Two weeks after Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, policeman Thomas Gilligan shot dead 15-year-old James Powell in Harlem. Powell had been either (as police said) attacking Gilligan with a knife or (as Powell’s friends said) caught up in a mostly peaceful protest of a landlord’s anti-loitering policies. The neighborhood exploded in riots, which lasted for six nights, one of which saw 200 police and civilians hospitalized. No sooner had they ended than Rochester, New York, blew up. Jersey City, Philadelphia, and Dixmoor, Illinois, followed.
