CHRIS CAMPION - "The War is Here - Newark 1967" (Editor) - Episode 143

Appearing this week on the Rick Flynn Presents podcast is British writer/author/ journalist/as well as editor and Archivist of the Estate of the late photographer Bud Lee, CHRIS CAMPION. Published by Ze Books, the new book is entitled "The War is Here: Newark 1967" and features the spectacular photographs of Bud Lee. With a foreword by the Honorable Ras J. Baraka, 40th Mayor of Newark, NJ, The War Is Here is Life magazine photographer Bud Lee’s dramatic, empathetic, and still shocking record of the Newark uprising of 1967―a pivotal moment in a summer of protest and rage across the country, whose reverberations we still feel today.  July 1967. After the arrest, beating, and imprisonment of cab driver John Smith by local police, the city of Newark―already a tinderbox―became a hotbed of protest and retaliation. Over five long days, 26 people were killed by police gunfire and hundreds more were injured, thousands arrested, and millions of dollars in property damage caused. The scars on the city remained for decades.  The most shocking thing about the photos in the book is that, over the last few years, exactly the same scenes have been playing out before us in cities across the US. In Portland, in Charlottesville, Ferguson, Memphis, Atlanta, Los Angeles, and many other places; anywhere people have come out on the streets to have their voices heard, to protest police brutality, police killings, and gun violence, and been met with disproportionate militarized force and state power. Looking at the images Bud Lee shot of Newark in 1967, seeing the parallels with today, we should ask ourselves, how is this still happening fifty years on?