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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.

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.