The 1964 Rochester Race Riot, Three Days in July

In the decade after World War Two, Rochester's Black population tripled, rising to more than twenty-five thousand people by the time of the nineteen sixty census. Most had come north following opportunity and following relatives, drawn by the same industries that had made Rochester prosperous. But the city's major employers, Kodak, Bausch and Lomb, Xerox, largely did not hire Black workers for anything but the lowest-paid positions. Housing was segregated by custom and sometimes by covenant. Policing in Black neighborhoods was frequent and often aggressive.

The tension came to a breaking point on the evening of July twenty-fourth, nineteen sixty-four. At a block party on Nassau Street in the Third Ward, Rochester police officers attempted to make an arrest. A crowd pushed back. What followed spread across three nights, July twenty-fourth, twenty-fifth, and twenty-sixth, and touched neighborhoods across the city's northeast side.

By the time it was over, five people were dead, four of them in a helicopter crash during the disturbances. More than three hundred people had been injured and nearly one thousand arrested. Two hundred and four stores were looted or damaged.

In the aftermath, Rochester's established institutions were forced into a reckoning. A coalition of Black civil rights leaders and the Rochester Area Churches invited the community organizer Saul Alinsky to help. With the Reverend Franklin Florence, they formed an organization called FIGHT, Freedom, Integration, God, Honor, Today, which over the following years successfully pressured Eastman Kodak to open hiring to Black workers and to engage with Black community leadership on questions of employment and city governance.