What it's like inside a riot

Have you ever been in a riot? I have. Dozens.

As a reporter in the Chicago bureau of The Associated Press, I covered no end of inner-city street eruptions during the mid '60s.

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The AP sent me to Detroit to cover the '67 riot in which 37 persons died. (Detroit still stands as America's worst in lives lost and property destroyed.) Then in '68, I covered a different kind of riot -- the Democratic National Convention street disorders. They still resonate, even though the just-ended Chicago DNC thankfully wasn't a repeat performance.

I got gassed during that '68 DNC. I got shot at in Detroit. My car windows were broken, more than once. I lay on my belly under a fire truck with a half-dozen Detroit firemen and watched a frame house burn to the ground ... because rumor was we were being shot at.

The looting was brazen, especially in the early nights. Folks smashed store windows with impunity and came out with armloads of stuff, then virtually thumbed their noses at police (who weren't doing much arresting anyway).

And laughing. The looters and rioters were having a great time.

This last phenomenon, which sociologists came to call the "carnival effect," so baffled me that I left journalism for the Ph.D. program at the University of Chicago, bent on spending the rest of my life trying to understand what I'd seen on the West Side with my own eyes.

Grad school was a disaster.

I'd thought I'd be bringing something to the ivory tower -- street experience to inform scholarship. I couldn't have been more mistaken. At the University of Chicago political science department, if it didn't happen in a book ... it didn't happen.

These were two of the most depressed years of my young life. What I learned at the U of C was that I needed to get back into the news business.

Well, I'd been to Washington for three weeks to do the research for my master's thesis ... and fallen in love with the place. Following the infamous "police riot" that tarred the '68 DNC and the Chicago cops, my home town had come to feel like a police state. I vowed to get out, move to DC by whatever means necessary ... and never set foot again in the Windy City.

I hired on with National Journal, then just launching. I drove all night in my red VW Bug convertible, arriving at dawn as the leaves blazed in autumn color. My half-finished master's paper lay in the back seat, packed in a cardboard box.

It's in my basement today -- still in that moldering carton, still half finished.

My vow to leave Chicago for good only lasted a few years. I built a new life in the DC area, raised two wonderful kids, am still married to the woman I persuaded to follow me from Chicago.

But my own story of those long-ago events ... I still hadn't told it.

Now I have.

To Do Justice, the final novel of my "Chicago Trilogy," is published at last. Rather than a dry academic monograph. It's a tale, a narrative, a work of fiction. And if I've done my job the way I intend, it's a page-turner too.

Sure, it's a made-up story -- but the facts are all there. What I saw on those long-ago streets, what I dug out of boxes and boxes of the Kerner Commission's files, unsealed by the National Archives the week before I arrived -- those are as true as I can recall them.

I've imagined my heroine an 11-year-old girl, a child of the meanest streets. I've named her Pinkie because, though she's being "raised Black," to many eyes she could be White.

Pinkie is on a quest to find the White woman who gave her birth -- but she can't do it alone. To help her, I've imagined a second heroine, a 23-year-old AP reporter named Mollie. Mollie is a plucky soul, swimming hard against the tides of '60s Mad Men sexism and disrespect. She's head over heels for an oafish colleague, Steve, who breaks her heart again and again.

Mollie is modeled on a woman I worked with at The AP. Pinkie? She came to me out of thin air.

And Steve, the oaf? Well, Steve is me.

Read the rest for yourself. Download a copy of To Do Justice from Amazon. It's FREE for five days starting next Monday, Labor Day.

I do ask one favor in return: Post a review.

I hope you give it five stars. But whether you love it, hate it or fall somewhere in between, please please PLEASE post that review. In our online era, reviews spell failure or success for obscure authors like me.

So:

¶ FREE copy

¶ Five days only

¶ Starts Monday, Sept. 2, Labor Day

¶ Ends at midnight Friday, Sept. 6

¶ Just CLICK HERE

Frank S Joseph Author

P.S. If you can't wait, the download is only $2.95. CLICK HERE

P.P.S. Maybe you prefer a paperback signed by Yours Truly, That'll be $19.95 + $6 postage, and MD buyers kindly add $1.20 state sales tax. Mail a check to Key Literary, 5636 Connecticut Ave. NW #42340, Washington DC 20015-9998, or pay via card, PayPal, CashApp or Zelle. Shoot an email to frank@frankjoseph.com and I'll walk you through it.