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.”