Juan Williams, who was booted off of NPR for being politically incorrect, has an excellent article on the potential riot:
http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2014/11/14/are-liberal-news-outlets-begging-for-race-riot-in-ferguson/"
Are liberal news outlets begging for a race riot in Ferguson?"
"Why is so much of liberal cable news begging for a race riot in Ferguson, Missouri?
Riots create chaos and disorder in black communities like Ferguson. They threaten the public safety of black families, drive down real estate prices in black neighborhoods and hurt the trade of black-owned businesses in the area.
We saw this with the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles in 1992. During the LA Riots, 50 people were killed, hundreds more injured and millions of dollars of property destroyed in the black community. Let me repeat, black people did not profit from riots.
If something good is to come out of the Ferguson shooting it will come from the ballot box not from a violent clash with police officers.Cities from Washington, D.C. to Detroit and L.A. can tell you that rioting in the 1960s is still hurting them today. Rioting only devastates communities. It even pushed out the black middle class.
Now, it is true that television networks profit from coverage of riots. So do extremist voices, often from out of town; suddenly people making threats and shouting vile things are in demand for interviews because they are elevated to the status of experts on the black experience. They certainly profit from racial chaos and violence and now they are looking to score again. ..."
An excellent article by John McWhorter was written in 2005:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/13/AR2005081300103.html" In comparison with the polite sleeve-tugging and forms of nonviolent protest typical of the earlier civil rights generation, the sea change in 1965 may seem at first glance to have been an overdue response to the injustice that black America had endured for so long. But after researching the riot and the policies established in its aftermath, I have come to a different conclusion.
In teaching poor blacks that picturesque battle poses were an "authentic" substitute for constructive intentions, the "Burn, Baby, Burn" ethos ultimately did more harm than good to a people who had already been through more than enough.The eternal question about the riots has been: Why did they happen just then? Leaders like Martin Luther King were baffled about this at the time, and the question is still relevant to assessing the black condition. In 1965, black Americans had been dealing with the short end of the stick for almost 400 years. If black American history from the early 1600s to 2005 could be condensed to 24 hours, then these riots took place at 10 p.m. Why not before?
The Watts riot began when white police officers stopped an intoxicated black driver in South Central Los Angeles. He resisted arrest and was forcibly subdued. A rumor quickly spread that the officers had beaten a pregnant black woman, and a growing mob started throwing rocks and bottles at the cops. The incident snowballed into a five-day conflagration, with blacks destroying a thousand businesses. Thirty-four people died, more than 1,000 were hospitalized and nearly 4,000 were arrested.
This was the first episode in a series of "long hot summers" in the late '60s, when blacks went on to riot and loot in one city after another. The Detroit rendition two years later was especially horrific, with 43 deaths, more than 7,200 arrests, and about 2,500 stores trashed.
...
As for Watts, just the year before the riots, the National Urban League had rated Los Angeles the best city in the nation for blacks to live in. Several studies have shown no correlation between the destructiveness of the black-led riots in a given city and conditions for blacks there....
In general, black America had been "fed up" for centuries before 1965. A useful black history must identify a different factor that sparked the events in Watts and across the land. This factor was a new mood. Only in the 1960s did a significant number of blacks start treating rebellion for its own sake -- rebellion as performance, with no plan of action behind it -- as political activism.
This did not come from nowhere, to be sure -- and where it came from was whites. In the '60s, it became a hallmark of moral sophistication among whites to reject establishment mores, culminating in the counterculture movement.But political rebellion always leaves in its wake people who are moved more by the sheer theatrics of acting up than by the actual goals of the protest. At the University of California at Berkeley in 1964, for example, the Free Speech Movement rose up against indefensible suppression of students' speaking truth to power. But on the same campus the following year, a new bunch started the "Filthy Speech Movement," based on emblazoning curse words on placards and watching the suits squirm. It was rebellion for rebellion's sake.
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That, instead, was the urban welfare state that was in large part the product of the model of high-pitched, menacing protest that had now been established.
That model was quickly taken up by the National Welfare Rights Organization the year after Watts.
As has been documented in many studies, Columbia University professors Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven declared to the press and beyond that poor blacks would be better off seeking welfare payments than working in low-level jobs."
The article goes on to say much more, and explains a lot about how today's conditions, even worse than in 2005, arose.
