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Watching televised scenes Monday night of looting, burning and rock-throwing in Baltimore brought back memories for Jewell Chambers. The West Baltimore resident was a young reporter for the Afro-American newspaper the last time the city saw a similar upheaval.

In early April 1968, the city exploded in a rampage of rock-throwing, arson and looting following the slaying of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. By the time peace was restored four days later, six people had been killed, 700 injured, 1,000 businesses ransacked or burned and 5,800 people arrested.

"There was absolute fear," said Chambers, now 72.

She recalls dodging rocks while covering the unrest - something reporters did Monday as well. She witnessed a bar owner pleading with rioters not to torch his place, and flinched when a jittery National Guardsman poked a bayonet into her car after stopping her for being out after the curfew.

The legacy of that trauma lingers 47 year later, say Chambers and others who lived through it or studied it. It also offers lessons, they say, for how to get past the latest eruption.

"A lot of the same issues that existed in 1968 in a lot of these neighborhoods still exist today," said Elizabeth Nix, an assistant history professor at the University of Baltimore who co-edited a book examining the 1968 riots.

While King's murder in Memphis sparked the rioting, Nix said, the violence fed on discontent in the African-American community over economic inequality, housing discrimination and perceptions of being disrespected by neighborhood merchants, many of whom did not live there.

The underlying resentment over poverty and racial inequities remains today, Nix said.

"There's still a lot of people who don't feel like their voices are heard and that they're cut off from the economic and social life of Baltimore," she concluded.

The 1968 rioting began in East Baltimore, as supermarkets, furniture stores, taverns and other shops were ransacked and burned. After hours of trying to quell the violence, Mayor Thomas D'Alesandro III called in more than 5,000 National Guardsmen and imposed an 11 p.m. curfew. Some criticized D'Alesandro then for not being more forceful in heading off trouble, as others now are faulting Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake.

But even the National Guard was not enough then. Rioting broke out the following day in West Baltimore, prompting Gov. Spiro Agnew to seek help from the White House. President Lyndon B. Johnson sent in thousands of Army troops.

In one respect, the 1968 riots were not as disruptive as the current upheaval. The Orioles only had to postpone a single game, their season home opener. But two players, shortstop Mark Belanger and relief pitcher Pete Richert, missed the game, having been called up by their National Guard units.

The 1968 devastation had lasting effects, said Robert C. Embry Jr., who was a member of Baltimore City Council then. It accelerated an exodus of white residents to the suburbs, he said, and it removed a lot of stores from African-American neighborhoods - leading to a shortage of shopping opportunities that persists today.

Embry, who's now president of the Abell Foundation after a career in public service that included being the city's first housing commissioner, said he didn't believe the outburst of violence on Monday would be enough to scare off the recent influx of residents or investment into the city.

"But I could be totally wrong," he said.

Chambers said she's disgusted by the vandalism and looting. The CVS pharmacy that was looted and burned, she said, was there to serve local residents, including a nearby senior housing facility.

But she said she believes the rioting shouldn't distract from dealing with the festering anger over police treatment of residents in poor, predominantly African-American neighborhoods. Before the outbreak, there had been a week of mostly peaceful demonstrations over the death in police custody of 25-year-old Freddie Gray, an incident protesters contend is part of a pattern of abuse by authorities.

"What we need to be concerned with in Baltimore is not so much black or white, it's blue," Chambers said. "It's the actions of the police."
Baltimore Sun reporter Mike Klingaman contributed to this article. tim.wheeler@baltsun.com

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City rioting evokes memories of 1968 unrest

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Watching televised scenes Monday night of looting, burning and rock-throwing in Baltimore brought back memories for Jewell Chambers. The West Baltimore resident was a young reporter for the Afro-American newspaper the last time the city saw a similar upheaval.

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Unlike the other corridors closer to the city's better-established Northwest districts, H Street Northeast is more of a work in progress than a finished product. There are still vacant and dilapidated buildings on and off the strip, but fewer and fewer.

Renewal of this largely African-American neighborhood began about five years ago, when young white professionals priced out of areas like Columbia Heights, near 14th Street, and the Shaw neighborhoods, near Seventh Street, discovered cheaper prices in this section of the city, according to residents and real estate brokers.

The changes to the neighborhood have generally been welcomed by older African-American residents and store owners, like Bernett Powell, the owner of Powell's II Barber Shop on H Street, who said that crime and loitering had declined. A decade ago, he said, there were "a lot of drunk people standing in front." But no more.

"This was basically an area fairly crime-infested," said Terrence McCauley, a broker with Long & Foster. "Now, over all, it is getting much better."

Chris Stanford, a newspaper page designer at The Washington Post, moved to the neighborhood in 2005 from Dupont Circle, where town houses and some condos were selling for upwards of $1 million. He moved for the affordable housing. "It wasn't an area I was familiar with, but it showed some promise," said Mr. Stanford, who is 35. He paid $365,000 for his two-bedroom row house on Wylie Street Northeast, one block north of H Street.

"It's certainly a transitional neighborhood," Mr. Stanford said, "but changes even in the last two years are noticeable in terms of safety and appearance."

Jonathan and Kirsten Teumer, who had previously rented on Capitol Hill, paid $349,000 for their Wylie Street row house in August 2004. They said they had moved to H Street not only for its affordability but also to continue living closer to Capitol Hill. Since they moved in, "it's improved quite a lot," said Mr. Teumer, a social worker, "and the street's a lot quieter."

The area has also become more expensive. Until recently, when the market slowed, speculators had been buying, renovating and reselling properties for a profit, and pushing up housing prices, Mr. McCauley, the broker, said. "Over the last five years they have at least doubled and in many cases tripled in value," particularly for homes that have been updated. In 2002, most row houses in the neighborhood could be bought for $100,000 or less. Today, prices range from $260,000 for a fixer-upper to $800,000 for a fully renovated home at the western end of H Street Northeast, closer to the Capitol.

Mr. Abdo's development and the rise in property values have given other developers confidence to build in the area. Other construction projects include a 540,000-square-foot office building opposite Mr. Abdo's development and a 2.5-million-square-foot mixed-use project over the Union Station rail yard. Also, at the other end of the H Street corridor, Clark Realty has city approval for a 460-unit residential project.

The nightclub scene is booming, too. Joe Englert, a nightclub and restaurant developer, has opened six restaurants and bars on H Street Northeast in the last two years, including the Rock and Roll Hotel, a bar and music forum that has attracted popular bands like Clap Your Hands Say Yeah.

Meanwhile, the area's biggest cultural attraction, a 1938 movie theater that closed after the riots, reopened last year as the Atlas Performing Arts Center, after a $21 million makeover.

The District of Columbia government is also investing $30 million in improvements like new sidewalks and street lights and $19 million more to buy trolley cars that will run down the H Street corridor. The improvements are expected over the next three years.

Although restaurants and bars have made a comeback, dollar stores, fast-food eateries and check-cashing outlets remain mainstays. "Even though the bars are fun and cool," said Paige Byrne, a Wylie Street Northeast resident since 2006, she still has no interest in strolling up and down the block during the day. "It just needs more shopping," she said. She and her husband, Geoffrey, both teachers, paid $365,000 for their renovated row house.

Anwar Saleem, 53, who experienced the 1968 riots firsthand, agreed. The director of H Street Main Street, a nonprofit group seeking to attract and increase businesses in the area, Mr. Saleem collected thousands of signatures in an as-yet-unsuccessful effort to lure the supermarket chain Trader Joe's to H Street Northeast.

The Steuart Investment Company, a development group that owns a parcel of land adjacent to the Landmark Lofts, was rebuffed by another upscale grocery chain it had hoped would occupy the ground floor of its planned residential development. Construction is contingent on finding another supermarket.

Still, "there's activity all through here," Mr. Abdo said. "Is it 14th Street?" he asked, referring to a transformed riot corridor where he has invested in residential real estate. "Not yet. But you can see the future."

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Unlike the other corridors closer to the city's better-established Northwest districts, H Street Northeast is more of a work in progress than a finished product. There are still vacant and dilapidated buildings on and off the strip, but fewer and fewer.

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Rioters in Baltimore hurled rocks at police, destroyed patrol cars and looted and burned stores as demonstrations over the death of a black man in police custody turned violent Monday.

Police said 15 officers were injured and two remained hospitalized Monday evening.

"All are going to be OK but sustained heavy damage to their bodies," Baltimore Police Commissioner Anthony Batts said in a news conference late Monday night.

One officer was hit in the head and another suffered severe damage to his knee cap, Batts said.

The police commissioner said at the news conference that he believes that the tensions were on the down side and on their way to dying down.

Batts said it was his understanding that a number of gangs met and decided that each group would "take out a police officer" after the Monday's funeral of Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old man who suffered a fatal spinal injury after being in custody with Baltimore city police.

Batts implored parents to take control of their children who might be taking part in the rioting and said what troubled him was that the structures that were being destroyed took great effort to erect in ailing communities that need them. Many communities do not survive riots, he said.

"I've seen cities that haven't recovered 50 years later," he said.

Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan declared a state of emergency in the city and activated the National Guard to assist city and state police, calling it a "last resort'' to restore order.

Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake called the rioters "thugs" and said the city was imposing a 10 p.m. to 5 a.m. curfew starting Tuesday. She said she asked Hogan to send in the Guard.

"We are deploying every resource possible to gain control of the situation and ensure peace moving forward,'' she said.

Referring to the looters, she said during a television interview: "I don't understand how stealing jeans is going to bring justice to Mr. Gray."

She said the city would get to the bottom of whether the rioters were from Baltimore or from outside the city. "We won't stand by and let our community be destroyed," Rawlings-Blake said.

The Baltimore Orioles postponed a scheduled Monday night game with the Chicago White Sox. The violence was taking place about two and a half miles from the Camden Yards baseball stadium that is home to the Orioles.

Police said more than two dozen people were arrested. The city's schools were canceled for Tuesday.

After darkness fell, a large building under construction near a Baptist church was engulfed in fire. A spokesman for the mayor, Kevin Harris, said the fire was related to the riots. He said the Mary Harvin Transformation Center was under construction and that no one was believed to be in the building at the time. The center is described online as a community-based organization that supports youth and families.

U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch dispatched the Justice Department's civil rights chief and director of the agency's community policing office to Baltimore in wake of rioting there. She condemned "senseless acts of violence.''

"In the days ahead, I intend to work with leaders throughout Baltimore to ensure that we can protect the security and civil rights of all residents,'' Lynch said. "And I will bring the full resources of the Department of Justice to bear in protecting those under threat, investigating wrongdoing, and securing an end to violence.''

Dozens of people could be seen throwing bricks, rocks and other objects at officers and at patrol cars with officers inside just hours after funeral services for Freddie Gray. Some demonstrators attacked a stopped police car, leaping on the roof and hood and smashing windows. At least two other police vehicles were set on fire.

Police officers moved in and took down several people near the damaged car. But no police could be seen as rioters looted stores including a CVS pharmacy, a check cashing store, a liquor store and a cell phone store.

A short time later, smoke billowed from the broken windows of the pharmacy. Police said via Twitter that rioters cut a hose firefighters were using to battle the blaze.

Police said on Twitter that looters were "continuing to break into businesses and set cars on fire'' in the area, and that they were responding to reports of looting inside Mondawmin Mall.

The rioting came after days of protests over the death of Gray, 25, who suffered a fatal spinal injury after being taken into custody by Baltimore city police. It was the latest in a series of deadly encounters with police around the country that has triggered a national debate over the use of force, especially against suspects who are black.

Linda Singh, adjunct general of the Maryland National Guard, said they were bringing in Guard troops in armoreed Humvee vehicles. "We are going to be out in massive force,'' she said.

As night approached, Baltimore police used Twitter to describe protesters as "a violent and aggressive group'' and urged citizens to avoid the area.

Numerous police officers in riot gear responded to the demonstrations near a mall in northwest Baltimore. Police described many of the protesters as juveniles.

A flier circulated on social media called for a period of violence Monday afternoon to begin at the Mondawmin Mall and move downtown toward City Hall, Associated Press reported. Outside the mall, a young person threw a flaming trash can at the line of officers.

The University of Maryland Baltimore shut down its campus, hours after city police announced a "credible threat" that local gangs were targeting police officers.

The police department said the Criminal Intelligence Unit had obtained information indicating "members of various gangs including the Black Guerilla Family, Bloods and Crips have entered into a partnership to 'take out' law enforcement officers."

The department said law enforcement agencies and officers should take appropriate precautions. It was not clear if the threat to officers was directly tied to the concern for safety at the school.

The campus shut down at 2 p.m. "at the recommendation of the BPD." The school cited unidentified "activities (that) may be potentially violent and UMB could be in the path of any violence.

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"The safety of our students and employees is of paramount importance please vacate the campus as soon as possible."

The schools alert was issued shortly after the funeral of Freddie Gray, which drew thousands of mourners to the downtown Baltimore church.

Gray's death April 19 while in police custody set off a week of protests. Most of the protest were quiet - until Saturday night. That protest began peacefully with more than 1,000 people rallying at City Hall. Police Commissioner Anthony Batts said he moved through the crowd, promising that his office was making systemic changes.

Batts, who is black, said the organized protest had essentially wrapped up when tense confrontations resulted in violence. He has blamed the violence on "agitators."

The protesters "became very violent. They began to throw objects," Batts said Saturday night. "They picked up aluminum barricades and smashed windows at our bars and pubs."

Patrol cars were smashed. Six police officers suffered minor injuries; 34 people were arrested.

Batts said some residents moved between police and the angry crowd, urging the protesters not to damage the city. He commended police officers for showing "tremendous restraint" and city residents for helping tamp down the unrest.

"I am proud of our residents and our police officers," Batts said. "The vast majority of residents out here did a good job. ... A small number of people felt like they had to turn this into an ugly day."
Contributing: Associated Press
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Baltimore police, protesters clash; 15 officers hurt

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CLOSE Rioters in Baltimore hurled rocks at police, destroyed patrol cars and looted and burned stores as demonstrations over the death of a black man in police custody turned violent Monday. Police said 15 officers were injured and two remained hospitalized Monday evening.

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THE 1968 riots rank with the 1904 fire that wiped out much of the downtown business district and the state legislature's 1947 vote to prevent the city from annexing additional land as major events that changed the course of history for Baltimore this century.

In the early hours, the unrest didn't seem like a momentous event. The city was relatively quiet after the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis on the evening of #F Thursday, April 4. But by April 6, sporadic, isolated incidents had gained momentum. Teeming crowds gathered on Gay Street in East Baltimore and began breaking store windows and looting. By 6:45 that evening, then-Gov. Spiro T. Agnew had called out the National Guard.

Hundreds of city and state police officers were deployed to limit destruction in East and West Baltimore. Many merchants decried the lack of police protection for businesses. The sky was blackened with the smoke of 800 fires in 72 hours.

The toll was steep: six people were killed, 700 were injured, 1,000 small businesses were looted or burned out and 5,800 people were arrested. Nearly 3,500 cases were tried in city courts.

Baltimore has since moved forward, forming multiracial coalitions address the city's ills, including the needs of the poor. Post-riot urban renewal efforts added some much-needed schools and recreational facilities.

But much remains to be done. Major corridors, such as Gay Street and North Avenue, and parts of Harford Road, Pennsylvania Avenue and Park Heights Avenue, still show scars from the riots. Some three decades later, the memories of that violent time remain clear for many people. Below are some recollections.

The events of Saturday evening, April 6, 1968, linger in my memory. Clarisse Mechanic, owner of the theater that bears her husband's name; my now-deceased husband, R.P. Harriss, then-arts editor of the News-American, and I were invited to a dinner party at the home of Dr. and Mrs. Irving Taylor, near Ellicott City.

We had just been seated when a policeman arrived and told everyone from Baltimore to leave at once and to take the shortest route to our homes because rioting had broken out in the city. As we drove, the streets were deserted except for soldiers.

When we dropped Mrs. Mechanic off at her home on North Charles Street, we could see flames shooting high in the sky from fires on Greenmount Avenue. By the time we reached our Guilford home, a strong odor of smoke was everywhere. That night, we did not sleep with guns by our side as several of our friends did.

Margery W. Harriss

Guilford

The Baltimore riot of April 1968 was a long Palm Sunday weekend of contrasts from Saturday through Tuesday.

People went to church and people looted. People were curious or scared to death. They went outside looking for adventure or to calm things down.

The skies were a sunny blue in one direction and black with smoke in another.

Tulips had replaced the daffodils in back yards and federal troops patrolled streets with bayonets on their guns.

The mayor said the riot was well-planned and others thought there was no evidence of that. Many agreed the trouble started in East Baltimore.

On the streets were Martin Luther King Jr. remembrance signs, an all-out curfew, no traffic, no liquor sales and no more mom-and-pop stores on corner lots.

We lived in Bolton Hill in the city - still do - and had a 10-day-old baby, a 1]- year-old and a 3-year-old. Buildings burned two blocks away and troops walked down our street. Since I worked downtown from darkness to darkness as an editor at The Evening Sun, we moved to Roland Park for a week.

From day to day, no one knew when the trouble would end. But by midweek, the curfew was eased; there were fewer fires, looting and arrests. City people helped dampen tensions.

For many, the riots ended with baseball. The Orioles opened their season at Memorial Stadium on Wednesday.

Ernest F. Imhoff

Sun reporter

People in the newsroom stood by the big east windows, as Saturday afternoon waned, watching plumes of smoke rise. The sight of Washington's rioters on television had been a signal to inner-city Baltimore. What next, here - the National Guard? The Army? I made one more call to New York - to Bob Parker, chief of domestic correspondents for Time magazine.

Time went to press then on Saturday evening. "We want you to size up the situation," Parker said, speaking very clearly. "If Baltimore's turning into another Newark, another Detroit, we'll hold everything. If your riots aren't that big, we'll close on the usual schedule.

"Call us about 6."

Four of us went off for a closer look: Phil Evans, city editor, and two reporters from The Evening Sun; I in my sideline as the local stringer for Time, Life and Fortune.

We drove up to East North Avenue - where several buildings were ablaze. I saw kids racing along the sidewalk and carrying burning torches. We turned south on Harford Road, where a big dry cleaning plant was already in ruins. No police or firemen were in sight. All this in daylight.

We headed north and over to the west side; a calmer scene. Vehicle traffic was scant; no one bothered a car with four gawking white men. We drove back to the Sun Building, at Calvert and Centre streets. I called New York.

"It's still early," I reported. "But we may not be having as hard a time as Washington. Nothing's going on downtown, nothing in the white residential districts. Don't hold the magazine for Baltimore."

Normally, the goal was some mention, any mention, of Baltimore. Now, with all this sudden power (the one such moment, it turned out, in 30 years of the Time tie-in), I was glad not to have to use it.

ames H. Bready

retired Evening Sun editorial writer

On Wednesday, April 10, 1968, my daughter, then 6, was scheduled for a tonsillectomy at Mercy Hospital downtown. Over the phone that morning, her doctor had assured me that it was business as usual there despite the rioting. So we made the trip from our Riderwood home.

From the windows of my daughter's hospital room, I could see fires from the riots dotting the landscape. I warned my groggy daughter that she would hear a lot of sirens in the night, but not to worry, she would be safe.

About 3 p.m., I reluctantly left the hospital to comply with the citywide 4 p.m. curfew. It was eerie to emerge from the hospital, midafternoon, onto silent, empty city streets. National Guardsmen wielding M-1 rifles were poised on every corner.

Irma C. Woodland

Riderwood

I was in private practice and handling the settlement on a Bolton Hill house on Lafayette Avenue for a bank on a day when fires were breaking out all around Bolton Hill. So, while we were sitting there doing the paperwork, you could see columns of smoke going up, and this couple that was buying the house kept getting more and more nervous, looking at these fires all around.

They asked us, "What in the world is going on?" I just tried to appear calm; I told them, "Oh, it's just the riots."

Thomas A. Ward

retired Circuit Court Judge

Driving to work in normal rush hour on an empty Jones Falls Expressway was my abnormal beginning to the third day of the riots. The road was closed to everyone except those with passes issued by the National Guard.

From Television Hill, the highest point in Baltimore, we of the Channel 13 staff had a panoramic and frightening view of some 300 fires - a city going up in smoke and anger. With some anxiety about my own safety, I joined one of the WJZ news crews going down for a closer look.

The smashed windows, the looting, the fires, the black banners from a thousand windows were pretty much what I expected from watching the coverage on television. But when we stopped on Pennsylvania Avenue in West Baltimore, I left the newsmen and wandered about - into the completely unexpected.

While I, a middle-aged white man clad in jacket and tie, walked self-consciously and fearfully along the street (and thankful for the National Guard presence), I encountered not one sign of hostility - not a push, not a word, not even an angry glance.

The atmosphere was an eerie combination of resignation and Roman holiday. I watched several burly men climbing through a smashed window of a liquor store, loading their loot into the trunk of a car. My presence didn't deter them; they seemed scarcely to notice me.

Up the street, yet another fire had broken out. The only visible firefighting equipment was busy with a burning building a block away, so the new flames were on their own. The bystanders watched passively amid smoke and confusion as if, despite this assertion of black power, they were still the powerless ones.

But fury, even when justified, is seldom rational. Vengeance was being directed against the physical symbols of white control, no matter if they were the local grocery store or coin laundry, or the apartment whose landlord wouldn't fix the leaky roof. A passing white person was not the enemy.

As we got safely back into the news wagon to return to the station, someone hurled a soda bottle against the side of the vehicle. That was the sum of the anti-white violence we endured that day.

Gwinn Owens

former editorial director of Channel 13

There's this myth that still persists that black businesses weren't destroyed during the riots - that all you had to do was put a black ribbon in the window or on the door to identify your business as being black owned and the looters would leave you alone. But many of the black stores were destroyed anyway. It really put them out of business; they lost everything because they didn't have the capital to rebuild, nor the business acumen to borrow money from lenders.

James Crockett

owner, Crockett Realty Co.

Before the 3 p.m. Palm Sunday curfew, I drove to a fire near Johns Hopkins Hospital. Walking down an alley, I saw an old black woman sitting on her steps, weeping. "This didn't have to happen," she kept repeating.

As I headed back to the seminary, I stopped for a red light. Suddenly, a group of stone-wielding youths appeared, and smashed the car widow of a nearby driver. As he sped off, the well-supplied youths headed for me. Then, one of them saw my Roman collar and shouted: "He's a priest, let him go."

Praise the Lord, and go I went.

$the Rev. Joseph Gallagher

retired Baltimore priest

My friends and I were milling around on the Towanda playground when two or three men came through and threw Molotov cocktails into Sam's Liquor Store at Quantico Street and Reisterstown Road. We hadn't seen anything like it; it was terrifying. The store burned in less than an hour.

ichael Johnson

owner of the Heritage Black Film Museum

Driving through the destruction that weekend, many people had a black cloth tied to the car's antenna, or wedged into a window. It signified mourning for Martin Luther King Jr. - also, if you liked, sympathy for the rioters.

Mother, who Sunday morning traversed the length of North Avenue, told of having seen, hanging out one residential upper window, a black brassiere.

R.C.S. Gladstone

Baltimore

We were staying at the Belvedere Hotel when the riots began, attending an Ocean City Dunes Club dinner dance. On hearing of the riots, some of us went up to the roof of the hotel to survey the unrest.

When we returned to the Charles Room, everyone at the dance had left the hotel, including the band and hotel staff, leaving the hotel doors locked behind them. We had a fitful night's sleep not knowing if the hotel would be torched.

The next morning, the streets were virtually deserted, except for trucks full of armed guards and police cars.

Francis J. Townsend Jr.

Ocean City

As a 21-year-old sergeant in the Maryland National Guard, my job was to cook for the guardsmen and city and state police. As I was cooking on the parking lot of the Fifth Regiment Armory, I could see fires all around us. I was scared to death, and I worried for my pregnant wife back in Pigtown.

I carried a .50-caliber machine gun and no bullets. I thank God no ammunition was issued because someone might have overreacted and killed someone.

David Brecht

Pasadena

While parts of the city were burning, life downtown seemed to go on relatively undisturbed.

Except for the soldiers and the gun emplacements on certain street corners, the sight of soldiers on these familiar sidewalks was chilling. Downtown suddenly looked formidable, threatening, hostile.

Walking about you had the sense that the city would be forever tarnished by this sad sight, stained by armed rebellion.

You felt in your gut that things would never be the same again. And, of course, they never were.

ilbert Sandler

free-lance writer

As I rode the No.7 bus home on Palm Sunday morning, I saw parents looting stores with their children in tow. When I saw that, bTC I knew that they were going to have trouble reasserting their authority. The 1968 riots was a time when parental authority and respect for adults in the African-American community began to erode.

My parents told me that if I brought any stolen item into the house, I was going out the back door with it.

R.B. Jones

free-lance writer

After news spread that Martin Luther King Jr. had been shot, you could feel the tension in the air everywhere. I went to Monument and Gay streets, because that's where I understood the trouble was going to start. A gentleman was there dressed in black - somebody I had never seen in the neighborhood. He threw a rock through the window of Sun Cleaners at Aisquith and Monument streets.

Then, all hell broke loose. They started looting stores, going north along Gay Street. The first fire started at the Lewis Furniture store on Gay Street.

I thought the best thing to do was to go home, and that's what I did.

Nathan C. Irby Jr.

executive secretary of the Baltimore City Liquor Board

Pub Date: 4/03/98

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THE 1968 riots rank with the 1904 fire that wiped out much of the downtown business district and the state legislature's 1947 vote to prevent the city from annexing additional land as major events that changed the course of history for Baltimore this century.

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The first plate-glass window was smashed around 5:30 p.m. at the Fashion Hat Shop in the 400 block of N. Gay Street.

Half an hour later, roving bands of black teens, itching for more action, looted their first business, Sun Cleaners, at Gay and Monument streets, spiriting away clothes wrapped in plastic bags. At 6:15 p.m., they set their first fire, torching the Ideal Furniture Company in the 700 block of Gay Street.

Alerted to the growing unrest, city cops, on- and off-duty, surged into Baltimore's modest East Side shopping district, setting up headquarters at the nearby Belair Market. While one plainclothes officer characterized the scene as "pretty festive" at 7 p.m., the situation quickly turned malicious, as store after store in the vicinity-groceries, appliance shops, furniture outlets, dry cleaners, five-and-dimes, tailors, taverns, liquor stores, pawn brokers-was broken into and ransacked.

At 8:45 p.m., the evening's first serious blaze (four alarms) consumed an A&P supermarket and three adjacent shops in the 1400 block of N. Milton Street, and, within the next hour, the disturbances spread to the commercial strips along North and Greenmount avenues. Around the same time, a suspected looter was shot and killed in a bar at Harford Road and Lafayette Avenue, while throughout the area, truculent young men pelted policemen and firemen with bottles and stones.

At 10 p.m., city police admitted their inability to contain the chaos, and Governor Spiro Agnew, at the request of Baltimore Mayor Thomas D'Alesandro III, called in the National Guard, simultaneously issuing an 11 p.m. to 6 a.m. curfew for the city.

By late evening on Saturday, April 6, 1968, the Baltimore riots were in full swing. When the sun rose the next day, 5,500 National Guardsmen, 400 state troopers, and 1,200 city cops occupied Baltimore. Three people were dead; 70 injured; more than 100 arrested; and 250 fire alarms had been reported. On the East Side, still-smoldering buildings lined streets and sidewalks that were flecked with shards of broken glass.

Sparked by the April 4 assassination of civil-rights patriarch Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis, and fueled by decades of repressed anger and resentment over perceived political, social, and economic injustices, African-American communities erupted in violence in Baltimore and many other U.S. cities-New York, Boston, Detroit, Cincinnati, and Tallahassee-with Chicago and Washington, D.C., suffering the most extensive damage.

When similar rioting also engulfed Baltimore's West Side on Sunday, April 7, it was Agnew's turn to ask for help; he turned to the White House for assistance. President Lyndon Johnson sent in nearly 3,000 U.S. Army soldiers, a force that ultimately would swell to approximately 5,000 troops. Despite the reinstitution of a curfew on Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday, the looting contagion continued to spread, striking businesses along York Road, Harford Road, and Edmondson Avenue. Worse, throughout the city, snipers fired on beleaguered police, firemen, soldiers, and National Guardsmen, while taunting groups of blacks and whites squared off on street corners.

Finally, on Tuesday night, the fever broke, and calm began to return. Devastation unlike anything seen since the Great Fire of 1904 stretched from Patterson Park Avenue to the east, W. Belvedere Avenue and 33rd Street to the north, Hilton Street and Hilton Road to the west, and Pratt Street and Washington Boulevard to the south.

Over four nights and three days, Baltimore experienced its greatest unnatural disaster of the second half of the 20th century-looting and arson on a massive, unprecedented scale. The grim toll: six dead; more than 700 people injured; 5,500 arrested; 1,050 businesses looted, vandalized, or obliterated by fire; and an estimated $13.5 million in property damages (which equates to nearly $79 million in today's dollars).

"The riots," as everyone called them, remain a watershed event, indelibly imprinted in the memories of those who witnessed the turmoil. Jazz singer Ruby Glover, who, in addition to her nightclub gigging back then, also worked as an administrator in the emergency room at Johns Hopkins Hospital, was out with friends and several co-workers "having a wonderful time" at a Pennsylvania Avenue club early on the evening of April 7. Unaware of the curfew, Glover was on stage performing when "the door burst open and there were all these soldiers with their sergeant, and he said, 'Outside, all hell has broken loose.'"

As the troops hustled everyone out of the club, Glover was thrust into a raging melee. "It looked like everything was on fire," she recalls. "It appeared that everything that we loved and adored and enjoyed was just being destroyed. It was just hideous."

On the night the riots began, James Bready, then an editorial writer for The Evening Sun, piled into a car with two newspaper colleagues in order to survey the escalating situation: "We drove along North Avenue, and I remember seeing kids running along from store to store with lighted torches to touch them off. But nobody ever tried to stop the car or interfere with us."

In the months following the riots, various reports analyzed the disturbances, in part examining the underlying societal forces that catalyzed the unrest. In June, the suitably staid Maryland Crime Investigating Commission Report of the Baltimore Civil Disturbance of April 6 to April 11, 1968 explained that "social and economic conditions in the looted areas constituted a clear pattern of severe disadvantage for Negroes compared with whites . . . Our investigation arrives at the clear conclusion that the riot in Baltimore must be attributed to two elements-'white racism' and economic oppression of the Negro. It is impossible to give specific weights to each, but together they gave clear cause for many of the ghetto residents to riot."

That September, the Middle Atlantic Region American Friends Service Committee's left-leaning "Report on Baltimore Civil Disorders, April 1968" declared that "different people were acting various roles in the disorders. Some were simply stealing desired goods. Some were seeking revenge upon storekeepers who, they felt, had exploited them and other black people. Some were consciously demonstrating the power of black people. But regardless of their roles, people knew that this was a shared experience and a shared act of black people, a shared expression of rage, grief, and frustration in the face of white dominance and obtuseness."

Tommy D'Alesandro, mayor for a mere 75 days when the riots exploded, sensed those same conditions. "There was a hurt within the black community that they were not getting their fair share," D'Alesandro notes now. "We were coming from a very segregated city during the 30's, 40's, and 50's-and it was still a segregated atmosphere."

Reflecting on the civil unrest, Bready suspects that "black people felt release after generations of 'You mustn't do this, you mustn't go there, you can't say that or think that.' Suddenly, the lid was off."

According to both the Crime Investigation Commission and the Friends Service Committee reports, the riots consciously sought to tilt the city's entrenched black/white economic imbalance. "Black militants weren't trying to start a race riot but trying to establish the machinery whereby Negroes were to run their own neighborhood stores," the former theorized. "The first phase of the plan was to burn out the white merchants." The latter study agreed that "almost all of the property damaged was owned by whites, not blacks," while positing that "this selectivity in the choice of targets seems to demonstrate that a prime motive was to get back at merchants known to have humiliated or exploited black people."

Post-riots, some merchants took their insurance money and rebuilt their businesses; others simply boarded up their establishments. Simultaneously, the housing market dove south. "What little confidence there had been among investors that they could ride out the weak market before the riots waned away as the scale of vandalism after the riots increased," contended Michael Stegman in his 1972 book Housing Investment in the Inner City: The Dynamics of Decline (A Study of Baltimore, Maryland, 1968-1970). "The seeming inability of city authorities to control it in any way became evident, and the polarization of landlord and tenant intensified. Values, which had been moving downward before, seemed to plummet sharply."

So did the city's population. People poured out of Baltimore, especially whites. The incipient urban depopulation that occurred between 1950 and 1960-from 950,000 to 939,000 residents, the city's first decrease since 1800-snowballed after the riots. From 1970 to 1980, Baltimore's population declined from 906,000 to 787,000. Left behind in the whirlwind of "white flight" to the suburbs, the percentage of black residents increased substantially. Pegged at only 24 percent in 1950, the city's "non-white" population steadily increased, registering at 65 percent by 2000, among 651,000 total residents.

Not surprisingly, this exodus dramatically affected commerce, particularly along the city's traditional Howard and Lexington streets shopping nexus, where a quartet of department stores-Stewart's, Hecht Co., Hutzler's, and Hochschild-Kohn-had thrived for decades, catering primarily to white ladies in white gloves.

Slowly, these behemoths withered and expired, their customer base severely undermined by a tsunami of suburban malls that opened in the 1970's and 1980's: Columbia, Golden Ring, White Marsh, Security Square, Hunt Valley, Owings Mills, among others.

Ultimately, perhaps the riots' most significant impact lies in something intangible: the way they forced Baltimoreans, both black and white, to reassess the city's prevailing racial dynamic.

"In some instances, the riots brought the races closer together; in some instances, they scared whites," says Dr. Charles Simmons, founder and president of Sojourner-Douglass College. Active in 1968 in the city's civil-rights movement in association with his job as a field representative for the Teamsters Union-while also attending Morgan State-Simmons emphasizes that "the riots really weren't personal: They were against the system, not individual white people. There was only property loss."

Pondering the turmoil now, D'Alesandro considers it "an awakening, a recognition that some in our society were being shortchanged, and they had to be brought in through the legitimate channels of government and commerce and education and jobs and housing.

"A lot of people thought the riots knocked us out. But we redoubled our efforts, and we accelerated the change that was needed, a change in people's attitudes-to give an acknowledgement throughout the community that all people are welcome."

And yet, nearly 40 years after the riots, Ruby Glover still laments that "so much in the city today almost brings back those memories-with the gangs, and the way that police have to work on streets where I grew up, where I laughed and entertained. There's still great fear, but it's coming not just from whites to blacks-now it's blacks to blacks."

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The first plate-glass window was smashed around 5:30 p.m. at the Fashion Hat Shop in the 400 block of N. Gay Street. Half an hour later, roving bands of black teens, itching for more action, looted their first business, Sun Cleaners, at Gay and Monument streets, spiriting away clothes wrapped in plastic bags.

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H Rap Brown Arrested 1970

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http://m.ft.com/cms/

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The day Baltimore planned to lay Freddie Gray to rest, the city went up in smoke.

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68 baltimore riots

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http://www.cnn.com/2015/04/27/us/baltimore-riots-timeline/index.html

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Evan Conley

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1968 riot

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The Baltimore riot of 1968 was a period of civil unrest that lasted from April 6 to April 14, 1968 in Baltimore. The uprising included crowds filling the streets, burning and looting local businesses, and confronting the police and national guard.

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Troops with bayonets bared marched through the streets of eastern and western Baltimore Monday, where 100,000 Black people live in poverty. April 7, Johnson had 2,000 troops dispatched to Baltimore at Gov. Agnew’s request to help the 6,000 National Guardsmen and 1,600 city and state police. By April 8, there were 10,848 troops in Baltimore.

Five killed, 12 critically injured, over 500 injured and 3,200 arrested added to the mounting nationwide list of Black people murdered and wounded. The fifth person killed in Baltimore was a Black mean shot down in the street for “suspected looting.” One New York Times report of April 9 revealed that cops were using dogs against the people in the Afro-American communities.

April 8, it was reported that the Black people were beginning to use guerrilla warfare tactics to drive off the armed invaders. Police were shot at and stoned from the roofs and pelted with bottles and bricks as they patrolled the besieged Black communities.

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Baltimore April 27, 2015

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Protesters hurled stones at police and their vehicles in northwest Baltimore, after the funeral for Freddie Gray who died in police custody last week.

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Baltimore protests remind me of 1968 riots in urban areas.

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Baltimore protests remind me of 1968 riots in urban areas.

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THEN: April 1968

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Baltimore Riots Looting Tears Gas Clash Protesters Freddy Gray Protest

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1968 Baltimore Riots - Baltimore, Maryland (April, 1968) - [Reel 2]

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The Baltimore Riot of 1968 was composed of black Baltimoreans lasting from April 6 to April 14. The riot included crowds filling the streets, burning and looting local businesses, and confronting the police and national guard. The immediate cause of the rioting was the April 4 assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.