Maybe it was the noise.
Chester Roach was a truck driver, and maybe he had to be up early on the morning of Monday, Aug. 5, 1968. He was a white man living on South Penn Street, a predominantly black neighborhood.
He came out of his second floor apartment around 11:30 p.m. Aug. 4, with a pellet gun, yelling at a group of 10 or 11 black youths who were laughing and talking. They yelled back, and he fired the pellet gun at them.
Someone called police.
Roach went upstairs and aimed a shotgun out a window. The kids taunted him.
He fired. Several teens fell wounded.
Police arrived, but they did not apprehend Roach. They escorted his wife out of the area, and then high-tailed it out themselves. Officers, remarked one neighbor, "seemed to want trouble to start."
That didn't take long.
Youths began throwing bricks through Roach's second-story windows, and those of Hoffman's Meat Market on the ground floor. Someone set a shed on fire.
Roach came out, a shotgun in one hand and a .38 caliber revolver in the other, and began firing, until someone shot and disarmed him.
Police returned and this time cordoned off the area. Ten blacks were shot, all but two of them teenagers. None of the injuries were life-threatening.
Roach later told police the blacks had thrown a brick through his window and were attempting to break into the meat market. He was not arrested and charged for three days -- and he was found not guilty in May after the key witness against him, William Orr, was shot and killed in his home. Orr's murder never was solved.
The meat market was gutted by fire within hours of Roach's rampage, as was a paper company on Penn Street. Anyone white was a target. Nearly 65 police equipped with two armored cars fought running battles with small groups of blacks firing guns and throwing bottles and firebombs.
Carloads of armed whites were spotted around the edges, and even in, the black neighborhoods.
"This is open warfare. Whitey made his statement last night. He said, 'I hate you niggers and I'm going to kill you,'" one young man told a reporter the next morning. "So, baby, if whitey is going to start shooting, you better bet I'm firing back."
Later that day, police returned to the gutted meat market, where people were looting. In trying to clear the building, Patrolman Pete Chantiles -- the same officer accused of beating Ronnie Banks on Freys Avenue three years before -- fired his gun into the air to scare off the looters. A 9-year-old girl was injured, though it was questionable whether a bullet lacerated her knee.
Angry crowds gathered and York County District Attorney John Rauhauser Jr. went into the neighborhood and told them he had asked Mayor John Snyder to suspend Chantiles, and the mayor had agreed.
Rauhauser would spend much of those days walking through the riot-stricken neighborhoods. He was the only elected official to do so.
Police in full riot gear sealed off the area again that night. They scanned roofs with spotlights and ducked snipers' bullets. At one point, reporters for the York Gazette and Daily newspaper heard officers shouting "kill them, shoot them." The officers, the newspaper reported, "seemed to have lost self-control."
Things calmed down Tuesday. Rauhauser made another walk through the city -- unescorted by police -- urging both black and white youths to let problems be solved through proper channels. The Chamber of Commerce also agreed to meet with blacks to work out grievances.
The word had gone out to "cool it." On top of that, a heavy rain fell just after dark.
That night, a crowd of 30 to 40 white teens congregated at Penn and King streets, a symbolic boundary between the black and white communities. The teens taunted blacks and dared them to cross the street, but none did.
Snyder instituted a 10:30 p.m. curfew Aug. 7. He did not do so earlier because he was "reluctant to bring disgraceful attention to our town."
And he still refused to accept that the violence could be coming from within York, despite the fact that state investigators had found no evidence of "outside agitators."
There was, meanwhile, evidence many whites were fed up.
"The police should shoot all of the troublemakers," one Salem Square resident told the Gazette and Daily.
Warned another, "These colored people don't know how well they have it. They never will have it so good again ... The cops better get busy or we're going to take the law into our own hands and me and a lot of other people are going to kill a lot of Negroes."
A few weeks later the Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission held hearings into what were by then called York's disorders. They could have waited a couple weeks, because the disorders of 1968 weren't over. Post-game violence
On Sept. 20, the York High football team won a stunning, come-from-behind victory over its old nemesis, Cedar Cliff.
Many in the stands had been drinking, and fights started before the game was over. The Cedar Cliff players were attacked before they could get to their buses.
As they always did, city police followed the blacks as they walked south on George Street. Fighting and rowdiness continued as the crowd crossed the North George Street bridge.
When a K-9 officer plunged into the crowd after someone, violence erupted
Afterwards, there were questions about what really started the trouble, but by then it didn't matter.
The crowd began breaking windows all along George Street, and the K-9 Corps was called in. Cars were damaged, whites were jumped.
Ten people were injured in the melee -- seven with dog bites -- and 15 were arrested.
City officials wanted to ban night football games. But black leaders said that was not the problem.
"These kids are rebelling; there's no doubt about it," said the Rev. Adam Kittrell. "And the parents of these kids that were bitten are bitter.
"When the police or anybody, particularly anybody white, looks like they're trying to exercise authority, particularly when it's not warranted, their reaction is really to give them a problem," he said.
Problems persisted through the weekend. A dozen people were assaulted, mostly whites attacked at random by groups of black youths.
Early Sunday, windows of the police headquarters at City Hall were blown out by a shotgun blast. That night, three dozen angry blacks descended on City Hall and met with officers.
Snyder reinstated the 10 p.m. curfew the next day, but despite the curfew, roving groups of blacks continued to assault whites. Isador Greenberg, a 79-year-old man, was standing at King and Pine streets when three youths assaulted him Sept. 23. He died three days later, the first fatality of the race riots.
There would be others.
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