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About The skanner. (Portland, Or.) 1975-2014 | View Entire Issue (Feb. 24, 2016)
February 24, 2016 - Black History Edition The Skanner Page 5 Black History By Zenitha Prince Special to the NNPA from the Afro-American Newspaper F or elders within Baltimore’s Black community, the re- cent uprising after the death of 25-year-old Freddie Gray was like a flashback to the riots that erupted in April 1968 af- ter the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Lu- ther King Jr. “Both were birthed from tragic events in- volving the deaths of an African-American man and both represented the underlying rage and frustration present in the African-American community caused by years of not just benign neglect but [also] what appears to be intention- al neglect caused by rac- ism,” said Bishop Douglas Miles, pastor of Koino- nia Baptist Church and co-chairman emeritus of the advocacy group, Baltimoreans United in Leadership (BUILD). Both riots occurred after months of protest by African-American communities across the nation. In the summer of 1967, smoke hovered over cit- ies such as Detroit, New- ark and Chicago as Black Americans expressed frustration over the lack of social and economic progress. Baltimore had large- ly kept its cool until the assassination of Dr. King on the balcony of a Memphis, Tenn., hotel on April 4, 1968 ignited the smoldering anger that had been, until then, con- tained. Within two days of King’s death, Baltimore had joined the almost 100 cities across the nation where riots had erupted. Driven by frustrations over limited job and housing opportunities, and further fuelled by resentment of merchants who practiced usury and charged higher prices for lower-quality goods, fire bombers struck the first major blow in the Gay Street commer- cial corridor on the night of April 6. “The looting and burn- ing swept eastward from Gay St. to Milton Ave., and spread in cra- zy-quilt patterns across the inner city,” reported the AFRO in its April 13, 1968 edition. Pastors, community ac- tivists and political lead- ers such as Clarence and Parren Mitchell walked the streets trying to calm protestors. And there were unexpected voices, like that of then-notori- ous drug kingpin Melvin Williams. “Little Melvin (Wil- liams) had talked to some of the guys to come to- gether,” Clarence Mitch- ell recalled in an April 2008 AFRO article. “The hustlers of the day came from East Baltimore, they came from South Baltimore and they came from West Baltimore and they made appeals to the communities that they came from to stop the ri- ots. The next day the ri- ots had stopped.” After four days of riot- ing, four people had been killed, 700 injured; there had been more than 600 fires, about 1,000 busi- nesses had been looted or burned and 5,800 peo- ple had been arrested, according to an AFRO re- counting. The seeds of disillu- sionment, hurt and frus- tration that gave birth to the ’68 riots were in many ways responsi- ble for the unrest that bloomed almost 50 years later. “The same societal ills that beset African Amer- icans in ’68 had been heightened over the years because of the lack of federal, state and local funding to correct many of the ills,” Bishop Miles said. “And what made it worse is the fact that the employment opportu- nities present in ’68 are virtually nonexistent in 2015, particularly Rust Belt jobs like those at Bethlehem Steel, which at its peak employed about 32,000 people. “That employment has been replaced by min- imum wage, part-time, often seasonal jobs in the service industry,” he continued. “And now the largest employer in poor communities in Balti- more is the illegal drug enterprise, which was virtually non-existent in 1968.” The explosion of the drug trade in turn in- fluenced the adoption of an aggressive, “broken windows” policing pol- icy that fostered police mistreatment of African Americans and bred mis- trust. The slaying of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner and count- less other unarmed Blacks at the hands of police and vigilantes over the past few years triggered protests across the nation. And the death of Freddie Gray, a Sand- town-Winchester resi- dent, while in police cus- tody on April 19, brought matters in Baltimore to a head. Days of peaceful pro- test were transformed April 27, the day of Gray’s funeral, when a group of students began to taunt and throw missiles at police officers and their cars near Mondawmin Mall. Activists and interfaith leaders, particularly the Rev. Jamal Bryant of Em- powerment Temple, took to the streets, offering prayers to God and pe- titions to rioters to stop the destruction. And, as the hustlers did in ‘68, members of the Crips, Bloods and Black Gue- rilla Family gangs also stepped up to try and re- new the peace in 2015. The damage was no- where near as far-rang- ing or extensive as left in the wake of the ’68 riots. In fact there are still some burnt-up shells of businesses that were PHOTO BY WARREN K. LEFFLER (PUBLIC DOMAIN) Riot Redux: Events of 2015 Mirrored the Unrest of 1967, 1968 This photograph shows a soldier standing guard on the corner of 7th & N Street NW in Washington D.C. with the ruins of buildings that were destroyed during the riots that followed the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. burned in 1968, particu- larly on Gay Street. But the new destruction com- pounded blight left be- hind 47 years ago, some leaders said. “We’re still recover- ing from a situation that occurred 40 years ago and now we have further destruction on top of it. This just sets us further back.” “There needs to be the same type of strategy development for neigh- borhoods as was created for the development of downtown, a strategy that must go forward regardless of who is in the mayor’s office or the governor’s seat,” he said. “Unless that kind of high- er commitment is made, three to five years from now we will be reliving the same type of turmoil that we are witnessing today.”
