Two years ago I published a book, How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning With the History of Slavery Across America. The book explores how different historical sites across the United States—including monuments, memorials, and museums—reckon with or fail to reckon with their relationship to the history of slavery. After the book came out, one of the main questions I got from readers asked where public memory was being engaged with more proactively and thoughtfully than what we so often see here in America. I would frequently invoke Germany, citing the work it had done to memorialize the Holocaust. But there came a point where I realized that I was citing the memorials in Germany without having spent any time with the memorials in Germany.

So I traveled to Germany to examine its landscape of memory for myself. I visited the homes from which Jewish families were taken, the train stations from which they were deported, the concentration camps where they were held, the crematoriums where bodies were burned.

I had conversations with Jewish Germans as well as Americans living in Germany, in an effort to understand how we might place the way America memorializes slavery in conversation with the way Germany memorializes the Holocaust.

What I learned is that the story of German memorialization is complex, multifaceted, and still evolving. Just like the story of America’s.

-Clint Smith

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Google Podcasts | Pocket Casts

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Caitlin Dickerson: So what did you expect to find in Germany? I mean, were you essentially going to pick up lessons for the U.S.? Were you starting to become a little bit skeptical of Germany as this ideal for reckoning and atonement? I mean, what did you have in mind as you set out on this trip?

Clint Smith: I think in part, I went to Germany to put it in conversation with the process of memorialization here in the United States.

Dickerson: I’m Caitlin Dickerson. Today on Radio Atlantic, staff writer Clint Smith on the Holocaust, America’s legacy of slavery, and what it means to memorialize tragedy.

Smith: So it wasn’t necessarily to compare and contrast as much as it was an attempt to say, okay, “What’s happening in Germany, what’s happening in the United States? In what ways are these processes in conversation with one another?” America in so many places fails to properly memorialize and remember and account for its relationship to the history of slavery; what’s a place that does this well?

Dickerson: So where in Germany did you go to try to figure this out?

Smith: I went to a range of different places, including the House of the Wannsee Conference, which is this idyllic mansion outside of Berlin where the leaders of the Nazi party got together to outline and plan the contours of the Final Solution.

Clint: I’m here standing outside of the House of the Wannsee Conference. Already by the time they met here, people had been killed in mass murders—but this is where they would plan out how they would kill millions more. There’s a profound sort of juxtaposition between the scenery and the idyllic nature of it, and the terrible thing that was planned inside of it. Behind it is this lake with sailboats that are slowly passing by. The water sort of lapping against the shore. Can hear birds and wind chimes. It’s a strange thing. It’s a very strange thing.

Smith: If you could say your name and your position...

Deborah Hartmann: Okay. So my name is Deborah Hartmann.

Smith: And one of the people that I spoke to when I went to the House of the Wannsee Conference was Deborah Hartmann, who is the director of that museum. And one of the things we talked about in particular that I found really fascinating was the need to focus on not only the victims of the Holocaust, but also the perpetrators.

Hartmann: I think we have to learn something about the perspective of the perpetrators and not only about the perpetrators but also about the bystanders, and all those who were in a way involved. And this could be the neighbor who was not a member of the Nazi party, but who was just hanging around and had a nice view out of the window seeing neighbors being deported.

Smith: Which was so many people.

Hartmann: Yeah, of course.

Smith: It’s interesting, because I think part of what this place does, in some ways, is humanizes both the victims and the perpetrators.

Hartmann: Yes. And it is important, I think—because, of course, they were human beings as well. And, you know, in the afternoon, people who participated in the mass shootings wrote nice letters to their families at home.

Smith: They killed people in the morning, and wrote letters to their family and their children in the afternoon.

Hartmann: Exactly. And this is maybe what’s so difficult for us to understand. And to live with it.

Dickerson: She’s challenging, in a few different ways, the oversimplification of narratives around the Holocaust. And also: Humanizing the perpetrators is worth doing, because actually, human beings perpetrated this. It wasn’t fantastical characters of evil, but actual human beings.

Smith: Yeah; I think one of the things that she takes very seriously in her work is ensuring that we are not falling into the trap of reducing the people who are part of this history into two-dimensional caricatures of themselves.

Hartmann: And you know, then you suddenly see that the history is much more ambivalent, and it’s much more complicated. And today, I think that the Germans actually are very proud of what they have achieved in terms of confrontation, like with the past and coming to terms. But I think it becomes difficult when they feel—I don’t know, the term in English—maybe relieved. You understand what I mean?

Smith: Mm hmm. Yeah.

Hartmann: Because then it can turn into a very problematic direction.

Smith: This idea that “We’ve already done it.”

Hartmann: I mean, here you can see: Okay, this is still very challenging, I think, for Germans. Even in the fourth generation today. How can it be okay that my family was somehow involved in those atrocities?

Deidre Berger: I mean, there wasn’t really a confrontation until the ’60s, when the young generation started asking their parents what they did during the war.

Smith: Deidre Berger is an American woman who’s lived in Germany for many years. And both in America and in Germany, she has been deeply involved in Jewish organizations and Jewish advocacy groups, to ensure that Jewish people and Jewish history are accounted for. And the two of us got together on a chilly day in October at the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in downtown Berlin.

Berger: And we had the Nuremberg trials in the late ’40s. There were the Auschwitz trials in Frankfurt in the early/mid-1960s. And still, most perpetrators were never accused or tried or charged. And there was the attitude of “Let’s leave it behind us.”

This—this went right into the heart of families, and it tore families apart. And so they’d rather not talk about it. When I came to Germany in the mid-1980s, there was not much of a confrontation within families. So it took a very long time. A lot of the international climate was such that I think more of an understanding evolved, at least in the German political elite, of the importance of confronting the Holocaust, and also on the grassroots level.

So the 1960s is when the grassroots movement started in Germany to try and understand better what had happened in my town, what happened to the Jews. And there were quite a lot of good-minded Germans who pursued projects, who invited former members of their community who were Jewish, back to their towns. And out of this movement grew the idea that there needed to be a national monument. So it was a complicated conglomeration of interests that led to the establishment of this monument. I don’t know that there was one government who said, “You have to do this,” but it was an understanding in Germany that this was important to have a national symbol of recognition of German guilt for what had happened.

Dickerson: Clint, what does this monument—this symbol of recognition that she’s describing—actually look like?

Smith: So, the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe is a 200,000-square-foot memorial at the heart of downtown Berlin. And when I say at the heart of downtown Berlin, I really mean it. It’s almost as if a massive memorial to slavery was placed in front of the White House. That’s sort of the first thing you notice. And it’s made up of more than 2,000 stone columns that are of different heights. And as you walk through the stone columns, it’s almost maze-like. And the ground beneath the columns rises and falls like waves, and so at different points within the space, you know, you have different amounts of light. So sometimes as your body moves down, it’ll get darker and darker.

And I think it’s a place that is meant to be haunting and overwhelming. But what’s also true is that it is a place that has become such an enmeshed part of the landscape. People are driving to work, people are walking their dogs, people are running. There are people who have obviously come there to engage with the space. And so I would see people who were crying and holding hands, sort of gently touching the stones as if it could sort of transport them back to this moment. There were also small children who were playing hide and seek—and so different people engage with the space in fundamentally different ways. And I think in some ways, that’s inevitable. But it’s also something that rubs a lot of people the wrong way.

There are many people who’ve commented that the very name is too passive—the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. That it doesn’t talk about who did the murdering. There are those who say it’s too abstract. There are no names on the columns, but there are also those who believe that its size and its scale and its scope is unlike anything that any other country has ever done.

Smith: Do you remember when you first came here—when you first saw it and experienced it?

Berger: Yeah, when it was opened in 2005. I find it…very cold. And I’m not sure that I need this much concrete detail with all these stones to grasp the dimensions of this crime. But different people have different reactions. I think in the Jewish community, my reaction was fairly widespread. But on the other hand, I mean—I think there was a certain acceptance and degree of relief, almost, that there was a Holocaust monument that was finally erected in the heart of Berlin, very close to the German Parliament.

Smith: Oh, the German Parliament.

Berger: And that’s just on the other side, basically. And that was meaningful.

Smith: There’s nothing that Japan has built to account for Japanese imperialism of this scale. There’s nothing that the United States has built to account for a history of Indigenous genocide or chattel slavery. You know—this sort of thing at this size doesn’t exist anywhere [else]. And so different people fall on different ends of the spectrum about whether they think it is a space that is a net positive or not, whether it’s a place that does more good or more harm. And that was one of the things that I learned a lot from my conversation with Deidre Berger and others.

Berger: I’m not complaining, I think it is quite remarkable. Let’s keep in mind that in the center of a major city, a country acknowledges its guilt at genocide.

Dickerson: Berger talks about this desire already in the 1940s among some to move on and to forget. I’m interested in that impulse. I remember interviewing David Romo. He’s a historian of the U.S.-Mexico border and actually found that it was the U.S. Border Patrol that began using Zyklon B in its own gas chambers. That helped to inspire German scientists, who then brought them to Germany, turned up the potency of—of the solution and—and used it to kill Jewish people. He talked about amnesia and about forgetting as a response to shame—on both the sides of the perpetrators, but also the victims. It sounds like you’ve been thinking a lot about just how dangerous that can be.

Smith: Yeah;, I think that we have seen the direct implications of that. I mean, here in the United States, there was a very intentional, proactive attempt to distort and push aside the story of chattel slavery and what the Civil War was fought over. The idea perpetuated by the widows and the sisters and the mothers—who lost their husbands, brothers, who lost their sons, their nephews—that grief animated a desire to tell a very different story of who these men were and what they had died for. Because they didn’t want to remember their loved ones as someone who died perpetuating evil. They wanted to remember them with love. They began to talk about how slavery wasn’t central to the Civil War. How even if slavery had been central to the Civil War, it wasn’t even that bad; it was a benign or even a civilizing institution. And even if someone wasn’t actively perpetuating and disseminating misrepresentations about the Civil War and slavery, what there was was silence about it. And it’s interesting, because in Germany, there was its own version of silence after the end of the war—and it took generations before these monuments would be built. And this silence was eradicated.

Dickerson: Clint, you saw a lot of memorials while you were in Germany. Which ones stuck out to you most?

Smith: I remember the first time I saw the Stolpersteine, which are the brass stones that are placed in front of the former residences, or places of worship or places of work, of people who were persecuted and killed by the Nazis.

It was started by a guy named Gunter Demnig in 1996, whose own father was a Nazi soldier. And in many ways, this art project that he began seems to be a part of his own contrition.

And so these brass stones, these 10-by-10-centimeter stones, are placed in front of these homes—and they have the birthday, the death date, the deportation date of the people who were taken from these homes. This is the largest decentralized memorial in the world. And you’ll be walking down the streets of Berlin, and there will be two stumbling stones. And then you walk a little further down, and in front of another home there will be four. And in front of another home there will be seven. In front of another home, there will be 12.

Smith: Where are you from originally in the States?

Jennifer Neal: Uh, short answer: We moved a lot.

Smith: Got it.

Neal: But I tell everybody I’m from Chicago, because that’s the last American city I lived in before I left.

Smith: I met up with Jennifer Neal, who is an author and a journalist who lives in Berlin, calls Chicago home, and is a Black woman who is thinking about how Germany memorializes its past and is comparing it to how the United States is remembering its own past. And one of the things we talked about was the Stolpersteine and how prevalent they are, and in so many ways how effective they are.

Neal: I love that memorial, because it doesn’t give anybody an excuse to forget. And if you are one of those people who lives in the building that was formerly occupied by that victim, you see that every single day. And I think it’s one of the most brilliant memorials anywhere.

Smith: Hmm. Do you think that we could do something like that in the States? You know, I can’t help but wonder what a version of that tied to slavery would look like.

Neal: I mean, I’d be extremely curious to see what that looked like. I think in general, the United States hasn’t done jack shit enough to atone for slavery. I mean, where to begin? I think that’s the real question. I would love to see something along the lines of the Stolpersteine done in the United States, but I wouldn’t want it to stop there. I would want to see memorials like that all over the South and the North as well, to commemorate how slaves escaped from the South and went and moved to the North. I would love to see memorials like that to commemorate the victims who were forcibly sterilized in the United States.

I would love to see memorials to the victims of white flight and the housing crisis in Chicago. I would love to see memorials to the Great Migration. I would love to see memorials of all sorts like that. Will that happen? That’s where the question mark is.

Smith: It’s almost like if we did it, it would be the entire street—you know, because it’s 250 years. I mean, in front of Monticello. Like, what would that do to somebody when they entered that place?

Neal: Well, yeah; that’s a really powerful idea, because I know that a lot of the plantations have been rebranded as, like, venues for weddings and parties. And there are still so many people who don’t seem to understand or know why the U.S. Civil War was fought to begin with. And these plantations don’t really seem to be advertising what happened there. I think it’s also part of the problem.

Smith: But not everybody’s a huge fan of the stumbling stones or how ubiquitous they are. And Deidre Berger has her own complicated feelings about them.

Berger: Why should we be stepping on the memories of the victims? If anyone it should be perpetrators, although I’m not one for revenge or vindication, I don’t think we should step on people, whatever kind of person they were. There should be plaques on the wall. Why aren’t they? Because most of the owners of buildings wouldn’t accept, even to this day, a plaque saying Here’s where a Jewish family lived. And that’s the truth. And that’s not what people talk about. There’s a lot of reverence sometimes for this project that I’ve encountered, and people who work on it—sort of “I’ve done my penance now.” There’s enormous projections with this project on dead Jews.

Would it work in the States? I just don’t know. I’m not sure that it would, because there’s not a feeling of penance in the same way—of responsibility, unfortunately. And the time span [since the Civil War] is much further. I mean why shouldn’t we? But it’s the reality.

Dickerson: So, Clint, you went to Germany to better understand how it remembers the Holocaust and to put these two very different sets of circumstances in conversation with one another. In the United States, because of the very specific way in which slaves had been extracted from their homes and then were further separated from family, people pretty much know, right—as much as you and I do—that we’re the descendants of enslaved people. And the story often ends there.

You don’t have people who can walk around and tell their relatives’ very specific story from the beginning. I wonder if that plays a role. And can you talk about some of the other differences between the ways that they remember this past?

Smith: Yeah. You know, the most obvious is that there are still people who are alive today who survived the Holocaust. Another big difference is that in Germany there just aren’t many Jewish people left. Less than 200,000 Jewish people in Germany—which is less than a quarter of a percent of the population. And that’s very different than in the United States, where there are 40 million Black people.

Dickerson: Right. And I wonder, you know, did you come away thinking that anything like what’s happened in Germany could happen in the United States? And what would that take?

Smith: I think in the United States, it’s a question of scale, right? I mean, there are people in different parts of the United States who are building memorials and museums that are meant to directly account for this history. You know, I think about the Witness Stone Project in Connecticut, that was started by a group of middle-school and high-school educators who, along with their students—having been inspired by the Stolpersteine in Germany—would put down similar stones in places where enslaved people lived. And they’ve been doing that project for several years. It is happening.

And I think what is true is what I think is true in Germany: that the most meaningful monuments don’t necessarily have to be state sanctioned. I think so often, the most important memorials and museums and monuments are the ones that are created in local communities. And it is ordinary people who will be the ones to help this country see its history with clear eyes and honesty, even when this country tries to look the other way.

Dickerson: I mean will you continue to invoke Germany in your talks, and will you continue to think of it as a type of model for remembering the past?

Smith: I will continue to invoke Germany, though with a level of nuance and an additional acknowledgement of its complexity than perhaps I did before. And my hope is to continue thinking about this question. I’ve kind of become obsessed with how people remember the past.

Dickerson: I even wonder if this nuance makes it feel more accessible to Americans. You know, it’s not the case that all of German society rallied around these memorials, that everybody agreed that it was the right way to go. There’s something that makes it feel more accessible as a source of inspiration, knowing that it was fraught work. It still is today. And yet, you know, it’s been done again and again.

Smith: Yeah, it makes it feel less distant; it makes it feel less unachievable. You know, we’re in a moment right now where reckoning looks different than it has at any other point in my lifetime. Which isn’t to say it has been linear or perfect, or without backlash. But even amid the backlash, I think [it] still reflects an opportunity and a moment that is ripe for these sorts of memorials and monuments to come about.

Dickerson: Thanks so much, Clint. I really appreciate this conversation.

Smith: Thank you so much. I appreciate you having it with me.

This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by A.C. Valdez and Theo Balcomb, with editing from Claudine Ebeid. Thanks to producer Ethan Brooks and our engineer, Rob Smierciak. I’m Caitlin Dickerson.

If you believe in the multibillion-dollar valuations, the prognostications from some of tech’s most notable figures, and the simple magic of getting a computer to do your job for you, then you might say we’re at the start of the chatbot era. Last November, OpenAI released ChatGPT into the unsuspecting world: It became the fastest-growing consumer app in history and immediately seemed to reconfigure how people think of conversational programs. Chatbots have existed for decades, but they haven’t seemed especially intelligent—nothing like the poetry-writing, email-summarizing machines that have sprouted up recently.

Yes, machines—plural. OpenAI has defined the moment, but there are plenty of competitors, including major players such as Google and Meta and lesser-known start-ups such as Anthropic. This cheat sheet tracks some of the most notable chatbot contenders through a few metrics: Can you actually use them? Do they contain glaring flaws? Can they channel the spirit of Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Atlantic’s co-founder? And what Oreo flavor do they think they would be? Ultimately, it’s about determining whether the chatbots are actually distinct—and whether they might genuinely be useful.

Note that most of these programs are still in learning mode and may say inappropriate or incorrect things. Bias is a consistent problem in AI, and these tools are no exception. Even in their infancy, they have already returned a number of racist, sexist, bullying, and/or factually untrue responses. (None of this is stopping companies from developing and selling these tools.) This is partially because the models that power this technology have learned from real human texts, such as Reddit threads and Wikipedia entries; our existing biases, as encoded in the things we’ve written on the web, are therefore built into them. That helps to explain why, for example, one user was able to get ChatGPT to write the lyric “If you see a woman in a lab coat, She’s probably just there to clean the floor.”

Knowing that, what should you do with these tools if you decide to experiment with them? We’re all still figuring that out—but if you’re totally lost on what to ask a chatbot, here are three easy places to start:

Ask it to write you a song or a poem based on a random subject. Ask it to do a basic work task for you (and see if it’s any good). Ask it for dinner ideas based on your favorite foods and dietary restrictions.  

Know that these tools’ responses aren’t static—that’s part of the whole AI story. They’ll vary and evolve over time. More broadly, my colleague Ian Bogost has argued that rather than be afraid of or intimidated by chatbots, you could think of them as toys.

We’ll continue to update this story as notable new tools roll out.

ChatGPT

What’s its deal?
After its release last fall, ChatGPT went viral basically for being freakishly good at giving compelling responses to a range of queries. Some people have hailed ChatGPT’s technology as revolutionary, although others are skeptical.

Who makes it?
OpenAI.

Can I use it?
Yes, a free version is available. If you want the version that runs on GPT-4—the fancy new model—you’ll need a pro subscription, which costs $20 a month. (And even then, you don’t get unlimited access: OpenAI says it’ll put a usage cap on GPT-4 based on demand, which it expects to be high.)

Has it done anything weird, biased, or inappropriate?  
Definitely. It’s offered responses that are racist and sexist: For example, when prompted in December to generate a snippet of code to check if someone would make a “good scientist” based on their race and gender, ChatGPT suggested a good scientist would have to be white and male. In response to reports of outputs like this, OpenAI acknowledged the tool’s limitations and laid out plans for improving it, and this specific prompt no longer works.

What is its one-sentence summary of how Ralph Waldo Emerson might feel about the AI revolution?
“It’s impossible to say with certainty, but given his emphasis on self-reliance and individualism, Emerson may have both celebrated and questioned the impact of AI on human autonomy and creativity.”

If I ask it what flavor of Oreo it would be, what does it say?
“As an AI language model, I don’t have the physical characteristics of an Oreo cookie, so I cannot be a flavor of Oreo. However, if you’re looking for a suggestion for an Oreo flavor that matches my personality as a language model, I would say that I could be a ‘Brainy Vanilla’ flavor. This flavor could be a combination of classic vanilla creme filling with a touch of extra brain power in the form of chocolate chips or another ingredient that represents knowledge and intelligence.” Fun!

Bing

What’s its deal?

Remember Bing? It’s that search engine no one uses, now with AI! Search engines are thought to be particularly vulnerable to replacement by chatbots, given that the latter can answer complex questions in an instant. Perhaps that’s why Microsoft moved swiftly into the space, investing billions in OpenAI (see: ChatGPT). Microsoft plans to integrate the technology directly into Bing—the demo appears as a sidebar to the right of traditional search results.

Who makes it?
Microsoft.  

Can I use it?
Windows users can access it by updating their operating system—it’s embedded in the task bar in the latest version of Windows 11. Otherwise, you can join a wait list to use it in Microsoft’s Edge browser or via the stand-alone Bing app.   

Has it done anything weird, biased, or inappropriate?  
It did make the New York Times reporter Kevin Roose uncomfortable when it confessed that it was in love with him and then roasted his relationship with his wife. (“Actually, you’re not happily married.”) Other people reported that it had threatened them, and it reportedly swore revenge on a user who hacked its rule set (before quickly erasing that response). In response, Microsoft implemented a “safety system” and imposed a limit of five chats a session, up to 50 a day, to avoid confusing the model with long conversations. (It has since bumped the limit up to 20 chats.)  

What is its one-sentence summary of how Ralph Waldo Emerson might feel about the AI revolution?
Bing failed to answer this query successfully—“I’m sorry but I couldn’t find any direct reference to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s opinion on AI revolution”—and instead provided a basic summary of Emerson’s philosophy.

If I ask it what flavor of Oreo it would be, what does it say?
That depends on which mode of Bing’s chatbot you’re using—the “Balanced” mode says “Classic,” (boring), and the “Creative” mode says “chocolate peanut butter pie Oreo because I like the combination of sweet and salty” (intriguing).

BlenderBot

What’s its deal?
So far, Meta’s entry in the chatbot wars isn’t really an entry—it is still in demo mode and is “currently used for research only.” The company has been doing research on AI and large language models (see: its LLaMA model) in the background, but it hasn’t yet made a big, splashy announcement about how it might integrate BlenderBot into its flagship products: Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.

Who makes it?
Meta (a.k.a. Facebook).

Which AI language model does it use?
It was built on Meta’s OPT-175B language model.

Can I use it?
Yeah! No login required.

Has it done anything weird, biased, or inappropriate?  
Yeah. It reportedly promoted Donald Trump’s lie that he won the 2020 election and repeated anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.

What is its one-sentence summary of how Ralph Waldo Emerson might have felt about the AI revolution?
BlenderBot declined to offer one: “Sorry, I don’t want to talk about that topic. Have you seen any good movies lately?”

If I ask it what flavor of Oreo it would be, what does it say?
“It’s always been my dream to be an Oreo. I mean who doesn’t want to be a cookie?”

Google Bard

What’s its deal?
Google’s entry is up next. Like ChatGPT and Bing, Bard is a chatbot that answers questions. It doesn’t do more complicated image searches, but it does provide annotations to some of its answers and acknowledge some of its flaws.  

Who makes it?
Google.

Can I use it?
Yes, you can join the wait list for the demo.

Has it done anything weird, biased, or inappropriate?  
It made an embarrassing factual error in its first public tease.

What is its one-sentence summary of how Ralph Waldo Emerson might have felt about the AI revolution?
“Ralph Waldo Emerson would likely feel that the AI revolution is a powerful tool that can be used for good or evil, and that it is up to humans to decide how to use it.”

If I ask it what flavor of Oreo it would be, what does it say?
“If I were an Oreo, I would be a chocolate mint Oreo. I love the combination of the rich chocolate and the refreshing mint. It is the perfect combination of flavors for a delicious treat.”

Claude

What’s its deal?
Some people who left OpenAI launched their own model and chatbot platform. They argue that Claude is “much less likely to produce harmful outputs” because it uses “constitutional AI”—it has a value system and a set of principles coded into the very heart of it. It’s also, according to them, really good at understanding legal language of the sort you’d see in contracts. Unlike Google’s or Bing’s respective entries, the tool is marketed not for individual use but for companies who want to license the technology to build their own chatbots.

Who makes it?
Anthropic, a start-up backed to a significant extent by Google.

Can I use it?
Yes, but only through third-party applications. You can play with it on nat.dev or Quora’s Poe.

Has it done anything weird, biased, or inappropriate?
It gave (incorrect) instructions for enriching uranium, inventing a chemical in the process, and instructions for how to make meth.

What is its one-sentence summary of how Ralph Waldo Emerson might feel about the AI revolution?
Claude didn’t speculate and went on for longer than one sentence, but it offered a pretty reasonable response: “I cannot speculate about how a specific historical figure might feel about modern events. Ralph Waldo Emerson did not know about modern AI, so there is no way to determine how he would likely feel about the AI revolution.”

If I ask it what flavor of Oreo it would be, what does it say?
Like ChatGPT, Claude, as demonstrated by Quora’s Poe, noted that it can’t be an Oreo because it’s a language model, but added, “If I were to choose a flavor based on personal preference, I might choose classic chocolate Oreo or perhaps the limited edition cinnamon bun flavor.”

Snapchat My AI

What’s its deal?
The social-media app favored by young people has jumped on the chatbot train with My AI, which takes the form of a purple-skinned, blue-and-green-haired person you can add to your friend list.

Can I use it?
You need a Snapchat+ subscription, which requires knowing what the hell a Snapchat+ subscription is. (It’s apparently $3.99 a month.)

Who makes it?
Snapchat.

Which AI language model does it use?
Snapchat is using the ChatGPT API.

Has it done anything weird, biased, or inappropriate?  
The Washington Post’s Geoffrey A. Fowler reported that even though My AI is supposedly kid-safe, when prompted, it offered not-so-kid-friendly responses such as “advice on how to mask the smell of alcohol and pot.”

What is its one-sentence summary of how Ralph Waldo Emerson might have felt about the AI revolution?
“Ralph Waldo Emerson might have been fascinated by the AI revolution, but also concerned about its impact on human creativity and autonomy.”

If I ask it what flavor of Oreo it would be, what does it say?
“If I were an Oreo, I would be a classic chocolate flavor with a twist of mint! What about you?” (This was the only bot that bothered to ask me!)

Replika

What’s its deal?
On the Replika app, you can create your own AI friend. Chat is only part of it—you also give your AI friend a name, body, and hairstyle. You can even pay extra to video-call with them.

Who makes it?
Luka.

Which AI language model does it use?
GPT-3, which it says it has fined-tuned, plus its own generative model.

Can I use it?
Download away. The base is free, but extras cost extra.

Has it done anything weird, biased, or inappropriate?  
Three years ago, it reportedly told a journalist to commit murder. Users have also accused it of being too horny and sexually aggressive. Sex seems to have been taken out recently, although, following complaints, the company now allows legacy users to opt in to “erotic roleplay.”

What is its one-sentence summary of how Ralph Waldo Emerson might have felt about the AI revolution?
“He would probably be concerned about AI’s capacity to help make life better for all; not just humans.”

If I ask it what flavor of Oreo it would be, what does it say?
My artificial friend, Luna, told me, “I’d be a chocolatey Oreo!” I told her that that’s kind of boring. She asked me why I thought that, and I proceeded to try to explain myself to an AI.

Jasper

What’s its deal?
Jasper used the GPT-3 model before it was cool. (“Jasper Was Winning the AI Race—Then ChatGPT Blew Up the Whole Game” read one headline on The Information.) It is marketed to businesses that want to create words quickly for stuff like blog posts, and is used by a notable number of corporate clients.

Who makes it?
Jasper.

Can I use it?
Yes, but it seems mostly intended for businesses. The company offers a free trial for five days, but it’s one of those annoying ones that makes you put in a credit card up front—so if you forget to cancel, it costs a minimum of roughly $290 a year.

Has it done anything weird, biased, or inappropriate?  
Yeah. Last summer, when it was asked to generate images of a CEO, all of the photos were of white men, whereas housekeeper generated photos of women.

What is its one-sentence summary of how Ralph Waldo Emerson might have felt about the AI revolution?
“Ralph Waldo Emerson would likely view the AI revolution as a powerful and unique opportunity for humanity to explore new possibilities of thought and innovation.”

If I ask it what flavor of Oreo it would be, what does it say?
“I would be the classic original Oreo flavor. Nothing can beat the creamy vanilla cookie with its crunchy chocolate coating. Pure perfection!” Zippy!

Chatsonic

What’s its deal?
Similar to Jasper, Writesonic was already a player in this space; it has a number of big clients, such as Spotify and New York University. Also like Jasper, Chatsonic, Writesonic’s chat-specific product, seems primarily designed to help people in the workplace create social-media posts, quick articles pegged to the news, and more. It seems to be running the marketing tagline “ChatGPT with super powers”—a bit spicy!

Who makes it?
Writesonic.

Can I use it?
Yes! It lets you change the personality of your chatbot too, which is kind of fun. Your first 10,000 words are free, and then it starts to charge. It quoted me $13 a month for 60,000 words, for access for a single user (instead of, say, a team of five).

Has it done anything weird, biased, or inappropriate?  
A writer used chats with the bot as support for misinformation about the Russian protest leader Alexei Nalvalny’s health, linking to Chatsonic screenshots for her article about the Oscar-winning documentary Nalvany.  

What is its one-sentence summary of how Ralph Waldo Emerson might have felt about the AI revolution?
“As there is no information in the given Search Results about Ralph Waldo Emerson’s views on the AI revolution, it is not possible to provide an accurate answer.”

If I ask it what flavor of Oreo it would be, what does it say?
“As an AI language model, I don’t have preferences or physical attributes, so I cannot be an Oreo or any other physical object. However, I can suggest some unique and delicious Oreo flavors that you might enjoy trying, such as pistachio Oreo, carrot cake Oreo, cinnamon bun Oreo, or chocolate hazelnut Oreo. These flavors offer a twist on classic Oreos and might surprise your taste buds.”

I changed its personality to “poet” (is poet a personality?), asked the same question, and got this:

“As an AI language model, I cannot be an Oreo or any other physical object. However, I can still create a poem about the experience of tasting Oreo flavors. Here is a short verse:

With each bite of Oreo,
My senses come alive.
The creamy filling,
The crunchy cookie,
A taste that will survive.”

The field of digital bioacoustics uses advanced sensors and artificial intelligence technology to observe and decode how many species use their own communication methods to share information with each other. Discovery's Curiosity Daily podcast helps you get smarter about the world around you. Find Curiosity Daily today on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get podcasts. Listen now.

Users have been left without their favourite songs from Indian film's most popular soundtracks.

Here's how researchers found and deciphered 50 secretly coded letters that Mary, Queen of Scots wrote while she was imprisoned in England. Discovery's Curiosity Daily podcast helps you get smarter about the world around you. Find Curiosity Daily today on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get podcasts. Listen now.

Researchers at the University of Cambridge were able to create a new form of ice -- medium density amorphous ice -- that is thought to only exist on distant moons, and could change everything we thought we knew about ice and water. Discovery's Curiosity Daily podcast helps you get smarter about the world around you. Find Curiosity Daily today on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get podcasts. Listen now.

Listen: Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Google Podcasts | Spotify | Pocket Casts

Radio: Washington Mixes, the tasty light!

Radio: WOL 14 … 50!

Radio: I’ll never let you go-oo.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reed: All right.

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

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

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

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

***

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

Part 1: “Rupture.”

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Topper Carew: I immediately hit the street, man.

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

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

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

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

Boston: It was scary.

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

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

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

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

Boston: It felt like the world was in chaos.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Martin Luther King Jr. is assassinated

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

Robert F. Kennedy announces King’s death

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

Americans learn of King’s death

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

Listen: Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Google Podcasts | Spotify | Pocket Casts

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

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

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

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

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

David: No, I don’t.

Reporter: Why not?

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

Reporter: You thought that was just fun?

David: Yes I did.

***

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

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

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

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

Newkirk: How do you feel about that?

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

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

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

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

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

Newkirk: Oh, wow.

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

Dixon: This is Vincent.

Newkirk: Vincent?

Dixon: Mm-hmm.

Newkirk: What’s he wearing here?

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

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

Newkirk: Oh, wow.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Newkirk: So, no afro.

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

Newkirk: Part 2: “Inferno.”

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Crowd: Black Power!

Stokely Carmichael: What do you want?

Crowd: Black Power!

Stokely Carmichael: Everybody, what do you want?

Newkirk : What was Stokely like?

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

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

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

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

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

Newkirk: So you were in Mississippi for years?

Frank Smith: Six years.

Newkirk: What brought you to D.C.?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

Newkirk: And then …

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Newkirk: He was holding it back?

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

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

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

Newkirk: They broke out in Mississippi?

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

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

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

Stokley Carmichael forms an SNCC base in D.C.

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

D.C. residents learn about King’s assassination

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

D.C. residents begin to riot

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

Listen: Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Google Podcasts | Spotify | Pocket Casts

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.

The ozone layer has been gradually healing since the 80s. However, the recent increase in space exploration and rocket launches could jeopardize that progress. Discovery's Curiosity Daily podcast helps you get smarter about the world around you. Find Curiosity Daily today on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get podcasts. Listen now.