King Assassination: 50 years later

On April 4th 1968 Martin Luther King Jr was killed by an assassin's bullet. In the immediate aftermath African Americans took to the streets of several U.S. cities in a wave of riots and unrest that lasted for days. The killing of the most visible and influential figure of the civil rights movement provoked an irruption of anguished anger which was further stoked by years of simmering tension and resentment in America's disinvested and disenfranchised urban black communities. Pittsburgh was among the U.S. cities to see significant tumult, with nearly a week of riots erupting in the Hill District, the city's center of black life and culture. I still occasionally encounter Pittsburghers citing the Hill riots as an example of blacks "irrationally" destroying their "own" communities as a historical rationalization for longstanding social and economic plights facing Hill residents, as well as implicitly justifying the American apartheid of residential segregation and uneven spatialization. The King assassination riots became emblematic of what came to be known as the "urban crisis" in the United States. A young Richard Sennett responded to the urban unrest of the late 1960's in his classic work of urban sociology, "The Uses of Disorder." Sennett's timely and prescient text presaged the advent of affluent "gated" communities and other emerging forms of social stratification and segregation. Defying the forces of entropy, Richard Nixon made the urban crisis a substantial element of his 1968 presidential campaign as the "law and order" candidate, a rhetorical strategy echoed in Donald Trump's 2016 presidential run.

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has created an excellent interactive retrospective titled "The Week the Hill Rose Up." Another Post-Gazette story explores the history behind August Wilson's play Two Trains Running, which dramatized the fallout of the Hill riots.

From CityLab: "Cities on Fire 1968 - Urban America after MLK"

The Washington Post has marked the anniversary with an article on how then-mayor of Cleveland Carl B. Stokes "helped save his city from burning" following the King assassination.

Writing for the ACLU, Jeffrey Robinson reflects and observes that fifty years later "we remain two societies, 'separate and unequal.'"

• Addendum (4/6/18): How the Pittsburgh Pirates persuaded the MLB Commissioner to postpone opening day in the wake of King's death.