The Nine-Month Occupation: Wilmington After Martin Luther King
Near Wilmington, Delaware
On April fourth, nineteen sixty-eight, Martin Luther King Junior was shot dead in Memphis. Four days later, a peaceful march in Wilmington turned violent when a brick went through a window, and the frustration of a city with documented housing conditions described by its own civic leaders as unhealthy, unsafe, and demoralizing, boiled into the street.
The two days of unrest that followed were not small. Around four hundred people were arrested. At least thirty were injured. At least fifteen buildings burned. But what happened next made Wilmington singular in the history of American civil unrest.
Delaware's Governor Charles Terry ordered twenty-eight hundred National Guard soldiers into the city on April ninth. Within a week, the violence had subsided. Wilmington's mayor formally requested that the Guard withdraw. Governor Terry refused, citing unspecified intelligence reports about the potential for renewed disturbances. The Guard stayed. Through spring, through summer, through fall, armed soldiers patrolled the streets of Wilmington's Black neighborhoods, backed by armored vehicles. The occupation lasted about nine months, from April of nineteen sixty-eight to January of nineteen sixty-nine, making it the longest military occupation of an American city since the Civil War by any measure historians have applied.
The occupation was not a response to ongoing violence. It was a political choice by a governor who faced a tough reelection fight. Terry lost anyway. When the new governor, Russell Peterson, took office in January of nineteen sixty-nine, he signed the withdrawal order within an hour of his inauguration.
What the nine months left behind is harder to quantify. Residents who lived through it describe the National Guard checkpoints, the curfews, the daily humiliation of armed soldiers on their blocks, as a wound that never fully closed. Wilmington's Black community had already lost population and economic ground to urban renewal and highway construction during the nineteen fifties and sixties. The occupation accelerated the distrust. The city's long struggle to rebuild those neighborhoods continues today, and anyone who wants to understand why requires an honest accounting of what those nine months meant.
Note: the precise intelligence reports cited by Governor Terry to justify the extended occupation have never been publicly released, and their contents remain undisclosed.
