The 1968 Baltimore Uprising: Six Days After King

Martin Luther King Junior was shot and killed in Memphis on April fourth, nineteen sixty-eight. Baltimore erupted two days later.

The fires began in West Baltimore, in the neighborhoods along Pennsylvania Avenue that had been the heart of Black civic life in the city for generations: churches, jazz clubs, small businesses, barbershops, the institutions of a community that had built itself up across a century of legal exclusion. Over six days, fires burned through the corridor. Six people died. Approximately seven hundred were injured. Governor Spiro Agnew deployed roughly five thousand National Guard troops.

What happened next would alter the trajectory of national politics that year. Agnew had built a reputation as a moderate Republican on race, a reformer by the standards of his party in the mid-nineteen sixties. He summoned Baltimore's Black civic leaders to a meeting at the State Office Building in Baltimore, a meeting the community expected to be a conversation about what had happened and why. Instead, Agnew stood at the front of the room and lectured the assembled leaders for failing to prevent the uprising, for not doing enough to restrain their community. Before Agnew had even finished speaking, the assembled leaders stood up and walked out on him.

The confrontation was reported nationally. Within weeks, it had contributed to Agnew's selection as Richard Nixon's vice-presidential running mate. The Republican Party had found, in his contempt for Black leadership, a political posture that would serve the party's electoral strategy for decades to come.

The neighborhoods that burned in April of nineteen sixty-eight did not recover. Pennsylvania Avenue and the surrounding blocks entered a long decline that was still visible in the same corridor in two thousand fifteen when Freddie Gray died in a police van eight blocks away. The distance between those two events is not just forty-seven years. It is the same unresolved question asked twice, to the same city, to no answer.