The word on the street: Rumor, “race” and the anticipation of urban unrest

Highlights

• We examine the emergence of Rumor Control Centers (RCCs) across the US in the 1960s.

• Citizens were asked to report divisive rumors to their local RCC.

• By mapping rumors, RCCs tried to anticipate and prevent outbreaks of urban unrest.

• In the process, RCCs often helped to monitor and immobilize young black activists.

• There are a number of contemporary corollaries of RCCs in operation today.

Abstract

This paper analyzes the emergence of Rumor Control Centers (RCCs) across the US during the late-1960s. The Centers, which were operated by municipal government agencies, were formed in response to the racialized violence that flared up in many cities between 1963 and 1967. State officials encouraged citizens to call their local center if they heard a “rumor” that suggested social tensions might be increasing in their neighborhood. Preemptive measures could then be taken to prevent these tensions from escalating into a riot. The paper outlines how the same anticipatory logics that underpinned Cold War civil defense were flexibly redeployed in response to the radicalizing of the civil rights movement within the US. It also shows how security infrastructures are sometimes fragile and may be reworked or rolled back due to political pressure or more mundane reasons such as failing to hold the attention of citizens and political elites.

Introduction

“A city is primarily a communications center, serving the same purpose as the nerve center in the body…[it] can only function efficiently if its means of communication are ample and well laid out.”

Weiner, Deutch, & de Santillana, 1950, p. 85

“No matter how elaborate the institutional channels, they are invariably supplemented by auxiliary channels – the ‘grapevine’.”

Shibutani, 1966, p. 22

In July 1967, the City of Chicago began operating a new kind of service. An office was equipped with a radio, television and typewriter, and a large map of the city hung on one of the walls. Ten telephone lines were also installed, including direct lines to the Police Department and Mayor's Office. Local government officials encouraged citizens to call the Center if they heard a “rumor” – defined as information unverified by official sources – that suggested social tensions in the city were increasing. By collecting, mapping and analyzing the diffusion of rumors through urban space, the center formed part of a security apparatus aimed at anticipating and even preventing future outbreaks of unrest in the city (for early assessments see Ponting, 1973, Weinberg and Eich, 1978) (Fig. 1).

This paper examines the rise of Rumor Control Centers (RCCs) across the US during the 1960s and connects their emergence to ongoing debates within political geography regarding security infrastructures, anticipatory logics, and geographies of racialization (e.g. Anderson, 2010a, Kurtz, 2009, Monahan, 2010). The centers were formed in response to violence that had flared up in multiple cities during the so-called “long hot summers” (for a contemporary sociological analysis, Ransford, 1968). Seeking to prevent further unrest, government officials in Chicago had drawn upon an idea articulated by two Harvard-based psychologists twenty years earlier: “no riot ever occurs without rumors to incite, accompany and intensify the violence” (Allport & Postman, 1947, p. 193). They established Rumor Central in 1967 and, having gained recognition from federal agencies, the idea soon spread across the country. By the end of the decade, over 100 cities had established RCCs, funded and operated by a varying constellation of local government institutions, private sector organizations and volunteer groups (Ponting, 1973).

While political geographers have drawn attention to the role of anticipation and preemptive action in the securitization of a wide range of “risks” in the contemporary era (Adey & Anderson, 2012), we show how similar logics informed urban security practices in the late-1960s. Some scholars have also connected contemporary anticipatory systems with the racialization of particular bodies and spaces (de Goede, 2007, Mitchell, 2010), and our analysis suggests that this was commonplace in the US during this period. Our paper, therefore, extends this literature by showing how rumor control came to play a key role in the governance of urban space during the 1960s and, in so doing, helps to trace out a genealogy of security ideas, infrastructures and practices. By focusing specifically on Seattle's RCC we also show how preemptive interventions associated with anticipatory systems may change over time. Indeed, the Seattle Center's shift from collecting rumors toward trying to prevent them by running “rumor clinics” suggests that security infrastructures can be reworked or rolled back due to opposition or for more mundane reasons such as lack of funding and simply not being able to hold the attention of citizens or local political and media elites. We therefore argue for a more geographically situated understanding of security practices and the “racial state” within the US (Goldberg, 2002, Omi and Winant, 1994).

We begin by examining the origins of anticipatory logics in military research and their role in the making of a distinctly American Cold War security culture (Field, 2005). Drawing on a range of interdisciplinary literatures, we then discuss the urban rebellions that destabilized “containment” politics from within and the subsequent identification of rumor as a domestic security concern. The subsequent two sections use archival and interview material to analyze the city of Seattle's particular experience with rumor control, tracing how and why the Seattle center moved toward running “rumor clinics”. We conclude by relating our study back to wider literatures to illustrate what has been learnt and in order to identify topics of further investigation.