1967-1968: MLK's Assassination and Uprisings
Garment workers listen to King's funeral service on a portable radio (April 9, 1968).
Source: Wikimedia
In 1967, growing tensions erupted into what came to be known as the “Long, Hot Summer of 1967.” Race uprisings—167 of them in large and small cities across America—began in Newark, New Jersey in response to housing and employment shortages and in response to the decreasing economic opportunities for African Americans (Thompson Fullilove, 2016, p. 153). In Newark alone, 26 people died, and nationwide, the revolts caused more than 100 deaths (Thompson Fullilove, 2016, p. 150). Though Baltimore did not experience uprisings in 1967, segregated housing in Baltimore was still a flashpoint. The dual housing market created by real estate speculators and developers still strongly benefited whites and left African Americans with little or no options for safe, affordable homes. This racially charged situation inspired local activists to invite Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to Baltimore “to lead a march against segregated housing on Memorial Day” 1967 (Pietila, 2010, p. 192). However, Dr. King never had a chance to march in Baltimore: on April 4, 1968, he was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee.
The nationwide response to Dr. King’s assassination, the Holy Week Uprising, was devastating. Many urban African American communities experienced unrest more destructive than the 1967 uprisings. Cities were torn apart, and black communities that were already stressed by decades of systemic racism suffered further isolation. Baltimore experienced its First Race Uprising following Dr. King’s assassination. Protesters in downtown Baltimore caused massive property damage (Pietila, 2010, p. 195).
The outcomes of the First Race Uprising, like the outcomes of racial unrest across the country, had a severe impact on Baltimore’s urban life. As Pietila noted, “Baltimore emerged from three nights of mayhem…with six persons dead, seven hundred injured, more than a thousand businesses ransacked and destroyed, countless houses torched, and more than five thousand people arrested” (p. 196). Like the Cambridge uprising in 1963, the National Guard was deployed in Baltimore in 1968, a pattern that continued in the 2015 Freddie Gray unrest. Some downtown neighborhoods impacted by the 1968 uprising still sit vacant today. Just as physical scars from the violence run deep in the physical locations of the uprising, the emotional scars run deep in the memories of people who experienced the unrest. Residents of Baltimore who in 2019 are in their sixties and seventies would have been in their twenties in 1967 and 1968.
President Johnson signing the Civil Rights Act of 1968
Source: Wikipedia
In response to the Civil Rights movement and to the 1967 and 1968 race uprisings, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1968, which made discrimination based on “race, color, religion, or national origin” a federal crime. Despite the new law of the land, however, African Americans still suffered race-based discrimination in most areas of their lives. Feagin (2014) found that, “After the 1968 Civil Rights Act went into effect, residential segregation across the color line became unofficial and informal, as it remains today” (p. 172).
When the 1968 Civil Rights Act was passed, the country was still embroiled in the “war on crime,” which continued to disproportionately single out African American men. An extension of the “war on crime” came with a new war – the “war on drugs.” The war on drugs emerged from the racially charged and anti-war environment of the 1968 presidential election. It introduced a new set of racially influenced laws that severely disadvantaged Black individuals (especially men) in the criminal justice system.