Two officers interviewed “asserted that they cannot recall in their police careers a riot, near riot, or a massive gang fight involving local youth.” They had not foreseen the events of May 30, 1965, known in the papers as the “Liberty Park Riot.” Police and protesters in motion. In December, the Salt Lake Tribune observed that “the riot is virtually unknown to Salt Lake Police and Salt Lake Sheriff’s Deputies.” The term occasionally appeared in the papers to describe rowdy crowds, but fistfights and “unruly fun” had been “wrongly classified” as riots by overzealous observers. Of course, in 1964, there were no signs that riots would soon occur in Salt Lake-not about race or any other matters. Flamm has noted, with the 1964 riots, “The image of the black rioter now joined the symbol of the black criminal, which had deep roots in American history together, they served as both the real and imagined basis of white anxiety.” An editorial in the Ogden Standard-Examiner declared the nation’s “biggest problem right now is finding a way to curtail the racial riots that are tearing city after city.” Importantly for the next year’s rumors, there were already claims that the riots had been instigated by the two groups who were allegedly planning the 1965 race riot, Black Muslims and communists.
They ended with large scale arrests, property damage, and some loss of life. They read of the riots in New York City, Rochester, Philadelphia, Chicago, and other eastern cities which typically began in protest to “alleged” acts of police brutality and then erupted into nights that included looting, throwing projectiles, and physical confrontations with police. While the Watts riots were the immediate precursor to September’s riot rumors, Utahns had been aware of what the papers had termed race riots sweeping through the nation’s cities in the summer of 1964.
Second, Quinn pointed to concern throughout major cities of the West after the six days long Los Angeles’ Watts riots of August 1965. In March, 300 demonstrators protested in front of the Church Administration Building in an effort to persuade the church to actively support civil rights legislation.
The Church of Jesus Christ faced criticism from the NAACP as well. While some church leaders expressed their support for civil rights, others condemned the movement as a communist front. First, Quinn pointed to tensions between the Church of Jesus Christ and the civil rights movement. Michael Quinn wrote about this moment as part of his study of Ezra Taft Benson and politics, he emphasized two factors that paved the way for the rumors becoming widespread throughout the region. In this essay, I look at the broader context of race and riots in Utah to better explain why these rumors were so pervasive in September 1965.
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four different encampments of Berkeley ‘agitators’ had set themselves up around the city.” Another variant of the rumor held that “2,000 professional demonstrators and Black Muslims will be imported to this area under NAACP sponsorship.” Last week, I wrote a short essay comparing the race riot fears to more recent Utah-based rumors circling around the Black Lives Matters protests. “According to different versions, 17 Bombs are missing from Hill Air Force, dynamite has been procured, hotels and motels are booked for the weekend, all plane flights from Los Angeles to Salt Lake are chartered by ‘Watts Negroes,’ a Negro man bought 40 rifles from a downtown sporting goods store, and 3500 ‘transient Negroes’ have already arrived in Salt Lake.” “Martin Luther King had taken a room in the Hotel Utah. A student writer at University of Utah’s Daily Utah Chronicle summarized the rumors. In September 1965, many people in northern Utah were convinced that the NAACP had planned a “riot” for the following month’s general conference of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.