Columbia Avenue
28 - 30 August 1964Columbia Avenue, now Cecil B. Moore Avenue, North Philadelphia, Philadelphia County, PA
A police stop at 22nd and Columbia on a Friday night in August 1964, and a false rumour that officers had beaten a pregnant Black woman to death, set off three days that North Philadelphia's main Black commercial street never recovered from.
Columbia Avenue was the commercial spine of Black North Philadelphia - shops, bars, record stores, most of them owned by white proprietors who did not live there. The neighbourhood's relationship with the police department was the ordinary one for a northern city in 1964, which is to say that residents experienced routine stops, routine force and an internal complaints process that went nowhere.
At 9.20 on the evening of 28 August 1964, officers ordered a married couple to move a car stopped at Twenty-Second Street and Columbia Avenue. A scuffle followed, a crowd gathered, and a rumour went through North Philadelphia that the police had beaten a pregnant Black woman to death. It was not true. By then it did not need to be: it was close enough to what people expected that it was believed.
The disorder ran three days. Police Commissioner Howard Leary ordered minimal force and kept the department largely in containment rather than confrontation, a decision that is generally credited with holding the death toll to two where other cities' that decade ran far higher. Six hundred officers were deployed the first night and eighteen hundred by the second. Mayor James H. J. Tate imposed a curfew on 29 August. Over two hundred people were injured taking part and more than a hundred officers were hurt. Seven hundred and twenty-six buildings were affected, and the damage and police overtime together came to $3.2 million.
What happened afterwards is the part that stayed. The businesses on Columbia Avenue were looted and burned, and many of them never reopened; the street's commercial life did not return, and the avenue stood as a line of boarded frontage for decades. Philadelphia, like every other city, treated the three days as the event. The policing that had made the rumour credible was not what got examined.
Two killed, over 200 participants and more than 100 officers injured, nearly 1,000 arrested, 726 buildings affected. The shape is the Columbia Avenue corridor the disorder ran along, drawn indicatively; the avenue was renamed for Cecil B. Moore in 1987.
Sources
- Columbia Avenue RiotEncyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia, Mid-Atlantic Regional Center for the Humanities, Rutgers-Camdenphiladelphiaencyclopedia.orgAlex Elkins. Backs the 9.20 p.m. stop at Twenty-Second and Columbia, the false rumour, two deaths, the injury and arrest figures, 726 buildings affected, $3.2 million, Leary's minimal-force order and Tate's curfew.
- Columbia Avenue RiotsCivil Rights in a Northern City: Philadelphia, Temple University Librariesexhibits.temple.eduDocuments and photographs from Temple's Special Collections on the uprising and the commercial corridor's decline afterwards.