Riots, Kerner and King's Last Year, 1965-68
Why Northern Cities Burned, 1965-67
Five days after President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act, the largest Black neighbourhood in Los Angeles erupted. On 11 August 1965 a white California Highway Patrol officer pulled over a Black driver, Marquette Frye, in Watts, a Black district of South Los Angeles. A scuffle escalated into six days of rioting that left 34 people dead, more than 1,000 injured, around 4,000 arrests and roughly $40 million of property damage. National Guard tanks rolled through Black neighbourhoods. Watts was not an isolated event. Over the next two summers a wave of urban uprisings struck cities across the North and Midwest. In 1967 there were over 150 such incidents; the worst were in Newark, New Jersey, where 26 people died, and in Detroit, where a five-day uprising killed 43 people. Johnson sent in 4,700 paratroopers and 8,000 National Guard.
The riots had long-term causes. Northern Black Americans had moved up from the Southern fields during the Great Migration to work in industrial cities; by 1965 those cities were losing manufacturing jobs as factories moved to the suburbs that Black families had been excluded from by ‘redlining’ (the federal practice of refusing mortgages in Black neighbourhoods). Schools were segregated by housing. Police forces were almost entirely white and routinely violent. The 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act had targeted the legal segregation of the South; they had not touched any of these Northern conditions.
Between 1965 and 1967 over 150 American cities saw urban uprisings. The biggest were Watts (Los Angeles, August 1965, 34 dead), Newark (New Jersey, July 1967, 26 dead), and Detroit (Michigan, July 1967, 43 dead). The riots showed that the legislative victories of 1964-65 had not addressed Northern poverty, housing segregation or racist policing.
The Kerner Report, February 1968
In July 1967, with Detroit still smouldering, Johnson appointed the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, chaired by Illinois governor Otto Kerner. Johnson hoped the Kerner Report would blame outside agitators. It did the opposite. Published on 29 February 1968 the report identified white racism, segregated housing, unequal schools, mass unemployment and police behaviour as the underlying causes. It found evidence of ‘strong racist attitudes’ in around three-quarters of police departments and warned that the United States was ‘moving toward two societies, one black, one white — separate and unequal’. The Commission recommended large-scale federal investment in housing, jobs, schools and police reform, and proposed treating racial inequality with the urgency of a national emergency.
Johnson, embarrassed by the criticism of his own ‘War on Poverty’ programme as inadequate, refused to receive the report ceremonially at the White House and never publicly endorsed its recommendations. Vietnam was now consuming the federal budget. Within weeks Johnson had announced he would not seek re-election; by November a presidential campaign that ran on the suburbs’ reaction to the riots had elected Richard Nixon, who promised ‘law and order’ and a ‘silent majority’. The Kerner recommendations were never implemented at the scale the Commission asked for.
A common misreading treats the urban uprisings of 1965-67 as proof the civil rights movement had failed, or that Black Americans were ungrateful for the 1964-65 legislation. Kerner reached the opposite conclusion. The Commission found that the rioters were not an aimless minority but a representative cross-section of young Black men in the cities concerned; that they had been provoked by specific incidents of police violence; and that the underlying conditions — housing, schools, jobs, policing — were structural rather than individual. Top-band evaluation answers can use the Kerner findings to challenge an interpretation that the post-1965 movement ‘turned violent’ or that civil rights had been substantially achieved by 1968.
King’s Chicago Campaign and the Northern Pivot, 1966-67
King had recognised the Northern question even before Watts. In January 1966 the SCLC launched the Chicago Freedom Movement, joining local activists in a campaign against slum landlords, housing segregation and discriminatory school enrolment. King and his family rented an apartment in a West Side tenement to dramatise the housing question. On a march through the all-white suburb of Marquette Park in August 1966, white residents threw bricks; King was struck, and said afterwards he had ‘never seen, even in Mississippi or Alabama, mobs as hateful as I’ve seen here in Chicago’. The settlement Mayor Richard Daley signed was vague, unenforceable and largely ignored. Chicago made plain that nonviolent direct action could not, on its own, dismantle Northern housing segregation.
In April 1967, in a speech at Riverside Church in New York, King condemned the war in Vietnam as a ‘cruel manipulation of the poor’, costing Black soldiers’ lives at disproportionate rates and starving the War on Poverty of money. The speech cost King support among white liberals, the Johnson administration and parts of the SCLC board, who feared losing federal allies. By late 1967 King had launched the Poor People’s Campaign: a multiracial march on Washington that would camp on the Mall to demand a Federal Economic Bill of Rights, a guaranteed income, decent housing and full employment.
Memphis, 4 April 1968
In February 1968 about 1,300 Black sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee went on strike under the banner ‘I AM A MAN’ after two refuse collectors were crushed to death by a malfunctioning truck while sheltering from the rain in its compactor — segregation policy denied them shelter inside the depot. King flew to Memphis on 18 March to support them. On 3 April, exhausted and ill, he gave the ‘Mountaintop’ sermon at the Mason Temple: ‘I’ve been to the mountaintop… I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you.’ The next evening, just after six o’clock on 4 April 1968, as King stood on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel, a single rifle shot from the boarding house across the street killed him. He was 39.
News of the killing triggered the largest single wave of urban uprisings in American history. In the week that followed, more than 100 cities saw rioting; 39 people were killed, around 21,000 were arrested, and federal troops occupied parts of Washington and Baltimore. Robert Kennedy, campaigning in Indianapolis on a Black side of the city, broke the news to a Black audience and asked them to honour King by going home. They did. Kennedy himself was shot dead in Los Angeles two months later.
Martin Luther King was assassinated on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, on 4 April 1968, at the age of 39. He had travelled to Memphis to support striking Black sanitation workers. In the week that followed, more than 100 American cities erupted in rioting, 39 people were killed and federal troops occupied Washington and Baltimore.
By 1975 the legal architecture of segregation had gone. The Civil Rights Act (1964), Voting Rights Act (1965) and Fair Housing Act (1968 — passed in the week after King’s death) had outlawed segregation in public accommodation, employment, voting and housing. Black voter registration in the South had risen from around 23 per cent in 1964 to over 60 per cent by 1969. The number of Black elected officials nationwide had risen from about 100 in 1964 to over 3,500 by 1975. But the Kerner conditions in Northern cities — segregated housing, segregated schools by housing, mass unemployment, racist policing — had not been addressed. Median Black household income remained around 60 per cent of white household income. The poverty rate of Black Americans was almost three times that of white Americans. The legal revolution was substantially complete; the economic and Northern revolution had barely begun. Top-band evaluation answers hold both readings together rather than picking one.