smoldering ruin. Though the town has a white mayor and a black police chief, efforts to negotiate a truce failed. Angry black teen-agers then led a charge across the Penn Central tracks into the fringe of the white business district. The litany of their grievances was reproachfully familiar: too little urban renewal, too few jobs, inadequate play areas, inadequate communication between black and white leaders. When the unemployed of Asbury Park look to the local welfare officer for help, they find her in the telephone directory under the listing Overseer of the Poor.
Giving a hard, immediate edge to the battle was the behavior of many of the 200-odd New Jersey state troopers called in to quell the rioting, a job some executed with zeal. Ninety-two blacks were wounded by police shotguns and pellet guns. But Asbury Park’s black residents had smashed the town’s complacency. After two days of rioting, but before the white district had been hit, Mayor Joseph F. Mattice had said: “We’re very fortunate it occurred where it did. It didn’t affect our business area.”
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