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Built with great hopes in 1949, Hanover Houses became a symbol of everything wrong with public housing before finally being torn down in 1982.

Sidebar: Can it happen again?

Has Rochester conquered the problems that led to the violence of the summer of '64? Sadly, despite much progress in societal attitudes, the cup still seems half empty to many.

In the last 30 years, Rochester's black population has more than doubled to over 60,000, making upalmost a third of the city. African Americans' growing political power is perhaps best symbolized by the election last fall of William Johnson, a former Urban League president, as the city's first black mayor.

Yet, as black educator David Anderson pointed out, “African Americans are still most at risk for unemployment, inadequate schooling and public health menaces like lead poisoning derived from substandard housing.”

Despite millions of government dollars poured into public housing, the results have been mixed. Critics charge that much of the black housing stock was unnecessarily destroyed by urban renewal bulldozers, only to be replaced by expensive developments beyond the reach of most blacks.

Although the business community, after initial resistance, did open some doors to black employment, there is a growing class of underemployed, untrained black youths. “Despite the mandates of law, equal access to employment opportunities still remains a distant dream,” observed Moses Gilbert, director of the Montgomery Neighborhood Center.

The statistics back up that claim. Young black adults between the ages of 16-24 have an unemployment rate as high as 35 per cent, more than twice that of their white counterparts.

Jobs available to blacks tend to be low in prestige and income. This explains why the median income for black households lags more than 1/3 behind whites, and almost three times as many blacks are living below the poverty level.

Conditions like these are eerily similar to those that prevailed 30 years ago. Can 1964 happen again? Black leaders believe it can, if problems continue to be ignored. They point out that, while rebellions may help draw attention, the destruction they wreak is a high price to pay. Many of the neighborhood businesses destroyed by looting in 1964 never returned.

As the late James McCuller, executive director of Action for a Better Community, said, “Another riot won't get us power, won't get us a more sophisticated organizational structure, won't get us more businesses, or a better educational system. Riots don't generate these things. A riot is a one way street–a dead end street."

Much of the information for this article was taken from a series written by James Goodman and Jim Meyers published in the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle on the 20th anniversary of Rochester's 1964 rebellion. Corrin Strong is the Publisher of Genesee Country Magazine