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

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[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.

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