The 1968 Uprising

On the evening of May twenty-seventh, nineteen sixty-eight, approximately four hundred people gathered at Twenty-Eighth and Greenwood Streets in the Parkland neighborhood on Louisville's West End. They had come to protest. The immediate trigger was the pending reinstatement of a white police officer who had been suspended for beating a Black man. The surrounding context was everything that had accumulated in the preceding two months: Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated on April fourth. The open housing marches of nineteen sixty-seven had produced a fair housing ordinance that was not being enforced.

The protest moved. Looting began. Fires were set in commercial buildings along the corridor. The city declared a state of emergency. Several hundred National Guardsmen were ordered into Louisville. Over three days of unrest, two teenagers were killed, four hundred seventy-two people were arrested, and several blocks of Parkland's commercial district were burned.

The two young people killed were James Cortez, age sixteen, and Mathew Browder, age nineteen. Their names are largely absent from the histories that were written about the uprising.

White business owners who had operated in Parkland and the surrounding West End neighborhoods left after the nineteen sixty-eight fires. Most did not return. The economic consequences for the neighborhood lasted for decades, longer in some areas than recovery has yet reached.

A fifty-years-later retrospective published in Louisville in twenty eighteen interviewed residents who had lived through it. Several said the same thing in different ways: the underlying conditions that produced the uprising, the concentrated poverty, the housing segregation, the unequal policing, had not changed enough to prevent it happening again. The uprising was a symptom, not the disease.