This chapter deals with the complexities of the Dalit and Black movements in India and the United States respectively, and the possibilities of their similarities and solidarities as framed in both academic literature and the popular media.1 Though appealing, such a comparison exaggerates what both movements stood for. To begin with, the positions of the Dalit and Black movements, generally speaking, were divergent. In America, from the 1960s there were radical uprisings among the educated Black youth, who were unfair targets of police harassment and brutality. For the Dalits in India, whose status was that of a subordinate minority and untouchables, any demands they made for equality as enshrined in the Constitution were met with localized violence, either committed against individuals or the Dalit ghettoes. Dalit women were a particularly vulnerable target.
Through media coverage of Black atrocities in the United States, Dalits in India became aware of the situation faced by the descendants of slaves in white-ruled America. Reports in the American media made their way to the larger Indian cities such as Mumbai, where they were picked up by the Dalit literati, who read Time magazine, the New York Times and Newsweek, and discussed the reports with friends in literary circles drawn from diverse castes. What happened in America resonated with Dalits in India. They read of the American state going rogue against Black people in a spate of racial attacks. In one incident, which took place on a Wednesday evening in July 1967, two white police officers dragged a Black man, John William Smith, into their precinct building in the city of Newark, New Jersey. Smith, a taxi driver, had just been arrested for the alleged crime of improperly passing the officers’ car, and was beaten so brutally that he could not walk. Residents of a nearby housing project saw him being dragged inside the precinct, and a rumour was set off that the cops had killed another Black man. A crowd formed and resorted to attacking the police station. For five days, violence tore through the city, with a toll of over two dozen lives. Some called it rioting, others a rebellion.
That was just one flashpoint in what came to be known as “the long, hot summer of 1967”. The United States witnessed over 150 “race riots” that season, with police brutality against Black people a common spark, extending a long lineage of rage—Hough in 1966, Watts in 1965, Harlem in 1964 and 1943, Chicago in 1935 and 1919, and so on. This has been termed a rebellion of the urban class of America, with 1967 the pivotal year. The US president Lyndon B. Johnson, already battling public anger over the invasion of Vietnam and faced with a fresh crisis, formed a committee to answer three questions: “What happened? Why did it happen? What can be done to prevent it from happening again?”
Te Kerner Commission, as part of its work, hired a group of social scientists to bolster its research. Their draft submission to the commission echoed the radical language and ideas of the rising Black Power movement, and came to some alarming conclusions. Under the present course, the researchers wrote, the United States was headed for a full-blown race war, involving “guerrilla warfare of Black youth against white power in the major cities of the United States.” It foretold civil war on the streets, which would turn American cities into “garrisons”.
The only way out of this impending war was a radical programme to tackle the poverty and socio-economic stagnation facing Black communities, to reform the police and other institutions that plainly discriminated against Black people, and to make drastic changes that went far beyond the “token concessions” offered to the community till then. “There is still time”, the researchers added, “for one nation to make a concerted attack on the racism that persists in its midst.” If it did not, “The harvest of racism will be the end of the American dream.”5 The document was entitled The Harvest of Racism.
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