Fifty-two years ago, I was 20 years old and living in Washington, D.C. I was smack dab in the middle of a burning city. My Howard University roommates and I were trapped in what seemed like the war zone from hell: There was no place to buy food, and armed soldiers were stationed in front of our apartment building. Tanks and other military vehicles rolled by, day and night, in an endless display of white military might. The smell of smoke was thick in the air, and we were afraid our building would be the next to burn.
Palm Sunday marks, for many Christians, the beginning of Holy Week, which commemorates Jesus of Nazareth’s last week on Earth, leading up to Easter Sunday. In the midst of the coronavirus epidemic, with the lies, confusion, and fear being churned up by the current White House resident, this Holy Week will be like few before it. My mind drifts back to another turmoil-wracked week, which also had none of the reverence, peace, or joy normally associated with this series of holy days.
It was April 1968, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. had just been assassinated by a white man, and many of the nation’s cities with significant black populations would go up in flames.
My roommates and I attended two memorial services for Dr. King on campus. One had a rather ponderous and solemn tone, led by Howard’s president, Dr. James Nabrit Jr.; the other was an impromptu gathering outside directly after, which sparked a fiery and militant response where Stokely Carmichael and other youthful members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) held sway.
Earlier, J. Samuel Walker writes, Carmichael had tried to calm things down:
Stokely Carmichael had joined the crowd, and he quickly assumed leadership. A graduate of Howard University, he happened to be in Washington during a series of speaking engagements around the country. He was no longer the SNCC national chairman, but when he heard about King’s shooting, he went to the group’s local office to consult with his colleagues. After talking with his SNCC associates, he decided that local businesses should close as a way of honoring King. He announced, “We’re going to close them down now,” and headed for the streets.
Carmichael was not alone in deciding that stores in the 14th Street and U Street corridors should shut down. A group of about 25 to 30 people fell in behind Carmichael and marched to a Peoples Drug Store at 14th and U Streets. Carmichael politely asked the manager of the store to close, and he immediately complied with the request. The group, mostly young men, soon grew to about a hundred as it moved on to other businesses. The owners, doubtless in part because they felt intimidated, promptly agreed with demands to shutter their stores.
Carmichael was not calm when he held this press conference on April 5. He called the assassination of Dr. King "white America's biggest mistake."
My roommates and I were of the SNCC persuasion. We were angry. As we walked home from the service, we got to Park Road, where people were breaking windows. There was a shoe store near the corner with the gates torn off and the door wide open. The only person inside was a young black girl, who looked about 9 years old, sitting in a chair with a pile of boxes on the floor beside her as pandemonium was going on outside. She was carefully opening the boxes, trying on shoes. I went in and told her to go home, that it was dangerous. She said softly, but firmly, “I need Easter shoes.” I stayed with her as she carefully tried on one pair after another. She finally selected the shoes she wanted, put the others back, grinned at me and left, clutching the box to her chest. I painted a picture of her that year, titled “Easter Shoes,” and my art professor and mentor, Lois Jones Pierre-Noël, arranged for its sale. She told me it was hanging in the office of a Congressional staffer. I wish I could remember who bought it.
Someone had set the corner liquor store on fire. Flames were shooting out of the store, and the sound of breaking glass and bottles exploding was the musical accompaniment to the madness, punctuated by the sound of sirens. Things were getting crazier and crazier, but we made it home without incident.
What people often forget about the nation’s capitol is that, up until recent gentrification, the District was dubbed “Chocolate City with the vanilla suburbs.” It was just a short run for people to get to the White House and other government buildings, huddled in the midst of blackness. That’s why the military was called in by President Lyndon Baines Johnson to quell the rebellion.
The White House announced at 5P.M. that because the President had determined that “a condition of domestic violence and disorder'' existed, he had issued a proclamation and an Executive order mobilizing combat-equipped troops in Washington. Some of the troops were sent to guard the Capital and the White House.
Reinforcements numbering 2,500 riot-trained soldiers - a brigade of the 82d Airborne Division from Ft. Bragg, N.C. were airlifted to nearby Andrews Air Force Base, to be held in reserve this weekend.
Meanwhile, all hell was breaking loose elsewhere. Daily Kos Community Contributor Susan Grigsby wrote a story in 2018 about her experiences at the same time in Chicago, called “The 1968 Chicago riot that everyone seems to forget.”
On that Saturday morning, while the rioting continued in isolated areas throughout the city, my father met me for breakfast at the diner on State and Division, hoping to talk me into going home until things settled down. But like most 18-year-olds would, I refused to consider it. In the middle of our conversation, an armored vehicle … drove down Division Street, turning onto State Street where National Guardsmen patrolled in pairs, with bayonets affixed to their rifles.
If the city felt like it was occupied in the Gold Coast, it looked like it had been bombed on the west side. More than 200 stores and businesses had been burned. That part of the city has never fully recovered and is still littered with vacant lots where once-thriving businesses stood.
She also detailed Mayor Richard J. Daley’s vile police strategy.
… the mayor established a commission to review the rioting and police response, and issued his infamous “shoot to kill” orders:
"I have conferred with the superintendent of police this morning and I gave him the following instructions, which I thought were instructions on the night of the fifth that were not carried out. I said to him very emphatically and very definitely that [he should issue an order] immediately and under his signature to shoot to kill any arsonist or anyone with a Molotov cocktail in his hand in Chicago because they're potential murderers, and to issue a police order to shoot to maim or cripple any arsonists and looters--arsonists to kill and looters to maim and detain."
Daley said he thought these instructions shouldn't have been needed. "I assumed any superintendent would issue instructions to shoot arsonists on sight and to maim looters, but I found out this morning this wasn't so and therefore gave him specific instructions."
The “inner cities” of America would be engulfed in fire—though, as African American history professor Ashley Howard noted in 2014, they had already been burning with regularity.
Sixties rebellions in major cities like Detroit and Los Angeles got the most media coverage, but the uprisings then were much more widespread. In 1967 alone 80% of revolts took place in cities with populations smaller than 500,000. Furthermore, urban outbursts were usually sparked by a specific kind of incident – an episode of real or rumored police brutality toward poor, minority urban residents.
Somehow we tend to forget this history—or, in the case of younger people, never even learn about it.
In the 2018 book The Great Uprising: Race Riots in Urban America during the 1960s, Peter Levy wrote about “The Holy Week Uprising of 1968.”
Between the evening of April 4th, when James Earl Ray shot Martin Luther King Jr. and Easter Sunday April 14, 1968, looting, arson, or sniper fire occurred in 196 cities in thirty-six states plus the District of Columbia. Fifty-four cities suffered at least $100,000 in property damage, with the nation's capital and Baltimore topping the list at approximately $15 million and $12 million (81 million in 2015 dollars), respectively. Thousands of small shopkeepers saw their life's savings go up in smoke. Combined forty-three men and women were killed, approximately 3,500 were injured, and 27,000 were arrested. Not until over 58,000 National Guardsmen and regular Army troops joined local state and police forces did the uprisings cease. Put somewhat differently, during Holy Week 1968, the United States experienced its greatest wave of social unrest since the Civil War.
Writing for the Washington Post in 2019, Levy further explored misconceptions about the uprisings.
For years, many white Americans mistakenly conceived of racism as a “Southern problem” and believed that Jim Crow only resided south of the Mason-Dixon Line. The racial violence of the 1960s throughout the country rudely awakened the nation to the speciousness of this belief.
Yet no sooner had that belief been discarded than it was immediately replaced with a new and equally false one: that America’s race problems extended only to our large cities and their inner-city ghettos, but not beyond that. The terms that we used — and still use — contributed to the misunderstanding of what was taking place. By using the term “riots,” we reinforce the notion that these acts of “collective violence” were spontaneous and apolitical and that they were disconnected to the protests for civil rights in the South. But a closer examination of them, individually and collectively, proves otherwise.
This flawed understanding had real consequences. Focused on large cities, the national media gave sparse coverage to the revolts in York and other midsize and small cities, despite the fact that the majority of them occurred in such places. In 1969 alone, revolts rocked midsized cities like Hartford, Conn., Harrisburg, Pa. and Fort Lauderdale, Fla.
Two years ago, for the 50th anniversary of Dr. King’s assassination and the turmoil that followed, WTOP News in Washington, D.C. created ”DC Uprising: Voices from the 1968 Riots.”
One of the interesting parts of this history of cities in flames is what happened, or more correctly, what didn’t happen, in Boston, and the politics of “why.” Journalist Charles Thomson interviewed David Leaf ahead of his film, The Night James Brown Saved Boston, for WaxPoetics in 2008.
For the audience to truly appreciate the significance of the concert, says Leaf, they had to first understand the context in which the concert took place. This meant defining, first of all, what kind of place America was in the 1960s.
“There is this feeling that the ’60s was all about hippies and peace and love. Really, it was perhaps the most contentious period in American history. There was a lot of turmoil, Vietnam was going on, and we were in the middle of the civil rights movement.” The concert took place just over twenty-four hours after Dr. Martin Luther King was pronounced dead at St. Joseph’s Hospital after being gunned down on his hotel balcony in Memphis, Tennessee. As news of King’s assassination swept across the country, riots engulfed over 150 cities. One of those cities was Boston, where the Roxbury area was ablaze.
The staff at Boston Garden Arena feared a riot inside their venue and cancelled James Brown’s concert. When news reached Tom Atkins, Boston’s only Black councilman, he predicted that the cancellation would result in an even more chaos. If 15,000 Black kids showed up at the Boston Garden and found the gates locked, he told the mayor, not only would there be a riot, but this time it would affect the city center and not just the inner city.
You can watch the entire film below.
If you have not seen the film, it is well worth watching.
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Many of us have favorite songs that evoke specific periods in our lived history. James Brown may have been the black musical voice of the time, in the estimation of filmmaker Leaf and many others, but for me, the soundtrack of those days of black rage during the ‘60s and early ‘70s will always be Marvin Gaye’s ”Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler).”
Gaye sings, “Panic is spreading/God know where we're heading ...” Sadly, this Holy Week has that same refrain. Makes me wanna holler.
And so I will holler, and make sure I get to the polls in November.