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.

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.

Reporter: The Poor People’s Campaign is more than six weeks old now. And the poor that Dr. Martin Luther King wanted to bring to Washington have come. The Blacks, the whites, the Puerto Ricans, the Mexican Americans, and Indians. More than 3,000 of them have come from across the country. And as Dr. King had dreamed, they built a shantytown to expose the nation’s shame. They call it Resurrection City.

(Group singing: “… This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine …”)

Vann R. Newkirk II: The thing people seem to remember best about Resurrection City is the rain.

(Group singing: “… Lord, which side are you on? Well, you can tell that God above …”)

Newkirk: A month after King was killed, Ralph David Abernathy and Coretta Scott King followed through with their promise to continue his plan. Thousands of people came to D.C. People took buses and even mule carts up from Mississippi and Alabama. From Memphis, the Invaders, the last group to meet with King, sent their own delegation. John Burl Smith didn’t make it, but one of his deputies, a man called Sweet Willie Wine, went instead.

Sweet Willie Wine: I brought a militant group here. We have become nonviolent to a certain extent. But don’t mean just because he's dead that it’s going to stop progress. It won’t stop me from thinking as I think. Because each time these people die—these leaders that is going to help, the poor people die—you know it makes me that much more mad, and makes me go out to recruit more people for my purposes.

Newkirk: The people started building shacks and tents on the National Mall on Mother’s Day, and they were ready for the heat of May and June in D.C. But then one day, it just started raining, and it didn’t stop.

Matthew Nimetz: There was mud and storms and the little kids there. And it was a real mess.

Newkirk: Matthew Nimetz was one of the staffers the White House named as a liaison to Resurrection City. He was the young guy in the White House. He’d done everything from trying to squash reports for President Johnson to organizing the meeting with civil-rights leaders the day after King was killed. So then he got this job.

Nimetz: We knew that these people were arriving, and we got reports they were coming, and there were these mules, and where would the mules go? I had to deal with the mules and try to find a farm for them, you know.

Newkirk: When King was alive, President Johnson had opposed his plan to stage the Poor People’s Campaign. The White House still didn’t love the idea after his death. They had just worked magic to pass the Fair Housing Act, against serious opposition. But the people in Resurrection City were challenging the president, demanding more—always more.

Resurrection City Speaker: We’re here because there’s a lot of problems that has to be dealt with in this country. We’re here because little children are standing around in Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia poverty-stricken, without food to eat. We’re here because most of the Black people in those states do not have adequate housing.They do not have education. That’s why we’re here. [Applause.]

Newkirk: The purpose of Resurrection City was in the name. If Black folks couldn’t bring back King, the man, then they could maybe bring back his spirit. They wanted to reiterate his call to transform America. They wanted to influence the presidential election and find a leader who could continue Johnson’s civil-rights legacy. When people took their mule carts up from the South in May, they hoped that this would be a new beginning.

Ralph David Abernathy: We are the people who come up out of great trials and tribulations. The death of Martin Luther King could not stop us. I am here to tell you today that certainly nothing that the Congress of the United States of America, and the policemen and the National Guard, or any other force can do here in Washington will stop us, because we have made up in our mind that we’re going to let nobody turn us around.

Newkirk: But that hope proved fleeting.

Harry Reasoner (journalist): A new white backlash is plainly visible in the country. The lead story in today’s Wall Street Journal is headed, “Ghetto Violence Brings Hardening of Attitudes Toward Negro Gains.”

Charles Kuralt (journalist): CBS News commissioned a poll, which attempted to measure racial attitudes in the United States statistically.

Newkirk: Shortly after the signing of the Fair Housing Act, journalists and pollsters tried to assess just how much the riots had moved white attitudes about civil rights and racial equality. CBS reported on a poll conducted during the Poor People’s Campaign.

Reporter: Fourteen percent of whites now believe that housing for Negro families in all-white communities is a good idea.

Reporter:  Just about half of whites in our survey said the Negro has not made more progress because he has not worked hard enough. Only 15 percent blame discrimination. Some had no opinion.

Newkirk: The most-pronounced shifts in white opinions had come, unsurprisingly, on the matter of riots.

Hal Walker (journalist): More than a third of whites say that when a riot occurs, it would be a good idea for police to shoot one or two rioters as examples to the rest.

Man 1: Shoot to kill. If they’re old enough to violate laws, shoot ’em. If it’s my own kid, I’d say shoot them. He deserves it. He should obey laws. There’s laws for us. There’s laws for Negroes. Let them start obeying them.

Man 2: There was a riot. They had signs all over—soul brother—made no difference. They robbed, raped, plundered, looted their own people.

Woman 1: They should be shot. That’s the only way we can stop them.

Newkirk: It was not an encouraging sign as a massive event like the Poor People’s Campaign was being held in Washington D.C., a city where riots had just recently erupted. What was worse, although Abernathy and the movement were recommitted to nonviolence, the majority of white folks opposed even peaceful protest.

Walker: We found when it comes to ways for the Negro to protest for what he wants, most whites are against Negro picketing or boycotting. In fact against anything other than holding a protest meeting.

Newkirk: Things were already just as bad on the political front.

Richard Nixon: When a nation with the greatest tradition of the rule of law is torn apart by lawlessness …

Newkirk: Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan had been trying to out “law and order” each other to win the Republican nomination for president.

Nixon: … then I say it’s time for new leadership in the United States of America.

Ronald Reagan: The government’s function is to protect society from the lawbreaker and not the other way around.

Newkirk: George Wallace, the segregationist governor of Alabama, was running as a third-party candidate and had been holding rallies as far north as Maryland and New York.

George Wallace: If you go out of this building tonight and somebody knocks you in the head, the person who knocks you in the head is out of jail before you get to the hospital. And on Monday morning, they will try the policeman. [Applause.]

Newkirk: In the Democratic primary, Black voters had latched on to the hope of electing Robert F. Kennedy. He had criticized the administration for not doing enough to implement the Kerner Commission’s recommendations. His wife, Ethel Kennedy, marched with Coretta Scott King during the Poor People’s Campaign. But then, just after winning the California primary, Bobby Kennedy was assassinated.

Andy West (journalist): Senator Kennedy has been shot. Is that possible? Is that possible? Is it possible, ladies and gentlemen? It is possible he has. Not only Senator Kennedy—oh, my God—Senator Kennedy has been shot…

Newkirk: Kennedy’s funeral procession stopped by Resurrection City on the way to burying him at Arlington Cemetery. A little more than three weeks after the Poor People’s Campaign first broke ground on the National Mall, they vowed to keep going, even as trash piled up and sewage ran into the mud in the shanties they built. But it was all just blow after blow. And the rain kept coming down.

C. Gerald Fraser (journalist): There is little doubt that the campaign has lost its momentum. Instead, the organization has been bogged down with problems overrunning Resurrection City, a task that has proved larger than most staffers would have believed.

Newkirk: Two weeks after that, their permit to stage the demonstration expired. The authorities shut Resurrection City down.

Matthew Nimetz: People like me were sympathetic, but we were realists. We knew we couldn’t change the country immediately. And then, in fact, things were going the wrong way.

Newkirk: There were not a whole lot of happy endings for Resurrection City. People went home exhausted, both from weeks of life in the tents and from the emotional letdown of tragedy after tragedy.

Some of them went back to Chicago, to Pittsburgh, to Baltimore, to neighborhoods and districts where police were still on edge, waiting for the next wave of riots. They took trains and planes and buses down south, where old Jim Crow was still fighting his best to hold on. They went to Memphis, where the Invaders were still trying their best to hold on to revolution. They went back to homes in D.C., walking past ruins where whole blocks used to be.

Even in real time, it all felt like a conclusion, like the end of a chapter of American history. But for the people leaving Resurrection City, and for the communities they went back to, trauma and grief didn’t have such neat endings, if they ended at all.

***

Newkirk: Part 8: “Resurrection.”

***

Newkirk: Last fall, John Burl Smith drove us out to his sister’s home, near Memphis. He likes to talk with both of his hands while driving, so I was already happy to be there. I was even happier when he opened the door and introduced me to his 102-year-old mother, Willie Mae Smith-Gray.

John Burl Smith: Hey, sweetheart.

Willie Mae Smith-Gray: I was worried about you.

Burl Smith: I’m doing fine. You’re my hero. [Laughter.] So I tell everybody about you. This is Vann.

Smith-Gray: Vance?

Burl Smith: Vann.

Smith-Gray: Vann?

Burl Smith: Vann, Vann …

Smith-Gray: Vann?

Newkirk: Yes, ma’am.

Burl Smith: Like Tommy’s daughter. Vann. V-A-N

Smith-Gray: Okay.

Newkirk: Nice to meet you.

Burl Smith: And this is Ethan.

Smith-Gray: Nice to meet him.

Newkirk: It’s been almost 55 years since John and the Invaders had their last meeting with Martin Luther King in room 306. I’d been talking to John for months about that meeting, but I want to know more about those 55 years, about what he carries with him, even now.

Burl Smith: Oh, let me get that.

Newkirk: John and I pulled some chairs into a back bedroom and talked.

Newkirk: I’m curious. Does this change the mission for the Invaders in the time after the assassination? You had a vision of the future for yourselves. What do you do next?

Burl Smith: Well... there were several events that happened.

Newkirk: There certainly were several events. A week after King’s funeral, the Memphis sanitation workers had finally gotten recognition by the city as a union, and they went back to work. John and his comrades sent a delegation up to D.C. for the Poor People’s Campaign, but they still tried to keep Black Power alive in Memphis. They were working with anti-poverty programs, giving out school lunches and breakfasts. John saw himself as a protector for Black kids around the city. He didn’t live too far from Carver High School, where a lot of the young Invaders were enrolled.

Burl Smith: The kids were being thrown out of school for wearing afros and Afro-centric dress, demanding Black history in their classes and Black books in the library and things like that. And they were suspending kids for that.

Newkirk: One day, John says he and the Invaders were visiting Carver to recruit kids for a local Black-theater program. Then they heard a commotion coming from the general-purpose room.

Burl Smith: And this particular day, they pulled the fire alarm and emptied the school. But the principal called the police. And when the police came, they were chasing the kids with blackjacks and things like that. And one of the police there recognized me as an Invader, and they arrested me.

Newkirk: Did you have the Invader jacket on?

Burl Smith: No. They arrested me for disorderly conduct.

Newkirk: The FBI’s COINTELPRO program was watching the indictment closely. They were keeping tabs on the Invaders, sabotaging them, passing intel to sympathetic reporters. Seeing John get caught up on those charges was mission accomplished.

Newkirk: I looked at the COINTELPRO report from then and they said you incited a riot. They said there were multiple fire bombings that you’d been involved in and that you’d had multiple marijuana parties at your apartment.

Burl Smith: Now, that might be the only thing that’s true in all of that, because we did party out, you know, and it was known—but you know, it’s marijuana. [Laughing.]

Newkirk: Around the same time Resurrection City was fully up and running, John was facing indictment. What’s more, after Congress slipped a new anti-riot law into the Fair Housing Act, Tennessee passed its own similar law. They established a five-year minimum sentence for setting fires and made inciting riots a felony. In essence, John became a test case for America’s newest crackdown on Black unrest.

Burl Smith: And the legislature met in July. And in September, the grand jury here in Shelby County indicted me for participating in a riot and trespassing in a public school, which were not even laws when this happened.

Newkirk: The only eyewitness testimony of any physical wrongdoing was a single account of one of John’s comrades throwing a bottle at an officer. There were no serious injuries. The scene that everyone described at Carver seems like it barely fit the definition of a real “riot” at all. But to the jurors, under the new state riot law, John became an example.

Burl Smith: That was the extent of it. But I did five years for that.

Newkirk: While John Burl Smith was on trial, the world changed. Going into the Republican National Convention, Richard Nixon was the frontrunner. But two factions inside the party tried to find delegates and maybe even join together to stop him. At the convention, Maryland’s Governor, Spiro Agnew, sent his delegates to Nixon and helped him win. Agnew had been a political nobody until he turned against civil-rights leaders in Baltimore. Now he was giving Nixon’s nomination speech.

Spiro Agnew: When a nation is in crisis and history speaks firmly to that nation, it needs a man to match the times. You don’t create such a man. You don’t discover such a man. You recognize such a man, the one whom all America will recognize as a man whose time has come—the man for 1968, the honorable Richard M. Nixon.

Nixon: All right. Thank you very much.

Newkirk: Agnew had become a voice of a kind of white backlash. He could knit together suburban moderates and southern conservatives. So when it came time for Nixon to pick a running mate, Nixon picked the nobody.

Reporter: Conservative Republicans generally applauded the choice. Liberals were dismayed.

Newkirk: The ticket was a clear signal to Black voters. The Baltimore Afro-American, the biggest Black paper in Maryland, understood that Agnew’s appeal wasn’t in policy or achievements, but his rhetoric in the face of Black protest.

Reporter: Mr. Agnew’s chief claims to fame are that he became governor of Maryland as the lesser of two evils and has proven his ability to insult Black leaders.

Newkirk: For white Americans, the Nixon-Agnew ticket had a pitch that worked. In one of his most famous ads, there are images of cities burning, of police confronting rioters in the street. And there’s some music.

Nixon: Let us recognize that the first civil right of every American is to be free from domestic violence. So I pledge to you we shall have order in the United States.

Newkirk: By the end of 1968, the optimism of Resurrection City seemed like a relic of a forgotten age. Nixon won the election, of course. You know that. Spiro Agnew became the vice president and became Nixon’s attack dog.

Agnew: You cannot have justice. You cannot have change without order.

Newkirk: Under Nixon and J. Edgar Hoover, COINTELPRO continued, focusing more on disrupting Black revolutionary groups.

Reporter: State’s attorneys police arrived at Fred Hampton’s West Side apartment, half a block from Panther headquarters, at 4:45 this morning.

Newkirk: On December 4, 1969, a group of law-enforcement officers, with the FBI’s backing, assassinated the Chicago Black Panther leader Fred Hampton in his sleep.

Reporter: Hampton’s body was found in bed.

Newkirk: Hampton’s lawyer, Flint Taylor, understood this as a clear proclamation from the government.

Flint Taylor: ...to send the message to all those young folks, whether they be Black or white, who wanted to get involved in the struggle: We’ll kill you in your bed.

Newkirk: Under Nixon, the Fair Housing Act was supposed to go into full effect. He even supported the law on the campaign trail. But once in office, he opposed enforcement, especially in America’s mostly white suburbs. He said that he was against forced integration.

In D.C., the riots remade reality. The city became a model for everything happening in Nixon’s America. White folks fled for the suburbs where integration never really came.

The law and order that Nixon promised came with the first War on Drugs. All the while, the burned shells of buildings from ’68 were never rebuilt. Walking and driving past them in Cardozo, Theophus Brooks only felt regret.

Theophus Brooks: We used to joke: “Why don’t we go downtown or Connecticut Avenue? We aren’t going down there.” You weren’t going down there, right? But it was the thing where, as young people, we thinkin about the burning, the excitement, stealing stuff. That’s what’s on everyone’s mind—what can we get? I’m going home and I don’t have nothin. I’m mad.

Newkirk: Do you think we missed an opportunity to do something then, in ’68?

Brooks: Yeah, we could have really banded together. You know what? Let me tell you something. I’m glad you said that. As close as we were, especially in this city, we could have made a big difference.

Newkirk: But there were people who did come together to try and do something. Even though the organization of SNCC was falling apart, a lot of the old organizers were still in D.C. They still had influence, especially cultural influence. Black people were calling themselves Black for the first time, partly because of the Black Power slogan. Young people were wearing afros, adopting Black-revolutionary fashion. The way SNCC and other radical organizations talked about the struggle became mainstream. The SNCC folks in D.C. had an opportunity, and they knew a guy.

Tony Gittens: There was this organization called African American Resources, and it was Courtland and Charlie, Marvin and some other people, and they asked me if I would be on the board.

Newkirk: Tony Gittens graduated from Howard a month after the riots. Around the same time, a group of SNCC veterans started a bookstore, the Drum and Spear. Tony was friends with a lot of them. He’d worked for the school newspaper. He didn’t have a job. So they named him the operator of the Drum and Spear.

Gittens: They were looking for somebody to do it and they threw me the keys, and that was how I became the manager of the bookstore.

Newkirk: It was a hard turn for Tony, after going down south to register voters and leading campus protests and then witnessing the rebellion on 14th Street. But for him—for all of them—it also sounds like it was therapy. They were finally able to settle down and build something. They had a radio show. They started a school. They had a press. The bookstore was located near 14th and U, near Cardozo. It gave them a chance to make beauty in a place that had seen heartbreak.

But for some Washingtonians, that kind of beauty never returned. Vanessa Lawson’s family was still waiting to hear any news about her brother Vincent. Vincent went out the night after King was killed, looting Morton’s department store to get his mother some stockings, and had never come back.

Weeks passed. Then months. Then years. Still, Vanessa and her family heard nothing. Vanessa moved on from junior high and started taking the bus to high school.

Vanessa Dixon: And I tell you, it was more than once—twice for sure; could have been three or four times, but I acted on it twice—I would see somebody that looked like him and I’d get off the bus. I had to know for sure.

Newkirk: The private investigator the family hired to find Vincent had put the idea in her head that Vincent might be out there alive, with amnesia. She held onto that hope. The whole family did. It was even worse for them than if Vincent had died, and they’d known. Vanessa’s grandmother walked the block by Morton’s week after week after week, hoping she might run into Vincent. She died a couple years later. Vanessa’s mother was hurting, and she drank to dull the pain. Every once in a while, when the morgue had an unidentified body, they called Vanessa’s father to take a look.

Dixon: My mom would be on pins and needles and it was never him.

Newkirk: It was easy to fall into a kind of a stasis, a repetition—look for Vincent, hope, repeat—in the same buildings and on the same blocks. But then, in 1971, construction workers finally came to H Street to demolish part of the block that had burned. The workers had found a skeleton in the warehouse next to Morton’s. It had been years, and the body was beyond identification.

Dixon: But he had this medallion. My dad had bought us medallions. And both of our medallions said, “V.L.”

Newkirk: They said, “V.L.”

Dixon: My name is Vanessa Lawson. His was Vincent Lawson. And they both said said “V.L,” on them. He still had his.

***

Newkirk: When I visited Vanessa in her home outside D.C., she shared photos of her family, going back generations. One of her uncles was a Tuskegee Airman. She’s got pictures of the farm the family comes from in Virginia. She’s also got newspaper clippings of how Vincent’s story has been told in the news. In those stories, there’s not usually a lot about what happened to the family after they found Vincent’s body. Vanessa says they wanted to do things the right way: They wanted to do an autopsy, get a death certificate, take Vincent’s body and have a service.

Dixon: They had already had him cremated, so they cremated him and they didn’t even keep his ashes.

Newkirk: The city had already disposed of Vincent’s remains. They just threw him away.

Dixon: We didn’t have anything to work with. We didn’t have a memorial. We didn’t have his ashes. We never had anything. We didn’t have a gravesite because there was no burial. We didn’t have a church service. There was nothing.

Newkirk: And then people from the city came by Vanessa’s mom’s place on East Capitol.

Dixon: Mayor Washington and his little entourage came to our house in the black limo. And these guys got out, and his little short, chunky self. And they were carrying this basket, you know, with all these flowers and ribbons. And they had literally bought us a turkey dinner. And he said he wanted to apologize.

Newkirk: He came to apologize.

Dixon: He came to apologize to my mom, and she was yelling at him saying, “You lied!” You know, “You told everybody—you told the world that those buildings were checked out before they were covered up. And it was a lie.”

Newkirk: The family was already spiraling, but Vanessa says it was like a double spiral. Her grandmother had just recently passed. Her mother was in bad shape.

Dixon: My mom was drinking a lot. My mom was working about six days straight and off for like three days. And on the three days I was like, “Hello? Hello? Remember me?” kind of thing, you know. “I’m still here. You still got a kid here.”

Newkirk: Vanessa’s parents had been divorced for years. Her father had his own family across town. Her brothers were in and out of her mother’s apartment, and her mother was in bad shape. Her drinking got worse and worse. Vanessa became her caretaker. She cooked and cleaned and took care of the place. Even in high school, she got a job downtown. Sometimes on weekends, Vanessa would stay with her father, to get away from stuff, just live like a normal teenager for a while. One weekend in the summer, she stayed with her dad until Monday and went to work from there.

Dixon: And I went to work July 23. I went to work and I went out at lunchtime, and when I came back with my little bookbag and stuff, I remember the white-lady supervisor—she came and she grabbed me.

Newkirk: Vanessa’s coworkers were crying and told her there was a family emergency. When her father came to pick her up, he’d been crying too. But he wouldn’t let her know what was going on. Vanessa made him pull the car over to tell her.

Dixon: And he says, “It’s your mother—she’s gone.” And he just started crying and you know. And he’s crying and crying, and I’m like, It’s my mother? What do you mean my mother? And he says, “She’s gone.” What you mean she’s gone? “She died.”

Newkirk: Vanessa’s mother died. It was another blow to the family, to Vanessa. But she says she couldn’t even feel sad about it. She was going into her senior year. Her mom knew somebody who was supposed to make her a prom dress for free. Vanessa needed her mother. She was angry at her mother for leaving.

Dixon: I was mad, mad, mad, mad at my mom. How could you do this to me? I’m going into my senior year in high school. You know, You’re missing so much. You know, Now you’re dead. You know, You just wanted to go be with him.

And I remember picking out the casket. I remember picking out the dress. I remember, you know, telling them, you know, how she liked her hair. I remember going to the viewing. I remember biting my lips so hard that it bled.

I never cried. I wasn’t in a crying mode.

Newkirk: She didn’t cry at all. Not for Vincent. Not for her mother. She just tried to keep going. To keep working. But then she got sick too.

Dixon: I got a cold and I couldn’t shake it. I couldn’t shake that common cold.

Newkirk: She started having breathing problems. Her dad made her take off work and check in at Providence Hospital. But the doctors didn’t believe that her main problem was physical.

Dixon: But I got diagnosed with emotional setback even though I was only 16, 17 years old. My body should have been able to fight it off before, way before it got to that point. But my resistance was so low.

Newkirk: She couldn’t shake it. And it got worse. Vanessa says her white-blood-cell levels dropped. They tried steroids. They gave her oxygen. They brought mental health professionals. But she just wasn’t responding. But then, she says, one night one of the nuns from the hospital came into her room to talk to her.

Dixon: And I remember one night in particular, I just lay there on the bed.

It was somewhere late during the night and this lady came in to check on me. And she had on white with some red stripes on it, and she talked to me. I can’t tell you verbatim, but—I can’t even tell you how long this went on—but she started stroking my hair. She stroked my earlobes. My mother used to do that—my earlobes—all the time.

She grabbed my hand and she told me, “Your mom is sorry and she’s with your brother, and they’re both wanting you to get better. She wants you to do good. And she’s really sorry, and everything is gonna be okay.”

When she left I started crying. I think I cried the next 24 hours or something, and that’s what I needed to do. And when they called my dad the next day, everybody came and said, “What happened?” He says. “Who talked to you?” I said, “The lady that was here last night.” And he wanted to know who it was so he could thank her, you know, whatever. But, she didn’t exist.

Newkirk: Providence.

Dixon: Okay.

Newkirk: Vanessa believes in Providence: the idea that things happen for a reason, that the things that happened to her happened to her for a reason. So does John Burl Smith. He ended up having to do two years in prison, at the Shelby County Penal Farm. But he says that his sentence saved him from the worse fates that came to lots of other Black radicals in the country.

***

John Burl Smith: They really hunted us out of existence. All the Black Power revolutionaries were either on the run, left the country, dead, or in jail.

Newkirk: While John was in prison, the Invaders disintegrated. With King dead, leadership went back to mostly antagonizing the SCLC and other groups in Memphis. One member of the Invaders was shot while attempting a robbery. Another was sent to prison for murder, and many others went to prison for other crimes. In other cities, Nixon waged war on the Panthers, and a lot of the people that John would’ve called comrades never made it home. But in prison, John found a counseling program that prepared inmates to go back out into the real world. He did so well that three years later they gave him a job as a counselor when he got out.

Burl Smith: And so when I got out in ’71, things have changed quite a bit, quite a bit. But because I got out with the job, I was able to pick my life up even better than it was before I went in. So as I said, in the grand scheme of things, I was saved and blessed. And so I’m on my third life now.

Newkirk: In his third life, John’s been studying history and how we tell the story of Black freedom in America. He’s particularly interested in how we tell the story of King, and what we got wrong about it.

Newkirk: What do you make of the fact that when King was killed, he was easily one of the most unpopular men in America? He didn’t poll, you know—in ’63 he was very popular, and every year since then, it lowered a little bit.

Burl Smith: Right.

Newkirk: In ’68, for favorability, he was like 60 to 70 percent unfavorable. He polled worse than the Vietnam War. [Laughs.] What do you make of the fact that after that assassination, some version of him is made to be an untouchable hero?

Burl Smith: Yeah.

Newkirk: How does that happen?

Burl Smith: Because he’s dead. He can’t do any more damage. When he was alive, he represented one of the greatest threats to white power in America.

***

Newkirk: Tony Gittens agrees with John. He believes that the fundamental questions about power in America were never really answered in the ’60s. The assassination in ’68 cut off a real debate, and the potential for revolution. Like John, Tony also believes that the image of King that is celebrated today is meant to keep people in place, instead of challenging things.

Tony Gittens: The American press ran to make him—[Laughs.] it was quite surprising—they made him the man who walked on water. Now, nobody was against Dr. King, but I remember that. And it was like King was the one; he was the man.

Newkirk: From Tony’s view, these sort of fundamental questions stopped being on the table for years after King’s death. He tried to keep them alive in his own work, doing what he could. That’s why he says he took notice in 2020, when people took to the streets again after the killing of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis.

Gittens: And there were all these young people marching down 16th Street, you know. And I watched it and I said, “I got to go. I got to go.” I walked down to 16th Street from one circle to the next, and there were all these people there.

But it was the same kind of feeling I had the night of Dr. King’s assassination out on Columbia Road and 14th Street. The same thing. I had to be there. I just had to be there. I did not want to miss this. I couldn’t. You know?

***

Newkirk: As it turns out, the launch of the Apollo 6 did make the front page of the Washington Post on April 5, 1968. The article is pretty pessimistic. The launch was described as a setback in our race to go to the moon, as a waste of an expensive Saturn V rocket. We know now that it wasn’t really, that it actually showed how resilient the rocket was, and how problems could be controlled. But it’s interesting to think about a time when space was in front of us, when we didn’t know if its challenges were surmountable or if humans could ever reach the moon—when progress wasn’t guaranteed.

But that news item from the paper is swallowed up by other events. It’s a small column, sandwiched between news about President Johnson canceling his Hawaii trip, a photo of Martin Luther King, and an article about Spiro Agnew’s crackdown on Black protesters at Bowie State. April 5 wasn’t a day for space. It was a day for keeping our heads down and mourning.

Vanessa Lawson Dixon has clippings from the Post from that day in a scrapbook on her kitchen table. They’re part of the constellation of papers and pictures she keeps to remember Vincent.

Dixon: So this little boy right here is my nephew. This boy looks 90 percent like Vincent.

Newkirk and Ethan Brooks (together): Yes, he does.

Dixon: My kids ask me all the time. Like my granddaughter, she’ll walk past. They know he died. They know that he didn’t have to. They know my mother was hurt from it and my mother was really sad. They know all of this, all of these things that happened was as a result of Martin Luther King getting assassinated and the significance of that.

Newkirk: One of the things Vanessa keeps is an obituary for Vincent. The Lawson family never had a service for him when they found his body in 1971. No obituaries or memorials either. But in 2018, on the 50th anniversary of the riots, Vanessa sent the Washington Post an obituary that she wrote for Vincent. It’s written as an apology from Vincent to his family for being hard-headed, for going out and getting in over his head. It’s got that picture of Vincent in it, with his spread collar and his baby face. It notes that he was only 14 years old. The date of his death is given as April 5.

Newkirk: Why did you pick that day?

Dixon: That’s the day that he went missing. That’s the day if he could have come home, he would have. That’s the last day that anybody saw him. That’s the day he should have come home.

Newkirk: She’ll never know the exact date Vincent died. None of us will. But it helps Vanessa to mark the date as April 5, because it connects him to King. People may not remember that a boy went out that night to score some stockings for his mother. They may not remember the mother who died just three years later. They might not remember Vanessa. But they will remember the nights that America grieved and the nights that America burned. So in a way, they’ll always remember Vincent.

The Poor People’s Campaign and Reverend Ralph Abernathy march

In May 1968, more than a month after King’s assassination, the Poor People’s Campaign, a movement created in response to economic inequities, march in Washington, D.C.

Robert F. Kennedy is assassinated

Kennedy, a senator representing New York and the Democratic presidential candidate, is shot and killed by Sirhan Sirhan in Los Angeles on June 6, 1968, after winning the California presidential primary.

Richard Nixon is elected president

Republican Richard Nixon is elected president of the United States on November 5, 1968. Maryland Governor Spiro T. Agnew is elected vice president.

Black Panther Fred Hampton is killed

On December 4, 1969, law-enforcement officers—with FBI support—kill the Chicago Black Panther leader Fred Hampton in his sleep.

Former US Rep. Patricia Schroeder of Colorado, a longtime Democratic congresswoman who championed women's rights, has died. She was 82.