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Malcolm McLaughlin, The Long, Hot Summer of 1967: Urban Rebellion in America (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2014, £60.00). Pp. xiii + 227. isbn 978 1 1372 6962 1.

The brutal killing of Michael Brown in the formerly obscure Missouri city of Ferguson in August  offers proof – as if any were needed – that the racial divide remains a chasm in the United States. Among its most horrifying features was the image of scores of protesters holding their hands in the air chanting “don’t shoot,” while SWAT teams paraded caches of weaponry more appropriate to a warzone. The widespread protesting and violence that erupted in the wake of Brown’s death also offered uncomfortable echoes of the so-called long, hot summer of , when urban upheavals threatened to consume the United States. Those who are wishing to delve further into the history of that summer will find Malcolm McLaughlin’s The Long Hot Summer of  illuminating and sobering. McLaughlin’s study is not merely a chronicle of the urban unrest but an important attempt to place the protests and the federal response they produced in a social and intellectual context. Its prime focus is the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, also known as the Kerner Commission, which was established by the Johnson administration to evaluate the meaning of the recent disturbances. McLaughlin’s intellectual history of the commission and its report is particularly illuminating, largely through the emphasis it places on a suppressed report entitled “The Harvest of American Racism” which circulated among the commission’s members. This was a far more radical document than the eventual Kerner Report, and while McLaughlin accepts that its prescription was perhaps overwrought, its suppression was clearly also regrettable. The Long, Hot Summer then devotes successive chapters to the events of the summer itself before revealing how these events assisted Stokely Carmichael’s and H. Rap Brown’s attempts to define black power. He closes the book with an evaluation of the summer’s legacy, as played out in the response to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s proposed Poor People’s Campaign. McLaughlin’s argument is clear and forceful: the Kerner Commission was hobbled by a failure to investigate the “problems of power and democracy” (xi) and the Great Society liberals were mistaken in turning to the police to quell the tension. The book is at its best when detailing the confusion of the political establishment when faced with the task of attempting to understand the rebellions. This bewilderment, McLaughlin suggests, derives from their simple inability to question the ideological foundations of modern capitalism. McLaughlin maintains that the advocates of the Great Society had too much faith in capitalism’s ability to address the multifarious needs of the poor and that they failed to understand that the American economy needed its own reconstruction. While the liberals might have correctly identified many of the problems and might have been right to allocate considerable funds to alleviate these problems, their failure to understand or even listen to the people they aimed to help constituted a failure of democracy. Elitism, he argues, was the fundamental problem, abetted by the report’s insistence that the uprisings were a consequence of urban poverty. Ultimately,