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Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee

Holy Week: Inferno

The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › podcasts › archive › 2023 › 03 › washington-dc-unrest-april-1968 › 673326

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

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

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

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

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

David: No, I don’t.

Reporter: Why not?

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

Reporter: You thought that was just fun?

David: Yes I did.

***

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

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

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

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

Newkirk: How do you feel about that?

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

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

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

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

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

Newkirk: Oh, wow.

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

Dixon: This is Vincent.

Newkirk: Vincent?

Dixon: Mm-hmm.

Newkirk: What’s he wearing here?

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

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

Newkirk: Oh, wow.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Newkirk: So, no afro.

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

Newkirk: Part 2: “Inferno.”

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Crowd: Black Power!

Stokely Carmichael: What do you want?

Crowd: Black Power!

Stokely Carmichael: Everybody, what do you want?

Newkirk : What was Stokely like?

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

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

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

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

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

Newkirk: So you were in Mississippi for years?

Frank Smith: Six years.

Newkirk: What brought you to D.C.?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

Newkirk: And then …

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Newkirk: He was holding it back?

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

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

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

Newkirk: They broke out in Mississippi?

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

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

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

Stokley Carmichael forms an SNCC base in D.C.

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

D.C. residents learn about King’s assassination

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

D.C. residents begin to riot

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

Holy Week: Black Messiah

The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › podcasts › archive › 2023 › 03 › black-power-organizers-nonviolent-leaders-1960s-revolution › 673330

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Archival news narrator: Memo. To: S.A.C. Boston. From: the director, FBI. Subject: Counterintelligence program.

Goals: One, prevent the coalition of militant Black-nationalist groups. An effective coalition of Black-nationalist groups might be the first step toward a real Mau Mau in America. Two, prevent the rise of a messiah who could unify and electrify the militant Black-nationalist movement. Martin Luther King, Stokely Carmichael, and Elijah Muhammad all aspire to this position. King could be a very real contender for this position.

Vann R. Newkirk II: Starting in 1956, J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI ran a secret program to spy on so-called subversive movements in the U.S. It was named the Counter Intelligence Program, or COINTELPRO. Its true extent wasn’t known until years later, when a group of activists broke into an FBI office and mailed over 1,000 classified documents to journalists. Through all the major moments of the Black freedom struggle, the FBI listened. They watched. They sabotaged.

The program expanded during the mid-’60s, with the rise of Black militant groups, and the beginnings of uprisings in America’s ghettos.

Reporter: While ghetto problems deepen, the Black militants gather and the crowds at their meetings get bigger. Many of them will not speak to whites at all. They have given up on the white man’s world and are desperately determined to make a Black world totally separate, totally and proudly black.

Newkirk: To J. Edgar Hoover, the danger was in the potential for any Black leader to help spark a Black insurgency.

Reporter: The FBI had trouble distinguishing between nonviolent Blacks and militant revolutionaries. To the FBI, the whole movement appeared dangerous, particularly if one man could unify millions of American Blacks.

Newkirk: Hoover wasn’t alone in his belief. In fact, Black radical leaders also thought that major riots in 1967 in the Black ghettos in Newark and Detroit had revolutionary potential. Folks like Stokely Carmichael and the Panthers out West built their philosophies on the hope that a riot in a Black ghetto could become something more—that they could start a chain reaction to topple white supremacy in America. In 1968, SNCC Chairman H. Rap Brown said that this revolution was imminent.

H. Rap Brown: We stand on the eve of a Black revolution, brothers. Masses of our people are in the streets. They’re fighting tit for tat, tooth for tooth, an eye for an eye, and a life for a life. The rebellions that we see are merely dress rehearsals for the revolution that’s to come.

Newkirk: The FBI and COINTELPRO’s methods grew more and more extreme. In the late ’60s they moved to outright blackmail and disruption schemes. Even after King was killed, COINTELPRO continued to watch his friends and family and sow discord in their ranks.

The FBI was probably also watching Stokely Carmichael on the first night of riots. That night, April 4, Stokely and his watchers had been caught off guard by the fury of the streets.

The next day, April 5, would be different. Everybody assumed the riots were coming back. But just how they came back was the question. Could Black rage and grief be channeled and directed into revolution? Would they fizzle out on its own? Or would they be crushed by the state?

***

Newkirk: Part 3: “Black Messiah.”

***

Newkirk: By the morning of April 5, less than 24 hours after Dr. King was killed, the riots had already made their mark on D.C. Fires had consumed much of 14th Street, along with some other areas. People left behind burned buildings, abandoned cars, and debris, all still smoking.

That morning, tourists were supposed to come in by the thousands for the Cherry Blossom Festival. But they stayed away.

Most people who worked downtown stayed away too. What was left was an eerie quiet. The breath before the next plunge into chaos. Still, Frank Smith was trying his hardest to get back home from Mississippi.

Frank Smith: I flew back to Washington. I got to the National Airport, and I couldn’t—taxicab driver didn’t want to take me. He said, “I’m not going to Washington. That place is on fire.”

Newkirk: When he finally found a cab, the driver would only go as far as Connecticut Avenue. Frank had to walk a ways to his home in Adams Morgan. But he had to get there. His wife was there. She had been there during the first night of riots, and she was terrified.

Frank Smith: She was scared to go out the house, you know. And we talkin’ about people—she had been in Mississippi with me. She was in Philadelphia, Mississippi, when the kids were killed down there. And we had seen violence. But this was very different. This was, it was like chaos.

Newkirk: Frank had led protests and demonstrations across the country. He had been with SNCC since the beginning, and his work in Mississippi was regularly dangerous. He’d helped name the organization the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and dedicated himself to movement tactics. Even when things got rowdy, he was trained. He was used to each demonstration having a concrete set of objectives. But he just couldn’t get his arms around what had happened in D.C. It was emotional. There was no organization.

Frank Smith: There was no set of demands. There was no goals that we could see. There was no—it was just people just reacting. And, you know, any time you’re leading a demonstration, there’s always a chance it’ll get out of hand. There’s always a chance. And in this case, just what it looked like to me, was that it was out of hand.

Newkirk: But around the city, some people were trying to give shape to Black rage.

At Howard University, most students hadn’t gone out on the night of April 4. But the next morning, activists on campus tried to galvanize students who still didn’t really know what to do.

Tony Gittens: People were very, very surprised. They weren’t ready to do what they were doing over on 14th Street, start tearing the place up.

Newkirk: I visited Howard with Tony Gittens to see his old stomping grounds. We checked out the dorm where he and his friends were playing cards on the night King was killed. We walked past the green where his friends had tried to organize a rally the morning after. He says, that morning, the tension was building.

Gittens: You know, every place I went people were angry. It was unbelievable. Some women, the young ladies, were crying. That was the sentiment. Nobody was passive about it.

Newkirk: That morning, The Hilltop, the campus newspaper, released an essay saying basically that nonviolence was dead.

“Much of the argument that through nonviolent marching and civil disobedience the Black will be liberated has no doubt been totally erased from the minds of the Black people in this country. There is a sense of outrage that another Black man has been murdered, and he a spokesman for nonviolence.”

They pushed even further. The writers of the op-ed said that one of the lessons of King’s death might be that:

“Liberation calls for more than we have heretofore been willing to pay.”

It was a provocative statement to make just after an assassination. But it was aimed at their fellow students and faculty. People who they thought were happy to sit in the ivory tower while the world burned. Tony was ready for a fight.

Gittens: Nobody was going to mess with us that day. [Laughs.] No security guard, none of that. They weren’t going to mess with us. They knew better.

Newkirk: That same morning, the leaders of SNCC, also tried their best to provoke people into action. They had recently dropped the whole nonviolent thing, and changed their name to the Student National Coordinating Committee. They invited journalists to their headquarters.

Floyd McKissick: This press conference will be for only five minutes. As soon as the press conference is over, you gentlemen will not leave anything in here that you didn’t bring in here. Your pens, your cigarette butts—you take them with you. If you wasting the water, you have to clean it up.

Newkirk: The press conference had actually been planned before the assassination to speak out against the incarceration of the current chairman of SNCC, H. Rap Brown. Brown was accused of inciting a riot in Maryland the summer before.

McKissick: Right, here, immediately right, is Stokely Carmichael, who is staff here in Washington, D.C.

Stokely Carmichael: We were very upset that Reverend Brown had been in jail for 41 days. And Governor Agnew of Maryland still seems to persist with his nonsensical charges. Now, we want the brother out of jail next week when he comes to trial.

Newkirk: In the footage of the press conference, all the SNCC leaders are standing together behind a table full of microphones. The other SNCC guys are wearing all black. Stokely stands out. He’s tall. He’s commanding. He’s got sunglasses on, and a long jacket. Behind him there are two posters, one of Malcolm X and another of H. Rap Brown. But he starts talking about Martin Luther King.

Carmichael: When white America killed Dr. King last night, she opened the eyes for every Black man in this country. When white America got rid of Marcus Garvey, she did it and she said he was an extremist; he was crazy. When they got rid of Brother Malcolm X, they said he was preaching hate; he deserved what he got. But when they got rid of brother Martin Luther King, they had absolutely no reason to do so. He was the one man in our race who was trying to teach our people to have love, compassion, and mercy for what white people had done. When white America killed Dr. King last night, she declared war on us.

Newkirk: As far as the FBI’s potential Black messiahs went, Stokely was on the list right behind King. It was Stokely who had been out on the scene the previous night, when riots started. The media was already blaming him for fanning the flames. He gave voice to all the people who felt like this was more than just the assassination of a single person. King was supposed to be the last best hope for a reckoning without blood. Stokely promised retribution.

Carmichael: The rebellions that have been occurring around the cities of this country is just light stuff to what is about to happen. We have to retaliate for the death of our leaders. The execution of those deaths will not be in the courtrooms; they’re going to be in the streets of the United States of America.

Newkirk: Stokely was talking about the thing white people had been afraid of for generations: a race war.

Then he opened up for questions.

Reporter: Mr Carmichael, when you say the execution of those deaths will be not in a courtroom but the streets, are you going to be a little more specific about the course of action you expect?

Carmichael: I think that is quite explicit.

Reporter: You expect an organized rebellion?

Carmichael: I think it is quite explicit. We die every day. We die in Vietnam for the honkies. Why don’t we die at home for our people? Black people are not afraid to die. We die all the time. We die in your jails. We die in your ghettos. We die in your rat-infested homes. We die a thousand deaths every day. So we’re not afraid to die; today we’re going to die for our people.

Newkirk: The night before, on 14th and U, Stokely had been conflicted. He was there when the riots started, but he also tried to clear out businesses to avoid casualties. He warned young Black folks to stay away from police and tried to temper their fantasies about fighting the military with rocks and bricks. Now there were no more calls for caution. Like everything he did, some of this was for show, to shock people. But he was also speaking from the heart. It sure did seem like he thought this could be the revolution.

Reporter 2: Stokely, what do you think is ultimately leading to? A bloodbath in which nobody wins?

Carmichael: First, my name is Mr. Carmichael. And secondly, Black people will survive America.

Reporter 2: What accomplishments or objectives do you visualize from the retaliation? What do you think you’ll accomplish?

Carmichael: If a Black man can’t do nothing in this country, then we will stand up on our feet and die like men. If that’s our only act of manhood, then God damn it, we’re going to die. Tired of living on our stomachs.

Reporter 3: Do you fear for your life?

Carmichael: The hell with my life! You should fear for yours. I know I’m going to die. I know I’m gonna die. [Applause.]

***

Newkirk: Stokely’s speech immediately made the rounds on radio and television. White politicians and no small number of Black leaders condemned him. Even Sammy Davis Jr. came out to tell militants to try and keep the peace.

Sammy Davis Jr.: Now is the time for the militant leaders to say, “All right, baby; let’s hold ourselves. You’re angry; you’re mad, man—let’s hold it now and see if whitey’s going to come up with it.”

Newkirk: Stokely Carmichael had been waiting for years. He had been waiting since he crossed the bridge in Selma, since he inspired people in Mississippi with Black Power. He was tired of waiting. He was trying to reach others who he thought might be impatient too: young folks who gravitated to Black Power—kids like Theophus Brooks.

Theophus Brooks: We looked at it this way: Martin Luther King, we respected him but he was soft. We look at Malcolm X, Black Panthers, H. Rap Brown, Stokely Carmichael—we looked at them like that was our heroes. Man we loved them. Martin Luther King, we looked at him as being a good person, a nice person, but he weak and he soft. You know, turn the other cheek and all that.

Newkirk: Theophus Brooks was a student at Cardozo High School, just a few blocks away from the epicenter of the riots in D.C. Before the assassination, he didn’t follow news about Jim Crow or voting rights or integration. He was too busy with running the streets, and chasing girls.

Brooks: First time I ever saw a gun, a girl put a derringer on me in the cafeteria because I was messing with another girl. And she found out and pulled a derringer on me. I was scared to death.

Newkirk: Also, football. He was a star safety for Cardozo High School.

Brooks: All of a sudden, in 11th grade—something clicked in my head. And not only did I go football crazy, but I turned into a vicious-type ballplayer. I don’t know what happened.

Newkirk: On the first night of riots, Theophus stayed home. A lot of his friends did. He still had to go to class in the morning. City officials hoped keeping schools open would keep kids off the streets. But it didn’t work.

Brooks: I was in the classroom at about 10, 11 o’clock in the day, and people ran in to say, “They rioting on 14th Street. Man, they stealin’ everything!”

Newkirk: By late morning, the students in Cardozo were out in the streets. Theophus was with them.

Brooks: It seemed like everybody broke out like it was recess. We broke out and went up to 14th Street.

Newkirk: What did you see when you got there?

Brooks: Maybe about 2,000 or 3,000 people. When I got up there, they had burned most everything down.

Dixon: Somebody hollered, “Get the white people; get the white people.” People started grabbing things, throwing at cars, trucks, at anybody that was driving was white.

Newkirk: Across town, on the east side of D.C., Vanessa Lawson Dixon was in the streets too. And she was angry. Her teacher used to go on and on about just how important King was. Her mother and grandmother loved King. And Vanessa was fed up with having to move to the projects and with how things were going in her life. So she chose to join the crowd.

Vanessa Dixon: And we participated. You know, I’m sorry to say I participated in that riot. I mean, I played a part in it.

Newkirk: In the Cardozo neighborhood, Theophus Brooks returned to the blocks that had burned just the night before. Many of the stores had already been cleaned out. But the students still wanted to do something.

Brooks: But when I got up there, a lot of stuff was gone. But then after that—it was maybe about 3:30, 4 o’clock—maybe 200 of us went to Cardozo. Now, if you know 13th Street at Cardozo, it’s a real hill going up.

Newkirk: Oh, yeah I know that hill.

Brooks: Okay, we were standing on each side of the hill throwing bricks at cars that looked like they had white people in it.

Newkirk: By the afternoon, Black neighborhoods in D.C. were back in full rebellion. The night before had all been unpredictable. It could’ve been a one-off thing. But the second night, April 5, was even more intense than the first. This would not be over soon.

Reporter: Tossing tear gas into the crowd. But that didn’t deter the Negroes … [shouting]

Reporter: … to see whether they could get a big radio–TV–record-player combination into a small, foreign-built car. It just wouldn’t fit.

Newkirk: Even in all the chaos, even as disturbances erupted in neighborhoods all across D.C., it was hard to imagine that this was the revolution that Stokely had promised. Theophus and his friends never got political. They were not being galvanized by a Black messiah—living or dead—to go to the White House or overthrow anybody. Theophus says they didn’t even really think much about King. Their response was more visceral. They stood on the street for hours, just throwing bricks. Because they could.

Brooks: And from 3:30 to about six, they must have broke about 100, 200 car windows.

Newkirk: He doesn’t think any of the drivers were seriously hurt, but still. The basic reality of the kids’ situation had been reversed. Police had always been untouchable. Across D.C., they were known for harassing and beating Black kids. But now the kids were throwing bricks at white folks’ cars and the police couldn’t do anything about it. It was exhilarating.

Brooks: They weren’t shooting anybody. It was like, Don’t do this; don’t do that. Stop, stop, stop this. You know, they wasn’t pulling out guns. And they arrested a few people, but it was just like a mob takeover. They took over and there weren’t nothing you could do about it.

Reporter 1: Aside from responding with tear gas, the officers generally ignored the bricks and bottles thrown at them. They knew that they were seriously understrength for any major outbreak of violence, and many of them were hoping for a call up of the National Guard or—what happened—the eventual deployment of Army troops.

Reporter 2: One policeman took off his gas mask, looked around, and asked if the National Guard had been called. “We need them,” he said. “We can’t hold this tonight. We’re losing.”

Newkirk: Frank Smith went out too. He thought that his duty as a SNCC veteran was to help keep people safe, or to organize them if he could. But he was skeptical that what he was seeing could turn into anything more.

Frank Smith: I don’t think that I ever thought this might be the revolution.

Newkirk: He was worried. The police were one thing, but he was afraid that people were going to get themselves hurt or killed when the military came.

Frank Smith: They got themselves in a position that no revolutionary army ever wants to be in, which is that it’s now facing down with an enemy with much more resources and much more gun power.

***

Scott Peters (journalist): Mayor Walter Washington has clamped a 5:30 p.m. curfew on the city. The presidential executive order has brought four companies of soldiers into the city. One is deployed around the downtown area; that includes the White House. Another is centered around the Capitol Hill. The other two are in the northwest section of the city. Additional soldiers are standing by for duty if needed. The president signed the order at the request of city officials.

Newkirk: As night fell and the hours went on, more and more students like Theophus Brooks poured into the streets. Protestors reignited the fires from the previous night and set new buildings ablaze.

Peters: Scott Peters, United Press International, the White House. President Johnson has ordered about 500 federal troops into Washington, D.C., in order to restore law to the city wracked by fires and looting.

Newkirk: The flames radiated out from the ghettos. They spread to just a few blocks away from the White House.

Peters: Two companies of soldiers are deployed in the worst-troubled area. One is near Capitol Hill, the fourth in the downtown area, which includes the White House.

Smoke from fires in downtown Washington is visible here at the White House. Police cars and ambulances are moving up and down the streets, the streets themselves jammed with traffic, the sidewalks crawling with people, some waiting for buses or trying to find taxis to go home. Some are spectators; some are looters. The White House gates are closed and White House policemen stand behind them. Normal routine has come to a halt in this part of the city. A group of Negro youths passed the White House gates a few minutes ago, carrying what looked to be transistor radios and other small appliances. They taunted White House police at the gates, one yelling “Shoot me! Shoot me!” while his companions laughed.

Newkirk: The police were outnumbered. Across the United States, fires burned in most big cities. A lot of the people on the streets were like Theophus Brooks and Vanessa Lawson Dixon: young folks who were just out there, because they could be. But politicians worried that Stokely’s vision might be coming true, that riots might be sustained, organized, even revolutionary. Governors mobilized state National Guards and started calling the White House for military assistance.

John Dennis (journalist): This is John Dennis in Boston for United Press International. Several thousand Massachusetts National Guardsmen are on the alert here in the Boston area tonight …

Dean Bailey (journalist): Dean Baily, United Press International, Chicago. Mayor Daley, in conjunction with his superintendent of police, was asking that the National Guard be put on standby alert …

Dennis: … Lieutenant Governor Francis Sargent, says the move “is a precautionary measure.”

Bailey: Acting Illinois Governor Sam Shapiro acceded to the request, and 6,000 Guardsmen are assembling at armories. They may be needed on the streets. Fires have broken out. There has been shooting; there has been looting. Most of the trouble is concentrated on the West Side, a predominantly Negro area. All Chicago firemen are on duty.

***

Newkirk: By the time Vanessa Lawson Dixon got back inside, it was dark. She heard her mother talking on the phone to her brother Vincent. He went to high school out by his grandmother’s house off H Street. They were rioting there too. People were breaking into the stores in the business district, including the department store where Vanessa’s family shopped.

Vanessa Dixon: He left and went looting. Him and his friends went out. Morton’s was one of the places he went. He had other stuff too, so he called my mom and told her, “I got you three boxes, the right size and the right color.”

Newkirk: He was proud. He and Vanessa had seen their mother struggling. They’d tried to give her their own money to buy stockings when she could only afford a pair or two. And now Vincent had three boxes, the right size and color. Their mom couldn’t even be that mad.

Dixon: And she’s laughing and crying at the same time and telling him, “Do not leave back out that house, you hear me? Do not leave back out that house.”

Newkirk: But then, a little while later, Vanessa’s grandma called to say that Vincent had left again. That he was back out on the streets.

Dixon: My grandmother called and said he wasn’t there. He wasn’t in the house. And the kids are running around like crazy.

Newkirk: Vanessa’s mother was worried. She lashed out. She put the responsibility on Vincent’s older brother Glen to find him.

Dixon: She told him, “Go get your brother.” And he left; he left back out.

Newkirk: In darkness, as chaos was spreading, Glen tried to make it six miles—over to 8th and H Streets, the neighborhood where their grandmother lived. He was trying to do what his mother told him: Don’t come home without Vincent.

Dixon: And he’s looking everywhere for him. And, you know, and the National Guard’s coming out now and they want everybody off the streets.

Newkirk: By the end of the night, nobody had heard from Vincent.

Dixon: And I just remember, you know, it’s just like hours and hours and hours. He didn’t ever come home.

Newkirk: Vanessa often talks about how she and Vincent had this, like, spiritual or metaphysical connection. She says she could feel how he was feeling, even when they weren’t together. And on that night, she felt … dread.

Dixon: Let me tell you, his heart was beating so fast. His heart was beating so fast. My brother’s heart was beating so fast. I’m sitting at home calm, and I’m feeling my heart is racing. I said, you know, something is wrong. Something is wrong. I kept telling my mother, something is wrong.

Newkirk: They all wanted to go back out and look. To keep searching until they found Vincent or could find out what had happened to him. But by then, troops from the Army’s 82nd Airborne division had been fully mobilized. That evening, their boots marched and their trucks rolled down D.C. streets—the streets where Vincent and Vanessa raked leaves, where Theophus played football, where Tony reported for his college paper. Army units, held back in reserve from Vietnam, swept across the district using tear gas, isolating all those Black neighborhoods from one another. The occupation of the city was beginning.

Stokely Carmichael demands “Black Power”

At a speech during the “March Against Fear” in Mississippi, on June 16, 1966, Carmichael uses the phrase Black Power.

The FBI sets counterintelligence goals

A month before King’s assassination, on March 4, 1968, the FBI, led by J. Edgar Hoover, issues a memo cautioning against allowing King to become a “messiah.”

Howard University students react to King’s assassination

The morning after King’s assassination, D.C. students walk out of class en masse. Howard University’s newspaper, The Hilltop, publishes an editorial criticizing nonviolence as a path to liberation.

The Atlantic releases Holy Week: eight-episode narrative podcast, hosted by Vann R. Newkirk II

The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › press-releases › archive › 2023 › 03 › atlantic-releases-holy-week-podcast › 673388

“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