MIAMI -- A small group of blacks and whites, taunting police with their chants, marched 7 miles through Liberty City without incident to mark the first anniversary of the race riot that left 18 people dead.
Police stationed along the route watched without expression Sunday as marchers chanted, 'Hey, hey! ho, ho! Racist cops have got to go!' while carrying signs saying, 'Fire racist cops.'
A year ago on May 17, rioting erupted in Liberty City within hours of the acquittal by an all-white jury in Tampa of four white former Dade County policemen charged in the beating death of black insurance agent Arthur McDuffie.
Three days of violence left 18 people dead, about 100 injured and more than $100 million in property damage in the Miami ghetto.
A Ford Foundation study released the day before the anniversary concluded the Liberty City rioting was the first time since the ante-bellum slave revolts that blacks rioted with the sole intent of killing or maiming whites.
The turnout for Sunday's march, from a boarded up service station to Moore Park, the heart of the riot area, was far short of the 1,000 people hoped for by the sponsoring Citizens Coalition for Racial Justice.
Estimates put the crowd at only 60, including a dozen whites. Some 40 news reporters, photographers and television technicians covered the march.
Uniformed Dade County and Miami police were stationed along the parade route and plainclothes officers watched warily from unmarked cars, but police said the march was peaceful.
In Moore Park, speakers denounced everything from South Africa to El Salvador and sympathized with causes ranging from Nicaragua's Sandinistas to the Irish Republican Army.
Speaker Jesse Gray, leader of New York rent strikers, told the crowd, 'If they send U.S. troops to El Salvador, each soldier will be met by 100,000 volunteers from other parts of the world.'
But a black youth in a green T-shirt inscribed 'Save Atlanta's Children' shouted angrily, 'We don't want to hear about El Salvador and South Africa. We want to hear about Atlanta and Miami.'
All of the speakers paid tribute in some fashion to McDuffie, including Gray who said, 'We ought to change the name of Liberty City to McDuffie City.'
The riot report, written by Florida International University psychologist Marvin Dunn and former Newsweek editor Bruce Porter, said the Liberty City violence differed from the racial disturbances of the '60s.
'... The incidence of blacks killing whites is unprecedented in this century and at any time since before the American Civil War,' Dunn said.
In addition, he said, the rioters seemed to be 'from a much more law-abiding and representative group of community residents than did those who took to the streets in the 1960s.'
