Martin Chambers and the White Hats
Near Tampa Bay, Florida
June eleventh, nineteen sixty-seven. Officer James Calvert of the Tampa Police Department shot nineteen-year-old Martin Chambers in the back while chasing him through the Central Park neighborhood on suspicion of robbing a camera supply warehouse.
Chambers died. The shooting was ruled justifiable.
Four days of civil unrest followed in the streets of Central Park, the neighborhood built on what was left of the Scrub after the interstates arrived. Over a hundred people were arrested. Two million dollars in property was damaged or destroyed. The unrest drew national attention as part of a summer of racial rebellions that swept American cities from Newark to Detroit.
Tampa's response produced something distinctive.
Hillsborough County's sheriff purchased one hundred twenty-five white helmets from an army surplus store. A group of Black community leaders, ministers, and business owners put them on and went into the streets. They were not police deputies. They had no arrest authority. They walked the blocks, talked to residents, monitored gatherings, and worked as intermediaries between the community and the law enforcement agencies that the community did not trust. They became known simply as the white hats.
The model worked in the short term. The white hats helped bring the unrest to an end. Tampa's nineteen sixty-seven unrest was less destructive and shorter than the rebellions in many other American cities that summer, and the white hats are part of the reason historians give for that.
The longer aftermath was more complicated. Several white hat members were later indicted on felony charges unrelated to the riots, which led to the organization being disbanded.
What the white hats represented, for the weeks they operated, was a community's attempt to claim standing in its own crisis: to be the people who kept the peace rather than the people whose anger was the crisis. That distinction matters. It does not appear in most national accounts of the nineteen sixty-seven summer of rebellion.
