The riots in Ferguson, Mo., over the shooting of Michael Brown, arrive at a particularly ironic moment?almost 50 years after the Watts riots in the summer of 1965, also spurred by one man?s encounter with law enforcement. That uprising, along with other mass urban insurrections in the 1960s, prompted a raft of riot commissions to examine why these outbreaks had occurred. What?s ironic is that they all came to the same conclusion: The riots were about far more than just the police. (Merlin Chowkwanyun is a Robert Wood Johnson Health & Society Scholar at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.)
Office of Strategic Communication