THE ROOF IS ON FIRE

Was it racial capitalism that burned the Bronx?

- BY DANIEL IMMERWAHR

An abandoned tenement burns in the South Bronx, in August, 1977, near the peak of an arson wave in the city.

ALAIN LE GARSMEUR/ALAMY; OPPOSITE: PIERRE BUTTIN

Sometimes people say exactly the right thing. Other times, they don't, and we just pretend that they did. When eighteenth-century Parisians clamored for bread, did Marie Antoinette respond, “Let them eat cake”? No, but the line captures the aristocracy’s witlessness. Patrick Henry probably never said “Give me liberty, or give me death,” either.

The second game of the 1977 World Series, at Yankee Stadium, provided another such occasion. It was a time of crushing austerity for New York City; tens of thousands of municipal employees had been laid off, including firefighters. These woes were background to the game, but they flashed into the foreground when a fire in an abandoned elementary school lit up the skies just blocks away. “Ladies and gentlemen,” the announcer Howard Cosell famously but never actually said, “the Bronx is burning.”

Indeed, it was. “It seemed like just every second there was a fire,”Darney (K-Born) Rivers, a local rapper, later recalled. “I’m talking about every block you went on.” Families kept suitcases by the door; children were told to wear shoes to bed.

To some, this was a tragic turn in the country’s racial drama. White people left cities for the suburbs, taking jobs and tax revenues with them. Black people, trapped in neighborhoods that felt increasingly like holding pens, revolted. The Watts uprising of 1965, in Los Angeles, incinerated hundreds of buildings. The fires continued. The historian Elizabeth Hinton, in “America on Fire” (2021), counts 1,949 urban insurgencies between May, 1968, and December, 1972.