The Crisis of Insurance and the Insuring of the Crisis: Riot Reinsurance and Redlining in the Aftermath of the 1960s Uprisings

Extract

The fire-ravaged skylines engulfing U.S. cities in the 1960s left such an enduring impression on the nation's historical imagination that they have obscured the far more destructive and more protracted fire wave of the 1970s. Mention the conflagrations that overtook U.S. cities in the second half of the twentieth century to someone born after 1980, and they are likely to summon the long, hot summers of the 1960s that laid waste to Watts, Newark, Detroit, and hundreds of other cities from coast to coast. These were fires born of Black and Puerto Rican outrage over the persistence of institutionalized white supremacy even in the face of a civil rights movement at its heyday. Historians generally describe this era of uprisings as stretching from Birmingham in 1963 to the nationwide uproar following Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination in 1968, or even to the unrest in Camden in 1971. Whether measured in dollars or lives lost, the destruction wrought by these uprisings pales in comparison to the wave of arson-for-profit in the 1970s. In 1967, the most violent year of the uprisings, the number of dead were counted in “the tens” and the insurable losses totaled $75 million. By contrast, throughout the 1970s at least five hundred people died of arson annually in the United States (this number is a low estimate), and by 1980 arson claimed a $15 billion annual toll. Admittedly, these are crude and fraught barometers of historical significance, and by no means do I wish to downplay the implications of the earlier uprisings. Rather, I would like to consider what is at stake for historical memory when stories of Black uprising in the 1960s obfuscate the structural violence inflicted upon Black and brown neighborhoods—primarily by landlords—over the subsequent decade.¹