It was the first week of April. The weather was unusually warm as the weekend approached.
I’d turned 12 years old a month before and I was already a news junkie. I devoured the Chicago Sun-Times every day and the Chicago American on Sundays. I watched Fahey Flynn on the WBBM Channel 2 ten o’clock news and Carl Greyson on WGN-TV Channel 9’s “Nightbeat, a brief recap of the day’s events between the late movie and the late, late movie. The news, those years, seemed always huge to this not-yet teenager. The Blizzard of 1967. The Apollo 1 astronauts dying in a launchpad fire. McCormick Place burning to the ground. Vietnam. The Tet Offensive. The hippies and the Summer of Love. The Democratic National Convention coming to Chicago that very summer. The Cubs, by some miracle, coming alive after a decades-long slumber. I ate it all up.
I alone (I’m sure) among my classmates at Lovett School knew who the president, the vice president, the governor, Illinois’s two US senators, the mayor, the alderman, the ward committeeman, and for chrissakes, even the precinct captain were.
The answers, in order:
- Lyndon Baines Johnson
- Hubert H. Humphrey
- Otto Kerner
- Everett Dirksen
- Charles Percy
- Richard J. Daley
- John Aiello
- Louie Garippo
- Barney Potenzo
Hah! Half the kids in my class probably didn’t even know their mothers’ maiden names. This, by the way, is how an aging coot thinks after “not living up to his potential” as a kid. John Biancalana and Joe Piombino got all E’s. I got mostly F’s and the occasional U (for a time the Chicago Public Schools graded on the E-G-F-U system — Excellent, Good, Fair, and U’re grounded until you get your grades back up). John Biancalana, I should mention, the top student in my class, once cheated off me on a science test once. That gave me great satisfaction.
Anyway, the news was huger than ever that early April weekend. The sky was darkened by smoke from hundreds of major fires roaring through the West Side. Any number of my neighbors sat on their front porches, pistols or rifles (or both) in their laps, in jittery expectation that hordes of Black men were about to sweep through their streets. The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. had been assassinated at dinner time Thursday. Chicago’s West Side Black neighborhoods had erupted in rage the next day. Miles of West Madison Street and Roosevelt Road were leveled. All off-duty firefighters were called in to work. The police commissioner cancelled all off-days and vacations for his force. Mayor Daley imposed a 24-hour curfew for anyone under 21. He ordered a moratorium on the sale of guns and ammunition.
Police dispatchers sent more than 10,000 officers into the riot-torn area. Gov. Kerner ordered some 6700 Illinois National Guard soldiers into the city. President Johnson sent in 5000 US Army troops. At the height of the mayhem, Mayor Daley flew over the battle zone in a helicopter with his police commissioner, James B. Conlisk. An enraged Daley watched as rioters ran rampant through the streets, carrying loot and tossing incendiaries. He turned to Conlisk and ordered him to direct the police “to shoot to kill any arsonist or anyone with a Molotov cocktail in his hand (and) to shoot to maim or cripple anyone looting stores in our city.”
The front page of the Sun-Times that Saturday morning carried a dramatic photo of police officers kneeling behind a squad car in front of the Cabrini-Green housing project on the Near West Side, aiming their guns at snipers leaning on windowsills in the high rises. Lieutenant Governor Sam Shapiro called the riot an “insurrection.” I wouldn’t hear that word breathed again in this holy land for another half century.
By the time a cooling thunderstorm quelled the violence on Saturday night, 11 people were dead, 500 injured, and 2150 had been arrested. More than 200 buildings had been destroyed.
Chicago was only one of more than 100 cities wracked by riots after King’s killing. From New York City to tiny Cairo, Illinois, Black neighborhoods erupted. Black people, pent up in their slums, denied mortgages, schooled in dumps, living in dilapidated fire traps, by “gentlemen’s agreements” kept from jobs and public office, cuffed, clubbed, harassed, and too often persecuted and tortured by white cops, had been seething for decades and were ready to blow.
That word — insurrection — wouldn’t pop up again in the United States until January 6, 2020, when a mob attacked the US Capitol as the House and Senate attempted to certify the November presidential election. The mayhem, the damage, the casualty count, the horror really, of January 6th paled in comparison to April 4-11, 1968. Yet the anger — the rage — seemed as deeply felt.
Why were Whites — why are Whites — so enraged? A lot of us — me included — like to dismiss the January 6th mob as dickheads. And, yeah, they are. But there’s no denying their anger. Their feeling of powerlessness. Their gut urge to lash out against anyone and everything that’s been crushing them. Sure, the 6th people were dickheads but what of the millions, the tens of millions, of other White non-dickheads who feel just as crushed?
They have been crushed. The wealth gap, the inability to get ahead, the realization that the young will be worse off than their parents, big money control of the electoral process, corporate takeovers of everything else, and the end of the American Dream all have radicalized Whites. Many — too many — place the blame, wrongly, on Mexicans and Central Americans seeking asylum, on drag queens, on liberals, on women, on Blacks, on Jews…, hell, pick a straw man.
They’re wrong but they’re right. Too many of them don’t realize they’ve been pushed down by a corrupt system gamed by a clever, moneyed class. They’re now as contemptible to their crushers as Blacks were to Whites in April, 1968.
Funny thing: good people dreamed of equality for Blacks fifty-plus years ago. It has become nearer a reality not by elevating Blacks but by debasing everyone else.