Police violence in places like Kenosha is nothing new

Many Americans might be surprised to see the latest police shooting and protests happening not in a major urban area, but in Kenosha, Wis. — a small city nestled up against Lake Michigan. But they shouldn't be. In the 1960s, another small Midwestern town, Waterloo, Iowa, experienced such unrest during three successive summers as a result of police violence.

And Waterloo wasn't unique. More than 40% of the "civil disorders" recorded by the Kerner Commission, which investigated the urban rebellions of the summer of 1967, took place in cities with fewer than 100,000 residents. More than half occurred in cities with populations of fewer than 50,000 residents.

Black teenagers threw rocks and smashed windows in Benton Harbor, Mich., in 1966 after police officers responded with force to a peaceful protest over the harassment of Black residents by police. During the nights of unrest that followed, a Black teenager was shot and killed by a White passenger in a car. In Cairo, Ill., the death of a 19-year-old Black man in the city jail sparked four days of riots in 1967. Afterward, the sheriff deputized members of the "White Hats," a White vigilante organization that terrorized Black residents for years.

This long history of protest and disorder in response to police violence in places such as Waterloo, Cairo and Benton Harbor reveals that such issues are not unique to cities, but are part of the fabric of American life in communities coast to coast, especially in the Midwest. Issues of discrimination in policing are not exclusive to cities with large African American communities like Chicago or Detroit, but have been widespread, touching Black Americans' lives everywhere, and will require broad and far-reaching solutions.

In the 1960s, journalists from New York and Washington puzzled over the unrest in Iowa. As the editor of the Waterloo Courier quipped, "We get calls from other newspapers and they all ask, 'What are they doing rioting out there in the cornfields?'"

But such questions depended on the erasure of Black Midwesterners from the region's history. Imagining the Midwest as rural and White required ignoring that Black people have lived and worked in the region and shaped its culture and politics for more than 200 years, including in its far-flung small cities and towns. Dred Scott, an enslaved man who sued for his freedom and launched one of the most significant Supreme Court cases in American history, intensifying the sectional crisis over slavery, resided for a time at Fort Snelling on the Upper Mississippi River in what is today Minnesota.

In the 19th century, Black people settled in communities across the region, seeking the same opportunities as Whites did in places as diverse as Cairo, Ill.; Winona, Minn.; and Muscatine, Iowa. Black "Exodusters" took advantage of the Homestead Act, which offered 160 acres of land to those who promised to farm or otherwise "improve" it, and moved to Kansas to stake their claims. The 1870 census recorded Black people living in every single county in Ohio.

But Black Midwesterners did not only find opportunity in the region, they also met with peril. White violence, including lynching, was endemic. While the Midwest's Black population was relatively evenly geographically dispersed in the 19th century, by the 20th century, White violence had pushed Black people out of small cities and towns across the region and into the relative safety of larger cities. This violence often took place — as new attention to the Tulsa race massacre and the Elaine massacre have exposed — on a massive scale, resulting in the murders of dozens and sometimes hundreds of Black people.

The Great Migration of the 20th century drew millions of Black people out of the Jim Crow South. Even as Midwestern states promised freedom and equal opportunity, they had their own histories of racial segregation and discrimination that were undergirded by violence.

In Waterloo, Black people were drawn to the city for its strong manufacturing base and well-paying blue-collar jobs. Yet owing to discrimination in the real estate market, Black residents lived in racially segregated neighborhoods and sent their children to segregated schools even though they made up only 9% of the city's population in 1970.

And racial discrimination, especially in policing, was a perpetual complaint. As Terry Sallis, who was born and raised in Waterloo, explained of the long-standing tensions between Black residents and law enforcement, "Nothing positive ever transpired between our community and the police." Even Waterloo's mayor admitted in the late 1960s that there were serious problems in the relationship between the city's police force and its Black residents, who organized and advocated for change with little success.

In 1966, Black frustration with policing erupted into mass protests when Eddie Wallace Sallis, a 23-year-old Black man, died in the city jail. City officials claimed that Sallis died by suicide, but many Black residents doubted the story and suspected foul play. As local activist, union leader and NAACP member Anna Mae Weems put it, "How could a man hang himself in jail if he is wearing only jeans?"

Two more summers of unrest followed in Waterloo, with more uprisings erupting after a high school football game in September 1968. Again, it was the arrest of a young Black man that set off a chain reaction. Students witnessing the arrest poured out of the stadium and into the street, where they argued with officers. The police responded with force, beating the Black teenagers with clubs and spraying them with mace. The uprising spread into other neighborhoods, where some damaged property.

The rebellion of young Black people in Waterloo in 1968 did not come out of the blue. It was the culmination of years of empty promises from city leaders and the local human rights commission in response to peaceful demands for change punctuated by the death of Sallis.

But what happened next in Waterloo might surprise you — and shows how durable racist institutions are in American life. After the smoke cleared, statements of support for racial reform emerged from high school teachers and a group of local ministers, who identified the rebellion as the result of "sicknesses long neglected." A grand jury made the unusual move of declining to indict any individual for the riots and instead issuing a condemnation of the entire community for its persistent racism.

Rather than discrediting the demands of Black activists, the unrest of 1968 spurred productive and important conversations among city leaders, school officials and residents about racial discrimination in Waterloo. And some of these conversations led to change. The school board opened an "integration academy" focused on racial justice and eventually adopted a voluntary desegregation plan. In 1969, the city adopted the Black Deputy Program to recruit and train Black officers that would respond to calls in segregated neighborhoods.

But these gains were partial. Students in Waterloo public schools continued to complain about racial discrimination at school, and there was no revolution in local policing. The department hosted an in-service training by the Iowa Civil Rights Commission, but the state agency focused its attention on housing, employment and education — not on policing. Efforts to hire Black officers did not transform the nature of policing on their own. It was only in April — some 52 years later — that Waterloo named its first Black police chief, who promised to train "all officers in de-escalation, procedural justice, and implicit bias."

Waterloo reveals that even in communities that took action after the uprisings of the 1960s, many of the issues that fueled them remain with us today. When a police officer shot Jacob Blake in the back in Kenosha, he ignited a powder keg of frustration and anger over constant violence against Black people in the United States. This history tells us that defusing these frustrations and ending these harms will not be easy, but it remains urgent nonetheless. And it cannot only be those in big cities who concern themselves with this task, but people in small cities, towns and rural areas across America, including places that look very much like Kenosha and Waterloo.

Schumaker is the Edith Kinney Gaylord presidential professor in the department of classics and letters at the University of Oklahoma and author of " Troublemakers: Students' Rights and Racial Justice in the Long 1960s." This piece was written for The Washington Post.