The protesters were mostly black; not all were poor. Middle-class black people also demonstrated against systemic inequality.[5] At the time, the media described these events as “race riots” and White businesses tended to be targeted. However, White public and community buildings such as schools and churches were largely spared.[1]
Compared to the previous summer of rioting, the number of fatalities was lower, largely attributed to new procedures instituted by the federal government, and orders not to fire on looters.[6]
In Los Angeles, the Los Angeles Police Department and community activists averted a repeat of the 1965 riots that devastated portions of the city. Several memorials were held in tribute to King throughout the Los Angeles area on the days leading into his funeral service.[citation needed]
The Washington, D.C., riots of April 4–8, 1968, resulted in Washington, along with Chicago and Baltimore, receiving the heaviest impact of the 110 cities to see unrest following the King assassination.
As word of King's murder by James Earl Ray in Memphis spread on the evening of Thursday, April 4, crowds began to gather at 14th and U. Stokely Carmichael led members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) to stores in the neighborhood demanding that they close out of respect. Although polite at first, the crowd fell out of control and began breaking windows. By 11pm, widespread looting had begun.
Mayor-CommissionerWalter Washington ordered the damage cleaned up immediately the next morning. However, anger was still evident on Friday morning when Carmichael addressed a rally at Howard, warning of violence. After the close of the rally, crowds walking down 7th Street NW and in the H Street NE corridor came into violent confrontations with police. By midday, numerous buildings were on fire, and firefighters were prevented from responding by crowds attacking with bottles and rocks.
Crowds of as many as 20,000 overwhelmed the District's 3,100-member police force, and 11,850 federal troops and 1,750 D.C. National Guardsmen under orders of PresidentLyndon B. Johnson arrived on the streets of D.C. to assist them. Marines mounted machine guns on the steps of the Capitol and Army soldiers from the 3rd Infantry guarded the White House. At one point, on April 5, rioting reached within two blocks of the White House before rioters retreated. The occupation of Washington was the largest of any American city since the Civil War. Mayor Washington imposed a curfew and banned the sale of alcohol and guns in the city. By the time the city was considered pacified on Sunday, April 8, some 1,200 buildings had been burned, including over 900 stores. Damages reached $27 million.
The riots utterly devastated Washington's inner city economy. With the destruction or closing of businesses, thousands of jobs were lost, and insurance rates soared. Made uneasy by the violence, city residents of all races accelerated their departure for suburban areas, depressing property values. Crime in the burned out neighborhoods rose sharply, further discouraging investment.
On some blocks, only rubble remained for decades. Columbia Heights and the U Street corridor did not begin to recover economically until the opening of the U Street and Columbia HeightsMetro stations in 1991 and 1999, respectively, while the H Street NE corridor remained depressed for several years longer.
Mayor-Commissioner Washington, who was the last presidentially appointed mayor of Washington, went on to become the city's first elected mayor.
Film shot by DASPO CONUS on April 9, 1968, of Chicago after the riots
On April 5, one day after King was assassinated, violence sparked on the West side of Chicago. It eventually expanded to consume a 28-block stretch of West Madison Street, with additional damage occurring on Roosevelt Road. The North Lawndale and East Garfield Park neighborhoods on the West Side and the Woodlawn neighborhood on the South Side experienced the majority of the destruction and chaos. The rioters broke windows, looted stores, and set buildings (both abandoned and occupied) on fire. Firefighters quickly flooded the neighborhood, and Chicago's off-duty firefighters were told to report for duty. There were 36 major fires reported between 4:00 pm and 10:00 pm alone. The next day, Mayor Richard J. Daley imposed a curfew on anyone under the age of 21, closed the streets to automobile traffic, and halted the sale of guns or ammunition.
Approximately 10,500 police were sent in, and by April 6, more than 6,700 Illinois National Guard troops had arrived in Chicago with 5,000 regular Army soldiers from the 1st Armored and 5th Infantry Divisions being ordered into the city by President Johnson. The General in charge declared that no one was allowed to have gatherings in the riot areas, and he authorized the use of tear gas. Daley gave police the authority "to shoot to kill any arsonist or anyone with a Molotov cocktail in his hand... and... to shoot to maim or cripple anyone looting any stores in our city."
By the time order was restored on April 7, 11 people had died, 500 had been injured, and 2,150 had been arrested. Over 200 buildings were damaged in the disturbance with damage costs running up to $10 million.
The south side ghetto had escaped the major chaos mainly because the two large street gangs, the Blackstone Rangers and the East Side Disciples, cooperated to control their neighborhoods. Many gang members did not participate in the rioting, due in part to King's direct involvement with these groups in 1966.[9]
The Baltimore riot of 1968 began two days after the murder. On Saturday, April 6, the governor of Maryland, Spiro T. Agnew, called out thousands of National Guard troops and 500 Maryland State Police to quell the disturbance. When it was determined that the state forces could not control the riot, Agnew requested Federal troops from President Lyndon B. Johnson. The riot was precipitated by King's assassination, but was also evidence of larger frustrations among the city's African-American population.
By Sunday evening, 5,000 paratroopers, combat engineers, and artillerymen from the XVIII Airborne Corps in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, specially trained in tactics, including sniper school, were on the streets of Baltimore with fixed bayonets, and equipped with chemical (CS) disperser backpacks. Two days later, they were joined by a Light Infantry Brigade from Fort Benning, Georgia. With all the police and troops on the streets, the situation began to calm down. The Federal Bureau of Investigation reported that H. Rap Brown was in Baltimore driving a Ford Mustang with Broward County, Florida tags, and was assembling large groups of angry protesters and agitating them to escalate the rioting. In several instances, these disturbances were rapidly quelled through the use of bayonets and chemical dispersers by the XVIII Airborne units. That unit arrested more than 3,000 detainees, who were turned over to the Baltimore Police. A general curfew was set at 6 p.m. in the city limits and martial law was enforced. As rioting continued, African American plainclothes police officers and community leaders were sent to the worst areas to prevent further violence. By the end of the unrest, 6 people had died, 700 were injured, and 5,800 had been arrested; property damage was estimated at over $12 million.[10]
One of the major outcomes of the riot was the attention Governor Agnew received when he criticized local black leaders for not doing enough to help stop the disturbance. While this angered black people and white liberals, it caught the attention of Republican presidential candidate Richard Nixon, who was looking for someone on his ticket who could counter George Wallace'sAmerican Independent Party campaign. Agnew became Nixon's vice presidential running mate in 1968.[11]
The rioting in Kansas City did not erupt on April 4, like other cities of the United States affected directly by the assassination of King, but rather on April 9 after local events within the city.[12][13] The riot was sparked when Kansas City Police Department deployed tear gas against student protesters when they staged their performances outside City Hall.[12][13]
The deployment of tear gas dispersed the protesters from the area, but other citizens of the city began to riot as a result of the police action on the student protesters. The resulting effects of the riot resulted in the arrest of over 100 adults, and left six dead and at least 20 admitted to hospitals.[14]
Although not as large as other cities, violent disturbances did erupt in Detroit. Michigan governor George W. Romney ordered the National Guard into Detroit. One person was killed,[15] and gangs tossed objects at cars and smashed storefront windows along 12th Street on the west side.[16]
Riots erupted in New York City the night King was murdered. Sporadic violence and looting occurred in Harlem, the largest African-American neighborhood in Manhattan. Tensions simmered down after Mayor John Lindsay traveled into the heart of the area and stated that he regretted King's wrongful death. However, numerous businesses were still looted and set afire in Harlem and Brooklyn following the statement.
Disturbances erupted in Pittsburgh on April 5 and continued through April 11. The riot peaked on April 7 in which one person was killed and 3,600 National Guardsmen were deployed into the city. Over 100 businesses were either looted or burned in the Hill District, Homewood, and North Side neighborhoods with various structures being set afire by arsonists. The riot left many of the city's black commercial districts in shambles and the areas most impacted by the unrest were slow to recover in the following decades.
The Cincinnati riots were in response to the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4, 1968. Tension in the Avondale neighborhood had already been high due to a lack of job opportunities for African-American men, and the assassination escalated that tension. On April 8, around 1,500 black people attended a memorial held at a local recreation center. An officer of the Congress of Racial Equality blamed white Americans for King's death and urged the crowd to retaliate. The crowd was orderly when it left the memorial and spilled out into the street. Nearby James Smith, a black man, attempted to protect a jewelry store from a robbery with his own shotgun. During the struggle with the robbers, also black, Smith accidentally shot and killed his wife.
Rioting started after a false rumor was spread in the crowd that Smith's wife was actually killed by a white police officer. Rioters smashed store windows and looted merchandise. More than 70 fires had been set, several of them major. During the rioting eight young African Americans dragged a white student, Noel Wright, and his wife from their car in Mount Auburn. Wright was stabbed to death and his wife was beaten. The next night, the city was put under curfew, and nearly 1,500 National Guardsmen were brought in to subdue the violence. Several days after the riot started, two people were dead, hundreds were arrested, and the city had suffered $3 million in property damage.
The Trenton Riots of 1968 were a major civil disturbance that took place during the week following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis, Tennessee, on April 4. More than 200 Trenton businesses, mostly in Downtown, were ransacked and burned. More than 300 people, most of them young black men, were arrested on charges ranging from assault and arson to looting and violating the mayor's emergency curfew. In addition to 16 injured policemen, 15 firefighters were treated at city hospitals for smoke inhalation, burns, sprains and cuts suffered while fighting raging blazes or for injuries inflicted by rioters. Denizens of Trenton's urban core often pulled false alarms and would then throw bricks at firefighters responding to the alarm boxes. This experience, along with similar experiences in other major cities, effectively ended the use of open-cab fire engines.[citation needed] As an interim measure, the Trenton Fire Department fabricated temporary cab enclosures from steel deck plating until new equipment could be obtained. The losses incurred by downtown businesses were initially estimated by the city to be $7 million, but the total of insurance claims and settlements came to $2.5 million.[17]
Trenton's Battle Monument neighborhood was hardest hit. Since the 1950s, North Trenton had witnessed a steady exodus of middle-class residents, and the riots spelled the end for North Trenton. By the 1970s, the region had become one of the most blighted and crime-ridden in the city,[18] although gentrification in the area eventually followed.[citation needed]
The two-day riot that occurred after King's assassination was small compared with riots in other cities, but its aftermath – a 9+1⁄2-month occupation by the National Guard– highlighted the depth of Wilmington's racial problem. During the riot, which occurred on April 9–10, 1968, the mayor asked for a small number of National Guardsmen to help restore order. Democratic governor Charles L. Terry (a southern-style Democrat) sent in the entire state National Guard and refused to remove them after the rioting was brought under control. Republican Russell W. Peterson defeated Governor Terry, and upon his inauguration in January 1969, Governor Peterson ended the National Guard's occupation in Wilmington.[19]
The Occupation of Wilmington caused scars on the city and its people that have lasted to this day. Some suburbanites grew fearful of traveling into Wilmington in broad daylight, even to attend church on Sunday morning. Over the next few years businesses relocated, taking their employees, customers and tax payments with them.[20]
Riots occurred in Louisville, Kentucky, in May 1968. As in many other cities around the country, there were unrest and riots partially in response to the assassination. On May 27, 1968, a group of 400 people, mostly Black people, gathered at Twenty-Eight and Greenwood Streets, in the Parkland neighborhood. The intersection, and Parkland in general, had recently become an important location for Louisville's black community, as the local NAACP branch had moved its office there.
The crowd was protesting the possible reinstatement of a white officer who had been suspended for beating an African-American man some weeks earlier. Several community leaders arrived and told the crowd that no decision had been reached, and alluded to disturbances in the future if the officer was reinstated. By 8:30, the crowd began to disperse.
However, rumors (which turned out to be untrue) were spread that Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee speaker Stokely Carmichael's plane to Louisville was being intentionally delayed by white people. After bottles were thrown by the crowd, the crowd became unruly and police were called. However the small and unprepared police response simply upset the crowd more, which continued to grow. The police, including a captain who was hit in the face by a bottle, retreated, leaving behind a patrol car, which was turned over and burned.
By midnight, rioters had looted stores as far east as Fourth Street, overturned cars and started fires.
Within an hour, Mayor Kenneth A. Schmied requested 700 Kentucky National Guard troops and established a citywide curfew. Violence and vandalism continued to rage the next day, but had subdued somewhat by May 29. Business owners began to return, although troops remained until June 4. Police made 472 arrests related to the riots. Two African-American teenagers had died, and $200,000 in damage had been done.[21]
The disturbances had a longer-lasting effect. Most white business owners quickly pulled out or were forced out of Parkland and surrounding areas. Most white residents also left the West End, which had been almost entirely white north of Broadway, from subdivision until the 1960s. The riot would have effects that shaped the image which white people would hold of Louisville's West End, that it was predominantly black and crime-ridden.[22]
The assassinations triggered active unrest in communities that were already discontented. For example, the Memphis sanitation strike, which was already underway, took on a new level of urgency. It was to these striking workers that King delivered his final speech, and in Memphis that he was killed. Negotiations on April 16 brought an end to the strike and a promise of better wages.[23][24]
President Lyndon B. Johnson and Joe Califano chart riot outbreaks in Washington, D.C.
On April 4, President Lyndon B. Johnson denounced King's murder. He also began to communicate with a host of mayors and governors preparing for a reaction from black America. He cautioned against unnecessary force, but felt like local governments would ignore his advice, saying to aides, "I'm not getting through. They're all holing up like generals in a dugout getting ready to watch a war."[25]
According to press secretary George Christian, Johnson was not surprised by the riots that followed: "What did you expect? I don't know why we're so surprised. When you put your foot on a man's neck and hold him down for three hundred years, and then you let him up, what's he going to do? He's going to knock your block off."[27]
Military deployment
After the Watts riots in 1965 and the Detroit riot of 1967, the military began preparing heavily for black insurrection. The Pentagon's Army Operations Center thus quickly began its response to the assassination on the night of April 4, directing air force transport planes to prepare for an occupation of Washington, D.C. The Army also dispatched undercover agents to gather information.[28]
On April 5, Johnson ordered mobilization of the Army and National Guard, particularly for D.C.[29]
Legislative response
Some responded to the riots with suggestions for improving the conditions that engendered them. Many White House aides took the opportunity to push their preferred programs for urban improvement. At the same time, some members of Congress criticized Johnson. Senator Richard Russell felt Johnson was not going far enough to suppress the violence. Senator Robert Byrd suggested that Washington, D.C. ought to be occupied indefinitely by the army.[30]
Audio records reveal a tense and variable relationship between Johnson and local officials. In conversations with Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley, Johnson describes the complications with ordering federal troops before local governments have exhausted all options.[32] Later, Johnson would describe the domestic unrest as another front in the global war, criticizing Daley for not requesting troops sooner.[33] From the transcript:[34]
President Johnson: [Unclear] ... Goddammit, I don't know how we handle these things. But I know one thing: that we've got to handle them with muscle and with toughness. And we put troops in every place they asked me to, and we came after it [in] reasonably good shape.
Daley: But the thing is, is there's just so much of this destruction takes place before we're able to—that was my observation. We have all these things destroyed before we ever—
President Johnson: Well, that's right. Now, Mayor, if you want my judgment what's wrong, it's wrong with your not asking for it.
In the same call, Johnson told Daley he wanted to use a strategy of pre-emption: "I'd rather move them and not need them than need them and not have them."
Impact
Physical
Some areas were heavily damaged by the riots, and recovered slowly. In Washington, D.C., poor urban planning decisions on the part of the federal and local government were an obstacle to recovery.[35]
A lot of [previous] civil rights [legislation] was about making the South behave and taking the teeth from George Wallace ... This came right to the neighborhoods across the country. This was civil rights getting personal.
The assassination and subsequent riots quickly revived the bill.[38][39][27][40] On April 5, Johnson wrote a letter to the United States House of Representatives urging passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1968, which included the Fair Housing Act.[31] The Rules Committee, "jolted by the repeated civil disturbances virtually outside its door," finally ended its hearings on April 8.[41] With newly urgent attention from White House legislative director Joseph Califano and Speaker of the HouseJohn McCormack, the bill—which was previously stalled that year—passed the House by a wide margin on April 10.[25]
For some liberals and civil rights advocates, the riots were a turning point. However, they increased an already-strong trend toward de facto racial segregation and white flight in America's cities, strengthening racial barriers that looked as though they might weaken.[30] The riots were political fodder for the Republican party, which used fears of black urban crime to garner support for law and order, especially in the 1968 presidential campaign[citation needed]. The assassination and riots radicalized many, helping to fuel the Black Power movement.[42]
The National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, known as the Kerner Commission after its chair, Governor Otto Kerner Jr. of Illinois, was an 11-member Presidential Commission established in July 1967 by President Lyndon B. Johnson in Executive Order 11365 to investigate the causes of over 150 riots throughout the country in 1967 and to provide recommendations that would prevent them from reoccurring.
The 1967 Detroit riot, also known as the 12th Street Riot and the Detroit Uprising, was the bloodiest of the urban riots in the United States during the "long, hot summer of 1967". Composed mainly of confrontations between black residents and the Detroit Police Department, it began in the early morning hours of Sunday July 23, 1967, in Detroit, Michigan.
The 1992 Los Angeles riots were a series of riots and civil disturbances that occurred in Los Angeles County, California, United States, during April and May 1992. Unrest began in South Central Los Angeles on April 29, after a jury acquitted four officers of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) charged with using excessive force in the arrest and beating of Rodney King. The incident had been videotaped by George Holliday, who was a bystander to the incident, and was heavily broadcast in various news and media outlets.
Following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., a leading African-American civil rights activist, on April 4, 1968, Washington, D.C., experienced a four-day period of violent civil unrest and rioting. Part of the broader riots that affected at least 110 U.S. cities, those in Washington, D.C.—along with those in Chicago and in Baltimore—were among those with the greatest numbers of participants. President Lyndon B. Johnson called in the National Guard to the city on April 5, 1968, to assist the police department in quelling the unrest. Ultimately, 13 people were killed, with approximately 1,000 people injured and over 6,100 arrested.
The 1991 Washington, D.C., riot, sometimes referred to as the Mount Pleasant riot or Mount Pleasant Disturbance, occurred in May 1991, when rioting broke out in the Mount Pleasant neighborhood of Washington, D.C., in response to an African-American female police officer having shot a Salvadoran man in the chest following a Cinco de Mayo celebration.
The Baltimore riot of 1968 was a period of civil unrest that lasted from April 6 to April 14, 1968, in Baltimore. The uprising included crowds filling the streets, burning and looting local businesses, and confronting the police and national guard.
Louisville, Kentucky experienced three days of rioting in May 1968. As in many other cities around the country, there were unrest and riots partially in response to the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., on April 4. On May 27, a group of 400 people, mostly blacks, gathered at 28th and Greenwood Streets, in the Parkland neighborhood. The intersection, and Parkland in general, had recently become an important location for Louisville's black community, as the local NAACP branch had moved its office there.
Avondale is one of the 52 neighborhoods of Cincinnati, Ohio. It is home to the Cincinnati Zoo and Botanical Garden. The population was 11,345 at the 2020 census.
The Memphis sanitation strike began on February 12, 1968, in response to the deaths of sanitation workers Echol Cole and Robert Walker. The deaths served as a breaking point for more than 1,300 African American men from the Memphis Department of Public Works as they demanded higher wages, time and a half overtime, dues check-off, safety measures, and pay for the rainy days when they were told to go home.
The 1968 Chicago riots, in the United States, were sparked in part by the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Rioting and looting followed, with people flooding out onto the streets of major cities, primarily in black urban areas. Over 100 major U.S. cities experienced disturbances, resulting in roughly $50 million in damage.
The 1968 Kansas City riot occurred in Kansas City, Missouri, in April 1968. Kansas City became one of 37 cities in the United States to be the subject of rioting after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. The rioting in Kansas City did not erupt on April 4, like other cities of the United States affected directly by the assassination, but rather on April 9 after local events within the city.
The Wilmington Riot of 1968 occurred in Wilmington, Delaware, in April of that year following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. The riot did not cause any fatalities, though there were numerous injuries, arrests, and buildings burned. Despite the quick cessation of rioting, the governor refused to recall the Delaware Army National Guard and Delaware Air National Guard, leaving them in the city as an occupying force until the following year.
The 1968 New York City riot was a disturbance sparked by the assassination of Martin Luther King on April 4, 1968. Harlem, the largest African-American neighborhood in Manhattan was expected to erupt into looting and violence as it had done a year earlier, in which two dozen stores were either burglarized or burned and four people were killed. However, Mayor John Lindsay traveled into the heart of the area and stated that he regretted King’s wrongful death which led to the calming of residents. Numerous businesses were still looted and set afire in Harlem and Brooklyn, although these events were not widespread and paled in comparison to the riots in Washington D.C., Baltimore, and Chicago in which federal troops were needed to quell the disorders.
The 1966 Chicago West Side riots occurred between July 12 and 15 in Chicago, Illinois. After police arrested a man who was wanted for armed robbery, black residents took to the streets in anger and looted and burned various stores throughout the West Side until the arrival of 1,200 National Guardsmen on July 15. Violence quickly subsided and most of the troops were sent home on July 20.
The 1967 Milwaukee riot was one of 159 race riots that swept cities in the United States during the "Long Hot Summer of 1967". In Milwaukee, Wisconsin, African American residents, outraged by the slow pace in ending housing discrimination and police brutality, began to riot on the evening of July 30, 1967. The inciting incident was a fight between teenagers, which escalated into full-fledged rioting with the arrival of police. Within minutes, arson, looting, and sniping were occurring in the north side of the city, primarily the 3rd Street Corridor.
The term ghetto riots, also termed ghetto rebellions, race riots, or negro riots refers to summer social unrest across the United States in the mid-to-late 1960s, characterized by African American groups using violent tactics.
"When the looting starts, the shooting starts" is a phrase originally used by Walter E. Headley, the police chief of Miami, Florida, in response to an outbreak of violent crime during the 1967 Christmas holiday season. He accused "young hoodlums, from 15 to 21", of taking "advantage of the civil rights campaign" that was then sweeping the United States. Having ordered his officers to combat the violence with shotguns, he told the press that "we don't mind being accused of police brutality". The quote may have been borrowed from a 1963 comment from Birmingham, Alabama police chief Bull Connor. It was featured in Headley's 1968 obituary published by the Miami Herald.
The 1967 New York City riot was one of many riots that occurred during the long, hot summer of 1967. The riot began after an off-duty police officer, Patrolman Anthony Cinquemani, while trying to break up a fight, shot and killed a Puerto Rican man named Renaldo Rodriquez who had a knife and lunged toward him.
↑ Levy, Peter B. (2011). "The Dream Deferred: The Assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., and the Holy Week Uprisings of 1968". In Jessica I. Elfenbein; Thomas L. Hollowak; Elizabeth M. Nix (eds.). Baltimore '68: riots and rebirth in an American city. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. ISBN978-1-4399-0662-0.
↑ "McKissick Says Nonviolence Has Become Dead Philosophy". New York Times. April 5, 1968.
↑ Risen, Clay (2009). "April 5: 'Official Disorder on Top of Civil Disorder'". A nation on fire: America in the wake of the King assassination. Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley & Sons. ISBN978-0-470-17710-5. There was no 'typical' rioter, but the statistically average profile was better educated and more likely to be employed than most people in the riot area (though, despite claims later made on the Senate floor, only a handful of rioters were government employees). Such results underscore an alternative theory of ghetto rioting: that it was at least as much an expression of protopolitical anger as it was of opportunism and common criminality.
↑ "Memphis Sanitation Workers Strike". King Institute Encyclopedia. Martin Luther King Jr., Research and Education Institute. June 2, 2017. Retrieved December 4, 2019.
1 2 3 4 Kotz, Nick (2005). "14. Another Martyr". Judgment days: Lyndon Baines Johnson, Martin Luther King Jr., and the laws that changed America. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. p.417. ISBN0-618-08825-3.
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