The Holy Week Uprising

After Martin Luther King, Jr. was murdered in April 1968, riots erupted in nearly 200 US-American cities. During the days that followed his death, the U.S. experienced the greatest wave of social unrest after the Civil War (via). These riots were a direct reaction to King's assassination. His assassination is, however, not seen as "the" reason. Tensions had already been high before King's death. Segregation was officially over but still part of everyday life. Being Black meant discriminatory housing policies, income dispartities, poverty, and lacking job opportunities. Due to these conditions, Black US-Americans often had to move to (Black) low-income areas which were not only poorly maintained but also meant being hassled by local police (via)

(Above: "A crowd described as "militant, dancing and chanting" takes part in a memorial to Martin Luther King Jr. in Garfield Park on April 7, 1968. This photo was published in the April 8, 1968, Milwaukee Sentinel. The banner depicts black activist H. Rap Brown, who famously said the previous summer, "Violence is as American as apple pie.") 

58,000 National Guardsmen and Army troops assisted law enforcement officers in handling the violence. 43 people were killed, around 3,500 were injured, 27,000 were arrested and 54 of the cities affected saw more than 100,000 dollars property damage, Washington D.C. experienced the most property damage. There, twelve days of unrest meant 1,200 fires and 24 million in insured property damage (174 million dollars in today's currency). It took decades for some neighbourhoods to fully recover. The fires had destroyed buildings, made thousands of people homeless and jobless, too many had died in burning buildings. In Baltimore, which came second to Washington in terms of damage, crowds first gathered peacefully to hold a memorial service. After a couple of small incidents, 6,000 National Guards arrived and protests erupted (via).

“If I were a kid in Harlem, I know what I’d be thinking right now. I’d be thinking that the whites have declared open season on my people, and they’re going to pick us off one by one unless I get a gun and pick them off first.”
President Johnson

"America must see that riots do not develop out of thin air. Certain conditions continue to exist in our society which must be condemned as vigorously as we condemn riots. (A riot) is the language of the unheard."
Martin Luther King

"For years, many white Americans mistakenly conceived of racism as a “Southern problem” and believed that Jim Crow only resided south of the Mason-Dixon Line. The racial violence of the 1960s throughout the country rudely awakened the nation to the speciousness of this belief. 

Yet no sooner had that belief been discarded than it was immediately replaced with a new and equally false one: that America’s race problems extended only to our large cities and their inner-city ghettos, but not beyond that. The terms that we used — and still use — contributed to the misunderstanding of what was taking place. By using the term “riots,” we reinforce the notion that these acts of “collective violence” were spontaneous and apolitical and that they were disconnected to the protests for civil rights in the South. But a closer examination of them, individually and collectively, proves otherwise. 

This flawed understanding had real consequences. Focused on large cities, the national media gave sparse coverage to the revolts in York and other midsize and small cities, despite the fact that the majority of them occurred in such places. In 1969 alone, revolts rocked midsized cities like Hartford, Conn., Harrisburg, Pa. and Fort Lauderdale, Fla."
Levy, Washington Post

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