Baltimore was burning

When they heard about the bullet that ended Martin Luther King Jr.’s life, Azrael turned to D’Alesandro and said, “Tommy, you’ll have trouble now.”

But no one imagined how much.

Forty years later, peering into that awful spring’s smoke and ashes and lingering bitterness, we still can’t fully measure how much trouble there was, and how painful it was for so many — and how intoxicatingly liberating for so many others who had grown frustrated marching peacefully and pleading for equal rights in reluctant America.

The simple facts about the Baltimore riots of 1968 are these: In four days and nights, beginning April 6, there were roughly 5,000 people arrested. Roughly 700 injured. Roughly a thousand businesses looted or burned, many never to reopen. Roughly a thousand separate buildings set ablaze. Six killed. Untold millions of dollars in property damage. Immeasurable psychological damage that has taken decades to heal.

There were roughly 5,000 National Guard troops with fixed bayonets and 500 state police called out to try to restore calm, along with thousands of city police working around the clock, and they were all late by about a hundred years.

Business owners — almost all of them white — saw their life savings go up in smoke.

Inner-city residents — most of them black — watched the streets where they lived go up in smoke.

And yet it was only part of America’s season in hell.

Hundreds of U.S. soldiers were dying each week in Vietnam that spring, and the Selective Service announced the draft call for May was 44,000 men. Bobby Kennedy, bidding for a Democratic presidential nomination, was instead on his way to assassination in a grubby Los Angeles hotel kitchen. In Richard Daley’s Chicago, the Democratic National Convention would bring massive political rioting.

And in Memphis Tenn., the sniper’s bullet struck Martin Luther King as he stood on a motel balcony and took his life, and set off rioting in more than a hundred American cities.

Forty years later, for all who were there in Baltimore, the memory is still vivid of people standing in streets littered with glass, many with tears in their eyes, crying, “The King is dead,” or, “They got The King,” almost as though Jesus himself had been slain — and of tear gas wafting through the spring air, sirens screeching, fire all around, and smoke rising above the remains of burned-out buildings.

Broken glass, fire

and troops in the city

D’Alesandro was 38 years old that spring and considered Martin Luther King a friend. In his years on the City Council, D’Alesandro had introduced plenty of long-overdue civil rights legislation. For this, he heard white people call him a bum. That was the polite language.

As council president, he’d reached into black communities the way nobody but Theodore McKeldin ever had before. When he ran for mayor, he won 93 percent of the black vote. Understanding the lateness of the hour when he took office, he appointed the city’s first black solicitor, its first black fire commissioner, its first black members of the zoning board and the parks board.

None of this mattered; the era of good intentions was now suspended for a brief glimpse of the apocalypse.

For many black people who heard the news about King’s assassination, the riots became a howl of pent-up rage, or anguish, or a moment to redress all of history’s outrages. For others, it was a once-in-a-lifetime chance to cash in, as stores and saloons were looted at will, and then burned.

When D’Alesandro turned on the television that first night, he saw rioting in what seemed like every big city but Baltimore. “If we can make it to Sunday morning, when the ministers can talk in church, we’ll be OK,” he thought.

But his city was already coming undone.

On Gay Street, on the East side, a pamphlet was distributed to business owners. In honor of Dr. King, it said, close your stores. The same kind of warning had been circulated in Washington before it exploded. At twilight the next day, a rock was thrown through a store window, and the riots in Baltimore commenced.

D’Alesandro was in the war room at police headquarters when he heard the news. Scores of fires were being set along decayed inner-city blocks. Here, poverty and bitterness were so ingrained that King’s death was seen not only as tragedy but also as opportunity: No more begging for decent jobs, no more waiting around for decent housing that had already taken a lifetime to arrive. It was the fire this time.

At The News American, where I had just started working, a city editor named Eddie Ballard sent every available reporter into the streets for the next four days and nights.

By nightfall on the first full day of the riots, there was broken glass littering the streets like confetti, and streams of black smoke coiling into the sky, and troops on city street corners with upraised rifles.

At the corner of Eager and Ensor streets, by the Latrobe Housing Projects, city police began lining kids against a wall. The kids were violating a curfew ordinance, and the cops wanted to know why they were still in the streets. The dialogue was always the same:

Officer: “Where are you going?”

Teenager: “My mother’s.”

Officer: “Where are you coming from?”

Teenager: “My father’s.”

At North and Greenmount avenues, an entire neighborhood seemed to rage against itself. In those days, there were still bars on Greenmount Avenue that wouldn’t serve black people. There were white food-store owners who had no blacks working for them. If the owner got sick, he simply shut the store down for the day.

Such places were among the first to be torched.

But there were others. Outside the Western District police station, crowds raced through the street in hazy sunlight, hordes of people panicked by police dogs or the sight of guns or the fires burning all around them, racing down the block like some ocean wave that might never stop because there was nothing there to stop it.

In the police station, the cells overflowed with the newly arrested and the courtroom was strangled with defendants. For some, the charges were related to the anguish over King’s murder; for others, the riots were a chance to snatch a free TV, or a case of booze, or fill a shopping cart with food.

In odd ways, it was a chance for the two Baltimores, black and white, to discover each other across the enormous gaps carved over generations.

There were parties scheduled in white Baltimore that weekend. “Curfew parties,” the lucky ones called them. They took place outside the city. On Palm Sunday, a woman in Timonium telephoned guests early in the day to cancel her party. Between sobs, she explained that her husband’s business had been burned out.

Outside a rundown barber shop on Greenmount Avenue, a woman sobbed because her home had been burned out. The same convulsions had touched the lives of the two women – one white, one black – and in the aftermath the entire metro area would struggle to find its common humanity.

It’s taken a long time, and still goes on.

In the quiet of 7:30 that Sunday morning, National Guard Maj. Gen. George Gelston took D’Alesandro for a jeep ride. They went to Gay Street and North Avenue. There were thousands of people already in the streets, but they were momentarily calm.

D’Alesandro looked at the ruins of his city, and he saw anger that hadn’t yet been spent. It wasn’t over, not yet. By 5:30 that afternoon, the first of 5,000 troops from the 82nd Airborne Division patrolled the streets, and slowly the world began to calm down.

Forty years later, an African-American man runs for president and thus offers a measure of distance America has traveled since 1968. There’s now an enormous black middle class inconceivable before the riots, and a few generations of black doctors and lawyers and educators.

But in places like Gay Street, and North and Greenmount avenues, and Eager and Ensor streets, the world has changed only marginally. And the dream remains just out of reach.