On April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. was struck down by an assassin’s bullet while standing on the balcony of a Memphis motel. Within hours riots broke out in more than one hundred US cities; by midnight the streets of Washington, DC were in flames. The four-day uprising that followed was finally quelled by sweeping arrests and the deployment of 13,000 federal troops—the largest military occupation of an American city since the Civil War. In the end, 13 people lay dead and more than 1,800 buildings were destroyed, putting to rest any claims that the Black-led rebellions which had engulfed the nation’s cities over the previous four years, would not reach the capital… read more
The struggle has come to land