Modern Era · North America · Politics

1964

Harlem riots

August 28, 1964

After an off-duty white police officer shot a fifteen-year-old Black boy in Harlem, six nights of rioting swept the neighborhood. One died, over a hundred were injured, five hundred arrested. It was the first of a long series of urban uprisings that would sweep American cities through the mid-1960s, exposing the limits of civil-rights legislation.