White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it.” “What white Americans have never fully understood-but what the Negro can never forget-is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. “Segregation and poverty have created in the racial ghetto a destructive environment totally unknown to most white Americans,” the report stated.

Johnson had released its investigation of the 1967 race riots in a document called the Kerner Report, which provided broad explanations for the deadly upheavals. Just weeks earlier, an 11-member commission established by President Lyndon B. King’s death wasn’t the only factor at play in the massive protests. Local and state governments, and President Lyndon Johnson, would deploy a collective total of 58,000 National Guardsmen and Army troops to assist law enforcement officers in quelling the violence. As Peter Levy writes in The Great Uprising: Race Riots in Urban America During the 1960s, “During Holy Week 1968, the United States experienced its greatest wave of social unrest since the Civil War.” Around 3,500 people were injured, 43 were killed and 27,000 arrested. When King’s funeral was held the following Tuesday in Atlanta, tens of thousands of people gathered to watch the procession.ĭespite King’s father expressing the family’s preference for nonviolence, in the 10 days following King’s death, nearly 200 cities experienced looting, arson or sniper fire, and 54 of those cities saw more than $100,000 in property damage.

Long before the public had any answers as to the identity of the assassin (a man named James Earl Ray, who pled guilty to the murder in March 1969 and was sentenced to life in prison, despite questions about the involvement of groups like the FBI or the Mafia), the nation was swept up in a frenzy of grief and anger. An hour later, he was pronounced dead at age 39. But the evening of April 4, while at his lodgings at the Lorraine Motel, King was shot through the jaw. On April 3, King delivered his “ I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech and made plans for a march to be held on April 5. made his way to Memphis, Tennessee, where sanitation workers were striking for a pay raise with the support of local ministers. In April 1968, civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr.

The death of american cities