Snapshot of 1984 riots (2024)

LAWRENCE — Amid three nights of unrest in August 1984, a moment of unlikely comic relief unfolded on the second day in the middle of Oxford Street where the upheaval began.

Forty years ago this week on a warm Wednesday – Aug. 8 – a neighborhood disruption erupted between white and Spanish residents in a French-Canadian enclave in Lawrence, escalating to wider racial strife and spilling into civil unrest.

By Friday, Aug. 10, Lawrence had been operating for two days under a curfew and an emergency police order.

Second- and third-generation white residents and more recently arrived Spanish people, then primarily from Puerto Rico, clashed in the Immigrant City’s lower Tower Hill section of single-family homes, duplexes, triple-deckers and small businesses.

Many residents who lived in the immediate area fled or sheltered in place, fearing fire, bullets and broken glass.

Outside, many youth and young adults, including those from other parts of the city and beyond, entered the fray.

Insults flew from opposite sides of the street. Bricks and rocks were thrown. Gunfire and molotov co*cktails exploded and buildings caught fire, including a liquor store looted for the hooch.

Unruly crowds pelted fire trucks. Police paused until they gathered sufficient numbers to enter and try to quell the hostilities.

This week, on Monday, Oxford Street was a paragon of everyday life.

At the street’s end, by the brick Merrimack Courts housing buildings on Melvin Street, an older resident, who has been living in Lawrence for 30 years, swept the sidewalk outside an apartment building.

A quarter-mile away, up Oxford at a small rise by the intersection of Haverhill Street, three older residents sat on an apartment building porch.

Motorists zipped between cars parked at the roadside, yellow taxis now and again pulling over to pick up or let off riders.

On the night of Aug. 8, 1984, Eagle-Tribune photographer Cheryl Senter, only a month on the job, and two reporters, including an intern, hopped in a Ford Escort and responded to a report of a disturbance on Oxford Street. They rode in the intern’s car.

At Oxford, Senter’s camera flash caught the attention of three white youths, who demanded that she give them her camera. They took it and smashed it, along with other gear.

The photographer and the others got in the intern’s car to leave, and the three men rocked it, apparently trying to tip it over, Senter said in a recent interview.

The next day Senter came into the newsroom and found all new camera gear ready for her. She headed out for a second night of documenting the tension and conflict.

By now, what was being referred to as the Lawrence riots was national news.

Boston television affiliates of the major networks converged on Lawrence and their footage received national, even international, coverage.

It was reported on daily broadcasts including NBC’s Today and The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour on PBS.

Bugzy Martinez was 16 years old and living in Lawrence with his grandmother at Hanco*ck public housing, a little more than a mile away from Oxford Street.

Word of the upheaval spread quickly throughout the city and people converged on the area, Martinez said.

Frustration over jobs, housing, education and prejudice made the time a tense one. Unlike today, when Lawrence is more than 80% people of Hispanic background, the city of about 63,000 in 1984 had a Spanish population of somewhere between 20% and 30%.

Today, Martinez and his wife, Daisy, are the longtime operators of Canal Street Gym, a boxing nonprofit.

There, young people learn discipline, get fit and form friendships at little or no cost, helped by volunteers including Tony Pelletier, a Lawrencian of French-Canadian descent, and whose family ran Pelletier’s Gym in Lawrence years ago.

Martinez said the mid-1980s were a tense time in Lawrence.

The television crews with their lighting units, large cameras and the other media presence added a dimension to the events making it more of a happening.

“It was exciting, it was scary,” said Martinez, who was hit by a couple of thrown items.

Daisy’s brother, then a young Pop Warner football coach, was walking kids home after practice, since their neighborhood was barricaded by police.

As he was returning to his car he was struck in the head by a piece of masonry and taken to the hospital for stitches.

Senter, now a freelance photographer, recalls being tear-gassed and also thinking that the large media presence was, at some point, prompting the people in the streets to behave badly.

“It felt like everything would have dissipated if we were not there,” she said. “Since we were there, they felt they needed to perform.”

So when Senter saw two young people making fun of the media by holding a shoulder-mounted, cut-out diaper box with a flashlight for a lens and a stick holding up an empty beer can for a microphone, she was impressed and took a photograph of them.

“For their ages, it was so insightful,” she said. “So clever.”

Martinez was there, out of the camera frame, when the kids were enacting their bit of street theater. They were clearly mocking television crews.

He remembers the nicknames of several of the kids in the photo. One was “Yogi,” whose older brother was nicknamed “Bear.”

Another fellow with a mustache and gesturing with his hand, worked his face into a talking head impression. He was called “Indio.”

At the time of publication, The Eagle-Tribune identified the two young men impersonating the news crew. One was Jose Colon, 9, of Essex Street, and the other, Eddie Santiago, 12, of Melvin St.

Their irrepressible grins and those of the protesters around them express glee at a memorable moment in an otherwise trying time in Lawrence’s history.

In the midst of the 1984 Lawrence riot — ugly race and poverty fueled mayhem that made national news for days — a couple of kids had satire on their minds.

Everybody got the joke.

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