“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.”

Today The Atlantic has released Holy Week, an expansive eight-episode narrative podcast reported by senior editor Vann R. Newkirk II about the uprisings that followed the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968––one of the most fiery, disruptive, and contentious weeks in American history––and how those seven days diverted the course of a social revolution. April 4, 1968, is remembered by many as the end of the civil-rights movement, and a time of loss. Holy Week tells a new story: a story that completely changes how we understand the entire trajectory of modern America.

All eight episodes of the podcast are available now; listen and subscribe at TheAtlantic.com/HolyWeek. Holy Week marks a return to narrative podcasts for The Atlantic following its Peabody-winning Floodlines, which was also hosted by Newkirk and was widely hailed as one of 2020’s best podcasts.

“Collective grief can have a way of warping the historical lens, trapping us in a moment and overshadowing some of what came before,” Vann narrates. In reporting the podcast over the past year, talking with people about the assassination and the unrest that upended their lives, he says: “What I’ve heard is a story about a break in time. It’s a story about the limits of racial reckonings. And about how trauma lives with people through time. It’s a story about hope, about grief, about dreams, and about dreams deferred.”

With dozens of original interviews and rarely heard archival material, Holy Week is told through the voices of those who witnessed history: activists and leaders of the movement, who worked alongside and at times at odds with King; officials from the Johnson White House, on the mindset, actions, and inactions of the president; and residents of D.C., Baltimore, Atlanta, Memphis, and elsewhere, who watched their cities burn and whose lives were forever changed. Among the individuals we meet:

John Burl Smith, one of the last people to meet with King at the Lorraine Motel, hours before King was shot. Smith was part of an activist group, The Invaders, that was growing frustrated with King’s practice of nonviolence.

Vanessa Dixon, a lifelong resident of D.C., who participated in the riots as a 12-year-old, and whose older brother, Vincent Lawson, went missing during the uprising.

Juandalynn Abernathy, the daughter of the civil-rights activist Rev. Ralph David Abernathy, and the best childhood friend of King’s oldest daughter, Yolanda King. Juandalynn recalls being on the phone with Yolanda when King’s death was announced, and delivering the news to her friend.

Matthew Nimetz, who worked as a staff assistant to President Lyndon B. Johnson beginning in the long hot summer of 1967. Nimetz was the liaison between Johnson and the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, known as the Kerner Commission.

Tony Gittens, who became involved in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee while at Howard University and speaks to the events of that week. Gittens later founded the Washington, D.C., International Film Festival.

Robert Birt, who as a teenager witnessed the uprising in Baltimore and the occupation of the city. Birt is now a philosophy professor at Bowie State University.

Holy Week begins what will be a significant year for The Atlantic in audio, with several strategic initiatives set to launch in the coming months. Audio is led by Claudine Ebeid as executive producer, alongside managing editor Andrea Valdez. Ebeid joined The Atlantic from The New York Times and, before that, NPR. The Holy Week team includes Jocelyn Frank and Ethan Brooks, with sound design by David Herman. New additions to the audio team in the past year include senior producer Theo Balcomb and engineer Rob Smierciak, who join producer Rebecca Rashid, producer Kevin Townsend, and senior producer A.C. Valdez.

Press Contacts:
Paul Jackson and Anna Bross | The Atlantic
press@theatlantic.com

Matthew Nimetz: Do you want something?

Vann R. Newkirk II: I’ll take …

Nimetz: If anyone wants a cookie …

Newkirk: Thank you. I’ll grab one after we finish. [Laughter.]

All right, so did you actually start that July?

Nimetz: Let’s see … I started ’66, let’s see; I clerked in ’65, ’66—yeah, ’67 … July ’67.

Newkirk: So you started it in the long, hot summer?

Nimetz: Yeah, it was tough and we had the Detroit riots as I was arriving—actually, the day I arrived, the riots …

Newkirk: Matthew Nimetz started working at the White House in the summer of 1967—the long, hot summer, when Detroit, Newark, and dozens of other places erupted in riots for days. The summer before King was assassinated.

Reporter: This is part of Springfield Avenue, Newark. On the night of July 13, 1967, hundreds of rioters smashed windows and looted these stores. Losses in the city were put at $10,251,000. The rioting cost the lives of 23 persons. Hundreds of others were injured.

Reporter: We are back on 12th Street in Detroit’s northwestern district, where it all began early Sunday morning. The state troopers [and] city police, here on the scene of this particular fire and numerous others in the city of Detroit, for the first time are under orders to shoot any looters or arsonists seen running from the scene.

Nimetz: We did a lot of work on riot preparation, riot control, what we would do with riots. This whole idea of the military going into our cities was a unique thing and very, very difficult, very questionable.

Newkirk: By the time Matthew started working for President Johnson, the ghettos in America had gone up for three straight years. But the uprisings in Detroit and Newark in 1967 became notorious, both for their destructiveness and for how brutally police and the military cracked down on them. White Americans were perplexed: Why were the Black ghettos rioting so regularly, so often? President Johnson resolved to find out.

Lyndon B. Johnson: We need to know the answer, I think, to three basic questions about these riots: What happened? Why did it happen? What can be done to prevent it from happening again and again?

Newkirk: To answer these questions, Johnson appointed a commission. They would travel to Black ghettos across the country, researching, interviewing, trying to find answers. He called it the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, nicknamed the Kerner Commission, after its chair. In order to head off another summer of riots, the commission had to work fast. By February ’68, two months before King’s assassination, the powder keg was already lit: State troopers fired into a crowd of Black students protesting a segregated bowling alley outside South Carolina State University.

Cleveland Sellers: See, the police were standing on the side of that hill, and while I’m going down, the shots hit me.

Reporter: Three Negros were killed and 36 others were injured in a fight with police.

Newkirk: The Orangeburg massacre, they called it. The Kerner Commission’s report was released to the public the same month.

Harry Reasoner (journalist): For the last few days, this country has lived under indictment: a charge of white racism, national in scale, terrible in its effects. The evidence to support that charge has now been presented—more than 1,400 pages of testimony, findings, conclusions, the full text of a report released just last night.

Newkirk: Committees in Washington don’t usually do much. They’re the kind of thing a president approves when they want to be seen as doing something. The commissioners were mostly white, mostly moderates, not radicals by any stretch. So when Otto Kerner came out saying stuff like this:

Otto Kerner: Our nation is moving toward two societies: one Black, one white …

Newkirk: … it was a bit of a shock.

Kerner: … separate and unequal.

Newkirk: The report found that racism was the main cause of Negro riots.The commissioners named dismal housing conditions, continued segregation in education, police brutality, and discrimination in hiring as the primary factors. Their eyes had been opened. They hoped that naming things so plainly and so boldly would move the public to understand.

Kerner: Reaction to last summer’s disorders has quickened the movement and deepened the division. Discrimination and segregation have long permeated much of American life. They now threaten the future of every American.

Newkirk: For much of America, this was a surprising conclusion. But for the leaders of the civil-rights movement, it was old news. They had been working for years to find solutions to the problem of the ghetto. In 1966, Martin Luther King joined an effort by his colleague Bayard Rustin and labor leader A. Philip Randolph to create a policy platform for the movement. Their “Freedom Budget” called for the federal government to end all poverty, Black or white, by spending billions on housing, a jobs guarantee, universal health care, and a federal minimum wage. Their demands were radical, but not unique. Whitney Young of the National Urban League wanted the government to commit to a domestic Marshall Plan to rebuild Black America the way it had been rebuilding Germany after World War II. Some reporters called his proposal the Negro Marshall Plan.

Whitney Young: But if we can say to the community, This is going to take 10 years, but next year this is what you can look for, everybody will have a job. Everybody. And remember, I’m asking you not just to hire the Phi Beta Kappas and the Lena Hornes; I’m asking you also to let apply and to hire dumb Negroes like you do dumb white people [Laughter], and mediocre Negroes like you do mediocre white people.

Newkirk: Now, in March 1968, the Kerner Commission joined the calls of King and Young: The Federal government needed to back Black America. Their recommendations were no more moderate or incremental. They echoed the “Freedom Budget” and the Negro Marshall Plan. The commissioners wanted 6 million new homes built for Black folks, and 2 million new jobs created.

Reasoner: … a guarantee of minimum income; far greater aid to schools than proposed thus far; a national commitment backed by the president, the Congress, the people with money.

Reporter: The commission itself did not say how much all of this would cost. The estimated cost is $8–10 billion a year more than the administration has asked for housing, education, welfare, and job programs. Dr. Martin Luther King, who is planning a new march on Washington, has been urging that kind of spending for a long time.

Newkirk: The commissioners tried to convince Americans—white Americans—that this was their problem to help fix, but they were fighting an uphill battle. Support of liberal urban and suburban white folks from the North had been vital in the civil-rights movement. In the years of the riots though, that support began to wane.

Reporter: [Gunshot] A grandmother fearful she’s part of what the president’s report calls the polarization of the American community. Talk in the suburbs of tanks and troops and terror [Gunshot] in the streets has led her to the pistol range.

Grandmother: Well, if there’s going to be another riot, I want to be prepared. And let me tell you one thing: He better not show his face in front of my house, because if it means my own life, I’d shoot him. Fear is fear, and when you get fear into you, you’ll do anything.

Man: Everyone’s afraid of the colored race lately. Everyone seems to be scared to make them obey the laws, which is something that doesn't happen to Joe Blow, like me or the guy next door. We’ll get thrown in jail for some of these actions.

Newkirk: In the days after the Kerner Report was released, news stations ran special reports about it. Newspapers put it on their covers. Everyone seemed to have something to say about the report. But Lyndon B. Johnson, the man who had called for the report seven months ago, hadn’t said a word.

Nimetz: It was an embarrassment. I think the president’s view, as I remember it, filtered through Joe Califano and others, was that it would be a ringing endorsement of his vision. That is a vision of a country with more and more Great Society social programs and more and more civil-rights acts.

Newkirk: Matthew Nimetz was a staff assistant to the president at the time. He says that Johnson didn’t like the report at all. The idea that there were two societies that were moving apart challenged his legacy as the builder of the Great Society.

Nimetz: I didn’t see him react. But, you know, the word around the place was, I’m not going to meet with these people. Get them out of town as soon as possible, and let’s bury this report.

Newkirk: Matthew was one of the young guys, just 29 when he came to work for the White House. But he had big responsibilities, including being one of the liaisons between Johnson and this new commission. It wasn’t the first time he’d been asked to bury a report.

Nimetz: We would often bury our reports. I mean, we set up task forces. And if they were going down a path that was not sympathetic to where we wanted to go, we would cut off their money and not help them out and sort of bury the report.

Newkirk: But the Kerner Report was too big to bury. A national debate swirled for weeks and weeks. Conservatives called the commissioners soft, and complained that their recommendations amounted to essentially rewarding lawbreakers. Some Black leaders embraced the report. Some said that it was simply stating the obvious. Johnson continued to slow-walk it, ignoring the recommendations. Mostly, each side waited until unrest came again, to vindicate their position. And then came the assassination.

Reporter: At least 4000 National Guard and federal troops are in this uneasy town tonight and more stand ready.

Reporter: The entire Metropolitan Park and Capitol Police forces are on alert.

Newkirk: It was Johnson’s nightmare, brought to his front steps. His staff watched as Black D.C. burned. They brought in machine guns and troops to protect the White House, to keep the rage contained in the ghettos.

The rebellion spread though, between neighborhoods and between cities. Even in cities that didn’t go up on the first night, uprisings were becoming common, even accelerating.

The SCLC and other Black leaders were pressing the White House to finally embrace the Kerner Commission’s report, and to champion a bill bigger and more expensive than anything they’d ever put on the table.

In white America, calls for law and order were growing, and becoming harder to ignore politically.The pressure was building. Johnson and his staff had to do something. But what was to be done? Which story, which diagnosis, which cure, would the White House listen to?

John Chambers (journalist): I’m standing here in front of a broken store window two blocks from the White House. The looters are still scuffling through the broken glass. The police are coming across the street. Here comes a teenager.

Teenager: It’s a shame. It’s a shame. It’s a shame. But I’m gonna get my shit.

Chambers: At the end of the block, an onlooker.

Onlooker: Oh God.

Chambers: What do you think it’s all coming to?

Onlooker: Well, you’ve got a man like Wallace in here and they’ll have police on every corner with orders to shoot to kill. That’s the only thing that’ll stop them.

***

Newkirk: Part 5: “Prophecy.”

***

Nimetz: So when King died, the first thing is, how major do you want to make this?

Newkirk: The night of the assassination, the White House scrambled to figure out how to respond. The riots demanded urgency, but there still wasn’t much consensus among staff. Some of them still resented King for opposing the Vietnam War. They argued about how they could properly honor a man devoted to peace. The first step they settled on was to declare a national day of mourning and to order states to lower their flags to half-mast. Then they decided on a second step: bringing civil-rights leaders to the White House, first thing in the morning. But even then, White House staff argued about how to do it.

Nimetz: You invite everyone. What do you do with the meeting? I mean, is it a ceremonial meeting? You know, you run the risk of all of them saying now’s the time to do the Marshall Plan and all the other things. We worried about that a little bit, that the meeting with the Black leaders would get out of hand, like the Kerner Commission, in a way.

Newkirk: As the sun rose the next morning, the Kerner Commission’s warnings had been made real. In D.C., Stokely Carmichael had reemerged and prepared to give his press conference predicting the beginning of a race war. Journalists and politicians were already blaming him and H. Rap Brown for the riots. At the same time, a group of Black leaders were also in the nation’s capital, on their way to the White House.

Reporter: President Johnson, with his Honolulu high-level conference held in abeyance by the killing of Dr. Martin Luther King, will meet with unspecified civil-rights leaders today at the White House.

Newkirk: The White House planned to meet and greet, and do some photo-op stuff. The idea was to show people, especially Black people, that Johnson was taking things seriously, and that he had a plan. The people who showed up were a who’s who of Black activism and politics in the ’60s. Martin Luther King Sr. was too ill to make it, but he sent a message. Some others stayed back to deal with riots in their communities. But lots of big names made it: Thurgood Marshall, the first Black Supreme Court justice; Dorothy Height, of the National Council of Negro Women; Bayard Rustin, who had been one of King’s close associates.

Nimetz: The president says if Wilkins, Whitney Young, and a couple of others can make it, to go ahead.

Newkirk: Whitney Young, of the National Urban League, and Roy Wilkins, of the NAACP, were both invited. But, there weren’t a whole lot of younger leaders on the list. Radical SNCC folks like Stokely Carmichael, they were out. Anybody affiliated with the Black Panthers or the Nation of Islam was also out.

The exclusion of more radical leaders meant that Johnson wouldn’t hear from some of the people who had the most connection to young people engaged in uprisings. But for the White House, that really didn’t matter.

Nimetz: You have a lot of meetings when you’re in government that are totally nonsubstantive. They’re ceremonial, and you know nothing’s going to come out of it. It’s sort of scripted, but it’s important to demonstrate to the world that it was a meeting, you know. It’s a sign of respect to the Black community, a sign of concern, and also hopefully to calm things down.

Newkirk: For the leaders who were present, it wasn’t just ceremonial. They came in with real policy demands. Whitney Young brought back his idea for the domestic Marshall Plan, a commitment, in billions of dollars, for jobs and housing for Black America. Other leaders agreed with him, even some of the more conservative ones. Johnson seemed to agree too, at least while he was in the room. He promised funds and said that he had already set the wheels in motion with Congress. In a press conference after the meeting, Whitney Young said again that it was time for a domestic Marshall Plan.

Whitney Young: We deliberately use that name. We want people to remember that if we could spend billions of dollars to rebuild West Germany—a country whose people set out not to destroy a few city blocks, but to destroy all of America—then we ought to be able to spend billions in our own cities. They don’t have any slums in West Germany. And what’s at stake here is far more than the plight of Negroes. What’s at stake here is this country becoming morally credible to young people, white and Black, and to the rest of the world.

Newkirk: Johnson seemed intent on getting something big done. Immediately after the meeting on Friday, he promised to convey the demands to Congress. He’d keep legislators home from Easter recess if he needed. He was forceful, the old LBJ who bulldozed congressmen and got stuff done. He was going to address Congress on the planned night of King’s funeral, Monday.

Johnson: I have asked the speaker of the House of Representatives and the Congress to receive me at the earliest possible moment, no later than Monday evening, in the area of 9 o’clock.

Newkirk: But behind the scenes, Matthew Nimetz and other staff knew that the chances of doing something big were slim. The president still just didn’t believe that the Negro Marshall Plan or the Kerner Commission recommendations were workable suggestions. And they only had three days to figure something out.

Nimetz: For us, the big question was, What are we going to put in that speech? You know he is going to give a speech, but is he going to call for all of these things? But if he doesn’t call for all for all these things like the Kerner Commission or implement these things, what’s the point of the speech?

Newkirk: The big problem was the same as it always is: money. The Vietnam war was costing as much as half of the American budget. Johnson didn’t think he could force through any bills, let alone demand billions for this one.

Nimetz: If you ruled out more money, there weren’t too many things that you could do.

Newkirk: As important as they were, the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act were cheap.

Nimetz: Civil-rights bills, they don’t cost a lot. I mean, you know, they’re profoundly important, but they’re not bills that you have to spend a lot of money on.

Newkirk: Even those bills had faced extreme opposition in Congress, when protesters were peaceful, nonviolent. Now there were riots going on.

Nimetz: Congress is a pretty good test of how people are feeling generally, right? And certainly you asked people to spend money on social programs for jobs and housing, and then they see everything being burned down, out. So there was anger and resentment and certainly not an atmosphere for pouring more money in.

Newkirk: Johnson backed himself into something of a corner by announcing the speech, and by making promises to the civil-rights leaders. He’d hoped that the meeting would calm the riots down. Going back on his promises might make the situation worse. But then the King family announced that the funeral would be Tuesday instead of Monday.

Reporter: In view of the Tuesday funeral for Dr. King, the president’s appearance before Congress would be postponed. The president has urged Speaker John McCormack to work for quick passage of a civil-rights bill. That plea still stands.

Newkirk: In his diary from that day, Matthew Nimetz wrote that the president had caught a break.

Nimetz: Anyway, the speech was postponed. I was glad as I couldn’t see this as being anything but another exhortation to an unsympathetic Congress and a troubled nation without many solutions.

Newkirk: After two days in the pressure cooker, President Johnson could relax. He didn’t immediately have to follow through on the promises he made to the civil-rights leaders. He didn’t have to go out and try to force Congress to pass a law he didn’t even really want.

If he waited it out, and the streets calmed down, maybe they wouldn’t even need to get a big bill done. Matthew Nimetz and his colleagues watched the news reports in D.C., Chicago, Newark, hoping that the riots would fizzle out. But then, another city went up.

***

Documentary Narrator: From a distance, Baltimore, like most cities, seems to be divided most visibly and dramatically into works of nature and works of man.

Yet this division between man and nature is not the most dramatic distinction that exists in the metropolitan area. The sharpest cleavage is at ground level, on man-made streets and in his buildings, where artificial but rock-solid boundaries separate blocks and homes into white, Negro, and transitional neighborhoods. On the bottom rung of this economic and social ladder is the Negro ghetto, which President Johnson called an indictment to our cities, North and South.

Newkirk: So, Dr. Birt, can you just first introduce yourself? What’s your name and where are you from?

Robert Birt: Okay. My name is Robert Birt. I’m from Baltimore, Maryland, the son of immigrants from North Carolina. You know, they came for the great Black migrations, as it was called in the 1940s.

Newkirk: I’m a Carolinian, so I’m always interested in this.

Birt: Ah, yeah.

Newkirk: Yeah. Where are they from?

Birt: Mother’s from Washington, North Carolina.

Newkirk: Little Washington, yes.

Newkirk: Robert Birt is a philosophy professor at Bowie State University. He grew up in East Baltimore. When he was born, Robert’s family lived in the slums. He still remembers how bad the conditions were.

Birt: There were splinters, and there were vermin floating around. One of my earliest memories is seeing my mother with a broom, chasing a rat away from my baby sister’s crib.

Newkirk: His family had its ups and downs. There weren’t a whole lot of ways to get ahead in Black Baltimore back then. So Robert’s dad liked to play the numbers.

Birt: There was a brief period in which we were actually experiencing a kind of upward mobility. I think he hit the number, or something like that, for $1,000, which in ’59 or ’60 was a substantial amount of money though it wouldn’t make you rich. And he opened up a store. And when he did, we actually bought a house. If I remember correctly, it was at 1209 Darley Avenue. Somehow I remember that as a child. And we had a backyard. We had a dog named Sandy.

Newkirk: They stayed there for two years. Robert’s dad ran the store, and they lived okay.

Birt: But that didn't last. There was a problem with the police. Police would come by the store, demanding their cut.

Newkirk: Baltimore police were known by Black citizens and local media to be corrupt. They were inept too, except when it came to brutality and cheating people out of their money. It was exactly the kind of thing the Kerner Commission had been warning about. And Robert Birt saw it up close.

Birt: I was in the store once and heard this big, fat, white policeman come in there. He went around boasting about how many Black people he killed. And in those days, they were pretty up front and in your face with their racism, and just outright calling my father, “[N-word], you better give me my money.” And I mean, you know, it was just unbelievable.

I don't know if my sister remembers, but I definitely do. We were there. They threatened to kill my father.

Newkirk: Soon after that, his father’s business folded. Robert doesn’t know exactly how, but he does know that they bounced back to the slums and then over to the Latrobe public-housing projects in East Baltimore. Back when Baltimore was segregated by law, Latrobe had been an all-white project, but by the time Robert got there, all the white folks had fled for the suburbs. Baltimore went from being 19 percent Black in 1940 to almost half Black in 1968. Robert recalls that white people who were left in the city guarded their neighborhoods, their property, from Black “intruders” like their lives depended on it.

Birt: I was out with a group of people—I guess it must have been ’66, ’67, the year Martin Luther King had visited Baltimore. We had gone out skating, and we had girls with us; we were teenage boys.

We were just wandering around and acting the way kids act, you know, silly and all that. And we wandered somehow or another into some part of a white area. We started noticing, You know, I think we took a wrong turn somewhere. [Laughs.]

Newkirk: Now, Robert has seen a lot. He tells every story so casually and low-key that sometimes these terrifying details just kinda walk right past you. But sometimes he laughs, and then you know it’s about to get real.

Birt: [Laughs.] And before we knew it, there was a crowd of white youths who were shouting and screaming racial slurs, name-calling us, you know, the N-word, you know.

They were acting like monkeys, actually. [Laughs.]

Some of them threw some things at us. But fortunately, we were at such a distance that nothing could connect. We did know we weren’t far away from home, so we just headed on out of there.

Newkirk: The group had to decide what to do to protect themselves.

Birt: One person said, well, look, if it gets too heavy, we were going to ask the girls to run and we were going to see if we couldn’t delay the crowd by throwing a couple of bricks or something to slow them down, but we probably couldn’t have succeeded at that. There were too many of them. [Laughs.]

We wisely decided to keep on walking and, fortunately, we weren’t far from a Black area. Somebody said, “If they cross over this territory, we own them.”

Newkirk: Robert Birt never needed the Kerner Commission report. Every single day, he lived all of the conclusions that had so shocked the commissioners. He saw a Black Baltimore that felt like it was primed to explode. But two days after King’s assassination, with uprisings happening all over the country, things were still quiet.

Maryland’s governor, Spiro Agnew, praised his citizens for not rioting. He even used some of the Kerner Commission’s rhetoric. He talked of charting a new course for Black Baltimore.

Spiro Agnew: I consider it especially important, in view of Maryland’s peaceful reaction to the current national crisis, to move quickly to consolidate gains that already have been made in the civil-rights field, and to chart a positive course for the future. Accordingly, I am asking prominent leaders of the Negro community in Baltimore and elsewhere in the state to meet with me next Thursday at 1:30 p.m. for a frank and far-reaching discussion of the problems that have faced the state and this nation.

***

Newkirk: Robert says that the calmness on the first few days was a mirage.

Birt: There was like two days of sorrow and suppressed anger and mourning. And then on Saturday, I guess you could say the grieving began to give way to anger.

Newkirk: That afternoon, there were a few memorial services in the city for King. Crowds of people started gathering, right by the projects where Robert lived. Robert was there.

Birt: They were cursing. They were saying, “These white so-and-sos, they murdered King. We’re going to kill them; we’re going to burn them out,” and so forth and so on. And some people in the crowd even clapped and cheered them.

Newkirk: First the crowd started smashing windows around the block. Then they moved to local businesses, throwing rocks and setting fires at dry cleaners and furniture stores. It was just like what happened in D.C. two days earlier.

Birt: Black Baltimore exploded.

Newkirk: Tell me what it looked like.

Birt: It was a crowd of people. They were angry, as I was. And some of them did the deeds. I mean, they destroyed things. They tore up white property.

Person on the street: We don’t burn down soul people. But some dummy, some dummy, some dummy started a fire right by our soul brother’s barbershop, and we didn’t mean to do that. But this is just the beginning; this is going to go on all summer.

Newkirk: The situation escalated quickly from there. Baltimore mobilized most of its police force as multiple buildings were firebombed, the first of over a thousand buildings where fires were reported. Spiro Agnew declared an 11 p.m. curfew, but in just a matter of hours, fires were burning all throughout Black neighborhoods in East Baltimore. They continued through the next day.

Agnew: We have taken the following steps to restore law and order in our state. You may be sure that the situation is under control and under constant vigilance of state and local authority.

Newkirk: He declared a state of emergency, called in the Maryland National Guard, and sent a telegram to the White House asking for federal troops.

Agnew: Attorney General Ramsey Clark agreed to immediately dispatch the troops. They should now be taking positions in the critical areas.

Newkirk: Thousands of soldiers marched through the streets to arrest hundreds of people for breaking curfew. By the next morning, at least three people were dead, either from the fires or the confrontations.

Robert Birt stayed out there and watched. But he says he didn’t participate.

Birt: Some people started a rumor that Robert Birt was throwing Molotov cocktails. I did not throw any cocktails. [Laughs.] But I had no negative attitude about those who did.

Newkirk: Ok, so, neutrality regarding the Molotov cocktails?

Birt: Um … well, I did clap a little. [Laughs.]

Newkirk: The Baltimore uprising began a new phase in the national reckoning, one where white fears about the riots really came into play. Agnew wanted his troops to be efficient and none too gentle in cracking down. He wasn’t the only white leader who used this playbook. In Chicago, Mayor Richard J. Daley came down hard and complained about not being able to order his police to shoot to kill.

Richard Daley: In my opinion, he should have had instructions to shoot arsonists and to shoot looters—shoot arsonists to kill and shoot looters in order that they would be detained—when this was being conducted.

Newkirk: In D.C., the riots had been contained and suppressed by the presence of federal troops and lots of tear gas. The White House had decided to send in mostly integrated units like the 82nd Airborne in order to try and build trust with Black communities, and Mayor Walter Washington helped coordinate a police response that he hoped would result in minimal loss of life. But when the disturbances threatened to move into D.C.’s mostly white suburbs, the response changed.

Bill Greenwood (journalist): A strong show of force by police and military units is credited for a significant decrease in violence in Washington and suburban areas. Authorities set up checkpoints along strategic highways. The visible presence of the heavily armed police and soldiers is believed to have caused the sharp drop in trouble.

Newkirk: In at least one case, Black people on the street were told in clear terms that they would be shot if they crossed over the border to Maryland. In other cities, they cordoned off white neighborhoods and downtown areas. Matthew Nimetz kept tabs on it all from the White House. He felt like he saw the window for change closing.

Matthew Nimetz: Those were pretty profound events in those cities, but also profound politically because it changed the mood in the Congress and I think in the country. When you have riots, even though it’s understandable, people react negatively. The combination of the assassination and the riots sort of put an end to a lot of new thinking.

Newkirk: By the morning of April 7, Palm Sunday, it was clear that the Kerner Commission’s report was not going to be endorsed and implemented. Lots of white people didn’t agree with the report before the riots. The dream of spending billions to transform Black life in America probably died in the fires. But the White House reached for one more option to try to get something done.

Harry Reasoner (journalist): Is this another stalemate? Or will they get something?

Roger Mudd (journalist): The reliability and viability of the Congress is at stake. Can the Congress respond to this report? The response, I would judge, would be open housing, which costs no money.

Reasoner: But very little in the nature of the kind of drastic, immediate action the report talks about.

Mudd: Very little.

Newkirk: There was a fair-housing bill that had been stuck in Congress for a while. It wasn’t exactly the Negro Marshall Plan. It wasn’t even close. But housing had been envisioned as the third part of a trifecta with the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act. The fair-housing bill would outlaw discrimination in many home sales to Black residents. The bill had been stalled by opposition from segregationists and white suburbanites, but the White House thought that now there might be the perfect storm in which to get it passed.

Nimetz: The thing is, it was there. We’re not talking about subsidies here. We’re not talking about a lot of handouts. That’s talking about Welfare mothers, all that type of stuff that arouses, you know, the conservatives. And I think because of the assassination, enough members of Congress were ready to do something, and this thing was languishing up there [Chuckles.] and it just needed a little push to get it out.

Newkirk: But, with backlash to the riots growing, even that bill, with no money attached, could face new opposition.

In the first moments and days after King’s assassination, the messages had been overwhelmingly in support of getting something major done. White politicians were taking the Kerner Commission report seriously. They were promising ambitious programs to support Black people and keep King’s dream alive. Now uprisings were triggering an uglier, more visceral response among white America.

Kener: To pursue our present course will involve the continuing polarization of the American community and ultimately the destruction of basic democratic values. The alternative will require a commitment to national action—compassionate, massive, and sustained, backed by the resources of the most powerful and richest nation on the Earth. From every American, it will require new attitudes, new understanding, and, above all, new will.

Newkirk: The struggle between Black rage and white backlash that unfolded in the days ahead would define the next era in the history of the country. The Kerner Commission had hoped that the White House could use the moment to finally bring the two Americas together. But maybe the most likely path was the one they feared: Perhaps Black America would be abandoned forever.

The “long hot summer” erupts

Riots take place in dozens of cities in America during the summer of 1967. President Lyndon B. Johnson establishes the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, nicknamed the Kerner Commission, to investigate the causes of the civil unrest.

The day after King is assassinated, riots unfold across the country

Less than 24 hours after King’s assassination, reports of fires and rioting emerge in dozens of cities across America, including Chicago, Buffalo, Boston, Detroit, and San Francisco.

Police around D.C. take aim

Two days after King’s assassination, police from Prince George’s County, Maryland, train rifles on D.C. protesters near the city border, with shoot-to-kill orders for crossing the line.

The National Guard is called in

Maryland Governor Spiro T. Agnew requests that federal troops be deployed to Baltimore on April 7, three days after King’s assassination. The president authorizes Agnew’s request.

Child 1: Mmm, yes.

Journalist: What did you do?

Child 1: I did a little looting, but I gave it back.

Journalist: You gave it back?

Child 1: Yes, but I think it’s all right to loot some people if they’re gonna stay open. But to burn it down, no. I caught a man in a Hahn’s shoe store trying to burn that down, and I put it out.

Journalist: You put out the fire?

Child 1: Yes, sir.

Journalist: What do you think? Were you involved in any of this looting?

Child 2: Yes, sir.

Journalist: What did you take?

Child 2: Oh, a safe and a couple—

Journalist: You took a safe?

Child 2: As a little safe that you put money in, and a couple more stuff. And I think they should have had the riot, but they shouldn’t have—

Journalist: Why should they have had the riot, young fella?

Child 2: Since Martin Luther King got shot, everybody seemed like they wanted to riot. I say that. I’m not saying that they should have had it, but if they did have the riot, they shouldn’t have burned.

Vann R. Newkirk II: The burning of Washington city, in 1814, by the British felt to many like the end of an era, the beginning of a new one. That sense of unease motivated our national anthem, the “Star Spangled Banner.” After fleeing Washington and seeing American troops then beat back the British in Baltimore, Francis Scott Key felt the triumph of the dawn’s early light.

One hundred and fifty-four years later, D.C. burned again. In the middle of it all, people tried to step back and think about what it meant for this country, this democracy. They tried to find meaning in the chaos of those spring nights. There were big, serious news specials and lofty speeches in the halls of the Capitol. But the recollections that interest me most come from a group of children at the heart of the riots. In the Cardozo district, primary and junior-high-school teachers started asking their students what they thought and documenting their replies.

Teacher: Here’s an interesting comment from another fifth grader, who is talking about Martin Luther King: “His dream wasn’t like most dreams. It wasn’t just him in the dream. He wanted everybody in his dreams. He wanted to take us to the promised land with him. Now he has left for the promised land, and we have to follow.”

Newkirk: Kids as young as 6 and 7 responded to prompts from their teachers about what they had witnessed in the streets, through drawings, poetry, through essays. Reporters from ABC were so captivated by this experiment that they came to see it.

Teacher: When we ask children the saddest thing that they saw, one child in the first grade responded that he was very sad when he saw three Negro boys beat up a white man and stab him. And then we asked also, “What was the happiest thing that you saw?” And children said, “People helping each other, giving them food and things of this type.”

Newkirk: The drawings are vivid and incredibly raw. There’s one drawing of a grocery store, a Safeway, where people are lined up outside, carrying food away. One woman has a speech bubble that says, “I got a lot of meat.” A guy answers her and says, “Let’s get more meat.” Across the street there’s a police car with its own speech bubble: “I will shoot tear gas.”

Teacher: I really think the children did a better job with the drawing of pictures. Because of the area where these children lived, many of them could see the flames coming from their houses, or they lived nearby where things were burning.

Newkirk: There are drawings of the first rocks being thrown at the Peoples Drug Store, images of soldiers, crayon pictures of fires. There are sketches of the soul brother signs people put in their windows, like lamb’s blood marking homes during Passover. One of the most haunting pictures is a pen drawing of the G. C. Murphy’s store on 14th and Irving. It shows the store burned and collapsing. There’s a body inside, trapped under the rubble. The newspapers say that two teenage Black boys died there in the fire. One was never identified. There’s a Bed Bath & Beyond there now.

Some teachers asked their kids a simple question: How did they feel? A few said they just wanted to be in clean, safe neighborhoods. Some said they were still sad, or still angry, or just trying to hold on to King’s message of nonviolence. Some hated the looting; some defended it. The answer that sticks with me is from one student who didn’t care about any of that. They wrote, “Right now I would like to forget about Black Power, soul, and all the burning of stores. I would like to forget about 14th Street.”

***

Journalist: Late last night, Washington’s deputy mayor, Thomas Fletcher, said that the city was so quiet that it's eerie, like a science-fiction movie. This morning, too, is quiet, sunny, cool. The jonquils blooming, a fresh breeze scattering the blossoms of cherry and mock orange and dogwood. But unlike other crisp spring mornings, soldiers are walking post up and down the avenues and streets, walking in pairs along F. One walks alone at the intersection of 14th and Pennsylvania Avenue. But there are 24 soldiers to the block …

Newkirk: In Black D.C., April 7 felt like a time for forgetting, if just for a moment. People were cleaning up shops and homes, sweeping glass and bricks and charred wood from the streets. Church bells rang as people walked to services to lay down their branches for Palm Sunday.

Journalist: Normally, this would be a special day for churchgoing, Palm Sunday. Today, there was another reason: a national day of mourning for Martin Luther King.

Newkirk: Some of the shoes that crunched on sidewalks were nicer than usual. There were brand-new stockings with no runs, dresses and sweaters that fit, with no patches. If you squinted and ignored the soldiers, maybe you could believe this was just like any other holiday. But in pretty much every church in America that Sunday, the sermons were a little different.

Preacher 1: Oh, Heavenly Father, be mindful of the soul of Dr. Martin Luther King, who sacrificed his life for the sanctification of thy holy name.

Preacher 2: Martin Luther King’s death deprives America of one of its outstanding spiritual leaders.

Preacher 3: Are we satisfied to pass along the poverty as we go along our palm march? Or do we want to march down the road of prosperity for all men?

Ralph David Abernathy: They thought that they could kill our movement by killing you, Martin. But, Martin, I want you to know that Black people love you.

Newkirk: In Atlanta, at West Hunter Street Baptist Church, Reverend Ralph David Abernathy gave a sermon directly addressed to his old friend. But it was also aimed at what was going on in places like D.C. He tried to reconcile what had happened on the streets with the nonviolent philosophy he still believed in.

Abernathy: It may seem that they are denying our nonviolence. But they are acting out their frustration. Poor people have had a hard time during these difficult days.

Newkirk: Palm Sunday in the church is supposed to symbolize the ultimate victory of Jesus over the material world, and to foreshadow his role as the spiritual conqueror of sin. In his sermon, Abernathy recast King as redeemer—conqueror of the sin of racism.

Abernathy: What we know, Martin, because we love people, is that after the bidding of frustration, there will be the need for reconciliation.

Crowd: Mm, hmm.

Abernathy: There you will be invisible, but real. Black and white will need you to take them from their shame and reconcile them into you and onto our master, Jesus Christ.

Newkirk: If there would be any reconciliation in D.C., its time was due. It wouldn’t just be a reconciliation between Black and white, but between two visions of what the city was. D.C. was supposed to be a model city for its thriving Black middle class. It was a city that was geographically in the South but seemed to rise above Jim Crow. There were Black doctors and Black lawyers and even a Black mayor (even though he wasn’t elected). For many Black people, life in D.C. had seemed like a safe haven, a bubble. But now, just like the kids in Cardozo schools, people in D.C. were forced to wake up from their dreams.

***

Newkirk: Part 6: “Kingdom.”

***

Roland Smith: My father, my grandfather, and my great-grandfather were born in the district. Actually, I’m a fourth-generation Washingtonian.

Newkirk: Wow. Fourth generation. I don’t meet a whole lot of those.

Smith: Yeah. It’s rare.

Newkirk: What neighborhood?

Smith: Well, we started off in northeast—far northeast—and then northwest. I went to Calvin Coolidge High School.

Newkirk: When I talk to old-school Washingtonians, they have a way of talking about “old D.C.,” before the riots, about what was lost in the fires. Roland Smith was born in D.C., and his family roots there go way back. Family legend has it that they moved to the city from a plantation in northern Virginia, but nobody really knows. The point is, Roland is D.C.

Smith: I think about D.C. back then as a sleepy southern town.

Newkirk: He’s got classic memories of just riding around D.C. on his bike as a kid. It’s never been a really big city, but it felt smaller then. There were no blocks dedicated to lobbyist offices, fewer condos, less traffic. Outside of government buildings, most of the town was residential. Roland was born in one of the first public-housing developments for Black people in all of Washington.

Smith: And that was at a public-housing unit, Langston Terrace Dwellings in northeast D.C., right on Benning Road.

Newkirk: Roland’s family was built on a foundation of civil service that was really only possible in D.C. His grandfather was a messenger on Capitol Hill who also tended bar sometimes for Hill staff. Roland’s mother was a government secretary. His father served in World War II, and as a disabled veteran, worked three jobs to save up enough money to buy a house.

Smith: It was a big deal in our family because not very—most of our family rented their houses or rented their apartments. They didn’t own.

Newkirk: For the family, it was a step up into a life they’d always dreamed of. The house became a way station for family members from all different sorts of situations. It was the kind of pathway that lots of Black families with deep roots wanted to follow. Taquiena Boston’s family was one of those.

Taquiena Boston: My mother grew up in southwest, which they refer to as “Old Southwest.” That was a neighborhood where people were in and out of each other’s houses. Your door was kept unlocked.

Newkirk: Like Roland, Taquiena also grew up in northeast, in apartments in Brentwood. Her family didn’t really have money. Her dad drove trash trucks. But still, her parents had plans for their kids. Taquiena’s mom took her and her younger sister to go get library cards as soon as they could read. They learned nursery rhymes. They read The Wizard of Oz.

Boston: My dad brought home some Encyclopedia Britannicas that were going to be discarded. They all had the front covers taken off, but he brought them home for me to have a set of encyclopedias.

Newkirk: Taquiena’s family didn’t live too far from the H Street Corridor, where Vanessa Lawson and her brother Vincent were born, the area where they started their first hustles raking leaves and carrying groceries.

Vanessa Dixon: Oh, my God. It was wonderful. I wish I could have raised my kids or my grandkids—they could have been raised in a neighborhood like I was. Everybody knew everybody’s name. Everybody knew everybody’s business. Everybody watched each other’s kids.

Newkirk: Vanessa can remember the details like it was yesterday. Before her parents split, they lived off H Street. They were behind the strip of Black businesses and shops. There were neat rows of breadbox houses with green lawns. Everybody went and worshiped together on Sundays, in a church right on the block.

Dixon: They had a basket full of musical instruments and you could grab what you wanted when you came in the church. And you knew, though, when you went in there, what was expected of you. Okay? So no horseplaying and none of that kind of stuff. And I got to say, everybody respected that little church.

Newkirk: You are painting such an amazing picture of life. I feel like I can put it all in my head right now. I feel like I’m there.

Dixon: I get chills talking to you every time I do. It’s just so surreal, you know? It was a good place, a good time in my life.

Newkirk: Vanessa’s parents came up from rural Virginia before she was born. They left behind a state where poll taxes were still used to keep Black folks from voting. They were drawn towards a city where Black theaters played Black movies on U Street; where families like Roland Smith’s could own houses in neighborhoods full of other Black homeowners; where maybe, just maybe, they could have the lives America promised its citizens. They were part of a wave of Black people that also included the parents of Theophus Brooks. His folks arrived in D.C. from North Carolina, before he was born.

Theophus Brooks: My mother’s from Goldsboro.

Newkirk: Goldsboro!

Brooks: My father’s from Hertford.

Newkirk: Oh yeah. I’m from North Carolina.

Brooks: Yeah, yeah. I got a lot of my cousins down there. Matter of fact, my uncle, my father’s brother, had 10 girls, no boys—10!

Newkirk: For Theophus, North Carolina might as well have been a world away. He lived in Cardozo, the Black enclave within the Black metropolis.

Newkirk: What was the city like back then?

Brooks: Oh, man, it was great. They had respectful families. You can almost leave your doors open because your neighbors could knock on the door and come on in. You know, a lot of kids ate breakfast and dinner at my house. I went over to their house. We respect everybody’s parents.

The ’60s to me, it was the best time because, in D.C., we didn’t have no racial problems. Never heard anybody call me a [N-word] because you didn’t have that in D.C.

Newkirk: It was all Black folks.

Brooks: Yeah, it was mostly Black.

Newkirk: With Theophus, it’s the same story as Roland and Taquiena and Vanessa. It’s like they’re describing a Black fairy tale. And in all of those tales, you don’t hear much about the bogeyman of Jim Crow.

Brooks: We livin’ in D.C.; we had all the rights. I mean, we didn’t think about being treated nasty because, you know, when you in this environment, you don’t think about that. I’m 73 and I’ve been in D.C. all my life. I never experienced racism in D.C.

Boston: My mother said she’d never, never have grown up feeling bad about being Black. She felt worse about being what she called “low-class.” Of course, they didn’t live around white people, right. So maybe that was why.

Roland Smith: I think that we were kind of insulated to some extent from some of that, early on.

Newkirk: For Theophus Brooks, Roland Smith, Taquiena Boston, and Vanessa Lawson, this was D.C., Black D.C. It’s what so many parents and grandparents had come to the city for, what people were still taking trains and buses to the city for: a safe haven.

Still, when the March on Washington came to town in 1963, a lot of Black Washingtonians were interested in what the speakers had to say about integration, jobs, and freedom. Roland Smith was a teenager then. He wanted to go, but his mother was afraid there would be violence. He snuck out anyways.

Roland Smith: I went to the March on Washington. So I was there. I was there listening to the stories of the marchers and what they had sacrificed to get there.

It was surreal. There were a lot of people, but there wasn’t a lot of noise. There was a reverence about the whole process. It seems to me there was some singing, and I just remember that this was something special. But I didn’t fully understand the implications.

Newkirk: You didn’t have a sense of sort of being in this historical moment?

Smith: Yeah, I think I did. I felt that more as we saw the news, you know, kind of post-march and how it was treated. And I was thinking I was just glad I was there. It was hot, though. It was. [Laughs.] It was a very hot Washington summer day. [Laughs.]

Newkirk II: When did your mother find out you were gone?

Smith: When I got home [Laughs.] later that evening. [Laughs.]

Newkirk: About 10 percent of the marchers in ’63 were native Washingtonians like Roland. It was a moment of pride for them—hosting, supporting, and marching. But for many residents, especially younger people, the march also helped highlight the truth about the D.C. fairy tale—the apparent freedom and prosperity they had, had limits.

March on Washington speaker: Brother John Lewis. [Applause.]

Newkirk: At the march, civil-rights hero John Lewis stepped up to the podium and started talking about voter disenfranchisement.

John Lewis: One man, one vote. It is the democratic cry. It is ours too. It must be ours. [Applause.]

Newkirk: One man, one vote. He was talking about the Deep South. But he was also speaking in a majority-Black city that didn’t even elect its own leaders and had no representation in Congress. There was no home rule. D.C. was controlled by a committee in the House that was full of segregationists. Washingtonians had just barely gotten the right to vote for president. For Roland and some others like him, the contradiction was glaring. How could D.C. be the Black metropolis if Black people couldn’t even govern themselves?

Roland Smith: You know, you think about things like the March on Washington and the role that that played with all the people descending upon the district. And I think, one of the issues for the district was not being able to vote. So, that was, home rule, was a big issue. And so I think that fomented some of the discontent.

Newkirk: As they grew into adolescence, Roland, Taquiena, Vanessa, and Theophus saw these contradictions more clearly. They were born in a city that had once been tightly segregated, but while they were all still kids, white folks started leaving by the thousands. They took their tax dollars and resources with them. The money moved to suburbs in Virginia and Maryland, where Black kids from D.C. were most definitely not welcome.

Taquiena Boston saw her mother’s old neighborhood paved over, by “urban renewal.”

Theophus Brooks learned to stay away from certain parts of Maryland.

For Black families like Vanessa’s, it became easier to fall down the ladder than to climb. When her parents got divorced and the kids had to move with their mother to the projects, her brother Vincent was angry about the changes.

Vanessa Dixon: My uncles and stuff came, and they packed us up and we moved. And when we got to where it was, my brother said, “All these places look alike. How are we going to know which house is ours?” kind of thing, you know. And he was the smart one. And the thing is, when we got over there and moved in, once he started learning the reality of this move, and that our new residence is in the projects—you know, the family decline—it’s like, he blamed it on my dad. So he was mad at him for most of the time after that.

Newkirk: The Lawson family found out that the paradise of Black D.C. was more of a limbo. The Black middle class was still thriving and glamorous but grew more distant from working-class spaces. The rise of television made it impossible to miss what was happening in the Deep South, and for some young Black Washingtonians, it started to shine a light on continued segregation in their own city. But the intense poverty of the ghettos was more like what was happening up north. Roland Smith says watching the riots there, in ’66 and ’67, was like holding up a mirror.

Roland Smith: Hearing about the unrest and the riots and the things going on in the South, and even in Detroit, I mean, you think about all those things that were going on back in the ’60s—early ’60s—and those were all kind of swirling in the mindset of folks.

Newkirk: What’s your family think about those? I had a big argument over the last weekend with some people who were more “don’t rock the boat” versus people who were behind it.

Smith: Oh, yeah. We had that. I mean, there was a lot of that. And I think that the divide actually started to break along generational lines.

Newkirk: D.C.’s ghettoes never did join northern cities in riots in the mid-’60s. It’s possible that the old mystique of the Black middle class and the magic of the fairy tale kept the city in place, kept hope in place, even in the teeth of poverty. That’s why King chose the city when he announced his Poor People’s Campaign. It had been planned to kick off in late April of 1968.

Reporter: There are large Negro neighborhoods here in Washington, like any major city. In fact, this is the only major city in the nation with a Negro majority, and it has a Negro mayor. There are four sections, and there are Negro middle-class sections. Washington, in many senses, is the middle-class Negro capital of the world.

Newkirk: The idea was to use the vibrant, Black-middle-class institutions as an organizing base for highlighting poverty on the doorstep of the nation’s capital. To do that nonviolently, King and the SCLC had wanted to harness whatever spirit of reconciliation had kept the city together.

But as the church bells rang after Palm Sunday services, the world began to spin again. Parishioners went back to ghettos, business districts, middle-class neighborhoods that had been burned. The fairy tale was over.

***

Newkirk: Just after the assassination, John Burl Smith had been crushed. He and other leaders of the Memphis Invaders had tried to bring Black Power organizing to the sanitation workers’ strike. They clashed with the establishment civil-rights leaders, but after he and his co-leader, Charles Cabbage, met with King in his motel room, they walked away thinking that Martin Luther King had taken them seriously. John believed it was the beginning of something special.

John Burl Smith: When we left the room, Charles and I was feeling really great, man. We had just become a part of the coalition of the No. 1 Black leader in the country, you know? That to me was as good as it gets. And when we get home, and the announcement that he’s been assassinated, it’s like everything’s fallen apart.

Newkirk: The Invaders’ last interaction with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference had been back at the demonstration on March 28, which turned into a riot. King had called the meeting partly to get the Invaders under his chain of command. And he let the media know that he would be working with them.

Reporter: One of the ironies that Dr. King was killed here, is that his last few days were spent trying to negotiate with the militants in Memphis and elsewhere, hoping to find some agreement, some way that they could all work together …

Newkirk: But other people in the SCLC had not endorsed that plan. They didn’t like or trust the Invaders. John says that he had gone into hiding because he thought SCLC members believed he might have been working to set King up.

Burl Smith: There were actually people in SCLC—I’m not going to give any names, but they spent, oh, the next month or some saying that we were a part of the assassination, that we had set Dr. King up to getting him down to the Lorraine.

Newkirk: John didn’t trust the SCLC, either. He thought for sure that they would just hang the sanitation workers out to dry, or would force them to settle with Memphis Mayor Henry Loeb.

Burl Smith: Oh, I figured that Loeb would probably win and that the strike was probably over, because the people left in charge were not people committed to the workers.

Newkirk: In his final address, the “Mountaintop” speech, King had promised to come back to lead another march in Memphis. It was a firm commitment that his involvement in the strike wouldn’t just be a cameo or a detour, but a central piece of his growing Poor People’s Campaign. John didn’t believe the new SCLC leader, Ralph David Abernathy, or King’s widow, Coretta Scott King, would keep that promise. But then he heard the SCLC announce that they were coming back to Memphis.

Ralph David Abernathy: We will conduct our march in support of the sanitation workers here in Memphis as scheduled on Monday, April the 8th. It will be a silent march in his memory. We will resume work on his Poor People’s Campaign in Washington in the hopes that this nation and its Congress will legislate the necessary economic reforms to put an end to poverty in this nation.

Newkirk: Like always, the organizers relied on local groups and volunteers to be marshals for the march, to move people along and keep order. The marshals would be especially important this go-around, after the disaster of the last march. John says, the SCLC didn’t reach out to the Invaders for this role, but he and his friends showed up anyways.

Burl Smith: Nobody ever reached out to us and said, We would like you to do this. Be there. But because of our promise to Dr. King, we did what we promised, which was to be marshals.

Newkirk: The hope was that the shock of King’s death would push the Memphis mayor to give in quickly. But that morning, the marchers got bad news.

Art McAloon (journalist): At the center of today’s parade and last week’s tragic events: the garbage workers’ strike. They broke off negotiations at 6 o’clock this morning with no settlement in sight. The demonstration was quiet …

Newkirk: Still, even though the sanitation workers were no closer to getting a deal, the march was important. Civil-rights organizations could keep public pressure on Mayor Loeb and could use the national spotlight on Memphis after the assassination to really bring the heat. And now, the people marching weren’t just Memphians and civil-rights activists. Thousands of people flew in from around the country to take part.

Percy Sutton (public figure): I’m absolutely fascinated by the size of the crowd. I didn’t expect a crowd this large in Memphis. Are most of these people from Memphis, or have many of them come from other parts of the country?

Robert Richards (journalist): I understand, sir, that about 6,000 have come from out of town.

Sutton: I think that’s beautiful. I think it shows the feeling throughout the country of the need for unity and accomplishment. I’m very happy to see this.

Newkirk: The marchers set out. Ralph David Abernathy and Coretta Scott King led, with three of her children walking alongside her and Harry Belafonte.

Art McAloon: It’s a gray, overcast day here in Memphis, as thousands of the city’s Negroes gather to march in the interrupted sanitation men’s demonstration. At the head of the line, with Mrs. Martin Luther King, will be Reverend Ralph Abernathy, Dr. King’s successor. Between the two, there will be an empty space, symbolizing the absence of Dr. King. March officials estimate as many as 40,000 …

Newkirk: They wore sharp suits and hats and overcoats in the cold rain. They moved quietly down the street, no chants or slogans or singing. The march was supposed to be a rejection of the riots gripping over 100 cities. It was also supposed to be a repudiation of the last march in Memphis, where John’s group had played a role in the chaos. But here he was, serving as a marshal, guiding the march and keeping it together.

John Burl Smith: We did what we could to keep the march moving and orderly and that kind of thing. But—

Newkirk: So you felt like you were upholding the promise?

Burl Smith: Yes.

Newkirk: Did anybody look at you sideways for showing up?

Burl Smith: No, no. I think most people understood. And they were—I mean, the Invaders were supported very well in Memphis. Young people were, felt, very heroic in terms of the invaders.

Newkirk: Journalists followed the entire march, pulling aside people and asking them questions with somewhat obvious answers.

Reporter: Did it have any personal meaning to you?

Man: Did it have a personal feeling to me? Sure. I always have a personal feeling, because I am a Negro. It is something maybe you don’t understand by being white.

Newkirk: Watching the footage of the march, there aren’t really a whole lot of white participants. But the Black people who showed up didn’t care. This march was for them, by them.

Reporter: Were you disappointed at the fact that the turnout of the white community was relatively small? I didn’t see too many whites marching.

Woman: Today, no, not really. I wasn’t disappointed at all. Because that’s something, here in Memphis that is not a disappointment to us.

Reporter: You didn’t expect it?

Woman: I guess not.

Newkirk: The march stopped in front of the pavilion by city hall. Then the leaders got up to speak. Ralph David Abernathy was the new leader and face of the SCLC, but he wasn’t the main draw this Monday morning.

Corretta Scott King: I was impelled to come.

Newkirk: Coretta Scott King had actually been criticized for deciding to come to the march. For deciding to be in the movement, instead of publicly grieving and caring for her children.

Scott King: Three of our four children are here today, and they came because they wanted to come too. [Applause.] And I want you to know that in spite of the times that he had to be away, his family, his children knew their daddy loved them, and the time that he spent with them was well spent.

Newkirk: Coretta Scott King came to clearly repeat King’s demands. They weren’t just the civil-rights laws that had already been passed or the new housing bill that President Johnson was rushing to pass. King was calling for transformation, for real economic change for workers and the poor.

Scott King: Every man deserves a right to a job or an income so that he can pursue liberty, life, and happiness. [Applause.] Our great nation, as he often said, has the resources. But his question was: Do we have the will? [Applause.]

Newkirk: Just like Abernathy did on Palm Sunday, Coretta Scott King tied her husband’s life, death, and legacy to the celebration of Holy Week. He might not be resurrected in flesh, but her hope was that she could call on America to revive the policy he’d fought for.

Scott King: Somehow I hope in this resurrection experience, the will will be created within the hearts and minds, and the souls and spirits, of those who have the power to make these changes come about. [Applause.]

Newkirk: The march ended without any drama. Marshals like John Burl Smith guided people off the streets, and Abernathy and the King family traveled back to Atlanta to prepare for the funeral. Riots in many cities still blazed. But it all felt like one phase of grief had transitioned to another. It was time to reckon with how the assassination and the riots had changed Black America, how they had changed all of America. John was left wondering what might have been.

John Burl Smith: Had he been able to do what he was planning to do, we would be looking at a different America.

Newkirk: To John, that new America would have been achieved by bridging the gap between nonviolence and self-defense, between the old guard and the militants. Perhaps in the silent march, as Invaders walked in their military jackets beside the SCLC in their suits, he saw a glimmer of it.

Burl Smith: Black Power would have been able to show that we could work with Dr. King, we could work with nonviolence, and we could actually be nonviolent, but we were definitely not going to be submissive and passive.

Newkirk: John never got to see that America. Nobody did. The next day, the nation would lay King to rest. All the talk in the movement and in Washington was of how they would keep his dream alive, how they could still overcome. But John worried that the dream might be buried with the man.

Taquiena Boston

a 13-year-old from Washington, D.C., receives a diary from her mother for Christmas in 1967. She begins journaling about her life, and includes her observations about King’s assassination and the days that followed.

Roland Smith

a 22-year-old student at Bowie State, in Maryland, is arrested the day of King’s assassination while leading student protesters at the Maryland capitol.

John Burl Smith

One day before King’s funeral, on April 8, John Burl Smith serves as a marshal for a silent march held in King’s memory in Memphis, Tennessee.

Stokely Carmichael: For us, the real funeral for Dr. King, the funeral pyre, was the burning of the fires of the cities—the teeming anger of the people. And I remember, while driving from Washington, D.C., to Atlanta, I saw smoke for the entire trip in the car. They were, everywhere, putting Dr. King to rest, giving his proper burial. When I arrived in Atlanta for the funeral, for all practical purposes, it was anticlimactic. I’d already seen the funeral from Washington to Atlanta.

***

Vann R. Newkirk II: Tuesday, April 9, 1968.

Five days after King was killed, Stokely Carmichael looked on as he was laid to rest. The services were held at the church King pastored with his father, Ebenezer Baptist, in Atlanta. A crowd of people swelled outside the church as far as the eye could see—over 100,000 people, one of the largest funerals for a private citizen in American history. They were all dressed up in their Sunday finest: kids in patent-leather shoes and vests, white ribbons in the girls’ hair. Dignitaries pulled up in black cars and snaked through the crowd. There’s George Romney, Bobby Kennedy, Richard Nixon, Mahalia Jackson, Harry Belafonte, Sammy Davis Jr., Thurgood Marshall. The vice president, Hubert Humphrey, showed up. It seemed like all the leaders in America were there, except President Johnson.

Joseph Califano: There’s a whole history of that. I mean, Nixon’s people calling and saying, you know, you could take Nixon and Bobby Kennedy together with you and Humphrey and take them all down. And it would show that the country is together.

Newkirk: Johnson’s top domestic adviser, Joe Califano, his right-hand man, says that plan didn’t work out for the president. Johnson had been on the outs with King and the SCLC before the assassination, and he heard (through the FBI’s COINTELPRO sources) that King’s people were planning to snub him.

Califano: Johnson didn’t want to do it. First of all, he had the Secret Service going crazy about the possibility that he would do it. But secondly, he just didn’t think anything would come of it. It wouldn’t help, and it could hurt him, so he sent Humphrey.

Newkirk: President Johnson and his staff watched the funeral the same way millions of Americans did: on TV.

Ralph David Abernathy: I am the resurrection and the life, saith the lord.

Newkirk: Watching the news footage, inside the church, as big as it is, it looks packed. Coretta Scott King is wearing a black veil. She and her children file in. She’s being held steady by her brother-in-law, Reverend A. D. King, but he doesn’t look too steady himself. Standing in the pulpit is Ralph David Abernathy.

Ralph David Abernathy: … in one of the darkest hours in the history of all mankind.

Juandalynn Abernathy: My father actually eulogized him. It was very difficult—very, very difficult.

Ralph David Abernathy: … a 20th-century prophet …

Newkirk: Juandalynn Abernathy was sitting in the pews with her sister and her mother. She and all the other kids were dressed in white. She was devastated. Her Uncle Martin was gone. And she was watching her father try to hold up an unimaginable burden.

Juandalynn Abernathy: But to see Daddy have to—his tears, you know—it was just, oh, for us … oh, it was horrible.

Ralph David Abernathy: Lift his voice and cry out to the pharaoh to let my people go.

Newkirk: After verses and hymns and eulogies, King’s pallbearers loaded his casket onto a cart. As Jesus had entered Jerusalem on a donkey, in peace, King toured his city one last time, drawn by mules. The procession went downtown, then to Morehouse College, his alma mater. Thousands of people followed on foot the whole four miles. At the college, his close mentor, former Morehouse president Benjamin Elijah Mays, delivered another eulogy.

Benjamin Elijah Mays: Make no mistake, the American people are, in part, responsible for Martin Luther King’s death. The assassin heard enough condemnation of King and Negroes to feel that he had public support.

Newkirk: From Ebenezer through the last tour of Atlanta, the ceremony lasted seven and a half hours. Outside Atlanta, lots of people tuned in to the whole thing. They listened on car radios. Families gathered on couches. People set up TVs outside in the projects.

In Brentwood, in northeast D.C., Taquiena Boston captured the event in her diary.

Taquiena Boston: For the first time, I cried because of the loss of Reverend King. When I think of him, I realize how wrong I was. All I’ve ever wanted is glory for myself.

Newkirk: She said it was time for the country to make a change. She was 13. In the Cardozo neighborhood in D.C., Theophus Brooks and his family watched too.

Theophus Brooks: We had a black-and-white TV. Everybody sit around it, quiet. Nobody—Oh, you think this?—No. Ain’t no discussion. Just quiet.

My mother and father didn’t discuss it. It would just be quiet, and we’d look at it. And the more we look at it, the more we realize this is terrible. You know, this is terrible. It’s terrible.

Newkirk: John Burl Smith, down in Memphis, had just finished working as a marshal in the silent march to commemorate King, and felt like he had kept his promise.

Newkirk: Did you watch King’s funeral?

John Burl Smith: No, I didn’t. I had an image of him that I don’t think anybody else had. I know what he went through and said during his last hours of life. That was my reasoning and justification.

Ralph David Abernathy: No crypt, no vault, no stone can hold his greatness, but we commit his body to the ground.

Newkirk: The funeral lasted until the evening. Even that night, National Guardsmen and Army troops still patrolled several cities and enforced curfews. But it was five days after King’s assassination. The riots were becoming old news. Some Americans were even ready to move past  all the coverage about uprisings. After all, the Oscars were coming on TV later that week. But there was still one last struggle taking place: a struggle to make meaning of this thing, of the freedom movement and King’s life and what came after. Black America and white America were battling to define and claim whatever might be called the “soul of the nation.” Or maybe they were realizing that soul had departed.

***

Newkirk: Part 7: “Covenant.”

***

Newkirk: Later that night …

Broadcaster: Live and direct from Atlanta, Georgia…

Newkirk: Public radio stations in Atlanta, New York, and Boston started a simultaneous broadcast of a call-in show.

Broadcaster: … and New York City, with listener participation by telephone from around the nation. You’re listening to the first national “Dial in for Nonviolence.”

Newkirk: “Dial in for Nonviolence.” It started up after the funeral as a place where normal people could just vent, or even chat with some movement leaders—all spontaneously, on the fly.

Broadcaster: All you need to do is place a collect call to area code 212, calling number 749-3311 from anywhere in the United States.

Host: How do you do, miss? We’d like to hear what you have to say.

Female caller: Dr. Martin Luther King was a wonderful person. I am against violence, but it’s hard to live without it when there is prejudice around you in employment and etcetera.

Male caller: I would like to voice an opinion, if I may.

Host: Surely.

Male caller: This country is at a point of grave crisis, which will, I believe and regret, be resolved through violence.

Host: Well, my friend, you see, if there isn’t an alternative to violence—and in this case a kind of genocide—then I think that we’re a very unimaginative people. Dr. King offered us one possible way.

Male caller: Precisely. But he’s been offering this solution for almost 15 years, and …

Host: Well—

Male caller: … the accomplishments are minimal compared to the time that he’s been, you know, the literal time that he’s been operating.

Host: Well, well …

Newkirk: There was an anxiety underlying all the talk. Everyone was just trying to figure out what to do, how to live in a world that was changing under their feet. They discussed what policy might best continue King’s work.

Broadcaster: If everything in the Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders report was acted on, we would come so near to accomplishing all of the goals that Martin Luther King worked and died for—that so many other people worked and died for and sacrificed for. It’s all laid out in very simple form.

Newkirk: But by the time of the radio show, the path that the Kerner Commission recommended was basically closed. The day after the assassination, President Johnson had promised civil-rights leaders that he would press Congress for a major bill to transform Black America. By the time of the funeral, the White House had quietly dropped any such promise. But there was a civil-rights bill that addressed housing discrimination that was already on the Hill. It had already been drafted and considered in the Senate but stalled in the House without a vote scheduled. The White House decided maybe they could use the momentum after the assassination to get it through. It would be a big deal. But for lots of people, it wouldn’t be big enough.

Broadcaster: Now, this bill deals with the problem of open housing primarily, and this is an area in which there is undoubtedly a great deal of resistance. And so if you’ve got a new law and a mandate from Congress, it seems that you can get a little more action.

Broadcaster 2: The House Rules Committee has got it out for a vote tomorrow.

Broadcaster 3: But the people of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, their comments are that it was just tokenism.

Broadcaster 2: Well it’s tokenism for us but …

Newkirk: The call-ins lasted for hours into the night. It all seemed like part of the process of grief after the funeral, like a nightcap or a long talk with friends after the repast.

***

Newkirk: That same night, the White House was up late too. President Johnson had directed Joe Califano and his staff to focus on getting fair housing done.

Califano: I urged him to put out an executive order and he said no. He said it’ll be repealed by the next president. It’s too unpopular. We’ve got to get it passed.

Newkirk: After the White House watched the funeral, they called and checked in with members of Congress, hoping to see who would vote for what. They monitored TV and radio reports of the riots that were continuing in several cities. They also kept up with reports of retaliation by white citizens.

Reporter: White Night Riders cruised through Jacksonville last night in the midst of fire bombings and rock throwing and gunned down an 18-year-old Negro youth as he sat on his bicycle. The youth was dead on arrival at Baptist Hospital with a bullet wound in his head.

Newkirk: The reports were significant. They were evidence that white backlash to the riots was solidifying, and that public opinion was largely moving against Black uprisings, and any civil-rights policy. When it came to housing, white people who otherwise supported voting rights and civil rights could become hostile, quickly. And now, with many of them being told to arm themselves to ward off Black rioters, the situation was even worse.

Califano: The public sentiment in the context of the majority of the American people was certainly not to have fair housing.

Newkirk: People had been trying to end discrimination in housing for years. King had tried to force Johnson to pass fair housing by staging demonstrations in segregated neighborhoods in Chicago in 1966. People wore swastikas to march against him, and threw rocks and bricks. He said it was even worse than being sprayed by water hoses or attacked by dogs in the Deep South. The backlash in Chicago had been so bad that some White House staff thought housing might be a dead letter.

Califano: If we could have picked our choice, we would not have urged King to go to Chicago. We would have tried to get the bill passed and then go somewhere.

Newkirk: In ’66, a housing bill did make it to Congress, but it was killed in the Senate. Another bill stalled in ’67, and then again in early 1968. But then, just a month before the assassination, Johnson had a breakthrough. In the Senate, Everett Dirksen, the Republican leader from Illinois, had always opposed the plan. But Dirksen was dying from cancer.

Larry Levinson: Johnson called him and said, “Look, you helped me before on voting. I really need your help on housing.”

Newkirk: According to Larry Levinson, Johnson’s deputy counsel, the president thought there was a play there.

Levinson: “And I know you’re not feeling too well. And if you want to go to Walter Reed for a day or two to take some rest and get some medical attention, I’ll make sure that happens, but I really need to get your help on this.”

Newkirk: Dirksen had been hesitant. Some of Dirksen’s constituents were the same white suburbanites who had run King out of town in Illinois for wanting fair housing. But Johnson worked out a compromise.

Califano: He knew people in Congress, knew their strengths and weaknesses, and he used everything he knew.

Newkirk: The bill would exempt single-family houses sold directly by the family, which would make the bill less effective at stopping discrimination but maybe more palatable for white voters.

Levinson: They called it the Dirksen amendment.

Reporter: The bill contains the first comprehensive federal open-housing law of our century, unless the owner sells without a real-estate agent, or in small, owner-occupied boarding houses.

Newkirk: Dirksen finally agreed to get the bill through the Senate. Still, even with Dirksen and the Senate on board, and even with the bill weaker than before, the House Rules Committee would not bring it to a vote.

But after the assassination, Johnson was energized. He loved having the opportunity to be able to bully congressmen one more time, or persuade them over scotch and soda.

Califano: Johnson was really very good at taking a crisis and using it.

Newkirk: On April 5, the day Johnson had made big promises about finding money for a new social program, he also told the speaker of the House to pass fair housing.

Levinson: Johnson was saying, look, we need to focus our attention on the House and the House members and on the Rules Committee.

Newkirk: They needed to get more support for the bill, and they needed to do it quickly. Conservatives were already lining up to defeat the legislation.

Reporter: The opposition’s strategy was to convince House members that the times are too tense to make a level judgment on a civil-rights bill. And speaker after speaker cited riots in the streets, cities still smoldering, troops on the Capitol plaza.

Newkirk: And white voters were sending letters and even coming to D.C. to protest the bill.

Journalist: Their vehicles, buses, and Jeeps are parked outside the central plaza steps. If this was not testament enough to the racial turmoil in this city and in the nation, the letters have flooded into congressional offices. A majority of these letters are complaints, what one member calls backlash by zip code.

Newkirk: The White House and allies in Congress made another compromise to get more support from conservatives. They decided to add an anti-riot provision. It was nicknamed after the SNCC leader H. Rap Brown.

Journalist: The bill tries to control riots by making it a federal crime to travel across state lines or use radio or telephone across state lines to incite a riot or to make or sell firearms or explosives to use in a riot.

Newkirk: The compromises were enough to move some people. Richard Nixon endorsed fair housing after opposing it for years. Nixon’s support helped give some Republicans in Congress the green light. President Johnson’s bullying, begging, and charming did the rest. The day before the funeral, he picked up a vote from a Democratic congressman in Texas by promising a million-dollar grant for housing in his district. And then, the night of the funeral, the White House finally got the last committee vote.

Levinson: And there was a congressman named John Anderson who said, “You know, I’m going for the fair-housing bill, and I think we can get this bill out of the Rules Committee.”

Newkirk: The White House celebrated. The next day, the Fair Housing Act would finally pass in Congress, and fulfill some version of Johnson’s promise to get something done. On the streets, the mood wasn’t exactly celebratory. Almost a week after King was killed, Baltimore and Chicago were still raging. And in places like D.C., where the unrest was dying down, the aftermath was becoming clear.

Brooks: It was ashes—like somebody took an atomic bomb and blew it up.

Newkirk: Theophus Brooks walked through D.C. streets that were still choked with debris, smoke, and lingering tear gas.

Brooks: With all the excitement, the next week was like a graveyard. It was calm.

Newkirk: Not too far away from Cardozo, Howard University student Tony Gittens was surveying the damage. He’d been out there the night the riot started. He’d understood the rage that moved people. Still, it was hard to see.

Recently, I walked with him down 14th Street and he tried to tell me just how it all looked in ’68.

Tony Gittens: Some places were still smoldering. Things were burned down, torn down. There was no place to to live then. I mean, it was uninhabitable. You would have felt as though you were in World War II, going into some place that had been bombed and where a war had taken place. They tore it up.

Newkirk: At Howard, finals were coming. Tony was due to graduate. He and the rest of his class were getting ready to move out, to move on. But they were still angry.

Gittens: But collectively, we had a sense that it was the country doing that, killing him. I was surprised and pissed off. And we’re so, How the fuck?—I mean, I’m sorry. [Laughs.]

They do that, to this man? He was their guy, you know. He said, “No, no, no. Don’t get too violent,” and that they killed him was incredible. It was just incredible that that would happen.

Newkirk: Looking at the businesses in D.C. that had been burned down, Frank Smith was worried. He’d only been in D.C. for a little while, after working in the South with SNCC for so long. But this was his home now, and he knew life would be hard for the people he was trying to organize. Grocery stores were gone, other essential establishments too. And lots of the people who owned them looked like they were leaving the city for good.

Frank Smith: There was nothing to eat in most of the neighborhoods. The food stores were all gone. And these people were saying they weren’t coming back. They just said, “We’ve had enough of that. There’s not enough ‘there’ to come back to in the first place. And secondly, it’s dangerous. So we’re not coming back.”

Newkirk: He was watching the beginning of the most aggressive era of white flight in urban America.

Frank Smith: Everybody who had two nickels to rub together left D.C. White people moved out to the suburbs, and D.C. became mostly Black. So now it was in rubbles and shambles and had to be put back together, and that happened in many of the major cities.

Newkirk: The riots had come and gone. Like so many Black commentators had predicted, the dynamite of the ghettoes had finally and fully exploded. For some folks like Stokely Carmichael, the fires of uprisings would lead to a Black phoenix of liberation. But when Frank looked out at the streets, all he saw was devastation. All he saw were ashes.

***

Newkirk: How did things wind down?

Robert Birt: The military. [Laughs.]

Newkirk: On April 11, exactly a week after King was killed, the Holy Week uprising in Baltimore was over. Over 100 cities total had gone up. In all, across the country, there were 43 recorded deaths, and over 20,000 arrests. One-fifth of those arrests had been in Baltimore. Maryland crushed the riots with overwhelming force, sending as many as 11,000 troops into the streets. Robert Birt watched the crackdown from the Latrobe housing projects in East Baltimore.

Birt: [Laughs.] Sooner or later, I mean, there is no such thing as battling the military with Molotov cocktails and bricks. It's not real. The National Guard and some parts of the Army came into the city, and gradually, they reestablished control of the city.

Newkirk: Before the city went up, Governor Agnew had been happy to play the moderate. He’d even invited civil-rights leaders to meet and discuss reforms that might finally start fixing Baltimore’s ghettoes. By April 11, that version of Spiro Agnew was gone. He said there would be no sympathy for people who looted or burned.

But he still held to his word to host those Black leaders in Baltimore. That afternoon, around 100 Black activists, politicians, and community leaders gathered at the state office. They hoped that the meeting would be the beginning of real change for Black Baltimore. But then Spiro Agnew just started reading prepared remarks.

Spiro Agnew: Hard on the heels of tragedy come the assignment of blame and the excuses. I did not invite you here today for either purpose. I did not ask you here to recount previous deprivations nor to hear me enumerate prior attempts to correct them. I did not request your presence to bid for peace with the public dollar.

Newkirk: As it turns out, he wasn’t there to discuss anything—not solutions, not proposals for jobs or housing. Agnew praised the leaders present for being law-abiding citizens. But then his speech took a turn.

Agnew: Look around you. If you’ll observe, the ready-mix, instantaneous type of leader is not present. The circuit-riding, Hanoi-visiting type of leader is not present. The caterwauling, riot-inciting, burn-America-down type of leader is conspicuous by his absence. This is no accident, ladies and gentlemen. It’s just good planning. And in the vernacular of today, that’s what it’s all about, baby.

Newkirk: Agnew was on the offensive. He called out Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown as provocateurs who had incited Black neighborhoods to riot. By extension, he blamed all Black radicals for creating the conditions for a race war in America. He rejected the idea that racism or the killing of King had anything to do with it.

Agnew: Now parts of many of our cities lie in ruins. And you know who the fires burned out, just as you know who lit the fires. They were not lit in honor of your great fallen leader, nor were they lit from frustration and despair. These fires were kindled at the suggestion and with the instruction of the advocates of violence.

Newkirk: What’s worse, he didn’t just blame the radicals. The room was full of moderates—the kind of people who’d even supported Agnew politically. And he was blaming them.

Agnew: We cannot have a meaningful communication and dialogue to solve the problem if we continue to listen to the lunatic fringes on each end of the problem. Now, I’ve said this to you, and I threw down the gauntlet to you: I repudiate white racists. Do you repudiate Black racists? Are you willing, as I am willing, to repudiate the white racists? Are you willing to repudiate the Carmichaels on the ground? Answer me. Answer me. Do you repudiate Rap Brown and Stokely Carmichael?

Leader: We don’t repudiate them as human beings.

Agnew: That’s what I was afraid of.

Leader: Wait a minute! Wait just a minute. I don't repudiate you as a person. I happen to be a Christian.

Newkirk: The speech blindsided the leaders. They were so angry that many of them walked out and held their own press conference, responding to Agnew, calling him out. But by then, not a lot of viewers or listeners would have tuned in, because around that same time, the signing ceremony for the Fair Housing Act was starting.

***

Journalist: Good afternoon. Signing of the civil-rights bill will be here in the East Room of the White House, a large room.

Levinson: Keep in mind, Vann, we went from April 4—the riots in Washington, the death of Martin Luther King, the meeting with the civil-rights leaders—to dealing with the American public, to dealing with the Senate, dealing with the House.

Journalist: A few months ago, few would have thought the 90th Congress would pass a bill so far reaching as to include a ban on discrimination in most of the nation’s housing.

Newkirk: Just after Spiro Agnew’s press conference, the time had finally come for President Johnson to sign the Fair Housing Act. It had been a hell of a week for the White House. Aides like Larry Levinson had spent so much time keeping tabs on riots and trying to get the bill through Congress. On the afternoon of April 11, they got to sit back and watch the show.

Levinson: Johnson sat down and looked around, had all his pens—piles and piles of signing pens. And around him were the leaders of the civil-rights movement: Thurgood Marshall; Clarence Mitchell Jr.; others in the NAACP; Senator Mondale; Senator Brooke; the House leader, McCormack; Emanuel Celler, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee.

Newkirk: Johnson was supposed to be the presidential lion in winter. He was old, sick, and tired, and he had given up the fight to younger, healthier men. But here in the East Room, he was LBJ again. He took time to look back on his legacy as the civil-rights president. He compared the moment to Reconstruction.

Lyndon B. Johnson: I shall never forget that it is more than 100 years ago when Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. But it was a proclamation. It was not a fact. And in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, we affirmed through law that men equal under God are also equal when they seek a job, when they go to get a meal in a restaurant, or when they seek lodging for the night in any state in the union.

Newkirk: He even urged Congress to do more, to take up the big spending bills that King had fought for. He denounced racism and rioting, and told Americans that unity was the only way forward through this national crisis.

Johnson: Of course, all America is outraged at the assassination of an outstanding Negro leader, who was at that meeting that afternoon in the White House in 1966. And America is also outraged at the looting and the burning that defiled our democracy. And we just must put our shoulders together and put a stop to both. The time is here. Action must be now.

Levinson: And as he was picking up his pen to sign the bill, he said, “And by the way, I want you to know, when I sign this bill, the chimes of liberty and the bell of liberty will ring a little bit louder.” And I heard that message, that statement, and I began to get sort of shivers up my spine. What a way to capture a moment.

Newkirk: This was the moment. For the White House, they’d finally gotten the trifecta passed. And they had done it in the middle of riots, in maybe the most hostile atmosphere for civil-rights legislation in a decade. Still, the bill wasn’t what Johnson had promised civil-rights leaders, or what the Kerner Commission recommended, and definitely not what more-radical Black leaders wanted. The ultimate question was the only one that nobody could really answer: What would King think?

Larry Levinson: I think there was always that, you know, dissonant chorus out there. But I think it was sort of a joinder at a point of mutual interest: the Martin Luther King movement with the aims and objectives of the LBJ administration.

Journalist: Do you happen to know whether Dr. King was asked before his death whether he was for or against this bill?

Hosea Williams: Certainly. We discussed it many times, and as far as Dr. King was concerned, as far as the Southern Christian Leadership Conference is concerned, this bill is an aspirin for cancer into blood. It is nothing.

Newkirk: In a televised debate just after the bill was signed, King’s old friend and former SCLC lieutenant Hosea Williams came out and said that the Fair Housing Act was a mockery, an insult to King’s memory. He stressed that the only thing that could make things right was a real investment in Black America.

Williams: If you can find money to put a man on the moon, if you can find money to burn little brown babies in Vietnam with napalm bombs, why can’t you find money to put Black men on their feet in this nation?

Newkirk: But there would be no more money, no new major bills. This new housing bill was what we got, and it would take a while to kick in, to hopefully integrate neighborhoods and outlaw discrimination. Until then, the plan was to try and go back to normal. But for people who had just been through the most traumatic week of their lives, that was more than hard to do.

***

Newkirk: In Baltimore, Robert Birt went back to taking the bus to his mostly white high school. One day, his teacher, a white woman, tried her best to talk to the students about the cause of the rebellion.

Robert Birt: She was trying to explain what had happened, and especially cause she’s a white teacher, she was saying that there were, of course, problems and grievances and etcetera, and that they’ve not been attended to. And so she said she imagined that the assassination of Dr. King was sort of the last straw, and things boiled over.

Newkirk: It was a pretty good, liberal sort of explanation. Some of the kids agreed with her.

Birt: One guy said, “You know, I’ll tell you the truth. If I was colored, I’d probably riot too, because I’ve been keeping up with this, and this is pretty bad, you know.”

Newkirk: But some students didn’t buy it.

Birt: And some person started saying things like, “Well, this is criminal activity,” you know? And at that point, I said, “What’s criminal—” And I was 15. I said, “What’s criminal is you and your society.”

Newkirk: Robert hadn’t been in trouble in school before. Maybe before the riots, before the assassination, he would’ve let something like this go. But that week, something in Robert Birt had changed.

Birt: The more they talked, the angrier I got, and I said, “I’m not going to tell you about everything you did. The last thing you did is you murdered Martin Luther King.”

Newkirk: In D.C., for Vanessa Lawson and her family, each passing day increased their anxiety and despair. There was still no sign of her brother Vincent. Her dad even hired a white private investigator to go search. They figured he might have better luck than Black people could in getting through all the curfews and checkpoints, but he hadn’t found anything yet.

Vanessa Dixon: I remember this guy assuring him, my dad. It just shook him, because within a couple of days, they were starting to board up buildings.

Newkirk: When the curfew finally lifted, the family decided to get out there and start looking themselves.

Dixon: When the National Guard finally start letting people come around, when they were boarding up buildings, my grandmother—everybody—just started walking and walking the whole neighborhood. You couldn’t even get down in that area. And my brother, my dad—I remember them going and just walking and walking.

Newkirk: Their only lead was the last call that Vincent had made to his mother, when he was so proud of grabbing her some stockings from a store. And then, the friends he was with told the investigator where they had gone last.

Dixon: They told him where they went. They were a group. They ran to this store. They ran to that store. And the last store that they ran out of, because the police was chasing them, was Morton’s.

Newkirk: It was Morton’s. The same department store they used to visit with their mother. It was a start. Someplace to look, even if it was just for a body, at that point.

Dixon: And what hurts me the most is the detective told my dad that they checked all these buildings before they started boarding them up.

Newkirk: The investigator told them that Mayor Washington had sent people in to look at all the boarded-up buildings. He said they didn’t find Vincent in Morton’s, or any evidence he had been there.

Dixon: They said they checked these buildings, and they haven’t found anything. Let’s just hope he’s okay, and he’s still just walking around. This guy says, “You know, maybe he’s just got hit in the head. Maybe he’s having a memory loss, and maybe, you know, he’s just drifted off somewhere.”

Newkirk: It was the thought that kept the family going, the hope against hope—this idea that Vincent might just be walking around the streets with no memory, no recollection of who he was or where he came from, that one day they might bump into him and things might go back to normal. But that kind of hope also kept them from moving on. It kept them stuck in the middle of the riots, looking out the window, waiting for Vincent to come home. And they waited for a long time.

In 1966, Spiro T. Agnew is elected governor

Agnew, campaigning as a moderate Republican, is elected governor of Maryland, defeating George P. Mahoney, a segregationist. In his campaign, Agnew championed antidiscrimination policies.

King’s funeral takes place in Atlanta, Georgia, on April 9, 1968

President Johnson does not attend.

The Fair Housing Act is passed

The FHA passes the House of Representatives on April 11, 1968, with a vote of 250–172, after being stalled in the legislature since 1966.

Governor Agnew blames civil-rights leaders

Agnew holds a press conference on April 11, 1968, a week after King was assassinated. He invites notable civil-rights leaders and then blames them for the violence in Baltimore.

Quarterback thirst is a perennial issue in the NFL—where most teams struggle to fill football’s marquee position—but that isn’t helping the former league MVP Lamar Jackson.

Jackson’s ongoing contract dispute with the Baltimore Ravens has morphed into a good, old-fashioned power struggle that pits players’ interests against the hypocrisy and stubbornness of NFL owners, who are desperate to reset the market now that quarterbacks are successfully using their leverage to attain precedent-setting contracts. Historically, most NFL players’ contracts have been partly contingent upon their staying healthy and maintaining their skills, but quarterbacks in particular have been seeking and receiving fully guaranteed contracts.

[Jemele Hill: In praise of selfish NFL players]

Owners seem to be using Jackson to show their resolve. The Ravens and Jackson have been trying to negotiate a long-term contract extension for two years. Earlier this month, the Ravens placed a nonexclusive franchise tag on Jackson, giving him the right to negotiate with other teams, and themselves the right to match any offer. If Jackson gets another offer that Baltimore doesn’t match, his new team will have to compensate the Ravens with two first-round draft picks. The Ravens have until July 17 to sign Jackson to a long-term deal, but if that doesn’t happen, Jackson will earn $32.4 million next season. That number may sound good, but had the Ravens given Jackson the exclusive franchise tag, Jackson’s salary would have been about $45 million.

On the surface, the Ravens’ strategy is risky: Another team could sign their franchise quarterback. But the second-youngest MVP in NFL history doesn’t seem to be garnering much interest from other NFL teams. It’s perplexing—even to other NFL players. As the New Orleans Saints safety Tyrann Mathieu recently asked on Twitter, “When is the last time a league MVP was treated so disrespectfully??”

A number of factors complicate the story. One is Jackson’s health history. Jackson has missed 10 regular-season games over the past two seasons because of ankle and knee injuries. One of the things that makes Jackson a special player is that he’s dangerously elusive and one of the best athletes in the league; he holds NFL records for rushing yardage by a quarterback. But his style of play also leaves him vulnerable to injuries.

Another factor is that Jackson doesn’t have an agent, and that seems to bother a lot of people. If Jackson were to get what he’s worth without traditional representation, that would be a pretty big glitch in the matrix.

But the biggest issue may be that NFL team owners see an opportunity to regain a semblance of control over quarterbacks’ escalating salaries. The top 10 NFL quarterbacks entering the 2022 season were earning at least $35 million a year, and those salaries and the amount of guaranteed money will continue to rise, because a good quarterback is essential for any team that wants to seriously compete for a championship—or even just put fans in the seats. Perfect example: The Carolina Panthers just sent the Chicago Bears four draft picks as part of a blockbuster trade that gives the Panthers the No. 1 overall pick in this year’s draft—which Carolina is expected to use on a quarterback. (The Panthers could have mortgaged less of their future by pursuing Jackson.)

Last year, the Cleveland Browns signed the former Houston Texans quarterback Deshaun Watson to a $230 million contract that included the most guaranteed money for a player in league history. Watson received this massive deal despite having served an 11-game suspension after more than two dozen women accused him of sexual misconduct during massage treatments. Watson, who has proclaimed his innocence, settled civil lawsuits with more than 20 of his accusers.

The optics of Watson’s highly lucrative deal were terrible. But what reportedly got other owners seething was that Cleveland had unwittingly created a new quarterback-compensation standard that included fully guaranteed contracts. In fact, Baltimore owner Steve Bisciotti all but admitted at the NFL owners meeting last year that the Browns had put him at a disadvantage in contract talks with Jackson.

[Read: The coronavirus is revealing football’s human cost]

“It’s like, damn, I wish they hadn’t guaranteed the whole contract. I don’t know that [Watson] should’ve been the first guy to get a fully guaranteed contract,” Bisciotti told reporters. “To me, that’s something that is groundbreaking, and it’ll make negotiations harder with others.”

I’m accusing NFL owners not of collusion against Jackson but of a ruthless awareness of their shared interest in limiting his leverage. The Ravens were likely willing to let Jackson test the market because they knew that other owners’ pettiness would give them the advantage they needed. Almost as soon as Jackson became a free agent, so to speak, journalists who cover professional football began leaking which teams weren’t interested in Jackson. It felt as if the owners were sending the message that they weren’t going to let another deal like Watson’s happen on their watch.

Considering that most teams have been willing to do whatever it takes to land a great quarterback, the owners seem to be digging into a lost cause. A multiyear contract worth more than $100 million is now the floor for a starting quarterback in today’s NFL. The promising young quarterbacks Jalen Hurts of the Philadelphia Eagles, Joe Burrow of the Cincinnati Bengals, and Justin Herbert of the Los Angeles Chargers all are eligible for contract extensions. Last week, the New York Giants signed the quarterback Daniel Jones to a four-year, $160 million deal that included $82 million in guaranteed pay. Jones is 21–31–1 as a starter—so imagine the rewards awaiting Burrow and Hurts, who have recently appeared in a Super Bowl, and Herbert, the former offensive rookie of the year and a 2021 Pro Bowler. Of course, some NFL players took note that Jones received a new contract before the more experienced and decorated Jackson. The Chicago Bears safety Jaquan Brisker tweeted, “MVP lol … other Bruh got paid today and is trash.”

NFL players should hope Jackson does receive a contract that rivals Watson’s—though most league insiders believe that is highly unlikely—because they benefit from his disruption of the way the NFL usually operates.

Making Jackson pay for a NFL owner’s lack of discipline is not just unfair; it’s wildly hypocritical. It’s not Jackson’s fault that the Browns prioritized winning over good character. Cleveland was the only team willing to give Watson that much guaranteed money, but multiple teams still wanted Watson—which says a lot about what owners are willing to excuse in order to win.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Newkirk: But that hope proved fleeting.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

Newkirk: Part 8: “Resurrection.”

***

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

John Burl Smith: Hey, sweetheart.

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

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

Smith-Gray: Vance?

Burl Smith: Vann.

Smith-Gray: Vann?

Burl Smith: Vann, Vann …

Smith-Gray: Vann?

Newkirk: Yes, ma’am.

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

Smith-Gray: Okay.

Newkirk: Nice to meet you.

Burl Smith: And this is Ethan.

Smith-Gray: Nice to meet him.

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

Burl Smith: Oh, let me get that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Newkirk: Did you have the Invader jacket on?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nixon: All right. Thank you very much.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reporter: Hampton’s body was found in bed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Newkirk: They said, “V.L.”

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

Newkirk: He came to apologize.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Newkirk: Providence.

Dixon: Okay.

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

Burl Smith: Right.

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

Burl Smith: Yeah.

Newkirk: How does that happen?

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Newkirk: Why did you pick that day?

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

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

The Poor People’s Campaign and Reverend Ralph Abernathy march

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

Robert F. Kennedy is assassinated

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

Richard Nixon is elected president

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

Black Panther Fred Hampton is killed

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