1968 | Human Rights, Social Justice
Human Rights, Social Justice
The Kerner Report issued February 29 says, "Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white, separate and unequal." The National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders headed by Gov. Otto Kerner Jr., 59, of Illinois charges white society with condoning the black ghetto it has created.
Martin Luther King Jr. is shot dead April 4 as he steps out on the balcony of his Memphis motel room. The civil-rights leader has for 6 years been under surveillance by the FBI, whose director J. Edgar Hoover has used wiretaps, electronic bugs, and paid informants to gain information on Rev. King's private life and circulated it in an effort to discredit him. A March 3 memo from Hoover has spelled out FBI goals in a "Counter-Intelligence Program" against "Black Nationalist Hate-Groups": "1. Prevent the coalition of militant black nationalist groups . . . [that] might be the first step toward a real 'Mau Mau' in America, the beginning of a true black revolution. 2. Prevent the rise of a 'messiah' who could unify and electrify the militant black nationalist movement . . . King could be a very real contender for this position should he abandon his supposed 'obedience' to 'white, liberal doctrines (nonviolence) and embrace black nationalism." Only 39 at his death, King has been picked off with one shot fired from a sniper's 30.06 Remington rifle. Fingerprints indicate that the assassin was ex-convict James Earl Ray, 39, who escaped last year from Mississippi State Penitentiary; he is indicted for murder and arrested June 8 by Scotland Yard detectives at a London airport (veteran detective Thomas M. J. Butler, now 55, has led the search for him). Extradited to stand trial, Ray will plead guilty and be sentenced next year to 99 years in prison, but he will later recant and doubts will remain as to whether he acted alone.
Race riots erupt at Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Detroit, Kansas City, Newark, Washington, D.C., and scores of other cities following the King assassination. Chicago's Mayor Daley gives police "shoot to kill" orders to put down the rioting that produces nearly 3,000 arrests in that city, $11 million in property damage, nine dead, 500 injured. Baltimore suffers $14 million in property damage, 5,800 arrests, six dead, 900 injured. Washington, D.C. suffers $24 million in property damage, more than 8,000 arrests, 11 dead, more than 1,000 injured (the city's new mayor, Harold E. Washington, angers FBI director J. Edgar Hoover by giving orders that looters are not to be shot). A total of 46 deaths result across the country, 55,000 federal troops and National Guardsmen are called out, 21,270 arrests made.
A new U.S. Civil Rights bill signed into law by President Johnson April 11 stresses open housing.
A Poor People's March on Washington gets under way May 3, but while his Alabama-born chief aide Rev. Ralph (David) Abernathy, 42, has succeeded the late Martin Luther King Jr. as head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and continues its commitment to nonviolent social clubs, the SCLC will soon stop mounting giant demonstrations and limit its activities to smaller campaigns, mostly in the South.
Poland's communist government launches a campaign in March against dissident intellectuals and students, stripping 12,000 to 20,000 Jews and people of Jewish origin of their citizenship and forcing them to leave the country. Poland's president will invite the Jews to return in March 1998, calling the anti-Semitic episode a shameful page in Polish history.
German-born French fascism fighter Beate Klarsfeld (née Kunzel), 29, confronts West German Chancellor Kurt-George Kiesinger during the Christian Democratic Party convention at West Berlin and slaps him in the face, drawing attention to his Nazi past. She is arrested and will serve a 1-year prison sentence, but Kiesinger will not be reelected. Not herself Jewish, Kunzel first heard about the Holocaust in 1960 from fellow student Serge Klarsfeld, whose father was one of some 70,000 French Jews killed at Auschwitz. She later married Klarsfeld, now a lawyer, and together they will work for the next 20 years to track down and expose former Nazis, including Kurt Lischka (who headed the Gestapo in France), the infamous "Butcher of Lyon" Klaus Barbie, and Auschwitz death camp doctor Joseph Mengele, despite beatings, car bombings, and death threats from neo-Nazis (see 1984).