At the end of last month, in a post about Senate hopeful Jeff Merkley reaching out to Harley-riding he-man types, one of the commenters mentioned that he had been spat on when he returned from service in Vietnam, presumably outside the Hunter’s Point naval station.
A couple of other commenters—myself included—asked about details, having remembered perhaps, Jerry Lembcke’s book The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam, in which he was unable to find any incidents of veteran-spitting reported in contempraneous accounts. Of course, that led to Pat Ryan, the author of the post and one of the regular contributors at Blue Oregon to advocate assault.
A couple of days later, I ran into this passage, from Curtis Austin’s Up Against the Wall: Violence in the Making and Unmaking of the Black Panther Party (p. 81):
One week later [after July 1967 riots in Newark] in Detroit a similar, but more destructive, rebellion occurred when police arrested a group of blacks celebrating the return of a Vietnam veteran at the United Community League for Civic Action, which doubled as an after-hours drinking spot. Racial tension had been running high because a few weeks earlier a group of whites in Rouge Park community had murdered black Vietnam veteran Danny Thomas.