The Eureka Theory of History Is Wrong

Invention alone can’t change the world, Derek Thompson wrote in the January/February 2023 issue. What matters most is what happens next.

Derek Thompson’s conclusion that societal progress depends on trust is profound and should be shouted from the rooftops. I am a rabbi, and I may make it the topic of my High Holiday sermon this coming year.

Rabbi Ilana Goldhaber-Gordon
Palo Alto, Calif.

Derek Thompson makes a number of insightful arguments about the decline in American progress. But in citing 1980 as the end of “building,” he glosses over an important point: 1980 is not a random year in U.S. history—it is the dawn of the Reagan era. The shift that began then—declaring a quest for personal advantage to be a driving force of progress, or, to use Ayn Rand’s phrasing, declaring selfishness to be a virtue—is central to the decline Thompson describes. Corporate strategies and business-school curricula rarely encourage thoughtful investments that yield reasonable returns for an extended period. Instead they emphasize strategic behavior that at times amounts to gaming the system rather than doing something useful.

Restoring public trust will require recognizing that selfishness is not a virtue, and that responsible business leadership requires more than maximizing shareholder value.

Regan Whitworth
Missoula, Mont.

Part of what stymies innovation in the U.S. is our culture’s focus on individualism. The collective good of the country has not been important to industrial and corporate leaders. If the U.S. as a nation is to progress, there has to be concern for society in its entirety; there needs to be an understanding that government is for all of us. During this period of divisiveness, we need to remind everyone that government policy and invention, like the internet, can benefit society as a whole.

Reginald I. Berry
Annandale, Va.

In light of Thompson’s discussion of the importance of leadership and culture for an invention’s implementation, I wanted to point out that one of the earliest supporters of smallpox inoculation in Europe was Catherine the Great, of Russia. Her bravery in receiving the inoculation in 1768, 28 years before Edward Jenner invented the first vaccine, narrowed the trust gap significantly in 18th-century Russia—no small feat, given the slow pace of communication. She used her status as empress to make the issue nonpartisan and nonclassist. She established inoculation clinics in several cities, and by 1800, 2 million Russians had been inoculated.

Robynn Jensen
Savage, Minn.

As an engineer, I agreed with much of Thompson’s article. But he errs in describing the pitfalls of nuclear power. I am an antinuclear activist, but I can assure you that the reason we don’t have more nuclear-power plants isn’t the success of the tiny antinuclear movement. It is because investors have been unwilling to finance an industry that for 50 years has overpromised and underdelivered. Every nuclear plant built in the past half century has suffered massive cost overruns and schedule delays. In 1985, Forbes famously called nuclear power “the largest managerial disaster in business history.” And nothing has changed since then, as the only two nuclear plants now under construction in the U.S., in Georgia, are projected to cost at least $30 billion—more than double the original estimate—and are more than six years behind schedule. Two reactors that had been under construction in South Carolina were canceled, wasting billions of taxpayer dollars.

Jeff Alson
Ann Arbor, Mich.

[From the March 2023 issue: The real obstacle to nuclear power]

I saw merit in Thompson’s argument until I reached the final section. The great problem of today’s world is not economic but ecological, and Thompson’s idea of “build, build, build” won’t solve it. We live on a planet with limited resources. Our economic system is dependent on our ecological system, not the other way around. We think our technology will protect us and therefore feel we can continue expanding our impact ad infinitum.

Jack M. Pedigo
Lopez Island, Wash.

Derek Thompson misunderstands the degrowth movement. Degrowth isn’t the reason for America’s housing shortage. First, the degrowth idea hasn’t caught on widely—the number of advocates in this country would fill only a modest auditorium. Second, the degrowth movement is about policy interventions to reduce inequality. It centers ideas such as replacing GDP with a metric that measures actual progress and advocates for trust-busting and more public investment in the commons. The real cause of unaffordable housing is inequality.

Robert Montroy
Rockford, Mich.

[From the January/February 2023 issue: The obvious answer to homelessness]

Though I enjoyed his article, I believe Thompson has overlooked the core paradox of human progress: that things generally get worse before they get better. Specifically, I feel Thompson misinterpreted our political discourse around climate change and the COVID‑19 vaccine as evidence of our failures, when they could in fact augur periods of substantial progress on the horizon. The United States has at times been even more polarized than it is today, yet our country still made significant progress. At the peak of our rancor, we fought a civil war—and it brought about the end of the archaic atrocity of slavery.

Nathaniel Barrett
Manchester, N.H.

What’s missing from Thompson’s otherwise compelling argument is consideration of whether any proposed material progress offers something sensationally desirable to citizens. If progress isn’t novel and pleasing to our senses, then arguments against implementation—however spurious, and from whichever band of the ideological spectrum—are far more likely to convince those on the fence.

My mother was born in 1929. She grew up in rural Pennsylvania without electricity. If electricity had brought only heat and light, it may have been easy to sway my poorly educated and conservative grandparents to oppose its broad implementation across rural America—after all, they already had fire and gas lamps. But electricity could also power radios, kitchen appliances, tools, and countless other useful and exciting gadgets. Life would change and improve at the sensory level with the flip of an actual switch.

Perhaps with the exception of high-speed rail, nothing in the current array of tech proposals has especially novel or aesthetic appeal. As Thompson notes, some technologies are repellent. Apartment buildings are old news. Solar panels can be eyesores that supplant natural landscapes. Nuclear reactors can be ugly and still have a bad reputation, however unwarranted. Where’s the novelty, the beauty? How excited can we become about what amounts to new batteries in the same old gadgets? To build a broad coalition of support, progress needs to look, smell, sound, and feel exciting—little else has so powerfully united the American people.

Allen Farmelo
Hopewell Junction, N.Y.

Derek Thompson replies:

I’m pleased that readers seem to have concluded that culture is paramount to progress. Especially trust. It simply doesn’t matter what we invent in our laboratories if scientists, companies, and governments are met with widespread distrust by the public, making it impossible to implement what we discover. And I deeply appreciate Allen Farmelo’s point—progress ought to feel beautiful. I tend to think about new ideas through a utilitarian filter: Will this new thing help more people? I’ll do my best to add Farmelo’s Corollary to my arsenal: Will this new thing make the world more beautiful?

Behind the Cover

In this month’s cover story, Adrienne LaFrance reports on political violence in the United States. We sought to convey the era’s “new anarchy” with a photo of an anonymous figure emerging from a cloud of smoke at a 2020 protest in Portland, Oregon. LaFrance argues that the Portland protests demonstrated how willing some radicals are to use violence—and that it may take a generation for their fervor to subside.

Luise Stauss, Director of Photography
Genevieve Fussell, Senior Photo Editor

Correction

“The Eureka Theory of History Is Wrong” (January/February 2023) stated that the United States advanced airplane technology during World War I. In fact, the U.S. advanced airplane technology after the war.

This article appears in the April 2023 print edition with the headline “The Commons.”

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Radio: Washington Mixes, the tasty light!

Radio: WOL 14 … 50!

Radio: I’ll never let you go-oo.

Mission Control: … now being retracted from the Saturn V vehicle. T minus 15, 14, 13, 12 …

Vann R. Newkirk II: Odds are, you don’t know much about the Apollo 6 mission.

Mission Control: … three, two, one. We have commenced; we have liftoff. (Crowd cheering.)

Newkirk: If you’ve ever seen that one famous video from outside a rocket detaching from the first stage, just beyond the Earth, then you probably have seen Apollo 6. It’s got a bit of a mixed record, as far as space stuff goes. It was just the second test flight of the Saturn V rocket, one of the most critical components of the entire moon-landing program. On its launch date in 1968, the idea was still new, still uncertain, still dangerous.

Mission Control: Now at 10 nautical miles of altitude, heading out beyond the Earth’s atmosphere, uh, we’re on our way.

Newkirk: It had just been six years since President Kennedy announced that we would go to the moon, not because it was easy, but because it was hard. It turned out that building something like a giant bomb that would send men a quarter-million miles away through the vacuum of space was pretty hard.

The launch wasn’t as big an event as previous launches. It was uncrewed, so there was none of the majesty of astronauts walking and smiling. No names to remember. There was no nail-biting drama of wondering if the boys might not make it home. Earlier that week, President Lyndon B. Johnson announced that he wouldn’t run for reelection. His announcement took away some of the attention from the launch. Still, this was the experiment that would tell us if the thing was possible at all. In a country where so much was falling apart socially and politically, this was the rare moment that might bring people together.

Mission Control: Our first stage will be falling away shortly now. That’s a day’s work done. Again the greatest weight-lifting effort ever … Our inner stage has separated—this crucial timeline event, right on schedule.

Newkirk: In the broad strokes, the Apollo 6 mission worked. The Saturn V rocket did not explode. The command module made it up to space and came back. But there was some damage to the rocket. The mission’s planned route was no longer possible.

Apollo 6 is often described as a failure, but it did end up being important. The ability to safely manage the problems in the launch gave NASA confidence in the Saturn V.

It meant that when Apollo 11 landed Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the moon a year later, it did so with the Saturn V rocket.

In the right light, the Apollo 6 launch might be remembered as a validation of the effort to go to space, maybe the greatest scientific endeavor humanity has ever attempted.

It was a spring evening, the week before Passover—10 days before Easter. A time of renewal. A time of change.

But Apollo 6 is not really remembered at all, because there was a bigger story on April 4.

Police scanner: 416. A shooting has occurred … You are to remain in the car until it is verified that the …

Ken Reed (journalist): Yes, this is Ken Reed, of Westinghouse Broadcasting in Washington. And we received word about, uh, the shooting of, uh, Dr. Martin Luther King. And, uh …

Public relations officer: We have no other information about his condition or where he is.

Reed: Uh, you don’t know, uh, when, when, uh, when or how or his condition, uh—you’re just about as ignorant as the rest of us are in all of this, huh?

Public relations officer: I’m sorry. I’ll have to hang up.

Reed: All right.

Police scanner: 24-16. We’ve finally put up on this … It has been confirmed that the Reverend King has been shot. 416. 416. Form a ring around the hotel, around the hotel. Ambulances are responding.

Newkirk: Just after 7 p.m. eastern time, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was shot on the balcony of his room at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. A bullet from a .30-06 Remington Gamemaster rifle traveled through his face and spine. His closest friends tried to care for him and reassure him as help came, as police fanned out into the city, looking for the gunman.

Reporter: Dr. Jackson said he had just asked Dr. King if he was ready for dinner when a bullet struck Dr. King in the face. The impact lifting him off his feet, he slumped to the floor without a word.

Newkirk: They rushed King to St. Joseph’s Hospital. But there wasn’t much to be done. Just an hour after the shooting, he died. He was 39 years old.

***

Newkirk II: From The Atlantic, I’m Vann Newkirk. This is Holy Week.

Part 1: “Rupture.”

***

Newkirk: The news of his assassination moved lightning fast to radio and TV stations across the country. For the next minutes, hours, and days, there was no other story. This was all that mattered.

Newscaster: NBC interrupts its regular program scheduled to bring you the following special report.

Douglas Edwards: This is Douglas Edwards, CBS News, in New York with a special report on Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King.

Reporter: Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was killed tonight in Memphis, Tennessee, this evening …

Reporter: Martin Luther King Jr. was killed tonight in Memphis, Tennessee …

Newkirk: Everywhere in America, daily life stopped. Dinners turned cold. Families watched the news with dread. People spilled out from homes, from stores, from restaurants, into the streets. Politicians scrambled to say something, to comfort people who were facing despair. They understood that this would send America into crisis.

Edmund Muskie: The criminal act that took his life brings shame to our country. An apostle of nonviolence has been the victim of violence.

Lyndon B. Johnson: I pray that his family can find comfort in the memory of all he tried to do for the land he loved so well.

Newkirk: For Black folks who were around in 1968, the moment is seared into memory. It’s the dark thought that comes with all the MLK boulevards, with the calendars and posters and records or speeches, or any time they hear Stevie Wonder’s “Happy Birthday” song.

It’s been over 50 years since then, but for many people, it feels like yesterday. Barbara Fleming and Taquiena Boston were both kids in northeast D.C. when it happened. They remember it well.

Barbara Fleming: That was major, major news. It was. They stopped everything on TV. Didn’t have but four channels, but it came on all the channels.

Taquiena Boston: How did it happen? Who did it? What do they know? You know, we were glued to the television.

Newkirk: Topper Carew was a young architect in D.C., trying his best to make Black neighborhoods beautiful. He remembers.

Topper Carew: It was just excruciating, you know, because not only are you feeling it physically, you’re feeling it psychologically because it has just thwarted your spiritual investment, your life investment.

Newkirk: Roland Smith was in a jail cell in Maryland. He remembers.

Roland Smith: I heard crying and, um, panic and everything. And this guy shook me. He says, “Roland, Roland—they killed Martin Luther King.”

Newkirk: Robert Birt and John Burl Smith were hundreds of miles apart. But on that night, it was like they were in the same room.

Robert Birt: I remember Walter Cronkite coming on television, interrupting the program to announce that Dr. King had just been shot and killed.

John Burl Smith: Walter Cronkite is the first face I see. And he’s telling us that Dr. King had just been shot.

Birt: I remember my mother breaking down and crying on the sofa. I can remember, you know, waves of sorrow, anger welling up in my chest at that time.

Burl Smith: Numbness is about the best description I could get it because there weren’t any words.

***

Newkirk: Almost universally, when I talk to Black people who remember the assassination of Martin Luther King, they’re still wrestling with grief. And there’s a pattern in how that grief manifested. First came the shock, the numbness. Then came despair: What are we going to do? But then … came fire.

Roland Smith: At that moment, a rage kind of jerked its way through my body that I had never felt before.

Topper Carew: You could feel the energy, man. The energy was just terrible, man.

Newkirk: In many ways, the story of the civil-rights movement is a story about disasters and violence. Assassinations, bombings, riots, lynchings, and brutality all take center stage. But I’ve found that King’s death is overlooked. It doesn’t get the same space that it has in so many people’s memories. In real time, that event changed hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of lives. Just after the killing, journalists in Memphis asked King’s associates to make meaning of what just happened. And to Jesse Jackson, King’s murder was nothing short of cataclysm.

Reporter: Do you think that this will have any dramatic effect on the relations between the white and Black in this community?

Jesse Jackson: Well, obviously it will. There were those who never believed in nonviolence because they never understood the depth of that method of solving problems in the world. Dr. King was by far the most articulate spokesman on earth in that regards. To some extent, Dr. King has been a buffer the last two years between the Black community and the white community. The white people do not know it, but the white people’s best friend is dead.

***

Newkirk: To me, King’s assassination has always stood at the crossroads of chance and destiny. There are few events in history that seem both so predetermined and so … random. In order to even be on the balcony where he was shot, King had to make a detour in his last campaign through Memphis. He had to choose to stay in the tiny, Black-owned Lorraine Motel, in a room with a balcony. Room 306. That room number had to be reported on the news for the assassin to hear.

From Bessie Brewer’s flophouse across the street, the assassin had to watch and wait. If King did come out, for long enough, the assassin had to run to another room to pull the trigger on his rifle. He had one shot. If the killer had tripped or been out of breath, if King had taken a longer nap, if the breeze had blown differently … The mind wanders.

But it all feels so inevitable too. For weeks, King had been delivering a sermon eulogizing himself. Just the night before his death, during his “Mountaintop” speech, he foreshadowed his own mortality. His eyes had “seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.”

Over the years, he had been jailed, stabbed, beaten, surveilled. Rumor has it the autopsy showed that his heart resembled that of a much older man. That years of unimaginable toil and stress were already working to kill him, even if a bullet hadn’t. It’s simply hard to imagine any past, any America, where Martin Luther King lives.

The inevitability of it all makes it hard to look straight at what actually happened when King was killed, and why it all matters.

Robert F. Kennedy: In this difficult day, in this difficult time for the United States, it is perhaps well to ask what kind of a nation we are and what direction we want to move in.

John True (journalist): United Press International, Memphis. Police and fire department are scrambling in answer to …

Art McAloon (journalist): Widespread violence and looting broke out in two areas of New York City tonight in the wake of the slaying of Martin Luther King in Memphis.

Judd Duval (journalist): Six thousand Guardsmen had been alerted during the afternoon as the vandalism and looting reached alarming proportions.

Jim McQuarie (journalist): This morning, the first violent acts were reported as small gangs of youths roamed the still riot-scarred sections of Detroit, throwing bricks, bottles and rocks through windows.

Tony Seargent (journalist): At least 4,000 National Guard and federal troops are in this uneasy town tonight and more stand ready.

Topper Carew: I immediately hit the street, man.

Taquiena Boston: And I didn’t know what was gonna happen.

Newkirk: After King was assassinated, Black neighborhoods erupted for days. Memphis, D.C., Chicago, Baltimore—in all, over 100 places went up. They were called riots or rebellions, sometimes now uprisings. Whatever you call them, and for whatever political reasons, the week was one of the most consequential in American history.

Reporter: Hundreds of Negroes were lining the streets, apparently in reaction to the news of Dr. King.

Vanessa Dixon: People that lived in the neighborhood were coming outside, throwing a rock, throwing a bottle.

Boston: It was scary.

Dixon: Mothers and fathers started coming out … older men, older women.

Boston: I couldn’t get in touch with my parents. I couldn’t get in touch with my aunts.

Reporter: I noticed some windows breaking and I looked and the Negroes had started looting stores in the area, mainly pawn shops and clothing stores.

Dixon: We was all just like, This is a release.

Boston: It felt like the world was in chaos.

Reporter: They then spotted me, and a very big, burly Negro said, “What are you doing?” And I said, “Well, I’m not doing anything. I’m just leaving.” And they said, “Well, you better run.”

Dixon: A white man killed a prominent person in our life.

Newkirk: That prominent person had taken on an almost prophetic role. It’s easy to see why his death became a sort of religious event. Dr. King was a Baptist preacher. His philosophy of nonviolence taught that his own suffering could be redemptive. More and more people viewed him as a sort of messiah. He even died during the Easter season. Across the country, the temptation to make King a martyr for white America’s sins was irresistible. But in America’s ghettos, that sin had not been washed away.

Barbara Fleming: As a child, you knew, you took the loss, but it didn’t hit you in the pit of your heart, as it does today when I sit back and think about all that he went through for us.

Lyndon B. Johnson: I hope that all Americans tonight will search their hearts as they ponder this most tragic incident.

Topper Carew: By nightfall there was a soldier on every corner.

Reporter: At least 100 fires have been ignited. Several are burning out of control at this hour.

Carew: … in your neighborhood. Yeah. In your neighborhood where you’re trying to make beauty, you’re trying to make art.

People on the streets: Hey, how you doing? This is James Louis, alright!

Carew: This is like aliens have just landed in the neighborhood, you know.

Memphis city statement: It’s believed by the Memphis Police Department that an emergency situation does exist, and at this time we are asking that all people of Memphis and Shelby County observe, and as we put into effect, a curfew. We request that all persons, unless it's absolutely an emergency to be on the street, to go to their homes and stay there until tomorrow, when things hopefully will be in a better situation.

Newkirk: That week, flags flew at half mast. Crowds recited and played back King’s speeches. They chanted his name. Choirs came together to sing songs honoring him, trying to keep people together.

Millions of Americans mourned. But they didn’t just mourn the man. They mourned a future that suddenly seemed impossible.

Roland Smith: I was a hospital employee, so I wound up having to report to work. It was, you know, kind of chaotic in the hospital.

I remember going to the top floor of the Washington hospital then, and looking out in one direction, seeing the smoke billowing from the buildings that had been set on fire. I see the military vehicles because D.C. was under martial law, and in the other direction I could see the Capitol dome with the flag flying. And I just kind of remember saying to myself, This is supposed to be the capital of the free world. You know, just thinking, What did our country come to? You know, I was just kind of feeling that sense of loss and anxiety.

Newkirk: The story we are often given transforms King’s death from a tragedy into a sort of redemption. The final chapter of a victorious movement for justice. But that story is wrong.

Martin Luther King Jr. is assassinated

King is shot on the balcony of his room at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, on April 4, 1968. He is pronounced dead within an hour.

Robert F. Kennedy announces King’s death

On the evening of April 4, 1968, Kennedy gives a speech announcing King’s assassination from his campaign trail in Indianapolis.

Americans learn of King’s death

That same evening, radio bulletins announcing the death of Martin Luther King Jr. reach listeners across the country.

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Reporter: You don’t think the death of Martin Luther King had anything to do with the rioting?

Young man: Some of them, they did it because of Martin Luther King, and some of them didn’t. Some of them did it because they just needed clothes for Easter and they didn’t have money to get it.

Reporter: Paul, you participated in the riots. Can you tell us why they—why you—had a part in them?

Paul: I had a part in it because where I live at is five stories high. And I can see my cleaners. And I saw them burning down my cleaners. So I say, Why shouldn’t I get something? And everybody burn down my clothes, take my clothes out, and do what they want to do? So I’m gonna go in the store and get what I want.

Reporter: You got any feeling about it at all, David?

David: No, I don’t.

Reporter: Why not?

David: It’s kind of fun to me, see, burning up property and stuff like that.

Reporter: You thought that was just fun?

David: Yes I did.

***

Vann R. Newkirk II: A riot is a collective. When people start to act together, the crowd can seem to have a mind of its own. It can move like an organic entity, with a will and a drive. By the time it reaches a critical mass, people, individuals, can be swallowed up into it.

But every person who decides to go out has a reason. Frustrations, rage, passions, setbacks, or even boredom all can play a role. Years of history and upbringing and feeling all come into play in the decision to throw just one brick. And you have to consider all that to understand any riot, uprising, or rebellion. Vanessa Dixon was just 12 years old when King was killed. She was Vanessa Lawson back then.

Newkirk: Did you ever watch any of the news when they were reporting on the looting and the rioting?

Vanessa Dixon: Yes, it was unbelievable. It was unbelievable to me, for one, for myself and my friends, that we participated at the beginning of what turned out to be so, so bad.

Newkirk: How do you feel about that?

Dixon: I can say I’m sorry for the things I did. I didn’t know better. But then the flip side of me says, I’m glad for the experience.

Newkirk: I went to see Vanessa in her house to understand. Vanessa Dixon lives just outside D.C. She’s something of a family historian.

Dixon: I’ve got a bunch of projects in here. I did try to clean it up as much as I could.

Newkirk: She keeps old newspapers, comic strips, obituaries, family trees. And she’s got a ton of photographs.

Dixon: … right here is the one with the black-and-white pictures in it.

Newkirk: Oh, wow.

Newkirk: The photos are all black-and-white. But they all remind me of my own childhood. She’s got one where her three older brothers are all very little, standing in front of a brick wall, smiling. She wasn’t born yet, I guess. The youngest of the boys, Vincent, is a toddler in overalls.

Dixon: This is Vincent.

Newkirk: Vincent?

Dixon: Mm-hmm.

Newkirk: What’s he wearing here?

Newkirk: Underneath the picture, somebody scribbled, “Boys in the Hood.”

Dixon: Do you remember the little photobooth they used to have? This was at Union Station.

Newkirk: Oh, wow.

Newkirk: The picture she treasures most is one of just Vincent, the littlest of her older brothers—the closest one to her age. They were the two youngest kids. They even got matching medallions with their initials on them: V.L. They were peas in a pod.

Dixon: He was my best friend in the world. I had little girlfriends and stuff like that I called my best friend, but he was really my best friend because we, we was like the dynamic duo.

Newkirk: Maybe it’s hard to imagine the little boy from the picture going out the night of a riot, but Vanessa says that Vincent did love excitement. He got in a little trouble sometimes, and Vanessa did too. But he was smart. He did well in class and he had a way with people. He was supposed to make it out. They were supposed to make it out together.

Dixon: We always thought we could feel each other’s heartbeat when we weren’t around.

Newkirk: In the picture Vanessa showed me, Vincent is a teenager, maybe 14 or so. To me, he mostly still looks like a little boy, but you can see where he’s starting to grow up. He’s still got a baby face and these wide eyes. But he’s clearly trying to look older, you know? He’s got on one of those ’60s-style, spread-collar white shirts and a jacket. Think … like, Teddy Pendergrass style. And his lineup is immaculate.

Dixon: That was his signature haircut. You never catch him, he wasn’t into the bush.

Newkirk: So, no afro.

Dixon: He wanted it shaped up. He was always brushing it. Always brushing. He used to talk about his mustache—when he got his mustache, how it was going to look, how his beard was going to look, how he’s going to keep it so shaped up. But he never got to have any hair on his face.

***

Newkirk: After King was assassinated, Vincent hit the streets, just like his sister. I wonder why he went out. Vanessa says part of it was that he was a bit of a thrill seeker, a daredevil. But there was also something there from how he grew up, and what he didn’t have growing up.

When they were kids, Vanessa and Vincent’s family bounced around the working-class neighborhoods in the heart of old Black D.C., around the H Street Corridor. The house Vanessa seems to remember best was right off 8th and H [Street] NE, right down the way from where the old Apollo Theater used to be. Their parents didn’t make a lot. Sometimes, instead of going to Shoe Town for new shoes, their dad would take them to Safeway, the grocery store.

Dixon: And there was a big, old, big, old basket. Huge. And the shoes weren’t in boxes. They were just tied together by the shoestrings. [Laughs.] And we, you know, while they did the shopping, our job was, You want some shoes? Dig through them, find your size and find what you want. Typically, that’s what most of the people around there did for their kids.

Newkirk: But, even as little kids, Vincent and Vanessa stayed with some money. The dynamic duo was always scheming on how to do odd jobs and hustle to make more for themselves. They were everywhere around H Street. They did yard work.

Dixon: We would knock on people’s doors and ask them, you know, “Do you want me to rake your leaves?”

Newkirk: They sold popcorn bags and odds and ends on the street. Their dad got them a broke-down Radio Flyer wagon from Goodwill, and they fixed it up and used it to take people’s groceries home—for a fee, of course.

Dixon: We couldn’t get them all in the wagon. So I literally had to carry a bag and my brother and I took turns. He would pull and I would carry, and he would carry and I would pull.

Newkirk: Vanessa and Vincent kept the money they made in shoeboxes, and needed bigger and bigger sized boxes when they came up with more hustles. One time, they turned their backyard into a petting zoo.

But things changed for the family when their parents got divorced. Vanessa and her siblings had to move with their mother away from H Street to the housing projects out on East Capitol, right by the Maryland border.

Dixon: I remember riding in a car up East Capitol Street, and when we got to where it was, my brother said, “All these houses look alike.” I had never even seen a project before. He hadn’t either.

Newkirk: The projects were different. It was like they were designed to remind people that they were poor. Mom had to take up a job keeping house for white folks across town. Vanessa hated that. They all still went to the Morton’s department store back on H Street to shop for essentials. But now those trips were heartbreaking for Vanessa and Vincent.

Dixon: She would get this cardboard box and she’d open it up. And then they had about six pairs of stockings in it, and she would take a couple of pair out. And one time I remember my brother asking her, “Mom, why do you keep coming up here and getting two pair of stockings?” Okay, and she said, “Well, that’s all I can afford for right now.” And we used to try to give her some of our money. We even tried to go in Morton’s to try to buy stuff. They wouldn’t let us in the store without a parent.

Newkirk: Looking at Vincent in that picture, with his spread collar and sharp haircut, he looks like was moving from boyhood to adulthood. He was trying to be somebody. He was blazing a new trail, finishing up his first year of high school. He went to school back over by his grandmother’s house, still out by H Street, which meant that he and Vanessa had to be apart more than ever. He wanted to make his folks happy. He wanted to make his mom happy. And then came the assassination.

Dixon: We see people blowing horns and sitting on the car doors and yelling and screaming and smoke bombs. It was crazy. It was hype for me, and I don’t think any of us had any fear. That’s why I know my brother felt the same way.

Newkirk: Vanessa and Vincent were just two of the thousands of Black people who hit the streets in D.C. after King was killed. Each one of those thousands is more than just a footnote to history. On the whole, they all tell a story that goes beyond the binary of the triumph of the civil-rights movement and the tragedy of losing one man. They help explain why, after a decade of supposed progress in America, its capital city, and one of its blackest cities, burned.

***

Newkirk: Part 2: “Inferno.”

***

Newkirk: Which route would you have taken, did you take?

Tony Gittens: We would have taken right down this street. This is Columbia Road. And we would have come from down where Howard is and walked up. We didn’t take any bus, there was no metro, and so we just walked.

Newkirk: Today, Tony Gittens is an institution in D.C. He founded the Washington, D.C., International Film Festival and has run it for over 35 years. He was on the local Commission on the Arts and Humanities, and he’s known just about every mayor to come through the city. He used to work with Marion Barry. He knows these streets like the back of his hand. But back in 1968, April 4, he was still a kid from Brooklyn who had only been in D.C. for a few years. He was attending Howard University.

Gittens: I didn’t know anything about Washington when I came here. I had no idea. I knew I was going to Howard. That’s all I knew. Got on the bus from Brooklyn, came. That’s all I knew.

Newkirk: While Vanessa and Vincent Lawson were settling into the East Capitol projects, Tony got involved with The Hilltop, the Howard University newspaper. And he started volunteering with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, SNCC—one of the major civil-rights protest organizations. It was famous on campus. Some of SNCC’s earliest and most well-known members had gone to Howard, including Kwame Ture, then known as Stokely Carmichael. Back In ’66, they took Tony on his first trip down South, to Alabama.

Gittens: And so I got to meet Stokely and Bob Manns and these other folks who had been in the movement in the South. Then they moved up to D.C. and we became friends, you know, became friends.

Newkirk: In 1966, Stokely was the chairman of SNCC. He was one of the most famous—or infamous—Black men in America. The same summer Tony went down to Alabama, Stokely started talking about Black Power. It was new. It was radical.

Stokely Carmichael: Every courthouse in Mississippi ought to be burned down tomorrow to get rid of the dirt in here. Now, from now on, when they ask you what you want, you know what to tell them. What do you want?

Crowd: Black Power!

Stokely Carmichael: What do you want?

Crowd: Black Power!

Stokely Carmichael: Everybody, what do you want?

Newkirk : What was Stokely like?

Gittens: Stokely. Stokely was a little … um … I was always a little scared of Stokely, until later on, when I got to know him slightly, a bit—slightly a bit.

He was a smart guy. He knew every goddamn thing. Bob Manns used to say, “Stokely Carmichael, you know every goddamn thing.” And he was a smart guy.

Newkirk: Tony turned all that organizing experience with SNCC into momentum on campus. In March, he and other students staged demonstrations, calling for change inside and outside the walls of campus. They even occupied the university’s administration building. And in response, Howard agreed to create a new student disciplinary system and consider making a more pro-Black curriculum.

Gittens: You know, we got, we walked into a room and they would almost say, “What do you want?” [Laughs.] They didn’t want us going back in that building. I tell you that.

Newkirk: SNCC was a major inspiration for Tony and the student protesters. They also were becoming a force in D.C. politics. Stokely had moved up to the city to try and build a power base for his organizing. Other SNCC veterans also moved up from projects in the Deep South. One of them was Frank Smith.

Newkirk: So you were in Mississippi for years?

Frank Smith: Six years.

Newkirk: What brought you to D.C.?

Frank Smith: Well, I met a woman who was in the civil-rights movement, too—a Howard University student. I dropped out of Morehouse. She dropped out of Howard. And we got married in ’65, and one of the things that we promised was we were both going to finish. She wanted to go to medical school. And so we eventually came here.

Newkirk: Frank is from Georgia, and he started his activism as a student at Morehouse College. He was involved in boycotts and other protests pretty early on. He says it’s something that was sparked in him by the killing of Emmett Till in 1955.

Frank Smith: I think I was in the eighth or ninth grade in Newnan, Georgia, when a young girl named Jessie Smith brought the Jet magazine to school with Emmett Till’s picture in there, that awful assassination and brutalization of him and mutilation of his body. And I think in my heart, I must have thought, That could have been me. And, This has to stop. And I hear that from a lot of people of my generation. It was personal, really, in a sense.

Newkirk: Frank was a founding member of SNCC when the group was formed at Shaw University in 1960. When the group decided to shift gears from the sit-ins and Freedom Rides to its voter-registration project, he was the first person they sent into the teeth of Jim Crow, the Mississippi Delta.

Frank Smith: So people ask me, “Why did you feel … Were you scared when you … ?” Well, hell, being scared was a rite of passage for Black boys in my generation. You were scared all the time. So what’s the difference between being scared in Mississippi and being scared in Georgia? You’ve got the same fear that some white person thinks they’re entitled, and with the law behind them and with all the tradition, could just do whatever the hell they want to you and your family and your property and your friends. Who wants to live like that?

Newkirk: He got there just seven years after Emmett Till was killed. In Mississippi, people were still being fired, beaten, disappeared, or worse for even joining the NAACP, let alone registering to vote. Just a few years earlier, a Black man named Mack Charles Parker was murdered and his body thrown from a bridge over the Pearl River. SNCC didn’t have infrastructure or protection. But Frank got to work getting sharecroppers to register. One of the people who was brave enough to do it was Fannie Lou Hamer. She ended up becoming a household name in Black America.

Frank Smith: She was already made by the time we met her. We found her in the Delta. She was ready for her freedom.

Newkirk: Frank had been to D.C. during the height of Freedom Summer in 1964, trying to spread the news nationally about the folks like Fannie Lou Hamer who were trying to participate in democracy for the first time. But when he moved up to the city for real, to the Adams Morgan neighborhood, it was a big change from life in the Mississippi Delta. Luckily for him, there were some familiar faces.

Frank Smith: One advantage of living in Adams Morgan was that it looked like what SNCC had started to look like then. And I wasn’t the only one there. There was probably 20 people from SNCC who were living in the neighborhood, too, in between there and 14th Street. So we had enough people for our own little tribe, if we wanted to have a tribe.

Newkirk: Frank started organizing immediately. He helped tenants out in disputes with landlords. He was all over the Black neighborhoods in D.C. He actually felt at home there. Lots of Black families had just recently arrived from the South. There were middle-class, working-class, and upper-class communities; Black universities like Howard; people who followed King; Black Power activists; and members of the Nation of Islam. There were people who just wanted to keep their heads down. Living in D.C., Frank saw potential for bringing everybody together. On April 3, Frank Smith was still working towards that goal when he ran into Martin Luther King.

Frank Smith: The day before he was killed, I flew into the airport in Memphis. He was coming from Atlanta. And I think it was Andy Young that pointed me out, saying, “There’s one of those SNCC’ers over there.” And so King came over and asked me … said he wanted me to come to Memphis to help organize the young people—he said the young Panthers.

Newkirk: King and his folks called all the Black radicals Panthers. But he was really talking about a local Memphis group, called the Invaders.

Frank Smith: They were obviously interested because they were coming to the demonstration and stuff. They just wouldn’t join the march. They were marching on the sides. They were throwing rocks and stuff. And he was scared that they were going to incite the cops to riot. And he wanted to see somebody come and help organize those young people. And I was probably 25 years old then, and so I wasn’t so young anymore, and also I told him I’d hung up my marching shoes. And he said, “Don’t ever hang up your marching shoes.” That was his last words to me.

***

Newkirk: In D.C., Tony Gittens and his friends were riding high. They were celebrating their successful protests against the Howard University administration. On the night of April 4, he and the boys were just hanging out.

Gittens: I was in Drew Hall, which is a dormitory, and in the social lobby there, and we’re just hanging around, talking, you know, some people probably playing cards and stuff. I don’t know.

Newkirk: And then …

Walter Cronkite: Good evening. Dr. Martin Luther King, the apostle of nonviolence in the civil-rights movement, has been shot to death in Memphis, Tennessee. Police have issued an all points bulletin …

Gittens: Everybody stopped. Everybody stopped. You know, everybody stopped and said, “What?”

Newkirk: Across the city, Black Washingtonians of all ages came out as more and more people heard the news. Rage came spontaneously, like hot tears or a lump in the throat.

Gittens: And they were talking about—there was this riot in the streets of D.C. So we had to be there.

Newkirk: Tony and his friends walked out from campus. They figured that if anything was happening, it was gonna be down on 14th and U. It was one of the busiest and most famous street corners in Black America. The corner was where everything happened. There was a drugstore there, and nearby a florist, banks, theaters—lots of shops. They didn’t have to walk far.

Gittens: The closer we got to it, the more you could smell the smoke.

Newkirk: Stokely Carmichael had actually been there, on that corner, when it all started. He’d been going from store to store, telling white business owners to shut down shop and go home. He was also telling Black folks to be careful. That they weren’t prepared to go up against the guns and tear gas of the police and military. But then, somebody threw a trash can through the window of the Peoples Drug Store.

Gittens: So we got to 14th and Columbia Road. And I remember this sharply, that there was all this fire. I mean, the place was … it was like a forest fire. You know, it was like this red fire. It was coming out of these buildings, these stores.

Newkirk: They made it a few blocks north of the epicenter. They were surrounded on all sides by fire.

Gittens: There were these young guys who were breaking into the stores and taking out the stuff, whatever was in that window there. A lot of people were just watching by, shouting at the police. Cars were going down, honking their horns, and there were these people just walking the streets, shouting, pissed off—just very, very angry people.

Newkirk: Walking on Columbia Road with Tony today, you can envision looking down the hill and seeing the smoke, hearing the chants of “Black Power!”, seeing the police … powerless.

Gittens: The police had no control. I mean, they had no control. They tried to talk to people. They weren’t pulling any arms or anything. But nobody was paying any attention to them. It was just chaos. It was like a war zone.

Newkirk: Some people went home. Down on U Street, things got out of hand, and Stokely got in a car and drove off. But lots of people, like Tony, just stayed out there, in a daze.

Gittens: You know, we felt like we were a part of it, quite frankly. We weren’t breaking into any buildings or setting any fires; we made no attempt to stop it; we understood it, thought maybe it was time for it to happen. We just felt, you know, Hey, America brought this on itself and this is what they had to pay.

We walked the street. I was up all night. I remember being up all night and just walking the street. Nobody wanted to mess with the police. We just stayed away from the police, just watching what was going on.

Newkirk: Why did you feel like you had to be out there to see it?

Gittens: It wasn’t even a question. Um … it would have been cowardly for me not to be there, that these were my people, in a way. These were the people who were fighting the fight. I didn’t even think about not going. [Laughs.] I had to be there. If the police were going to come and take us all to jail, I had to be one of the ones that was going to go down there.

Newkirk: Tony says he never participated in the riots. He wasn’t even really a King guy, philosophically. But he was angry at white people.

Gittens: This had built up over months, over years of frustration, not getting any response from the government. No change. No change. And this was like the last straw. He was holding it back.

Newkirk: He was holding it back?

Gittens: Holding it back. He would’ve said, Don’t do this rioting. He would have said, you know, Be cool. Go home. Demonstrate. March. You know. But don’t go in here and tear up this place like this. He would have said that. He was holding it back. And they took him away. Dams burst. Dams burst. I mean, that was my feeling. He was the good guy, and you killed him.

Newkirk: Within just a few hours, disturbances were reported in many of the country’s largest Black communities. There was unrest in Harlem, Brooklyn, Detroit, Cincinnati, Trenton. There were even reports coming from outside of cities. Frank Smith saw what rebellion looked like in rural Mississippi.

Frank Smith: So I was actually in Mississippi the day he was killed. I was in Greenwood. And I can tell you, the demonstrations broke out everywhere.

Newkirk: They broke out in Mississippi?

Frank Smith: Everywhere brother. People burned cotton gins and stuff, man. Everybody did some kind of protesting, man.

Newkirk: Frank watched the chaos unfold around him. He also paid attention to the news from the rest of the country. He knew D.C. was on fire. He had to find a way back to his wife. He wanted to get out there and organize his community.

But Frank didn’t know what would happen next. He didn’t know whether one night of disturbances would become many. Whether it might become the revolution or the race war that so many had feared. He didn’t know how America would react. He didn’t know that when he left the fields of Greenwood, he would be leaving one era and entering another.

Stokley Carmichael forms an SNCC base in D.C.

In January 1968, three months before King’s assassination, Kwame Ture, then known as Stokely Carmichael, moves to Washington, D.C., to build a power base for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).

D.C. residents learn about King’s assassination

A couple of hours after King’s assassination, Carmichael and his SNCC comrades ask businesses in D.C.’s U Street corridor to close. Carmichael attracts a growing crowd.

D.C. residents begin to riot

Around 9:30 p.m. on April 4, the first glass is broken in Washington, D.C.—the window of the Peoples Drug Store at the intersection of U Street and 14th Street.

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Archival news narrator: Memo. To: S.A.C. Boston. From: the director, FBI. Subject: Counterintelligence program.

Goals: One, prevent the coalition of militant Black-nationalist groups. An effective coalition of Black-nationalist groups might be the first step toward a real Mau Mau in America. Two, prevent the rise of a messiah who could unify and electrify the militant Black-nationalist movement. Martin Luther King, Stokely Carmichael, and Elijah Muhammad all aspire to this position. King could be a very real contender for this position.

Vann R. Newkirk II: Starting in 1956, J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI ran a secret program to spy on so-called subversive movements in the U.S. It was named the Counter Intelligence Program, or COINTELPRO. Its true extent wasn’t known until years later, when a group of activists broke into an FBI office and mailed over 1,000 classified documents to journalists. Through all the major moments of the Black freedom struggle, the FBI listened. They watched. They sabotaged.

The program expanded during the mid-’60s, with the rise of Black militant groups, and the beginnings of uprisings in America’s ghettos.

Reporter: While ghetto problems deepen, the Black militants gather and the crowds at their meetings get bigger. Many of them will not speak to whites at all. They have given up on the white man’s world and are desperately determined to make a Black world totally separate, totally and proudly black.

Newkirk: To J. Edgar Hoover, the danger was in the potential for any Black leader to help spark a Black insurgency.

Reporter: The FBI had trouble distinguishing between nonviolent Blacks and militant revolutionaries. To the FBI, the whole movement appeared dangerous, particularly if one man could unify millions of American Blacks.

Newkirk: Hoover wasn’t alone in his belief. In fact, Black radical leaders also thought that major riots in 1967 in the Black ghettos in Newark and Detroit had revolutionary potential. Folks like Stokely Carmichael and the Panthers out West built their philosophies on the hope that a riot in a Black ghetto could become something more—that they could start a chain reaction to topple white supremacy in America. In 1968, SNCC Chairman H. Rap Brown said that this revolution was imminent.

H. Rap Brown: We stand on the eve of a Black revolution, brothers. Masses of our people are in the streets. They’re fighting tit for tat, tooth for tooth, an eye for an eye, and a life for a life. The rebellions that we see are merely dress rehearsals for the revolution that’s to come.

Newkirk: The FBI and COINTELPRO’s methods grew more and more extreme. In the late ’60s they moved to outright blackmail and disruption schemes. Even after King was killed, COINTELPRO continued to watch his friends and family and sow discord in their ranks.

The FBI was probably also watching Stokely Carmichael on the first night of riots. That night, April 4, Stokely and his watchers had been caught off guard by the fury of the streets.

The next day, April 5, would be different. Everybody assumed the riots were coming back. But just how they came back was the question. Could Black rage and grief be channeled and directed into revolution? Would they fizzle out on its own? Or would they be crushed by the state?

***

Newkirk: Part 3: “Black Messiah.”

***

Newkirk: By the morning of April 5, less than 24 hours after Dr. King was killed, the riots had already made their mark on D.C. Fires had consumed much of 14th Street, along with some other areas. People left behind burned buildings, abandoned cars, and debris, all still smoking.

That morning, tourists were supposed to come in by the thousands for the Cherry Blossom Festival. But they stayed away.

Most people who worked downtown stayed away too. What was left was an eerie quiet. The breath before the next plunge into chaos. Still, Frank Smith was trying his hardest to get back home from Mississippi.

Frank Smith: I flew back to Washington. I got to the National Airport, and I couldn’t—taxicab driver didn’t want to take me. He said, “I’m not going to Washington. That place is on fire.”

Newkirk: When he finally found a cab, the driver would only go as far as Connecticut Avenue. Frank had to walk a ways to his home in Adams Morgan. But he had to get there. His wife was there. She had been there during the first night of riots, and she was terrified.

Frank Smith: She was scared to go out the house, you know. And we talkin’ about people—she had been in Mississippi with me. She was in Philadelphia, Mississippi, when the kids were killed down there. And we had seen violence. But this was very different. This was, it was like chaos.

Newkirk: Frank had led protests and demonstrations across the country. He had been with SNCC since the beginning, and his work in Mississippi was regularly dangerous. He’d helped name the organization the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and dedicated himself to movement tactics. Even when things got rowdy, he was trained. He was used to each demonstration having a concrete set of objectives. But he just couldn’t get his arms around what had happened in D.C. It was emotional. There was no organization.

Frank Smith: There was no set of demands. There was no goals that we could see. There was no—it was just people just reacting. And, you know, any time you’re leading a demonstration, there’s always a chance it’ll get out of hand. There’s always a chance. And in this case, just what it looked like to me, was that it was out of hand.

Newkirk: But around the city, some people were trying to give shape to Black rage.

At Howard University, most students hadn’t gone out on the night of April 4. But the next morning, activists on campus tried to galvanize students who still didn’t really know what to do.

Tony Gittens: People were very, very surprised. They weren’t ready to do what they were doing over on 14th Street, start tearing the place up.

Newkirk: I visited Howard with Tony Gittens to see his old stomping grounds. We checked out the dorm where he and his friends were playing cards on the night King was killed. We walked past the green where his friends had tried to organize a rally the morning after. He says, that morning, the tension was building.

Gittens: You know, every place I went people were angry. It was unbelievable. Some women, the young ladies, were crying. That was the sentiment. Nobody was passive about it.

Newkirk: That morning, The Hilltop, the campus newspaper, released an essay saying basically that nonviolence was dead.

“Much of the argument that through nonviolent marching and civil disobedience the Black will be liberated has no doubt been totally erased from the minds of the Black people in this country. There is a sense of outrage that another Black man has been murdered, and he a spokesman for nonviolence.”

They pushed even further. The writers of the op-ed said that one of the lessons of King’s death might be that:

“Liberation calls for more than we have heretofore been willing to pay.”

It was a provocative statement to make just after an assassination. But it was aimed at their fellow students and faculty. People who they thought were happy to sit in the ivory tower while the world burned. Tony was ready for a fight.

Gittens: Nobody was going to mess with us that day. [Laughs.] No security guard, none of that. They weren’t going to mess with us. They knew better.

Newkirk: That same morning, the leaders of SNCC, also tried their best to provoke people into action. They had recently dropped the whole nonviolent thing, and changed their name to the Student National Coordinating Committee. They invited journalists to their headquarters.

Floyd McKissick: This press conference will be for only five minutes. As soon as the press conference is over, you gentlemen will not leave anything in here that you didn’t bring in here. Your pens, your cigarette butts—you take them with you. If you wasting the water, you have to clean it up.

Newkirk: The press conference had actually been planned before the assassination to speak out against the incarceration of the current chairman of SNCC, H. Rap Brown. Brown was accused of inciting a riot in Maryland the summer before.

McKissick: Right, here, immediately right, is Stokely Carmichael, who is staff here in Washington, D.C.

Stokely Carmichael: We were very upset that Reverend Brown had been in jail for 41 days. And Governor Agnew of Maryland still seems to persist with his nonsensical charges. Now, we want the brother out of jail next week when he comes to trial.

Newkirk: In the footage of the press conference, all the SNCC leaders are standing together behind a table full of microphones. The other SNCC guys are wearing all black. Stokely stands out. He’s tall. He’s commanding. He’s got sunglasses on, and a long jacket. Behind him there are two posters, one of Malcolm X and another of H. Rap Brown. But he starts talking about Martin Luther King.

Carmichael: When white America killed Dr. King last night, she opened the eyes for every Black man in this country. When white America got rid of Marcus Garvey, she did it and she said he was an extremist; he was crazy. When they got rid of Brother Malcolm X, they said he was preaching hate; he deserved what he got. But when they got rid of brother Martin Luther King, they had absolutely no reason to do so. He was the one man in our race who was trying to teach our people to have love, compassion, and mercy for what white people had done. When white America killed Dr. King last night, she declared war on us.

Newkirk: As far as the FBI’s potential Black messiahs went, Stokely was on the list right behind King. It was Stokely who had been out on the scene the previous night, when riots started. The media was already blaming him for fanning the flames. He gave voice to all the people who felt like this was more than just the assassination of a single person. King was supposed to be the last best hope for a reckoning without blood. Stokely promised retribution.

Carmichael: The rebellions that have been occurring around the cities of this country is just light stuff to what is about to happen. We have to retaliate for the death of our leaders. The execution of those deaths will not be in the courtrooms; they’re going to be in the streets of the United States of America.

Newkirk: Stokely was talking about the thing white people had been afraid of for generations: a race war.

Then he opened up for questions.

Reporter: Mr Carmichael, when you say the execution of those deaths will be not in a courtroom but the streets, are you going to be a little more specific about the course of action you expect?

Carmichael: I think that is quite explicit.

Reporter: You expect an organized rebellion?

Carmichael: I think it is quite explicit. We die every day. We die in Vietnam for the honkies. Why don’t we die at home for our people? Black people are not afraid to die. We die all the time. We die in your jails. We die in your ghettos. We die in your rat-infested homes. We die a thousand deaths every day. So we’re not afraid to die; today we’re going to die for our people.

Newkirk: The night before, on 14th and U, Stokely had been conflicted. He was there when the riots started, but he also tried to clear out businesses to avoid casualties. He warned young Black folks to stay away from police and tried to temper their fantasies about fighting the military with rocks and bricks. Now there were no more calls for caution. Like everything he did, some of this was for show, to shock people. But he was also speaking from the heart. It sure did seem like he thought this could be the revolution.

Reporter 2: Stokely, what do you think is ultimately leading to? A bloodbath in which nobody wins?

Carmichael: First, my name is Mr. Carmichael. And secondly, Black people will survive America.

Reporter 2: What accomplishments or objectives do you visualize from the retaliation? What do you think you’ll accomplish?

Carmichael: If a Black man can’t do nothing in this country, then we will stand up on our feet and die like men. If that’s our only act of manhood, then God damn it, we’re going to die. Tired of living on our stomachs.

Reporter 3: Do you fear for your life?

Carmichael: The hell with my life! You should fear for yours. I know I’m going to die. I know I’m gonna die. [Applause.]

***

Newkirk: Stokely’s speech immediately made the rounds on radio and television. White politicians and no small number of Black leaders condemned him. Even Sammy Davis Jr. came out to tell militants to try and keep the peace.

Sammy Davis Jr.: Now is the time for the militant leaders to say, “All right, baby; let’s hold ourselves. You’re angry; you’re mad, man—let’s hold it now and see if whitey’s going to come up with it.”

Newkirk: Stokely Carmichael had been waiting for years. He had been waiting since he crossed the bridge in Selma, since he inspired people in Mississippi with Black Power. He was tired of waiting. He was trying to reach others who he thought might be impatient too: young folks who gravitated to Black Power—kids like Theophus Brooks.

Theophus Brooks: We looked at it this way: Martin Luther King, we respected him but he was soft. We look at Malcolm X, Black Panthers, H. Rap Brown, Stokely Carmichael—we looked at them like that was our heroes. Man we loved them. Martin Luther King, we looked at him as being a good person, a nice person, but he weak and he soft. You know, turn the other cheek and all that.

Newkirk: Theophus Brooks was a student at Cardozo High School, just a few blocks away from the epicenter of the riots in D.C. Before the assassination, he didn’t follow news about Jim Crow or voting rights or integration. He was too busy with running the streets, and chasing girls.

Brooks: First time I ever saw a gun, a girl put a derringer on me in the cafeteria because I was messing with another girl. And she found out and pulled a derringer on me. I was scared to death.

Newkirk: Also, football. He was a star safety for Cardozo High School.

Brooks: All of a sudden, in 11th grade—something clicked in my head. And not only did I go football crazy, but I turned into a vicious-type ballplayer. I don’t know what happened.

Newkirk: On the first night of riots, Theophus stayed home. A lot of his friends did. He still had to go to class in the morning. City officials hoped keeping schools open would keep kids off the streets. But it didn’t work.

Brooks: I was in the classroom at about 10, 11 o’clock in the day, and people ran in to say, “They rioting on 14th Street. Man, they stealin’ everything!”

Newkirk: By late morning, the students in Cardozo were out in the streets. Theophus was with them.

Brooks: It seemed like everybody broke out like it was recess. We broke out and went up to 14th Street.

Newkirk: What did you see when you got there?

Brooks: Maybe about 2,000 or 3,000 people. When I got up there, they had burned most everything down.

Dixon: Somebody hollered, “Get the white people; get the white people.” People started grabbing things, throwing at cars, trucks, at anybody that was driving was white.

Newkirk: Across town, on the east side of D.C., Vanessa Lawson Dixon was in the streets too. And she was angry. Her teacher used to go on and on about just how important King was. Her mother and grandmother loved King. And Vanessa was fed up with having to move to the projects and with how things were going in her life. So she chose to join the crowd.

Vanessa Dixon: And we participated. You know, I’m sorry to say I participated in that riot. I mean, I played a part in it.

Newkirk: In the Cardozo neighborhood, Theophus Brooks returned to the blocks that had burned just the night before. Many of the stores had already been cleaned out. But the students still wanted to do something.

Brooks: But when I got up there, a lot of stuff was gone. But then after that—it was maybe about 3:30, 4 o’clock—maybe 200 of us went to Cardozo. Now, if you know 13th Street at Cardozo, it’s a real hill going up.

Newkirk: Oh, yeah I know that hill.

Brooks: Okay, we were standing on each side of the hill throwing bricks at cars that looked like they had white people in it.

Newkirk: By the afternoon, Black neighborhoods in D.C. were back in full rebellion. The night before had all been unpredictable. It could’ve been a one-off thing. But the second night, April 5, was even more intense than the first. This would not be over soon.

Reporter: Tossing tear gas into the crowd. But that didn’t deter the Negroes … [shouting]

Reporter: … to see whether they could get a big radio–TV–record-player combination into a small, foreign-built car. It just wouldn’t fit.

Newkirk: Even in all the chaos, even as disturbances erupted in neighborhoods all across D.C., it was hard to imagine that this was the revolution that Stokely had promised. Theophus and his friends never got political. They were not being galvanized by a Black messiah—living or dead—to go to the White House or overthrow anybody. Theophus says they didn’t even really think much about King. Their response was more visceral. They stood on the street for hours, just throwing bricks. Because they could.

Brooks: And from 3:30 to about six, they must have broke about 100, 200 car windows.

Newkirk: He doesn’t think any of the drivers were seriously hurt, but still. The basic reality of the kids’ situation had been reversed. Police had always been untouchable. Across D.C., they were known for harassing and beating Black kids. But now the kids were throwing bricks at white folks’ cars and the police couldn’t do anything about it. It was exhilarating.

Brooks: They weren’t shooting anybody. It was like, Don’t do this; don’t do that. Stop, stop, stop this. You know, they wasn’t pulling out guns. And they arrested a few people, but it was just like a mob takeover. They took over and there weren’t nothing you could do about it.

Reporter 1: Aside from responding with tear gas, the officers generally ignored the bricks and bottles thrown at them. They knew that they were seriously understrength for any major outbreak of violence, and many of them were hoping for a call up of the National Guard or—what happened—the eventual deployment of Army troops.

Reporter 2: One policeman took off his gas mask, looked around, and asked if the National Guard had been called. “We need them,” he said. “We can’t hold this tonight. We’re losing.”

Newkirk: Frank Smith went out too. He thought that his duty as a SNCC veteran was to help keep people safe, or to organize them if he could. But he was skeptical that what he was seeing could turn into anything more.

Frank Smith: I don’t think that I ever thought this might be the revolution.

Newkirk: He was worried. The police were one thing, but he was afraid that people were going to get themselves hurt or killed when the military came.

Frank Smith: They got themselves in a position that no revolutionary army ever wants to be in, which is that it’s now facing down with an enemy with much more resources and much more gun power.

***

Scott Peters (journalist): Mayor Walter Washington has clamped a 5:30 p.m. curfew on the city. The presidential executive order has brought four companies of soldiers into the city. One is deployed around the downtown area; that includes the White House. Another is centered around the Capitol Hill. The other two are in the northwest section of the city. Additional soldiers are standing by for duty if needed. The president signed the order at the request of city officials.

Newkirk: As night fell and the hours went on, more and more students like Theophus Brooks poured into the streets. Protestors reignited the fires from the previous night and set new buildings ablaze.

Peters: Scott Peters, United Press International, the White House. President Johnson has ordered about 500 federal troops into Washington, D.C., in order to restore law to the city wracked by fires and looting.

Newkirk: The flames radiated out from the ghettos. They spread to just a few blocks away from the White House.

Peters: Two companies of soldiers are deployed in the worst-troubled area. One is near Capitol Hill, the fourth in the downtown area, which includes the White House.

Smoke from fires in downtown Washington is visible here at the White House. Police cars and ambulances are moving up and down the streets, the streets themselves jammed with traffic, the sidewalks crawling with people, some waiting for buses or trying to find taxis to go home. Some are spectators; some are looters. The White House gates are closed and White House policemen stand behind them. Normal routine has come to a halt in this part of the city. A group of Negro youths passed the White House gates a few minutes ago, carrying what looked to be transistor radios and other small appliances. They taunted White House police at the gates, one yelling “Shoot me! Shoot me!” while his companions laughed.

Newkirk: The police were outnumbered. Across the United States, fires burned in most big cities. A lot of the people on the streets were like Theophus Brooks and Vanessa Lawson Dixon: young folks who were just out there, because they could be. But politicians worried that Stokely’s vision might be coming true, that riots might be sustained, organized, even revolutionary. Governors mobilized state National Guards and started calling the White House for military assistance.

John Dennis (journalist): This is John Dennis in Boston for United Press International. Several thousand Massachusetts National Guardsmen are on the alert here in the Boston area tonight …

Dean Bailey (journalist): Dean Baily, United Press International, Chicago. Mayor Daley, in conjunction with his superintendent of police, was asking that the National Guard be put on standby alert …

Dennis: … Lieutenant Governor Francis Sargent, says the move “is a precautionary measure.”

Bailey: … Acting Illinois Governor Sam Shapiro acceded to the request, and 6,000 Guardsmen are assembling at armories. They may be needed on the streets. Fires have broken out. There has been shooting; there has been looting. Most of the trouble is concentrated on the West Side, a predominantly Negro area. All Chicago firemen are on duty.

***

Newkirk: By the time Vanessa Lawson Dixon got back inside, it was dark. She heard her mother talking on the phone to her brother Vincent. He went to high school out by his grandmother’s house off H Street. They were rioting there too. People were breaking into the stores in the business district, including the department store where Vanessa’s family shopped.

Vanessa Dixon: He left and went looting. Him and his friends went out. Morton’s was one of the places he went. He had other stuff too, so he called my mom and told her, “I got you three boxes, the right size and the right color.”

Newkirk: He was proud. He and Vanessa had seen their mother struggling. They’d tried to give her their own money to buy stockings when she could only afford a pair or two. And now Vincent had three boxes, the right size and color. Their mom couldn’t even be that mad.

Dixon: And she’s laughing and crying at the same time and telling him, “Do not leave back out that house, you hear me? Do not leave back out that house.”

Newkirk: But then, a little while later, Vanessa’s grandma called to say that Vincent had left again. That he was back out on the streets.

Dixon: My grandmother called and said he wasn’t there. He wasn’t in the house. And the kids are running around like crazy.

Newkirk: Vanessa’s mother was worried. She lashed out. She put the responsibility on Vincent’s older brother Glen to find him.

Dixon: She told him, “Go get your brother.” And he left; he left back out.

Newkirk: In darkness, as chaos was spreading, Glen tried to make it six miles—over to 8th and H Streets, the neighborhood where their grandmother lived. He was trying to do what his mother told him: Don’t come home without Vincent.

Dixon: And he’s looking everywhere for him. And, you know, and the National Guard’s coming out now and they want everybody off the streets.

Newkirk: By the end of the night, nobody had heard from Vincent.

Dixon: And I just remember, you know, it’s just like hours and hours and hours. He didn’t ever come home.

Newkirk: Vanessa often talks about how she and Vincent had this, like, spiritual or metaphysical connection. She says she could feel how he was feeling, even when they weren’t together. And on that night, she felt … dread.

Dixon: Let me tell you, his heart was beating so fast. His heart was beating so fast. My brother’s heart was beating so fast. I’m sitting at home calm, and I’m feeling my heart is racing. I said, you know, something is wrong. Something is wrong. I kept telling my mother, something is wrong.

Newkirk: They all wanted to go back out and look. To keep searching until they found Vincent or could find out what had happened to him. But by then, troops from the Army’s 82nd Airborne division had been fully mobilized. That evening, their boots marched and their trucks rolled down D.C. streets—the streets where Vincent and Vanessa raked leaves, where Theophus played football, where Tony reported for his college paper. Army units, held back in reserve from Vietnam, swept across the district using tear gas, isolating all those Black neighborhoods from one another. The occupation of the city was beginning.

Stokely Carmichael demands “Black Power”

At a speech during the “March Against Fear” in Mississippi, on June 16, 1966, Carmichael uses the phrase Black Power.

The FBI sets counterintelligence goals

A month before King’s assassination, on March 4, 1968, the FBI, led by J. Edgar Hoover, issues a memo cautioning against allowing King to become a “messiah.”

Howard University students react to King’s assassination

The morning after King’s assassination, D.C. students walk out of class en masse. Howard University’s newspaper, The Hilltop, publishes an editorial criticizing nonviolence as a path to liberation.

This is Work in Progress, a newsletter by Derek Thompson about work, technology, and how to solve some of America’s biggest problems. Sign up here to get it every week.

Who killed SVB—and triggered the mini–banking crisis sweeping the United States?

You could blame the bank’s executives, who bet $80 billion on long-term bonds that bled value when interest rates went up, thus torching their portfolio with fantastic efficiency.

You could blame the Federal Reserve for falling behind inflation and then quickly raising interest rates, bludgeoning investors who watched in horror as their bold portfolios melted down.   

You could blame regulators, such as KPMG, who gave SVB a clean bill of health when they looked into its portfolio just weeks before its historic collapse.

You could blame the phalanx of interests—President Donald Trump, Senate Republicans, tech titans, bankers, and even a handful of Democrats—who called to roll back midsize-bank regulations in 2018, potentially setting the stage for this catastrophic mismanagement.

You could, abandoning all common sense, blame “woke” banking culture, under the bizarre assumption that only an all-white, all-male banking team can properly steward a financial institution. (Never mind, say, the entire crisis-strewn history of mostly white, mostly male banking.)

Or you could blame venture capitalists. One week ago, SVB was technically insolvent but far from doomed. Without a massive run on its deposits, the bank likely would have puttered along as its long-term bonds matured. Surely, SVB had put itself in an awful position by tossing fresh cash into the Dumpster fire of the 2022 bond market. But actual bank death required one further step: Clients, led by the venture-capital community, had to turn on a trusted financial partner.

That’s exactly what happened. As SVB’s leadership scrambled to raise funds, Founders Fund and other large venture investors told their companies late last week to pull out all of their cash. When other start-ups banking with SVB caught wind of this exodus on group chats and Twitter, they, too, raced for the exits. On Thursday alone, SVB customers withdrew $42 billion—or $1 million a second, for 10 straight hours—in the largest bank run in history. If SVB executives, regulators, and conservative politicians built a barn out of highly flammable wood and filled it with hay and oil drums, venture capitalists were the ones who tipped over the barrels and dropped a lit match.

After some VCs helped trigger the bank run that crashed SVB, others went online to beseech the federal government to fly to the rescue. “YOU SHOULD BE ABSOLUTELY TERRIFIED RIGHT NOW,” the investor Jason Calacanis bleated on Twitter. David Sacks, another investor and a regular panelist on the popular tech podcast All In, chimed in by blaming Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and Fed Chair Jerome Powell for jacking up rates “so hard it collapsed a huge bank.” (Never mind that the CEO of SVB was on the board of directors of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.) On Sunday night, the tech community got its wish when the federal government announced it would backstop every dollar of every depositor in SVB.

The death of Silicon Valley Bank offers a strange lesson for VCs. In a typical bank-run prisoner’s dilemma, individuals have to choose to cooperate (everybody keeps their money in the bank, and the bank lives) or defect for individual advantage (a few players pull their funds, spurring others to do the same and leading to a bank collapse). But now all depositors at SVB have been made whole, which means that early defection conferred no advantage. The withdrawals benefited no individual depositor, but they collectively killed SVB.

On Monday, the tech writer Ben Thompson wrote that the collapse of SVB pointed to a broader rot in Silicon Valley itself. “I assumed that the venture capitalist set knew about Silicon Valley Bank’s situation [and] I assumed that Silicon Valley broadly was in the business of taking care of their own,” he wrote. “Last week showed that both [theories] were totally wrong.” Far from the familiar metaphor of Silicon Valley as a symbiotic ecosystem, where investors, mentors, and collaborators benefit from a culture of trust and faith in progress, the SVB collapse makes the tech world seem more like an actual jungle, where everything looks lovely and peaceful until a jaguar comes along and lays waste to some capybara.

In this light, the SVB saga is just the latest episode of the American tech industry struggling through three overlapping transitions. First is the macro transition from an era of low interest rates that supported cash-burning consumer-tech companies to an era of high interest rates that require discipline and unit economics. Second is the existential transition from tech’s dominance of attention economics and cloud computing to its expensive struggle to figure out the next mountain to climb, whether it’s crypto, the metaverse, artificial intelligence, climate, or something else. Third is the cultural transition from “tech” as a metonym for high-growth start-ups to “Big Tech” as a description of the largest companies in the world. All three transitions are contributing to a scarcity mentality in Silicon Valley, where, as Thompson observed, “tech has been shifting away from greenfield opportunities and expanding the pie to taking share in zero sum contests for end users, from their attention to their pocketbooks.” This is the cultural climate that explains a crippling run on SVB followed by a call for national bailouts.

Something I’ve always liked about the founders, venture capitalists, and tech evangelists that I’ve met over the years is their disposition toward technology as a lever for progress. They tend to see the world as a set of solvable problems, and I’d like to think that I generally share that attitude. But this techno-optimist mindset can tip into a conviction that tradition is a synonym for inefficiency and that every institution’s age is a measure of its incompetency. One cannot ignore the irony that tech has spent years blasting the slow and stodgy government systems of the 20th century only to cry out, in times of need, for the Fed, the Treasury, and the FDIC to save the day—three institutions with a collective age of several hundred years.

I am still “long” on American invention and innovation, which is a way of saying that I’m long on Silicon Valley as a place and as an idea. But we are still learning exactly how much of this industry’s genius was a mere LIRP, or low-interest-rate phenomenon. The answer from the past 100 hours is that it’s more than I feared. As the saying goes, kind of: When the interest-rate tide goes out, you see who’s been LIRPing naked.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has long sought to avoid taking a position on Russia’s war in Ukraine. On the eve of the Russian invasion, 165 Florida National Guard members were stationed on a training mission in Ukraine. They were evacuated in February 2022 to continue their mission in neighboring countries. When they returned to Florida in August, DeSantis did not greet them. He has not praised, or even acknowledged, their work in any public statement.

DeSantis did find time, however, to admonish Ukrainian officials in October for not showing enough gratitude to new Twitter owner Elon Musk. (Musk returned the favor by endorsing DeSantis for president.) On tour this month to promote his new book, DeSantis has clumsily evaded questions about the Russian invasion. When a reporter for The Times of London pressed the governor, DeSantis scolded him: “Perhaps you should cover some other ground? I think I’ve said enough.”

Even his allies found this medley of past hawkishness and present evasiveness worrying—especially because he was on record, in 2014 and 2015, urging the Obama administration to send both “defensive and offensive” weapons to Ukraine after the Russian annexation of Crimea. So last night, DeSantis delivered a more definitive answer on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show.

DeSantis’s statement on Ukraine was everything that Russian President Vladimir Putin and his admirers could have wished for from a presumptive candidate for president. The governor began by listing America’s “vital interests” in a way that explicitly excluded NATO and the defense of Europe. He accepted the present Russian line that Putin’s occupation of Ukraine is a mere “territorial dispute.” He endorsed “peace” as the objective without regard to the terms of that peace, another pro-Russian talking point. He conceded the Russian argument that American aid to Ukraine amounts to direct involvement in the conflict. He endorsed and propagated the fantasy—routinely advanced by pro-Putin guests on Fox talk shows—that the Biden administration is somehow plotting “regime change” in Moscow. He denounced as futile the economic embargo against Russia—and baselessly insinuated that Ukraine is squandering U.S. financial assistance. He ended by flirting with the idea of U.S. military operations against Mexico, an idea that originated on the extreme right but has migrated toward the Republican mainstream.

[Elliot Ackerman: The arsenal of democracy is reopening for business]

A careful reader of DeSantis’s statement will find that it was composed to provide him with some lawyerly escape hatches from his anti-Ukraine positions. For example, it ruled out F-16s specifically rather than warplanes in general. But those loopholes matter less than the statement’s context. After months of running and hiding, DeSantis at last produced a detailed position on Ukraine—at the summons of a Fox talking head.

There’s a scene in the TV drama Succession in which the media mogul Logan Roy tests would-be candidates for the Republican presidential nomination by ordering them to bring him a Coke. The man who eventually gets the nod is the one who didn’t even wait to be asked—he arrived at the sit-down with Logan’s Coke already in hand. That’s the candidate DeSantis is showing himself to be.

DeSantis is a machine engineered to win the Republican presidential nomination. The hardware is a lightly updated version of donor-pleasing mechanics from the Paul Ryan era. The software is newer. DeSantis operates on the latest culture-war code: against vaccinations, against the diversity industry, against gay-themed books in school libraries. The packaging is even more up-to-the-minute. Older models—Mitt Romney, Jeb Bush—made some effort to appeal to moderates and independents. None of that from DeSantis. He refuses to even speak to media platforms not owned by Rupert Murdoch. His message to the rest of America is more of the finger-pointing disdain he showed last year for high-school students who wore masks when he visited a college.

The problem that Republicans confront with this newly engineered machine is this: Have they built themselves a one-stage rocket—one that achieves liftoff but never reaches escape velocity? The DeSantis trajectory to the next Republican National Convention is fast and smooth. He raised nearly $10 million in February—a single month. That’s on top of the more than $90 million remaining from the $200 million he raised for his reelection campaign as governor. His allies talk of raising $200 million more by this time next year, and there is no reason to doubt they will reach their target. DeSantis has been going up in the polls, too. According to Quinnipiac, Donald Trump’s lead over DeSantis in a four-way race between them, Mike Pence, and Nikki Haley has shriveled to just two points.

[Read: The martyr at CPAC]

After that midpoint, however, the DeSantis flight path begins to look underpowered.

Florida Republicans will soon pass—and DeSantis pledged he would sign—a law banning abortion after six weeks. That bill is opposed by 57 percent of those surveyed even inside Florida. Another poll found that 75 percent of Floridians oppose the ban. It also showed that 77 percent oppose permitless concealed carry, which DeSantis supports, and that 61 percent disapprove of his call to ban the teaching of critical race theory as well as diversity, equity, and inclusion policies on college campuses. As the political strategist Simon Rosenberg noted: “Imagine how these play outside FL.”

But even this understates the DeSantis design flaw.

More dangerous than the unpopular positions DeSantis holds are the popular positions he does not hold. What is DeSantis’s view on health care? He doesn’t seem to have one. President Joe Biden has delivered cheap insulin to U.S. users. Good idea or not? Silence from DeSantis. There’s no DeSantis jobs policy; he hardly speaks about inflation. Homelessness? The environment? Nothing. Even on crime, DeSantis must avoid specifics, because specifics might remind his audience that Florida’s homicide numbers are worse than New York’s or California’s.

DeSantis just doesn’t seem to care much about what most voters care about. And voters in turn do not care much about what DeSantis cares most about.

[Yascha Mounk: How to save academic freedom from Ron DeSantis]

Last fall, DeSantis tried a stunt to influence the midterm elections: At considerable taxpayer expense, he flew asylum seekers to Martha’s Vineyard. The ploy enraged liberals on Twitter. It delighted the Fox audience. Nobody else, however, seemed especially interested. As one strategist said to Politico: “It’s mostly college-educated white women that are going to decide this thing. Republicans win on pocketbook issues with them, not busing migrants across the country.”

A new CNN poll finds that 59 percent of Republicans care most that their candidate agrees with them on the issues; only 41 percent care most about beating Biden. DeSantis has absorbed that wish and is answering it. Last night, in his statement on Ukraine, DeSantis delivered another demonstration of this nomination-or-bust strategy.

DeSantis will be a candidate of the Republican base, for the Republican base. Like Trump, he delights in displaying his lack of regard for everyone else. Trump, however, is driven by his psychopathologies and cannot emotionally cope with disagreement. DeSantis is a rational actor and is following what somebody has convinced him is a sound strategy. It looks like this:

Woo the Fox audience and win the Republican nomination. ?? Become president.

Written out like that, you can see the missing piece. DeSantis is surely intelligent and disciplined enough to see it too. But the programming installed in him prevents him from acting on what he sees. His approach to winning the nomination will put the general election beyond his grasp. He must hope that some external catastrophe will defeat his Democratic opponent for him—a recession, maybe—because DeSantis is choosing a path that cannot get him to his goal.

Juandalynn Abernathy: Yolanda and I were on the telephone talking, as we did every day—every day after school. We were extremely close.

And at that time, we had the Princesses telephone. You know what that little Princess telephone looked like? It’s this oval, half oval. And she had the pink color and I had a pink color.

Vann R. Newkirk II: Juandalynn Abernathy was at home in Atlanta, on her private phone line with her best friend, Yolanda—Yolanda King, who she called Yoki. Then another phone line at the house rang.

Abernathy: And then I said, “Yoki, wait just a moment. The telephone is ringing. Let me pick it up.” And in picking up the phone was a friend of mine, and she said, “I’ve been trying to get you on your line.” And I said, “I know. I’m on the phone with Yoki.” And she says, “You have to turn on the television. Dr. King has been shot.”

Newkirk: Juandalynn was 13. To her, “Dr. King” wasn’t just a famous person on the TV. He was “Uncle Martin.” Her daddy was Ralph David Abernathy, King’s closest associate and his best friend. The two families had been joined together by the movement. They went on vacations together. And King’s daughter, her best friend, was waiting on the other line.

Abernathy: I hung up the phone, turned on the television up front, and ran back to the bedroom. And I told Yoki. And she hung up the phone; I hung up the phone. And then all of a sudden, the doorbell starts to ring. And I run up front, and the house starts filling up with people, and my mother is walking out of the bedroom.

Newkirk: Juandalynn’s mother had already gotten the news.

Abernathy: She was on the phone with Aunt Coretta.

Newkirk: Like all the partners and spouses in the movement, she had a bag packed and plans in place to move at a moment’s notice, in case of something urgent: A bomb threat. A disaster. An assassination.

Abernathy: It wasn’t 10 minutes, and we were gone. Just like that [snaps].

Newkirk: Friends came to take the family to the airport, to get to Memphis.

Abernathy: And I just remember thinking, Oh. I’m praying. Oh, he’ll be all right. He’ll be all right. Just praying.

Newkirk: This was something they’d known might happen, something they’d trained for.

Abernathy: We were no fools, you see. So we were praying, of course, that Uncle Martin would make it, and just hoping and thinking, It’s not bad. It’s not bad. He’ll be all right.

Newkirk: King had almost died once before, when a woman stabbed him in the chest with a letter opener in 1958. Still, experiencing this was another thing.

Abernathy: And then we’re jumping out of the car, and Mother has met Aunt Coretta, and they’re on the way to the gate. And I see the mayor, Ivan Allen, walking toward them. And I hear him say to Coretta, he’s very sorry to have to say to her, um … that Uncle Martin had died.

Newkirk: Coretta Scott King would fly the next day to Memphis, to claim her husband’s body. She and Ralph David Abernathy had to plan a funeral befitting a man who meant so much to so many, and who had been killed for that meaning. They would all have to begin to learn to make grief a companion, and figure out how to go on without a husband, father, brother, uncle, and friend.

On the ground in Memphis, how to mourn King as a person was only one consideration of many. Movement leaders and the Black workers they’d come to aid had to figure out how to keep King’s work alive. But in order to do that, they had to confront a country that had grown suspicious of him and of the movement. They had to learn how to march without their drum major. A crisis of faith was coming. And there were no easy answers.

Abernathy: It was like our world fell apart, because Uncle Martin was like the center. Everything centered around Uncle Martin.

***

Newkirk: Part 4: “Overcome.”

***

Newkirk: The old Lorraine Motel in Memphis is now the National Civil Rights Museum. Walking through the front door, you see and hear an entire history of the movement, from slavery to emancipation, through the killing of Emmett Till, to the sit-ins and boycotts. A walk through the history of Blackness leads you to room 306, the only area that still looks like it did in 1968. The last bedroom where Martin Luther King slept is now enclosed in glass. Music and the sound from a video exhibit usually bleeds into the hallway and bounces off the glass walls. But when museum staff turned the sound off for us, the space became contemplative. Still.

We visit with John Burl Smith. He stops and comments on the photos we pass. He’s got on a brown Kangol beret. It’s somewhere between New Jack City and Nick Fury.

John Burl Smith: Room 306 is just down the walk, about four or five rooms from where we were.

Newkirk: He can’t find his own face in the exhibits, and he feels a certain way about it. But he was a part of this story. A part of the story of this room.

Burl Smith: And we came down and knocked on the door. Dr. King came to the door and he invited us in. And I was surprised that it was only him, because the hotel was full of SCLC people. But he was in a room by himself. We came into the room and we talked.

Newkirk: Room 306 feels like a liminal space between what is and what might have been. Between the present that we have and the future that people in the movement dared to envision. It’s easy to get caught up here, thinking about what happens if there is peace in Vietnam in ’68, or what happens if King does not get shot, if he lives to be an old man.

Many of the histories of the movement say that it ended here, with a single gunshot, in 1968. But that reading of history always struggles to explain the reason King was here in the first place. In fact, the movement was already at a crossroads—maybe a turning point, maybe a breaking point—before he traveled to Memphis at all. King was no longer in favor with the public, or with the president. People were wondering if his philosophy of nonviolence was useful anymore. Lots of younger Black folks were tuning King out, even saying he was the problem.

Burl Smith: I basically saw him as an appeaser, so to speak.

Newkirk: John was born to a sharecropping family in Mississippi, but they moved to Memphis when he was young. Growing up, he wasn’t a “rock the boat” kind of kid.

Burl Smith: Well, I’ll put it like I was raised to be a good colored boy.

Newkirk: It’s interesting to see John now and try to think about him as a kid. Right now the guy is a walking radical-Black-history encyclopedia. He’s like the platonic ideal of the conscious older brother. He wrote 1,000-page book telling the history from slavery to hip-hop. But back in the day? His mother did a little community work. They knew the NAACP, but they weren’t activists. John wanted to grow up and have that middle-class, white-picket-fence life. He liked the bravado of John Wayne in his movies. So during the Vietnam War, he decided to join the Air Force.

Burl Smith: I had honored the nation by serving. I felt that I was due the blessings of America in terms of a good job and those kind of things.

Newkirk: He shipped out in ’64—after the “I Have a Dream Speech” but before the Selma to Montgomery march. The Civil Rights Act passed that year and everything seemed on the way up. The Voting Rights Act passed the next year. But then, the energy started to shift.

Reporter: It began with police and rioters clashing on a hot Wednesday night. Some believe it could have been stopped right then.

Police dispatch: Calling in looters at 52 and Broadway. All units …

Newkirk: In ’65, not too long after Selma and the Voting Rights Act, the ghetto in Watts, California, rose in rebellion.

Crowd: Kill the white man!

Reporter: Then came summer, 1966, and as riots crackled through his cities, the Northern white man came to realize the depth of his confusion, his animosity, and fear. Black Power was the catalyst, a phrase shouted by a 25-year-old revolutionary on a Mississippi highway. It was a rallying cry to Northern Blacks, mired in frustration and bitterness, a cry that sounded like a threat of violence, of vengeance, to a white man fed up with racial turmoil.

Newkirk: Major riots took place over the following four summers in cities across America. SNCC and other organizations pushed away from King’s orbit. Leaders like Stokely Carmichael with his message of Black Power questioned if nonviolence could even still work.

Burl Smith: Stokely uttered the first statements about Black Power, but civil-rights leaders had closed the door on that. They really didn’t want anything to do with Black Power. And I, following their line, felt the same way: that Black Power really was something that was going to destroy the Black community.

Newkirk: King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference knew that Black Power was tapping into something real, especially in the North. They decided to shift their organizing up to Chicago, to protest housing segregation and prove that they had relevance beyond old Jim Crow. But Chicago didn’t go as they planned.

[Racist shouting: “I live here. Get back. I live here! Those fucking (N-word) don’t live here; I live here.”]

Newkirk: White folks showed up by the busload to protest against him. Some waved signs with swastikas. During one march in a white neighborhood in 1966, a counter protester hit King in the head with a rock.

Eventually, King and the SCLC did force some housing reforms in the city. But it didn’t feel like the same kind of glory that people were used to.

Reporter: King’s people acknowledged that they needed a victory if there were not to be defections from their forces. That victory finally came when Dr. King threatened to march on the suburban town of Cicero. Chicago civic leaders feared violence there. So at a hastily assembled summit meeting, they agreed to some concessions and King called off his march. Through it all, though, he had insisted that no matter what the competition from his more-militant Black brothers, he would never renounce his policy of nonviolence.

Newkirk: King was being challenged and changed. Around the same time, so was John Burl Smith. He came back from Vietnam in ’66 and got a job. He was working his way toward that white-picket-fence life. But his old childhood friend, Charles Cabbage, had just come back from Morehouse College in Atlanta. And he had been radicalized.

Burl Smith: Well, Charles, when he comes home, I don’t recognize him because he’s got this—he’s wearing sandals and Levi’s, and he’s got a dashiki on and a big, huge afro and a beard. He’s wearing shades.

Newkirk: Charles had bought into Black Power. He was already affiliated with SNCC and trying his best to bring Stokely Carmichael’s philosophies and tactics to Memphis. And he wanted John’s help.

Burl Smith: So for about three weeks, we are debating the political atmosphere in the Black community. And of course, I’m on the side of defending America. I believe the Bill of Rights and the Constitution applied to me. And Charles is on the other side, chopping all that up as it come out of my mouth. I knew he was not someone that was pumped up with a lot of, you know, “bull” about being Black. And so Charles was like my model as to what Black Power advocates do.

Newkirk: John decided to start taking his own trips to Atlanta. SNCC had an organizing and training program around Black colleges there. Prospective Black radicals came there to read Black socialists and anarchists, and to learn how to debate other people’s beliefs.

Burl Smith: And this kind of developed into what they started to call Black Power sleepovers. So it was kind of like a party, but it was really serious because we were really the people who had done the reading.

Newkirk: Around the same time, Charles was making good on his promise to build something in Memphis. He and a friend, Coby Smith, were starting a homegrown organization, similar to the Black Panthers out West. They began by calling it the Black Organizing Project. John was a founding member.

Burl Smith: Charles brought Black Power to Memphis.

Newkirk: And how did that feel to be the guys?

Burl Smith: It felt strange to me, but good.

Newkirk: The group spread their message to Black youth in the colleges and universities around Memphis. They brought in their friends and cousins. There were younger kids in the city too, who were restless—neighborhood clubs and gangs. Charles and John wanted to connect with them and channel their energy into organizing.

Burl Smith: They had a little neighborhood club and the leader of the group was an artist whose name was Donny Delaney. Donny had taken a Levi’s jacket and cut the sleeves off and decorated the back, and the name of their group was called the Invaders. At that time, there was this TV show called The Invaders.

Newkirk: The premise of the show was that aliens had come to the Earth and wanted to make it their world.

Burl Smith: So I identified with that metaphor, and I put the letters on the back of my Army jacket. And this is basically the beginning of the Invaders.

Newkirk: By late 1967, John was about as far away from the white-picket-fence life as you can get. He had an Afro. He was walking around Memphis with a military jacket with invaders on the back. He was speaking out openly against capitalism and imperialism and the Vietnam War. And he was definitely not with all that nonviolent stuff.

Burl Smith: Civil-rights leaders were busy attacking Black Power advocates for destroying the community and even being Communists. Yeah, any kind of charge that would denigrate Black Power in the eyes of the general public.

Newkirk: The group called themselves the Invaders. They didn’t think much of Dr. King. But even they noticed that something was changing about him. Around the same time John made his radical turn, King started speaking out forcefully against the war in Vietnam. He tied the struggle against white supremacy to the larger struggle against imperialism.

In doing so, he knowingly offended Lyndon B. Johnson, white liberal supporters, and other members of that civil-rights middle-class leadership. The NAACP openly criticized King. But it all got John to listening.

Burl Smith: When you look at how America was treating us in terms of the denial of the basic rights of human beings, then a person like Dr. King can’t do anything but come out against the war, because it was an anathema for him. There was no way you could make a deal with the devil.

Newkirk: Even with his new stance on Vietnam, the Black papers were reporting that King was losing ground and authority to more militant, younger Black groups. The SCLC was under pressure on all sides. So they decided to try something new. Something bigger.

Bill Greenwood (journalist): The most massive series of demonstrations ever attempted is the promise of Dr. Martin Luther King, leader of a planned April civil-disobedience drive in Washington. Dr. King …

Reporter: … A coalition of 75 Washington Negro groups has voiced support for Dr. Martin Luther King’s April demonstrations here …

Newkirk: In 1967, King announced the new Poor People’s Campaign. The idea was to bring thousands of people from Black neighborhoods to march on D.C. They would push for legislation for jobs, housing, and wages. King sent the SCLC’s biggest names around the country to try and spread the word, and held massive planning meetings in Atlanta. Ralph David Abernathy worked to harness the energy of the heyday of the movement.

Ralph David Abernathy: Are you with this Poor People’s Campaign? If so, raise your hand. All right, get that written down. [Laughter.] With the movement and with this Poor People’s Campaign. Now I’ve got to run, got to preach a sermon. [Laughter.] But I did want to get that on the record [Laughter] before I left. Now who is the next speaker?

Newkirk: The Poor People’s Campaign was going to be big—it would make the 1963 March on Washington look like a picnic. King didn’t have allies left to offend anymore, so he began planning something more confrontational, something more like a nonviolent siege.

But the SCLC wasn’t raising a lot of money. They were downright broke in early 1968. National media and public opinion were not catching the spirit Abernathy expressed. They were not rallying behind King the way they had in Selma, Montgomery, Birmingham. There was a real chance that the campaign King planned might not even get off the ground, let alone help eliminate poverty in America. But early that year, he got word about the Black sanitation workers who were striking in Memphis. And the Invaders were helping organize them.

Burl Smith: And the sanitation strike is the real event that brought everything together.

Labor leader: The lowest-paid man in our society should not have to strike to get a decent wage a century after emancipation and after the enactment of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendment.

Taylor Rogers: It was awful every day. We had these tubs we had to put the garbage in. Most of the tubs had holes in them, and garbage would leak all over you.

Elmore Nickelberry: I had maggots in my shirts. Maggots go down into my shoes. And we worked in the rain—snow, ice, and rain. We had to. If we didn’t, we’d lose our jobs.

Speaker at rally: … because these men tell us that all their lives they’ve been wanting to be men. All their lives they’ve been struggling to be dignified. [Applause.] And they tell us that this may be their only chance and they’re not giving up! [Cheering and applause.]

Newkirk: The situation in Memphis had begun in February ’68, after two Black men, Echol Cole and Robert Walker, were crushed to death in the back of a garbage truck during a rainstorm. Black sanitation workers were already fed up. They weren’t allowed to use facilities that white workers could, or ride in the cabs of the garbage trucks. They couldn’t even protect themselves from the rain without risking their lives … So they planned to strike.

When Mayor Henry Loeb got word of the strike, he denounced it.

Henry Loeb: As mayor, I represent the whole city. First, I represent these men and have been available and will be available to discuss our problems. Second, and most important, I represent the public, whose health is endangered. And this cannot and will not be tolerated.

Newkirk: The sanitation workers decided to defy the mayor and strike for better wages and working conditions. They chose to organize at Clayborn Temple, an old church that was one of the centers of Black community life in Memphis.

***

Newkirk: Clayborn Temple is under construction now. The old, stained-glass windows that would have bathed people in multicolored light are boarded up. One of the walls collapsed. The giant organ pipes, in the back, are still there but tarnished. But now the church is being restored by a group of people inspired by the sanitation workers’ strike.

John Burl Smith and I are both given hard hats as we look around. He gave me a sense of just how packed the place must have been during the strike.

Burl Smith: That was the podium area where the preacher sat. And then there was a choir stand behind that. They had three pulpits—a large one and two little small ones. There was two aisles, and pews on the outer edge, and the way it was designed, as they went back, they got larger.

Newkirk: John says that he was drawn to the meetings at Clayborn because he’d been raised to care about his people.

Burl Smith: They had children, you know—families. And at a dollar and 75 cents, eight-hour, ten-hour days, I mean, you’re barely paying rent and buying food.

Newkirk: But he also says that at first the meetings at Clayborn mostly featured civil-rights leaders talking down at the workers—that the workers themselves weren’t given a voice. They looked dejected. Even talking about it now seemed to get to him.

Newkirk: Now, I notice this is something you get animated about.

Burl Smith: Yes, I get very animated about it because they were like my father. You know. I could look in their faces and in their eyes, and I knew what was going on in their life.

Newkirk: Lots of the younger Invaders, the members of the group he led, were children of the sanitation workers.

Burl Smith: So it became personal to me the more I came down and the more I became involved in it, because I saw the helpless position they were in.

Newkirk: One night, a preacher who knew John and knew he wanted to say something invited him up to say a word before the prayer.

Burl Smith: Standing there looking out; they were so quiet and calm, you know, and subdued like they had been beat down, you know. And I wanted to make them feel like the fight had just begun. You have power.

Newkirk: There were community organizers in the crowd, including Maxine Smith, the leader of the local NAACP. John wanted to shock them, so he dialed up the rhetoric.

Burl Smith: When I get to the end, I mentioned the fact that they may have to pick up some guns and fight because this is your life and this is your livelihood.

Newkirk: When you said, “You need to get guns,” do they cheer you? Did anybody here boo you?

Burl Smith: No. Nobody booed me.

Newkirk: What did they do?

Burl Smith: Maxine Smith jumped up and ended the speech, because, “We’re not for that. We’re not for violence. We don’t want violence. Don’t listen to him.” And you know what? I didn’t care, because they had heard it.

Newkirk: They cut him off, got to the prayer. But John’s proud of that speech. For him and the Invaders, it crystallized their approach. They thought the civil-rights leaders in the city wanted to get the strikers to go back to work, to give up all their leverage.

The Invaders pushed more and more in a radical direction. John says he had the idea to use counterterrorism tactics he’d learned fighting the Viet Cong. They coached kids on how to draw the city’s attention away from the workers. They set trash fires and built barricades, and harassed the scabs who came to pick up trash.

Burl Smith: You could throw bricks at them. You could throw bottles at them. You know, you could do anything you could to make it hard on them.

Newkirk: At the start, the SCLC didn’t pay much attention to Memphis. It was a local labor conflict. But King’s associate James Lawson was chairman of the local civil-rights coalition supporting the workers. Lawson invited King to speak. After police beat strikers during one of the nearly daily marches, King finally agreed to come down. John was one of the thousands of people who crammed into another church, the Mason Temple, when King spoke.

Burl Smith: And when Dr. King got there, they had to almost carry him to the podium to get through the people.

(Group singing, then male soloist: “We shall overcome … Oh, deep in my heart, I do believe, we shall overcome someday.”)

Newkirk: A lot of people thought King would just come down and give a speech and go. The Invaders even thought he might come down to break the strike, and encourage the strikers to go back to work. But then King started talking about power. He said that “power is the ability to achieve purpose; power is the ability to affect change.” It wasn’t too far from what Stokely Carmichael was saying, what the Black Panthers were saying out in Oakland. That all impressed John and his comrades a little. And then came the bombshell.

Burl Smith: And when they quieted down, and he said anybody that’s got a job shouldn’t go to work that day and children shouldn’t attend school.

And then he told them, “If you want me to, I’ll lead the march to the mayor’s office.” And of course, [Imitates crowd roar] everybody went wild.

Newkirk: It was stunning, maybe one of the most unexpected moments of King’s life. In 13 years of activism, he’d never called for or been part of a general strike. Now here he was, proposing to come back and lead it himself, talking about power. John was sold.

Burl Smith: We had proposed some radical stuff. But never, you know—we never even thought that a general strike would be something to think about, let alone do. I thought it was great. That’s when I really knew he was on the side of the workers rather than on the side of the power structure.

Newkirk: In that crowd, King saw the face of the issues he was trying to deal with. Here were poor Black workers, struggling not for the right to send their kids to white schools or the right to vote, but for a piece of the pie. It made the Poor People’s Campaign real, gave it shape and direction, in a time when the SCLC didn’t really have a plan. King decided that he would come back. He said, “The movement lives or dies in Memphis.”

***

Newkirk: Ten days later, Martin Luther King came back to Memphis to lead the march. They started here at Clayborn Temple.

Burl Smith: You know, I’d never seen that many Black people in one place. The March on Washington was different, you know—white people, Black people, you know. But this was Black people.

Newkirk: Some of the Invaders wanted to disrupt the march, to show it was a sham. But John just wanted to witness it.

Burl Smith: We took up positions right there at the door. On either side were the pillars are. And when the march started to move, you know, it was like being on the reviewing stand because people were waving and giving the Black Power signal and all of that as they marched down the street.

Reporter: Several thousand Negro demonstrators are participating in this largest civil-rights demonstration ever in Memphis, Tennessee. Many of the demonstrators are carrying the sign i am a man. They stretch out for several blocks. Police are on hand with about 600 officers. Almost the entire force is standing by here.

Newkirk: The march was huge. It was exactly the kind of action that Black folks in Memphis wanted King to help the strikers do.

Paul Barnett (journalist): Hundreds of people have joined. There must be 5,000 at this time or more.

Newkirk: But as the march advanced some of the younger folks walking alongside it began breaking windows.

Barnett: There go some windows. Right here, right here on Beale between Second and Third. There go the windows. We don’t know whether you can hear the tinkling of the glass or not. The first violence we have seen.

Newkirk: The whole thing started to break down. And when police came out and met the marchers with force, King’s triumph turned into a full-on riot.

Ray Sherman (journalist): Police rushing to the scene—almost struck a pedestrian. They’re moving in with riot guns and tear gas canisters. Negro youths are smashing windows.

Barnett: Dr. Martin Luther King, who was supposed to lead the march—no one has any idea where he is…

Newkirk: King’s advisers were terrified that he might be hurt or killed. So they put him in a car and drove him away.

Sherman: That sound you just heard was the sound of tear gas fired by…

(Crowd in background: “Go, go, go go.”)

Barnett: Complete disorder on Beale Street … as we mentioned the breaking of windows here on Beale …

Sherman: Police have formed a cordon across Main Street at this time in an attempt to at least calm the demonstration, which has gotten completely out of hand.

The Negro youths are shouting at this time, “Go, go, go!”

Newkirk: Police started attacking and chasing Black people on the streets. One of the officers saw Larry Payne, an 16-year-old Black kid, exiting the Sears department store. With no evidence of a crime, he chased the boy to his mother’s apartment nearby. The officer waited for Payne to leave the housing complex and shot him in the stomach with his shotgun, killing him. The police said that Payne was holding a knife, although eyewitnesses say he was unarmed and holding his hands up. The officer was never prosecuted.

***

Newkirk: Larry Payne was the only recorded fatality of the day. But the Memphis police brutalized the sanitation workers and their families. Some people tried to defend themselves with the same poles that carried the i am a man signs. But they were surrounded by the police.

Burl Smith: They attacked the march. And so you didn’t really have a chance to think about anything other than defending yourself. This was not just Invaders but Black men in general. There were women and children and old folks in the march. They were running for their lives. And they pushed us all the way back to Clayborn Temple, where the march started. And we were there with our backs to Clayborn Temple, and the women and children and old folks went inside the church. And they shot tear gas in the church.

Newkirk: They shot tear gas into the church?

Burl Smith: They shot tear gas into the church—went inside the church and beat up the people that were in there.

Newkirk: The organizers of the march took King back to his hotel. He crawled under the covers. He knew that this was all bad. He knew that the news would say he led a riot. When the headlines started to roll in, that’s exactly what they said. The FBI had sent direct memos to newsrooms discrediting King. They used claims they’d gotten from a crew of informants that infiltrated every single Black organization in Memphis. Even some Black publications and leaders criticized King for calling for the strike and increasing tensions in the city. City leaders used the riot to take a hard line against further protests. Mayor Loeb promised crackdowns on any future unrest.

Henry Loeb: The police, with my full sanction, took the necessary action to restore law, and order and to protect the lives and property of the citizens of Memphis.

Newkirk: The Memphis march was supposed to be King’s second wind. It was supposed to be proof that the Poor People’s Campaign would work. The SCLC was furious at the Invaders. They blamed them for instigating young people into breaking windows and setting fires. In a press conference the next morning, King basically said as much. And Coby Smith, of the Invaders, didn’t exactly dispute it.

Reporter: Have you or your group organized last night’s burnings?

Coby Smith: We don’t organize burnings; essentially, we organize people. If people burn, they burn.

Newkirk: King’s colleagues at the SCLC wanted him to denounce the Invaders. The press asked him to denounce all Black radicals in the country, including SNCC’s Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown, for instigating riots. But he refused. He said that their rage was a symptom, a product of white supremacy. He reached out.

Burl Smith: And Charles and Calvin and a couple other guys met with Dr. King. And that was the first meeting between the Invaders and Dr. King.

Newkirk: It was March 29. The Invaders were still skeptical of King. But that invitation to meet was the beginning of a sort of mutual respect. King understood their frustration and goals, and saw the value in keeping them closer to him … so he could keep an eye on them. For their part, the Invaders would never formally commit to nonviolence. But they believed King was walking the talk. They decided to consider working with him and planned to talk again, when he was back in town the next week, on the afternoon of April 4 at the Lorraine Motel.

Burl Smith: Charles and I walked down to his room, walked down to Dr. King’s room for that last meeting.

Newkirk: John says they talked about the Invaders becoming marshals in the next march, about how the Invaders wanted King to help fund some of their community programs, even though they didn’t really know the SCLC was broke.

Burl Smith: He reached over and put his hand on my knee. And during that instance and exchange, I don’t know but I just got the feeling that he was genuine—that he was serious and really dedicated to what he was trying to do for the poor people of America.

Newkirk: They talked about how Memphis had changed the Poor People’s Campaign, about how the strikers embodied the problems King wanted to address, and how winning for the workers was now a strategic goal for the SCLC. They talked about what was next. John left the Lorraine and drove back to his apartment. He was convinced that there had been a breakthrough. But he says law enforcement had used his meeting to make their move.

Burl Smith: So I get to the apartment, I open the door, I walk in, and the place is torn apart because they’ve raided. The TV is on the floor, and so by the time I got it set up and plugged in and turned it on, Walter Cronkite is the first face I see.

Walter Cronkite: Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., civil-rights leader and Nobel Prize winner, was shot and killed tonight in Memphis, Tennessee.

Burl Smith:  And he’s telling us that Dr. King had just been shot. That’s how I find out.

Newkirk: Wow. How did that feel?

Burl Smith: Oh, man. That was like the bottom dropping out.

***

Bill Plant (journalist): Just to date this morning, Dr. Martin Luther King’s body was brought to lie in state for an hour. They were old; they were dressed for work; they were middle-aged with families—young, curious children. But they were almost all Black. For some, the experience was just too much. [Crying in background.]

Newkirk: Just hours after the shooting, a funeral home in Memphis prepared King’s body for public viewing, and then to be carried home to Atlanta. It immediately became a site of pilgrimage for Black Memphians. The rioting the previous night had been muted compared to other cities’, and even compared to the peak of the sanitation workers’ march just the week before. Maybe it was because King’s colleagues were still in the city, asking people to be peaceful. But it also felt as if everyone was just too occupied with King, with how to make the dream live on. The movement lived or died in Memphis.

After an all-night meeting with the SCLC, Ralph David Abernathy held a press conference outside of room 306. He looked and sounded tired. Exhausted. But he spoke deliberately. He used the preaching cadence that so many people associated with the movement, with King.

Ralph David Abernathy: The assassination of my dearest friend and closest associate, Martin Luther King Jr., has placed upon my shoulders the awesome task of directing the organization which he established.

Newkirk: It was like he was trying to still inspire people. Maybe even himself.

Abernathy: I tremble as I move forward to accept this responsibility. No man can fill Dr. King’s shoes.

Newkirk: Abernathy announced that the SCLC would continue the march that King had planned in support of the sanitation workers. He promised to keep the Poor People’s Campaign, and carry out the march to Washington. But he recognized that the political situation had changed. Riots burned in dozens of cities already, with no sign of stopping. Stokely Carmichael was going live right around this same time calling for the Black revolution. The window for nonviolence as a dominant, national organizing strategy was closing fast.

Reporter: Dr. Abernathy, what does the death of Dr. King mean to the policy of nonviolence?

Abernathy: Well, it only means that those of us who are dedicated to nonviolence will have to intensify our efforts and work with all of our power to seek to save this society. That is, if it can be saved, because, as Martin Luther King said over and over again, violence is not only immoral, but it is impractical.

Newkirk: He sounds less confident, more unsure about nonviolence as a philosophy than he or King had been before. He offered a fallback defense instead: that the violence of rioting or race war would only invite police and military crackdowns that would destroy Black communities.

As he spoke, those fears were already coming to pass. Mayors and governors across the country were asking for federal assistance in crushing rebellions and riots.

Journalist: The violence was by no means limited to Washington. Detroit tonight is under a curfew, and National Guard troops are on duty there. Guardsmen also have been mobilized in Chicago, where five blocks of predominantly Negro West Madison Avenue were reported afire, where looting broke out in the downtown Loop area, and in Boston, where a menacing crowd of young Negroes kept customers trapped in a supermarket for a time.

Newkirk: Politicians and pundits were already seizing on the riots, calling for law and order and worse. And in Memphis, among the activists and the remnants of the movement, grief and shock over the nationwide riots were widening rifts that had already been opened by years of stress and government infiltration. John Burl Smith was afraid the FBI or the police might finally make their move on him.

Burl Smith: “It was numbness” is about the best description I could give it because there weren’t any words, other than they were probably coming at us next.

***

Newkirk: Memphis was named after hallowed ground. Its ancient namesake was a capital of the Old Kingdom of Egypt. In the necropolis, at its center, there was a complex of pyramids and tombs where the kings of Egypt underwent their transformation from mortals to divine beings under the watch of the god of the underworld, Osiris. This significance might have originated in the placement of the capital on the Nile River, which itself is also tied to the old notions of rebirth and eternity. Thousands of miles and thousands of years away, settlers saw the bluff on the Mississippi River and thought there was something fitting about the name. In 1968, that city also became hallowed—a place where the life of a man was transformed into something beyond himself.

Douglas Edwards (journalist): The Reverend Abernathy, successor to Martin Luther King at the head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and the crowds shuffling past King’s coffin.

Abernathy: We have pledged to you that we are going to carry his work forward. Now, let us not do anything at this particular time that will discredit his life. He lived so nobly.

Tony Brunton (journalist): National Guardsmen, fixed bayonets, behind them helmeted city policemen with shotguns, submachine guns, and rifles, pushing the crowd back [Crowd singing], from time to time [Crowd singing: “Black and white together.”] asking them to move back for their own protection, the police said. Now they have moved back at the request of the Reverend Ralph Abernathy, the man who will be taking over for Dr. King, the leader of the Southern Christian conference. He asked them to move back.

(Crowd singing: “We shall overcome some day.”)

The Black Power group called the Invaders is created

The Black Organizing Project is founded in Memphis in 1967. Soon, some members begin calling themselves the Invaders.

Sanitation workers strike in Memphis

Two months before King’s assassination, sanitation workers in Memphis begin to strike. King later promises to join a protest march through the city for the workers.

King joins sanitation workers’ march

One week before King’s assassination, he travels to Memphis to lead the sanitation workers’ march, which is marred by bursts of violence. Memphis police kill 16-year-old Larry Payne.

Matthew Nimetz: Do you want something?

Vann R. Newkirk II: I’ll take …

Nimetz: If anyone wants a cookie …

Newkirk: Thank you. I’ll grab one after we finish. [Laughter.]

All right, so did you actually start that July?

Nimetz: Let’s see … I started ’66, let’s see; I clerked in ’65, ’66—yeah, ’67 … July ’67.

Newkirk: So you started it in the long, hot summer?

Nimetz: Yeah, it was tough and we had the Detroit riots as I was arriving—actually, the day I arrived, the riots …

Newkirk: Matthew Nimetz started working at the White House in the summer of 1967—the long, hot summer, when Detroit, Newark, and dozens of other places erupted in riots for days. The summer before King was assassinated.

Reporter: This is part of Springfield Avenue, Newark. On the night of July 13, 1967, hundreds of rioters smashed windows and looted these stores. Losses in the city were put at $10,251,000. The rioting cost the lives of 23 persons. Hundreds of others were injured.

Reporter: We are back on 12th Street in Detroit’s northwestern district, where it all began early Sunday morning. The state troopers [and] city police, here on the scene of this particular fire and numerous others in the city of Detroit, for the first time are under orders to shoot any looters or arsonists seen running from the scene.

Nimetz: We did a lot of work on riot preparation, riot control, what we would do with riots. This whole idea of the military going into our cities was a unique thing and very, very difficult, very questionable.

Newkirk: By the time Matthew started working for President Johnson, the ghettos in America had gone up for three straight years. But the uprisings in Detroit and Newark in 1967 became notorious, both for their destructiveness and for how brutally police and the military cracked down on them. White Americans were perplexed: Why were the Black ghettos rioting so regularly, so often? President Johnson resolved to find out.

Lyndon B. Johnson: We need to know the answer, I think, to three basic questions about these riots: What happened? Why did it happen? What can be done to prevent it from happening again and again?

Newkirk: To answer these questions, Johnson appointed a commission. They would travel to Black ghettos across the country, researching, interviewing, trying to find answers. He called it the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, nicknamed the Kerner Commission, after its chair. In order to head off another summer of riots, the commission had to work fast. By February ’68, two months before King’s assassination, the powder keg was already lit: State troopers fired into a crowd of Black students protesting a segregated bowling alley outside South Carolina State University.

Cleveland Sellers: See, the police were standing on the side of that hill, and while I’m going down, the shots hit me.

Reporter: Three Negros were killed and 36 others were injured in a fight with police.

Newkirk: The Orangeburg massacre, they called it. The Kerner Commission’s report was released to the public the same month.

Harry Reasoner (journalist): For the last few days, this country has lived under indictment: a charge of white racism, national in scale, terrible in its effects. The evidence to support that charge has now been presented—more than 1,400 pages of testimony, findings, conclusions, the full text of a report released just last night.

Newkirk: Committees in Washington don’t usually do much. They’re the kind of thing a president approves when they want to be seen as doing something. The commissioners were mostly white, mostly moderates, not radicals by any stretch. So when Otto Kerner came out saying stuff like this:

Otto Kerner: Our nation is moving toward two societies: one Black, one white …

Newkirk: … it was a bit of a shock.

Kerner: … separate and unequal.

Newkirk: The report found that racism was the main cause of Negro riots.The commissioners named dismal housing conditions, continued segregation in education, police brutality, and discrimination in hiring as the primary factors. Their eyes had been opened. They hoped that naming things so plainly and so boldly would move the public to understand.

Kerner: Reaction to last summer’s disorders has quickened the movement and deepened the division. Discrimination and segregation have long permeated much of American life. They now threaten the future of every American.

Newkirk: For much of America, this was a surprising conclusion. But for the leaders of the civil-rights movement, it was old news. They had been working for years to find solutions to the problem of the ghetto. In 1966, Martin Luther King joined an effort by his colleague Bayard Rustin and labor leader A. Philip Randolph to create a policy platform for the movement. Their “Freedom Budget” called for the federal government to end all poverty, Black or white, by spending billions on housing, a jobs guarantee, universal health care, and a federal minimum wage. Their demands were radical, but not unique. Whitney Young of the National Urban League wanted the government to commit to a domestic Marshall Plan to rebuild Black America the way it had been rebuilding Germany after World War II. Some reporters called his proposal the Negro Marshall Plan.

Whitney Young: But if we can say to the community, This is going to take 10 years, but next year this is what you can look for, everybody will have a job. Everybody. And remember, I’m asking you not just to hire the Phi Beta Kappas and the Lena Hornes; I’m asking you also to let apply and to hire dumb Negroes like you do dumb white people [Laughter], and mediocre Negroes like you do mediocre white people.

Newkirk: Now, in March 1968, the Kerner Commission joined the calls of King and Young: The Federal government needed to back Black America. Their recommendations were no more moderate or incremental. They echoed the “Freedom Budget” and the Negro Marshall Plan. The commissioners wanted 6 million new homes built for Black folks, and 2 million new jobs created.

Reasoner: … a guarantee of minimum income; far greater aid to schools than proposed thus far; a national commitment backed by the president, the Congress, the people with money.

Reporter: The commission itself did not say how much all of this would cost. The estimated cost is $8–10 billion a year more than the administration has asked for housing, education, welfare, and job programs. Dr. Martin Luther King, who is planning a new march on Washington, has been urging that kind of spending for a long time.

Newkirk: The commissioners tried to convince Americans—white Americans—that this was their problem to help fix, but they were fighting an uphill battle. Support of liberal urban and suburban white folks from the North had been vital in the civil-rights movement. In the years of the riots though, that support began to wane.

Reporter: [Gunshot] A grandmother fearful she’s part of what the president’s report calls the polarization of the American community. Talk in the suburbs of tanks and troops and terror [Gunshot] in the streets has led her to the pistol range.

Grandmother: Well, if there’s going to be another riot, I want to be prepared. And let me tell you one thing: He better not show his face in front of my house, because if it means my own life, I’d shoot him. Fear is fear, and when you get fear into you, you’ll do anything.

Man: Everyone’s afraid of the colored race lately. Everyone seems to be scared to make them obey the laws, which is something that doesn't happen to Joe Blow, like me or the guy next door. We’ll get thrown in jail for some of these actions.

Newkirk: In the days after the Kerner Report was released, news stations ran special reports about it. Newspapers put it on their covers. Everyone seemed to have something to say about the report. But Lyndon B. Johnson, the man who had called for the report seven months ago, hadn’t said a word.

Nimetz: It was an embarrassment. I think the president’s view, as I remember it, filtered through Joe Califano and others, was that it would be a ringing endorsement of his vision. That is a vision of a country with more and more Great Society social programs and more and more civil-rights acts.

Newkirk: Matthew Nimetz was a staff assistant to the president at the time. He says that Johnson didn’t like the report at all. The idea that there were two societies that were moving apart challenged his legacy as the builder of the Great Society.

Nimetz: I didn’t see him react. But, you know, the word around the place was, I’m not going to meet with these people. Get them out of town as soon as possible, and let’s bury this report.

Newkirk: Matthew was one of the young guys, just 29 when he came to work for the White House. But he had big responsibilities, including being one of the liaisons between Johnson and this new commission. It wasn’t the first time he’d been asked to bury a report.

Nimetz: We would often bury our reports. I mean, we set up task forces. And if they were going down a path that was not sympathetic to where we wanted to go, we would cut off their money and not help them out and sort of bury the report.

Newkirk: But the Kerner Report was too big to bury. A national debate swirled for weeks and weeks. Conservatives called the commissioners soft, and complained that their recommendations amounted to essentially rewarding lawbreakers. Some Black leaders embraced the report. Some said that it was simply stating the obvious. Johnson continued to slow-walk it, ignoring the recommendations. Mostly, each side waited until unrest came again, to vindicate their position. And then came the assassination.

Reporter: At least 4000 National Guard and federal troops are in this uneasy town tonight and more stand ready.

Reporter: The entire Metropolitan Park and Capitol Police forces are on alert.

Newkirk: It was Johnson’s nightmare, brought to his front steps. His staff watched as Black D.C. burned. They brought in machine guns and troops to protect the White House, to keep the rage contained in the ghettos.

The rebellion spread though, between neighborhoods and between cities. Even in cities that didn’t go up on the first night, uprisings were becoming common, even accelerating.

The SCLC and other Black leaders were pressing the White House to finally embrace the Kerner Commission’s report, and to champion a bill bigger and more expensive than anything they’d ever put on the table.

In white America, calls for law and order were growing, and becoming harder to ignore politically.The pressure was building. Johnson and his staff had to do something. But what was to be done? Which story, which diagnosis, which cure, would the White House listen to?

John Chambers (journalist): I’m standing here in front of a broken store window two blocks from the White House. The looters are still scuffling through the broken glass. The police are coming across the street. Here comes a teenager.

Teenager: It’s a shame. It’s a shame. It’s a shame. But I’m gonna get my shit.

Chambers: At the end of the block, an onlooker.

Onlooker: Oh God.

Chambers: What do you think it’s all coming to?

Onlooker: Well, you’ve got a man like Wallace in here and they’ll have police on every corner with orders to shoot to kill. That’s the only thing that’ll stop them.

***

Newkirk: Part 5: “Prophecy.”

***

Nimetz: So when King died, the first thing is, how major do you want to make this?

Newkirk: The night of the assassination, the White House scrambled to figure out how to respond. The riots demanded urgency, but there still wasn’t much consensus among staff. Some of them still resented King for opposing the Vietnam War. They argued about how they could properly honor a man devoted to peace. The first step they settled on was to declare a national day of mourning and to order states to lower their flags to half-mast. Then they decided on a second step: bringing civil-rights leaders to the White House, first thing in the morning. But even then, White House staff argued about how to do it.

Nimetz: You invite everyone. What do you do with the meeting? I mean, is it a ceremonial meeting? You know, you run the risk of all of them saying now’s the time to do the Marshall Plan and all the other things. We worried about that a little bit, that the meeting with the Black leaders would get out of hand, like the Kerner Commission, in a way.

Newkirk: As the sun rose the next morning, the Kerner Commission’s warnings had been made real. In D.C., Stokely Carmichael had reemerged and prepared to give his press conference predicting the beginning of a race war. Journalists and politicians were already blaming him and H. Rap Brown for the riots. At the same time, a group of Black leaders were also in the nation’s capital, on their way to the White House.

Reporter: President Johnson, with his Honolulu high-level conference held in abeyance by the killing of Dr. Martin Luther King, will meet with unspecified civil-rights leaders today at the White House.

Newkirk: The White House planned to meet and greet, and do some photo-op stuff. The idea was to show people, especially Black people, that Johnson was taking things seriously, and that he had a plan. The people who showed up were a who’s who of Black activism and politics in the ’60s. Martin Luther King Sr. was too ill to make it, but he sent a message. Some others stayed back to deal with riots in their communities. But lots of big names made it: Thurgood Marshall, the first Black Supreme Court justice; Dorothy Height, of the National Council of Negro Women; Bayard Rustin, who had been one of King’s close associates.

Nimetz: The president says if Wilkins, Whitney Young, and a couple of others can make it, to go ahead.

Newkirk: Whitney Young, of the National Urban League, and Roy Wilkins, of the NAACP, were both invited. But, there weren’t a whole lot of younger leaders on the list. Radical SNCC folks like Stokely Carmichael, they were out. Anybody affiliated with the Black Panthers or the Nation of Islam was also out.

The exclusion of more radical leaders meant that Johnson wouldn’t hear from some of the people who had the most connection to young people engaged in uprisings. But for the White House, that really didn’t matter.

Nimetz: You have a lot of meetings when you’re in government that are totally nonsubstantive. They’re ceremonial, and you know nothing’s going to come out of it. It’s sort of scripted, but it’s important to demonstrate to the world that it was a meeting, you know. It’s a sign of respect to the Black community, a sign of concern, and also hopefully to calm things down.

Newkirk: For the leaders who were present, it wasn’t just ceremonial. They came in with real policy demands. Whitney Young brought back his idea for the domestic Marshall Plan, a commitment, in billions of dollars, for jobs and housing for Black America. Other leaders agreed with him, even some of the more conservative ones. Johnson seemed to agree too, at least while he was in the room. He promised funds and said that he had already set the wheels in motion with Congress. In a press conference after the meeting, Whitney Young said again that it was time for a domestic Marshall Plan.

Whitney Young: We deliberately use that name. We want people to remember that if we could spend billions of dollars to rebuild West Germany—a country whose people set out not to destroy a few city blocks, but to destroy all of America—then we ought to be able to spend billions in our own cities. They don’t have any slums in West Germany. And what’s at stake here is far more than the plight of Negroes. What’s at stake here is this country becoming morally credible to young people, white and Black, and to the rest of the world.

Newkirk: Johnson seemed intent on getting something big done. Immediately after the meeting on Friday, he promised to convey the demands to Congress. He’d keep legislators home from Easter recess if he needed. He was forceful, the old LBJ who bulldozed congressmen and got stuff done. He was going to address Congress on the planned night of King’s funeral, Monday.

Johnson: I have asked the speaker of the House of Representatives and the Congress to receive me at the earliest possible moment, no later than Monday evening, in the area of 9 o’clock.

Newkirk: But behind the scenes, Matthew Nimetz and other staff knew that the chances of doing something big were slim. The president still just didn’t believe that the Negro Marshall Plan or the Kerner Commission recommendations were workable suggestions. And they only had three days to figure something out.

Nimetz: For us, the big question was, What are we going to put in that speech? You know he is going to give a speech, but is he going to call for all of these things? But if he doesn’t call for all for all these things like the Kerner Commission or implement these things, what’s the point of the speech?

Newkirk: The big problem was the same as it always is: money. The Vietnam war was costing as much as half of the American budget. Johnson didn’t think he could force through any bills, let alone demand billions for this one.

Nimetz: If you ruled out more money, there weren’t too many things that you could do.

Newkirk: As important as they were, the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act were cheap.

Nimetz: Civil-rights bills, they don’t cost a lot. I mean, you know, they’re profoundly important, but they’re not bills that you have to spend a lot of money on.

Newkirk: Even those bills had faced extreme opposition in Congress, when protesters were peaceful, nonviolent. Now there were riots going on.

Nimetz: Congress is a pretty good test of how people are feeling generally, right? And certainly you asked people to spend money on social programs for jobs and housing, and then they see everything being burned down, out. So there was anger and resentment and certainly not an atmosphere for pouring more money in.

Newkirk: Johnson backed himself into something of a corner by announcing the speech, and by making promises to the civil-rights leaders. He’d hoped that the meeting would calm the riots down. Going back on his promises might make the situation worse. But then the King family announced that the funeral would be Tuesday instead of Monday.

Reporter: In view of the Tuesday funeral for Dr. King, the president’s appearance before Congress would be postponed. The president has urged Speaker John McCormack to work for quick passage of a civil-rights bill. That plea still stands.

Newkirk: In his diary from that day, Matthew Nimetz wrote that the president had caught a break.

Nimetz: Anyway, the speech was postponed. I was glad as I couldn’t see this as being anything but another exhortation to an unsympathetic Congress and a troubled nation without many solutions.

Newkirk: After two days in the pressure cooker, President Johnson could relax. He didn’t immediately have to follow through on the promises he made to the civil-rights leaders. He didn’t have to go out and try to force Congress to pass a law he didn’t even really want.

If he waited it out, and the streets calmed down, maybe they wouldn’t even need to get a big bill done. Matthew Nimetz and his colleagues watched the news reports in D.C., Chicago, Newark, hoping that the riots would fizzle out. But then, another city went up.

***

Documentary Narrator: From a distance, Baltimore, like most cities, seems to be divided most visibly and dramatically into works of nature and works of man.

Yet this division between man and nature is not the most dramatic distinction that exists in the metropolitan area. The sharpest cleavage is at ground level, on man-made streets and in his buildings, where artificial but rock-solid boundaries separate blocks and homes into white, Negro, and transitional neighborhoods. On the bottom rung of this economic and social ladder is the Negro ghetto, which President Johnson called an indictment to our cities, North and South.

Newkirk: So, Dr. Birt, can you just first introduce yourself? What’s your name and where are you from?

Robert Birt: Okay. My name is Robert Birt. I’m from Baltimore, Maryland, the son of immigrants from North Carolina. You know, they came for the great Black migrations, as it was called in the 1940s.

Newkirk: I’m a Carolinian, so I’m always interested in this.

Birt: Ah, yeah.

Newkirk: Yeah. Where are they from?

Birt: Mother’s from Washington, North Carolina.

Newkirk: Little Washington, yes.

Newkirk: Robert Birt is a philosophy professor at Bowie State University. He grew up in East Baltimore. When he was born, Robert’s family lived in the slums. He still remembers how bad the conditions were.

Birt: There were splinters, and there were vermin floating around. One of my earliest memories is seeing my mother with a broom, chasing a rat away from my baby sister’s crib.

Newkirk: His family had its ups and downs. There weren’t a whole lot of ways to get ahead in Black Baltimore back then. So Robert’s dad liked to play the numbers.

Birt: There was a brief period in which we were actually experiencing a kind of upward mobility. I think he hit the number, or something like that, for $1,000, which in ’59 or ’60 was a substantial amount of money though it wouldn’t make you rich. And he opened up a store. And when he did, we actually bought a house. If I remember correctly, it was at 1209 Darley Avenue. Somehow I remember that as a child. And we had a backyard. We had a dog named Sandy.

Newkirk: They stayed there for two years. Robert’s dad ran the store, and they lived okay.

Birt: But that didn't last. There was a problem with the police. Police would come by the store, demanding their cut.

Newkirk: Baltimore police were known by Black citizens and local media to be corrupt. They were inept too, except when it came to brutality and cheating people out of their money. It was exactly the kind of thing the Kerner Commission had been warning about. And Robert Birt saw it up close.

Birt: I was in the store once and heard this big, fat, white policeman come in there. He went around boasting about how many Black people he killed. And in those days, they were pretty up front and in your face with their racism, and just outright calling my father, “[N-word], you better give me my money.” And I mean, you know, it was just unbelievable.

I don't know if my sister remembers, but I definitely do. We were there. They threatened to kill my father.

Newkirk: Soon after that, his father’s business folded. Robert doesn’t know exactly how, but he does know that they bounced back to the slums and then over to the Latrobe public-housing projects in East Baltimore. Back when Baltimore was segregated by law, Latrobe had been an all-white project, but by the time Robert got there, all the white folks had fled for the suburbs. Baltimore went from being 19 percent Black in 1940 to almost half Black in 1968. Robert recalls that white people who were left in the city guarded their neighborhoods, their property, from Black “intruders” like their lives depended on it.

Birt: I was out with a group of people—I guess it must have been ’66, ’67, the year Martin Luther King had visited Baltimore. We had gone out skating, and we had girls with us; we were teenage boys.

We were just wandering around and acting the way kids act, you know, silly and all that. And we wandered somehow or another into some part of a white area. We started noticing, You know, I think we took a wrong turn somewhere. [Laughs.]

Newkirk: Now, Robert has seen a lot. He tells every story so casually and low-key that sometimes these terrifying details just kinda walk right past you. But sometimes he laughs, and then you know it’s about to get real.

Birt: [Laughs.] And before we knew it, there was a crowd of white youths who were shouting and screaming racial slurs, name-calling us, you know, the N-word, you know.

They were acting like monkeys, actually. [Laughs.]

Some of them threw some things at us. But fortunately, we were at such a distance that nothing could connect. We did know we weren’t far away from home, so we just headed on out of there.

Newkirk: The group had to decide what to do to protect themselves.

Birt: One person said, well, look, if it gets too heavy, we were going to ask the girls to run and we were going to see if we couldn’t delay the crowd by throwing a couple of bricks or something to slow them down, but we probably couldn’t have succeeded at that. There were too many of them. [Laughs.]

We wisely decided to keep on walking and, fortunately, we weren’t far from a Black area. Somebody said, “If they cross over this territory, we own them.”

Newkirk: Robert Birt never needed the Kerner Commission report. Every single day, he lived all of the conclusions that had so shocked the commissioners. He saw a Black Baltimore that felt like it was primed to explode. But two days after King’s assassination, with uprisings happening all over the country, things were still quiet.

Maryland’s governor, Spiro Agnew, praised his citizens for not rioting. He even used some of the Kerner Commission’s rhetoric. He talked of charting a new course for Black Baltimore.

Spiro Agnew: I consider it especially important, in view of Maryland’s peaceful reaction to the current national crisis, to move quickly to consolidate gains that already have been made in the civil-rights field, and to chart a positive course for the future. Accordingly, I am asking prominent leaders of the Negro community in Baltimore and elsewhere in the state to meet with me next Thursday at 1:30 p.m. for a frank and far-reaching discussion of the problems that have faced the state and this nation.

***

Newkirk: Robert says that the calmness on the first few days was a mirage.

Birt: There was like two days of sorrow and suppressed anger and mourning. And then on Saturday, I guess you could say the grieving began to give way to anger.

Newkirk: That afternoon, there were a few memorial services in the city for King. Crowds of people started gathering, right by the projects where Robert lived. Robert was there.

Birt: They were cursing. They were saying, “These white so-and-sos, they murdered King. We’re going to kill them; we’re going to burn them out,” and so forth and so on. And some people in the crowd even clapped and cheered them.

Newkirk: First the crowd started smashing windows around the block. Then they moved to local businesses, throwing rocks and setting fires at dry cleaners and furniture stores. It was just like what happened in D.C. two days earlier.

Birt: Black Baltimore exploded.

Newkirk: Tell me what it looked like.

Birt: It was a crowd of people. They were angry, as I was. And some of them did the deeds. I mean, they destroyed things. They tore up white property.

Person on the street: We don’t burn down soul people. But some dummy, some dummy, some dummy started a fire right by our soul brother’s barbershop, and we didn’t mean to do that. But this is just the beginning; this is going to go on all summer.

Newkirk: The situation escalated quickly from there. Baltimore mobilized most of its police force as multiple buildings were firebombed, the first of over a thousand buildings where fires were reported. Spiro Agnew declared an 11 p.m. curfew, but in just a matter of hours, fires were burning all throughout Black neighborhoods in East Baltimore. They continued through the next day.

Agnew: We have taken the following steps to restore law and order in our state. You may be sure that the situation is under control and under constant vigilance of state and local authority.

Newkirk: He declared a state of emergency, called in the Maryland National Guard, and sent a telegram to the White House asking for federal troops.

Agnew: Attorney General Ramsey Clark agreed to immediately dispatch the troops. They should now be taking positions in the critical areas.

Newkirk: Thousands of soldiers marched through the streets to arrest hundreds of people for breaking curfew. By the next morning, at least three people were dead, either from the fires or the confrontations.

Robert Birt stayed out there and watched. But he says he didn’t participate.

Birt: Some people started a rumor that Robert Birt was throwing Molotov cocktails. I did not throw any cocktails. [Laughs.] But I had no negative attitude about those who did.

Newkirk: Ok, so, neutrality regarding the Molotov cocktails?

Birt: Um … well, I did clap a little. [Laughs.]

Newkirk: The Baltimore uprising began a new phase in the national reckoning, one where white fears about the riots really came into play. Agnew wanted his troops to be efficient and none too gentle in cracking down. He wasn’t the only white leader who used this playbook. In Chicago, Mayor Richard J. Daley came down hard and complained about not being able to order his police to shoot to kill.

Richard Daley: In my opinion, he should have had instructions to shoot arsonists and to shoot looters—shoot arsonists to kill and shoot looters in order that they would be detained—when this was being conducted.

Newkirk: In D.C., the riots had been contained and suppressed by the presence of federal troops and lots of tear gas. The White House had decided to send in mostly integrated units like the 82nd Airborne in order to try and build trust with Black communities, and Mayor Walter Washington helped coordinate a police response that he hoped would result in minimal loss of life. But when the disturbances threatened to move into D.C.’s mostly white suburbs, the response changed.

Bill Greenwood (journalist): A strong show of force by police and military units is credited for a significant decrease in violence in Washington and suburban areas. Authorities set up checkpoints along strategic highways. The visible presence of the heavily armed police and soldiers is believed to have caused the sharp drop in trouble.

Newkirk: In at least one case, Black people on the street were told in clear terms that they would be shot if they crossed over the border to Maryland. In other cities, they cordoned off white neighborhoods and downtown areas. Matthew Nimetz kept tabs on it all from the White House. He felt like he saw the window for change closing.

Matthew Nimetz: Those were pretty profound events in those cities, but also profound politically because it changed the mood in the Congress and I think in the country. When you have riots, even though it’s understandable, people react negatively. The combination of the assassination and the riots sort of put an end to a lot of new thinking.

Newkirk: By the morning of April 7, Palm Sunday, it was clear that the Kerner Commission’s report was not going to be endorsed and implemented. Lots of white people didn’t agree with the report before the riots. The dream of spending billions to transform Black life in America probably died in the fires. But the White House reached for one more option to try to get something done.

Harry Reasoner (journalist): Is this another stalemate? Or will they get something?

Roger Mudd (journalist): The reliability and viability of the Congress is at stake. Can the Congress respond to this report? The response, I would judge, would be open housing, which costs no money.

Reasoner: But very little in the nature of the kind of drastic, immediate action the report talks about.

Mudd: Very little.

Newkirk: There was a fair-housing bill that had been stuck in Congress for a while. It wasn’t exactly the Negro Marshall Plan. It wasn’t even close. But housing had been envisioned as the third part of a trifecta with the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act. The fair-housing bill would outlaw discrimination in many home sales to Black residents. The bill had been stalled by opposition from segregationists and white suburbanites, but the White House thought that now there might be the perfect storm in which to get it passed.

Nimetz: The thing is, it was there. We’re not talking about subsidies here. We’re not talking about a lot of handouts. That’s talking about Welfare mothers, all that type of stuff that arouses, you know, the conservatives. And I think because of the assassination, enough members of Congress were ready to do something, and this thing was languishing up there [Chuckles.] and it just needed a little push to get it out.

Newkirk: But, with backlash to the riots growing, even that bill, with no money attached, could face new opposition.

In the first moments and days after King’s assassination, the messages had been overwhelmingly in support of getting something major done. White politicians were taking the Kerner Commission report seriously. They were promising ambitious programs to support Black people and keep King’s dream alive. Now uprisings were triggering an uglier, more visceral response among white America.

Kener: To pursue our present course will involve the continuing polarization of the American community and ultimately the destruction of basic democratic values. The alternative will require a commitment to national action—compassionate, massive, and sustained, backed by the resources of the most powerful and richest nation on the Earth. From every American, it will require new attitudes, new understanding, and, above all, new will.

Newkirk: The struggle between Black rage and white backlash that unfolded in the days ahead would define the next era in the history of the country. The Kerner Commission had hoped that the White House could use the moment to finally bring the two Americas together. But maybe the most likely path was the one they feared: Perhaps Black America would be abandoned forever.

The “long hot summer” erupts

Riots take place in dozens of cities in America during the summer of 1967. President Lyndon B. Johnson establishes the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, nicknamed the Kerner Commission, to investigate the causes of the civil unrest.

The day after King is assassinated, riots unfold across the country

Less than 24 hours after King’s assassination, reports of fires and rioting emerge in dozens of cities across America, including Chicago, Buffalo, Boston, Detroit, and San Francisco.

Police around D.C. take aim

Two days after King’s assassination, police from Prince George’s County, Maryland, train rifles on D.C. protesters near the city border, with shoot-to-kill orders for crossing the line.

The National Guard is called in

Maryland Governor Spiro T. Agnew requests that federal troops be deployed to Baltimore on April 7, three days after King’s assassination. The president authorizes Agnew’s request.

Child 1: Mmm, yes.

Journalist: What did you do?

Child 1: I did a little looting, but I gave it back.

Journalist: You gave it back?

Child 1: Yes, but I think it’s all right to loot some people if they’re gonna stay open. But to burn it down, no. I caught a man in a Hahn’s shoe store trying to burn that down, and I put it out.

Journalist: You put out the fire?

Child 1: Yes, sir.

Journalist: What do you think? Were you involved in any of this looting?

Child 2: Yes, sir.

Journalist: What did you take?

Child 2: Oh, a safe and a couple—

Journalist: You took a safe?

Child 2: As a little safe that you put money in, and a couple more stuff. And I think they should have had the riot, but they shouldn’t have—

Journalist: Why should they have had the riot, young fella?

Child 2: Since Martin Luther King got shot, everybody seemed like they wanted to riot. I say that. I’m not saying that they should have had it, but if they did have the riot, they shouldn’t have burned.

Vann R. Newkirk II: The burning of Washington city, in 1814, by the British felt to many like the end of an era, the beginning of a new one. That sense of unease motivated our national anthem, the “Star Spangled Banner.” After fleeing Washington and seeing American troops then beat back the British in Baltimore, Francis Scott Key felt the triumph of the dawn’s early light.

One hundred and fifty-four years later, D.C. burned again. In the middle of it all, people tried to step back and think about what it meant for this country, this democracy. They tried to find meaning in the chaos of those spring nights. There were big, serious news specials and lofty speeches in the halls of the Capitol. But the recollections that interest me most come from a group of children at the heart of the riots. In the Cardozo district, primary and junior-high-school teachers started asking their students what they thought and documenting their replies.

Teacher: Here’s an interesting comment from another fifth grader, who is talking about Martin Luther King: “His dream wasn’t like most dreams. It wasn’t just him in the dream. He wanted everybody in his dreams. He wanted to take us to the promised land with him. Now he has left for the promised land, and we have to follow.”

Newkirk: Kids as young as 6 and 7 responded to prompts from their teachers about what they had witnessed in the streets, through drawings, poetry, through essays. Reporters from ABC were so captivated by this experiment that they came to see it.

Teacher: When we ask children the saddest thing that they saw, one child in the first grade responded that he was very sad when he saw three Negro boys beat up a white man and stab him. And then we asked also, “What was the happiest thing that you saw?” And children said, “People helping each other, giving them food and things of this type.”

Newkirk: The drawings are vivid and incredibly raw. There’s one drawing of a grocery store, a Safeway, where people are lined up outside, carrying food away. One woman has a speech bubble that says, “I got a lot of meat.” A guy answers her and says, “Let’s get more meat.” Across the street there’s a police car with its own speech bubble: “I will shoot tear gas.”

Teacher: I really think the children did a better job with the drawing of pictures. Because of the area where these children lived, many of them could see the flames coming from their houses, or they lived nearby where things were burning.

Newkirk: There are drawings of the first rocks being thrown at the Peoples Drug Store, images of soldiers, crayon pictures of fires. There are sketches of the soul brother signs people put in their windows, like lamb’s blood marking homes during Passover. One of the most haunting pictures is a pen drawing of the G. C. Murphy’s store on 14th and Irving. It shows the store burned and collapsing. There’s a body inside, trapped under the rubble. The newspapers say that two teenage Black boys died there in the fire. One was never identified. There’s a Bed Bath & Beyond there now.

Some teachers asked their kids a simple question: How did they feel? A few said they just wanted to be in clean, safe neighborhoods. Some said they were still sad, or still angry, or just trying to hold on to King’s message of nonviolence. Some hated the looting; some defended it. The answer that sticks with me is from one student who didn’t care about any of that. They wrote, “Right now I would like to forget about Black Power, soul, and all the burning of stores. I would like to forget about 14th Street.”

***

Journalist: Late last night, Washington’s deputy mayor, Thomas Fletcher, said that the city was so quiet that it's eerie, like a science-fiction movie. This morning, too, is quiet, sunny, cool. The jonquils blooming, a fresh breeze scattering the blossoms of cherry and mock orange and dogwood. But unlike other crisp spring mornings, soldiers are walking post up and down the avenues and streets, walking in pairs along F. One walks alone at the intersection of 14th and Pennsylvania Avenue. But there are 24 soldiers to the block …

Newkirk: In Black D.C., April 7 felt like a time for forgetting, if just for a moment. People were cleaning up shops and homes, sweeping glass and bricks and charred wood from the streets. Church bells rang as people walked to services to lay down their branches for Palm Sunday.

Journalist: Normally, this would be a special day for churchgoing, Palm Sunday. Today, there was another reason: a national day of mourning for Martin Luther King.

Newkirk: Some of the shoes that crunched on sidewalks were nicer than usual. There were brand-new stockings with no runs, dresses and sweaters that fit, with no patches. If you squinted and ignored the soldiers, maybe you could believe this was just like any other holiday. But in pretty much every church in America that Sunday, the sermons were a little different.

Preacher 1: Oh, Heavenly Father, be mindful of the soul of Dr. Martin Luther King, who sacrificed his life for the sanctification of thy holy name.

Preacher 2: Martin Luther King’s death deprives America of one of its outstanding spiritual leaders.

Preacher 3: Are we satisfied to pass along the poverty as we go along our palm march? Or do we want to march down the road of prosperity for all men?

Ralph David Abernathy: They thought that they could kill our movement by killing you, Martin. But, Martin, I want you to know that Black people love you.

Newkirk: In Atlanta, at West Hunter Street Baptist Church, Reverend Ralph David Abernathy gave a sermon directly addressed to his old friend. But it was also aimed at what was going on in places like D.C. He tried to reconcile what had happened on the streets with the nonviolent philosophy he still believed in.

Abernathy: It may seem that they are denying our nonviolence. But they are acting out their frustration. Poor people have had a hard time during these difficult days.

Newkirk: Palm Sunday in the church is supposed to symbolize the ultimate victory of Jesus over the material world, and to foreshadow his role as the spiritual conqueror of sin. In his sermon, Abernathy recast King as redeemer—conqueror of the sin of racism.

Abernathy: What we know, Martin, because we love people, is that after the bidding of frustration, there will be the need for reconciliation.

Crowd: Mm, hmm.

Abernathy: There you will be invisible, but real. Black and white will need you to take them from their shame and reconcile them into you and onto our master, Jesus Christ.

Newkirk: If there would be any reconciliation in D.C., its time was due. It wouldn’t just be a reconciliation between Black and white, but between two visions of what the city was. D.C. was supposed to be a model city for its thriving Black middle class. It was a city that was geographically in the South but seemed to rise above Jim Crow. There were Black doctors and Black lawyers and even a Black mayor (even though he wasn’t elected). For many Black people, life in D.C. had seemed like a safe haven, a bubble. But now, just like the kids in Cardozo schools, people in D.C. were forced to wake up from their dreams.

***

Newkirk: Part 6: “Kingdom.”

***

Roland Smith: My father, my grandfather, and my great-grandfather were born in the district. Actually, I’m a fourth-generation Washingtonian.

Newkirk: Wow. Fourth generation. I don’t meet a whole lot of those.

Smith: Yeah. It’s rare.

Newkirk: What neighborhood?

Smith: Well, we started off in northeast—far northeast—and then northwest. I went to Calvin Coolidge High School.

Newkirk: When I talk to old-school Washingtonians, they have a way of talking about “old D.C.,” before the riots, about what was lost in the fires. Roland Smith was born in D.C., and his family roots there go way back. Family legend has it that they moved to the city from a plantation in northern Virginia, but nobody really knows. The point is, Roland is D.C.

Smith: I think about D.C. back then as a sleepy southern town.

Newkirk: He’s got classic memories of just riding around D.C. on his bike as a kid. It’s never been a really big city, but it felt smaller then. There were no blocks dedicated to lobbyist offices, fewer condos, less traffic. Outside of government buildings, most of the town was residential. Roland was born in one of the first public-housing developments for Black people in all of Washington.

Smith: And that was at a public-housing unit, Langston Terrace Dwellings in northeast D.C., right on Benning Road.

Newkirk: Roland’s family was built on a foundation of civil service that was really only possible in D.C. His grandfather was a messenger on Capitol Hill who also tended bar sometimes for Hill staff. Roland’s mother was a government secretary. His father served in World War II, and as a disabled veteran, worked three jobs to save up enough money to buy a house.

Smith: It was a big deal in our family because not very—most of our family rented their houses or rented their apartments. They didn’t own.

Newkirk: For the family, it was a step up into a life they’d always dreamed of. The house became a way station for family members from all different sorts of situations. It was the kind of pathway that lots of Black families with deep roots wanted to follow. Taquiena Boston’s family was one of those.

Taquiena Boston: My mother grew up in southwest, which they refer to as “Old Southwest.” That was a neighborhood where people were in and out of each other’s houses. Your door was kept unlocked.

Newkirk: Like Roland, Taquiena also grew up in northeast, in apartments in Brentwood. Her family didn’t really have money. Her dad drove trash trucks. But still, her parents had plans for their kids. Taquiena’s mom took her and her younger sister to go get library cards as soon as they could read. They learned nursery rhymes. They read The Wizard of Oz.

Boston: My dad brought home some Encyclopedia Britannicas that were going to be discarded. They all had the front covers taken off, but he brought them home for me to have a set of encyclopedias.

Newkirk: Taquiena’s family didn’t live too far from the H Street Corridor, where Vanessa Lawson and her brother Vincent were born, the area where they started their first hustles raking leaves and carrying groceries.

Vanessa Dixon: Oh, my God. It was wonderful. I wish I could have raised my kids or my grandkids—they could have been raised in a neighborhood like I was. Everybody knew everybody’s name. Everybody knew everybody’s business. Everybody watched each other’s kids.

Newkirk: Vanessa can remember the details like it was yesterday. Before her parents split, they lived off H Street. They were behind the strip of Black businesses and shops. There were neat rows of breadbox houses with green lawns. Everybody went and worshiped together on Sundays, in a church right on the block.

Dixon: They had a basket full of musical instruments and you could grab what you wanted when you came in the church. And you knew, though, when you went in there, what was expected of you. Okay? So no horseplaying and none of that kind of stuff. And I got to say, everybody respected that little church.

Newkirk: You are painting such an amazing picture of life. I feel like I can put it all in my head right now. I feel like I’m there.

Dixon: I get chills talking to you every time I do. It’s just so surreal, you know? It was a good place, a good time in my life.

Newkirk: Vanessa’s parents came up from rural Virginia before she was born. They left behind a state where poll taxes were still used to keep Black folks from voting. They were drawn towards a city where Black theaters played Black movies on U Street; where families like Roland Smith’s could own houses in neighborhoods full of other Black homeowners; where maybe, just maybe, they could have the lives America promised its citizens. They were part of a wave of Black people that also included the parents of Theophus Brooks. His folks arrived in D.C. from North Carolina, before he was born.

Theophus Brooks: My mother’s from Goldsboro.

Newkirk: Goldsboro!

Brooks: My father’s from Hertford.

Newkirk: Oh yeah. I’m from North Carolina.

Brooks: Yeah, yeah. I got a lot of my cousins down there. Matter of fact, my uncle, my father’s brother, had 10 girls, no boys—10!

Newkirk: For Theophus, North Carolina might as well have been a world away. He lived in Cardozo, the Black enclave within the Black metropolis.

Newkirk: What was the city like back then?

Brooks: Oh, man, it was great. They had respectful families. You can almost leave your doors open because your neighbors could knock on the door and come on in. You know, a lot of kids ate breakfast and dinner at my house. I went over to their house. We respect everybody’s parents.

The ’60s to me, it was the best time because, in D.C., we didn’t have no racial problems. Never heard anybody call me a [N-word] because you didn’t have that in D.C.

Newkirk: It was all Black folks.

Brooks: Yeah, it was mostly Black.

Newkirk: With Theophus, it’s the same story as Roland and Taquiena and Vanessa. It’s like they’re describing a Black fairy tale. And in all of those tales, you don’t hear much about the bogeyman of Jim Crow.

Brooks: We livin’ in D.C.; we had all the rights. I mean, we didn’t think about being treated nasty because, you know, when you in this environment, you don’t think about that. I’m 73 and I’ve been in D.C. all my life. I never experienced racism in D.C.

Boston: My mother said she’d never, never have grown up feeling bad about being Black. She felt worse about being what she called “low-class.” Of course, they didn’t live around white people, right. So maybe that was why.

Roland Smith: I think that we were kind of insulated to some extent from some of that, early on.

Newkirk: For Theophus Brooks, Roland Smith, Taquiena Boston, and Vanessa Lawson, this was D.C., Black D.C. It’s what so many parents and grandparents had come to the city for, what people were still taking trains and buses to the city for: a safe haven.

Still, when the March on Washington came to town in 1963, a lot of Black Washingtonians were interested in what the speakers had to say about integration, jobs, and freedom. Roland Smith was a teenager then. He wanted to go, but his mother was afraid there would be violence. He snuck out anyways.

Roland Smith: I went to the March on Washington. So I was there. I was there listening to the stories of the marchers and what they had sacrificed to get there.

It was surreal. There were a lot of people, but there wasn’t a lot of noise. There was a reverence about the whole process. It seems to me there was some singing, and I just remember that this was something special. But I didn’t fully understand the implications.

Newkirk: You didn’t have a sense of sort of being in this historical moment?

Smith: Yeah, I think I did. I felt that more as we saw the news, you know, kind of post-march and how it was treated. And I was thinking I was just glad I was there. It was hot, though. It was. [Laughs.] It was a very hot Washington summer day. [Laughs.]

Newkirk II: When did your mother find out you were gone?

Smith: When I got home [Laughs.] later that evening. [Laughs.]

Newkirk: About 10 percent of the marchers in ’63 were native Washingtonians like Roland. It was a moment of pride for them—hosting, supporting, and marching. But for many residents, especially younger people, the march also helped highlight the truth about the D.C. fairy tale—the apparent freedom and prosperity they had, had limits.

March on Washington speaker: Brother John Lewis. [Applause.]

Newkirk: At the march, civil-rights hero John Lewis stepped up to the podium and started talking about voter disenfranchisement.

John Lewis: One man, one vote. It is the democratic cry. It is ours too. It must be ours. [Applause.]

Newkirk: One man, one vote. He was talking about the Deep South. But he was also speaking in a majority-Black city that didn’t even elect its own leaders and had no representation in Congress. There was no home rule. D.C. was controlled by a committee in the House that was full of segregationists. Washingtonians had just barely gotten the right to vote for president. For Roland and some others like him, the contradiction was glaring. How could D.C. be the Black metropolis if Black people couldn’t even govern themselves?

Roland Smith: You know, you think about things like the March on Washington and the role that that played with all the people descending upon the district. And I think, one of the issues for the district was not being able to vote. So, that was, home rule, was a big issue. And so I think that fomented some of the discontent.

Newkirk: As they grew into adolescence, Roland, Taquiena, Vanessa, and Theophus saw these contradictions more clearly. They were born in a city that had once been tightly segregated, but while they were all still kids, white folks started leaving by the thousands. They took their tax dollars and resources with them. The money moved to suburbs in Virginia and Maryland, where Black kids from D.C. were most definitely not welcome.

Taquiena Boston saw her mother’s old neighborhood paved over, by “urban renewal.”

Theophus Brooks learned to stay away from certain parts of Maryland.

For Black families like Vanessa’s, it became easier to fall down the ladder than to climb. When her parents got divorced and the kids had to move with their mother to the projects, her brother Vincent was angry about the changes.

Vanessa Dixon: My uncles and stuff came, and they packed us up and we moved. And when we got to where it was, my brother said, “All these places look alike. How are we going to know which house is ours?” kind of thing, you know. And he was the smart one. And the thing is, when we got over there and moved in, once he started learning the reality of this move, and that our new residence is in the projects—you know, the family decline—it’s like, he blamed it on my dad. So he was mad at him for most of the time after that.

Newkirk: The Lawson family found out that the paradise of Black D.C. was more of a limbo. The Black middle class was still thriving and glamorous but grew more distant from working-class spaces. The rise of television made it impossible to miss what was happening in the Deep South, and for some young Black Washingtonians, it started to shine a light on continued segregation in their own city. But the intense poverty of the ghettos was more like what was happening up north. Roland Smith says watching the riots there, in ’66 and ’67, was like holding up a mirror.

Roland Smith: Hearing about the unrest and the riots and the things going on in the South, and even in Detroit, I mean, you think about all those things that were going on back in the ’60s—early ’60s—and those were all kind of swirling in the mindset of folks.

Newkirk: What’s your family think about those? I had a big argument over the last weekend with some people who were more “don’t rock the boat” versus people who were behind it.

Smith: Oh, yeah. We had that. I mean, there was a lot of that. And I think that the divide actually started to break along generational lines.

Newkirk: D.C.’s ghettoes never did join northern cities in riots in the mid-’60s. It’s possible that the old mystique of the Black middle class and the magic of the fairy tale kept the city in place, kept hope in place, even in the teeth of poverty. That’s why King chose the city when he announced his Poor People’s Campaign. It had been planned to kick off in late April of 1968.

Reporter: There are large Negro neighborhoods here in Washington, like any major city. In fact, this is the only major city in the nation with a Negro majority, and it has a Negro mayor. There are four sections, and there are Negro middle-class sections. Washington, in many senses, is the middle-class Negro capital of the world.

Newkirk: The idea was to use the vibrant, Black-middle-class institutions as an organizing base for highlighting poverty on the doorstep of the nation’s capital. To do that nonviolently, King and the SCLC had wanted to harness whatever spirit of reconciliation had kept the city together.

But as the church bells rang after Palm Sunday services, the world began to spin again. Parishioners went back to ghettos, business districts, middle-class neighborhoods that had been burned. The fairy tale was over.

***

Newkirk: Just after the assassination, John Burl Smith had been crushed. He and other leaders of the Memphis Invaders had tried to bring Black Power organizing to the sanitation workers’ strike. They clashed with the establishment civil-rights leaders, but after he and his co-leader, Charles Cabbage, met with King in his motel room, they walked away thinking that Martin Luther King had taken them seriously. John believed it was the beginning of something special.

John Burl Smith: When we left the room, Charles and I was feeling really great, man. We had just become a part of the coalition of the No. 1 Black leader in the country, you know? That to me was as good as it gets. And when we get home, and the announcement that he’s been assassinated, it’s like everything’s fallen apart.

Newkirk: The Invaders’ last interaction with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference had been back at the demonstration on March 28, which turned into a riot. King had called the meeting partly to get the Invaders under his chain of command. And he let the media know that he would be working with them.

Reporter: One of the ironies that Dr. King was killed here, is that his last few days were spent trying to negotiate with the militants in Memphis and elsewhere, hoping to find some agreement, some way that they could all work together …

Newkirk: But other people in the SCLC had not endorsed that plan. They didn’t like or trust the Invaders. John says that he had gone into hiding because he thought SCLC members believed he might have been working to set King up.

Burl Smith: There were actually people in SCLC—I’m not going to give any names, but they spent, oh, the next month or some saying that we were a part of the assassination, that we had set Dr. King up to getting him down to the Lorraine.

Newkirk: John didn’t trust the SCLC, either. He thought for sure that they would just hang the sanitation workers out to dry, or would force them to settle with Memphis Mayor Henry Loeb.

Burl Smith: Oh, I figured that Loeb would probably win and that the strike was probably over, because the people left in charge were not people committed to the workers.

Newkirk: In his final address, the “Mountaintop” speech, King had promised to come back to lead another march in Memphis. It was a firm commitment that his involvement in the strike wouldn’t just be a cameo or a detour, but a central piece of his growing Poor People’s Campaign. John didn’t believe the new SCLC leader, Ralph David Abernathy, or King’s widow, Coretta Scott King, would keep that promise. But then he heard the SCLC announce that they were coming back to Memphis.

Ralph David Abernathy: We will conduct our march in support of the sanitation workers here in Memphis as scheduled on Monday, April the 8th. It will be a silent march in his memory. We will resume work on his Poor People’s Campaign in Washington in the hopes that this nation and its Congress will legislate the necessary economic reforms to put an end to poverty in this nation.

Newkirk: Like always, the organizers relied on local groups and volunteers to be marshals for the march, to move people along and keep order. The marshals would be especially important this go-around, after the disaster of the last march. John says, the SCLC didn’t reach out to the Invaders for this role, but he and his friends showed up anyways.

Burl Smith: Nobody ever reached out to us and said, We would like you to do this. Be there. But because of our promise to Dr. King, we did what we promised, which was to be marshals.

Newkirk: The hope was that the shock of King’s death would push the Memphis mayor to give in quickly. But that morning, the marchers got bad news.

Art McAloon (journalist): At the center of today’s parade and last week’s tragic events: the garbage workers’ strike. They broke off negotiations at 6 o’clock this morning with no settlement in sight. The demonstration was quiet …

Newkirk: Still, even though the sanitation workers were no closer to getting a deal, the march was important. Civil-rights organizations could keep public pressure on Mayor Loeb and could use the national spotlight on Memphis after the assassination to really bring the heat. And now, the people marching weren’t just Memphians and civil-rights activists. Thousands of people flew in from around the country to take part.

Percy Sutton (public figure): I’m absolutely fascinated by the size of the crowd. I didn’t expect a crowd this large in Memphis. Are most of these people from Memphis, or have many of them come from other parts of the country?

Robert Richards (journalist): I understand, sir, that about 6,000 have come from out of town.

Sutton: I think that’s beautiful. I think it shows the feeling throughout the country of the need for unity and accomplishment. I’m very happy to see this.

Newkirk: The marchers set out. Ralph David Abernathy and Coretta Scott King led, with three of her children walking alongside her and Harry Belafonte.

Art McAloon: It’s a gray, overcast day here in Memphis, as thousands of the city’s Negroes gather to march in the interrupted sanitation men’s demonstration. At the head of the line, with Mrs. Martin Luther King, will be Reverend Ralph Abernathy, Dr. King’s successor. Between the two, there will be an empty space, symbolizing the absence of Dr. King. March officials estimate as many as 40,000 …

Newkirk: They wore sharp suits and hats and overcoats in the cold rain. They moved quietly down the street, no chants or slogans or singing. The march was supposed to be a rejection of the riots gripping over 100 cities. It was also supposed to be a repudiation of the last march in Memphis, where John’s group had played a role in the chaos. But here he was, serving as a marshal, guiding the march and keeping it together.

John Burl Smith: We did what we could to keep the march moving and orderly and that kind of thing. But—

Newkirk: So you felt like you were upholding the promise?

Burl Smith: Yes.

Newkirk: Did anybody look at you sideways for showing up?

Burl Smith: No, no. I think most people understood. And they were—I mean, the Invaders were supported very well in Memphis. Young people were, felt, very heroic in terms of the invaders.

Newkirk: Journalists followed the entire march, pulling aside people and asking them questions with somewhat obvious answers.

Reporter: Did it have any personal meaning to you?

Man: Did it have a personal feeling to me? Sure. I always have a personal feeling, because I am a Negro. It is something maybe you don’t understand by being white.

Newkirk: Watching the footage of the march, there aren’t really a whole lot of white participants. But the Black people who showed up didn’t care. This march was for them, by them.

Reporter: Were you disappointed at the fact that the turnout of the white community was relatively small? I didn’t see too many whites marching.

Woman: Today, no, not really. I wasn’t disappointed at all. Because that’s something, here in Memphis that is not a disappointment to us.

Reporter: You didn’t expect it?

Woman: I guess not.

Newkirk: The march stopped in front of the pavilion by city hall. Then the leaders got up to speak. Ralph David Abernathy was the new leader and face of the SCLC, but he wasn’t the main draw this Monday morning.

Corretta Scott King: I was impelled to come.

Newkirk: Coretta Scott King had actually been criticized for deciding to come to the march. For deciding to be in the movement, instead of publicly grieving and caring for her children.

Scott King: Three of our four children are here today, and they came because they wanted to come too. [Applause.] And I want you to know that in spite of the times that he had to be away, his family, his children knew their daddy loved them, and the time that he spent with them was well spent.

Newkirk: Coretta Scott King came to clearly repeat King’s demands. They weren’t just the civil-rights laws that had already been passed or the new housing bill that President Johnson was rushing to pass. King was calling for transformation, for real economic change for workers and the poor.

Scott King: Every man deserves a right to a job or an income so that he can pursue liberty, life, and happiness. [Applause.] Our great nation, as he often said, has the resources. But his question was: Do we have the will? [Applause.]

Newkirk: Just like Abernathy did on Palm Sunday, Coretta Scott King tied her husband’s life, death, and legacy to the celebration of Holy Week. He might not be resurrected in flesh, but her hope was that she could call on America to revive the policy he’d fought for.

Scott King: Somehow I hope in this resurrection experience, the will will be created within the hearts and minds, and the souls and spirits, of those who have the power to make these changes come about. [Applause.]

Newkirk: The march ended without any drama. Marshals like John Burl Smith guided people off the streets, and Abernathy and the King family traveled back to Atlanta to prepare for the funeral. Riots in many cities still blazed. But it all felt like one phase of grief had transitioned to another. It was time to reckon with how the assassination and the riots had changed Black America, how they had changed all of America. John was left wondering what might have been.

John Burl Smith: Had he been able to do what he was planning to do, we would be looking at a different America.

Newkirk: To John, that new America would have been achieved by bridging the gap between nonviolence and self-defense, between the old guard and the militants. Perhaps in the silent march, as Invaders walked in their military jackets beside the SCLC in their suits, he saw a glimmer of it.

Burl Smith: Black Power would have been able to show that we could work with Dr. King, we could work with nonviolence, and we could actually be nonviolent, but we were definitely not going to be submissive and passive.

Newkirk: John never got to see that America. Nobody did. The next day, the nation would lay King to rest. All the talk in the movement and in Washington was of how they would keep his dream alive, how they could still overcome. But John worried that the dream might be buried with the man.

Taquiena Boston

a 13-year-old from Washington, D.C., receives a diary from her mother for Christmas in 1967. She begins journaling about her life, and includes her observations about King’s assassination and the days that followed.

Roland Smith

a 22-year-old student at Bowie State, in Maryland, is arrested the day of King’s assassination while leading student protesters at the Maryland capitol.

John Burl Smith

One day before King’s funeral, on April 8, John Burl Smith serves as a marshal for a silent march held in King’s memory in Memphis, Tennessee.

Stokely Carmichael: For us, the real funeral for Dr. King, the funeral pyre, was the burning of the fires of the cities—the teeming anger of the people. And I remember, while driving from Washington, D.C., to Atlanta, I saw smoke for the entire trip in the car. They were, everywhere, putting Dr. King to rest, giving his proper burial. When I arrived in Atlanta for the funeral, for all practical purposes, it was anticlimactic. I’d already seen the funeral from Washington to Atlanta.

***

Vann R. Newkirk II: Tuesday, April 9, 1968.

Five days after King was killed, Stokely Carmichael looked on as he was laid to rest. The services were held at the church King pastored with his father, Ebenezer Baptist, in Atlanta. A crowd of people swelled outside the church as far as the eye could see—over 100,000 people, one of the largest funerals for a private citizen in American history. They were all dressed up in their Sunday finest: kids in patent-leather shoes and vests, white ribbons in the girls’ hair. Dignitaries pulled up in black cars and snaked through the crowd. There’s George Romney, Bobby Kennedy, Richard Nixon, Mahalia Jackson, Harry Belafonte, Sammy Davis Jr., Thurgood Marshall. The vice president, Hubert Humphrey, showed up. It seemed like all the leaders in America were there, except President Johnson.

Joseph Califano: There’s a whole history of that. I mean, Nixon’s people calling and saying, you know, you could take Nixon and Bobby Kennedy together with you and Humphrey and take them all down. And it would show that the country is together.

Newkirk: Johnson’s top domestic adviser, Joe Califano, his right-hand man, says that plan didn’t work out for the president. Johnson had been on the outs with King and the SCLC before the assassination, and he heard (through the FBI’s COINTELPRO sources) that King’s people were planning to snub him.

Califano: Johnson didn’t want to do it. First of all, he had the Secret Service going crazy about the possibility that he would do it. But secondly, he just didn’t think anything would come of it. It wouldn’t help, and it could hurt him, so he sent Humphrey.

Newkirk: President Johnson and his staff watched the funeral the same way millions of Americans did: on TV.

Ralph David Abernathy: I am the resurrection and the life, saith the lord.

Newkirk: Watching the news footage, inside the church, as big as it is, it looks packed. Coretta Scott King is wearing a black veil. She and her children file in. She’s being held steady by her brother-in-law, Reverend A. D. King, but he doesn’t look too steady himself. Standing in the pulpit is Ralph David Abernathy.

Ralph David Abernathy: … in one of the darkest hours in the history of all mankind.

Juandalynn Abernathy: My father actually eulogized him. It was very difficult—very, very difficult.

Ralph David Abernathy: … a 20th-century prophet …

Newkirk: Juandalynn Abernathy was sitting in the pews with her sister and her mother. She and all the other kids were dressed in white. She was devastated. Her Uncle Martin was gone. And she was watching her father try to hold up an unimaginable burden.

Juandalynn Abernathy: But to see Daddy have to—his tears, you know—it was just, oh, for us … oh, it was horrible.

Ralph David Abernathy: Lift his voice and cry out to the pharaoh to let my people go.

Newkirk: After verses and hymns and eulogies, King’s pallbearers loaded his casket onto a cart. As Jesus had entered Jerusalem on a donkey, in peace, King toured his city one last time, drawn by mules. The procession went downtown, then to Morehouse College, his alma mater. Thousands of people followed on foot the whole four miles. At the college, his close mentor, former Morehouse president Benjamin Elijah Mays, delivered another eulogy.

Benjamin Elijah Mays: Make no mistake, the American people are, in part, responsible for Martin Luther King’s death. The assassin heard enough condemnation of King and Negroes to feel that he had public support.

Newkirk: From Ebenezer through the last tour of Atlanta, the ceremony lasted seven and a half hours. Outside Atlanta, lots of people tuned in to the whole thing. They listened on car radios. Families gathered on couches. People set up TVs outside in the projects.

In Brentwood, in northeast D.C., Taquiena Boston captured the event in her diary.

Taquiena Boston: For the first time, I cried because of the loss of Reverend King. When I think of him, I realize how wrong I was. All I’ve ever wanted is glory for myself.

Newkirk: She said it was time for the country to make a change. She was 13. In the Cardozo neighborhood in D.C., Theophus Brooks and his family watched too.

Theophus Brooks: We had a black-and-white TV. Everybody sit around it, quiet. Nobody—Oh, you think this?—No. Ain’t no discussion. Just quiet.

My mother and father didn’t discuss it. It would just be quiet, and we’d look at it. And the more we look at it, the more we realize this is terrible. You know, this is terrible. It’s terrible.

Newkirk: John Burl Smith, down in Memphis, had just finished working as a marshal in the silent march to commemorate King, and felt like he had kept his promise.

Newkirk: Did you watch King’s funeral?

John Burl Smith: No, I didn’t. I had an image of him that I don’t think anybody else had. I know what he went through and said during his last hours of life. That was my reasoning and justification.

Ralph David Abernathy: No crypt, no vault, no stone can hold his greatness, but we commit his body to the ground.

Newkirk: The funeral lasted until the evening. Even that night, National Guardsmen and Army troops still patrolled several cities and enforced curfews. But it was five days after King’s assassination. The riots were becoming old news. Some Americans were even ready to move past  all the coverage about uprisings. After all, the Oscars were coming on TV later that week. But there was still one last struggle taking place: a struggle to make meaning of this thing, of the freedom movement and King’s life and what came after. Black America and white America were battling to define and claim whatever might be called the “soul of the nation.” Or maybe they were realizing that soul had departed.

***

Newkirk: Part 7: “Covenant.”

***

Newkirk: Later that night …

Broadcaster: Live and direct from Atlanta, Georgia…

Newkirk: Public radio stations in Atlanta, New York, and Boston started a simultaneous broadcast of a call-in show.

Broadcaster: … and New York City, with listener participation by telephone from around the nation. You’re listening to the first national “Dial in for Nonviolence.”

Newkirk: “Dial in for Nonviolence.” It started up after the funeral as a place where normal people could just vent, or even chat with some movement leaders—all spontaneously, on the fly.

Broadcaster: All you need to do is place a collect call to area code 212, calling number 749-3311 from anywhere in the United States.

Host: How do you do, miss? We’d like to hear what you have to say.

Female caller: Dr. Martin Luther King was a wonderful person. I am against violence, but it’s hard to live without it when there is prejudice around you in employment and etcetera.

Male caller: I would like to voice an opinion, if I may.

Host: Surely.

Male caller: This country is at a point of grave crisis, which will, I believe and regret, be resolved through violence.

Host: Well, my friend, you see, if there isn’t an alternative to violence—and in this case a kind of genocide—then I think that we’re a very unimaginative people. Dr. King offered us one possible way.

Male caller: Precisely. But he’s been offering this solution for almost 15 years, and …

Host: Well—

Male caller: … the accomplishments are minimal compared to the time that he’s been, you know, the literal time that he’s been operating.

Host: Well, well …

Newkirk: There was an anxiety underlying all the talk. Everyone was just trying to figure out what to do, how to live in a world that was changing under their feet. They discussed what policy might best continue King’s work.

Broadcaster: If everything in the Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders report was acted on, we would come so near to accomplishing all of the goals that Martin Luther King worked and died for—that so many other people worked and died for and sacrificed for. It’s all laid out in very simple form.

Newkirk: But by the time of the radio show, the path that the Kerner Commission recommended was basically closed. The day after the assassination, President Johnson had promised civil-rights leaders that he would press Congress for a major bill to transform Black America. By the time of the funeral, the White House had quietly dropped any such promise. But there was a civil-rights bill that addressed housing discrimination that was already on the Hill. It had already been drafted and considered in the Senate but stalled in the House without a vote scheduled. The White House decided maybe they could use the momentum after the assassination to get it through. It would be a big deal. But for lots of people, it wouldn’t be big enough.

Broadcaster: Now, this bill deals with the problem of open housing primarily, and this is an area in which there is undoubtedly a great deal of resistance. And so if you’ve got a new law and a mandate from Congress, it seems that you can get a little more action.

Broadcaster 2: The House Rules Committee has got it out for a vote tomorrow.

Broadcaster 3: But the people of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, their comments are that it was just tokenism.

Broadcaster 2: Well it’s tokenism for us but …

Newkirk: The call-ins lasted for hours into the night. It all seemed like part of the process of grief after the funeral, like a nightcap or a long talk with friends after the repast.

***

Newkirk: That same night, the White House was up late too. President Johnson had directed Joe Califano and his staff to focus on getting fair housing done.

Califano: I urged him to put out an executive order and he said no. He said it’ll be repealed by the next president. It’s too unpopular. We’ve got to get it passed.

Newkirk: After the White House watched the funeral, they called and checked in with members of Congress, hoping to see who would vote for what. They monitored TV and radio reports of the riots that were continuing in several cities. They also kept up with reports of retaliation by white citizens.

Reporter: White Night Riders cruised through Jacksonville last night in the midst of fire bombings and rock throwing and gunned down an 18-year-old Negro youth as he sat on his bicycle. The youth was dead on arrival at Baptist Hospital with a bullet wound in his head.

Newkirk: The reports were significant. They were evidence that white backlash to the riots was solidifying, and that public opinion was largely moving against Black uprisings, and any civil-rights policy. When it came to housing, white people who otherwise supported voting rights and civil rights could become hostile, quickly. And now, with many of them being told to arm themselves to ward off Black rioters, the situation was even worse.

Califano: The public sentiment in the context of the majority of the American people was certainly not to have fair housing.

Newkirk: People had been trying to end discrimination in housing for years. King had tried to force Johnson to pass fair housing by staging demonstrations in segregated neighborhoods in Chicago in 1966. People wore swastikas to march against him, and threw rocks and bricks. He said it was even worse than being sprayed by water hoses or attacked by dogs in the Deep South. The backlash in Chicago had been so bad that some White House staff thought housing might be a dead letter.

Califano: If we could have picked our choice, we would not have urged King to go to Chicago. We would have tried to get the bill passed and then go somewhere.

Newkirk: In ’66, a housing bill did make it to Congress, but it was killed in the Senate. Another bill stalled in ’67, and then again in early 1968. But then, just a month before the assassination, Johnson had a breakthrough. In the Senate, Everett Dirksen, the Republican leader from Illinois, had always opposed the plan. But Dirksen was dying from cancer.

Larry Levinson: Johnson called him and said, “Look, you helped me before on voting. I really need your help on housing.”

Newkirk: According to Larry Levinson, Johnson’s deputy counsel, the president thought there was a play there.

Levinson: “And I know you’re not feeling too well. And if you want to go to Walter Reed for a day or two to take some rest and get some medical attention, I’ll make sure that happens, but I really need to get your help on this.”

Newkirk: Dirksen had been hesitant. Some of Dirksen’s constituents were the same white suburbanites who had run King out of town in Illinois for wanting fair housing. But Johnson worked out a compromise.

Califano: He knew people in Congress, knew their strengths and weaknesses, and he used everything he knew.

Newkirk: The bill would exempt single-family houses sold directly by the family, which would make the bill less effective at stopping discrimination but maybe more palatable for white voters.

Levinson: They called it the Dirksen amendment.

Reporter: The bill contains the first comprehensive federal open-housing law of our century, unless the owner sells without a real-estate agent, or in small, owner-occupied boarding houses.

Newkirk: Dirksen finally agreed to get the bill through the Senate. Still, even with Dirksen and the Senate on board, and even with the bill weaker than before, the House Rules Committee would not bring it to a vote.

But after the assassination, Johnson was energized. He loved having the opportunity to be able to bully congressmen one more time, or persuade them over scotch and soda.

Califano: Johnson was really very good at taking a crisis and using it.

Newkirk: On April 5, the day Johnson had made big promises about finding money for a new social program, he also told the speaker of the House to pass fair housing.

Levinson: Johnson was saying, look, we need to focus our attention on the House and the House members and on the Rules Committee.

Newkirk: They needed to get more support for the bill, and they needed to do it quickly. Conservatives were already lining up to defeat the legislation.

Reporter: The opposition’s strategy was to convince House members that the times are too tense to make a level judgment on a civil-rights bill. And speaker after speaker cited riots in the streets, cities still smoldering, troops on the Capitol plaza.

Newkirk: And white voters were sending letters and even coming to D.C. to protest the bill.

Journalist: Their vehicles, buses, and Jeeps are parked outside the central plaza steps. If this was not testament enough to the racial turmoil in this city and in the nation, the letters have flooded into congressional offices. A majority of these letters are complaints, what one member calls backlash by zip code.

Newkirk: The White House and allies in Congress made another compromise to get more support from conservatives. They decided to add an anti-riot provision. It was nicknamed after the SNCC leader H. Rap Brown.

Journalist: The bill tries to control riots by making it a federal crime to travel across state lines or use radio or telephone across state lines to incite a riot or to make or sell firearms or explosives to use in a riot.

Newkirk: The compromises were enough to move some people. Richard Nixon endorsed fair housing after opposing it for years. Nixon’s support helped give some Republicans in Congress the green light. President Johnson’s bullying, begging, and charming did the rest. The day before the funeral, he picked up a vote from a Democratic congressman in Texas by promising a million-dollar grant for housing in his district. And then, the night of the funeral, the White House finally got the last committee vote.

Levinson: And there was a congressman named John Anderson who said, “You know, I’m going for the fair-housing bill, and I think we can get this bill out of the Rules Committee.”

Newkirk: The White House celebrated. The next day, the Fair Housing Act would finally pass in Congress, and fulfill some version of Johnson’s promise to get something done. On the streets, the mood wasn’t exactly celebratory. Almost a week after King was killed, Baltimore and Chicago were still raging. And in places like D.C., where the unrest was dying down, the aftermath was becoming clear.

Brooks: It was ashes—like somebody took an atomic bomb and blew it up.

Newkirk: Theophus Brooks walked through D.C. streets that were still choked with debris, smoke, and lingering tear gas.

Brooks: With all the excitement, the next week was like a graveyard. It was calm.

Newkirk: Not too far away from Cardozo, Howard University student Tony Gittens was surveying the damage. He’d been out there the night the riot started. He’d understood the rage that moved people. Still, it was hard to see.

Recently, I walked with him down 14th Street and he tried to tell me just how it all looked in ’68.

Tony Gittens: Some places were still smoldering. Things were burned down, torn down. There was no place to to live then. I mean, it was uninhabitable. You would have felt as though you were in World War II, going into some place that had been bombed and where a war had taken place. They tore it up.

Newkirk: At Howard, finals were coming. Tony was due to graduate. He and the rest of his class were getting ready to move out, to move on. But they were still angry.

Gittens: But collectively, we had a sense that it was the country doing that, killing him. I was surprised and pissed off. And we’re so, How the fuck?—I mean, I’m sorry. [Laughs.]

They do that, to this man? He was their guy, you know. He said, “No, no, no. Don’t get too violent,” and that they killed him was incredible. It was just incredible that that would happen.

Newkirk: Looking at the businesses in D.C. that had been burned down, Frank Smith was worried. He’d only been in D.C. for a little while, after working in the South with SNCC for so long. But this was his home now, and he knew life would be hard for the people he was trying to organize. Grocery stores were gone, other essential establishments too. And lots of the people who owned them looked like they were leaving the city for good.

Frank Smith: There was nothing to eat in most of the neighborhoods. The food stores were all gone. And these people were saying they weren’t coming back. They just said, “We’ve had enough of that. There’s not enough ‘there’ to come back to in the first place. And secondly, it’s dangerous. So we’re not coming back.”

Newkirk: He was watching the beginning of the most aggressive era of white flight in urban America.

Frank Smith: Everybody who had two nickels to rub together left D.C. White people moved out to the suburbs, and D.C. became mostly Black. So now it was in rubbles and shambles and had to be put back together, and that happened in many of the major cities.

Newkirk: The riots had come and gone. Like so many Black commentators had predicted, the dynamite of the ghettoes had finally and fully exploded. For some folks like Stokely Carmichael, the fires of uprisings would lead to a Black phoenix of liberation. But when Frank looked out at the streets, all he saw was devastation. All he saw were ashes.

***

Newkirk: How did things wind down?

Robert Birt: The military. [Laughs.]

Newkirk: On April 11, exactly a week after King was killed, the Holy Week uprising in Baltimore was over. Over 100 cities total had gone up. In all, across the country, there were 43 recorded deaths, and over 20,000 arrests. One-fifth of those arrests had been in Baltimore. Maryland crushed the riots with overwhelming force, sending as many as 11,000 troops into the streets. Robert Birt watched the crackdown from the Latrobe housing projects in East Baltimore.

Birt: [Laughs.] Sooner or later, I mean, there is no such thing as battling the military with Molotov cocktails and bricks. It's not real. The National Guard and some parts of the Army came into the city, and gradually, they reestablished control of the city.

Newkirk: Before the city went up, Governor Agnew had been happy to play the moderate. He’d even invited civil-rights leaders to meet and discuss reforms that might finally start fixing Baltimore’s ghettoes. By April 11, that version of Spiro Agnew was gone. He said there would be no sympathy for people who looted or burned.

But he still held to his word to host those Black leaders in Baltimore. That afternoon, around 100 Black activists, politicians, and community leaders gathered at the state office. They hoped that the meeting would be the beginning of real change for Black Baltimore. But then Spiro Agnew just started reading prepared remarks.

Spiro Agnew: Hard on the heels of tragedy come the assignment of blame and the excuses. I did not invite you here today for either purpose. I did not ask you here to recount previous deprivations nor to hear me enumerate prior attempts to correct them. I did not request your presence to bid for peace with the public dollar.

Newkirk: As it turns out, he wasn’t there to discuss anything—not solutions, not proposals for jobs or housing. Agnew praised the leaders present for being law-abiding citizens. But then his speech took a turn.

Agnew: Look around you. If you’ll observe, the ready-mix, instantaneous type of leader is not present. The circuit-riding, Hanoi-visiting type of leader is not present. The caterwauling, riot-inciting, burn-America-down type of leader is conspicuous by his absence. This is no accident, ladies and gentlemen. It’s just good planning. And in the vernacular of today, that’s what it’s all about, baby.

Newkirk: Agnew was on the offensive. He called out Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown as provocateurs who had incited Black neighborhoods to riot. By extension, he blamed all Black radicals for creating the conditions for a race war in America. He rejected the idea that racism or the killing of King had anything to do with it.

Agnew: Now parts of many of our cities lie in ruins. And you know who the fires burned out, just as you know who lit the fires. They were not lit in honor of your great fallen leader, nor were they lit from frustration and despair. These fires were kindled at the suggestion and with the instruction of the advocates of violence.

Newkirk: What’s worse, he didn’t just blame the radicals. The room was full of moderates—the kind of people who’d even supported Agnew politically. And he was blaming them.

Agnew: We cannot have a meaningful communication and dialogue to solve the problem if we continue to listen to the lunatic fringes on each end of the problem. Now, I’ve said this to you, and I threw down the gauntlet to you: I repudiate white racists. Do you repudiate Black racists? Are you willing, as I am willing, to repudiate the white racists? Are you willing to repudiate the Carmichaels on the ground? Answer me. Answer me. Do you repudiate Rap Brown and Stokely Carmichael?

Leader: We don’t repudiate them as human beings.

Agnew: That’s what I was afraid of.

Leader: Wait a minute! Wait just a minute. I don't repudiate you as a person. I happen to be a Christian.

Newkirk: The speech blindsided the leaders. They were so angry that many of them walked out and held their own press conference, responding to Agnew, calling him out. But by then, not a lot of viewers or listeners would have tuned in, because around that same time, the signing ceremony for the Fair Housing Act was starting.

***

Journalist: Good afternoon. Signing of the civil-rights bill will be here in the East Room of the White House, a large room.

Levinson: Keep in mind, Vann, we went from April 4—the riots in Washington, the death of Martin Luther King, the meeting with the civil-rights leaders—to dealing with the American public, to dealing with the Senate, dealing with the House.

Journalist: A few months ago, few would have thought the 90th Congress would pass a bill so far reaching as to include a ban on discrimination in most of the nation’s housing.

Newkirk: Just after Spiro Agnew’s press conference, the time had finally come for President Johnson to sign the Fair Housing Act. It had been a hell of a week for the White House. Aides like Larry Levinson had spent so much time keeping tabs on riots and trying to get the bill through Congress. On the afternoon of April 11, they got to sit back and watch the show.

Levinson: Johnson sat down and looked around, had all his pens—piles and piles of signing pens. And around him were the leaders of the civil-rights movement: Thurgood Marshall; Clarence Mitchell Jr.; others in the NAACP; Senator Mondale; Senator Brooke; the House leader, McCormack; Emanuel Celler, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee.

Newkirk: Johnson was supposed to be the presidential lion in winter. He was old, sick, and tired, and he had given up the fight to younger, healthier men. But here in the East Room, he was LBJ again. He took time to look back on his legacy as the civil-rights president. He compared the moment to Reconstruction.

Lyndon B. Johnson: I shall never forget that it is more than 100 years ago when Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. But it was a proclamation. It was not a fact. And in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, we affirmed through law that men equal under God are also equal when they seek a job, when they go to get a meal in a restaurant, or when they seek lodging for the night in any state in the union.

Newkirk: He even urged Congress to do more, to take up the big spending bills that King had fought for. He denounced racism and rioting, and told Americans that unity was the only way forward through this national crisis.

Johnson: Of course, all America is outraged at the assassination of an outstanding Negro leader, who was at that meeting that afternoon in the White House in 1966. And America is also outraged at the looting and the burning that defiled our democracy. And we just must put our shoulders together and put a stop to both. The time is here. Action must be now.

Levinson: And as he was picking up his pen to sign the bill, he said, “And by the way, I want you to know, when I sign this bill, the chimes of liberty and the bell of liberty will ring a little bit louder.” And I heard that message, that statement, and I began to get sort of shivers up my spine. What a way to capture a moment.

Newkirk: This was the moment. For the White House, they’d finally gotten the trifecta passed. And they had done it in the middle of riots, in maybe the most hostile atmosphere for civil-rights legislation in a decade. Still, the bill wasn’t what Johnson had promised civil-rights leaders, or what the Kerner Commission recommended, and definitely not what more-radical Black leaders wanted. The ultimate question was the only one that nobody could really answer: What would King think?

Larry Levinson: I think there was always that, you know, dissonant chorus out there. But I think it was sort of a joinder at a point of mutual interest: the Martin Luther King movement with the aims and objectives of the LBJ administration.

Journalist: Do you happen to know whether Dr. King was asked before his death whether he was for or against this bill?

Hosea Williams: Certainly. We discussed it many times, and as far as Dr. King was concerned, as far as the Southern Christian Leadership Conference is concerned, this bill is an aspirin for cancer into blood. It is nothing.

Newkirk: In a televised debate just after the bill was signed, King’s old friend and former SCLC lieutenant Hosea Williams came out and said that the Fair Housing Act was a mockery, an insult to King’s memory. He stressed that the only thing that could make things right was a real investment in Black America.

Williams: If you can find money to put a man on the moon, if you can find money to burn little brown babies in Vietnam with napalm bombs, why can’t you find money to put Black men on their feet in this nation?

Newkirk: But there would be no more money, no new major bills. This new housing bill was what we got, and it would take a while to kick in, to hopefully integrate neighborhoods and outlaw discrimination. Until then, the plan was to try and go back to normal. But for people who had just been through the most traumatic week of their lives, that was more than hard to do.

***

Newkirk: In Baltimore, Robert Birt went back to taking the bus to his mostly white high school. One day, his teacher, a white woman, tried her best to talk to the students about the cause of the rebellion.

Robert Birt: She was trying to explain what had happened, and especially cause she’s a white teacher, she was saying that there were, of course, problems and grievances and etcetera, and that they’ve not been attended to. And so she said she imagined that the assassination of Dr. King was sort of the last straw, and things boiled over.

Newkirk: It was a pretty good, liberal sort of explanation. Some of the kids agreed with her.

Birt: One guy said, “You know, I’ll tell you the truth. If I was colored, I’d probably riot too, because I’ve been keeping up with this, and this is pretty bad, you know.”

Newkirk: But some students didn’t buy it.

Birt: And some person started saying things like, “Well, this is criminal activity,” you know? And at that point, I said, “What’s criminal—” And I was 15. I said, “What’s criminal is you and your society.”

Newkirk: Robert hadn’t been in trouble in school before. Maybe before the riots, before the assassination, he would’ve let something like this go. But that week, something in Robert Birt had changed.

Birt: The more they talked, the angrier I got, and I said, “I’m not going to tell you about everything you did. The last thing you did is you murdered Martin Luther King.”

Newkirk: In D.C., for Vanessa Lawson and her family, each passing day increased their anxiety and despair. There was still no sign of her brother Vincent. Her dad even hired a white private investigator to go search. They figured he might have better luck than Black people could in getting through all the curfews and checkpoints, but he hadn’t found anything yet.

Vanessa Dixon: I remember this guy assuring him, my dad. It just shook him, because within a couple of days, they were starting to board up buildings.

Newkirk: When the curfew finally lifted, the family decided to get out there and start looking themselves.

Dixon: When the National Guard finally start letting people come around, when they were boarding up buildings, my grandmother—everybody—just started walking and walking the whole neighborhood. You couldn’t even get down in that area. And my brother, my dad—I remember them going and just walking and walking.

Newkirk: Their only lead was the last call that Vincent had made to his mother, when he was so proud of grabbing her some stockings from a store. And then, the friends he was with told the investigator where they had gone last.

Dixon: They told him where they went. They were a group. They ran to this store. They ran to that store. And the last store that they ran out of, because the police was chasing them, was Morton’s.

Newkirk: It was Morton’s. The same department store they used to visit with their mother. It was a start. Someplace to look, even if it was just for a body, at that point.

Dixon: And what hurts me the most is the detective told my dad that they checked all these buildings before they started boarding them up.

Newkirk: The investigator told them that Mayor Washington had sent people in to look at all the boarded-up buildings. He said they didn’t find Vincent in Morton’s, or any evidence he had been there.

Dixon: They said they checked these buildings, and they haven’t found anything. Let’s just hope he’s okay, and he’s still just walking around. This guy says, “You know, maybe he’s just got hit in the head. Maybe he’s having a memory loss, and maybe, you know, he’s just drifted off somewhere.”

Newkirk: It was the thought that kept the family going, the hope against hope—this idea that Vincent might just be walking around the streets with no memory, no recollection of who he was or where he came from, that one day they might bump into him and things might go back to normal. But that kind of hope also kept them from moving on. It kept them stuck in the middle of the riots, looking out the window, waiting for Vincent to come home. And they waited for a long time.

In 1966, Spiro T. Agnew is elected governor

Agnew, campaigning as a moderate Republican, is elected governor of Maryland, defeating George P. Mahoney, a segregationist. In his campaign, Agnew championed antidiscrimination policies.

King’s funeral takes place in Atlanta, Georgia, on April 9, 1968

President Johnson does not attend.

The Fair Housing Act is passed

The FHA passes the House of Representatives on April 11, 1968, with a vote of 250–172, after being stalled in the legislature since 1966.

Governor Agnew blames civil-rights leaders

Agnew holds a press conference on April 11, 1968, a week after King was assassinated. He invites notable civil-rights leaders and then blames them for the violence in Baltimore.