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The History of Segregation and Structural Racism in Rochester for Kids

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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: The danger of a single story

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Our lives, our cultures, are composed of many overlapping stories. Novelist Chimamanda Adichie tells the story of how she found her authentic cultural voice -- and warns that if we hear only a single story about another person or country, we risk a critical misunderstanding.

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The Implicit Bias In Photojournalism - Dame Magazine

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In one of her landmark TED Talks, the Nigerian author, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie speaks of “The Danger of a Single Story.” The single story, she explains, is the overarching narrative told about people that robs stories of their intrinsic nuances and complexities, and as a consequence can deny a grou…

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ROCHESTER, N.Y. (WROC) - In the aftermath of Daniel Prude's death, a Black Lives Matter protest is underway in downtown Rochester.

A peaceful protest began at Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Park at Manhattan Square in downtown Rochester at 6:30 p.m. Friday.

After a few hours of speeches and prayer, including a speech from Daniel Prude's brother, Joe Prude, the group of more than 1,000 demonstrators began a march through the city - heading down East Avenue, to Alexander Street, through residential areas of Park Avenue, to Monroe Avenue, and then down Chestnut Street. They chanted "Daniel Prude" often throughout the march.

When the protesters turned left down Court Street, they were met by a large police presence. Officers on megaphones announced "Rochester police has deemed this an unlawful assembly" and began launching tear gas into the crowd.

Officers said demonstrators would be arrested if they stayed, yet many did while others dispersed.

Daniel Prude, a 41-year-old Black man from Chicago, died after an encounter with Rochester police back in March, but news of the incident just came to light Wednesday, and now the case is being investigated by the New York State Attorney General's Office.

The autopsy report from the Monroe County Medical Examiner's Office ruled the death of Prude a homicide. The report says Prude's cause of death includes "complications of asphyxia in the setting of physical restraint." The report also showed that Prude also had a small amount of PCP in his system at the time of his death, which could explain his erratic behavior.

Seven Rochester police officers have been suspended with pay in connection to the incident.

Protests have been ongoing in Rochester since the news broke Wednesday. This page will serve to document those protests.

Police use of spit hoods scrutinized after Daniel Prude's death in Rochester

Depew Police say Daniel Prude was asked to leave Amtrak train on March 22, day before police encounter

Rochester police union: Chief's office said 'no concern of actions' by officers at Daniel Prude scene

Mental health experts: Prude needed help, not police

8 arrested, 2 officers injured, pepper spray deployed during Daniel Prude protest in Rochester

Mayor Lovely Warren: RPD Chief told me Daniel Prude died from an apparent drug overdose

Daniel Prude's brother: 'He didn't have history of mental health issues'

Gov. Cuomo on Daniel Prude death: 'What I saw was deeply disturbing and I demand answers'

7 Rochester police officers involved in Daniel Prude death suspended with pay

Daniel Prude, Black man killed by Rochester police, remembered as loving

Rochester civil rights groups demand firing, prosecution of officers involved in Daniel Prude's death

Protests in Rochester after bodycam video surfaces in death of Daniel Prude

Daniel Prude's family demands justice for 'cold-blooded murder'

Protest in Rochester sparks after news of Daniel Prude's death

Autopsy report: Daniel Prude death ruled a homicide, died from asphyxia due to 'physical restraint'

9 arrested in Rochester during protest at Public Safety Building over Daniel Prude's death

WATCH: Footage of encounter between Daniel Prude and Rochester police officers before his death

Daniel Prude's death, police encounter caught on body camera sparks NY AG investigation, protests in Rochester

Check back with News 8 WROC as we will continue to update this developing story.

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Rochester police, Black Lives Matter protesters clash downtown at Daniel Prude demonstration

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A peaceful protest began at Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Park at Manhattan Square in downtown Rochester at 6:30 p.m. Friday. After a few hours of speeches and prayer, including a speech from Daniel Prude's brother, Joe Prude, the group of hundreds began a march through the city - heading down East Avenue, to Alexander Street, to Monroe Avenue, down Chestnut Street.

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After more than 100 people were arrested in a flurry of nationwide protests Friday night, police departments were preparing for another round of demonstrations Saturday demanding justice after the shootings this week of black men by cops.

Police arrested 74 people at a Black Lives Matter rally in Rochester, New York, and 30 were booked and charged during a protest in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, which remains on edge after 37-year-old Alton Sterling was fatally shot by police early Tuesday.

The Rochester demonstration was one of many held in the wake of Sterling's death and the shooting of Philando Castile, 32, in suburban Minneapolis. The protest came less than 24 hours after another one in Dallas, where a sniper killed five officers.

Officials said they had made attempts to communicate with organizers and thought the protest was ending before the arrests were made.

"We actually started demobilizing officers and ... arranging for some officers to be in the area just to keep an eye on things," Rochester Police Chief Michael Ciminelli said at a news conference early Saturday.

Officers wore riot gear "later on" and then the crowd began to surround them and throw rocks, he said.

"At this point ... there were 74 arrests for disorderly conduct. There were also two charges for resisting arrest," he said. The crowd numbered more than 400 people, he added.

At the same briefing, Rochester Mayor Lovely Warren said the situation had "escalated a little bit" but police did not have to use any pepper spray, batons or "deploy any weapons, any tasers."

Two journalists were also mistakenly arrested.

"I apologize for that. They were there trying to do their job to cover this event," Ciminelli added. Warren also apologized to the journalists.

Nobody was injured during the night, Ciminelli said without going into detail about the circumstances around the detentions.

The 74 arrests made it "difficult for us to break down each individual one," he added.

In spite of the number of detentions, Ciminelli said the department "didn't blindly make arrests."

Earlier, Ciminelli said, he would have preferred not to have the rally in the city on Friday, a day after the Dallas massacre. However, he said, if people wanted to gather and voice their concerns, "we will protect them in doing so."

In Baton Rouge, 30 people were arrested, mostly for obstructing a highway and inciting to riot, officials said.

At one point, an officer pulled his handgun on protesters in an incident caught on video.

Baton Rouge Lt. Johnny Dunham told NBC News that the footage is being reviewed.

"It's difficult to tell why the officer pulled his weapon. We are working to identify this officer so we can better understand the reason he might have done this," Dunham said. "After the Dallas murder of five officers at a protest the night before officers are very cautious and on the lookout for any threat. Tensions were very high last night on both sides. But in the end cooler heads prevailed."

Rashad Rusk, 23, said the protesters intended to stay peaceful, but he vowed the protests won't stop until the two officers accused in Alton Sterling's death are charged with murder.

Friday's protests around the country Friday shut down traffic at times but were reportedly peaceful:
Arkansas
About 300 people gathered in front of the state Capitol to seek solutions to racial strife, which Little Rock knows too well.

The pastor of the Mount Pleasant Baptist Church in North Little Rock said Friday everyone should be working to end the nation's unsettled time.

"The question remains, 'When will enough be enough?'" Earl Graham Jr. asked.

The crowd chanted the question back to him.

Little Rock was the scene of one of the nation's first desegregation battles in 1957, when President Dwight D. Eisenhower sent troops into the city to escort nine black children into Central High School.
Arizona
Freeway ramps were closed and pepper spray and tear gas were used during a protest in downtown Phoenix.

Police deployed the deterrents as demonstrators moved toward a freeway.

The Arizona Department of Transportation tweeted that multiple Interstate 10 ramps were closed.

About 1,000 people chanted "black lives matter" and "hands up, don't shoot" as they marched.

The few dozen officers initially escorting marchers mostly wore plain clothes.

Later, officers wore uniforms and riot gear.

Minor scuffles broke out when a man wearing a "Make America Great Again" T-shirt and holding a Donald Trump campaign sign interrupted the protest. Police pulled the man aside to let the marchers continue.
California
Rappers Snoop Dogg and The Game led a peaceful march to Los Angeles police headquarters, where they met with the mayor and police chief and urged improved relations between authorities and minority communities.

In San Francisco, about 2,000 protesters marched across downtown to a rally outside City Hall under a huge banner that read, "Stop the Racist Police Terror in the U.S." An organizer urged the crowd to remain peaceful.

"Our anger must be controlled and strategic," Lawrence Shine said. "Love will overcome hate."

In Sacramento, guards closed the Capitol early in expectation of a protest Friday evening. Several dozen demonstrators marched around the Capitol carrying posters demanding justice for black men killed by police across the country.
Colorado
Black Lives Matter supporters said they plan to continue a sit-in in Denver in response to the police shootings of black men in Minnesota and Louisiana through Tuesday for a total of 135 hours. That's an hour for each of the black people they say have been killed by police across the country this year.

The gathering, across from the City and County Building, began Thursday afternoon, several hours before police officers were killed in Dallas.

People have been dropping off food and water for those camped out on chairs and blankets in Civic Center Park.
Georgia
About 10,000 people flooded the streets of downtown Atlanta to protest recent police shootings of African-Americans.

Marchers brought traffic to a standstill downtown after gathering at the National Center for Civil and Human Rights near Centennial Olympic Park. Drivers in cars honked their horns as protesters holding signs and chanting "hands up, don't shoot" streamed beside them.

Police Chief George Turner and Democratic Mayor Kasim Reed urged protesters to cooperate with law enforcement. The march appeared peaceful.

The Georgia State Patrol said three people were arrested.
Illinois
Members of Chicago's Black Lives Matter movement and other groups played dead outside President Barack Obama's home in an effort to push the president to act on the violence occurring between police officers and black people.

Activist Jedidiah Brown said there is more the president can do than just speak about the violence.

In another demonstration, activist priest the Rev. Michael Pfleger and actor-comedian Nick Cannon led 100 people through the city's violence-plagued Auburn-Gresham neighborhood.

"It's very apparent that we're all in pain and we're frustrated," Cannon said.
Maryland
Baltimore police arrested four people overnight as demonstrators marched from the Inner Harbor to police headquarters and held a sit-in, block traffic.

Those arrested would not move when ordered to, reported NBC affiliate WBAL.

"Outside of that, the protesters have been peaceful and the protest organizers have been helpful," police spokesman Jeremy Silbert said in a statement.
Massachusetts
Religious leaders gathered at an interfaith service in Boston to pray for an end to the racially tinged violence racking the nation.

Nancy Taylor, senior pastor of Old South Church, told the gathering she was weary of the mounting death toll.

"I'm here to say that I'm tired of praying," she said. "Tired of praying over dead bodies, the young dead. Sick and tired of praying over those killed by gun violence."

The Rev. Laura Everett, of the Massachusetts Council of Churches, called on people "to do the work of dismantling the systemic racism that pervades our American society."
Michigan
A peaceful protest against police brutality drew more than 1,000 people to Campus Martius Park in Detroit.

Nickell Young, 25, a black student at Central Michigan University, said she wasn't surprised by the fatal attacks on police officers in Dallas.

"They put on the uniform, and that represents brutality," she said. "The police who say they are good and they are not speaking up" against the officers who violate the rights of blacks.
New York
In addition to the protests in Rochester, about 300 people rallied in New York City Friday night.

The protesters started in Manhattan's Union Square Friday night, chanting "hands up, don't shoot" and "no justice, no peace."

The protesters then separated - one group marched across a Bridge while another marched through Grand Central Terminal, chanting "black lives matter."

The protesters had signs that said "Black Lives Matter," similar to those who marched the night before, but some signs read: "We mourn for Dallas too."
Pennsylvania
Pittsburgh's police chief walked along with protesters at an activist march downtown on Friday and said it was peaceful.

Organizers billed the march as a protest against "growing inequality and a toxic atmosphere of hate." Police Chief Cameron McLay shook marchers' hands and chatted with them.

In Philadelphia, about 150 people marched for the third consecutive night to protest the deadly shootings of black men by police in Louisiana and Minnesota.

The demonstrators, ranging from young children to seniors who recalled marches by civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., held signs and chanted.
Washington, D.C.
A few dozen people rallied peacefully outside the U.S. Department of Justice headquarters, holding candles and quietly singing "We Shall Not Be Moved" amid a heavy local and federal police presence.

Howard University student George Wyche, who's from Houston, said he was worn out emotionally from the racially tinged violence of this week. He said he believes there are no easy answers to the tensions plaguing the country.

"It's a time for belief in the greater good of humanity," Wyche said.

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More Than 100 Arrested at Black Lives Matter Protests

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After more than 100 people were arrested in a flurry of nationwide protests Friday night, police departments were preparing for another round of demonstrations Saturday demanding justice after the shootings this week of black men by cops.

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The uprising and violence over the past weekend in Rochester and across the nation are reminding some people about the 1964 Race Riots in the city of Rochester.

The filmmaker of "July '64" says what caused the 1964 riots was very similar to what led to violence this past week in Rochester and across the nation.

"It had everything to do with pent up anxiety around issues of education, employment, healthcare and aggressive police tactics in Rochester, New York," said Carvin Eison, the filmmaker of "July '64."

What You Need To Know

Filmmaker of "July '64" draws parallels between violence today in Rochester and in 1964 Race Riots

He says riots and unrest this weekend are a result of racial issues that have reached a boiling point

Man who lived through the '64 riots says he doesn't agree with the looting today

He says people need to vote for change and police recuitment and training needs reform

Walter Cooper, who lived through the 1964 Race Riots in Rochester said, "The police department had the habit of bringing the K-9 dogs around as if trouble was starting, but it was an instrument of actually to bring fear into the lives of the kids."

The 1964 Race Riot, or "Uprising" as some called it, started at a street dance after police were called on a man that had too much to drink. Police brought police dogs and arrested the man during the incident.

Cooper said, "people were infuriated because the K-9's had been a symbol of hatred in the community, so they set one car on fire and the police chief, he was lucky to escape with his life."

The filmmaker of "July '64" says riots and unrest this weekend are a result of racial issues that have reached a boiling point for people throughout the country.

"When you add it all up, the open air, wholesale killing of black men and women has been going on for a long time, and people are saying it's enough, it's time to stop this now," said Eison.

The filmmaker does not agree with the looting that happened in Rochester and believes people should vote, and get involved in the community to force change. Walter Cooper believes change should also happen with police recruiting and training.

"The police has to go into a community as its servant, not as its master, public service, you're a servant to the people, to the public, not a master to maintain the status quo of racism," said Cooper.

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Comparing the Current Violence in Rochester to the Race Riots of 1964

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The uprising and violence over the past weekend in Rochester and across the nation are reminding some people about the 1964 Race Riots in the city of Rochester. The filmmaker of "July '64" says what caused the 1964 riots was very similar to what led to violence this past week in Rochester and across the nation.

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Compare to articles from '64

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The riots began during a party on Nassau Street%2C near Joseph Avenue%2C on July 24%2C 1964

5 people were killed and 350 people were injured during the riots

450 state troopers and 1%2C500 National Guard troops came in to restore order

The city began returning to normal by July 27%2C and by Aug. 2-3%2C troopers and National Guard units left town

Roberta Abbott Buckle knew something had gone terribly wrong when, on July 26, 1964, she heard on the radio that a helicopter had crashed carrying a Monroe County official.

That official, Col. Robert Abbott, was Buckle's father, a decorated veteran of the Korean War who had gone on to become director of civil defense for the county. He had been surveying a part of Rochester - the Corn Hill area - torn up by rioting the night before when the helicopter plummeted because of pilot error.

The pilot and two men in a house on Clarissa Street died from the fire that engulfed the helicopter and house. Abbott, who was eventually pulled out of the helicopter by two state troopers, died a month later from an infection caused by the burns.

His death left Buckle with a feeling of deep resentment.

"I had a good deal of racism in me," said Buckle, who is now 68 and lives in Penfield.

But all that changed seven years after the crash when Buckle was working as a research assistant in the county's public information office. An African-American legislator from the city, Bill Smith, asked Buckle if she was Abbott's daughter and then said: "I tried to pull him out of the helicopter but the flames were too hot."

Smith's comments took Buckle by surprise and immediately caused her to put her resentment behind her, she said. "I buried everything, then and there," she said. "I started to try to understand what caused the riots."
Racial realities
For whites as well as African-Americans, issues of race and racial attitudes surfaced in a variety of ways as a result of the three days of rioting that gripped the Rochester community 50 years ago, and continue to resonate today.

The unrest was sparked by an arrest at a street party off Joseph Avenue, during the late evening hours of July 24, 1964.

Violence spread up and down the Joseph Avenue area. Before the night was over Rochester Police Chief William Lombard's car was overturned on Joseph near Kelly Street and many stores on Joseph were trashed.

The next day City Manager Porter Homer declared a state of emergency, with a curfew going into effect at 8 p.m.

Rioting nonetheless broke out across town - in the Corn Hill area in southwest Rochester -and ended on the third day, with 450 state troopers and 1,500 National Guardsman occupying the city.

Almost 900 arrests were made, with nearly 250 stores looted. Five people died - including four from the helicopter crash- and about 350 people were injured.

The frustrations were largely vented by Rochester's growing African-American community, which had tripled in size during the 1950s, from 7,845 to 23,586 in 1960, and continued to grow to more than 32,000 in 1964.

Many had come from the South - fleeing racism and hoping for a better life.

But a better life was hard to realize, with new arrivals finding dilapidated housing, high unemployment, prejudice and despair. In 1964, unemployment for blacks in Monroe County was over 16 percent. For whites it was 2.5 percent.

A report by a state Commission Against Discrimination at the time said that for the African-American population, Rochester was "sitting on a pressure cooker whose relief valve has long been choked."

"The riots woke a lot of people up to the problems of the city - and the problems between the races," said Connie Mitchell, who lived in the Corn Hill area and in 1961 became the first African-American woman elected to the County Legislature, then called the Board of Supervisors.

Rochester's riots came a week after Harlem - the heart of the African-American community in New York City - erupted in violence. The Rochester riots garnered front-page headlines across the country.

The struggle for equality that the Civil Rights movement brought to the South took a different turn in the North.

"Young African-Americans in the North were much less willing to listen to the message of Dr. King. The success of the civil rights movement in the South raised expectations, but blacks in the North didn't see these changes. Prejudice limited their opportunities," said Michael W. Flamm, who teaches at Ohio Wesleyan University and has written a new book about the Harlem riot.

Almost every riot in the 1960s, Flamm noted, began with a police incident that spun out of control.

In the years that followed, riots occurred in dozens of cities, prompting President Lyndon Johnson, in 1967, to appoint a commission that, in its Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, concluded: "Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white - separate and unequal."

Political leaders did not expect Rochester to be a tinderbox for racial unrest. City spokesman Arthur Deutsch, in a blistering telegram to Newsweek magazine in response to its "Rage in Rochester" headline, said: "This city has made more progress in helping minority groups than any other."

While that might have been the perception, the reality was different.

Walter Cooper, who moved to Rochester as a graduate student in chemistry at the University of Rochester, said that in 1954 he was turned down 69 times before he could find an apartment - with some telling him to his face that they did not "rent to Negroes."

"I was taken aback. I just didn't expect this magnitude of racism in housing," said Cooper, who with his wife and child found an apartment in a house on South Plymouth Avenue, part of what was known as the Third Ward.

That area, based in Corn Hill, and the neighborhood surrounding Joseph Avenue in northeast Rochester were where many of the new arrivals settled.

Being from an integrated neighborhood in Pennsylvania, Cooper did not expect to encounter the kind of discrimination he found in Rochester.

Cooper, who went on to become a scientist at the Eastman Kodak Co., was active in the local NAACP and involved in voter registration.

Similar was the experience of David A. Anderson, who had moved to Rochester in 1956 to attend Rochester Institute of Technology. When Anderson walked into the RIT housing office and introduced himself, the staff member, as Anderson tells it, turned his back and said: "Got no room.'"

Living in the Corn Hill area, Anderson heard the term "bean pickers," in reference to migrant workers - many were African-Americans from Florida - who were beginning to move to the neighborhood from Wayne and Orleans counties.

Betty Marshall knew what migrant life was like firsthand.

Looking for a better life, her father, Raleigh, and mother, Ossie, moved the family from Cocoa, Florida, to the Sodus area of Wayne County - driving up with 6-year-old Betty and five other daughters in 1954. Raleigh Marshall landed construction jobs - but picked produce to make extra money.

After Betty Marshall turned 11, she worked in the cherry and apple orchards with her dad during the summer, sometimes after school and on weekends. She loved to read - but was interrupted by calls of "Come on back to work."
Flash point on Joseph
Connie Mitchell became the go-to person for migrants resettling in the city, helping them find housing and jobs. "My husband used to laugh about it when they'd say, 'We are looking for the lady who can help us.' "

Joseph Avenue, in 1964, was a bustling neighborhood in northeast Rochester, lined with small businesses and receptive to visitors.

"It was busier than Main Street. You could find anything - meat markets, fish markets, restaurants, a department store," said Jack Feldman, 89, a Jewish refugee who had survived four years in Nazi concentration camps.

He opened Jack's Modern Fish Market on Joseph in 1954 and prides himself in treating people with the decency that he had been denied by the Nazis.

Having good relations with the African-American community is why Feldman believes his fish market, now run by his son, Irving, was spared from looting.

But on July 24, 1964, the crowd that filled Joseph was full of anger.

The arrest of a 20-year-old man, Randy Manigault, about 11:30 that night at a street party on Nassau Street, near the intersection with Joseph, turned into a confrontation with police. Manigault was apparently intoxicated and bothering several women.

Chief Lombard had come into office with a change in City Hall administrations a couple of years earlier and had begun to implement outreach efforts.

"We thought we were on pretty good footing," said Joseph Cimino, a plainclothes detective then who today is president of the Association of Rochester Police and Area Law Enforcement Retirees. "We were totally caught off guard on this, and I still think to this day it was some overt actions at the dance that just started the whole thing."

Another plainclothes detective back then was Daniel Funk, who was a couple of blocks away that night with another officer, talking with neighbors - "people that we knew" - when the riot broke out. They saw officers emerge down the street with Manigault and a crowd closing in around them.

Hoping the crowd would back off, Funk said that he drove up to pick-up the suspect. "It didn't work out that way," he said.

When officers called for backup, they said that because the department was short-staffed, a K-9 unit responded.

"Everybody avoided the dog, that gave us a path, and we went away," Funk said. Cimino, who also worked as a K-9 officer but was not there that night, is adamant that police practice was not to use the dogs for crowd control.

Other accounts differ - and in a 1984 interview with the Democrat and Chronicle another officer who was present that night said two police dogs held the crowd at bay.

The way police dogs agitated the crowd that night was noted by City Manager Porter Homer, who in his 1965 report about the riots, told how a "call for help brought K-9 units to the scene, which appeared to further enrage the crowd. In a matter of minutes, the crowed turned into an angry mob of about 500 persons."

Prior to the riots, use of police dogs - German shepherds - had become a volatile issue in Rochester and elsewhere, with national television showing police dogs lunging at civil rights protesters in Birmingham, Alabama.

"The K-9 dogs represented police oppression and repression," said Cooper, who in the early 1960s helped negotiate an agreement with city officials to curtail the use of the dogs.

Police ranks also lacked diversity - only 11 officers were African-American in 1963. By contrast, about 25 percent of the current department force of 732 is minority. In total, the department numbered about 320 in patrol at the time of the riots - roughly 50 percent smaller than today to cover a city that was 50 percent larger in population.

The police-community tensions that persisted were evident in a complaint filed about an incident that occurred on July 27, 1964 - the day after the rioting stopped.

Roswald Graham, an African-American working in Henrietta, was driving white co-workers home in Rochester when he was pulled over by police.

"I was hit on the leg by a night stick for no reason at all," wrote Graham in his complaint, which went to tell how an officer said: "You hate white people?"
Unrest spreads
Graham replied, "No, I do not hate white people because I have stuck out my neck tonight to take these fellows home."

The unrest spread to the southwest part of the city - the Corn Hill area - on the second day of the riots.

"That night was the night that was planned ... the first night, that was spontaneous," said former Rochester school board president Darryl Porter, who was 15 at the time and living with his older sister and brother on Clarissa Street.

He recalls "a continuous night," as he and others met after the initial rioting to plan, went home briefly and then gathered after curfew. The plan was to move into downtown - to make clear this was a city problem.

"I saw it as a rebellion. People were just fed up being treated like animals. Living like animals. Being cussed at, hollered at," Porter said, adding a lack of access to government to the grievances. "You had frustrations of all kinds, and you get to a point it's like a dam. You got a little crack ... you keep the pressure on it, the flood gate is going to crash - and here comes the water."

What started with the youths grew to involve adults. That evening, the first fatality of the riots occurred near the intersection of Clarissa and Atkinson streets in Corn Hill.

Perry Judson Bryan, an unemployed white salesman from Wayland, Steuben County, had been knocked to the ground during an argument with an unidentified black man who hit him with a lead pipe.

Lying by the curb, Bryan was accidentally run over by a passing car, which dragged his body. He died on the spot.

More fatalities came Sunday. In mid-afternoon, a Page Airways helicopter, surveying what had been the Clarissa Street riot area, hovered over a rooming house - and then crashed.

James Docharty, the pilot, was trapped in the wreckage, which burst into flames. He died at the scene.

The crash also caused a fire in the rooming house. Two men in the house - John Riley and Willie Jones - could not escape the flames.

Robert Cannioto, a Page employee, was thrown from the helicopter and survived the crash with bumps and bruises.

Abbott, the county's civil defense director, was finally pulled out of the helicopter by two state troopers, but suffered severe burns. He died at Strong Memorial Hospital a month later from an infection caused by the burns.

A Civil Aeronautics Board review of the crash told how Docharty, at the time of the flight, had a .08 percent blood-alcohol content, which was "considered an amount sufficient to cause diminution of attention, judgment and control."

Buckle said that she was told by a doctor at Strong that the 33 months that her father had spent as a prisoner of war in North Korea a decade earlier had weakened his immune system - and would make it difficult to fight infection.

"The community lost a very special person. I lost a dad," Buckle said.

Cannioto died in 1990 in an accident in Corning involving an experimental aircraft.

His widow, Mary Ann Cannioto, who lives in Horseheads, Chemung County, calls the riots "horrible," and said: "I don't understand why black and white can't live together."
Twitter.com/Goodman_DandC
JGOODMAN@DemocratandChronicle.com
By the numbers
Includes reporting by staff writer Brian Sharp.
250 - stores looted or damaged
350 - people injured
893 - people arrested: 720 were black, 128 were white and 45 described as "other."
Some numbers about the 1964 riots in Rochester, per City Hall records:

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1964 riots revisited: 3 days that shook Rochester

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The riots began during a party on Nassau Street%2C near Joseph Avenue%2C on July 24%2C 1964 5 people were killed and 350 people were injured during the riots 450 state troopers and 1%2C500 National Guard troops came in to restore order The city began returning to normal by July 27%2C and by Aug.

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ROCHESTER, NY - Black Lives Matter protesters took over City Hall on Tuesday and said they would hold it until police officers involved in Daniel Prude's detainment and death are arrested and fired.

Protest organizers Ashley Gantt and Adrian Elim said they didn't trust City Hall's internal review of how it handled the Prude case.

Prude suffocated while being restrained by Rochester police officers in March. He died a week later but his encounter with police wasn't made public until Sept. 2, when his family came forward with police body camera footage of the incident.

The death has been ruled a homicide, and the state is empaneling a grand jury to investigate the actions of Rochester officers.

Protesters were restricting access to the building but didn't appear to be inside any of the offices. Shortly before 7 p.m., they were playing classical music on the building's outer stairs.

Rochester police closed off Church Street between State Street and Plymouth Avenue.

Protesters plastered part of City Hall with "WANTED" posters of Mayor Lovely Warren, Monroe County District Attorney Sandra Doorley and Locust Club (RPD union) President Michael Mazzeo. The word "RESIGN" was stamped over their faces.

Daniel Prude's name was scrawled in chalk on Church Street, and a banner emblazoned with "the people's demands" was erected in front of the doors to City Hall. The demands are the same as those read and passed out during the nighttime protests.

The occupation began shortly before 9 a.m., when a handful of people gathered downtown in front of Rochester's Public Safety Building, 185 Exchange Blvd., for a rally in response to Prude's death.

By 9:14 a.m., the crowd had grown to 100 and was marching down Exchange Boulevard, arriving at City Hall, 30 Church St., by 9:23 a.m. "What we are doing right now is an occupation at City Hall," one said. Seven doors at City Hall later were blocked.

At 10:05 a.m., protesters hoisted a Black Lives Matter flag and another flag in front of City Hall after taking down and respectfully and properly folding a U.S. flag and a New York state flag. At 12:37 p.m., Gantt and several white men debated over the men's request to put the U.S. flag back up; protesters declined.

The Rochester Police Department tweeted Tuesday evening that the flags that had been taken down were in its care.

The takeover of City Hall occurred one day after Warren announced that she'd relieved Police Chief La'Ron Singletary of his command.

Tuesday's protest action was the 14th straight day community members called for justice in the death of Daniel Prude and sought the resignation of the may.
What happened: Observations, photos and videos from Democrat and Chronicle journalists Victoria Freile, Tina MacIntyre-Yee, Sarah Taddeo and Shawn Dowd follow, in reverse chronological order, after the photo gallery. How Daniel Prude suffocated as Rochester police restrained him
'City Hall is our new home,' protesters say

5:40 p.m.: Stanley Martin again called for the firing and indictment of officers involved in death of Prude. Officers who "took the lead on murdering Daniel Prude," Martin says, are still at large. Until those demands are met, we will continue to organize and "City Hall is our new home. This is the people's home."

On police substation: Martin said people have been arguing against that for a long time. "We are not listened to until a man dies."

On Police Chief La'Ron Singletary retiring and further relief of duty by Mayor Lovely Warren: Martin said we're happy he stepped down, but we can't enjoy that win because of Simmons being in charge.

Martin on for Mayor Bill Johnson's comments surrounding current events: He's not down here at these protests. Police killed people during his tenure, too. What matters to me is the voices of the families who continue to show up for action.

Martin said we have not been consulted about how to protect our lives and our mental health. "We need a seat at the table."

"We plan to be out here (at City Hall) until the demands are met," Martin said.

Joe Prude also spoke at the press conference.

"The city is basically telling me my brother doesn't matter," said Prude. "They ain't hurting..my family is."

Daniel Prude's name written on Church Street

5:30 p.m. A press conference is expected by Free The People Roc. In the interim, Daniel Prude's name is now scrawled in chalk on Church Street.

50 protesters block access to Rochester City Hall

1:30 p.m.: about 50 Black Lives Matter protesters are holding Rochester's City Hall. Some are dressed in vests, helmets, shields and gear normally seen during the nighttime protests. Others are wearing everyday clothes. Protesters are restricting access to the building and at least some employees were allowed to leave earlier. It doesn't appear that the protesters are inside any of the offices. The occupation of City Hall began around 9:30 a.m.

12:45 p.m.: A banner emblazoned with the "the people's demands" is erected in front of the doors to City Hall. The demands are the same as those read and passed out during the nighttime protests.

12:37 p.m.: There was a debate between Ashley Gantt, one of the protest organizers, and several white men who wanted the American flag put back up in front of City Hall. (Earlier, protesters had taken it down and put up a Black Lives Matter flag and another flag.) Protesters declined to put the American flag back up. "We don't want violence," said one of the men who did not want to identify himself by name. "We want peace like everyone else."

11:27 a.m.: A number of city employees exited City Hall, where, during the morning, the parking lot was largely empty.

11:19 a.m.: A total of seven doors at City Hall are blocked; the most visible ones are on Church and Fitzhugh streets.

11:14 a.m.: The crowd of protesters has gotten smaller.

10:05 a.m.: Protesters hoisted a Black Lives Matter flag and another flag in front of City Hall after taking down and respectfully and properly folding a U.S. flag.

9:55 a.m.: Rochester police have closed off Church Street between State Street and Plymouth Avenue.

9:50 a.m.: Protest organizers Ashley Gantt and Adrian Elim say they don't trust City Hall's internal review of how it handled the Daniel Prude case.

9:36 a.m.: Protesters have plastered part of City Hall with "WANTED" posters of Mayor Lovely Warren, Monroe County District Attorney Sandra Doorley and Locust Club (RPD union) President Michael Mazzeo. The word "RESIGN" is stamped over their faces.

9:32 a.m.: All four entrances to City Hall have been blocked by protesters.

9:29 a.m.: The protesters say they will occupy City Hall until police officers involved in Daniel Prude's detainment and death are arrested and fired. "We're going to be here as long as it takes."

9:23 a.m.: The crowd has arrived at City Hall, 30 Church St.: "What we are doing right now is an occupation at City Hall."

9:14 a.m.: Crowd is up to 100. Most people are on the sidewalk, and the group is marching down Exchange Boulevard.

8:57 a.m.: About 75 people, some bundled up for the 45-degree weather, have assembled on both sides of the street. Some passing cars have been honking their horns.
Thank you to our subscribers, who help make the Democrat and Chronicle's local coverage of Daniel Prude's death and the Rochester protests possible. Please consider supporting quality local journalism with a digital subscription. Here's our latest offer.
8:48 a.m.: A handful of people gathered downtown in front of Rochester's Public Safety Building, 185 Exchange Blvd., for a morning (vs. a night) protest in response to the police-custody death of Daniel Prude in March.

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BLM protesters to occupy Rochester City Hall until demands are met

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ROCHESTER, NY - Black Lives Matter protesters took over City Hall on Tuesday and said they would hold it until police officers involved in Daniel Prude's detainment and death are arrested and fired. Protest organizers Ashley Gantt and Adrian Elim said they didn't trust City Hall's internal review of how it handled the Prude case.

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Rochester, New York's uprising began on July 24, 1964. It occurred less than a week after the Harlem Riot. The Rochester Rebellion came as a surprise to many white residents because of the city's history of progressive 19th century politics. A large part of that history revolved around the Underground Railroad, and resident abolitionist Fredrick Douglass as well as women's rights activist Susan B. Anthony. Both were buried in the city's Mount Hope cemetery.

Despite that historical legacy, African Americans in mid-20th century Rochester faced housing and employment discrimination. The schools were segregated and police-black community relations were as strained in Rochester as in any major city in the North.

Much of the tension was fueled by the rapid growth of Rochester's black population which increased from 7,845 in 1950 to around 32,000 in 1964. Most of these newcomers were funneled into dilapidated housing in Upper Falls Rochester, the site where the "riot" began. Black residents of Upper Falls had an unemployment rate six times higher than whites within the same community. Many of the migrants were publicly disparaged and humiliated. They were often called "bean pickers" by their white neighbors. Ironically, slum clearance and urban renewal policies designed to get rid of the dilapidated structures that housed these newcomers often ended up eliminating vast areas of housing without replacement dwellings for those forced to move. All of these factors created the atmosphere for rebellion in 1964.

Rochester's Rebellion began Friday night, July 24, on Nassau Street in Rochester's Seventh Ward. It started at a block party with 200 people present. At 10 p.m., Rochester police arrested Randy Manigault, a 19-year-old African American man, for public intoxication and harassing women at the party. Sine the arrest was made in an atmosphere of tension, additional police were called to the scene. False rumors of an assault on a pregnant woman by a police officer and a child by a police dog spread through the crowd at the party and soon into the surrounding neighborhood.

By this point Rochester Police Chief William Lombard was on the scene personally directing his officers. When he ordered the crowd to move, many young blacks began throwing rocks at the police cars, and one police car was overturned. By 11:30 p.m. more than 400 people were battling the police and all available officers went to the streets. At 2:00 a.m., Chief Lombard ordered the police officers to use riot weapons on the crowd. By 3:30 a.m. the crowd had grown to 2,000 people and looting began on Clinton Avenue, the main thoroughfare through Upper Falls.

By 9:00 a.m. on July 25, the uprising was officially called a "riot" and a state of emergency was declared by New York governor Nelson Rockefeller. While the rioting calmed during the day on Saturday, by 10:00 p.m. Saturday night it resumed. By that point one white man had died. By Sunday night when the riot ended, approximately 250 stores were looted; five white people died (four men died in a helicopter crash blamed on the riot), and nearly 350 people were injured. The police had arrested more than 900 people in connection with the uprising, the majority were employed black men between 20 and 40 years old with no prior records of violence. Only 15 percent of those arrested were white.

Through their actions, participants in the Rochester Rebellion debunked several local myths: first, that racial discrimination was mainly a Southern issue; second, that most whites in Rochester were progressive; and finally, that upstate New York African Americans had no issues with discrimination.

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Rochester, New York's uprising began on July 24, 1964. It occurred less than a week after the Harlem Riot. The Rochester Rebellion came as a surprise to many white residents because of the city's history of progressive 19th century politics. A large part of that history revolved around the Underground ...

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Editor's Note: This article was first published in July 7, 2014, as a retrospective of the Rochester riots that took place 50 years earlier.

The riots that forever changed Rochester began on July 24, 1964, at a Friday night street dance on Joseph Avenue. A chaperone asked two police officers for help with an intoxicated young man. The officers arrested the man, but a crowd surrounded them to prevent the police from taking him into custody. The officers called for backup and more police arrived, including the K-9 unit - a source of tension for years, with blacks insisting that the dogs were unnecessary and that using them to facilitate an arrest was inhumane.

The dogs may have been the match tossed into the dry tinder of years of frustration and anger. Rocks and bottles were thrown and before long, store windows were being shattered. A mob swept through the Seventh Ward, looting stores and rushing past peacemakers such as Mildred Johnson, who ran a neighborhood unemployment service and tried to calm the crowd. Police Chief William Lombard, who was popular in the black community, walked alone into the angry crowd and pleaded for reason. The rioters ignored him, too, and then overturned his car and set it on fire.

The rioting, or revolt as it is sometimes called, continued until morning despite the presence of hundreds of police officers. On Saturday night, the disturbance reignited and spread to the Third Ward, with rioters looting stores along Clarissa Street, Jefferson Avenue, and South Plymouth Avenue.

On Sunday afternoon, 1,500 National Guard troops arrived to help restore order. When the smoke lifted, property damage topped $1 million, 350 people were injured, and 800 had been arrested. But the life-changing consequence of the riots was not property damage or physical injury, or even the four tragic deaths, but the fear the city sucked deep into its lungs - a fear that has shaped the community that Rochester has become.

In the decade after the riots, "whole neighborhoods seemed to just pack up and move across the canal into Gates or into northeast Greece," says Paul Haney, a Monroe County legislator and a former member of Rochester City Council.

Not that all was well before the riots, of course. White Rochesterians had actually begun their exodus years earlier. Some no doubt feared an increasingly black city, but others merely took advantage of accessible FHA mortgages designed to aid the construction of suburban neighborhoods. The riots accelerated the exodus, in other words, but were not the only cause.

And though Rochester's black population tripled to more than 25,000 during the 1950's, the newcomers did not have the high-level skills needed for employment in the manufacturing sector, and the city's iconic industries did far too little to recruit and train them for jobs. Black unemployment was over 10 percent.

Meanwhile, thousands of jobs went unfilled and unemployment for whites hovered below 2 percent.

The city's leaders seemed oblivious to the changing demographics and the pressure cooker that unemployment and overcrowded housing was creating in the city center - despite high-profile police clashes with black citizens.

In August 1962, for example, police arrested Rufus Fairwell while he was closing the service station where he was employed. He was accused of refusing to identify himself; he suffered two fractured vertebrae in police custody and was eventually cleared of any wrongdoing.

Most blacks were clustered within a few city blocks; houses built for one or two families had four or five mailboxes on the front porch. Overcrowding was endemic; the 1960 Census found that 35 percent of the housing units in the Third and Seventh wards were deteriorated and dilapidated. Lagging behind other upstate cities, Rochester built just two affordable housing projects during the 1950's.

It's an oversimplification to say that the anger that exploded that July night was the product of Third World housing, high unemployment, and stifling temperatures. But thousands of black people came to Rochester expecting to build better lives and found only better public assistance benefits. Their despair was bound to find its voice sooner or later.

So where are we 50 years later? The poor are effectively "detained" in their neighborhoods, says Carvin Eison, a Rochester filmmaker and director of "July '64," a 2006 documentary about the lasting impact of the riots. (Eison is filming a sequel - "July 2014.") In the original film, Minister Franklin Florence, the first president of the local civil rights organization FIGHT, says that the big problems in 1964 were "health, education, and jobs." Not much has changed in 50 years, Eison says.

Census data analyzed in an exhaustive report released last December by the Rochester Area Community Foundation reveals that Rochester has become the fifth-poorest city in the country. Despite huge increases in state and federal aid, the city lacks the resources to repair its neighborhoods, to expand services for children and seniors, or to attract young families and businesses, the report says.

Our schools are among the worst in the country. And while the city school district has begun a $1 billion program to renovate and retrofit its crumbling schools, there is no countywide plan to be sure that city children get the quality education they are promised by the state Constitution.

The fear that drove Rochesterians to the burbs is like the lead dust that has poisoned Rochester's children. It worked its way through the vital organs and then settled deep in the bones, shaving points off the social and political IQ we need to solve these problems.

The residents of this county are good people; when the calls go out for volunteers to read with city children, prepare Thanksgiving baskets, or collect winter clothes, thousands of hands are raised. And yet, when you ask how we can reverse this decline, the response is a collective shrug of resignation.

Middle-class suburbanites have worked hard to build successful lives for themselves and their children, and many believe that Rochester's poor just need to do the same. They welcome minorities who have "earned" the right to a suburban ZIP code, but they bristle at proposals for more affordable housing in their towns or to open their excellent schools to impoverished city children.

But to see poverty as the consequence of weakness or laziness is to miss what urban poverty has done - isolated the poor not just from "stuff," but from the connections and tools they need to know how to get that stuff.

Traditionally, cities in America have responded to middle-class flight by annexing adjoining towns, growing their tax bases, and giving suburbanites a personal stake in the success of the city. New York put an end to that practice in the 1920's, freezing its cities in 100-year-old footprints.

New York's 19th century system of local government has codified the ridiculous notion that a city, 19 towns, 10 villages, and 19 school districts, tightly squeezed into a mid-sized county, have such distinct interests that they require separate governments. Legally, there is no Community of Monroe, as folks here once described themselves, and the last communitywide response to the city's decline was a sales tax redistribution plan - 30 years ago.

In Monroe County, too many people have become comfortable with walls between city and suburbs, white and black, affluent and poor. Any whisper of city-suburban school partnerships to mitigate the impact of high-poverty city schools on learning is met with a predictable narrative: "Integration" equals "forced busing" equals dragging innocent first graders from Brighton and Pittsford to some hellhole school in the city where the teachers are inept and the black students will beat up the white kids.

Never mind that it's been 40 years since the Supreme Court struck down busing across district lines to relieve segregation resulting from housing patterns or other de facto reasons.

This is the legacy that fear has bestowed on Rochester: good people frozen in time, unwilling to imagine, let alone try a plan to reverse the city's slide into poverty and despair.

Prominent Rochesterians say and have said for years that regional solutions are needed for the city's problems. But it is rare for them to publicly endorse any specific ideas for the biggest challenges - public safety, housing, and education; they saw how former Mayor Bill Johnson was destroyed during his campaign for county executive when he suggested countywide schools.

"You know the definition of a pioneer?" asks Larry Glazer, the developer who hopes to reinvent Midtown and much of downtown Rochester. "It's a guy in the desert with an arrow through his heart. Nobody wants to get too far out in front."

Is Rochester finally more open to change? Maybe. Sandra Parker, president and CEO of the Rochester Business Alliance, and others say that there is a genuine commitment to dealing with both poverty and education, which is essential to the community's economic health. Local business leaders are mining an anti-poverty report done last year by a mayoral commission in Richmond, Virginia, for strategies that could be adopted in Rochester. There are many other community conversations under way, as well. Will any of this talk lead to fundamental change? Not without a big dose of courage.

Shrug off the great shrug

Many people here hold that Rochester's decline was inevitable, partly the result of a global economy that decimated the city's 20th century industries (which it did), and partly the result of personal choice (to move out for greener pastures).

But there were many junctures over the past 50 years when different decisions surely would have set Rochester on a different path. Here are three:

* A broad cross section of public and private sector experts (called the Greater Rochester Intergovernmental Panel) labored from 1972 to 1975 to develop recommendations for sweeping changes to government services, under the auspices of the National Academy of Public Administration. The GRIP-NAPA report called for a two-tiered system of local government that would have retained local control of many services while consolidating key functions: police, fire, ambulance, housing development, human services, and others - at the county level. The idea was to provide better service at a better price, but the real virtue of the plan was that it would have required local governments to work together for their shared future.

The report's authors noted with prescience that while they'd been told not to address public school collaboration, "We only do half the job in remaking local government...without considering the various serious needs in education."

Most of the panel's recommendations were ignored.

Democrats, who captured a City Council majority in 1973, were worried that county Republicans (who had been the champions of metropolitan solutions in the late 1960's and early 1970's) would effectively take control of the city if restructuring were put in place. "In my political career, there is only one thing I really regret," says Haney, who was elected to City Council in 1973 and was asked by Mayor Tom Ryan to be the city's point person in the GRIP-NAPA deliberations. "I had my marching orders - to drag my feet - and I happily complied," he says. "If some of the things they recommended had been adopted, we'd be a much different community today. It was a lost opportunity."

* A second missed opportunity came with the gutting of the state's Urban Development Corporation, established in 1969 for the purpose of building low-income affordable housing in cities and in suburbs. With the authority to override local zoning regulations, the UDC built large complexes across the state, including projects in Greece, Perinton, and Webster. These developments, rather than attacking concentrated poverty, moved it to the suburbs. Opposition in the 1970's led the State Legislature to strip UDC of its ability to build without local approval. The smarter course would have been to require UDC to build smaller townhouse developments.

* A third opportunity came in 1983 with the referendum for a consolidated county police force that would've spread the cost out to everyone in the county and begun to address the causes of the city's decline - population loss, a shrinking tax base, and rising costs. After its defeat, the city and county agreed a year later to the Morin-Ryan sales tax formula that gave the city a much larger share of county sales tax revenue. The sales tax plan was essential to the city's fiscal survival in the short run, but it was also an excuse for not moving toward a sustainable form of local government.

The way forward

"We have a culture of poverty now and the lack of will to do anything about it," says Leonard Brock, director of educational initiatives for the Children's Agenda. "And this is much more challenging than poverty itself."

Indeed, if there is any consensus among the roughly 30 community leaders interviewed for this piece, it is this: Doing nothing leads nowhere, but doing what needs doing will test this community as never before.

Proposed remedies for Rochester's poverty settle into two broad categories:

* Major policy initiatives to address chronic inequities - notably the development of affordable housing in and outside the city, and having high-quality public schools available to city and suburban students. It's not that jobs and economic development are suddenly lesser issues, but Rochester has for too long aggressively courted business while ignoring the obvious: great schools and decent housing are the keys to city neighborhood revitalization, which can only make Monroe County more attractive to employers. These are preconditions for reinvestment.

* A wide range of actions to energize and engage the poor in ways that will help build community and allow them to take a more active role in decisions that affect their lives.

First, the latter. Poverty is much more than not having enough money. In Rochester and many inner cities, isolation and the lack of engagement are even more dire problems. Transportation (to and from jobs, to child care, to full service grocery stores) is a huge obstacle.

Many poor people are unconnected to primary health and dental care. They have unreliable or partial cell phone or Internet services. They do not have a network of friends and professional colleagues who can alert them to opportunities for training or youth summer jobs. They do not have experience at being advocates for their children's education. They are often "under-banked," relying on predatory lenders and check cashing establishments.

In short, they are outside the mainstream of society's network of opportunities and connections.

"We need access and information," says the Children's Agenda's Leonard Brock.

Engaging marginalized people is critical to change. Poor people are not stupid; bringing them into the decision-making process is the way to make the best decisions for the common good. There are organized efforts in Rochester to expand the conversation on the city's future. But engagement must be broad, deep, and result in action.

It's hard to assess whether there is a trend in this direction. But here, in no particular order, are some of the strategies being tried or planned.

* Efforts to connect existing training and education programs to assure that those who enter the pipeline emerge at the other end with a job. Major public and private funders want to support organizations that collaborate to minimize duplication and maximize outcomes, says Simeon Banister, who runs a fund-raising consulting firm, administers a self-help initiative called Save for Success (which provides an 8-to-1 match for students who save a small amount for education or training), and chairs the Greater Rochester MLK Jr. Commission, a nonprofit that promotes nonviolence, economic justice, and community empowerment.

An abundance of training programs exists in Rochester, Banister says, but those programs may not always connect directly to jobs. With funding, the MLK commission could hire a team of "navigators" who would become fully familiar with the educational programs aimed at employment. They would develop an online database of programs that would help providers move students through the pipeline - from basic training for high school youth to higher level programs. The idea is to link training and jobs more closely to assure that once someone is in the pipeline, the path to employment is clear.

* Churches should focus on building community and promoting self-reliance. "Churches should stop seeing themselves as having a mission of survival and start seeing themselves as having a mission of discovery," says the Rev. Matthew Nickoloff, pastor of the new South Wedge Mission, a small Episcopal-Lutheran congregation on Caroline Street. Nickoloff, a Fairport native who studied at Princeton and Duke Divinity School, describes himself as the "poster boy for privilege." He says he doesn't know what poverty feels like, but he does know what it means to be a good neighbor.

Pastors should ask their members to commit to living in transitional neighborhoods for a period of time, Nickoloff says, to bring stability to those areas. Churches should open their buildings to host community meetings, cafes or musical events, to provide child care, to be present to their neighbors, he says.

Similarly, the Rev. Lewis Stewart, a veteran civil rights activist and head of the United Christian Leadership Ministry, says that black churches have become insular and should re-engage their communities. Congregants should have a higher profile in the neighborhoods around their churches, he says.

"We have to say to black people, 'You have to change,'" Stewart says.

No one wants to live in neighborhoods where there is an epidemic of violence and drugs, he says, and churches must help people find ways to turn themselves around.

* Build diverse networks. For example, Clay Osborne, a retired vice president for human resources at Bausch and Lomb and the former director of operations for Monroe County, says that he would love to see a campaign asking employers to commit to hiring one person of color over the next year. Employers who say they can't find qualified minorities should look harder, Osborne says.

"Don't change your standards or lower your requirements," he says. "But maybe prolong your search."

That one new employee will be connected to an informal network that will help the employer hire more minorities, Osborne says. It's a small step, he says, but that is how change happens.

* Connect the poor to financial institutions and credit. At ESL Federal Credit Union, Ajamu Kitwana, the newly hired program manager for consumer prosperity, is working on strategies to reach out to poor people who are "under-banked" - that is, people without bank accounts or debit cards or a credit history that can open the door to car loans and mortgages.

"Social challenges present opportunities," Kitwana says. As a credit union, ESL is chartered to serve this region and to engage low-income customers who are outside the financial mainstream. It's a win-win, he says. ESL makes money by helping the poor utilize financial services to their own advantage.

* Making healthier choices. Learning healthier habits can be another point of entry for poor people to connect to the opportunities that middle-class families have long enjoyed.

"People think they can't be healthy because they are poor," says Candice Lucas, director of community health services for the University of Rochester Medical Center's Center for Community Health. "You may not be able to afford a gym, but you can be active."

The center runs several initiatives, including Rochester Walks, a program that has developed safe walking routes in many city neighborhoods to encourage fitness. The interaction with clients gives the staff a chance to explain the health benefits of fitness, Lucas says, and to help clients get medical care they need but didn't know they were covered for through Medicaid or other insurance. It's about making connections, Lucas says.

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There are things that we can do

As critical as engagement is to the effort to reverse poverty, none of these steps will be successful without the housing and education policies that would have been much easier to implement 30 years ago when the city was less poor and the county was much wealthier.

What should these policy initiatives produce? A city where families and businesses do not face an unusual financial risk by investing in city property and a city where schools are so good that no one moves to escape them.

The heyday of state and federal housing programs may be over, but opportunities still exist, says Stuart Mitchell, president and CEO of PathStone Corporation, a developer of affordable housing and provider of other services to low-income communities.

Federal tax credits enable developers to build affordable family housing, and several hundred units have been built in suburban Monroe County over the years, he says. "But even if there were no (political) resistance to affordable housing," Mitchell says, "I don't think we (the Rochester community) could do more than two projects a year with 100 units each because there is so much competition for the credits."

Still, over a decade that could make a substantial difference and help break down the reluctance of many towns to welcome low-income families.

It's been several years since Crerand Commons, 48 townhouses for low-income families, opened in Gates, and Supervisor Mark Assini says he would welcome additional units. Assini says he supports efforts to end the concentration of poverty. He says he has always believed "in pulling yourself up by your bootstraps," but that individual initiative is not enough to lift families who have been trapped in poverty for generations. The Crerand Commons families moved from the city for a better life and better schools, Assini says.

Assini says that he's taken some heat for his views on poverty, but that he isn't bothered by it. "I am a Republican, but I'm also a Catholic," he says, referring to the church's historic commitment to justice for the poor.

Watch the trailer for "July '14," a documentary about the current state of Rochester through the lens of the '64 riots, produced at Rochester Community Television and directed by Carvin Eison. Find out more about community events commemorating the riots at RCTV's website.

Incentive zoning (granting a special permit or zoning variance in exchange for a builder's commitment to add a certain number of affordable housing units) is a tried and tested tool that has largely been used to leverage senior housing, but it could be used to build family units as well.

A third idea, Mitchell says, is to create a private fund that would provide a rent subsidy - say, $300 a month - that low-income families could use to supplement their own resources to rent an apartment of their own choosing in the suburbs. All that's missing is a generous foundation with a million bucks or so to invest.

The point is that there are ways to support and grow economically diverse communities, if there's the will to do so. The same basic concept is true for schools.

Fifty years of research and experience have shown that high-poverty schools fail. Put those same poor students into schools with a healthier socioeconomic mix and they do much better academically with no adverse impact on their more affluent class classmates.

Some urban areas have consolidated school districts (not going to happen here because the legal and political hurdles are too high), but there are other voluntary ways to erase high-poverty schools. Open multiple countywide magnet schools, primary and secondary, with programs attractive to city and suburban families. Triple or quadruple the size of the existing Urban-Suburban program. Look for ways that suburban districts can partner with the city on programs - which could provide better integration and utilize excess building capacity in suburban districts.

Simple, but not easy. The path forward is mined with political and logistical obstacles. We tend to focus on white suburban objections to integration efforts, but there are likely to be objections also from black families in the city.

"I don't believe any black child learns better sitting next to white children," the Rev. Lewis Stewart says. "I think that idea is wrong-headed, and Urban-Suburban is wrong-headed. Why can't we pour money and resources into these (city) schools?"

Similarly, Leonard Brock of the Children's Agenda says that he no longer believes socioeconomic integration is the only way to go. Union City, New Jersey, has made great strides in turning around high-poverty schools with a huge infusion of state money, he says.

And there are legitimate questions about how funding for magnet schools would impact district budgets, about rising poverty populations in several districts, and about the impact on teacher union contracts.

But these are challenges that other communities have started to address. Can Monroe County do the same? Rochester Mayor Lovely Warren, who was not available to be interviewed for this piece, has repeatedly called for broad-based solutions to the city's multiple crises. And yet, it has been decades since the city and county have exercised their intergovernmental muscles to reverse the city's inexorable decline.

Ed Doherty, recently retired vice president of the Community Foundation and principle author of its poverty report, says the newest Census numbers show that Rochester is on track to a 5 percentage point increase in poverty by 2020, which would put the city where Detroit is today.

"As a municipal entity, Rochester is no longer viable," Doherty says. "From a fiscal point, Rochester has survived only with dramatic increases in state aid. The poverty report put that number at a 175 percent increase over the past 15 years."

That's a dramatic increase, but amenities such as recreation and libraries have been cut back as public safety expenses rise, he says. The Rochester school district, too, has seen a dramatic increase in state aid, with 81 percent of its budget now attributable to the state and federal government.

How long can Rochester survive? Impossible to say, Doherty says. The state seems committed to enough aid to maintain life support, he says, but a turnaround will be much more difficult.

One way forward is to set goals, he says. Doherty's idea is a loose framework he calls the 10-10-10 plan - a commitment to lift 10,000 Rochesterians out of poverty (65,000 city residents now live in poverty), create housing for 10,000 poor people in the suburbs (about 3,600 units), and add 10,000 middle-class residents to the city.

These goals would require no governmental restructuring or pose an excessive burden on any particular group. The three goals work together to reduce the concentration of poverty; if the city attracts 10,000 middle-class residents while lifting 10,000 others out of poverty, the impact is multiplied.

It would be worth adding an educational goal to the mix - one that would interact with the others to reduce the impact of poverty. Something like, no schools in the county with a poverty population in excess of 50 percent.

None of this can happen, of course, unless the county executive (a new one will be elected in 2015), mayors, town supervisors, school boards and superintendents, and business leaders agree to step beyond the narrow and parochial requirements of their offices and work for the common good. This is possible, but hardly probable.

This kind of leadership requires creativity, courage, great political skill, and a heart for justice. It requires pioneers willing to risk the arrows for the greater good.

(Mark Hare retired in 2012 after 28 years as a columnist, reporter, and editorial writer for the Democrat and Chronicle and Times-Union. From 1978-1984, he was a reporter and columnist for City Newspaper.)

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A look back: Riots of '64 still haunt Rochester

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Editor's Note: This article was first published in July 7, 2014, as a retrospective of the Rochester riots that took place 50 years earlier. The riots that forever changed Rochester began on July 24, 1964, at a Friday night street dance on Joseph Avenue.

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Lessons From July '64: A Need To Know Special