On Thursday, Michael Weaver?s mother was crying in front of the television set ? “she wept like a baby,” he said ? and by Saturday there was a National Guard truck at the mailbox on the corner, a .50 caliber machine gun mounted on the back.
The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King had just been murdered in Memphis, Tenn., his cleric?s status unable to protect him as so many black folks had hoped. Baltimore was one of more than a hundred cities in Lyndon Johnson?s America to go up in flames in response.
Weaver was 16, a Baltimore Polytechnic senior living on the east side at 2824 Federal St. near the corner of North Kenwood Avenue.
Under a lock and key curfew greater than the one at 6 p.m. imposed by martial law ? “my parents wouldn?t let us out of the house” ? Weaver peeped from the window of his invalid grandmother?s bedroom to stare at soldiers and black skies.
“Vietnam was on TV and the army was in front of my house,” remembered the 56-year-old poet. “War was everywhere.”
In a wheelchair, her roots going back to the “colored” world of sharecropping Virginia, his grandmother remained stoic. Younger grown-ups were angry and in despair; the kids as fascinated as they were afraid.
“Black smoke and gunfire ? scared the hell out of me,” said Weaver. “I had a Brownie camera that I loved, but I didn?t think to try and take any pictures.”
The killing of King touched off African-American violence across the country. The build-up, said Weaver, was in the local air long before the bullets left James Earl Ray?s rifle.
Weaver felt it as one of the first black kids to integrate Herring Run Junior High School in 1963; he saw it at the annual City-Poly football game; and he feared it when he and his friends walked from the top of East Baltimore down to Patterson Park to swim.
“When we took the bus to [Herring Run] I saw a man so angry he almost leaped over the fence in the backyard, yelling: ?You niggers stay where you belong.? ”
At the City-Poly game the previous Thanksgiving, the shy, somewhat introverted Weaver watched his black acquaintances “stomp” a white kid.
“Black boys were hunting for white boys and white boys were hunting for black boys. It had nothing to do with the game,” he said. “I stood by feeling helpless. I knew it was wrong but I was afraid of saying anything for fear of getting beaten myself.”
Weaver remembers that for several summers, he and his friends walked toward Highlandtown ? where word went out between 1964 and 1965 that white punks were on the prowl for black targets ? with trepidation. Headed for the public pool in the park, “we were prepared to fight on the way down and fight our way back out.”
The murder of King led to a long, violent weekend symbolized for Weaver by the shattering of the massive Sears, Roebuck display window at Harford Road and North Avenue, the place where black families shopped when they couldn?t go into segregated department stores downtown.
When the smoke cleared, six people had died and a man was seen running up Harford Road with a Sears rowboat on his head.
It was an immediate shock to a teenager on the cusp of college. But not much of a surprise to the middle-aged man who supplanted that awkward kid, a guy who educated himself out of the Proctor & Gamble soap factory in Locust Point, where he befriended white men who confirmed what he?d long heard about: The season when certain Highlandtown boys set out to “kill themselves a nigger.”
“The world was in one of those states of uproar back then,” Weaver said. “It?s in an uproar again today, but it?s a different one.”
Now known as Aafa Michael Weaver, he is the alumnae professor of English at Simmons College in Boston. His most recent book of poetry is “The Plum Flower Dance.”
Strangest of all is something beyond the conjuring of the 16-year-old who stole looks out his grandmother?s window to see Baltimore burning.
Weaver?s personal papers and manuscripts are in the same archive as those of the martyr King at Boston University.
And though Weaver has been writing for more than 30 years, he?s never written about the riots he lived through.
“A dear part of Baltimore was gone,” he said. “We spent most of the ?70s just watching things deteriorate.”
