In April 1967, one year before his assassination, Martin Luther King Jr. made a prediction.
Cities from Los Angeles to Chicago to Washington were “powder kegs,” he told reporters gathered in New York to cover his participation in an anti-war rally. “I’m sorry to say this, but the intolerable conditions which brought about racial violence last summer still exist.”
“Last summer” was 1966, when race riots ripped through cities such as San Francisco, Omaha, Neb., and Cleveland. Those came on waves of earlier summers’ riots: Watts in 1965, Philadelphia and New York in 1964.
Throughout the second half of the decade, largely spent protesting the war in Vietnam and fighting for rights of blacks in the North as well as the South, King put words to what many blacks felt: Despite several years of symbolic victories, including King’s “I Have A Dream” speech in Washington, for many, prospects were no better.
It’s a situation ripe for violence, said Frank Gilliam, professor of political science and the University of California, Los Angeles. He called the phenomenon “aspirational deprivation.”
“People’s hopes were up,” Gilliam said. “There was the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965. People thought things were really going to change.”
With hopes so high and gains so elusive, Gilliam said, it took just one event to trigger a reaction on the scale of the District’s
devastation.”There are some symbols that things are getting better, then something happens to let you know, ‘You know what? Things aren’t getting better, and in fact these changes may be threatening to people.’”
