What violence in the wake of the King assassination can, and can’t, teach us about Baltimore today.

[Agschmid]

[font size="8"]The Riots of ’68[/font]
What the violence in the wake of the King assassination can, and can’t, teach us about Baltimore today.

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As smoke continues to rise above Baltimore, some are wondering whether the day’s events will prove as devastating to the city as the long and deadly riot that engulfed it in the spring of 1968. That uprising, which cost six people their lives, injured 700, and destroyed about 1,000 small businesses, was initially set off by the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Not unlike the chaos we’ve seen Monday night, it began as a peaceful demonstration, and grew into something much more dangerous on the night of Saturday, April 6th, after a few fires were set, some windows were broken, and an 11 p.m. curfew was instituted by the mayor.

City officials have already invoked the specter of 1968 in their calls for looters to return to their homes. “We can not go back to 1968 where we burned down our own infrastructure and our own neighborhoods,” City Council President Jack Young was quoted as saying. “We still have scars from 1968, where we had some burnt out buildings, and businesses did not want to come back to the city of Baltimore.”

But drawing connections between the past and the present is rarely as straightforward as it might seem. To get a better sense of how much should be made of the similarities between what happened in 1968 and what’s happening now, I called Elizabeth M. Nix, assistant professor at the University of Baltimore, and a co-editor of the 2011 book, Baltimore '68: Riots and Rebirth in an American City.

Read the rest here.

[Egnever]

1. This part is what I fear for the people that live there.

The conclusion we came to after our study was that, in ’68, the physical damage was not irreversible. But the perception of Baltimore that outsiders had—that Baltimore was a dangerous place, that it was a place where you’d never want to live—that was an effect of the uprisings of 1968. And that, more than the physical damage, had a huge effect on Baltimore for decades.

I understand the anger but this is a vicious cycle. Now the desperate become more desperate because opportunity that was utterly lacking to begin with will now be even harder to achieve.

A sad day for Baltimore.

[gwheezie]

2. I was in Newark during the riot in 1967

It was very bad. People were killed. The arrest and beating of the cab driver smith was the catalyst after a long simmering rise of anger. It wasn't one thing.