NEWARK , N.J. — Forty years have passed since New Jersey’s largest city was convulsed by six days of rioting, but the intervening decades apparently haven’t quelled debate on the subject.

That was made abundantly evident during a screening of a new documentary that examines the events of July 12-17, 1967, which began with a routine traffic stop and ended with 26 people dead and much of the city left in ruins.

The audience at the Newark Museum — some of whom lived through the riots — had critical words for husband-and-wife filmmakers Marylou Tibaldo-Bongiorno and Jerome Bongiorno, led by poet Amiri Baraka’s charge that the documentary represented a “subjective, white petit-bourgeois version of reality.”

The release of “Revolution ‘67”, scheduled to air on PBS next Tuesday night, on the 40th anniversary of the riots has reignited discussions about what Rutgers-Newark historian Clement Price termed “the defining moment in our 20th-century history.”

The film features searing images of National Guard tanks rolling through downtown Newark and police marksmen firing seemingly at random into housing projects. Reports estimated the number of people injured or arrested to be more than two thousand, with property damage estimated as high as $10 million.

“Revolution ‘67” effectively documents the social forces that formed the city’s landscape in the mid-1960s: A stagnating economy; deteriorating relations between a largely white police force and the city’s black residents; a lack of adequate housing exacerbated by urban renewal and discriminatory lending practices, known as redlining, that kept blacks in the city and hastened white flight to the suburbs.

However, it also touched a nerve in the overflow crowd at the Newark Museum with what many considered its heavy reliance on interviews with white activists including Tom Hayden, the former president of Students for a Democratic Society who organized protests in Newark in the mid-1960s with a group called the Newark Community Union Project.

“Unfortunately, it really provides a flashpoint for people who were there and are rightfully sensitive to this, putting a white face out front as though Newark was just waiting for Tom Hayden and his missionaries to save it,” said lifelong Newark resident Richard Cammarieri, head of special projects for a community development corporation. “But at the core of the film is something that is extremely important to understanding why July ‘67 happened.”

Junius Williams, who was on break from Yale Law School during the summer of 1967, recalled being pulled over by police in Newark on the second day of rioting and staring down the barrel of a shotgun, fearing for his life.

“They told me to open the trunk of the car and they saw law books,” recalled Williams, who now is director of Rutgers-Newark’s Abbott Leadership Institute. “These cops wanted to kill us. The sergeant said to the other three, ‘These are law students, leave them alone.’ He had to say it more than once, because they clearly wanted to do something else. “

Williams attended the screening and, while adding that he and Hayden are friends, took issue with the film’s implication that there was little or no activism before Hayden’s group was formed.

“It gives the impression that the white man had to come in and save the Black people from themselves,” he said.

Tibaldo-Bongiorno, who directed the documentary, defended Hayden’s role in the film. She noted Hayden was in Newark from 1964-68 and wrote a book chronicling the riots.

“Within the city, there seems to be a desire to rewrite history and remove him,” she said by telephone from a film festival in Pesaro, Italy. “He gave us great, important details about life in the Newark streets in the ‘60s, but even more important, he put Newark into a national context.”

Jerome Bongiorno, the film’s editor and cinematographer, said the placing of Newark’s unrest in the context of numerous other uprisings across the country in 1967 helped he and his wife sell the project after several organizations rejected it as being too localized. He said the film’s message has resonated in other cities that experienced similar unrest.

“You just change your archival footage and that’s their story, too,” he said. “When you start talking about bank redlining and other things the government did to get people out to the suburbs, it’s national.”

In Newark, Williams said the riots — he and others prefer to use the term “rebellion” — forced those in power to pay more attention to protesters’ demands, particularly in the battle over the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey’s plan to claim more than 100 acres for its new campus.

After the dust had settled, UMDNJ agreed to a scaled-down plan that set aside 60 acres for housing.

“Our position was based on what I call ‘That unnamed brother with the brick’ who was standing at the bargaining table with us,” Williams said. “We would not have gotten as much as we did were it not for the rebellion. I am absolutely convinced of that. They had withstood all our protests earlier in the year.”

Forty years later, as Newark continues to grapple with poverty and an epidemic of gun violence, Williams lamented the lack of an organized effort to address many of the underlying problems.

“‘Resistance’ has become nightly shootouts in our community based on the drug-economic subculture, where all the energy is directed toward the controlling of the drug domain and not toward centers of power in our country,” he said. “If their energy could be redirected toward things like better schools or more jobs, things would be different.”

— (AP)